State Armor launched a six-figure advertising blitz urging Congress to investigate the Environmental Law Institute, a nonprofit that has trained thousands of American judges on climate science, over alleged decades-long ties to Chinese Communist Party-linked organizations.
The campaign, which rolled out Wednesday in Washington with television ads, mobile billboards circling Capitol Hill and the institute's M Street headquarters, and targeted digital spots, follows a letter State Armor CEO Michael Lucci sent Tuesday morning to five Republican committee chairmen asking them to examine the Environmental Law Institute's funding, its relationships with Chinese entities, its information-sharing activities, and its judicial education programs.
Lucci addressed the letter to Sen. Chuck Grassley of the Senate Judiciary Committee, Sen. Mike Lee of the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee, Rep. Jim Jordan and Rep. Brett Guthrie of the House Judiciary Committee, and Rep. John Moolenaar, who chairs the House Select Committee on the Chinese Communist Party. It marks the second such request in four months; State Armor first wrote to the same chairmen in June.
The Environmental Law Institute, known inside legal circles as ELI, created its Climate Judiciary Project in 2018. The project has since trained more than 2,000 American judges on environmental law, the Daily Caller News Foundation reported. ELI itself says on its website that it has provided training and resources to more than 3,000 judges in 28 countries since 1990 and describes its mission as helping "people improve the implementation of environmental and natural resource law globally."
State Armor's 39-page report, released in July, alleges the institute worked with Chinese government agencies, universities, judges, and legal groups for decades while advancing policies inside the United States that restrict domestic energy production. Fox News reported that ELI's programming in China concluded only in 2024 and that the relationships stretched back to the mid-1990s, encompassing Chinese NGOs, universities, judges, and environmental regulators.
Breitbart reported that the alleged institutional relationships included Wuhan University, Shanghai Jiao Tong University, China's Supreme People's Court, and China's Ministry of Ecology. The breadth of those connections, spanning courts, academia, and government regulators, is what State Armor says warrants congressional scrutiny.
Lucci, in a statement provided to the Daily Caller News Foundation, did not hold back about the group's position:
"ELI has allowed itself to be a middleman for Chinese influence here in America, and has carried out work that effectively advances the CCP's [Chinese Communist Party] geopolitical goals."
He added that Congress should "take a serious look at ELI's actions and relationships with Communist China to determine if legal action should be taken." His letter to the five chairmen described the institute as what "may represent one of the most sophisticated and least scrutinized potential avenues of Chinese influence operating within American legal and policy institutions."
The September letter adds a new dimension that the June letter did not include: a claim that ELI is working against American data center development at the same time China is racing to dominate artificial intelligence infrastructure.
Lucci wrote that the institute "has positioned itself as a leading voice against the rapid development of data centers and the energy infrastructure necessary to power them" and "is working to impede American development in a strategically critical industry while China races ahead."
To support the claim, the letter points to two items on ELI's own website. The first is a July 2025 public webinar on data center water use that ELI co-hosted with the Network for the Digital Economy and Environment, featuring panelists from Virginia Tech, the consulting firm WestWater Research, and the nonprofit Protect Our Aquifer. The second is a comment published this month in ELI's journal, the Environmental Law Reporter, titled "A Call for a National Data Center Moratorium and Policy Framework."
That journal comment was written by Bob Sussman, a former deputy administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency under President Bill Clinton. The Environmental Law Reporter states on its articles page that it welcomes outside submissions and that its goal is to educate the profession and foster debate, a framing that could complicate any effort to treat the Sussman piece as an institutional ELI position rather than a guest contribution.
State Armor, for its part, posted on X on September 15 that "China stands to gain when lawmakers become skittish about building modern data centers needed to keep us ahead in the AI race," tagging Attorney General Todd Blanche's account and adding: "China wants us to slow down. Lawmakers should keep that in mind when considering policies that could do just that."
Chad Mizelle, a former chief of staff and acting associate attorney general at the Justice Department, weighed in through a statement provided by State Armor. He pointed to what he described as a conflict involving a firm that sits on ELI's board while also briefing groups he called "CCP-adjacent" and defending energy companies in climate lawsuits:
"That a firm can sit on ELI's board and brief CCP-adjacent groups while defending energy companies in dozens of climate suits is exactly the kind of conflict that should outrage clients and federal officials alike."
Mizelle did not name the firm. State Armor's letter and report do not identify it in the material provided through the Daily Caller's reporting, leaving one of the sharper allegations without a public target.
State Armor's letter also frames the judicial training question in terms of perception. The group wrote in its congressional letter that "the question is not whether judges should receive continuing education but rather whether any educational initiative funded, organized, or influenced by organizations with relationships with foreign entities, particularly a foreign adversary, could affect the perception or reality of judicial impartiality."
Several of the Republican lawmakers who received the letter have separately voiced alarm. Sen. Tom Cotton of Arkansas wrote in a Facebook post in July that judges trained by or working with Communist China "have no place in our judicial system." Cotton added, in remarks reported by Breitbart: "If these allegations are true, they will be held accountable."
Rep. Moolenaar, who chairs the House Select Committee on the Chinese Communist Party, told The Daily Signal in early July that American judges "should closely vet the programs they participate in and never take part in training sponsored by CCP-linked United Front groups." The United Front Work Department is a Chinese government body that coordinates influence operations abroad, a fact that gives Moolenaar's warning a specific institutional edge.
Whether any of the five chairmen will act on State Armor's request remains unclear. None has publicly responded to either the June or September letters as of the Daily Caller's reporting.
The Environmental Law Institute did not respond to the Daily Caller News Foundation's request for comment. On its website, the institute says suggestions that the Climate Judiciary Project's activities are improper are "without merit." ELI describes its curriculum as drawing on the National Climate Assessment, the National Academies, and the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.
The institute's website also states: "We educate thousands of environmental professionals each year in the United States, with the conviction that more skilled environmental professionals result in better environmental outcomes." Separately, ELI says it is "training judges around the world on critical topics in domestic and international environmental law and informing communities dependent on the Gulf of Mexico on how to influence the restoration and recovery process."
Those descriptions paint a picture of a mainstream legal education outfit. But the gap between that self-portrait and the allegations in State Armor's 39-page report, which claims ELI maintained working relationships with Chinese courts, universities, and government ministries through 2024, is wide enough that congressional committees could reasonably decide it warrants a closer look.
The timing of State Armor's campaign is not accidental. On October 5, the Supreme Court is scheduled to hear Suncor Energy v. County Commissioners of Boulder County as the first argument of its new term. That case will decide whether local governments can pursue energy companies for climate damages under state law, a question that could reshape the broader climate litigation strategy in which ELI-trained judges may play a role.
If the court opens the door to state-level climate suits, the judges presiding over those cases will matter more than ever. And if those judges received their climate education from an organization with unresolved questions about foreign entanglements, the legitimacy of their rulings could face challenges that go well beyond the merits of any individual case.
Americans have a right to expect that the judges deciding their cases answer to the Constitution, not to the priorities of a foreign adversary. Congress now has the letter, the report, and the questions. What it lacks is an excuse not to ask them.
A Washington state Democratic candidate who had just won her primary election was arrested for driving under the influence after her truck allegedly slammed into a parked car and damaged five vehicles, and bodycam footage captured the whole thing.
