#congressional-oversight

#congressional-oversight

More than 20 members of Congress are demanding answers from the Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) and homeland security officials after the Guardian revealed the VA is compiling a report on all non-US citizens employed by or affiliated with the government agency that will then be shared with other federal agencies, including immigration authorities. The lawmakers, led by Illinois congresswoman Delia Ramirez along with congressman Mark Takano of California

In an interview Saturdayon the sidelines of the 2025 Reagan National Defense Forum in Simi Valley, Calif., House Armed Services Committee Ranking Member Adam Smith offered new details about lawmakers' compromise on the 2026 National Defense Authorization Act just ahead of the bill's Sundayrelease.

Trump Cabinet members have also started to draw a skeptical eye from some Republicans. Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.) called for Defense Sec. Pete Hegseth to testify under oath over the operation that killed alleged drug smugglers, while Rep. Mike Turner (R-Ohio) said that members on the of the House Armed Services Committee were "very concerned" by the strikes. Sen. Joni Ernst (R-Iowa), who has at times been more skeptical of Hegseth than other Republicans, called his tenure "bumpy" this week.

The US House speaker, Mike Johnson, has developed a go-to response when asked about something controversial Donald Trump or members of his administration said or did. It's some version of I don't know anything about that. When pressed about the latest scandal from the Trump administration, Johnson, a Republican from Louisiana, frequently says he is not aware of that news including last week to reports about a US military strike on an alleged drug boat that has roiled Washington politics.

The Navy admiral who reportedly issued orders for the U.S. military to fire upon survivors of an attack on an alleged drug boat is expected Thursday on Capitol Hill to provide a classified briefing to top congressional lawmakers overseeing national security. The information from Adm. Frank "Mitch" Bradley, who is now the commander of U.S. Special Operations Command, comes at a potentially crucial moment in the unfolding congressional investigation into how Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth handled the military operation in international waters near Venezuela.

That strike, just one of more than 20 that have to date killed at least 80 people in the Trump administration's posturing against the regime of Nicolás Maduro, now balanced on the edge of conventional war, recently reignited a firestorm of controversy when fresh reporting at the end of November revealed that a second strike had allegedly been ordered to kill several survivors of the wrecked boat.

President Donald Trump called his Cabinet to meet Tuesday morning as the administration insists that it was lawful for the U.S. military to launch a secondary strike on an alleged drug boat in the Caribbean Sea in September. Experts in the military code say this was clearly illegal, but The White House said Monday that Navy Vice Adm. Frank "Mitch" Bradley ordered the second strike and was "within his authority and the law."

The call, announced Monday by the office of Joint Chiefs Chairman Gen. Dan Caine, occurred after The Washington Post reported Friday that Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth gave a spoken order to kill the entire crew of a vessel thought to be ferrying narcotics in the Caribbean Sea, the first of more than 20 such strikes directed by the Trump administration since early September.

I know for a fact that Zelensky has said many times that he's been grateful. The people of Ukraine are grateful for our help. But he tends to blame Ukraine for Russia's invasion. I don't get it. And so I do not have confidence. The president has periodically said the right things, but more often that seems to waver back into the Russian camp, the invader camp. That's why I think the House and the Senate need to take the lead here.

Donald Trump's head-spinning about-face on legislation to force disclosure of the Epstein files by his own administration is leading a lot of observers to wonder if the 47th president has lost his mojo. Some write about the embattled president as though he's Richard Nixon being stalked by congressional and media predators with the Epstein files being a turning point that blows up Trump's control of the legislative branch and the GOP, as Politico Playbook suggests:

Members of the Senate Committee on Commerce, Science and Transportation, which oversees professional sports, called the allegations against Guardians pitchers Emmanuel Clase and Luis Ortiz "markedly more serious" than other recent betting incidents in baseball. Federal prosecutors on Sunday indicted Clase and Ortiz and accused them of rigging individual pitches over multiple games so gambling associates could profit on wagers.

