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.
Secretary of State Marco Rubio spent Tuesday cleaning up comments that briefly threatened to overshadow the most consequential military action of the Trump presidency. One day after suggesting that an anticipated Israeli operation forced the United States to accelerate its strike on Iran, Rubio insisted he was misunderstood and walked back his prior statements.
The correction came after President Trump flatly denied that Israel chose the timing of the attack, maintaining that he chose to act after unsuccessful US-Iran talks on Thursday in Geneva.
The distinction matters. There is a significant difference between a president who orders a strike on his own strategic timetable and one who gets pulled into combat by a junior partner's operational calendar. Rubio's initial comments, made on Monday, muddied that distinction. His Tuesday clarification tried to unmuddy it.
According to the New York Post, Rubio told reporters on Monday that the United States knew an Israeli action was coming and understood the consequences for American forces in the region:
"We knew that there was going to be an Israeli action, we knew that that would precipitate an attack against American forces, and we knew that if we didn't preemptively go after them before they launched those attacks, we would suffer higher casualties and perhaps even higher those killed."
Read plainly, that framing places Israel in the driver's seat. It suggests the US struck on Saturday because Israel was going to act anyway, and Washington needed to get ahead of the retaliation that would inevitably target American troops. That's a coordination story, not a command story.
By Tuesday, Rubio sought to reframe. Pressed by reporters, he drew a line between the decision to strike and the timing of the strike:
"The president had already made a decision to act. On the timing, the president acted on the timing that gave us the highest chance of success."
He elaborated further, insisting the confusion was about sequencing, not sovereignty over the decision:
"This was a question of timing, of why this had to happen as a joint operation, not the question of the intent."
And then the clearest version of the cleanup:
"The president made a decision that negotiations were not going to work, that they were playing us on the negotiations and that this was a threat that was untenable. The decision was made to strike them."
Here's the thing: both versions of events can be true simultaneously. A president can decide independently that military action is necessary. He can also choose to execute that action at a moment that maximizes operational advantage, which in this case meant coordinating with Israel's own planned operations. Rubio's Monday comments were sloppy in their emphasis, not necessarily wrong in their substance.
The problem was one of framing. In Washington, perception is policy. If the Secretary of State goes on camera and makes it sound like Israel's operational timeline dictated when American pilots flew into harm's way, every adversary on Earth takes note. Every ally recalculates. Every critic at home gets a talking point they didn't earn.
Rubio acknowledged as much on Tuesday, conceding that awareness of Israeli intentions shaped the operational window while maintaining the underlying decision belonged to Trump alone:
"Obviously we were aware of Israeli intentions and understood what that would mean for us, and we had to be prepared to act as a result of it. But this had to happen no matter what."
That last sentence does the heavy lifting. "This had to happen no matter what" is the line that should have led on Monday.
The press corps saw daylight between Rubio's Monday remarks and Trump's position, and they drove a truck through it. That's what reporters do. The more interesting question is why this particular gap mattered so much to so many people so quickly.
The answer is obvious. The left has spent years constructing a narrative that American foreign policy in the Middle East operates at Israel's direction rather than the other way around. Rubio's Monday comments, taken at face value, handed that narrative a gift. It suggested the United States launched Operation Epic Fury not on its own strategic assessment but because an Israeli action was about to create facts on the ground that would endanger US troops.
That framing is useful to people who want to argue that America doesn't act in its own interests in the region. It's useful to people who want to drive a wedge between Trump and voters skeptical of Middle Eastern entanglements. And it's useful to Iran, which would love nothing more than to portray the strike as a war fought on someone else's behalf.
Rubio's Tuesday clarification denied all of those factions the foothold they were looking for.
The US struck Iran on Saturday after negotiations in Geneva collapsed on Thursday. The timeline is tight: talks fail, and within 48 hours, American forces are conducting strikes on Tehran. That speed suggests the military planning was already mature before anyone sat down at the negotiating table. Diplomacy was given its chance. It failed. The contingency became the plan.
Rubio described it as "a unique opportunity to take joint action against this threat." Joint action with Israel is not the same as action dictated by Israel. Coalition warfare has always involved synchronizing operations across allied forces. The fact that the US and Israel moved in concert doesn't mean one was leading the other by the nose.
The communications stumble was real, but it was a stumble, not a revelation. Rubio misspoke, or at least mis-emphasized, and spent the next day fixing it. In the grand scheme of what happened this past weekend, a Secretary of State needing a do-over on messaging ranks well below the actual military operation it was meant to describe.
The strike happened. The decision was Trump's. The diplomacy was exhausted first. Everything else is noise.
President Trump on Tuesday declared that Iran's air defense, Air Force, Navy, and leadership "is gone," dismissing Tehran's belated attempts at diplomacy in the midst of a joint American and Israeli strike campaign on the Iranian capital.
