Pete Hegseth’s Signal Phone Number Can Be Found Everywhere

The phone number that Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth was using to discuss sensitive war plans on Signal was used on multiple other public platforms, according to The New York Times.

Hegseth’s number was found on WhatsApp, Facebook, and a fantasy sports website, among other websites. This is another absurd security development for the country’s top defense secretary.

Even lower-ranking officials are warned not to use their personal phone for government purposes. Hegseth’s digital breadcrumbs left all over the internet have almost certainly opened him up to cyberattacks, experts said.

“There’s zero percent chance that someone hasn’t tried to install Pegasus or some other spyware on his phone,” former director of the National Counterintelligence and Security Center Mike Casey told the Times. “He is one of the top five, probably, most targeted people in the world for espionage.”

This comes as multiple news outlets have detailed chaos and derision inside Hegseth’s Pentagon in his few months as defense secretary.

Read more at The New York Times.

The FBI arrested a sitting U.S. judge Friday for “obstructing an immigration arrest operation,” a jarring escalation in Donald Trump’s nationwide assault on immigrants, the judicial system, and anybody who opposes his mass deportation efforts. Democrats are reeling.

Milwaukee Judge Hannah Dugan was arrested on charges of obstruction after she helped an undocumented immigrant evade arrest in her courtroom, FBI Director Kash Patel wrote on X Friday morning. The 30-year-old man, originally from Mexico, Eduardo Flores Ruiz, is now in Immigration and Customs Enforcement custody. His arrest marks at least the third time in recent months that ICE agents have appeared at the courthouse with arrest warrants, the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel reported.

“Federal law enforcement coming into a community and arresting a judge is a serious matter and would require high legal bar,” Wisconsin Representative Gwen Moore said, shortly after the arrest in her home state. “I will be following this case closely, and facts will come out, however, I am very alarmed at [these] increasingly lawless actions of the Trump Admin, and in particular ICE, who have been defying court orders and acting with disregard for the Constitution.”

“It is remarkable that the Administration would dare to start arresting state court judges,” said Representative Jamie Raskin. “It’s a whole new descent into government chaos.”

“The Trump administration again is breaking norms in how it’s dealing with immigration, the legal system, and normalcy.… This is stuff I expect from Third World countries,” Wisconsin Representative Mark Pocan told Axios.

Representative Darren Soto echoed Pocan’s disbelief that a judge was arrested in the United States. “Arresting federal judges is third world country dictator type of stuff. Everyday they get more desperate,” Soto wrote on X. “This will be bounced out of court as quick as the rest of their illegal actions.”

Senator Tammy Baldwin called Dugan’s arrest a “gravely serious and drastic move,” but in line with Trump’s attack on the rule of law.

The president has ignored a number of court orders relating to his unlawful deportations and will apparently punish anyone who gets in his way. At least eight immigration judges across three states have now been fired or put on leave.

“Make no mistake, we do not have kings in this country and we are a democracy governed by laws that everyone must abide by,” Baldwin said in a statement on X. “While details of this exact case remain minimal, this action fits into the deeply concerning pattern of this president’s lawless behavior and undermining courts and Congress’s checks on his power.”

The Justice Department quietly invoked the Alien Enemies act last month to give Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents the power to conduct warrantless searches of people’s homes as long as they suspect them to be an “alien enemy.” USA Today obtained the memo that contained this order on Friday.

“As much as practicable, officers should follow the proactive procedures above—and have an executed Warrant of Apprehension and Removal—before contacting an Alien Enemy,” the memo reads. “However, that will not always be realistic or effective in swiftly identifying and removing Alien Enemies.… An officer may encounter a suspected Alien Enemy in the natural course of the officer’s enforcement activity, such as when apprehending other validated members of Tren de Aragua. Given the dynamic nature of enforcement operations, officers in the field are authorized to apprehend aliens upon a reasonable belief that the alien meets all four requirements to be validated as an Alien Enemy. This authority includes entering an Alien Enemy’s residence to make an AEA apprehension where circumstances render it impracticable to first obtain a signed Notice and Warrant of Apprehension and Removal” (emphasis added).

