Mojtaba Khamenei, Iran's 56-year-old new supreme leader, finally broke his silence Thursday with a statement read by a news anchor on Iranian state TV. Not by Khamenei himself. An anchor read the words while an image of the new ayatollah was displayed on screen.
The statement was loaded with threats. Khamenei vowed to avenge "the blood of your martyrs," promised to keep wielding the "lever" of closing the Strait of Hormuz, and hinted at opening entirely new fronts against the United States and Israel. He pledged to obtain compensation from Iran's enemies, and if that failed, to destroy their assets outright.
The man delivering these threats could not be bothered to show his face.
Khamenei was a no-show at his own succession rally in Tehran on Monday. Thursday's statement, his first since assuming power following his father Ayatollah Ali Khamenei's death in an Israeli strike just after the war began, did nothing to quiet growing doubts about his physical condition, as The New York Post reports.
An Iranian source told The Sun that the new supreme leader's injuries are severe:
"One or two of his legs have been cut off. His liver or stomach has also ruptured. He is apparently in a coma as well."
Other Iranian sources insisted the injuries were minor, though none were named and none provided direct quotes. No explanation has been given for why Khamenei did not appear in the flesh.
Annika Ganzeveld, the Middle East Portfolio Manager for the Critical Threats Project at the American Enterprise Institute, noted that Iran's military leaders are likely shielding him from public view:
"Right now, they want to portray strength, and if he's injured, they might not want to put him on display."
That's a generous reading. A less generous one: the regime is Weekend at Bernie 's-ing its own supreme leader.
Khosro Isfahani, the research director for the Washington-based National Union for Democracy in Iran think tank, was considerably more blunt about the nature of Thursday's statement. He said the message was a clear call for Iran's allies abroad to take revenge, and pointed to what he saw lurking between the lines:
"It hints at activating terror cells, like the warnings that have come out of Europe and the US, and the reports of preparing strikes on the West Coast."
Isfahani did not believe Khamenei wrote the statement at all:
"It's clear that he has not written this himself, or we would have seen him on air or in a recorded message."
He went further, calling Khamenei a puppet for the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps. Having previously described the new supreme leader as possessing the "charisma of a boiled potato," Isfahani said the IRGC is happy to let him take the reins to avoid being targeted themselves:
"He's just being used as a puppet for the IRGC's message to the world."
And then the line that deserves to be framed: if Khamenei is alive, Isfahani said, "he's not even a good enough puppet to be put in front of a camera."
The substance of Khamenei's statement reads like a wishlist from a regime running out of options. Consider what he actually promised:
The statement also specifically noted to avenge those killed in the strike on the Shajarah Tayyebeh elementary school building in Minab. Khamenei framed retaliation broadly:
"The retaliation we have in mind is not limited only to the martyrdom of the great leader of the revolution; rather, every member of the nation who is martyred by the enemy constitutes a separate case in the file of revenge."
This is a regime that has lost its supreme leader, may have lost its replacement, and is now broadcasting threats it may lack the capacity to execute. The language about "other fronts" and enemy vulnerability is doing a lot of heavy lifting for a government that can't even produce a video of its own head of state.
Khamenei did acknowledge the death of his father in Thursday's statement, describing what he claimed was a personal viewing of the body:
"I had the honor of seeing his body after his martyrdom. What I saw was a mountain of steadfastness, and I was told that the fist of his intact hand had been clenched."
He also confirmed that his wife, one of his sisters, his niece, and the husband of his other sister died in the airstrike. The personal losses are real, and they matter, both as human tragedy and as the fuel for whatever decisions come next from Tehran.
But note the construction. Even grief is propaganda in the Islamic Republic. A clenched fist on a dead man's "intact hand" is not a eulogy. It is a recruitment poster.
Since the war began, law enforcement officials in the US and around the world have issued warnings about the possibility of sleeper cell attacks from Tehran's agents and supporters. Isfahani's reading of Thursday's statement as a signal to activate those cells deserves serious attention.
A regime cornered militarily does not become less dangerous. It becomes increasingly dangerous. Iran's conventional options are narrowing. The Strait of Hormuz threat is not new. The proxy networks are degraded. What remains is the unconventional: terror cells embedded in Western countries, soft-target operations, and the kind of asymmetric warfare that a state on the brink reaches for when it has nothing left to lose.
The fact that Iran's supreme leader cannot appear on camera does not mean Iran's intelligence apparatus cannot operate abroad. Those are two different capabilities, and confusing them would be a mistake.
What Thursday revealed is a regime in profound crisis. The new supreme leader is either gravely injured, incapacitated, or so diminished that even his own government won't put him on screen.
The IRGC appears to be running the show, using Khamenei's name as a letterhead for threats they author themselves. The statement was dressed up in revolutionary language, but the delivery told the real story.
Iran's top leadership wanted someone to hold the title so they wouldn't have to hold the target. Mojtaba Khamenei fit the bill. Whether he is conscious enough to know it is another question entirely.
FBI Director Kash Patel announced that the Bureau is investigating the shooting at Old Dominion University as an act of terrorism after an armed individual opened fire on campus, killing one person and wounding two others. The shooter is dead, subdued not by a SWAT team or a negotiator, but by a group of students who rushed him.