Iranian leadership "wants to talk," Trump said. His response was blunt: "It's too late."
The strikes, carried out jointly by the United States and Israel, have targeted Tehran's military and political infrastructure with devastating effect. White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt announced that 49 of the most senior Iranian regime leaders have been killed, including Supreme Leader Ayatollah Khamenei. Leavitt framed the campaign in terms no one could misunderstand:
"Killing terrorists is good for America."
Trump made clear in a New York Post interview that he is not ruling out any option, including ground forces. In a political culture where presidents reflexively promise "no boots on the ground" before a conflict even begins, Trump refused the ritual.
"I don't have the yips with respect to boots on the ground — like every president says, 'There will be no boots on the ground.' I don't say it."
Instead, he offered a characteristically pragmatic assessment, saying he "probably doesn't need them" but would use them "if they were necessary." That's not saber-rattling. That's refusing to hand the enemy a playbook.
Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth reinforced the posture at a Monday press briefing, calling it "foolish" to telegraph "what we will or will not do." For years, American adversaries benefited from administrations that pre-announced constraints, turned military planning into a public seminar, and signaled hesitation before the first sortie launched. That era is over.
Trump also noted the United States has "the capability to go far longer" than the four-to-five-week time frame projected for military operations against Iran. The message to Tehran: the clock is yours, and it's running out.
In an interview with The Atlantic on Sunday, Trump revealed that Iran had reached out and that he had agreed to talk. But the window, he made clear, had already narrowed to a slit.
"They want to talk, and I have agreed to talk, so I will be talking to them. They should have done it sooner. They should have given what was very practical and easy to do sooner. They waited too long."
This is the central dynamic that critics of this administration consistently fail to grasp. Strength creates diplomacy. The Iranian regime did not suddenly discover a desire for dialogue out of philosophical reflection. They discovered it because their Supreme Leader is dead, their senior military and political figures are being systematically eliminated, and their air defenses no longer exist in any meaningful sense.
For four decades, the theocratic regime in Tehran operated under the assumption that no American president would ever follow through. Sanctions would tighten and loosen. Diplomats would shuttle between capitals. Think tanks would publish papers. And the regime would continue funding proxies, enriching uranium, and threatening its neighbors while Western capitals debated "proportionality."
That calculus just collapsed.
The joint nature of this operation deserves attention. American and Israeli forces striking in coordination against Iranian targets represents a level of allied resolve that the regime's planners likely war-gamed but never truly expected to face. The elimination of 49 senior regime figures is not a pinprick. It is a decapitation.
Reports and imagery from Monday showed plumes of smoke rising over Tehran. Separately, an AP photo from Sunday, March 1, 2026, captured damage at a warehouse in Sharjah City in the United Arab Emirates following reports of Iranian strikes in Dubai, a reminder that the regime was lashing out even as its own infrastructure crumbled around it.
This is what happens when a rogue state exhausts the patience of serious people. Iran had every opportunity to come to the table. Trump said it himself: what was being asked was "very practical and easy to do." They chose defiance. They chose wrong.
There will be no shortage of voices in the coming days urging restraint, calling for off-ramps, and warning about escalation. These are the same voices that spent years crafting a nuclear deal that enriched the regime while buying nothing permanent. The same voices that treated Iranian proxies as a regional nuisance rather than an existential threat. The same voices that confused process with progress.
The results of this operation speak in a language that doesn't require translation. Iran's military capacity is degraded. Its leadership structure is shattered. And its surviving officials are now asking to talk.
They should have called sooner.
Actor Michael Rapaport unloaded on Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and New York Mayor Zohran Mamdani on Sunday, exposing a glaring double standard: both Democrats rushed to condemn President Trump's military strikes against Iran's mullahs but had nothing to say while the regime spent weeks slaughtering its own people.
Rapaport's message to Ocasio-Cortez was blunt:
"You said 0.0 during the last few weeks as 35k civilians were slaughtered raped and arrested in Iran. Resign."
He saved similar treatment for Mamdani, writing on X:
"You said 0.0 during the last few weeks as 35k plus civilians were slaughtered raped and arrested in Iran. Shovel Snow & get me my free shit."
The backdrop is straightforward. The president authorized a series of surprise attacks on Iran's mullahs on Saturday. Democratic officials all across the country immediately rose to defend the brutal Iranian regime. Ocasio-Cortez ripped Trump and accused him of refusing to use "diplomacy" in Iran, calling him a "president who does not care about the long-term consequences of his actions." Mamdani blasted Trump for what he called a "catastrophic" and "illegal" war on Iran.
None of them had a word to say as the mullahs spent the last month killing tens of thousands of civilians protesting for democracy.
