A 56-year-old father opened fire at a Pawtucket, Rhode Island, ice rink during a high school hockey game Monday afternoon, killing two family members, critically injuring three others, and then turning the gun on himself. The shooter, Robert Dorgan, also identified as Roberta Esposito, had posted a threatening message on X just hours before the massacre.
The dead include the mother of Dorgan's hockey-playing son, a senior at North Providence High School, and the student athlete's sibling. Three others, described as two relatives and a family friend, remained in critical condition. Police had not publicly identified the victims at the time of reporting.
Pawtucket Police Chief Tina Goncalves addressed reporters after the shooting:
"It appears that this was a targeted event, that it may be a family dispute."
It was not immediately clear whether the mother killed was Dorgan's ex-wife, Rhonda Dorgan.
On Sunday evening, someone on X called trans Democratic Rep. Sarah McBride a man. The post involved actor Kevin Sorbo. Dorgan responded publicly with a message that now reads like a warning shot:
"Keep bashing us. But do not wonder why we Go BERSERK"
Less than 24 hours later, the New York Post reported, Dorgan walked into an ice rink full of families and children and started shooting.
Police said they are still probing the exact motive. Detectives were reviewing surveillance footage from inside the arena. But the timeline is what it is. A person posted a threat invoking violence in the context of trans-rights grievance, then carried out a mass shooting targeting family members the very next day.
Dorgan underwent gender reassignment surgery in 2020. That same year, Rhonda Dorgan filed for divorce. A court filing obtained by local outlet WPRI listed the grounds as "gender reassignment surgery, narcissistic + personality disorder traits." The divorce was finalized in 2021.
What followed were years of heated court disputes over Dorgan's identity. No specific details about those proceedings have been made public, but they paint a picture of a family in prolonged crisis, the kind that courts can document but rarely resolve.
A woman identified as Dorgan's daughter was spotted leaving the Pawtucket police station after the shooting. She told reporters plainly:
"He shot my family, and he's dead now."
She added that Dorgan "has mental health issues" and was "very sick."
Witnesses described a Good Samaritan, the father of another hockey player, who rushed toward the gunfire rather than away from it. He attempted to subdue Dorgan and, according to witnesses, managed to disarm him. But Dorgan had a backup firearm. The heroism was real. So was its limit.
Chief Goncalves hailed the man's courage. In a scene that should have held nothing more dangerous than a body check, an ordinary dad tried to do what instinct and decency demanded.
This shooting arrived just days after another: 18-year-old Jesse Van Rootselaar, a transgender high school dropout in Canada, killed his own mother and stepbrother, then shot six others at his former school in one of Canada's deadliest mass shootings.
Two mass shootings. Two transgender shooters. Back to back.
The cultural establishment will spend the next week doing what it always does: warning against "misuse" of these facts, cautioning that correlation is not causation, and urging restraint in connecting dots that are, frankly, sitting on top of each other. They will frame any discussion of a pattern as bigotry. They will insist the real danger is the conversation itself.
But the question is not whether every transgender person is violent. Obviously not. The question is whether a cultural and medical framework that often accompanies severe mental health distress is getting the scrutiny it deserves, or whether ideological commitments have made that scrutiny impossible. When Dorgan's own daughter says her father was "very sick," and court documents reference narcissistic personality disorder traits alongside gender reassignment surgery, you don't have to be a diagnostician to recognize that something was profoundly wrong long before Monday afternoon.
The left has spent years insisting that gender transition is purely therapeutic, that questioning it is violence, and that anyone who resists the narrative is responsible for harm against trans individuals. Dorgan's X post operated on exactly that logic: you bash us, so don't wonder when we snap. It reframed the shooter as the victim before the first shot was fired.
That framing is not just wrong. It is dangerous. It provides a moral architecture for violence by casting the perpetrator as the oppressed party striking back. And when the bodies are real, the framework collapses under its own weight.
Police are still investigating. The surveillance footage may clarify the sequence of events inside the rink. The relationships between Dorgan and each victim may shed light on whether this was purely domestic or whether the trans-rights grievance expressed online played a motivating role.
But families in Pawtucket already know everything they need to know. They brought their kids to a hockey game. Two people came home in body bags. Three more may not recover.
A high school rink in Rhode Island is now a crime scene. The stick tape and Zamboni marks share the floor with evidence markers. Somewhere, a teenage hockey player just lost his mother and sibling because his father chose carnage over whatever shred of humanity remained.
No manifesto makes that legible. No grievance makes it forgivable.
Democratic Gov. Laura Kelly vetoed a Republican-backed bill that would have required government buildings — including public schools and universities — to segregate restrooms and locker rooms by biological sex. The bill passed with more than two-thirds support in both chambers of the Republican-dominated legislature, and GOP lawmakers are expected to attempt an override.
Kansas has been here before. Last year, the legislature overrode a Kelly veto to pass a ban on puberty blockers and hormone replacement therapy for minors. The governor appears determined to keep playing goalie for the gender ideology lobby, even as her own state's elected representatives — by overwhelming margins — keep sending these bills to her desk.
The legislation would have required government buildings, including public schools and universities, to "take every reasonable step" to segregate restrooms and locker rooms by sex. Individuals who repeatedly use facilities not matching their biological sex could face fines or civil suits of $1,000 and criminal charges.
A separate provision would have banned Kansans from changing the gender marker on state-issued driver's licenses and birth certificates — a longstanding goal of Republican Attorney General Kris Kobach. Children up to the age of eight would have been permitted in opposite-sex restrooms when accompanied by a caregiver.
Republican Rep. Bob Lewis, who amended the bill to include the bathroom provisions, framed it plainly to NPR's Kansas City affiliate:
"It just codifies social norms. When people go into bathrooms or locker rooms, there's just an expectation that it'll be single-sex."
That's the core of it. The bill doesn't invent a new norm. It writes down the one that existed without controversy for the entirety of American history until roughly five minutes ago.
Kelly issued a statement positioning herself as the defender of common-sense priorities:
"I believe the Legislature should stay out of the business of telling Kansans how to go to the bathroom and instead stay focused on how to make life more affordable for Kansans."
