Hezbollah Officials Had Suspicious Conversation About Tulsi Gabbard

Tulsi Gabbard is facing more scrutiny over her foreign travels, specifically a trip she made to the Middle East while a member of Congress.

In 2017, as a member of Congress representing Hawaii, Gabbard made a trip to Syria and Lebanon to meet with Syrian leader Bashar Al Assad. But shortly after her visit, The New York Times reported, U.S. intelligence agencies intercepted a call between two Hezbollah officials in which they said that she met with “the boss” or “the big guy.”

Intelligence officials assume that the person in question was a senior Hezbollah official, or a high-ranking Lebanese government official with strong ties to Hezbollah. Gabbard denied meeting anyone from the militant organization and political party but acknowledged that she met with different Lebanese officials on her trip, including some close to Hezbollah, such as the head of Lebanese intelligence at the time. 

The Times spoke with unnamed people close to Gabbard who said that she disclosed all of her meetings from the trip and that the reports were misinterpreted. But this latest revelation is sure to introduce another snag into Gabbard’s confirmation process to serve as director of national intelligence. Gabbard hasn’t yet won over the Republicans on the Senate Intelligence Committee, nor influential Senator Mitch McConnell. 

The report also notes that Gabbard found herself under additional scrutiny from a federal agency that protects flights, thanks to a trip she made to the Vatican for an event organized by a European businessman on the FBI watchlist.

Trump’s allies are trying to force the normally secret committee vote to be made public in the hopes of forcing skeptical Republicans, like Senators Susan Collins and Todd Young, to back her. Gabbard can’t afford to lose a single committee vote, stacking the odds against this particularly quixotic Cabinet choice. 

Trump’s ultimatum to federal workers is backfiring—making them vow to stay in their positions out of sheer spite. 

On Tuesday, the president announced that he’d be giving federal workers a choice: return to the office full-time or quit with a buyout and severance pay through September 30. This is part of his effort to revamp the federal bureaucracy in his own image, and with his own supporters.

“The President required that employees return to in-person work, restored accountability for employees who have policy-making authority, restored accountability for senior career executives, and reformed the federal hiring process to focus on merit,” a mass email said. “As a result of the above orders, the reform of the federal workforce will be significant.

“If you resign under this program, you will retain all pay and benefits regardless of your daily workload and will be exempted from all applicable in-person work requirements until September 30, 2025 (or earlier if you choose to accelerate your resignation for any reason),” the email continues.

Federal workers aren’t taking this lying down.

“I’ll be honest, before that email went out, I was looking for any way to get out of this fresh hell,” said one user in the popular r/fednews subreddit. “But now I am fired up to make these goons as frustrated as possible, RTO be damned.”

These sentiments were echoed throughout the thread.

“I’ll continue to do my job and fight for the position I’ve earned,” another said. “It took me 10 years of applying and 20 years experience in my field to get here. I will not be pushed out by two billionaire trust funds babies. I’M NOT LEAVING!”

“I’ve never been more motivated to stay. Before the ‘buyout’ memo, I was ready to go job hunting, but then a revelation hit. I took an oath under this position to the American people and leaving my job under the current state would be failing to maintain my oath as civil servant,” another worker wrote. 

“You can’t buy me off, scare me away, or intimidate me into resigning. I’m angry, spiteful, and resolute in holding the line and outlasting anyone trying to destroy the agency whose work I believe in and a mission I take to heart,” one comment stated. “My colleagues feel the same way and we’re not leaving, you’ll have to drag us out. We’ll continue to follow mission we’re charged with executing and serving the individuals we’re charged with serving.… We will be here and continue to be here.” The user also noted that he and 12 other co-workers would be wearing “Rebel Alliance” T-shirts under their work clothes every Friday in the office.

“They just created the imaginary deep state they convinced everyone they were fighting against, oh the irony,” another user noted.

Federal employees also noticed that the memo announcing the buyouts was eerily similar to the one Elon Musk sent Twitter employees in 2022.

A judge on Tuesday temporarily blocked Donald Trump’s move to freeze funding for all federal grants and loans. 

U.S. District Judge Loren AliKhan ordered a brief administrative stay on the Office of Management and Budget’s effort to stop funding to federal grant contracts.