Patel delivered the announcement via an X post, laying out the facts without ambiguity:
"Earlier today, an armed individual opened fire at Old Dominion University, leaving one person dead and two others wounded. The shooter is now deceased thanks to a group of brave students who stepped in and subdued him – actions that undoubtedly saved lives along with the quick response of law enforcement."
The FBI's Joint Terrorism Task Force is fully engaged and embedded with local authorities on the ground.
According to various reports cited by Breitbart News, the alleged attacker has been identified as Mohamed Bailor Jalloh, a 36-year-old who carries a history that should have kept him nowhere near a university campus or, frankly, American soil.
Jalloh was arrested on July 3, 2016, for attempting to provide material support to the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant. In 2017, he was convicted and sentenced to 11 years in prison. Right Line News's Eric Daugherty noted that Jalloh was a "migrant from western Africa."
This is not an isolated data point. Breitbart News noted that the attacker who opened fire on Burford's Backyard Beer Garden in Austin, Texas, on March 1, 2026, was also from West Africa. Two mass shootings. Two attackers from the same region. Both on American soil.
The immigration question here is not a tangent. It is the story. Every time an attack like this occurs, the same machinery activates: the calls for gun control, the pivot to mental health funding, the insistence that we not "politicize" tragedy. But the one question that keeps proving relevant, the question of who was allowed into this country and why they were still here, gets treated as impolite to ask.
Jalloh wasn't some unknown quantity. He was arrested, tried, and convicted of attempting to support a terrorist organization.
The system identified him. The system processed him. The system sentenced him. And then the system released him back into the population with enough time left on the calendar to allegedly carry out exactly the kind of attack his original crime suggested he wanted to commit.
There is one detail in this story that deserves to stand apart from the policy failures surrounding it. A group of students at Old Dominion University charged a gunman. They subdued him. They stopped the killing.
Patel's statement credited their actions directly, saying they "undoubtedly saved lives along with the quick response of law enforcement." That language is worth noting. The FBI director did not bury their role in a subordinate clause. He led with it.
These were not trained operators. They were college students who decided in a moment when most people freeze. Whatever conversation follows about sentencing, immigration, and vetting failures, their courage deserves its own weight. More people are alive because of what they did.
The terrorism classification matters. It directs federal resources. It shapes the investigation's scope. It means the FBI isn't treating this as a random act of campus violence to be filed away under "lone wolf" and forgotten by the next news cycle.
But classification alone doesn't answer the harder question: how does a convicted terrorism supporter end up free and operational? The sentencing was eleven years. The conviction was in 2017. You can do the math. Either the sentence was served, and the system deemed him safe for release, or he was released early. Neither answer is comforting.
This is the consequence of a justice system that treats terrorism convictions with the same revolving-door philosophy it applies to everything else. A man who tried to materially support ISIS should not get a second opportunity to act on those loyalties. The leniency wasn't compassion. It was negligence. And someone at Old Dominion University paid for it with their life.
The Joint Terrorism Task Force is on the ground. The investigation will proceed. More details will surface about Jalloh's movements, his associations, and how he spent his time after leaving federal custody. Those details will matter.
But the structural failure is already visible. A convicted terrorist sympathizer, a migrant from western Africa, was given a sentence that allowed him to walk free while still young enough and motivated enough to kill. The vetting failed. The sentencing failed. The post-release monitoring, if it existed at all, failed.
One person is dead at Old Dominion University. Two more are wounded. A group of students had to do what the system should have made unnecessary.
Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson used a rare public appearance alongside Justice Brett Kavanaugh on Monday to forcefully criticize how the Supreme Court has handled emergency applications, calling the court's increasing willingness to intervene "a real unfortunate problem." Kavanaugh, sitting beside her at the federal courthouse in Washington, pushed back and defended the court's actions.
The hourlong event, attended by lawyers and judges, including Chief Judge James E. Boasberg, laid bare the internal fault lines on a court that has repeatedly stepped in to unblock the Trump administration's agenda after lower courts tried to stop it.
According to NBC News, Jackson did not hold back. She characterized the court's emergency docket work as fundamentally flawed, arguing that it distorts the judicial process itself.
"I just feel like this uptick in the court's willingness to get involved ... is a real unfortunate problem."
She called the emergency proceedings "a warped kind of proceeding" and declared flatly that the practice is "not serving the court or this country well." Her proposed solution was straightforward: if the court were "stingier about granting them," the filings would drop. She also claimed the uptick "affects how lower court judges approach cases," suggesting the court's emergency interventions ripple downward through the entire judiciary.
This is a revealing complaint. What Jackson frames as a procedural concern is, at bottom, frustration that the court's conservative majority keeps clearing the path for lawful executive action. The lower courts she worries about "approaching cases" differently are, in many instances, the same courts that have issued sweeping injunctions to stall presidential authority. When the Supreme Court steps in to lift those blocks, the system is working exactly as designed. The problem Jackson identifies is not a broken process. It is a process producing outcomes she opposes.
Kavanaugh offered a measured but pointed rebuttal. He noted that government emergency applications to the court are "not unique to Trump," pointing out that the Biden administration made similar requests, "albeit at a lower rate." He also identified the structural cause that Jackson conspicuously ignored: presidents in recent years have relied more heavily on executive orders because persuading Congress has become increasingly difficult. Those orders are then immediately challenged in court, which generates the very emergency filings Jackson objects to.