Krista Perez, 40, a Democratic candidate for the Washington state House of Representatives in the 29th Legislative District, was pulled over by Tacoma police shortly after midnight on August 11 following a chain-reaction crash. Officers found her behind the wheel, smelling of alcohol, with slurred speech, red eyes, and an unsteady gait, the Daily Mail reported. She had won her primary just one week earlier.
Bodycam footage obtained by The Jason Rantz Show on Seattle Red shows Perez telling the arresting officer she had consumed "one glass of wine" at a friend's business on Tacoma Avenue South. When asked whether she had been in an accident, she said she had not, despite the five damaged vehicles behind her.
The footage paints a picture of a candidate who understood she was in trouble but tried to talk her way out of it. When the officer asked Perez to rate her own sobriety on a scale of zero to ten, zero being completely sober, she gave herself a four, the New York Post reported. That is a remarkable self-assessment for someone who claimed she had only one glass of wine.
The officer explained the field sobriety test clearly and patiently. He told Perez it was "totally voluntary" and described it as "a series of tests that I take you through to make sure to see if you're impaired by alcohol, or you're not."
Perez declined. Repeatedly.
Her response, captured on bodycam: "Not right now. I'd like to go home first." The officer told her plainly that going home was not an option. "You're not going to go home first. I'm going to tell you that right now, okay?" he said. Perez asked, "And do I have a choice?" The officer confirmed the test was voluntary, but that the decision had to be made right then, not later.
She chose not to take it. Under Washington state law, declining a roadside sobriety test is a driver's right and carries no separate penalty. But what happened next at the police station is a different matter.
After Perez was placed under arrest, officers transported her to Tacoma Police headquarters to provide a breath sample. She attempted the test three times but failed to produce a usable sample before the machine timed out. Prosecutors alleged a refusal enhancement, an additional charge layered on top of the DUI, based on those failed attempts.
The arrest report, obtained by The Jason Rantz Show, cited the smell of alcohol, noticeable mood swings, slurred speech, red eyes, and an unsteady gait as the basis for the arrest. Perez was booked into Pierce County Jail and released approximately six hours later.
The episode is the latest in a string of embarrassing moments for Democrats who seem unable to stay out of their own way. The national party has struggled with internal revolts and defections that undermine their leadership's credibility, and candidates like Perez do nothing to help the brand.
Perhaps the most striking portion of the footage came after the arrest, when Perez sat in the back of the patrol car. She broke down crying and began praying aloud in Spanish, "Dios, ayúdame por favor. Ayúdame por favor", before switching to English.
Fox News reported the footage showed Perez sobbing and pleading:
"Help me, God. Help me. Help me. Holy Spirit, help me, God."
During the arrest process, Perez also "repeatedly said she 'did not know what any of this means,'" suggesting confusion, or an attempt to distance herself from the gravity of the situation.
Perez works as a strategic partnerships manager at the Washington State Department of Commerce. Whether her state employment could be affected by the arrest or the pending charge remains unclear. She had previously made a failed bid for Tacoma City Council before turning her sights on the state legislature.
Her November opponent is incumbent Representative Melanie Morgan. Washington state law does not prevent anyone facing a DUI charge from serving in the legislature, so Perez remains on the ballot. But voters in the 29th District now have bodycam footage to factor into their decision, a candidate who crashed into parked cars, denied it happened, refused every test available, and wept in the back of a squad car.
Bryan Hershman, Perez's attorney, spoke to the Washington State Standard and tried to minimize the situation. His argument boiled down to: it's just a DUI.
"We're talking about a DUI. It's not like we're talking about felony murder here."
Hershman also attempted to redirect attention to policy, telling the Standard that "no matter what happens in this DUI case, there's still homeless people we need to get off the streets." He added that he hopes "we can stay focused on an important campaign."
That framing is convenient but hollow. A candidate for public office who allegedly drove drunk, crashed into five vehicles, denied the crash to police, refused sobriety testing, and then failed to provide a usable breath sample is not facing a minor inconvenience. She is facing a question of character, the same quality voters are supposed to evaluate when they cast a ballot. Democrats have faced growing scrutiny over their candidates' conduct and credibility, from party figures whose behavior alienates their own base to primary winners who carry baggage into general elections.
Perez herself has made no public statement outside of her attorney's comments. The Daily Mail reached out to Hershman, Perez, and the City of Tacoma for comment. No responses were reported.
The current status of the DUI charge and the refusal enhancement, whether formal charges have been filed in court, remains unclear from available reporting. No results from any subsequent chemical testing, such as a blood draw, have been disclosed.
Washington Democrats have dealt with a pattern of alcohol-related incidents among their elected officials and candidates in recent years, a track record that does nothing to inspire confidence in the party's bench. Nationally, the party continues to grapple with candidates who win primaries only to face serious questions heading into November.
Meanwhile, the same party that lectures Americans about institutional accountability and public trust now asks voters in Tacoma to overlook bodycam footage of their candidate denying a crash, dodging every test, and crying out for divine intervention in the back of a squad car. Democratic leadership at every level, from House floor theatrics to local races, seems increasingly comfortable asking the public to look the other way.
Voters deserve candidates who can pass the tests they're given, on the road and at the ballot box.
The House voted decisively Tuesday to table Rep. Al Green's impeachment resolution against President Trump, but 147 Democrats voted to keep the effort alive, exposing a party split that its own leadership tried to sidestep.
Republicans moved swiftly to kill the resolution, and the final tally was lopsided: 232 members voted to table, 147 voted against, and 47, including House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries and his top deputies, voted "present." The maneuver let Democratic leadership avoid a direct vote on impeachment while still allowing nearly 150 of their members to register support for removing a sitting president less than two months before the November election.
Green, a Houston-area Democrat who already lost his primary earlier this year and will leave Congress in January, forced the vote over the objections of his own party's leaders. His resolution cited the conduct of Immigration and Customs Enforcement and Customs and Border Protection, specifically naming four individuals, Renee Good, Alex Pretti, Lorenzo Salgado Araujo, and Johan Sebastian Duran Guerrero, whom Green said were killed by federal immigration agents this year.
The vote was not just a Republican-versus-Democrat affair. Eighteen Democrats broke ranks and voted alongside Republicans to table the resolution outright, a bipartisan rejection that made the outcome even more lopsided than the raw party-line numbers suggest. Another 46 or 47 Democrats, depending on the tally, chose to vote "present," a procedural dodge that allowed them to avoid going on record either for or against impeachment.
Democratic leadership announced in a joint statement on Monday, one day before the vote, that they would vote "present" on the motion to table. They did not whip the vote, leaving individual members to decide for themselves whether to back Green's push or distance themselves from it.
Jeffries framed the decision as a matter of process, not substance. In his statement Tuesday, the minority leader called impeachment "a sacred constitutional vehicle designed to hold a corrupt executive accountable for abuse of power, breaking the law and violating the public trust." He then laid out a long list of prerequisites he said Green had not met, as Just The News reported:
"The effort traditionally requires a comprehensive investigative process, the collection and review of thousands of documents, an exacting scrutiny of the facts, the examination of dozens of key witnesses, Congressional hearings, sustained public organizing and the marshaling of the forces of democracy to build a broad national consensus."
Jeffries added that "none of that serious work has been done, with the Republican majority focused solely on rubber stamping Donald Trump's extreme agenda." The leadership's joint statement said they would vote present "as we continue our fight to make life more affordable for everyday Americans."