AliKhan’s order, which landed just as the freeze was to begin at 5:00 p.m. on Tuesday, will go into effect immediately and last until 5:00 p.m. on February 3—little less than a week. 

A hearing for further arguments has been scheduled for Monday morning. 

“I think there is the specter of irreparable harm,” said AliKhan, according to Politico. 

The Trump administration’s decision to pause all funding caused widespread chaos and confusion Tuesday as officials across the country reported that they’d been locked out of  essential government services, such as Medicaid and Head Start. 

The sweeping memo from OMB will affect 2,600 accounts across government, holding hostage the funding for essential government agencies, programs, and nonprofits until they’re willing to answer questions about their commitments to environmental justice, “gender ideology,” and diversity, equity, and inclusion.

Lawmakers from across the country warned Tuesday that the systems for crucial programs such as Head Start were shut down as a direct result of the funding freeze, forcing the organizations to grind to a halt. Medicaid portals were down in every single state.

But OMB insisted that certain programs  would not be affected by the order. The White House claimed that the Medicaid portal had experienced an “outage” and that they expected it to be up and running “soon.”

Attorneys general from at least 23 states joined a federal lawsuit Tuesday against Trump to oppose his freeze on vital health services. 

This story has been updated.

Speaking before a crowd at the March for Life in Washington last week, House Speaker Mike Johnson promised that the anti-abortion movement would be “entering a new era” under Donald Trump’s leadership. The newest benchmark for the conservative party under that banner is, apparently, allowing people to attack and shutter health care clinics providing abortion services.

Republican lawmakers held a private meeting with anti-abortion activists, pledging to repeal the Freedom of Access to Clinic Entrances, or FACE, Act, reproductive rights columnist Jessica Valenti reported Tuesday. The FACE Act prohibits the use of physical force, threat, or intimidation to prevent people from obtaining an abortion, and prohibits damaging or destroying the clinics that provide them.

“God demands justice,” said Representative Andy Biggs, according to Valenti.

The meeting followed an effort by Representative Chip Roy last week, in which the Texas Republican introduced a bill in the House to formally repeal the act.

“Americans just spent the last four years being targeted by a weaponized justice system,” Roy said in a statement at the time. “The FACE Act was one of the primary weapons of abuse—being used to politically target, arrest, and jail pro-life Americans for speaking out and standing up for life.”

Regardless of the FACE Act’s future, the Department of Justice announced it won’t enforce the protective statute, anyway. In a memo issued Friday, the acting attorney general’s chief of staff directed the agency’s Civil Rights Division to dismiss several FACE Act cases against anti-abortion protesters, claiming that the act embodied the “weaponization of the federal government.” The department also ceased future prosecutions under the statute, except under “extraordinary circumstances,” such as death, “serious bodily harm, or serious property damage.”

In the same week, Trump pardoned 23 anti-abortion activists who blockaded the entrance of a Washington clinic in October 2020. They included Lauren Handy, who was arrested in 2022 for retaining five fetuses at her house.

Meanwhile, conservatives are also attacking abortion access through the judicial system: Anti-abortion activists have asked the Supreme Court to overrule Hill v. Colorado, which established a buffer zone around abortion clinics that prevents activists from speaking to patients or distributing anti-abortion materials to them within 100 feet of a facility.

The intention, for Republicans, is clear.

Speaking at the National Mall last week, Vice President JD Vance pledged to protect Christians and anti-abortion activists from federal prosecution.

“This administration stands by you, we stand with you, and most importantly we stand with the most vulnerable,” Vance said. “America is fundamentally a pro-baby, a pro-family, and a pro-life country.”

The first foreign leader to visit President Donald Trump at the White House in his second term will be wanted for war crimes.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu announced Tuesday that Trump will host him at the White House on February 4. Trump had earlier hinted at the announcement on Monday by saying he’ll be “speaking with Bibi Netanyahu in the not too distant future.”

Less than two weeks ago, a ceasefire in Israel’s war in Gaza went into effect. Netanyahu deliberately delayed the ceasefire to be implemented the day before Trump’s inauguration, agreeing to terms with Hamas that were nearly identical to previous ceasefire proposals months before.