In other words, the uptick in emergency applications is not a symptom of a rogue Supreme Court. It is the predictable result of an executive branch governing through its constitutional authority and a sprawling legal apparatus rushing to the nearest friendly courtroom to stop it.
Kavanaugh insisted on institutional neutrality:
"We have to have the same position regardless of who is president."
Jackson said she agreed with that statement. Whether her broader critique is consistent with it is another question entirely.
In the last year, the Supreme Court has allowed the Trump administration to fire thousands of federal workers, assert control over previously independent federal agencies, and implement key elements of its immigration policy. Each of these actions had been blocked by lower courts. Each time, the Supreme Court's conservative majority intervened to let the executive branch function.
This is what Jackson calls a problem. But consider what the alternative looks like: a single district judge, sometimes hundreds of miles from Washington, issuing a nationwide injunction that freezes the agenda of a president elected by tens of millions of Americans. The Supreme Court stepping in to restore executive authority is not an abuse of the emergency docket. It is the court performing its most basic function, ensuring that one branch of government does not strangle another.
The left has grown comfortable with judge-shopping as a governing strategy. When a policy they oppose survives the legislative or electoral process, they route it through the judiciary. When the Supreme Court clears the obstruction, they call the process broken.
Both justices acknowledged the rising temperature around the judiciary. Jackson expressed concern about "the increase in violent threats against judges," calling it "unfortunate because it relates to a lack of understanding about judicial independence." Kavanaugh praised Chief Justice John Roberts, saying he had "picked his spots" in responding to criticism. Roberts recently put out a statement rebuking suggestions that judges should be impeached for ruling against the administration.
Notably, Chief Judge Boasberg, one of the judges some Republicans want to impeach, was among those at Monday's event. His presence added a layer of gravity to the discussion that neither justice could ignore.
Threats against judges are unacceptable regardless of the source. That principle is not complicated, and it does not require elaborate framing about "judicial independence" to state clearly. But the conversation about accountability is a separate one. Judges who issue sweeping injunctions against the elected executive should expect scrutiny. Scrutiny and threats are not the same thing, and conflating them serves only those who want to insulate the judiciary from any public accountability at all.
Kavanaugh noted that the court has, in some cases, opted to hear full oral arguments and issue longer written rulings in response to criticism of the shadow docket. That is a reasonable concession to transparency. But the core dynamic is not going to change. As long as lower courts continue issuing aggressive nationwide injunctions against executive action, the Supreme Court will continue fielding emergency applications. And as long as the conservative majority holds, it will continue lifting those injunctions when the law supports it.
Jackson acknowledged as much, conceding that "there's no easy answer, for sure." She is right about that, though perhaps not in the way she intended. The answer is not for the Supreme Court to stop intervening. The answer is for lower courts to stop overreaching.
Until that happens, expect more hourlong public events where liberal justices call the process broken and conservative justices explain, patiently, that it is working.
A Fulton County judge ruled Monday that District Attorney Fani Willis cannot participate in the legal battle over millions of dollars in attorney fees that President Donald Trump and his co-defendants are seeking to recoup from her failed racketeering prosecution. Judge Scott McAfee found that Willis, already "wholly disqualified" from the case itself, has no standing to intervene in the fee dispute either.
Trump has requested that Willis' office reimburse him more than $6.2 million. Across all defendants, the total sought reaches $16.8 million.
Willis' lawyers argued that blocking her from the proceedings would deny her due process. In their filing, they claimed:
"Without intervention by the District Attorney, any award would violate basic fundamental notions of due process by denying her an opportunity to be heard or even challenge the reasonableness of the claimed attorney fees before it is taken from her budget."
McAfee was unmoved. The judge noted that Fulton County itself could be involved in the proceedings, since any award would ultimately come from county coffers. But Willis personally? She's out.
The RICO prosecution was supposed to be the crown jewel of the legal campaign against Trump. Willis brought the case in August 2023, charging Trump and 18 co-defendants with conspiring to overturn the 2020 election results in Georgia. It was ambitious in scope and unmistakable in its political timing.
Then it unraveled.
The Georgia Court of Appeals disqualified Willis in 2024 after finding that her undisclosed romantic relationship with lead prosecutor Nathan Wade presented a conflict of interest. Not a technicality. Not a procedural hiccup. A conflict of interest was born from a relationship she chose to hide while running one of the most politically significant prosecutions in American history.
The case was transferred to the Georgia Prosecuting Attorneys' Council, headed by Director Peter Skandalakis. He took one look at the wreckage and moved to dismiss. McAfee granted the request. Skandalakis offered a blunt assessment of what continuing the prosecution would have meant:
"In my professional judgment, the citizens of Georgia are not served by pursuing this case in full for another five to ten years."
Five to ten more years. For a case that was already politically radioactive and legally compromised. Skandalakis made the only responsible call available to him.
A state law passed in 2025 opened the door for defendants to seek reimbursement in cases where prosecutors are disqualified. Trump and his co-defendants walked through it. The $16.8 million price tag reflects the staggering legal cost of defending against a prosecution that should never have survived its own internal contradictions.
Trump's lead attorney in the case, Steve Sadow, framed Monday's ruling as the logical consequence of Willis' own misconduct:
"Judge McAfee has properly denied DA Willis' motion to intervene in POTUS' action for reimbursement of attorney fees because her disqualification for improper conduct bars Willis and her office from any further participation in this dismissed, lawfare case."