In other words, Jeffries acknowledged his own party had done none of the investigative groundwork that impeachment demands, then blamed Republicans for it. That framing let leadership avoid the political cost of endorsing impeachment while still leaving the door open for the 147 Democrats who voted to keep the resolution alive.
This was not Green's first attempt. Fox News reported that this was at least his second impeachment push in 2025 alone. A previous effort in June saw an even larger number of Democrats, 128, join Republicans in tabling it. The September vote represented a shift: fewer Democrats voted to kill the resolution this time, meaning more were willing to go on record supporting impeachment as the election draws closer.
Green has a history of forcing these confrontations. He was censured by the House last year for routinely interrupting the president during an address to a joint session of Congress. In an earlier Congress, he introduced an impeachment resolution focused solely on Trump's comments about immigrants and four Democratic congresswomen, a move that National Review documented at the time as one that even then-Speaker Nancy Pelosi resisted.
Green himself has been unapologetic about the timing and the lack of a formal investigation. He told reporters that fellow Democrats "will acknowledge that what the president is doing is impeachable, but they would have us wait. Well, the Constitution doesn't have a wait clause in it."
That argument may carry conviction in progressive circles, but it did not carry the House floor. And Green, having lost his own primary in his Houston-area district, will not be around to try again after January.
House Majority Whip Tom Emmer wasted no time framing the vote as a liability for Democrats heading into November. "Less than two months from the November election, House Democrats are showing the American people they're the party of obstruction," Emmer said.
The political math supports that read. Nearly 150 House Democrats voted to advance impeachment proceedings against a sitting president without the investigative record their own leader said was necessary. They did so weeks before a general election, on a resolution introduced by a lame-duck congressman who has already been censured for disrupting presidential addresses.
For Republicans, the vote is a clean contrast: the majority moved to table a resolution it considered unserious, and a significant chunk of the minority went on record supporting it anyway. The 47 "present" votes from Democratic leadership add another layer, a caucus that could not bring itself to vote yes or no, choosing instead to abstain while letting the progressive wing carry the impeachment banner.
The split mirrors a broader pattern of Democratic leadership struggling to manage its left flank on high-profile votes. When members feel pressure from activist constituencies, leadership often opts for procedural sidesteps rather than direct confrontation, a strategy that avoids an internal fight but leaves the party's position muddled in the public record. That dynamic has played out in recent legislative battles on both sides of the Capitol.
Unlike previous impeachment efforts that centered on alleged abuses of presidential power or obstruction, Green's resolution took a different approach. It cited the conduct of ICE and CBP officers, specifically, the deaths of four named individuals at the hands of federal immigration agents. The resolution named Renee Good, Alex Pretti, Lorenzo Salgado Araujo, and Johan Sebastian Duran Guerrero, all of whom Green said were killed this year.
The specific circumstances of those deaths were not detailed in the resolution as described in available reporting. Green's argument appeared to be that the president bears direct responsibility for the actions of federal immigration enforcement officers, a theory of executive accountability that even Jeffries was unwilling to endorse without a formal investigation.
That gap between Green's charges and the evidentiary record his own leadership demanded is the central weakness of the effort. Impeachment, as Jeffries himself noted, traditionally requires thousands of documents, dozens of witnesses, and congressional hearings. Green offered names and accusations. The House, including a sizable share of his own party, found that insufficient.
Green's willingness to force votes on impeachment, repeatedly, and without the backing of his caucus leadership, has made him a recurring headache for Democrats trying to present a unified front. His censure last year and his primary loss this year suggest his approach has worn thin even in his own district. But the 147 votes his resolution attracted Tuesday show that the appetite for impeachment within the Democratic caucus is growing, not shrinking, even as the party's leaders try to keep it off the table.
That tension between the base and the leadership is not unique to the impeachment question. Democrats have faced similar internal friction on issues ranging from confrontations with ICE officers to primary challenges that have reshaped the party's roster heading into the next Congress.
The headline outcome, resolution tabled, impeachment dead, is straightforward. But the 147 Democrats who voted to keep it alive are the number worth watching. In June, 128 Democrats joined Republicans to kill Green's earlier attempt. Three months later, that number dropped, and more Democrats moved from "kill it" or "present" into the "keep it alive" column.
If the trend continues, Democratic leadership may find it harder to maintain the "present" dodge. Jeffries can call impeachment a "sacred constitutional vehicle" and insist the groundwork has not been laid, but if a growing share of his caucus votes to move forward anyway, the leadership's position becomes less a principled stand and more a stalling tactic with a shrinking shelf life.
For now, the resolution is dead. Green will leave Congress in January. But the 147 votes he pulled on his way out the door are a signal, not of a serious impeachment threat, but of a Democratic caucus increasingly willing to put impeachment on the record regardless of what its leaders say. That is a problem Jeffries will have to manage long after Green is gone, and it is one that Democratic primary voters may or may not reward at the ballot box.
When your own leader says the homework has not been done, and 147 of your members vote to turn it in anyway, the problem is not the homework, it is the caucus.
Former President Barack Obama is pushing Democrats to build their midterm and 2028 strategy around artificial intelligence regulation, a move conservatives warn is less about safety and more about expanding government control over the fastest-growing sector in the economy.
At a private fundraiser in New York City with House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries, Obama urged the Democratic leader to make AI oversight the party's signature issue. Obama's office provided a partial transcript of his remarks to the New York Times, and the message was blunt: get ahead of AI or risk letting it become dangerous.
Obama told Jeffries directly that if Democrats win the House majority, AI should be their first order of business. "Once you are speaker, I would strongly urge that the Democrats put together a framework for a very public conversation," Obama said, as Breitbart News reported. He added: "This is something that is moving very fast in private hands, and if we don't get on top of it, I think can be dangerous."
Jeffries wasted no time echoing the former president. "President Obama is correct that decisive action must be taken on artificial intelligence," Jeffries said in a statement. "Republicans have abdicated their responsibility to govern on behalf of the American people. We will not repeat their error."
The remarks were not a one-off. Obama has been working behind the scenes for months to shape the White House's approach to AI policy, a fact that both Obama's office and the White House confirmed to the Washington Examiner. That quiet involvement now appears to be going public, and going political.
The fundraiser with Jeffries was the latest in a series of moves. In March 2025, Obama gave a speech at Hamilton College in which he argued that "big disruptions" to the world like AI "require us to reorganize our societies." In May, he visited Toronto to meet with Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney, who has employed American Democratic staffers as top advisers.
Obama also urged prospective 2028 presidential candidates to develop a "very clear plan" for AI and make it one of their "central agendas," Fox News reported. That framing, AI as a defining campaign issue, tracks with what the party's political infrastructure is already doing on the ground.
The House Majority PAC, a Jeffries-aligned political group spending tens of millions of dollars to help Democrats take the House in November, released a memo this month encouraging candidates to strike a "conspiratorial nerve" with voters on AI. The memo pushed Democrats to spread what the group itself described as conspiratorial theories about AI in order to defeat Republicans.
Meanwhile, Sen. Jon Ossoff of Georgia, widely seen as a possible 2028 Democratic presidential candidate, made his own pitch at a rally this weekend. Ossoff called for a president who would "rush inspectors into frontier labs, fortify the nation against bioterrorism, demand legislation from Congress, and lead the world toward an AI treaty." Questions have already emerged about Ossoff's approach to campaign rallies and whether his rhetoric is designed to inform voters or alarm them.