She also called the legislation "poorly drafted," claiming it left room for unintended consequences beyond bathroom use.
The "stay focused on affordability" dodge is a favorite of Democratic governors who don't want to explain their actual position on a culture-war bill they know is popular. Kelly doesn't argue the bill is wrong on the merits. She argues the legislature should be doing something else. It's a deflection dressed as fiscal responsibility — and it falls apart the moment you remember that legislatures handle multiple bills in a session. Walking and chewing gum is, in fact, the job description.
Twenty states have already passed similar laws restricting bathroom access based on biological sex in certain public spaces. Kansas isn't blazing a radical trail here. Kelly is the one standing against a growing national consensus.
The bill cleared both the state House and Senate with more than two-thirds support — the exact threshold needed to override a gubernatorial veto. Republican House Speaker Dan Hawkins didn't mince words about Kelly's decision:
"Instead of standing with the overwhelming majority of Kansans on this issue, the Governor chose to appease her most radical supporters at the cost of women and girls in our state."
Hawkins has the numbers to back the rhetoric. When a bill passes with veto-proof margins, and the governor vetoes it anyway, the gesture is almost purely symbolic — a signal to progressive donors and activist groups that she tried, even if the override succeeds. It's constituency politics, not governance.
Republican leaders used a procedure known as "gut and go" — cutting the contents of one bill and pasting them into another — to add the bathroom provisions. Critics flagged that this bypassed the opportunity for public comment. Republican state Rep. Susan Humphries, who chairs the committee where the bill was introduced, pushed back:
"School administrators want clarity on how they're supposed to handle these things. And we're going to give them clarity on that."
Humphries noted that lawmakers had a six-hour floor debate before the bill passed. Whatever procedural shortcut was used to get the language into the bill, six hours of floor debate is not a vote taken in the dark.
The pattern in Kansas mirrors what's happening across red and purple states: legislatures pass popular, common-sense protections for women's single-sex spaces, Democratic governors veto them, and then those vetoes get overridden or become campaign liabilities. Kelly's veto of last year's gender-affirming care ban for minors was overridden. A legal challenge to that law is now pending in state court.
Democratic Rep. Abi Boatman, a transgender woman who filled a House vacancy earlier this month, spoke during the January floor debate:
"Am I afforded all of the rights and responsibilities of an elected official, or do I need to just go waste my time at facilities asking where I'm allowed to take a dump?"
Boatman argued the bill targets transgender Kansans' freedoms rather than protecting women. But this frames the debate exactly backward. The question isn't whether transgender individuals have dignity — of course they do. The question is whether biological women and girls have the right to single-sex spaces in government buildings, schools, and locker rooms. The bill answers yes. That shouldn't be controversial. For most Americans, it isn't.
The left's position requires you to believe that acknowledging biological sex in the most intimate public spaces is an act of cruelty — while ignoring that the women and girls who use those spaces have interests worth protecting too. Every time a Democratic governor vetoes one of these bills, they're making that trade explicit. They're choosing gender ideology over the physical privacy of women.
Kelly can veto. The legislature can override. And Kansas voters will remember which side each chose.
Steve Bannon told Jeffrey Epstein he would "take down" Pope Francis. That's according to newly released Department of Justice files containing messages between the former White House advisor and the late financier, exchanged in June 2019.
The messages, part of a broader trove of Epstein-related communications shared by the DOJ, show Bannon and Epstein discussing the Pope, the Clintons, Chinese President Xi, and the European Union in the same breath — a kind of globe-spanning enemies list dressed up as casual banter between two men who apparently had more contact than previously known.
"The Clintons, Xi, Francis, EU – come on brother."
That was Bannon to Epstein. Whatever one thinks of the targets on that list, the company in which those thoughts were shared should stop anyone cold.
The conversations centered in part on *In the Closet of the Vatican*, a 2019 book by French journalist Frédéric Martel that made the bombshell claim that 80 percent of clergy working in the Vatican are gay. Bannon apparently wanted to turn it into a film — and told Epstein he was the executive producer.
"You are now exec producer of 'ITCOTV.'"
Epstein's reply referenced Noam Chomsky — the leftist intellectual with whom Epstein was known to be close — asking about the status of the film. Whether any of this was a real production effort or just two men inflating their own sense of influence over cocktail-napkin schemes remains genuinely unclear.
What is clear: Bannon, who reportedly identifies as a Roman Catholic, was actively discussing how to weaponize a book about Vatican corruption against the sitting Pope — and his chosen collaborator was Jeffrey Epstein, as The Independent reports.
None of this hostility toward Pope Francis was new for Bannon. In a 2018 interview with The Spectator, he described the Pope as "beneath contempt" and accused him of "siding with globalist elites." The DOJ files simply reveal that his contempt had an operational dimension — and a deeply troubling partner.
At one point, Epstein sent Bannon an article titled "Pope Francis or Steve Bannon? Catholics must choose." Bannon's response was two words:
"Easy choice."
It's worth pausing here — not to relitigate Bannon's views on Catholic Church governance, some of which resonate with faithful Catholics who have legitimate grievances about institutional corruption and doctrinal drift. There are serious critiques to be made of Pope Francis's pontificate from a conservative Catholic perspective. The problem isn't the critique. It's the chat room.
The Epstein files have been a slow-drip indictment of elite culture across the political spectrum. Every new release names people who had no business being in that man's orbit — and yet were. Bannon's inclusion in that orbit is significant not because it discredits conservatism, but because it illustrates how Epstein operated: attaching himself to the power of every ideological flavor, making himself useful, making himself trusted.
Conservatives who rightly demanded full transparency on the Epstein files — who pushed for every name to be released and every connection scrutinized — cannot flinch now that the files touch someone on their side of the aisle. The principle was never "expose only the Democrats." The principle was sunlight.
The same release that shows Bannon's messages also shows Epstein in communication with Chomsky, a figure the left has lionized for decades. Epstein's network was ideologically promiscuous. That's what made it dangerous.
Pope Francis and the conservative movement had a genuinely complicated relationship — one that extended well beyond Bannon's personal vendetta. In 2016, Francis suggested that Donald Trump's border wall plans made him "not Christian":
"A person who thinks only about building walls, wherever they may be, and not building bridges, is not Christian."