Ocasio-Cortez's invocation of "diplomacy" deserves particular scrutiny, as Breitbart points out. Diplomacy with Iran has been failing since 1979. Nearly half a century of engagement, negotiation, frameworks, and deals, and the theocratic regime still brutalizes its own citizens, funds terrorism across the Middle East, and inches toward nuclear capability.
At what point does the call for "diplomacy" stop being a policy position and start being a reflexive tic? When Iranian protesters are being slaughtered in the streets, and your first instinct is to criticize the American president for acting against the regime doing the slaughtering, you have revealed something about your priorities. It isn't flattering.
The pattern is familiar. Authoritarian regimes commit atrocities. The American left says nothing. The moment a Republican president takes action, they discover their voice. The outrage is never directed at the people pulling triggers in Tehran. It's directed at the Oval Office.
Mamdani calling military action against Iran "illegal" and "catastrophic" is rich coming from a mayor whose own policy instincts have drawn fire from across the political spectrum. His concern for legality appears highly selective. Tens of thousands of Iranian civilians arrested, beaten, and killed by their own government didn't trigger a single statement about illegality. But is American military action against the regime responsible? Catastrophic. Illegal. Must be condemned immediately.
This is the tell. For a certain kind of progressive politician, American power is always the problem. Never the dictatorship. Never theocracy. Never the regime that hangs dissidents from cranes. The villain is always Washington.
Rapaport is not a conservative commentator. He's a Hollywood actor who has been willing to break with progressive orthodoxy when the facts demand it. That's precisely what makes his criticism effective. He isn't operating from a partisan playbook. He's pointing out something obvious that most people in his industry would rather ignore.
The question he posed is simple, and neither Ocasio-Cortez nor Mamdani has answered it: Where were you during the last few weeks?
Not during the strikes. During the slaughter. When Iranian civilians, many of them young, many of them women, were being killed for demanding basic democratic rights, where was the outrage? Where were the press conferences? Where were the posts on X?
Silence. Total silence. Then, the moment Trump acts against the regime responsible, the keyboards start clacking.
This is the core rot in progressive foreign policy thinking. Moral urgency is activated only when it can be aimed at domestic political opponents. Iranian civilians dying in the streets? Not useful. Can't be pinned on a Republican. File it away. But American military action? Now we're in business. Now we can fundraise. Now we can clip quotes for social media.
It isn't principled opposition. Its performance. And increasingly, ordinary Americans can see the difference.
Rapaport told them both what millions of people were already thinking. Neither has offered a convincing answer. Neither is likely to. When your silence is the argument against you, there's not much left to say.
Iran unleashed a barrage of drone and missile strikes against civilian and military targets across nine countries on Saturday, killing at least six people and sending residents and military personnel scrambling for shelter from the Middle East to the Persian Gulf. The strikes targeted locations in the UAE, Bahrain, Israel, Syria, Iraq, Qatar, Kuwait, Jordan, and Saudi Arabia in what Tehran framed as retaliation for Operation Epic Fury.
Among the targets: a US Navy base in Bahrain, Dubai International Airport, Prince Sultan Air Base outside Riyadh, and residential neighborhoods in Tel Aviv and Abu Dhabi. The scope was enormous. The damage was real. And the message from Tehran was unmistakable.
This wave of violence followed Operation Epic Fury, a US and Israeli daylight attack that struck at the heart of the Iranian regime, including the death of Supreme Leader Ayatollah Khamenei and other key regime figures. What Iran launched Saturday was not the strike of a confident power projecting strength. It was the spasm of a decapitated regime scattering fire in every direction, hitting allies and bystanders as much as adversaries.
Consider the target list. Iran didn't just strike at Israel or American military assets. It fired on Kuwait, the UAE, Jordan, Saudi Arabia, and Syria. Several of these are Muslim-majority nations. Some have spent years trying to maintain diplomatic back channels with Tehran. None of that mattered when the mullahs needed to project fury; they no longer had the leadership to sustain, as New York Post reports.
At Dubai International Airport, a late Saturday strike was intercepted, but falling debris injured four people and killed one. Smoke filled a terminal. Passengers captured the chaos on video, with one clip capturing screams of "Oh my God" as travelers fled. Near the five-star Fairmont the Palm in Dubai, apparent debris from another intercepted attack set a large fire. It remains unclear if anyone was hurt there.
In Abu Dhabi, a worker was killed in a residential area, a strike the UAE's Ministry of Defense confirmed on X. The UAE military said it intercepted three waves of ballistic missiles from Tehran, and the government's response was blunt.
"Reserves the right to respond."
That is the UAE choosing its words carefully while keeping every option open.