Left-leaning social media influencers praised Ossoff's remarks. The pattern is clear enough: Obama sets the framework, the party apparatus distributes the messaging, and ambitious Democrats audition for 2028 by repeating it.
Not everyone is buying what Obama and the Democrats are selling. Senior figures in the Trump administration have warned explicitly that the push for AI regulation is a vehicle for something much larger than consumer protection.
David Sacks, Trump's former AI czar, laid out the case in Breitbart News contributor Wynton Hall's book Code Red: The Left, the Right, China, and the Race to Control AI. Sacks argued that Republicans should understand that "hyperbolic and unproven claims" about potential AI job losses are "not an accident" but rather "part of an influence operation."
"The goal" is "to further 'Global AI Governance,' a massive power grab by the bureaucratic state and globalist institutions."
Sacks said the organizers behind global AI governance are "billionaires with a long history of funding left-wing causes and Trump hatred." He warned that while "it's fine to be concerned about a technology as transformational as AI," repeating their claims uncritically means "you may be falling for an AstroTurfed campaign by the 'AI Existential Risk Industrial Complex.'"
Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent, who oversees much of the AI front for the current White House, framed the issue as a national security imperative at a recent Breitbart News event. "There is no day after tomorrow if China wins at this," Bessent said. "If they were to pull away from us on AI, then nothing else would matter."
Emil Michael, a top Pentagon official overseeing AI implementation for the U.S. military, went further. He described the philosophical vision behind much of the AI safety movement as dystopian.
"It's a sort of dystopian, 'Brave New World' view of the world, where machines that are using 1s and 0s are going to have no bias and are going to decide the perfectly rational and best thing for everyone on Earth. It's a strange philosophical concept, and I don't think it's a place any normal person wants to live in."
Michael added that while AI companies have "distanced themselves" from the Effective Altruism movement that animated much of their early culture, "the detritus of that philosophy still lives inside these companies in my view."
The corporate side of the debate is just as revealing. Dario Amodei, CEO of the AI company Anthropic, published a blog post titled "We Must Pace the Frontier" calling for a slowdown in AI development. "We must slow the pace at which we improve the capabilities of AI models," Amodei wrote. "Progress will still seem fast, and we must make wise use of the time we gain."
But Amodei's own post acknowledged the strategic risk. He said he agreed with Bessent "that a Chinese lead in AI would pose grave danger for the United States and the world." He warned that Chinese projects tied to the CCP "will run the alignment risks that U.S. companies are carefully preventing, and even if they avoid those risks, they will be in a position to militarily dominate democracies (for example with AI-driven drones)."
The contradiction sits in plain view. Amodei wants American companies to slow down while conceding that China will not. That tension is exactly what Trump administration officials have been flagging, and what they believe Democrats are either ignoring or exploiting for political advantage. The question of how figures like Obama accumulate influence and wealth after leaving office only sharpens the skepticism about whose interests these frameworks actually serve.
Wynton Hall's Code Red, published months ago, anticipated much of what is now unfolding. Hall wrote that "Bernie Sanders and Barack Obama are eager to leverage both real and imagined AI job losses to press for Universal Basic Income (UBI) or a four- or three-day workweek."
Hall called those proposals "fanciful" but "dangerous nonetheless, because elites will seize even greater control over our lives because of the liberties we gave up in exchange." He argued that "very powerful and highly organized leftists have built a massive echo chamber designed to amplify and stoke public fears about AI job losses, regardless of whether they are minimal or maximal."
The end goal, Hall wrote, is that "billionaire tech elites hope the public will cede greater decision-making and regulatory authority to them and groups such as the United Nations, WEF, and others to ensure 'AI safety' and mitigate existential risks." The United Nations and the World Economic Forum, institutions with no democratic accountability to American voters, are the intended beneficiaries of that handoff.
A Fox News poll found that 70% of registered voters opposed construction of AI data centers in their communities, a data point that suggests real public anxiety about AI's footprint. Democrats clearly see an opening in that anxiety. The question is whether their proposed solution, more regulation, more international frameworks, more bureaucratic oversight, would protect American workers or simply transfer power to the very institutions that have spent years trying to constrain American sovereignty.
Obama's track record on multilateral frameworks is not reassuring. He pushed the Trans-Pacific Partnership and the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership, both of which failed. His predecessor Bill Clinton signed NAFTA, which Trump replaced with the U.S.-Mexico-Canada Agreement during his first term. The pattern is consistent: Democratic presidents reach for sprawling international agreements, and American workers end up holding the short end. The broader shifts inside the Democratic Party have done nothing to break that pattern.
Ossoff's call for an "AI treaty" and Obama's push for a "framework" that would reorganize societies fit neatly into that tradition. So does the broader record of the Democratic establishment when it comes to accountability and follow-through.
AI is real, its disruptions are real, and serious people should debate how to handle both. But when a former president who failed at two major trade deals resurfaces to demand global governance over the most consequential technology of the century, and when the party's own political arm tells candidates to play on conspiracy fears to win elections, the agenda deserves more scrutiny than applause.
President Trump shut down a defense attorney's public plea to pardon Lindsay Clancy, the Massachusetts mother charged with murdering her three children, making clear the case falls outside his federal authority, but the attorney's real target may not have been the White House at all.
Trump addressed the request on Sunday, days after Clancy's lawyer Kevin Reddington went on national television to ask the president to intervene. Trump acknowledged the tragedy but drew a firm constitutional line: the president can pardon federal crimes, not state charges. Clancy faces three counts of first-degree murder in Massachusetts, and no amount of presidential sympathy changes that jurisdictional fact.
Fox News Digital reported Trump's remarks, in which he called the case "very sad" and made clear he would not act.
"There's no winner there. There's no win no matter what you do. Three children are dead."
Trump also praised Reddington's legal abilities, saying he had heard from others that Reddington is "a very good attorney," and added, "I hope they can work it out. That's something they have to work out... There is no win there."
Reddington knew before he ever went on camera that Trump lacked the legal power to pardon his client. He said so himself. The appeal was not really directed at the Oval Office, it was aimed at Plymouth County District Attorney Tim Cruz, the Republican prosecutor who must now decide whether to retry Clancy after a jury deadlocked earlier this month.
Reddington appeared on Good Morning America and CBS Boston to make his case publicly. As National Review detailed, the defense attorney's strategy was to leverage Trump's political influence to pressure Cruz, who has held the DA's seat since 2001, into declining a retrial.
"The goal is pretty simple. It's to seek help from Trump. I mean, if President Trump feels that this is a case that warrants that type of intervention from, you know, the executive branch, even though legally it's not a federal case, he certainly has an awful lot of clout."
That is a candid admission from a defense lawyer: the pardon request was a pressure campaign dressed up as a legal petition. Reddington wanted headlines, and he got them. Whether those headlines move Cruz is another question entirely.
Trump had previously weighed in on the case after Judge William Sullivan declared a mistrial when the jury could not reach a unanimous verdict. In those earlier remarks, Trump did not hold back about what Clancy did.
"I assume there's going to be another trial. It's a terrible situation. Look, she did a horrible, horrible thing. Can't be worse. But you'll find out what the price to pay is. There'll be a price. It's going to be [a] mental institution or jail or something."