There is a certain symmetry to it. Willis built a sprawling prosecution, leveraged the full weight of her office, and concealed a relationship that compromised the entire enterprise. Now she wants a seat at the table to argue about the bill. McAfee told her the seat was never hers to take.
The Willis saga is worth studying not as an isolated scandal but as a case study in what happens when prosecutorial power is wielded for political ends. Consider the sequence, as reported by Fox News:
Every step follows from the one before it. The conflict of interest didn't appear out of nowhere. It was baked into the prosecution from the beginning, hidden deliberately, and only exposed because the defendants fought back.
Trump called Willis a "rabid partisan" and labeled the prosecution a "witch hunt." Those are the words of a defendant. The court record tells the same story in quieter language. Disqualification. Dismissal. Reimbursement.
McAfee's acknowledgment that Fulton County could be drawn into the fee dispute raises an uncomfortable reality for residents. The $16.8 million in legal fees wasn't spent by abstract institutions. It was forced out of the pockets of defendants by a prosecution that a court found was compromised by the prosecutor's own conduct. If that money comes from the county budget, Fulton County taxpayers will foot the bill for Willis' choices.
That is what lawfare produces. Not justice. Not accountability. Costs. Transferred from the powerful to the public, from the politically ambitious to the people who never asked for any of it.
Fani Willis wanted to make history. She made a mess. And now she can't even argue about who cleans it up.
A federal judge ruled Monday that the three attorneys running the U.S. Attorney's Office in New Jersey have no lawful authority to do so, disqualifying the entire leadership team in a 130-page opinion that threatens to upend federal prosecutions across the state.
Chief Judge Matthew Brann found that senior counsel Philip Lamparello, executive assistant U.S. attorney Ari Fontecchio, and special attorney Jordan Fox are all disqualified from serving. The decision was stayed pending appeal, meaning the trio remains in place for now.
But the warning attached to the ruling carries real teeth:
"The Government is warned that any further attempts to unlawfully fill the office will result in dismissals of pending cases."
That's a federal judge threatening to throw out criminal prosecutions, not because of evidentiary problems or procedural defects, but because he objects to who is bringing them.
This is not the first time Brann has inserted himself into the question of who runs the New Jersey U.S. Attorney's Office, the New Jersey Monitor reported. In August, he disqualified Alina Habba, a personal attorney for President Trump and adviser to U.S. Attorney General Pam Bondi, from serving as New Jersey's U.S. attorney. An appeals court later agreed she had "no lawful authority" to run the office, and Habba resigned in December.
The trio of Lamparello, Fontecchio, and Fox has led the office since Habba's departure. Now Brann has knocked them out, too.
The core of Brann's argument is a separation-of-powers claim: that these attorneys were installed without Senate confirmation, and that the administration's legal justification for their authority amounts to a workaround. In his words:
"The Government assembles a convoluted patchwork of statutory cross-references to craft a leadership structure that it contends can do anything a United States Attorney can, without being a United States Attorney."
The opinion also included broader commentary about the administration. Brann wrote:
"One year into this administration, it is plain that President Trump and his top aides have chafed at the limits on their power set forth by law and the Constitution."
That kind of language tells you something about where the judge's sympathies lie. This isn't a narrow procedural finding. It reads like a political statement dressed in legal robes.
Here's the context Brann's opinion treats as irrelevant: the U.S. Senate failed to act to confirm Habba. U.S. Sens. Cory Booker and Andy Kim, both Democrats, opposed her nomination and helped prevent it from advancing. Trump's U.S. attorney choices have stalled in multiple states.
So the sequence works like this:
The result is a federal law enforcement office that effectively cannot function. Not because the administration refuses to fill it, but because the Senate refuses to confirm, and a judge refuses to accept any alternative arrangement. The office is paralyzed by design, and the people who created the paralysis frame it as a constitutional crisis caused by the executive branch.
Brann acknowledged the inconvenience in almost admiring terms:
"This division of power means that the President may not always be able to appoint his first choice to a specific office, and he may sometimes have to wait for the Senate to act, which can take time. But that is the point of this divided authority, not a defect."
Easy to say when you're not the one explaining to crime victims in New Jersey why their cases might get thrown out.
It's worth noting who brought the challenges that led to this ruling. One was filed by Daniel Torres, whom the courts found was unlawfully indicted by Habba. The other came from Raheel Naviwala, a Florida man awaiting sentencing after being convicted last February of defrauding roughly $100 million from Medicare and other insurers.
A man convicted of a nine-figure Medicare fraud scheme now has a federal judge questioning whether the prosecutors who handled his case had the authority to be there. If Brann's ruling survives appeal and the stay is lifted, the implications for pending cases are staggering. Convicted fraudsters and criminal defendants could see their prosecutions collapse, not on the merits, but on a technicality about staffing.
That's what "safety for the people of NJ" looks like when the judiciary decides personnel disputes matter more than prosecutions.
Habba, for her part, did not mince words. She called the ruling "ridiculous" and posted a sharper response on social media:
"The unconstitutionality of this complete overreach into the Executive Branch, time and time again, will not succeed. They would rather have no U.S. Attorney than safety for the people of NJ. Judges do not fire DOJ officials, AG Pam Bondi and POTUS do — get in line."