One nighttime barrage appeared to land direct hits in Tel Aviv, where at least 125 missiles were fired, with 35 piercing Israeli airspace. One woman was killed. At least 20 people were hurt. In the Syrian town of Sweida, four people were killed. In Kuwait, the Ministry of Defense announced it had successfully intercepted "several ballistic missiles" launched at Ali Al-Salem Air Base, with military personnel and residents warned of the incoming attack.
An Iranian missile was also launched at the US Navy base in Bahrain on February 28, 2026. The impact on the headquarters of the US Fifth Fleet was not immediately clear, though a related headline referenced three US service members killed and five seriously wounded.
President Trump warned of possible casualties from Iranian attacks but reassured that proper protocols were in place to minimize American deaths. His statement framed the broader mission in terms that the American public deserves to hear from a commander in chief:
"My administration has taken every possible step to minimize the risk to US personnel in the region."
"But we're doing this not for now, we're doing this for the future and it is a noble mission."
That is the posture of a president who understands that the elimination of the Iranian regime's top leadership will be measured not by Saturday's retaliatory fireworks but by what the region looks like six months from now. Operation Epic Fury removed the head. The body is thrashing. That was always going to be the ugly part.
People fled to nearly a dozen countries. Kuwait, the UAE, Jordan, Syria, Iraq, and Saudi Arabia fended off Iranian strikes throughout the day. The geographic breadth of the attack is itself an indictment of the regime. Iran didn't hit military targets with precision. It sprayed missiles across an entire region, killing civilians in airports and apartment buildings and Syrian towns that had nothing to do with Operation Epic Fury.
For years, the foreign policy establishment warned that confronting Iran would destabilize the Middle East. What Saturday demonstrated is that Iran was always the source of that instability. A regime willing to fire on nine countries, including nations it ostensibly maintained diplomatic relations with, was never a partner for peace. It was a threat waiting for a reason.
The interceptors worked in most cases. The Gulf states' defense systems, built in large part through American partnerships, absorbed the blow. Kuwait intercepted. The UAE intercepted. Israel intercepted most of what came its way. The infrastructure America spent decades building in the region did exactly what it was designed to do.
The question now is whether what remains of Iran's command structure can sustain this level of aggression or whether Saturday was the high-water mark of a dying regime's capacity. The Gulf states are watching. Israel is watching. And every one of them is doing the math on what Iran looks like without Khamenei, without its key figures, and without the illusion of untouchability that kept its neighbors deferential for decades.
The UAE's four-word statement said everything. Saudi Arabia hosted incoming fire at a base 40 miles from Riyadh. Kuwait took missiles at an air base housing coalition forces. These governments now have domestic justification for responses they may have previously hesitated to pursue.
Saturday was ugly. People died in airports and living rooms and ancient Syrian towns. But the regime that ordered those strikes no longer has the leadership that built it, the supreme leader who sustained it, or the aura of invincibility that protected it. Iran fired in nine directions at once. That is not a strength. That is the last act of a collapsing power trying to burn everything on its way down.
California Sen. Adam Schiff planted himself squarely in the middle of the Paramount and Warner Bros. Discovery merger this week, insisting the multi-billion-dollar deal face intense regulatory review "free from White House political influence."
The statement arrived shortly after Warner Bros. Discovery declared Paramount's amended bid the "superior proposal" over Netflix, which subsequently withdrew from contention.
The Wrap reported that Schiff framed his concern around jobs and free speech, wrapping familiar progressive anxieties in Hollywood-friendly language:
"The merger of two of Hollywood's biggest studios must be subject to the highest levels of scrutiny, free from White House political influence, to determine its impact on American jobs, freedom of speech and the future of one of our nation's greatest exports."
He also called for bringing "moviemaking back to our shores" and investing in the workforce. Noble sentiments from a senator whose party has spent decades championing the regulatory and tax environment that drove production overseas in the first place.
Netflix's exit was notably pragmatic. The streaming giant, already facing an antitrust investigation from the Department of Justice, acknowledged the math no longer worked:
"However, we've always been disciplined, and at the price required to match Paramount Skydance's latest offer, the deal is no longer financially attractive, so we are declining to match the Paramount Skydance bid."
That's a clean business decision. But Sen. Elizabeth Warren saw something darker. She openly questioned what changed after Netflix co-CEO Ted Sarandos met with Attorney General Pam Bondi and White House Chief of Staff Susie Wiles on Thursday.
"Looks like crony capitalism with the President corrupting the merger process in favor of the billionaire Ellison family."
No evidence accompanied the accusation. Just a meeting and a conclusion. Warren's formula is reliable: observe a sequence of events, assume corruption, skip the part where you prove it.
Paramount CEO David Ellison expressed confidence after WBD's board unanimously affirmed the value of the offer. WBD CEO David Zaslav matched that enthusiasm:
"We are excited about the potential of a combined Paramount Skydance and Warner Bros. Discovery and can't wait to get started working together telling the stories that move the world."