The mistrial came after a full week of deliberations. The jury of nine women and three men split 11 to 1, with the overwhelming majority reportedly favoring acquittal on grounds that Clancy was not criminally responsible due to mental illness. One holdout juror prevented a unanimous verdict, and Sullivan had no choice but to declare a mistrial.
The defense argued throughout the trial that Clancy, a 36-year-old former nurse, suffered from postpartum psychosis when she killed her three children, Cora, 5; Dawson, 3; and Callan, 8 months old, at their home in Duxbury, Massachusetts, in January 2023. After the killings, Clancy attempted to take her own life and was left paralyzed.
One juror's conduct drew scrutiny after the trial. A juror admitted she changed her vote and may still believe Clancy is guilty, raising questions about the dynamics inside the deliberation room.
Reddington has also pointed to Clancy's psychiatric care before the killings, telling ABC News that she had sought treatment from a psychiatrist he described as inexperienced. The defense contends that a doctor prescribed medications for postpartum depression in the months leading up to what they characterize as a psychotic break. The psychiatrist's name and the specific medications have not been publicly identified in reporting on the case.
Retired Massachusetts Superior Court Judge Jack Lu told Fox News Digital that a plea deal would be a "good idea" and in the public's "interest." But Lu predicted that prosecutors will not take that path. Instead, he expects the Plymouth County DA's office to seek a first-degree murder conviction again at retrial.
That prediction carries weight. Cruz has held his position for more than two decades and built a record as a law-and-order prosecutor. Walking away from a triple-murder case, regardless of the jury split, would be an extraordinary concession. The 11-to-1 vote gives the defense strong talking points, but it does not erase the fact that three children are dead and the person who killed them is alive.
The Washington Examiner reported that Trump's response specifically noted the constitutional boundary: the president's pardon power extends only to federal offenses. Clancy's charges are entirely under Massachusetts jurisdiction, and no presidential action, pardon, commutation, or otherwise, can reach them.
Trump has used his clemency powers actively in other contexts. He has weighed issuing 250 pardons to mark America's 250th anniversary, and he recently commuted the sentence of a Philadelphia union boss, citing the man's wife's terminal illness. But those cases involved federal convictions, the one category where presidential authority applies.
The Clancy case has drawn intense public attention and unusual courtroom incidents. A woman was accused of filming jurors during the trial and later pleaded not guilty before fleeing reporters outside the courthouse, a sign of how emotionally charged the proceedings became.
Reddington's media strategy reflects a defense team that understands the case will be tried in public opinion as much as in court. By dragging the president's name into the conversation, he ensured that every news cycle about the Clancy retrial now includes the phrase "pardon", even though a pardon was never legally possible. It is a savvy move, and it is also a distraction from the central question: whether a Massachusetts jury, presented with the same evidence a second time, will reach a different result.
The New York Post reported Reddington's direct appeal to Trump: "Mr. President, I would hope that you would consider this young lady, the type of person she is and what she's been through, and consider a pardon." That language frames Clancy as a sympathetic figure deserving mercy, a framing the families of three dead children might see very differently.
Trump handled the question correctly. He expressed sympathy, acknowledged the horror, and declined to overstep his authority. The case belongs to Massachusetts, and Massachusetts will have to resolve it, either through a retrial, a plea deal, or a prosecutorial decision not to proceed. Federal intervention was never on the table, no matter how loudly a defense attorney asked for it.
Three children are dead. The system that exists to answer for that is the one in Plymouth County, not the one in Washington. And no amount of cable-news strategy changes who has to make the call.
Former First Lady Michelle Obama used her podcast to explain why she deliberately denied her daughters things while they grew up in the White House, a parenting philosophy that stands in sharp contrast to the sheltered, privileged bubble most Americans associate with life inside the executive mansion.
On the September 9 episode of her IMO podcast, co-hosted with her brother Craig Robinson, Michelle Obama fielded a fan question about handling job rejections and turned it into a broader lesson about resilience. She said her daughters, Malia and Sasha, have reminded her how often she refused their requests when they were young, and that she did it on purpose.
The reason, she said, was straightforward: children of a sitting president live in a world where almost nobody tells them no, and she wanted to make sure that world didn't warp them.
Michelle Obama told listeners that failure works like physical exercise, painful in the moment, essential for long-term strength.
"Life is like a big muscle. You've got to build it up. Every failure is like a push-up or a rep. The more reps you do, the stronger you get at life. You don't get the strength without the reps."
She then connected that philosophy directly to how she raised Malia and Sasha inside the most famous house in America.
"The girls tell me, 'Mom, you used to tell us no.' They'd be like, 'Why?' Because you need to know what no feels like."
Michelle Obama drew a line between her own childhood and the one her daughters experienced. She and Craig Robinson grew up hearing "no" constantly, no, they couldn't afford something; no, they couldn't have it. That friction, she argued, built something their daughters' environment could not replicate on its own.
"Especially for kids like ours... there's no natural 'nos,'" she said on the podcast. The implication was clear: when the entire apparatus of the federal government is organized around your family's comfort and security, ordinary childhood disappointments vanish unless parents deliberately reintroduce them.
Robinson, a former college basketball coach, echoed the point. He encouraged parents to let their children experience failure while they are young, arguing it helps them in the long run and prevents a first major setback in their twenties from feeling like a catastrophe.
Michelle Obama added that everyone needs to learn their own process for getting through failure, something she believes people figure out as they get older.
The podcast comments arrive more than a year after Malia Obama made a quiet but telling decision: she dropped "Obama" from her professional name. The eldest Obama daughter, now a filmmaker, premiered her short film The Heart at the 2024 Sundance Film Festival under the credit "Malia Ann."
Michelle Obama addressed the move during a June 2025 appearance on Kate and Oliver Hudson's Sibling Revelry podcast, saying her daughters are deeply aware of how people perceive children of powerful parents.
"It is very important for my kids to feel like they've earned what they are getting in the world, and they don't want people to assume that they don't work hard, that they're just naturally, just handed things."
She said both Malia and Sasha, 25 and 23 at the time of that podcast, are "very sensitive to that" and "want to be their own people." She also acknowledged the limits of a name change when your face is one of the most recognized in the country.
"We were like, they're still going to know it's you, Malia. But we respected the fact that she's trying to make her way."
Former President Barack Obama told a similar story months earlier, during an October 2024 appearance on The Pivot Podcast. He recalled Malia's reasoning for the change with a mix of amusement and respect.
"I was all like, 'You do know they'll know who you are.' And she's all like, 'You know what? I want them to watch it that first time and not in any way have that association.' So I think our daughters go out of their way to not try to leverage that."
Michelle Obama also described a period of distance during Malia and Sasha's adolescence, the kind of parent-child tension most families recognize but few discuss publicly when the family in question occupied the White House.
"Our daughters are 25 and 23. They are young adult women, but they definitely went through a period in their teen years where it was the push away... [where] you're trying to distinguish yourself," she said on the Sibling Revelry podcast in June 2025.
That teenage push for independence, she suggested, eventually matured into the professional independence Malia demonstrated by shedding the family name for her film career. The thread connecting the two was the same: a desire to be judged on merit, not lineage.
Whether a name change accomplishes that is debatable. Both parents acknowledged the obvious, everyone already knows who Malia Ann is. But the gesture itself tells you something about how the Obama daughters view the family brand: as something to earn distance from, not coast on.