In the memo, the Justice Department defined an “alien enemy” as anyone who is 14 years of age or older, not a U.S. citizen or lawful permanent resident, a citizen of Venezuela, and “a member of the hostile enemy Tren de Aragua,” per the Alien Enemy Validation Guide, a document that has already been slammed by immigration experts.

The broad definition has already resulted in the apprehension and deportation of more than 200 men to El Salvador who just happened to have tattoos, like gay makeup artist Andry José Hernández Romero.

This type of order will likely lead to more indiscriminate arrests and wanton racial profiling. The memo, which is from March 14, is another massive departure from the U.S. immigration norms.

Donald Trump’s administration will restore student visas that were terminated “solely based on” minor legal infractions.

The Department of Justice announced in federal court Friday that Immigration and Customs Enforcement was developing a new policy regarding students with F-1 visas. In the meantime, international students’ terminated online visa records would “remain Active or shall be reactivated” in the federal Student and Exchange Visitor Program, or SEVIS, database.

“ICE will not modify the record solely based on the NCIC finding that resulted in the recent SEVIS record termination,” said Assistant U.S. Attorney Joseph Carilli, referring to the National Crime Information Center, which holds records of students’ misdemeanor charges and dismissed cases that had been used as justification for their loss of legal status.

Crucially, under the current F-1 visa policies, students can only be removed for committing violent felonies, not the minor and dismissed charges levied against the students the Trump administration has targeted.

Earlier this week, a federal judge ordered that the Trump administration reinstate the legal status of 133 students who had their visas revoked by Tuesday evening, arguing that they had been “abruptly and illegally” terminated by ICE.

The Trump administration has terminated the student visa records of nearly 1,900 international students at more than 280 colleges and universities, as part of its crackdown on immigration and pro-Palestinian speech. The terminations have summoned more than 100 lawsuits, with judges in more than 50 cases across 23 states issuing orders to undo the government’s actions.

Donald Trump doesn’t know, or at least isn’t revealing, how much he’s paying Savaldoran President Nayib Bukele to detain immigrants deported from the United States without due process.

After reaffirming he hopes to soon deport American citizens to El Salvador in Time’s “100 Days” interview released Friday, Trump was asked how much money El Salvador is getting to hold more than 200 Venezuelan immigrants unlawfully deported from the U.S.

“I don’t know,” Trump responded. “I could get you the information, but we’re paying less than we would normally.” 

“Did you personally approve those payments?” the interviewer asked Trump.

“No I didn’t,” he replied. 

It’s either a concerning admission or a damning lie from the president, who seemingly knows very little about an international deportation deal that’s been heavily scrutinized across the globe and resulted in multiple court orders, which Trump has ignored. 

The White House previously disclosed that it’s paying Bukele $6 million to hold deportees in the megaprison CECOT, which can hold up to 40,000 inmates and is notorious for human rights abuses. Last week, Democratic Senator Christopher Van Hollen visited the country and reported that he believes the deal is closer to $15 million.

Van Hollen had made the trip to see Kilmar Abrego Garcia, a man who was unlawfully deported to El Salvador and detained in CECOT due to an admitted administrative error from the Trump administration. His deportation prompted vigorous pushback from a handful of Democrats who are fighting for his return. Abrego Garcia is now being held at a lower-security prison, but Trump maintains that the father of three—whom he baselessly claims is part of MS-13—will remain in El Salvador despite a ruling from the Supreme Court ordering the Trump administration to “facilitate” his return.  

Trump played dumb yet again when asked by Time about Abrego Garcia’s release. “I leave that to my lawyers. I give them no instructions,” he said of the Supreme Court’s directions. 

“Have you asked President Bukele to return him?” the interviewer asked.

“I haven’t, uh, he said he wouldn’t,” Trump responded, before delving into the White House’s go-to lie about immigrant men with tattoos. “He wasn’t a saint. He was MS-13,” Trump said, despite there being no evidence connecting Abrego Garcia to MS-13.  