Both executives pointed to shareholder value as the driving rationale. In a media landscape where legacy studios are hemorrhaging subscribers and theatrical revenue remains volatile, consolidation carries an obvious industrial logic. Two weakened players combining assets is not inherently sinister. It is what companies do when the market demands scale.
California Attorney General Rob Bonta, however, signaled that the deal still faces significant hurdles at the state level. He called it "not a done deal" and noted that the California Department of Justice has an open investigation with plans for a "vigorous" review.
There is something instructive about Schiff's intervention here. His demand for scrutiny "free from White House political influence" presupposes that such influence is being exerted. The source material offers no evidence of that beyond a meeting between Sarandos and administration officials, which is the kind of meeting that happens in every administration during every major corporate transaction.
Schiff is performing oversight without a predicate. He wants the public to associate the merger with political interference before any interference has been demonstrated. This is a familiar pattern: establish the narrative first, then hunt for the facts to justify it.
His call to "bring moviemaking back to our shores" also deserves scrutiny. Hollywood's exodus to foreign production hubs like Canada, the UK, and Eastern Europe accelerated under incentive structures that California's own leadership failed to compete with.
Studios chase tax credits. They always have. If Schiff wants American production jobs, the answer lies in tax and regulatory policy, not in extracting concessions from a merger he has no authority to block.
The real question isn't whether Adam Schiff approves of this deal. It's whether the combined entity serves consumers and shareholders better than the current fragmented landscape. The antitrust review process exists precisely to answer that question, and it will proceed whether Schiff issues press releases or not.
What voters should notice is the reflex. A major corporate transaction moves forward. Democrats immediately:
Netflix made a business decision. WBD's board voted unanimously. The Ellison-led Paramount team put forward a superior offer. These are the facts. Everything else is positioning.
Schiff wants a stage. Hollywood just handed him one.
Hillary Clinton abruptly ended a press exchange Thursday after a reporter asked her a simple question: Why was Ghislaine Maxwell invited to Chelsea Clinton's wedding?
Clinton had just finished a closed-door House deposition related to Jeffrey Epstein. She was speaking to reporters when the question landed.
"Can I ask, why was Ghislaine Maxwell invited to your daughter Chelsea Clinton's wedding?"
Clinton's answer was brief and careful. She said Maxwell "came as the plus one, the guest of someone who was invited." Then she offered a quick "Thank you all" and stopped taking questions.
The reporter didn't let the moment pass without context, noting that Maxwell had already been named in a civil lawsuit by Virginia Giuffre before the wedding and that Jeffrey Epstein had already been convicted.
Clinton didn't respond to that. She was already walking away.
Chelsea Clinton married on July 31, 2010, in Rhinebeck, New York. Multiple outlets reported that Maxwell attended. Photos from the event show her among the guests. Maxwell herself said she attended with her then-boyfriend, tech billionaire Ted Waitt.
By that date, the public record on Epstein was not exactly thin. In 2009, Giuffre filed a lawsuit against Epstein under the pseudonym "Jane Doe 102," alleging she had been trafficked as a minor. In that lawsuit, Giuffre alleged Maxwell recruited and groomed her for Epstein. The Daily Caller reported.
So when the Clintons welcomed Maxwell to one of the most high-profile social events of the decade, these allegations were already part of the legal landscape. Not a rumor. Not gossip. Court filings.
Giuffre later sued Maxwell directly for defamation in 2015. That case was settled in Maxwell's favor in 2017.
Clinton's appearance on Thursday was not voluntary in spirit, even if it was technically consensual. The Clintons consented to appear on Feb. 2 to answer questions about their connections to Epstein.
The timing mattered. Just one day earlier, the Department of Justice made public a new batch of records that mentioned former President Bill Clinton. Those records included an image depicting him in a hot tub with Epstein. Federal officials distributed the materials in batches under requirements set by the Epstein Files Transparency Act, which President Donald Trump enacted in November.
That sequence tells its own story. The documents drop. The next day, the Clintons sit for a deposition. And when a reporter connects the obvious dots, Hillary Clinton offers one sentence and leaves.
There's a pattern with the Clintons and the Epstein question that has persisted for years. Every answer is technical. Every response is minimal. Every exit is swift.
Maxwell was a "plus one." That's the explanation. Not an expression of regret. Not a concession that maybe the guest list should have been vetted more carefully, given that Epstein had already been convicted and Giuffre's allegations against Maxwell were already in the courts. Just a procedural deflection: she came with someone else.
The reporter's follow-up framed the issue precisely. Giuffre's lawsuit was filed in 2009. Epstein's conviction preceded the wedding. The information was available. The Clintons are not people who lack access to information, staff, or legal counsel. They are arguably the most connected political family in modern American history. The idea that Maxwell simply slipped through as an anonymous plus-one strains belief past its breaking point.