Credit where it's due on the parenting instinct. Telling your kids "no" when the whole world is telling them "yes" takes discipline. Whether the Obamas applied that same discipline to the policies they imposed on everyone else's kids is a different question, but inside their own house, at least, they understood that comfort without friction produces nothing worth having.
Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and dozens of House Democrats demanded a federal investigation into hanging deaths of Black Americans they called "widespread modern-day lynchings", but law enforcement and medical examiners ruled nearly every cited case a suicide.
Ocasio-Cortez posted on X on Friday that she was "proud to have signed onto" a letter led by Rep. Ayanna Pressley of Massachusetts calling on Attorney General Todd Blanche and FBI Director Kash Patel to launch a "thorough, transparent, and comprehensive federal investigation into every hanging death of a Black individual across the United States." Approximately 50 Democrats co-signed the letter, which accused federal agencies of having "failed for decades to adequately investigate such deaths."
The problem: the specific cases that prompted the letter have, one after another, been investigated by local authorities and ruled suicides, not homicides, and not lynchings. Only one of the high-profile hanging deaths cited in 2025 and 2026 remains under homicide investigation, and the suspect in that case is the victim's former partner, not a racial vigilante. X's crowdsourced Community Notes feature flagged Ocasio-Cortez's post with links to the law-enforcement and medical-examiner findings that contradicted her framing.
In Cobb County, Georgia, a 21-year-old Atlanta man was found hanging from a tree in a park. Officials ruled out foul play and classified the death as a suicide. In Mississippi, Delta State University student Demartravion Reed died by hanging; officials determined the manner of death was suicide. In Albany, New York, 58-year-old Earl Smith was found hanging. The Albany Police Department ruled his death a suicide and said investigators found "no evidence" of criminal activity.
Albany police acknowledged the public anxiety the cases had generated. In a statement, the department said it was "aware of concerns posted on social media suggesting that criminal activity was involved with this incident, which has understandably caused public concern." But the department stood by its finding.
In Brookfield, Wisconsin, a 39-year-old man was also found hanging. The Brookfield police chief said a preliminary investigation pointed to suicide.
The sole case that has not been ruled a suicide is that of Tasia Fortune, a Black woman found hanging outside an abandoned house in Jackson, Mississippi. Her death remains under homicide investigation. Terence Bernard Anderson, the father of one of Fortune's children, was questioned by authorities and later arrested, not on a murder charge, but on unrelated weapons charges. Breitbart reported that the Fortune case was the only one of the high-profile deaths confirmed as a homicide, a fact that undercuts the "widespread lynching" framing entirely.
On X, Ocasio-Cortez wrote:
"This year, there have already been 10 reported hangings of Black people in the U.S. I'm proud to have signed onto Rep. Pressley's letter to address these widespread modern-day lynchings and put a stop to this racial terror."
X's Community Notes, the platform's crowdsourced correction feature, responded by directing readers to the law-enforcement and medical-examiner findings in several of the cases. The notes stated that most high-profile hanging deaths identified in 2025 and 2026 had been ruled suicides and that one remained under homicide investigation.
Former Senate staffer Matt Whitlock challenged the lawmakers' language directly:
"Every death is a tragedy, but what do you think 'widespread' means if only one of these was actually a homicide. Not sure you've landed the point about 'racial terror' with this."
Ocasio-Cortez, who has surged in 2028 Democratic nomination odds, did not respond to Fox News Digital's request for comment. Neither did the DOJ or the FBI.
The letter, spearheaded by Pressley, leaned heavily on historical racial violence. It cited the Emmett Till Antilynching Act, the 2022 federal law named after the Black teenager kidnapped and murdered by white men in Mississippi in 1955 after being falsely accused of flirting with a white woman. The letter argued that Congress enacted the law "to ensure the DOJ and FBI are empowered to fully investigate suspicious deaths and hold individuals accountable."
Pressley's own language went further. "Black folks are being found hanged in America," she wrote. "We cannot stand by while strange fruit hangs from trees across the country." The phrase "strange fruit" is a reference to the Billie Holiday song about lynching victims, a deliberate rhetorical choice that frames the deaths as racial murders before investigators have reached that conclusion.
When Fox News Digital reached Pressley's spokesperson, Ricardo Sanchez, for comment, he directed the outlet back to the letter itself rather than addressing the gap between the lawmakers' framing and the official findings.
Former Energy Department official Matt Van Swol posted a blunter critique on X:
"In the last 'lynching' of a Black woman, the media conveniently left out the prime suspect in the case was her Black boyfriend. Zero White people are lynching Black people in America today."
Van Swol's characterization is consistent with the known facts in the Fortune case: the only person arrested in connection with the investigation is Anderson, the father of one of Fortune's children, and he was taken into custody on unrelated weapons charges, not on a lynching charge, and not as part of any racial conspiracy.
The pattern here is not subtle. Roughly 50 House Democrats signed a letter demanding a sweeping federal investigation into what they characterized as "widespread modern-day lynchings." They invoked the name of Emmett Till. They used the language of racial terror. And they did all of this while the actual case files, compiled by local police departments, medical examiners, and investigators, showed suicide ruling after suicide ruling.
That does not mean these deaths are not tragedies. Every one of them is. But tragedy and racial terror are not the same thing, and lawmakers who blur that line do real damage. They stoke fear where the evidence calls for grief. They weaponize pain for political leverage. And they erode public trust in the very institutions they claim to be defending.
The congressional letter also reflects a broader trend among progressive Democrats who increasingly set the party's tone, one that prioritizes ideological narrative over verified fact. When confronted with Community Notes, fact-checks, and official findings, neither Ocasio-Cortez nor Pressley's office offered a substantive response. Sanchez pointed reporters back to the letter. Ocasio-Cortez said nothing.
That silence is its own answer. If the facts supported the "lynching" framing, the lawmakers would be citing them. Instead, they cited a 2022 law, a 1955 murder, and the emotional weight of the word itself.
Meanwhile, House Democrats continue to struggle with internal discipline, and episodes like this one illustrate why. When a party's most prominent voices make claims that crumble under the first layer of scrutiny, the credibility cost is not limited to one post on X. It spreads.
Fox News Digital reached out to the DOJ and the FBI for comment on the letter's demands. No responses were noted. Whether federal authorities will act on the request remains an open question, but the local investigators who actually examined these cases have already spoken.
Ocasio-Cortez, whose personal life has drawn tabloid attention alongside her political ambitions, has built a brand on moral urgency. But moral urgency without factual grounding is just noise, and in this case, it is noise that cheapens the real history of racial violence in America by attaching it to deaths that investigators say were not racial violence at all.
If Democrats want the public to take claims of racial terror seriously, they might start by taking the evidence seriously first.
The U.S. Supreme Court has now twice declined to intervene in Missouri's redistricting fight, ending Republican efforts to use a 2025 congressional map ahead of November's midterm elections, a decision that preserves a Democratic-held seat in Kansas City.
The court's Thursday rejection came without public dissents, shutting down an emergency appeal by the anti-gerrymandering group People Not Politicians, which had asked the justices to overturn a lower court order mandating use of the Republican-drawn map. The ruling caps a chaotic week in which Missouri's congressional boundaries changed three times and the state's secretary of state was hauled before the Missouri Supreme Court on contempt charges.