Just one day before Trump's second inauguration in January 2025, Francis weighed in again on mass deportation plans:
"If it is true, it will be a disgrace, because it makes the poor wretches who have nothing pay the bill for the imbalance. It won't do. This is not the way to solve things."
These interventions frustrated many American conservatives who saw a Pope more interested in scolding sovereign nations for enforcing their borders than in addressing the institutional rot within his own Church. That frustration was — and remains — legitimate.
Vice President JD Vance, himself a Roman Catholic, offered perhaps the most thoughtful conservative response to this tension. In an interview, he articulated the concept of *ordo amoris* — the ordered nature of Christian love:
"There's this old school – and I think it's a very Christian concept, by the way – that you love your family and then you love your neighbour and then you love your community and then you love your fellow citizens and your own country, and then after that you can focus and prioritise the rest of the world."
Francis directly contradicted this, insisting that Christian love "is not a concentric expansion of interests that little by little extend to other persons and groups." It was one of the more revealing theological exchanges in recent political memory — two Catholics, both sincere, arriving at fundamentally different conclusions about what love demands of a nation.
Vance met with Pope Francis on Easter Sunday 2025 and shared a homily with him. Francis died on April 21, 2025. President Trump called him "a good man, who worked hard and loved the world."
The DOJ files raise questions that deserve answers — not from partisan actors looking to score points, but from anyone who took the Epstein accountability project seriously. The specifics of why these files were released, through what legal mechanism, and what other communications they contain remain unclear.
Bannon's representatives have not responded to requests for comment.
The conservative critique of Pope Francis — on immigration, on globalism, on the Church's internal scandals — stands or falls on its own merits. Millions of faithful Catholics hold those views without ever exchanging a single message with Jeffrey Epstein. That's the line. The critique doesn't need Epstein, and anyone who brought him into it contaminated something that was otherwise defensible.
You can want accountability in the Vatican without wanting it delivered by a man who trafficked children. That distinction matters more than any of the politics around it.
Secretary of State Marco Rubio departed for Germany on Thursday to lead the U.S. delegation at the 2026 Munich Security Conference, one year after Vice President JD Vance stood on the same stage and told European leaders their biggest threat wasn't Russia or China — it was themselves.
Fox News reported that Rubio's message before boarding was blunt.
"The Old World is gone. Frankly, the world I grew up in, and we live in a new era in geopolitics, and it's going to require all of us to re-examine what that looks like and what our role is going to be."
That's not diplomatic throat-clearing. That's a warning — delivered plainly, without apology, to a continent that has spent the better part of a decade pretending the post-Cold War order would sustain itself indefinitely.
To understand what Rubio is walking into on Saturday, you have to understand what Vance walked into last year. At the 2025 Munich Security Conference, the Vice President delivered a speech that reportedly left European leaders stunned. He accused European governments of drifting toward censorship and argued that the continent's greatest danger was internal democratic decay — not external military threats.
"What I worry about is the threat from within, the retreat of Europe from some of its most fundamental values — values shared with the United States of America."
President Trump called the speech "brilliant" and noted that Europeans are "losing their wonderful right of freedom of speech." The speech drew significant attention from conservatives and backlash from European officials — though notably, none of the critics were willing to go on the record.
The administration hasn't let the rhetoric remain rhetorical. The State Department has targeted the European Union's Digital Services Act as "Orwellian" censorship. New visa restrictions have been implemented aimed at foreign officials accused of censoring Americans online. These aren't talking points. Their policy.
The conference this year features a curious guest list on the American side. Former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, and California Gov. Gavin Newsom are all attending.
Think about that lineup for a moment. A failed presidential candidate, a socialist congresswoman from the Bronx, and a governor who can't keep the lights on in his own state — all flying to Munich to represent... what, exactly? The opposition? The resistance? A shadow government pitching itself to foreign leaders?
There's one Secretary of State, and he's Marco Rubio. The rest are tourists with diplomatic pretensions.
Rubio arrives in Munich not as a freshman diplomat finding his footing, but as the most versatile official in the administration. He has served as acting national security advisor, acting archivist of the United States, and acting administrator of USAID — all while running the State Department. The man's portfolio makes most Cabinet secretaries look part-time.
White House spokeswoman Olivia Wales framed the Munich trip within the administration's broader record:
"The President and his team have flexed their foreign policy prowess to end decades-long wars, secure peace in the Middle East and restore American dominance in the Western Hemisphere. The entire administration is working together to restore peace through strength and put America First."
The "Western Hemisphere" line isn't throwaway. Earlier this year, the U.S. military captured Venezuelan dictator Nicolás Maduro. Rubio was at Mar-a-Lago with President Trump, monitoring the operation. That's the kind of credibility you carry into a room full of European defense ministers who struggle to meet their NATO spending targets.
There's been speculation about the dynamic between Rubio and Vance on the world stage — the kind of palace intrigue narrative the press loves to construct. The facts tell a different story.
This week alone, Vance signed a peaceful nuclear cooperation agreement with Armenia and a strategic partnership with Azerbaijan. Earlier in February, both Vance and Rubio held a bilateral meeting with Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni. Vance led a delegation — which included Rubio — at the Winter Olympics opening ceremony in Milan.
Wales put it simply:
"President Trump has assembled the most talented team in history, including Vice President Vance and Secretary Rubio, who are working in lockstep to notch wins for the American people."
Working in lockstep doesn't mean doing the same job. Vance laid the intellectual groundwork at Munich last year. Rubio builds on it this year with a different style but the same core message: Europe must reckon with its own failures before demanding American resources.
At the World Economic Forum in Davos last December, President Trump said something that should have set off alarms across every European capital:
"I don't want to insult anybody and say I don't recognize it. And that's not in a positive way. That's in a very negative way. And I love Europe and I want to see Europe do good, but it's not heading in the right direction."
That wasn't a diplomatic slight. It was a diagnosis. And it's one that European leaders have studiously avoided confronting because confronting it would require them to admit that their immigration policies, their speech codes, their defense freeloading, and their regulatory overreach are self-inflicted wounds — not externalities imposed by Washington.