And yet the question remains one that apparently cannot be answered for more than eight words.
The Epstein Files Transparency Act exists because the American public grew tired of watching powerful institutions treat the Epstein case like something to be managed rather than resolved. The steady release of documents has kept the story alive in a way that quiet settlements and sealed records were designed to prevent.
Every new batch of records puts names back in the spotlight. Every deposition forces someone to sit in a chair and answer questions. That is what accountability looks like when it finally arrives, however late.
The Clintons consented to appear. They answered questions behind closed doors. But when the doors opened, and a reporter asked the most obvious question in the world, Hillary Clinton gave seven words and walked away.
The documents will keep coming. The questions won't stop. And "she was a plus one" is not an answer that ages well.
CBS Evening News host Tony Dokoupil praised President Trump's record-breaking State of the Union address as "extraordinary" and "historic" Tuesday night, while over on MSNBC, Rachel Maddow offered a starkly different verdict: the speech was "wound-up and weird" and amounted to "violence porn."
The split-screen reactions, delivered within minutes of Trump concluding the longest State of the Union in American history, offered a near-perfect snapshot of where the media stands heading into the midterms. One network's anchor engaged with the substance. The other couldn't get past her own revulsion long enough to try.
Trump spoke for a record-breaking 1 hour and 47 minutes, covering the economy, immigration, gender ideology, and voter identification. Dokoupil, 45, who was elevated to the CBS Evening News anchor desk in January 2026, described what he watched this way:
"It was an extraordinary speech - the longest to a joint session in history, the longest State of the Union in history... The first part of the speech, all about the economy, an issue we know a lot of Americans want to hear about."
As reported by the Daily Mail, he characterized the performance as "vintage Trump: combative, populist. Historic for other reasons, as well." Dokoupil also identified what he called "the heart of the speech," pointing to the president's remarks on immigration, gender, and voter identification as the substance that mattered most.
Dokoupil noted that Trump ad-libbed one of the night's sharpest lines, one that wasn't in the prepared script: "The first duty of elected officials is to protect Americans, not illegal aliens." He also observed that Trump "seemed at times to be goading Democrats into reacting, and at times they took that bait."
That's a straightforward observation. It's also the kind of analysis that would have been unremarkable at CBS five years ago. Today it qualifies as countercultural.
Rachel Maddow, 52, took a different approach. She skipped past the economic portion of the address almost entirely, dismissing it in a single breath:
"The president didn't seem very invested in the lies that he was telling about the economy, but he did list a whole bunch of them right off the bat."
No rebuttal. No specifics. Just "lies" as a category and a wave of the hand. The real offense, in Maddow's telling, was that Trump devoted large portions of the speech to anecdotes about Americans killed by illegal immigrants. She described it as gratuitous:
"He talked about people being covered in blood, gushing blood, blood pouring out of things… people being on the edge of death."
She went further, accusing Trump of going into "graphic detail on several different people's injuries" and offering "as much sort of gory detail as he could, talking about very bloody scenes." Her final characterization: the president engaged in "sort of violently pornographic riffing."
Think about what that framing actually does. A president stands before Congress and tells the stories of Americans whose lives were destroyed by people who should never have been in the country. He names the cost of policy failure in human terms. And the progressive response is to complain that it was too vivid.
The families of those victims might use a different word than "pornographic." They might call it recognition.
Maddow predicted the main takeaway from the speech would be "his pace and his freneticism." That tells you everything about how she processed the evening. Not the policy. Not the arguments. The tempo.
CBS Chief Washington Analyst Robert Costa offered a more grounded assessment, calling the speech "entirely who President Trump is":
"Totally defiant, blunt force politically on all of these issues, not so much making a speech but a presentation, and a recharacterization of the political reality. Trying to put it in his fingerprints ahead of the midterms."
Costa may not have been cheerleading, but he was doing his job: explaining what the speech accomplished politically. That's a low bar, and yet it towers above dismissing the whole thing as a blood-soaked fever dream.
The divide here isn't really between CBS and MSNBC. It's between a media willing to grapple with what a president actually said and a media that pre-decided its reaction before Trump reached the podium. Maddow didn't engage with the immigration argument. She didn't contest the specific cases Trump raised. She objected to the fact that he raised them at all.
Dokoupil's willingness to call the speech "extraordinary" without immediately qualifying it into meaninglessness is worth noting in context. He was promoted from CBS Mornings earlier this year by new editor-in-chief Bari Weiss, 41, the founder of the right-leaning Free Press, who was appointed by Paramount CEO David Ellison under the pretense of being a disruptor after the company's merger with Skydance.