Now Trump and Netanyahu will gloat before media cameras and will probably discuss how Trump plans to thank the Israeli leader—perhaps more military aid, a green light for annexing the occupied West Bank, or a revival of the idea to ethnically cleanse Gaza. Trump already lifted the Biden administration’s superficial ban on exporting 2,000-pound bombs to the country last week.

Netanyahu is facing allegations of bribery, fraud, and breach of trust back in Israel, along with an arrest warrant from the International Criminal Court for crimes against humanity. The U.S. under the Biden administration rejected the warrants against Netanyahu and his former defense minister Yoav Gallant, and Trump’s Secretary of State Marco Rubio has similarly defended Israel’s actions during its brutal war against Gaza and condemned the ICC.

Senate Republicans attempted to give Netanyahu a gift on Tuesday by trying to advance a bill sanctioning the ICC, but Senate Democrats (minus John Fetterman) blocked the bill. Regardless, Netanyahu will be able to travel to the White House next week and meet with his corrupt American counterpart worry-free.

Trump fired two prominent officials of the National Labor Relations Board while everyone was rightly worried about the federal funding freeze.

The president fired the board’s general counsel, Jennifer Abruzzo, who was a Biden appointee, as well as Democratic member and former Chair Gwynne Wilcox Monday evening. Their departures leave the board two members short of what it requires to actually function as the country’s top labor watchdog.

The NLRB protects nonfederal employees from unfair labor practices and preserves their right to unionize—and during the Biden administration went further than ever before in doing so. Trump’s firings come as the NLRB is already facing lawsuits from SpaceX and Amazon for apparently doing too much to protect workers.

The NLRB allows the president to remove board members only in exceptional circumstances, like negligence of duty or malfeasance.

“These moves will make it easier for bosses to violate the law and trample on workers’ legal rights on the job and fundamental freedom to organize,” AFL-CIO president Liz Shuler wrote.

Wilcox, the first Black woman to serve on the labor board, believes her firing was illegal.

“I will be pursuing all legal avenues to challenge my removal, which violates long-standing Supreme Court precedent,” she said.

Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez called Donald Trump’s federal funding freeze—which appears to have kneecapped Medicaid access nationwide—a constitutional crisis. So is anyone going to do anything about it?

A memo from the Office of Management and Budget announced that starting Tuesday at 5 p.m., there would be a freeze on all federal grants and loans, affecting nearly 2,600 agencies and programs, including nonprofit organizations that provide school meals for low-income students, safety from domestic violence, and reintegration for homeless veterans, among other services.

To resecure funding, these organizations would have to report to OMB whether they promote ideas such as environmental justice, “gender ideology,” and diversity, equity, and inclusion. They would also have to say whether they provide services to undocumented immigrants.

A second memo published by OMB Tuesday claimed that certain programs, including Medicaid, Head Start, food stamps, and Pell Grants, would be unaffected—but multiple states reported having issues accessing these programs.

Florida Representative Maxwell Frost said that his state Medicaid portal had been shut down. Trump’s press secretary Karoline Leavitt confirmed during her first press conference that there had been a “portal outage,” but she did not confirm whether it was connected to the OMB’s memo.

At the same time, Connecticut Senator Chris Murphy said that Head Start’s reimbursement system was no longer working. “Don’t believe these people,” Murphy warned in a post on X, referring to the second OMB memo.

The decision to issue a blanket funding freeze has created widespread chaos and confusion Tuesday as essential government services were left in limbo.

Ocasio-Cortez slammed the administrative clusterfuck as nothing short of a constitutional crisis.

“Trump is holding all the nation’s hospitals and vital services hostage to seize power from Congress and hand it over to billionaires,” Ocasio-Cortez wrote on X Tuesday. “We must state the truth: this is a constitutional crisis. It’s a massive, illegal power grab that the House and Senate have a sworn duty to stop.”

So what are House Democrats doing to stop the hostile takeover? They’re meeting virtually on Wednesday, according to Punchbowl News.

The city of Chicago may be too smart for Tom Homan.

Donald Trump’s border czar appeared on CNN Tuesday complaining that Chicagoans were too knowledgeable of their basic rights.