Rubio understands the cultural connection. He told reporters before departing:
"We're very tightly linked together with Europe. Most people in this country can trace both, either their cultural or their personal heritage, back to Europe. So, we just have to talk about that."
That's the posture — not adversarial, but honest. America isn't walking away from Europe. It's demanding that Europe walk toward reality.
The Munich Security Conference draws hundreds of senior decision-makers from around the world every year. Under the first Trump administration, Vice President Mike Pence attended twice. Under Biden, Kamala Harris attended three times. Previous secretaries of state — Kerry, Blinken, Clinton — have all addressed the body.
But none of them went to Munich with the leverage this administration carries. A captured dictator. Peace agreements in the Middle East. Nuclear cooperation deals were signed days before arrival. A State Department actively confronting European censorship regimes rather than enabling them.
Rubio's speech Saturday will land in a room where the old assumptions about American patience have already been dismantled. The question isn't whether Europe will listen. It's whether Europe can afford not to.
Mike Schaefer, an 87-year-old disbarred attorney with a misdemeanor spousal abuse conviction, a $1.83 million slumlord judgment against him, and a permanent restraining order obtained by actor Brad Garrett, filed Tuesday to run for Congress in California's 48th District. He filed from a Las Vegas address.
This is what Democrats mean when they talk about expanding the map.
Schaefer joins a handful of other Democrats hoping to flip CA-48, a seat currently held by Republican Darrell Issa and one of five GOP-held districts now in play after Proposition 50 redrew California's congressional boundaries. The U.S. Supreme Court upheld the new maps on Feb. 4, and Democrats have wasted no time trying to capitalize. The district shifted from formerly Republican-leaning to what's being characterized as toss-up or even left-leaning territory—not because voters changed, but because the lines did.
Schaefer has run for office approximately 33 times over more than 50 years, according to the Daily Caller. He usually loses badly.
He was elected the youngest San Diego City Council member ever at age 27 in 1965 and served two terms. After that, the wins dried up. He pulled 0.98% in the 1971 San Diego mayoral race. He managed 2.5% in a 2016 Nevada congressional primary. He started as a Republican before switching to the Democratic Party around 2004—a conversion that coincided not with any discernible ideological awakening but with the discovery that one party's ballot lines were easier to get on in the districts where he wanted to run.
The one bright spot: in 2018, at age 80, Schaefer won a seat on the California State Board of Equalization, beating a Republican state senator. He was re-elected in 2022 with his party's endorsement, dubbing himself "The Equalizer." He is now termed out of that position, which apparently means it's time for Congress.
Schaefer was disbarred in both California and Nevada in 2001 for serious ethics violations. The Nevada Supreme Court cited a litany of offenses:
He has not been reinstated despite multiple appeals, the most recent in 2014.
Then there's the housing record. In 1981, Schaefer owned a 64-unit building in the mid-Wilshire area of Los Angeles for eight months. A 1986 jury in Los Angeles Superior Court awarded his former tenants $1.83 million—a record at the time. The building was found overrun with rats, cockroaches, and sewage backups that caved in ceilings and floors. Street gangs operated inside the property. Schaefer blamed the gangs for blocking improvements.
That wasn't an isolated episode. In 1979, he faced fire-code violations and threats of jail time in San Diego over unsafe conditions in properties he controlled. In 1982, he was involved in a rent dispute case in Arizona. He owned rundown apartments in Baltimore that drew complaints over alleged neglect and poor maintenance. The man earned the "millionaire slumlord" label across multiple states and multiple decades.
In 1993, Schaefer was convicted of misdemeanor spousal abuse. He later served jail time for violating the terms of his probation.
By 2013, actor Brad Garrett—best known for "Everybody Loves Raymond"—secured a permanent restraining order against Schaefer in Las Vegas Justice Court. The dispute reportedly began over a complimentary show ticket at the MGM Grand and escalated from there, with Garrett accusing Schaefer of stalking and harassment.
The court ordered Schaefer to stay 100 feet away from Garrett at all times, banned him from the MGM Grand entirely, and required him to obtain court permission before filing any future lawsuits against Garrett or his staff. Schaefer had allegedly kept pushing unwanted promotion offers on Garrett and refused to stop. Garrett cited Schaefer's history of violence and erratic behavior in seeking the order.
A man who needs a judge's permission to file a lawsuit wants voters to send him to Washington to write laws.
Schaefer is a sideshow, but the circus he wandered into matters. Proposition 50 handed Democrats a redrawn map that puts five Republican congressional seats in jeopardy. Republicans challenged the maps in court, arguing they were drawn in at least one area to favor Hispanic voters in violation of federal voting rights law. The Supreme Court disagreed on Feb. 4, and the maps stand.
The term for this is gerrymandering, though polite company only uses that word when Republicans draw the lines. When Democrats do it in California through a voter-approved ballot measure, it's called "independent redistricting" or "democracy in action." The result is the same: lines redrawn to predetermine outcomes.
Issa is running for re-election in November in a district that no longer resembles the one his voters chose him to represent. Democrats smell blood—and their recruiting standards reflect the urgency. When your redistricting scheme is so aggressive that an 87-year-old disbarred, convicted, restraining-order-carrying perennial candidate sees a viable path, the maps aren't expanding democracy. They're diluting it.
The California Democratic Party endorsed Schaefer for his Board of Equalization re-election in 2022. That endorsement came decades after his disbarment, his spousal abuse conviction, his jail time, and the largest slumlord judgment in Los Angeles history. None of it disqualified him in the eyes of the party apparatus. None of it gave anyone pause.
This is the party that lectures the country about character, about protecting women, about housing as a human right. They endorsed a man convicted of beating his wife, who let tenants live with rats and sewage. They didn't just tolerate him—they put their brand behind him.
Now he's running for Congress, and the silence from California Democrats tells you everything about what "standards" mean when a seat is in play. The district is new. The candidate is the same man he's been for 50 years.
Thirty-three campaigns and counting. The voters have answered him 32 times. He keeps asking.