The interviewer asked Trump if he thought Abrego Garcia deserved a court hearing regardless.

“That’s not my determination,” the president said—a pathetic response, given he’s done literally whatever he wants in his first 100 days in office.

Congress’s mouthiest liar will be spending the next seven years in prison.

A federal judge sentenced former Representative George Santos to 87 months in the clink on Friday.

The reputed hustler—who was caught fabricating his entire résumé and lying about his relation to Holocaust survivors, his connection to the 2016 Orlando nightclub shooting, and the kidnapping of his niece, among many other things—pleaded guilty last year to wire fraud and aggravated identity theft, as well as credit card fraud and illegally receiving unemployment benefits.

“I betrayed the confidence entrusted to me by constituents, donors, colleagues, and this court,” Santos told the court as his sentence was delivered.

Prosecutors in Santos’s trial derided him as a “pathological liar and fraudster.” U.S. District Judge Joanna Seybert described him as “an arrogant fraudster” guilty of “flagrant thievery.”

Santos is due in prison by July 25. He was also ordered to immediately repay more than $373,000 in restitution, and must serve two years supervised release after his prison sentence ends.

But in a bizarre turn of events, Santos appears more scared of what awaits him inside prison than the wrath of his enemies on the outside. Prior to being sentenced, Santos told One America News that he intended to spend the entirety of his sentence in solitary confinement because he “feared” for his safety.

In 2023, Santos became only the sixth representative in U.S. history to be expelled from the lower chamber after “overwhelming evidence” emerged out of a House Ethics Committee report that Santos had broken the law by stealing peoples’ identities, racking up tens of thousands of dollars in unauthorized charges on his donors’ credit cards, and lying to the FEC and, by extension, the public about himself and his campaign.

Months later, Santos tried to recoup another congressional seat in the Empire State by primarying Representative Nick LaLota, but withdrew his bid after FEC filings showed that he had raised $0 within the first fundraising quarter.

It’s unclear if the MAGA acolyte will receive any kind of pardon from Donald Trump, who has repeatedly used his presidential powers to shore up alliances. For his own part, the fabulist has claimed he would not request a pardon from the president, telling The New York Times earlier this week that he intended to take “accountability and responsibility.”

But even as he faces years in lock-up, Santos’s former friends warn against taking the conman’s statements at face value.

“I wouldn’t trust a word out of his mouth,” Peter Hamilton, a decade-old friend of Santos, told the Times. Prior to Santos’s sentencing, Hamilton told the news daily that even a seven-year sentence would be “too little.”

Prosecutors recommended the 87-month sentence for Santos in large part due to his apparent lack of remorse. In their sentencing memo, they wrote that “Santos’s unrestrained greed and voracious appetite for fame enabled him to exploit the very system by which we select our representatives.” In further legal filings, prosecutors pointed to the language employed in Santos’s social media posts—in which the Republican referred to himself as a political “scapegoat”—as evidence that he remained “unrepentant.”

This story has been updated.

Donald Trump has made the outrageous claim that he’s struck a whopping 200 trade deals with foreign leaders during his 90-day pause on his “reciprocal tariff” policy. But when pressed, the president refused to say with which countries any of the deals have been made.

In a sweeping interview with Time magazine about his first 100 days in office, Trump was asked whether Peter Navarro’s prediction that he would make 90 trade deals in 90 days was still possible, 13 days into his tariff pause, with zero trade deals announced. The president said he’d already surpassed it.

“I’ve made 200 deals,” Trump claimed.

When directly asked who the deals were with, Trump refused to answer the question and set off on a lengthy rant comparing the United States to a department store.

“Because the deal is a deal that I choose,” Trump said. “View it differently: We are a department store, and we set the price. I meet with the companies, and then I set a fair price, what I consider to be a fair price, and they can pay it, or they don’t have to pay it. They don’t have to do business with the United States, but I set a tariff on countries.”