The outcome leaves Missouri locked into its 2022 congressional districts for the 2026 midterms, a map that gives Republicans a likely 6-2 advantage over Democrats instead of the 7-1 edge the newer map was designed to deliver. The lost seat is the Kansas City district held by Democratic Rep. Emanuel Cleaver, which the 2025 redistricting plan had carved up to favor a Republican challenger.
The legal whiplash began Tuesday, when the Supreme Court let stand a Missouri Supreme Court decision ordering Secretary of State Denny Hoskins to use the older 2022 map. Moments later, a federal judge in Missouri temporarily blocked that very map, effectively reinstating the 2025 GOP version. By Tuesday night, a lower court had issued its own order mandating use of the Republican-drawn districts.
On Wednesday, People Not Politicians raced back to the Supreme Court, asking the justices to overturn the Tuesday night order. By Thursday, the court said no, for the second time in days.
The Associated Press reported that Thursday's decision "appears to be the end of the push to use the 2025 redistricting map." Republican U.S. Rep. Bob Onder disagreed.
"This isn't over."
Onder's two-word response signals that the redistricting fight may continue in other legal venues even as the midterm clock runs out.
Missouri Secretary of State Denny Hoskins became a central figure in the dispute after the Missouri Supreme Court ordered him to administer elections under the 2022 map. Hoskins refused. The state high court summoned him to explain why he should not be held in contempt, a remarkable breakdown in the chain of legal authority between a statewide elected official and the state's highest court.
The confrontation grew out of a citizen-led referendum effort. More than 300,000 Missouri voters signed a petition challenging the 2025 redistricting plan, triggering a legal requirement that the new districts could not take effect unless voters approved them at the ballot box. Hoskins refused to place the referendum on the ballot, setting off the cascade of lawsuits that eventually reached the Supreme Court twice in a single week.
The Missouri Supreme Court's earlier ruling blocking the GOP map had already signaled that the state judiciary viewed the referendum signatures as a constitutional barrier to the new districts.
Missouri Attorney General Catherine Hanaway had filed an emergency appeal to the Supreme Court days earlier, trying to revive the 2025 map before a Tuesday deadline for ballot changes. Justice Brett Kavanaugh, who handles emergency appeals from the region, asked opponents to respond by Monday and had the option to decide alone or refer the matter to the full court.
Hanaway did not mince words in her filing, as Fox News reported:
"We have just appealed yesterday's catastrophic ruling to the Supreme Court of the United States. We look forward to the Court's prompt review of this critical matter, as our ability to hold timely and lawful congressional elections hangs in the balance."
Her office's appeal went further, arguing that no court in American history had ever granted such an extraordinary remedy and that the state court's order "inflicts unprecedented chaos on Missouri."
The Supreme Court was unmoved. Its unanimous, unsigned order halting the federal district court's restoration of the 2025 map carried no public dissents, a signal that not even the court's most conservative members saw grounds to intervene on an emergency basis.
The decision came during a term in which the justices have faced a packed docket of politically consequential cases touching executive power, immigration, and elections.
Richard von Glahn, executive director of People Not Politicians Missouri, framed the outcome in simple terms:
"The law is the law, the Missouri Constitution is clear as was the Missouri Supreme Court."
Von Glahn's group had gathered the 300,000-plus signatures that forced the legal standoff. From their perspective, the Missouri Constitution gave citizens a right to challenge mid-decade redistricting through referendum, and the courts upheld that right.
But the episode exposed a serious institutional problem. A sitting secretary of state openly defied the state's highest court. A federal judge issued an order that contradicted the state supreme court's ruling within minutes of the U.S. Supreme Court declining to disturb it. And Missouri's congressional map changed three times in five days, weeks before voters were supposed to cast ballots.
The Washington Examiner noted that the Supreme Court's emergency ruling forced Missouri to revert to the 2022 map, reducing the Republican congressional advantage from a projected 7-1 split to 6-2. For Republicans who had counted on the newer map to flip the Kansas City seat, the loss is concrete and immediate.
Courts across the country have been grappling with similar high-stakes disputes over election rules and voter eligibility. A recent Wisconsin Supreme Court ruling on voter eligibility records drew comparable controversy over the judiciary's role in shaping election outcomes.
With the 2022 map now locked in for November, Missouri's eight congressional races will play out under district lines that give Democrats a realistic shot at holding two seats instead of one. The Kansas City district that Republicans targeted remains intact.
The broader question is whether Missouri's redistricting saga sets a precedent for other states where legislatures attempt mid-decade map changes. The 300,000-signature referendum petition proved to be the legal lever that stopped the 2025 map, a tool available in Missouri's constitution but not in every state's.
Rep. Onder's insistence that "this isn't over" suggests Republicans may pursue legislative or legal avenues after the midterms. But for the 2026 cycle, the fight is settled.
The Supreme Court's willingness to stay out of the fray, twice, unanimously, with no dissents, is itself a statement. The justices have shown in other recent terms that they will step into politically charged disputes, including on gun laws and executive authority. On Missouri's maps, they chose silence.
When 300,000 citizens sign a petition and the state's own constitution backs their right to a vote, the system is supposed to work. That it took two trips to the Supreme Court and a contempt summons to get there says more about the officials who resisted than the courts that finally held the line.
The White House removed a Tetris-style game called "Build The Wall" from its website days after The Tetris Company publicly accused it of copyright infringement, the latest in a pattern of intellectual-property dust-ups with the administration's social media operation.
The game, one of five arcade-style titles hosted on the White House website, let users stack falling blocks to build a border wall. It disappeared without explanation after The Tetris Company posted on X on September 4, declaring that it was "not involved in the creation" of the game and that it takes "copyright infringement very seriously." The White House has not responded to BBC requests for comment or offered any official reason for pulling the game.
Four other games remain on the site, including "Flappy Bill", a clone of the viral 2013 mobile hit Flappy Bird, set against Washington's National Mall monuments, and "Rio Run," a border-themed game in which players patrol a river, catching illegal immigrants and tallying a "Deported" counter on screen.
The Tetris Company did not simply flag the legal issue. It drew a moral line. Its September 4 post included a pointed statement about the company's identity:
"At Tetris we believe in the power of connection and building people together, not dividing them."
The company added a message aimed at its fanbase:
"To our fans everywhere: we love you, we see you, and we're grateful to have you in our community."
The firm has a track record of enforcing its intellectual property. In 2012, it settled a copyright infringement lawsuit against the makers of an iPhone game called Mino for an undisclosed fee. That history suggests the company's objection to "Build The Wall" carried real legal weight, even if no formal lawsuit was filed in this case.
Whether The Tetris Company sent a formal cease-and-desist letter or a DMCA takedown notice, the standard legal tool for forcing removal of infringing content online, before or after its public post remains unclear. The White House's silence leaves open the question of whether the game was pulled voluntarily, under legal pressure, or on some other basis entirely.
The "Build The Wall" episode is not the first time the administration's digital team has drawn complaints from intellectual-property holders. In October 2025, the official White House X account posted an AI-created image of President Trump wearing a suit from the Halo video game franchise. That post drew criticism from Steve Downes, the voice actor behind Halo's iconic character Master Chief.