White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt told reporters Tuesday that a recently released Department of Justice document supports what President Trump has long maintained — that he took early, proactive steps to alert authorities about Jeffrey Epstein's behavior, years before the financier's crimes became a matter of national reckoning.
The document, released by the DOJ, contains details from a 2019 FBI interview with Michael Reiter, then the police chief of Palm Beach, Florida. According to that interview, Trump called Reiter in July 2006 to offer assistance with the investigation into Epstein, making him, per the document's language, "one of the very first people to call" the police chief about the case.
The timing matters. In 2006, Epstein had not yet become a household name. His crimes were still emerging through a local Palm Beach investigation, not splashed across cable news. And yet, according to Reiter's account to the FBI, Trump reached out on his own initiative.
According to Breitbart News, the DOJ document relays Reiter's recollection of his conversation with Trump. Reiter's 2019 FBI interview documents what Trump told the Palm Beach police chief:
"You should know that guy is a bad guy, and you should be looking at him."
Reiter further told the FBI that Trump offered to help the investigation in whatever way he could. According to the document, Trump said:
"If you need anything from me, you call."
These aren't quotes captured on tape or pulled from a deposition. They are statements attributed to Trump by Reiter during an FBI interview conducted over a decade after the phone call allegedly took place. That's an important distinction — but so is the fact that a law enforcement official was willing to relay them to the FBI under those circumstances.
At the White House briefing, Leavitt seized on the document's contents to push back against years of insinuation linking Trump to Epstein's crimes. She told reporters that the release "cracks" the establishment narrative surrounding the president and Epstein.
Leavitt pointed to Trump's long-standing claim that he banned Epstein from Mar-a-Lago, arguing the newly surfaced document adds weight to a pattern of behavior Trump has described for years.
"President Trump has always said he kicked Jeffrey Epstein out of Mar-a-Lago."
She added that the evidence suggests Trump was ahead of the curve:
"He was one of the first people — if not the first person — to call the Palm Beach Police Department to report what he knew about Jeffrey Epstein."
It's worth noting that Leavitt herself used conditional language when discussing the phone call, suggesting the White House is presenting the document's account as strongly supportive rather than independently verified in every detail. But her broader point is clear: when the question was whether Trump was complicit or cooperative, this document lands firmly on the side of cooperation.
For years, a certain class of commentator has treated a handful of photographs and passing social references as evidence that Trump and Epstein were close associates — or worse. The implication was always heavy, always directional, and seldom accompanied by anything resembling proof of wrongdoing.
Meanwhile, the actual investigative record — now including this DOJ release — tells a different story. A man who called the police. A man who offered to help. A man who, by Reiter's account, flagged Epstein as someone worth investigating before most of the country had any idea who Epstein was.
The media spent years building guilt by association. What they never seemed interested in was the association that actually mattered: Trump's association with the investigation itself.
The released document does not appear to be the full scope of the DOJ's Epstein-related materials. There's no indication of why the department chose to release this particular document now, or what else may remain in the pipeline. Ghislaine Maxwell is referenced in the document, though her specific role in the context of these details is not elaborated.
Nor does the document resolve every open question about the Epstein case — a case that involves dozens of powerful figures across politics, finance, and media. The full Epstein story remains one of the most significant unfinished chapters in modern American public life.
But what this document does accomplish is straightforward: it provides a contemporaneous law enforcement account — relayed to the FBI — that Trump acted as a willing cooperator, not a person with something to hide.
Consider the asymmetry. Every time an Epstein-related document drops, a segment of the media reflexively scans it for Trump's name. When they find it in the context of cooperation with the police, the story vanishes from the front page. When a photo from a 1990s party surfaces, it leads the cycle.
This is not journalism. It is narrative maintenance.
The same outlets that spent years demanding transparency on Epstein have shown remarkably little interest in the transparency that has actually arrived — because it doesn't confirm what they assumed. The document doesn't show a man entangled with a predator. It shows a man who picked up the phone and called the cops.
That's not ambiguous. That's not spin. That's the FBI's own file.
The Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals — not exactly known as friendly territory for conservative policy — handed the Trump administration a significant legal victory this week, granting a stay of a lower court order that had blocked the end of Temporary Protected Status for migrants from Honduras, Nicaragua, and Nepal.
The ruling clears the path for the administration to proceed with terminating TPS for approximately 60,000 migrants who hold no other immigration status in the United States. The case, National TPS Alliance v. Noem, had been one of several legal battles waged to keep the decades-old designations alive indefinitely.
DHS Secretary Kristi Noem didn't mince words:
"A win for the rule of law and vindication for the US Constitution. Under the previous administration, Temporary Protected Status was abused to allow violent terrorists, criminals, and national security threats into our nation."
The word "temporary" is doing a lot of heavy lifting in Temporary Protected Status. Honduras and Nicaragua were first designated for TPS in 1999, following a hurricane. Nepal received its designation in 2015 after an earthquake. That means Honduran and Nicaraguan TPS holders have been living under "temporary" protection for over a quarter century.
A hurricane hit. Clinton granted temporary relief. Then Bush extended it. Then Obama extended it. Then Trump tried to end it. Then Biden not only extended it but expanded the entire program to the highest levels in its history, ensuring over a million migrants became eligible. Nearly every president since Clinton has routinely extended TPS and designated new countries — turning an emergency measure into a conveyor belt for indefinite residency.
As Breitbart News reported, Noem framed it plainly:
"TPS was never designed to be permanent, yet previous administrations have used it as a de facto amnesty program for decades. Given the improved situation in each of these countries, we are wisely concluding what was intended to be a temporary designation."
She's right on the structural point, whatever one thinks of the individual cases. Congress designed TPS as a short-term shield — a way to pause deportations when a country was in acute crisis. It was never meant to create a parallel immigration system where "temporary" meant "until someone has the political will to say no."
The scale of what the Biden administration did with TPS deserves its own reckoning. Over a million migrants became eligible under Biden's watch — a staggering expansion of a program that was already being stretched well past its statutory intent. That wasn't emergency management. That was immigration policy conducted through the back door, bypassing the legislative process entirely.