The frustration is understandable. The judiciary has now disqualified four different people from leading a single U.S. Attorney's Office. At some point, the question shifts from whether the executive branch is following proper procedure to whether the courts are using procedural objections to achieve a policy outcome: an empty office.
Senate confirmation exists for good reason. No serious person disputes that. But the confirmation process also carries an obligation to act in a reasonable time, and when the Senate refuses to hold votes or actively sabotages nominations, the executive branch faces an impossible choice: leave critical offices vacant or find legal mechanisms to keep them running.
Brann's ruling says the second option is off the table. The first option means federal law enforcement in New Jersey grinds to a halt. Democrats who blocked Habba's confirmation will shed no tears over that outcome. And a judge who spent 130 pages explaining why the office can't operate as currently staffed offered zero guidance on how it should operate in the meantime.
The ruling is stayed for now. The appeal will determine whether New Jersey's federal prosecutors keep their jobs or whether the state's most significant criminal cases start falling apart. Somewhere in Florida, a man who stole $100 million from Medicare is watching closely.
The prison guard assigned to the unit where Jeffrey Epstein was held searched his name on Google minutes before his body was found, according to DOJ documents and FBI records. The same guard, Tova Noel, had received a $5,000 cash deposit just over a week before the convicted pedophile died in his Manhattan jail cell in August 2019.
That deposit was the largest of 12 cash deposits into Noel's bank account, stretching back to April 2018. Chase Bank flagged the pattern in a suspicious activity report filed with the FBI in November 2019, three months after Epstein's death.
None of this is speculation. It's in the records.
Breitbart reported that according to the documents, Noel searched "latest on Epstein in jail" twice in the minutes before correctional officer Michael Thomas found Epstein's body. Thomas, for his part, was also browsing the internet during the hours he was supposed to be conducting inmate checks. Both guards were required to check on Epstein every 30 minutes. Neither did.
Epstein's cell sat approximately 15 feet from the guards' desks.
Noel later denied searching for Epstein on Google, claiming she did not remember doing so and also claiming the FBI records were inaccurate. No direct quote from Noel appears in the available documents.
Manhattan U.S. Attorney Geoffrey Berman put it plainly in 2019:
"The guards had a duty to ensure the safety and security of federal inmates in their care."
"Instead, they repeatedly failed to conduct mandated checks on inmates, and lied on official forms to hide their dereliction."
Noel and another guard were accused of falsifying records to make it appear as though they had checked on Epstein during the night hours. Both lost their jobs. Then the charges were dropped.
An unnamed inmate housed in the Special Housing Unit told the FBI what he recalled from the morning of August 10, 2019. At around 6:30 a.m., he heard officers shouting. Among the voices, one command cut through: "Breathe! Breathe!"
Then an unnamed officer said something far more chilling:
"Dudes, you killed that dude."
A female guard, according to the inmate's account in FBI notes, said:
"If he is dead, we're going to cover it up and he's going to have an alibi — my officers."
Other inmates reportedly chanted, "Miss Noel killed Jeffrey."
The FBI interviewed the inmate. What came of that interview remains unclear from the available records.
The financial trail deserves its own scrutiny. Twelve cash deposits into Noel's bank account beginning in April 2018. The largest, $5,000, landed on July 30, 2019, roughly three weeks before Epstein was found dead. Chase Bank considered the pattern suspicious enough to report it to the FBI.
That's a bank, not a conspiracy theorist, flagging a federal employee's account.
The public has never received a satisfying explanation for these deposits. No official named in the available documents has addressed them. The charges against the guards were dropped, and the story was supposed to end there.
For years, anyone who raised questions about the circumstances of Epstein's death was dismissed as a conspiracy theorist. The official narrative was tidy: a man facing the rest of his life in prison took his own life, and two lazy guards failed to notice. Tragic. Case closed.
But the official narrative now has a guard Googling the inmate she was supposed to be watching, minutes before he turned up dead. It has unexplained cash deposits flagged by one of the largest banks in the country. It has an inmate recounting a guard openly discussing a cover-up. It has falsified records. It has dropped charges.
The question was never whether Epstein deserved sympathy. He didn't. He was a convicted pedophile who trafficked in human misery. The question is whether the most high-profile federal inmate in America died under circumstances that powerful people had every incentive to arrange, and whether the institutions responsible for answering that question ever intended to.
Every new detail that surfaces points in the same direction. Not toward a definitive conclusion, but toward the realization that the people who were supposed to investigate this had the evidence in hand and let it gather dust.
Fifteen feet from the guards' desks. And nobody saw a thing.
Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz responded to Kristi Noem's departure from the Department of Homeland Security on Thursday not with a statement but with a threat. He wants state investigators embedded in the federal probe into two deaths during DHS operations in Minneapolis, and he says he'll try to hold up her successor's confirmation until he gets it.
President Trump announced Noem's exit on Thursday and nominated Sen. Markwayne Mullin of Oklahoma to replace her, posting on Truth Social that he'd like Mullin in the role by the end of the month.
"Markwayne will work tirelessly to Keep our Border Secure, Stop Migrant Crime, Murderers, and other Criminals from illegally entering our Country, End the Scourge of Illegal Drugs and, MAKE AMERICA SAFE AGAIN."