For months, President Trump has raged over Biden's autopen use and claimed that the former president's pardons should be "VOID, VACANT, AND OF NO FURTHER FORCE OR EFFECT" because they were "done by Autopen." In a statement posted on X, Bondi said, "My team has already initiated a review of the Biden administration's reported use of autopen for pardons." Friction point: Legal scholars previously told Axios that other presidents have used autopen and that Trump's rationale behind his claims was unlikely to succeed in court.

(AP Photo/Mark Schiefelbein) President Donald Trump called for former Special Counsel Jack Smith to be jailed over the investigation into him known as Arctic Frost. In a post fired off on Truth Social Thursday, Trump wrote the following about Smith: He is a CRIMINAL AND SHOULD BE IN JAIL. A MAJOR LOWLIFE AND FAILURE. An ugly person, both inside and out! I beat him badly, and love watching him squirm now.

You can't throw tariffs around indiscriminately and then not negotiate because you're mad about a pushback from one of the countries that you're having a trade war with. People are paying too much for groceries, for durable goods; inflation is up from September, all because of Trump's tariff taxes on all of us. It does have a negative effect on Americans, and it has a negative effect on Canadians.

The missives are undersigned by firms like the Babel Street and the ANDECO Institute, which sell risk and threat intelligence services derived from commercially or publicly available information that's not necessarily gathered through more covert means available to spy agencies. Graphika, which performs social media network analysis to identify disinformation campaigns, is also a signatory. The measures, housed in Title 6 of the House Intelligence Committee's version of the fiscal year 2026 Intelligence Authorization Act, are also supported by the OSINT Foundation, a professional association of open-source practitioners in the U.S. intelligence community.

For these members of the administration to treat Congress with such contempt, or to just completely tear apart the White House without consulting with Congress. Not that these Republicans have shown much of a spine anyway, he said. But still, I really do think there are people who are in the and let me say this slowly so they understand the second branch of government who now think they're the only branch of government, because they got elected by, what, 49.9% of the vote?

American citizens are being dragged off the streets by masked men and thrown into detention cells without access to a lawyer or even a phone call, Garcia said. No one, regardless of their background or appearance, should be living in fear of being thrown behind bars by their own government because of their race or what they look like. Their actions are unconstitutional, unacceptable, and completely un-American, and we will not stop fighting until this Administration is held accountable, he added.

"President Trump and his administration continue to fail to answer pressing questions regarding the president's orders to carry out lethal U.S. military strikes on boats in the Caribbean Sea," Smith said. "They have failed to demonstrate the legality of these strikes, provide transparency on the process used or even a list of cartels that have been designated as terrorist organizations."

We just want to go in and look at the facility and see what the conditions are and they would not let us in. It is shameful. They've refused to tell us this information. I've done this job for a few years now, I've never had this stonewalling by any presidential administration. What are you afraid of? You don't hide, you don't run away when you're proud of what you're doing.

I've kind of dug into this a little bit more, and the way they do it is they do these scenes, and they switch them around very fast. In the old days [in the era of comedian and producer] Andy Griffith, it was just one camera and it was great. And [modern producers] do different scenes and it's moving around every second, and that releases certain things in young children's minds, and we need to find out why are they doing like this because this is contracting their brains, this is molding their brains.

After days of clashes between federal officers and protesters at an immigration jail in his home state of Illinois, Democratic US senator Dick Durbin on Sunday renewed demands to meet with Trump administration immigration officials. Durbin wrote on X that Immigration and Customs Enforcement (Ice) must be accountable for its actions amid the administration's cruel immigration crackdown. The post on Sunday morning came after Saturday night protests and arrests at an immigration detention center in Broadview, Illinois.

The authors of that law made a fatal error of putting a three-year expiration date on key programs that benefit people outside cars. That sell-by date typically would have been morethan enough time to finalize grant agreements between the feds and communities, but with Trump weaponizing government bureaucracy, the Campaign says his administration is simply running out the clock on programs it doesn't like, until the final deadline arrives when federal fiscal year ends on Sept. 30 and wipes the money out.

Earlier this year, we were critical of the US's National Academies of Science for seemingly refusing to respond to the Trump administration's attacks on science. That reticence appeared to end in August with the release of the DOE climate report and the announcement that the EPA was using that report as the latest word on climate science, which it argued had changed considerably since the initial EPA decisions on this issue in 2009.