This is the pattern that conservatives have identified for years: a program is created with narrow, sympathetic parameters. It gets extended once, twice, a dozen times. Each extension creates a larger constituency that makes termination politically harder. Eventually, the "temporary" designation calcifies into something indistinguishable from permanent residency — and anyone who suggests winding it down gets accused of cruelty.
It's a ratchet that only turns one direction. Until now.
The fact that this stay came from the Ninth Circuit matters. This is the appellate court that immigration activists have long treated as a reliable backstop against enforcement. For years, the circuit served as the preferred venue for challenges to border security measures, deportation orders, and asylum restrictions.
The Ninth Circuit concluded the administration's position was strong enough to warrant staying the lower court's injunction, which signals something important about the legal merits. Courts grant stays when they believe the party seeking one is likely to succeed and that irreparable harm would result from leaving the lower court's order in place. The Trump administration cleared that bar in the Ninth Circuit.
That alone tells you where the legal winds are blowing on TPS termination.
The approximately 60,000 migrants affected by this ruling now face the reality that "temporary" may finally mean temporary. The legal battle in National TPS Alliance v. Noem isn't over — stays are procedural steps, not final rulings — but the trajectory is clear. The administration has momentum, the appellate court's action suggests the legal foundation is sound, and DHS is moving forward.
The broader question is whether this becomes a template. TPS designations remain in effect for numerous other countries, many with their own long histories of routine extension. If the administration succeeds in unwinding the Honduras, Nicaragua, and Nepal designations, the precedent will be difficult to contain.
For twenty-six years, Washington treated "temporary" as a word with no expiration date. The Ninth Circuit just put one back on the calendar.
Senator Ted Cruz told donors at a private fundraiser that Newsmax CEO Chris Ruddy would deploy his network to support a Cruz 2028 presidential campaign, according to an anonymous attendee who spoke to the Daily Mail. The claim — denied by both Cruz's office and Ruddy's team — lands just as Ruddy prepares to testify before Cruz's own Senate committee on media ownership.
The timing alone deserves attention.
Cruz chairs the Senate Committee on Commerce, Science, and Transportation, which is holding a hearing Tuesday titled "We Interrupt This Program: Media Ownership and the Digital Age." Ruddy is a scheduled witness. The two men share a common opponent in the proposed Nexstar-Tegna merger — and if the anonymous donor's account is accurate, they may share quite a bit more.
The donor, described as someone who has contributed financially to Cruz, told the Daily Mail:
"I attended a Ted Cruz fundraiser late last year and during the fundraiser Senator Cruz mentioned that Chris Ruddy would be using Newsmax to support his candidacy when and if he runs for the Republican primary, which is expected."
Cruz spokesperson Macarena Martinez fired back without hesitation:
"Once again, anonymous sources are putting words in Senator Cruz's mouth to further their own agendas. These are obvious lies, but the media once again shows that they are ready and eager to be spun up and used at every opportunity."
She added:
"Journalists used to know how to do their jobs. Those days are clearly far behind us."
Ruddy's team issued its own denial after publication, with a spokesperson saying the Newsmax CEO "denies the 'fake news' he ever promised Senator Cruz any endorsement, and neither he nor Newsmax has made any pledge of support for any candidate in 2028."
The anonymous donor, when presented with the denial, offered a parting shot:
"I guess they don't call him lying Ted for nothing."
So what we have is a single anonymous source against two on-the-record denials. That's worth noting before anyone builds a narrative castle on this foundation.
Even if the specific claim is exaggerated or fabricated, the underlying dynamics are real — and they illuminate the early fault lines of what could be a bruising 2028 Republican primary.
Cruz has been making moves. Last week, in an episode of the Ruthless podcast first obtained by the Daily Mail, he rejected the idea of a Supreme Court appointment that President Trump had recently floated:
"My answer's not just no, it's hell no."
His reasoning was characteristically blunt:
"A principled federal judge stays out of political fights and stays out of policy fights. I want to be right in the middle of them."
That's not a man positioning himself for a lifetime of judicial temperament. That's a man who wants to run for president — again.
Then there's the leaked audio. Last month, recordings given to Axios by a Republican source captured Cruz offering a remarkably candid assessment of Vice President JD Vance:
"Tucker created JD. JD is Tucker's protégé, and they are one and the same."
That's not the kind of thing you say about someone you view as an ally. It's opposition research delivered in your own voice.
If Cruz were shopping for conservative media support, his options would be limited. A source described as close to the White House explained why Ruddy's backing — real or imagined — would matter:
"Because he's got no other conservative outlet. Everyone else is gonna be with JD."
That same source added a less flattering assessment of what Ruddy's support would actually be worth:
"Maybe the way he sees it is Ted's going to be in the primary for a month and then he'll be gone, so it's not really - it's not like he's making a long-term commitment."
The numbers bear out the skepticism. Newsmax pulls roughly one-sixth of Fox News Channel's audience. In January, Newsmax's highest-rated primetime show drew 345,000 viewers. Fox's comparable figure: 2.046 million. It's the difference between a megaphone and a bullhorn — both amplify, but one carries a lot further.
Lost in the 2028 speculation is an actual policy fight worth watching. Tuesday's hearing centers on media ownership rules in the digital age, and the Nexstar-Tegna merger sits at the heart of it.
Tegna owns 64 local television stations across 51 U.S. markets. The FCC currently prohibits broadcasters from owning stations that reach more than 39 percent of American households. An enlarged Nexstar would reach 54.5 percent — blowing past the cap.
Ruddy filed a complaint with the FCC, arguing the deal violates national ownership caps. In a November Newsmax op-ed, he wrote:
"The answer to Big Tech consolidation is not to give left-wing TV broadcasters massive consolidation and power too. We don't need anti-Trump media controlling everything."
He also took a direct shot at the administration's own FCC chairman, Brendan Carr:
"It shocks me President Trump's FCC chairman has made his main priority giving the TV broadcasters more power and control, especially over local news."
President Trump, for his part, endorsed the merger on Truth Social Saturday:
"We need more competition against THE ENEMY, the Fake News National TV Networks. Letting Good Deals get done like Nexstar - Tegna will help knock out the Fake News because there will be more competition, and at a higher and more sophisticated level."