Weiss has had a turbulent tenure since taking over in October. She held a highly publicized town hall with Erika Kirk in December. She hired Matt Gutman, a longtime former ABC journalist who previously worked at the Jerusalem Post, as the network's chief reporter. She also pulled a 60 Minutes segment that was set to examine conditions at CECOT, the Terrorism Confinement Center in El Salvador, where the Trump administration has been sending illegal immigrants.
The CECOT decision drew predictable outrage from the usual corners, but it signaled something important: editorial choices at CBS are no longer running on autopilot. Whether Weiss can sustain that shift through a full midterm cycle is an open question, but Dokoupil's Tuesday night performance suggests she's at least putting anchors in front of the camera who are willing to describe reality without flinching.
There's a pattern worth naming. Every time a conservative leader forces the public to confront the human consequences of illegal immigration, the progressive media apparatus reaches for the same move: don't argue the facts, argue the tone. Call it fearmongering. Call it exploitation. Call it pornographic. Anything to avoid the underlying question: were these people killed, and could their deaths have been prevented by enforcing the law?
Maddow never answered that. She never had to, because her audience doesn't require it. They tuned in to be told the speech was bad, and she delivered.
Dokoupil's audience got something different. They got an anchor who acknowledged the speech was long, noted its political strategy, identified its emotional core, and let viewers decide for themselves. That used to be called journalism.
The longest State of the Union in history, and the most revealing reaction wasn't anything Trump said. It was what his critics refused to hear.
Democratic Reps. Ilhan Omar (MN) and Rashida Tlaib (MI) began screaming during President Trump's State of the Union address on Tuesday, only to have their outbursts swallowed whole by Republican lawmakers chanting "U-S-A, U-S-A" across the House Chamber. Texas Democrat Al Green was ejected after brandishing a placard reading "Black people aren't apes." The joint session of Congress, meant to showcase a president's agenda, instead became the latest stage for Democratic theatrics.
The disruptions started early and escalated fast. As Trump spoke about domestic accomplishments from his first year in office, cameras caught Omar appearing distraught, almost overcome with emotion, before she and Tlaib began yelling. The pair shouted "You have killed Americans" and called the president a liar, their voices competing with, and ultimately losing to, the rolling "U-S-A" chants from the Republican side of the chamber.
Trump did not flinch. He branded the two members of Congress a "disgrace" and told them plainly from the podium:
"You should be ashamed."
The moment that appeared to trigger the outburst was Trump's direct remarks about fraud in Minnesota, the state Omar represents, according to the Daily Mail. The president did not mince words:
"When it comes to the corruption that is plundering America, there has been no more stunning example than Minnesota, where members of the Somali community have pillaged an estimated $19 billion from the American taxpayer."
He went further, arguing that the pattern of corruption in Minnesota illustrates a broader problem with immigration policy:
"Importing these cultures through unrestricted immigration and open borders brings those problems right here to the USA."
Omar, who represents Minneapolis and is herself Somali, took the remarks personally. That much was obvious from the cameras. But taking remarks personally and refuting them are two different things. The $19 billion figure Trump cited has been a subject of ongoing scrutiny in Minnesota, and screaming from the House floor is not the rebuttal that a serious legislator would offer if the numbers were wrong.
If Omar had data showing the president was mistaken, a press conference would have been the appropriate venue. A written rebuttal. A hearing request. Instead, she chose a primal scream on national television, which tells you everything about whether the goal was to inform or to perform.
Before the address even got underway, the evening had already been beset by protests. Al Green brought a sign into the chamber reading "Black people aren't apes," a reference to a recent Trump social media post featuring an AI video depicting Barack and Michelle Obama as primates.
GOP Senators Markwayne Mullin and Roger Marshall moved swiftly to stand in front of Green, blocking his sign from view. Trump kept walking. Green was subsequently ejected from the chamber.
Whatever one thinks of the social media post in question, the State of the Union is not a protest rally. There are rules governing decorum in the House Chamber, and Green knew them. The placard was designed for a camera, not for a conversation. He got his clip. He also got escorted out.
There was a time when the so-called Squad commanded enormous media attention simply by existing. Omar, Tlaib, and their allies were treated as the ideological vanguard of the Democratic Party, their every tweet amplified, their every accusation treated as moral authority. That era is visibly ending.
What played out on Tuesday was not powerful dissent. It was impotence dressed up as courage. The heckling accomplished nothing legislatively. It changed no votes. It persuaded no one who wasn't already persuaded. And it was physically overwhelmed by the opposing chant, a metaphor so on-the-nose it barely needs articulation.
Consider what voters actually saw:
The optics were brutal for Democrats. Not because conservative media will frame them that way, but because the footage speaks for itself. One side looked like it was governing. The other looked like it was melting down.