Walz had a different focus entirely. Speaking to MSNBC's Jen Psaki on Thursday, the governor framed himself as the man standing between Noem and a clean getaway.
"I would just say at this time that former Secretary Noem should probably get used to spending more time in Minnesota because I have a pretty good feeling in the future she may be doing that because we have got to get accountability."
Federal agents shot and killed two Americans during January operations in Minneapolis. The victims have been identified as Renee Good and Alex Pretti. The details of those shootings, including the circumstances and identities of the agents involved, remain sparse in the public record, as The Hill reports.
What is known: The superintendent of the Minnesota Bureau of Criminal Apprehension has said state investigators were shut out of both joint investigations with the FBI. Walz is treating that exclusion as the leverage point. He told Psaki he would try to stall Mullin's nomination until the administration allows state agencies to join the federal investigation.
"My demand for all the senators who are voting: don't vote for anything until they let us be part of the investigation into these murders and these crimes."
Note the word choice. Walz called these "murders" on national television. Not deaths. Not incidents under investigation. Murders. That is not the language of a governor seeking a transparent inquiry. That is the language of a man who has already rendered his verdict and wants the investigation to ratify it.
Walz wasn't the only Democratic governor who treated Noem's departure as an invitation to grandstand. California Gov. Gavin Newsom posted on X that "saying goodbye" to Noem "is not enough," demanding that Noem, Greg Bovino, and Stephen Miller "must be held accountable for terrorizing and endangering the American people."
Illinois Gov. JB Pritzker, who pushed back against the deployment of federal officers to Chicago last year, went further. He posted a video on X and did not hold back.
"Here's your legacy: corruption and chaos, parents and children tear-gassed, moms and nurses, U.S. citizens getting shot in the face."
"Now that you're gone, don't think that you just get to walk away. I guarantee you, you will still be held accountable."
Three Democratic governors. Three separate platforms. One synchronized message: Noem must be pursued even after leaving office.
The deaths of Renee Good and Alex Pretti deserve scrutiny. Any time federal agents use lethal force against American citizens on American soil, the public is owed answers. That principle isn't partisan. If Walz's stated concern were simply transparency, it would be difficult to argue with.
But transparency isn't what this looks like. This looks like a coordinated campaign by Democratic governors to criminalize immigration enforcement by turning the political cost of two deaths into a legal battering ram against anyone involved in carrying it out. Walz isn't asking questions. He's pre-loading the answers. Newsom isn't seeking accountability. He's naming targets. Pritzker isn't mourning. He's performing.
Consider the framing. These governors have spent years obstructing federal immigration enforcement in their states and cities. They've created sanctuary policies. They've refused cooperation with ICE. They've treated illegal immigrants as a protected class and the agents tasked with enforcing the law as an occupying force. Now, when enforcement operations produce tragic outcomes, they point to those outcomes as proof that enforcement itself is the problem.
It is a closed loop. Obstruct enforcement. Wait for something to go wrong. Blame the enforcers. Demand that the enforcement stop.
Walz's demand that senators refuse to vote on Mullin's confirmation until Minnesota gets access to the federal investigation is worth examining on its own terms. A governor does not get to set conditions on Senate confirmation votes. That is not how the process works. Walz knows this. The demand isn't meant to succeed. It's meant to create a narrative: that the administration is hiding something, that Mullin's confirmation is being "rushed" to avoid accountability, that anyone who votes yes is complicit.
Meanwhile, Walz offered this line with a straight face:
"We're not looking for retribution; we're looking for justice and we're looking to make sure that no one's above the law."
The same Tim Walz who governs a state that watched Minneapolis burn in 2020 while officials delayed the National Guard response. The same governor whose political allies spent that summer arguing that law enforcement was the real threat to public safety. Now he wraps himself in the language of law and order when it serves a different target.
The practical question is whether any of this actually slows Mullin's path to confirmation. Senate Republicans hold the majority. Walz has no procedural mechanism to block a vote. His leverage exists only in the media environment, where the demand itself becomes the story, and the confirmation vote becomes a referendum on whether senators "care" about the deaths in Minneapolis.
The broader question is what precedent this sets. If Democratic governors can use state investigative agencies to pursue former federal officials for carrying out lawful federal operations, the political weaponization of law enforcement reaches a new level. Every future DHS secretary will govern under the knowledge that any enforcement action in a blue state could result in personal legal exposure the moment they leave office.
That isn't accountability. It's deterrence aimed at the wrong people.
Renee Good and Alex Pretti are dead. Their families deserve facts, not a political production. But what Walz, Newsom, and Pritzker are building has less to do with those families than with the next election, and the one after that.
James Carville wants Ilhan Omar gone. Not quietly retired, not primaried, not gently sidelined. Gone. Out of the Democratic Party entirely.
KOMO News reported that the veteran Democratic strategist doubled down on past criticism of the far-left "Squad" member during an appearance on Stephen Smith's podcast "Straight Shooter," telling Omar she should abandon the party and launch her own movement. It's the kind of advice that sounds like an insult because it is one, wrapped in just enough strategic logic to make it sting.
Carville didn't mince words:
"Lady, why don't you just get out of the Democratic Party. Honestly, start your own movement."
He went further, suggesting Omar follow the model of AOC and operate under the Democratic Socialists of America banner rather than claiming a seat inside the Democratic coalition.