That puts Ruddy and Cruz on one side of a media consolidation fight and the President on the other — a notable split that makes the alleged backroom alliance all the more interesting, regardless of whether it's real.
It also places Ruddy on the same side of the merger issue as Elizabeth Warren, Maxwell Frost, and Summer Lee. Strange bedfellows don't begin to cover it.
Cruz has tangled with FCC Chairman Carr before — particularly over Carr's September move to go after ABC's broadcast license over comments made by Jimmy Kimmel. Cruz called it what he saw:
"Dangerous as hell."
"That's right out of Goodfellas."
His concern wasn't about defending ABC. It was about precedent:
"Going down this road, there will come a time when a Democrat wins again – wins the White House … they will silence us. They will use this power, and they will use it ruthlessly. And that is dangerous."
Cruz warned that if the government got into the business of policing what the media said, "that will end up bad for conservatives." It's a consistent libertarian-conservative position on media regulation, and it explains why he'd chair a hearing designed to scrutinize ownership consolidation rather than rubber-stamp it.
Strip away the anonymous sourcing and the denials, and a clear picture still emerges. Ted Cruz is not going to the Supreme Court. He's not retiring to a podcast. He's running for president — or at minimum, keeping every door open and every relationship warm.
Whether Chris Ruddy promised anything is almost beside the point. The structural reality is that a Cruz campaign would need a media ecosystem, and the major conservative outlets are likely to coalesce around Vance. If Newsmax — even at one-sixth of Fox's audience — provides a platform, it's better than nothing.
Ruddy, meanwhile, told the Daily Mail he looks forward to Tuesday's hearing and "an open and frank discussion about the dangers of media consolidation in the television broadcast industry." He did not answer directly when asked about supporting Cruz's presidential bid.
The denials are on the record. The ambitions are obvious. And both men sit down on Tuesday in a Senate hearing room where their interests happen to align perfectly — on media ownership, at least.
Everything else is just 2028 positioning disguised as 2026 policy.
Labour backbenchers are openly calling on Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer to step down — and they're using the words of his own departing chief of staff to do it.
Morgan McSweeney resigned Sunday, claiming "full responsibility" for advising Starmer to appoint Lord Peter Mandelson as U.S. Ambassador. The sacrifice was supposed to stop the bleeding. It hasn't. Within hours, Labour MPs turned McSweeney's exit into a template and pointed it straight at Downing Street.
The trigger: Starmer's admission in the House of Commons this week that he knew Mandelson had maintained a relationship with convicted pedophile Jeffrey Epstein — after Epstein served prison time for child sex offences — and appointed him anyway.
Ian Byrne, Labour MP for Liverpool West Derby, told The Telegraph that one resignation wouldn't be enough:
"This will not stop with a single resignation. A true change in political direction must now come from, and be led from, the very top."
He wasn't subtle about the implication, according to Breitbart News:
"The Prime Minister must now reflect honestly on his own position and ask whether, for the good of the country and the Labour Party, he should follow McSweeney's lead."
Brian Leishman, Labour MP for Alloa and Grangemouth, echoed the call almost word for word:
"There must be a change in political direction and that comes from the very top, so the Prime Minister must look at his own position and question whether he should follow McSweeney's lead one last time, and resign for the good of the country and the Labour Party."
The coordinated language tells you this isn't spontaneous frustration. It's organized pressure.
Then there's the anonymous Labour MP who spoke to the broadsheet and dispensed with the diplomatic phrasing entirely:
"He's a coward who refuses to take responsibility for his own actions. He is a moral gravity-well, from which neither decency, honesty or integrity can escape. A genuine disaster for this country and the Labour movement."
That same MP predicted Starmer would go down as the worst PM in Labour history. From a member of his own party. Not the opposition benches — his own side.
The scandal isn't just that Mandelson had ties to Epstein. Plenty of powerful figures did. The scandal is that Starmer knew Mandelson continued the relationship after Epstein's conviction and imprisonment — and still handed him one of Britain's most prominent diplomatic posts.
This isn't a failure of vetting. It's a failure of judgment so total that it raises the question of what, exactly, Starmer thought was acceptable. The man who spent years conducting a methodical purge of the Labour left — sidelining rivals, consolidating power — suddenly couldn't manage basic due diligence on an appointment that would define his government's relationship with Washington.
The Metropolitan Police opened an investigation this week after U.S. DOJ documents indicated Mandelson apparently provided Epstein with confidential government information during the 2008 financial crisis — information that could have been used to game the markets. A criminal investigation into a sitting ambassador, triggered by American government documents. The diplomatic implications alone are staggering.
McSweeney's resignation has all the hallmarks of a controlled demolition — sacrifice the aide, protect the principal. Downing Street moved quickly to frame this as accountability in action. A spokesman said:
"The Prime Minister recognises the need for government to address the issues highlighted by the Mandelson revelations."
And:
"Work began last week on this. The Prime Minister has instructed officials to move at pace to deliver change. He hopes to update the country as early as tomorrow."
"Move at pace to deliver change" is the kind of phrase that sounds decisive and means nothing. Starmer is expected to address the nation on Monday. What he can say that reframes "I knowingly appointed a man linked to a convicted pedophile" remains unclear.
The problem with the fall-guy strategy is that McSweeney can only absorb blame for the advice. Starmer is the one who took it. He's the Prime Minister. The appointment was his decision, made with full knowledge of the Epstein connection. No amount of staff turnover changes that sequence.
Lord Maurice Glasman, founder of the Blue Labour faction that argues for a return to working-class priorities, went further than anyone on Sky News Sunday. He said the party must "repent" of the "sin" of the "love of globalisation" and the "worship of success and money."
Then he delivered the line that will echo through Westminster for weeks:
"The Labour Party has to repent and reject New Labour as an alien body that took over the party. And this is where it leads: perversion and pedophilia."
Glasman also noted he had advised against hiring Mandelson — the longtime Labour operative and so-called "Prince of Darkness" who served as the power behind Tony Blair's throne. He described the New Labour approach associated with Mandelson as "Maoist Managerialism."
It's a striking moment. Labour's internal critics aren't just attacking a bad appointment. They're attacking the entire ideological infrastructure that produced it — the globalist, elite-networked, morally flexible project that New Labour represented and that Starmer, for all his talk of change, never actually dismantled.