“Sanctuary citizens are making it very difficult to arrest the criminals. For instance, Chicago, very well-educated. They’ve been educated how to defy ICE, how to hide from ICE. I’ve seen many pamphlets from many NGOs: ‘Here’s how you escape ICE from arresting you’; ‘Here’s what you need to do.’ They call it ‘Know Your Rights.’ I call it ‘How to escape arrest.’”

Homan is referring to the city’s Know Your Rights campaign, launched by Mayor Brandon Johnson. The program seeks to “ensure residents of Chicago know their rights in the event of being stopped and detained by federal immigration agents.” The information is posted on video screens throughout the city’s public transit system.

The immigration czar is spearheading efforts to carry out Trump’s mass deportation plans, which have hit major cities like Chicago, Miami, Atlanta, and New York.

Republican Senator Chuck Grassley and his Democratic colleague Dick Durbin are demanding that Donald Trump “immediately” follow the law regarding the impromptu firings of more than a dozen inspectors general across 18 offices.

“While IGs aren’t immune from committing acts requiring their removal, and they can be removed by the president, the law must be followed,” the chairman and ranking member of the Judiciary Committee wrote in a joint memo.

Grassley and Durbin highlighted that in ousting the prosecutors, Trump had not complied with a legally mandated 30-day notice to Congress, and had not shared the case-specific reasons for their removal.

“IGs are critical to rooting out waste, fraud, abuse, and misconduct within the Executive Branch bureaucracy, which you have publicly made clear you are also intent on doing,” they continued. “Accordingly, we request that you provide Congress with a written communication that contains the ‘substantive rationale, including detailed and case-specific reasons’ for each of the IG’s removed.”

Grassley and Durbin also requested that the administration issue a list to the committee regarding proposed temporary replacements, and that the White House “work quickly” to nominate “non-partisan individuals” to formally replace the lost officials.

The mass firing targeted career prosecutors who had worked directly with former special counsel Jack Smith as he developed two cases against Trump: one focused on the forty-fifth president’s alleged retention of classified documents after he left the White House, and another on Trump’s involvement in the January 6 riots. Smith’s team had at least 40 attorneys investigating Trump after the end of his first term.

The matter boiled down to “trust” for the incoming administration, according to a spokesperson, who claimed on Monday that the prosecutors had weaponized the government against the MAGA leader and could not be relied upon to advance Trump’s agenda.

Rank-and-file prosecutors are rarely terminated by incoming administrations for their involvement in sensitive investigations, according to the Associated Press.

The firing of Smith’s team follows a major reshuffling of key officials at the Justice Department, which last week conducted a leadership shakeup by reassigning as many as 20 senior officials to different departments.

Donald Trump’s halting of federal funding to state and local governments has resulted in Medicaid web portals being down in all 50 states. 

Senator Ron Wyden posted on BlueSky Tuesday that his staff confirms disruptions in the health care program across the country, potentially hurting millions of low-income Americans including children, senior citizens, pregnant women, and people with disabilities.  

Officials in other states like Florida and Illinois, where about four million residents rely on Medicaid in each state, confirmed issues with their Medicaid portals. Illinois Governor J.B. Pritzker said state agencies also began experiencing issues accessing federal funding and disbursement systems. 

The disruption was caused by the Monday release of a memo from Trump’s Office of Management and Budget announcing a pause in federal funding to take effect at 5 p.m. EST on Tuesday. The memo sparked mass confusion in state and local governments, as well as nonprofit organizations across the country, well before then. 

The memo called for a “pause” on “all activities related to obligation or disbursement of all federal financial assistance,” and any other programs that included “D.E.I., woke gender ideology and the Green New Deal,” but ultimately went much further than that. As a result, six state attorneys general announced plans on Tuesday to file lawsuits seeking to halt the funding freeze, joining a coalition of small businesses and nonprofits that have already sued the administration themselves. 

The Trump administration has tried to clarify in a new memo that the funding freeze is not “across-the-board,” but that may not mitigate the flurry of lawsuits, as the funding in question was already appropriated by Congress. It seems that the new president has just set off a big legal battle.