What's notable is not just what Omar and Tlaib said, but what the broader Democratic caucus did not say. No Democratic leader appears to have condemned the disruptions or called for decorum. No one from the party stepped to a microphone to distance themselves from the spectacle.
This is the trap that progressive theatrics set for the larger party. When your most vocal members turn a joint session of Congress into a shouting match, and your leadership says nothing, voters draw a reasonable conclusion: this is who you all are.
Trump told them they should be ashamed. The chants drowned out the screaming. And somewhere in that chamber, the Democratic Party's moderates, if any remain, watched their brand shrink a little further.
Peter Mandelson, the former U.K. ambassador to the United States, has been released on bail after his arrest on suspicion of misconduct in public office. The Metropolitan Police confirmed the news in a statement issued just after 2 a.m. Tuesday.
Mandelson, 72, was filmed being led from his London home to a car by plainclothes officers on Monday afternoon. Police searched two of his properties in London and western England as part of a criminal probe launched earlier this month into his ties to the late Jeffrey Epstein.
The Metropolitan Police spokesperson kept it clinical:
"A 72-year-old man arrested on suspicion of misconduct in public office has been released on bail pending further investigation."
The police did not name the suspect. Mandelson had previously been identified as the former diplomat under investigation.
At the center of the investigation are claims that Mandelson passed sensitive government information to Epstein, the disgraced U.S. financier convicted of sex offenses involving a minor in 2008. Messages suggest the information exchange occurred in 2009, when Mandelson was a senior minister in the British government, the AP reported. The information was potentially market-moving.
Mandelson also appears to have told Epstein he would lobby other members of the government to reduce a tax on bankers' bonuses. This was after Epstein's conviction. Not before. After.
And Mandelson once called Epstein "my best pal."
More than 3 million pages of Epstein-related documents were released last month by the U.S. Justice Department. Those files helped trigger the criminal probe now engulfing two of Britain's most prominent public figures.
Mandelson's arrest was not an isolated event. Four days later, Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor, the former Prince Andrew, landed in police custody on suspicion of a similar offense related to his friendship with Epstein. Both men are suspected of improperly passing U.K. government information to the financier.
Mountbatten-Windsor was released after 11 hours in custody while the police investigation continues.
Two members of the British establishment, each with deep ties to Epstein, each arrested within days of each other, each on suspicion of betraying their government's trust to a convicted sex offender. The pattern speaks for itself.
The political fallout lands squarely on Prime Minister Keir Starmer, who made the baffling decision to name Mandelson as ambassador to Washington at the start of President Donald Trump's second term. This was a man with known, deep, and publicly acknowledged connections to Jeffrey Epstein. Starmer chose him anyway.
The decision nearly cost Starmer his job earlier this month. He has since acknowledged he made a mistake and apologized to the victims of Epstein. He fired Mandelson in September.
Consider the sequence: Starmer appointed a man who called a convicted sex offender his "best pal" to represent Britain in Washington, then fired him when the obvious became undeniable, then watched him get arrested on suspicion of passing government secrets to that same sex offender. This is not a case of hindsight being 20/20. The warning signs were visible from orbit.
The British government has pledged to begin releasing documents connected to the appointment in early March. Whatever those documents reveal, the judgment failure has already been exposed.
Mandelson was no backbencher. He was an architect of New Labour, the political movement that brought the party back to power in 1997. He served in senior government roles under Prime Minister Tony Blair between 1997 and 2001, then returned under Prime Minister Gordon Brown from 2008 to 2010. He was the European Union's trade commissioner between those stints. He was appointed to the House of Lords for life in 2008. His grandfather, Herbert Morrison, was a former Labour Cabinet minister.
He twice had to resign from government posts. Earlier this month, he resigned from the House of Lords entirely.
The man was Labour royalty. Now he is out on bail.
Gordon Brown, for his part, has been particularly angered by the revelations and has been helping police with their inquiries. When a former prime minister cooperates with investigators probing his own former cabinet minister, the institutional rupture runs deep.
Mandelson remains on bail pending further investigation. The government's promised document release in early March could deepen the political crisis or clarify the scope of Starmer's knowledge before the appointment. Meanwhile, the Mountbatten-Windsor investigation proceeds on a parallel track.
The Epstein saga has already consumed reputations on both sides of the Atlantic. The release of 3 million pages of documents by the U.S. Justice Department made sure of that. But what's unfolding in Britain is something distinct: not just social embarrassment or tabloid scandal, but criminal investigations into whether powerful men traded their country's secrets to a man everyone already knew was a predator.
Mandelson helped secure a trade deal in May. He moved in the highest circles of British and international politics for three decades. None of it insulated him from a pair of plainclothes officers and a Monday afternoon car ride.