Starmer spent this week trying to rally Labour against Reform UK, pitching himself as the last line of defense for the multicultural, pro-diversity globalist project. Reform has held a commanding lead in the polls over the past year. Nigel Farage's anti-mass migration movement has captured ground that Labour once considered its birthright.
The timing could not be worse. Starmer needed unity. He got a revolt. He needed moral authority. He got an Epstein scandal. He needed to project competence. His chief of staff just walked out the door.
Years of brutal internal consolidation — the purges, the sidelining, the methodical takeover of the party apparatus — were supposed to make Labour ungovernable by anyone but Starmer and his circle. Instead, they left him isolated. When the crisis hit, there was no deep bench of loyal allies willing to absorb the blow. There was McSweeney, and now McSweeney is gone.
The backbenchers calling for Starmer's head aren't political heavyweights. They don't need to be. The damage isn't in the weight of the voices — it's in the fact that they're speaking at all. A prime minister whose own MPs publicly suggest he resign over a moral failing doesn't recover by giving a Monday morning address. He recovers by being right, and Starmer was wrong on this from the beginning.
He knew. He appointed Mandelson anyway. And now his own party is telling him that one resignation wasn't enough.
President Trump proclaimed on Friday, opening the Northeast Canyons and Seamounts Marine National Monument to commercial fishing, revoking prohibitions that had locked American fishermen out of nearly 5,000 square miles of Atlantic waters off the New England coast.
The White House branded the move part of Trump's "America First Fishing Policy" — a direct reversal of restrictions first imposed by Barack Obama in 2016 and reinstated by Joe Biden after Trump lifted them during his first term.
Three presidential terms. Three reversals. The 4,913-square-mile monument has become a regulatory ping-pong ball, and the people who actually make their living on the water have paid the price every time the pendulum swings toward Washington's environmental bureaucracy.
The White House made a straightforward argument: the fishing ban was never necessary in the first place.
"Prohibiting commercial fishing is not necessary for the proper care and management of the Monument, as many fish species are highly migratory, not unique to the area, and are already protected through existing laws, such as the Magnuson-Stevens Fishery Conservation and Management Act."
That last point matters more than environmentalists want to admit. The Magnuson-Stevens Act is one of the most successful fishery management laws in the world. It already governs catch limits, habitat protections, and sustainability standards across U.S. waters. Layering a blanket commercial fishing ban on top of it wasn't science — it was symbolism, as Breitbart reports.
Obama established the monument in 2016, describing it as a way to protect vulnerable undersea corals and ecosystems. The timing — the final year of his presidency — was characteristic of an administration that loved using executive authority to lock up natural resources on its way out the door. Biden's restoration of the ban followed the same instinct: regulate first, ask fishermen later.
The White House statement framed the proclamation in broader economic terms:
"President Trump is committed to removing unnecessary restrictions on American fishermen in order to strengthen the U.S. economy, support coastal communities, and restore fairness to an industry disadvantaged by overregulation and unfair foreign competition."
John Williams, president and owner of the Atlantic Red Crab Company in New Bedford, Massachusetts, put it plainly to the Associated Press:
"We deserve to be rewarded, not penalized. We're demonstrating that we can fish sustainably and continue to harvest on a sustainable level in perpetuity."
Williams represents the kind of working Americans who rarely get a seat at the table when Washington decides how to manage the ocean. New England's fishing communities are not abstract stakeholders in a policy debate. They are families, businesses, and towns whose economic survival depends on access to the waters their industry has worked for generations.
The conservation establishment treats commercial fishermen as the problem. The fishermen themselves — the ones who depend on healthy fish stocks for their livelihoods — understand sustainability better than most of the advocates who lobby against them from offices hundreds of miles inland.
Gib Brogan, fisheries campaign director at the environmental group Oceana, offered the predictable counter to the Associated Press:
"The Northeast Canyons and Seamounts Marine National Monument was created to provide strong protections for the wide range of marine life that live in these unique habitats."
Note what's missing from that statement: any specific claim that commercial fishing in the monument area has caused measurable ecological harm. Brogan describes why the monument was created. He doesn't demonstrate that the fishing ban achieved anything that the Magnuson-Stevens Act couldn't.
This is the pattern with environmental opposition to resource access. The argument is always about intention — what the policy was "created to" do — never about whether the restriction actually accomplished more than existing law. It's preservation by declaration, where drawing a line on a map substitutes for evidence-based management.
When the federal government closes off nearly 5,000 square miles of ocean to commercial fishing without demonstrating that existing regulations are inadequate, it isn't protecting the environment. It's choosing environmentalist aesthetics over the livelihoods of coastal Americans. The fish in that monument are highly migratory — they don't respect the boundaries Obama drew. But the fishermen who lost access to those waters felt every mile of them.
Trump announced the move on Truth Social, calling it:
"another BIG WIN for Maine, and all of New England."
He also aimed at the whiplash the industry has endured:
"In my first term, I reversed the prohibitions placed on commercial fishing, but Joe Biden, or whoever was using the AUTOPEN, foolishly reinstated them. Since Day One, I have taken historic action to end these disastrous policies."
The broader story here extends well beyond one marine monument. For decades, the progressive approach to conservation has followed a simple formula: restrict access, claim moral authority, and force the people who actually work the land and sea to prove they deserve permission to keep doing what they've always done.
It's a framework that treats American industry as guilty until proven innocent — and even then, the restrictions rarely come off. Obama imposed the ban. Trump lifted it. Biden reimposed it. The only constant was uncertainty for the fishermen caught in the middle.
The White House statement connected the proclamation to broader economic goals:
"By revoking the Obama-Biden restrictions, President Trump's proclamation supports New England's fishing communities, in turn fostering economic growth and job creation in coastal regions."
Coastal New England doesn't need another layer of federal protection from an industry that already operates under one of the world's most stringent fishery management frameworks. It needs Washington to stop treating working Americans as collateral damage in a conservation branding exercise.
The monument is open. The fishermen can fish. And the waters will be just fine — managed, as they already were, by the law.