Trump seems to have settled on a metaphor he likes to understand his high-risk trade policy, and mentioned department stores four times throughout his Time interview. He also made similar remarks to reporters in the Oval Office Thursday. One might suspect it has something to do with search engine optimization because historically when one Googles “Trump department store,” a very different subject comes up.

In reality, the U.S. is quite unlike a department store—if it was, the country wouldn’t have the hundred-billion-dollar trade deficit it does now. Americans want stuff from other countries way more than other countries want stuff from the U.S.

Trump said he would announce the supposed 200 trade deals in the “next three to four weeks,” but he seemed confused about whether the deals were actually done.

“And we’re finished, by the way,” Trump said.

“You’re finished?” Time asked.

“We’ll be finished,” Trump clarified.

“Oh, you will be finished in three to four weeks,” Time said.

“I’ll be finished. Now, some countries may come back and ask for an adjustment, and I’ll consider that, but I’ll basically be, with great knowledge, setting—ready? We’re a department store, a giant department store, the biggest department store in history. Everybody wants to come in and take from us,” Trump said, launching into another lengthy response that didn’t answer the question and again betrayed a fundamental misunderstanding of U.S. trade policy.

Trump’s unwillingness to share details about the deals may prolong economic uncertainty that has rattled the U.S. economy and global trade for at least another month, if not longer.

Trump also claimed that China’s President Xi had called him but wouldn’t say when or what they’d discussed. “He’s called. And I don’t think that’s a sign of weakness on his behalf,” Trump said.

The U.S. president launched a trade war with China after escalating tariffs to a whopping 145 percent earlier this month. China in turn raised tariffs on American goods to 125 percent.

When asked what Xi had said, Trump again refused to answer. “If people want to—well, we all want to make deals. But I am this giant store. It’s a giant, beautiful store, and everybody wants to go shopping there. And on behalf of the American people, I own the store, and I set prices, and I’ll say, if you want to shop here, this is what you have to pay.”

The only legal representation available to MyPillow CEO and ardent election-denier Mike Lindell is, apparently, completely fake.

Attorneys for the longtime Donald Trump ally are facing possible discipline for filing an AI-generated brief with fabricated legal citations in order to defend their client.

After facing accusations from a federal judge, Lindell and his legal team confessed to turning in a brief with “nearly 30 defective citations.” One of Lindell’s attorneys, Christopher Kachouroff, claimed that he “personally outlined and wrote a draft of a brief before utilizing generative artificial intelligence,” according to a legal filing. That final draft, however, pointed to legal cases that never happened.

U.S. District Court Judge Nina Wang has given Kachouroff and Lindell’s other attorney, Jennifer DeMaster, until May 5 to prove why they should not face disciplinary proceedings and lose their legal licenses.

It is, shockingly, not the first time that Kachouroff has been caught with his pants down. Last year, the attorney was literally caught without any pants during a break in a Zoom court hearing, in which he was representing another election denier.

Lindell is accused of undermining U.S. democracy and leveraging his connection to Trump to boost his poly-foam pillow sales. At one point, the MAGA businessman’s company was generating as much as $300 million in annual revenue, according to court filings. But by mid-April, Lindell claimed that he still owed $70 million in debt and that his income had plummeted to $1,000 a week.

Last week, Lindell told a federal judge that he couldn’t afford to pay $50,000 in sanctions in one of the long-standing election fraud cases against him and that he was financially “in ruins” over the lawsuits as nobody will lend to him anymore.

“Not one dime,” Lindell said.

MyPillow has been struggling since Lindell aggressively saddled himself up to flip Trump’s 2020 election loss. According to Lindell, his infomercial-heavy product lost $100 million in revenue after it was dropped by shopping networks and retailers, had its credit limit downsized by American Express, and had to auction off thousands of pieces of equipment. Last February, the company also lost a place to lay its head, facing eviction from its warehouses after Lindell failed to pay rent at the company’s Minnesota facilities.