Downes posted a now-deleted tweet calling for "the producers of this disgusting and juvenile war porn" to remove his voice from a related video. That video, posted by the White House X account on March 6, mixed footage of U.S. military strikes in Iran with clips from films and television, including a Halo audio clip of Master Chief saying "finishing this fight."
The administration has also had run-ins beyond the gaming world. The Pokémon Company International criticized the White House after it included a small image of the character Pikachu in a "Make America Great Again" meme posted online in March. No direct quotes from The Pokémon Company's response were reported, but the objection added to a growing list of brand owners pushing back against the administration's freewheeling use of pop-culture imagery.
Connecticut Democratic state senator Matt Lesser used the arcade section to take a shot at the administration's priorities. Lesser tweeted:
"Heating oil is near an all-time high but hey you can play Border Tsar Tom Homan in a video game."
The criticism is predictable from a Democratic state legislator, and Lesser offered no sourced figure to back his heating-oil claim. But the broader point, that a White House website hosting browser games invites easy mockery, is one the administration's own team should have anticipated.
The remaining games on the site, including "Rio Run" with its "Deported" counter, will likely continue to draw attention from critics. Whether the White House communications team views the arcade section as effective outreach or a liability is anyone's guess, the administration has said nothing publicly about the games' purpose or who authorized them.
The identity of the person or team that created "Build The Wall" and the other titles has not been disclosed. No official has claimed credit, and no internal process for approving the games has been described.
There is nothing wrong with a president's team using creative digital content to advance a policy message. Border security is a serious issue, and communicating it in accessible formats is fair game. But borrowing the look, mechanics, and brand identity of a globally recognized game without permission is a different matter. Copyright law protects creators regardless of who is doing the copying, and the federal government is not exempt from that principle.
The Tetris Company's 2012 settlement over the Mino clone shows the firm does not make idle threats. The White House apparently recognized the risk and acted, quietly, without comment, and without acknowledging any fault.
That silence is the least satisfying part. An administration that prides itself on confronting critics head-on chose to say nothing when a game company called it out for copying its product. A brief statement, "we pulled the game out of respect for intellectual property", would have closed the story in a news cycle. Instead, the silence lets critics fill the vacuum.
The broader pattern of using copyrighted characters, audio, and game designs without clearance suggests a digital operation that moves fast and worries about permissions later, or not at all. The Halo clips, the Pikachu meme, and now the Tetris-style game all point to a team that treats pop culture as a free resource. It isn't.
Conservatives who believe in property rights, intellectual property included, should expect the White House to respect them. If the message is worth making, it is worth making with original work.
A 69-year-old Long Island man was allegedly stabbed to death by his 33-year-old son inside his own apartment early Monday morning, and managed to crawl to a phone and call 911 before he collapsed.
Edward Brown was found dead at his Mastic, Long Island, home after Sage Arias-Brown allegedly broke in around 12:30 a.m. and stabbed him multiple times in the abdomen and chest, the New York Post reported. Police arrested Arias-Brown blocks from the apartment shortly after the killing.
Suffolk County prosecutors say a witness heard Arias-Brown force his way into the apartment and heard Brown screaming for help. The witness then saw Arias-Brown leave the building. Brown, despite his wounds, dragged himself to a phone and dialed 911 to report the attack, then collapsed before help arrived. He was declared dead at the scene.
Arias-Brown was arraigned Tuesday on a charge of second-degree murder. He pleaded not guilty, was remanded without bail, and is due back in court Friday.
His defense attorney, Katherine Fernandez, told the court that Arias-Brown has a history of mental illness. Fernandez also disclosed that her client has an open robbery case, a detail prosecutors did not dispute.
Assistant District Attorney Melissa Grier laid out the timeline for the court at Tuesday's arraignment:
"A witness heard [Arias-Brown] gain entry into the apartment and heard [Brown] screaming for help, the witness then saw him exit the building."
After the stabbing, Brown somehow found the strength to reach a phone and call 911. He reported the attack himself. Then he collapsed. By the time officers arrived, there was nothing they could do.
The sequence is stark. A 69-year-old man, alone in his apartment after midnight, is attacked by his own adult son. He is stabbed repeatedly. And his last conscious act is to call for help that arrives too late.
The case carries echoes of other recent cases in which parents were allegedly killed by their own children, a pattern that raises hard questions about what systems failed before the violence began.
Fernandez's disclosure that Arias-Brown was already facing a robbery charge, and had a documented history of mental illness, puts an uncomfortable spotlight on the gap between what authorities knew and what they did about it.
Prosecutors have not publicly detailed the nature of the open robbery case or when it was filed. They have not said whether Arias-Brown was under any conditions of release at the time of the alleged killing. Those are questions the court proceedings ahead may answer.
But the basic outline is damning enough on its own. A man with a pending violent felony charge and known mental health issues allegedly broke into his elderly father's home in the middle of the night and stabbed him to death. Edward Brown is gone. The system that was supposed to track his son's open case did not prevent it.
Violent crimes committed by suspects already entangled in the justice system have become a grim recurring theme in New York. Elsewhere in the country, courts have handed down severe sentences for acts of extreme violence, but those sentences come after the damage is done.
At his Tuesday arraignment, Arias-Brown arrived in a worn track suit and fidgeted throughout the proceedings. He entered a plea of not guilty to the second-degree murder charge. The judge remanded him without bail.
Suffolk County prosecutors offered no public statement on motive. What exactly unfolded inside the Mastic apartment before the stabbing remains unclear. Investigators have not said whether any confrontation preceded the attack or what method Arias-Brown allegedly used to break in.
The identity of the unnamed witness, the person who heard Brown's screams and saw Arias-Brown leave, has not been disclosed. Nor has the specific police agency that made the arrest been named publicly, though the case falls within Suffolk County's jurisdiction.
Stabbing deaths involving family members have drawn national attention in recent months. In one Pennsylvania case, a college athlete was allegedly stabbed to death by a boyfriend, with the suspect's own mother later charged in a cover-up.
Several critical facts remain missing from the public record. No cause of death from a medical examiner has been released. The exact nature of Arias-Brown's mental health history has not been detailed beyond Fernandez's general statement. The specifics of the open robbery case, when it was filed, what the allegations were, and whether Arias-Brown was free on bail or his own recognizance, are unknown.
Those gaps matter. If Arias-Brown was out on bail or released under supervision while facing a violent felony, the question becomes whether the system had the tools to keep Edward Brown safe and chose not to use them, or whether it lacked the tools entirely.
New York's criminal justice reforms over the past several years have repeatedly drawn scrutiny for limiting judges' ability to hold defendants pretrial, particularly in cases involving mental illness. Whether those policies played any role here is not yet established. But every time a suspect with an open violent case allegedly commits another act of violence, the question gets louder.
Cases involving criminal charges stemming from violent or disturbing conduct continue to test whether the justice system can identify dangerous individuals before they escalate.
Arias-Brown is scheduled to return to court Friday. That hearing may begin to answer some of the open questions, about the robbery case, about his mental health treatment, and about the circumstances that put him at his father's door at 12:30 in the morning.
For now, the facts speak plainly. A 69-year-old man was stabbed in his own home by his own son. He bled out after calling 911 himself. His alleged killer had a violent criminal history and documented mental illness. And he was free to walk to his father's apartment in the dead of night.
Edward Brown did everything right in his final moments. He fought to reach the phone. He called for help. The system that was supposed to keep people like his son in check had already failed him long before the phone rang.