"And so what I would say to Congresswoman Omar, 'Why don't you be a Democratic Socialist of America?' Do what AOC did, and then if they win, the truth of that is, I share a lot of ideological issues in common with Congressman Omar, but maybe you should do like a parliamentary government. We'll let you in the governing coalition, but not the electoral coalition."
That distinction matters. Carville is drawing a line between governing, where ideological allies cooperate, and campaigning, where Omar's brand is apparently too toxic to carry into a general election.
Carville's frustration isn't just aesthetic. It's arithmetic. He pointed to the simple reality that roughly a third of the electorate consists of white men, a bloc that Democrats have spent years alienating with barely concealed contempt.
"About 33% of the people that are gonna vote are gonna be White males. Well, it's stupid to attack 33% of the voters!"
He called the party's belief that it can win national elections without white voters "insanity," and not the metaphorical kind.
"That we can somehow or another win an election without White males. It's just insanity. It's literally mathematical insanity, cultural insanity."
This is not a new observation. Conservatives have made this point for years: the Democratic Party's progressive wing treats entire demographic groups as monolithic villains or monolithic allies, depending on the news cycle. What's notable is hearing it from the man who helped elect Bill Clinton.
Carville's comments were reportedly in response to a 2018 interview Omar gave to Al Jazeera, in which she declared that "our country should be more fearful of white men because they're causing most of the deaths within this country."
That kind of rhetoric is exactly what Carville was warning about. It doesn't persuade. It doesn't build coalitions. It paints a third of the electorate as a threat and then asks them to vote for you anyway. Omar said the quiet part out loud, and seven years later, a senior Democratic strategist is still cleaning up the debris.
To his credit, Carville pushed back on the entire framework of demographic generalizations:
"All White people are not the same. All Black people are not the same. All Hispanic people are not the same, all right? And I don't like generalizing about someone's gender or their race or their sexual preference or anything else. All gay people are not the same. They're very different personalities. They're very different values, very different everything."
He even described Omar as a "very attractive, soft-spoken lady" before telling her to "stop." The juxtaposition is almost funny. Almost.
What's worth watching here isn't whether Omar actually leaves the Democratic Party. She won't. The interesting story is that one of the most recognized strategists in modern Democratic politics is publicly begging his own side to exile one of its most visible members, not because she's wrong on the merits in his view, but because she's electoral poison.
Carville admitted he shares "a lot of ideological issues in common" with Omar. He's not fighting over policy. He's fighting over strategy and losing. The progressive wing of the Democratic Party has spent years consolidating cultural power inside the institution.
Figures like Omar aren't anomalies. They're the product of a party that rewarded identity grievance politics for so long that it can no longer control the forces it unleashed.
Conservatives don't need to pick a side in this fight. Both sides of it confirm what the right has argued for a decade: the Democratic Party's fixation on racial and gender scorekeeping has made it fundamentally hostile to a huge share of the American public, and no amount of strategist hand-wringing on podcasts will fix that.
Carville can see the fire. He just can't find the extinguisher. Because the extinguisher is the problem.
A Marine Corps veteran and Green Party Senate candidate was dragged out of a Senate Armed Services Committee hearing on March 4 after standing up and shouting objections to U.S. policy in the Middle East, triggering a physical confrontation that ended with his arrest on multiple charges.
Brian C. McGinnis refused to stop speaking after interrupting the proceedings, shouting that Americans did not want to "fight and die for Israel." When Capitol Police moved to remove him, he held onto the door frame of the hearing room, allegedly breaking his arm in the struggle. Officers later arrested McGinnis on charges including assault on a police officer, resisting arrest, and unlawful demonstration.
Senator Tim Sheehy of Montana, a Republican member of the committee and former Navy SEAL, left his seat and physically assisted officers in removing McGinnis, grabbing him as officers attempted to free his arm from the doorway and carry him out. Sheehy later described his actions as an effort to assist law enforcement and de-escalate the situation.
Capitol Police pushed back on any suggestion that McGinnis was simply a passive protester caught up in excessive force, Military.com reported. According to their account, McGinnis actively resisted removal and escalated the physical confrontation.
"Got his own arm stuck in a door to resist our officers and force his way back into the hearing room."
Officers also sustained minor injuries during the incident. Senate rules permit the removal of individuals who disrupt official proceedings, a fact that tends to get lost when the disruption aligns with a cause the left finds sympathetic.
This isn't new. Congressional hearings have become stages for performative protest, and the script is always the same: disrupt, resist, get removed, claim victimhood. The causes rotate. The tactic doesn't.
McGinnis is a Green Party candidate for U.S. Senate in North Carolina. That detail matters. This wasn't a random citizen overcome by emotion in the gallery. This was a political candidate making a calculated scene inside a committee hearing, a scene guaranteed to generate exactly the kind of coverage he's now receiving.
None of this diminishes his military service. But wearing the uniform in the past does not grant a license to assault police officers in the present. The charges against McGinnis are serious: assault on a police officer, resisting arrest, and unlawful demonstration. Those aren't the charges of a man who stood up, said his piece, and left when asked.