The former millionaire spent months using every platform at his disposal to seed conspiracy theories following the 2020 presidential election, including against Dominion Voting Systems and Smartmatic, claiming the electronic voting companies were complicit in a scheme to keep Trump from retaking the White House. That, however, cost Lindell $5 million and made him a major target in a $1.3 billion defamation suit brought by Dominion, in which Lindell is being sued not just for spreading the lies but also for attempting to profit off them.

FBI Director Kash Patel said Friday the agency has arrested a Wisconsin judge for “obstructing an immigration operation.”

Milwaukee Judge Hannah Dugan was arrested on charges of obstruction after she “intentionally misdirected federal agents away” from an immigrant man, Eduardo Flores Ruiz, to prevent his arrest, Patel wrote in a post on X Friday, which he initially deleted before reposting again two hours later.

Patel said FBI agents “chased down the man on foot,” and he is now in custody.

A spokesperson for the U.S. Marshals Service in Washington, D.C., confirmed Dugan’s arrest Friday morning, as did several Milwaukee judges, The Milwaukee Journal Sentinel reported Friday. 

On Tuesday, the Journal Sentinel reported that the FBI was investigating Dugan over whether she tried to help an undocumented immigrant in her courtroom evade arrest. Federal agents reportedly came to the Milwaukee County Courthouse on April 18 with an arrest warrant. 

Their visit occurred the same day that Flores Ruiz, the man Patel accused Dugan of assisting, appeared in her courtroom for a pretrial conference related to three counts of misdemeanor battery, the Journal Sentinel reported.

“When they went to the chief judge’s office, Dugan directed the defendant and his attorney to a side door in the courtroom, directed them down a private hallway and into the public area on the 6th floor,” the report reads.  

The 30-year-old man originally from Mexico is now being detained by ICE at Dodge Detention Facility in Juneau, according to the federal detainee database. His arrest marks at least the third time in recent months that ICE agents have appeared at the courthouse with arrest warrants, according to the Journal Sentinel.

Dugan’s arrest comes as Trump continues his widespread attack on immigration judges, eight of whom have been fired or put on leave in the last week across California, Massachusetts, and Louisiana.

This story has been updated.

Donald Trump has made a new promise to end the Ukraine war by Wednesday.

Trump repeatedly pledged on the campaign trail he’d end the war in Ukraine by the first day he returned to power. But as he fast approaches his 100th day in office, his inability to find a solution has become an increasingly obvious flaw of his presidency.

After a surprise attack on Kyiv killed at least 12 Ukrainians amid collapsing peace deal negotiations late Wednesday, the president reportedly told aides that he wants to resolve the conflict before his 100th day arrives next week, according to CNN.

Rising frustration over the ongoing conflict—and Russian President Vladimir Putin’s and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy’s deep hatred for one another—has flustered Trump.

On Thursday, the president had resorted to begging Putin to stop the violence. At a White House press conference later that day, Trump claimed that Russia had offered major concessions in a possible peace deal. Those concessions, however, amounted to “stopping taking” the entirety of Ukraine. Senior officials in the Trump administration—including the president himself—have also verbally recognized Crimea as a part of Russia, a remarkable reversal of long-standing U.S. policy that made Kremlin propagandists on state-sponsored television laugh at the downfall of American power.

Trump has since tried to backtrack his initial promises over the war. In a 100-day retrospective with Time magazine, Trump claimed that his pledge to end the war “on day one” was little more than a joke.

“Obviously, people know that when I said that, it was said in jest, but it was also said that it will be ended,” Trump told Time.

But when pressed on when the war would finally end, Trump said, “I don’t think it’s long.”

“I mean, look, I got here three months ago,” he continued, again deflecting blame for the conflict onto former President Joe Biden.

“It’s Biden’s war. It’s not my war. I have nothing to do with it. I would have never had this war. This war would have never happened,” Trump said. “Putin would have never done it. This war would have never happened. [October] 6 would have never happened. [October] 7 would have never happened. Would have never happened. Ever. You then say, what’s taking so long? Do you hear this, Steve [Cheung]? The war has been raging for three years. I just got here, and you say, what’s taken so long?”