Predictably, the political response has focused less on the man who broke the law and more on the senator who helped enforce it. A pro-Israel spending tracker that says it compiles totals from federal campaign finance records lists $641,337 in "pro-Israel lobby & mega donor" support tied to Sheehy, broken down as $79,253 from PACs and $562,084 from bundlers.
The implication is obvious: Sheehy didn't intervene because a man was disrupting a Senate hearing and fighting Capitol Police. He intervened because his donors told him to. This is the kind of reasoning that sounds compelling only if you've already decided the conclusion.
A former Navy SEAL saw a physical altercation unfolding feet away from him and stepped in. Capitol Police have not suggested any misconduct by the senator. There is no indication that Sheehy faces legal scrutiny for his involvement. The simpler explanation is usually the correct one: a man trained for exactly this kind of situation acted on instinct when chaos broke out in his workplace.
Consider how this story would play if the politics were reversed. If a protester had stormed a hearing to shout down a Democratic policy priority and a Democratic senator with a special operations background had helped remove him, the coverage would be wall-to-wall heroism. Profiles in courage. A senator who doesn't just talk tough but acts.
Instead, because the protest targeted Israel's policy and the senator who intervened is a Republican, the framing flips. The protester becomes a brave dissenter. The senator becomes a stooge for the lobby. The Capitol Police officers who sustained injuries became an afterthought.
This is how the narrative machine works. The facts don't change. The framing does all the heavy lifting.
Senate hearings exist to conduct the business of government. They are not open mic nights for political candidates looking to build name recognition. The right to petition your government does not include the right to physically resist law enforcement officers doing their jobs inside a federal building.
McGinnis made his choice. He chose spectacle over process, confrontation over persuasion. He now faces criminal charges that reflect that choice. Whatever sympathy his cause may generate in certain circles, the law doesn't carve out exceptions for protests you agree with.
Officers were injured. A hearing was disrupted. A man who wanted attention got it, along with a booking number.
Rep. Al Green, the Texas Democrat who has made a second career out of trying to impeach President Donald Trump, failed to clear the 50% threshold in his bid to hold onto a congressional seat and now faces a runoff against a fellow Democrat.
Green and Rep. Christian Menefee will square off on Tuesday, May 26, 2026, after neither secured a majority in the race for Texas's 18th Congressional District. The Associated Press reported Wednesday that Menefee pulled 46% of the vote to Green's 44.2%.
That means the man who has spent more time grandstanding against a sitting president than legislating for his own constituents now has to fight just to keep his job. And he's losing.
Green has served in Congress since 2005, originally representing Texas's 9th Congressional District. His tenure has been marked less by legislative accomplishment than by a singular, almost liturgical devotion to removing Donald Trump from office.
His impeachment push in November was described by Fox News as his fifth attempt to bring charges against the president. Five times. Green told local reporters at the time:
"We have to participate. This is a participatory democracy. The impeachment requires the hands and the guidance of all of us."
What that "guidance" has produced, in practical terms, is nothing. No successful impeachment. No coalition built. No legislation of consequence riding on the effort. Just a congressman who turned himself into a one-man protest movement while voters in his district waited for someone to address their actual concerns.
Green's flair for the dramatic extends well beyond impeachment resolutions. At the 2026 State of the Union, he brought a sign reading "black people aren't apes" into the chamber and was removed. The year before, at Trump's joint address to Congress on March 4, 2025, Green refused to be seated and waved his cane at the president until security escorted him out.
"I am not moving."
Voters, apparently, are.
Green isn't even running in his original district. Redistricting changes advanced by Republicans reportedly look to eliminate as many as five Democrat-held seats in Texas, and Green's 9th District was among the casualties. Rather than retire, he announced he would pursue reelection in the 18th Congressional District.
"So, I announce I will be running for the permanent seat."
The problem: he's not the only Democrat who wanted it. Menefee, a former Harris County Attorney, won a January special election to fill the seat after Rep. Sylvester Turner died in office last March at age 70. Menefee had announced his own candidacy for the district before Texas had even completed its redistricting plans, staking his claim early.
The Congressional Progressive Caucus Political Action Committee endorsed Menefee in 2025. A post on his website last March framed his decision in revealing terms, noting that he had been mentioned as a potential statewide candidate but chose Congress instead because "the prospects for breaking the Republican hold on state politics in Texas appeared dim for Democrats in the short term."
That's a remarkable concession from a Democrat. Texas isn't turning blue, and even their own candidates know it. The honest play, at least for Menefee, was to grab a safe House seat while one was available.
What voters in the 18th District are choosing between tells you everything about where the Democratic Party stands in 2026. On one side: a 20-year incumbent whose national profile rests entirely on performative opposition to Trump, culminating in repeated ejections from the House chamber. On the other: a progressive-backed newcomer who openly admits his party can't compete statewide in Texas.
Neither candidate is offering a vision. Green offers spectacle. Menefee offers managed decline.
Under Texas law, if no candidate captures a majority of the vote, the race heads to a runoff. That runoff is now set for May 26. In a solidly blue district, the winner will almost certainly head back to Congress.
The question isn't really who wins. It's what either victory would mean. Green has spent two decades in the House and is best known for waving a cane at the president. Menefee arrived months ago through a special election and already outpaced him at the ballot box. One represents a Democratic Party that mistakes disruption for resistance. The other represents a party that has stopped pretending it can win the fights that matter.
The 18th District will make its choice. The rest of the country already has.