Pete Hegseth Calls Alarming Meeting With Hundreds of Military Leaders

Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth has urgently called on hundreds of U.S. military officials around the globe for a spontaneous meeting at a Marine Corps base in Virginia next week, though the reason for the gathering remains top secret.

The unusual directive was received by top military commanders stationed around the world, ordering them to meet in Quantico on Tuesday, reported The Washington Post. There are approximately 800 U.S. generals and admirals in total. Hegseth’s order applies to “all senior officers with the rank of brigadier general or above, or their Navy equivalent, serving in command positions and their top enlisted advisers,” insiders told the Post. It does not apply to military officers who hold staff positions.

In a statement Thursday, Pentagon spokesman Sean Parnell told the Post that Hegseth “will be addressing his senior military leaders early next week,” but did not clarify further.

The message shocked members of the U.S. military, who could not recall another instance in which a defense secretary summoned so many commanders for a sudden in-person meeting—especially without a clear rationale. Some warned that having so many integral military leaders in one place could pose a national security risk.

“People are very concerned. They have no idea what it means,” one source told the Post.

Another military source expressed frustration that commanders stationed overseas would also be required to attend: It’s “not how this is done,” they said. “You don’t call [general and flag officers] leading their people and the global force into an auditorium outside D.C. and not tell them why/what the topic or agenda is.”

“Are we taking every general and flag officer out of the Pacific right now?” a third U.S. official told the Post. “All of it is weird.”

Hegseth’s directive comes months after he announced a massive overhaul of America’s defense systems, promising to massively slash staffing. That includes firing about 100 generals and admirals, instituting a “minimum” 20 percent reduction in the number of four-star officers across the military and the National Guard, and a 10 percent reduction to the number of generals and admirals.

President Trump’s upcoming ballroom will be bigger than the White House.

Recent renderings obtained by CBS News show that the ballroom—which Trump has been obsessing over for some time now—shows a gaudy, gold-tinged, 90,000-square foot building that looks like it came straight from the Gilded Age. The White House is only 50,000 square feet.

“For 150 years, Presidents, Administrations, and White House Staff have longed for a large event space on the White House complex that can hold substantially more guests than currently allowed,” the White House’s July announcement read. “President Donald J. Trump has expressed his commitment to solving this problem on behalf of future Administrations and the American people.”

The construction project, which began earlier this month, is estimated to cost $200 million, and at this point has been funded by Google, tobacco company R.J. Reynolds, Booz Allen Hamilton, Palantir, and Lockheed Martin.

“They’ve wanted a ballroom at the White House for more than 150 years, but there’s never been a president that’s good at ballrooms,” Trump said in July.

In September, when asked about conservative activist Charlie Kirk’s assassination, Trump immediately pivoted to the ballroom.

“And by the way, right there you see all the trucks; they just started construction of the new ballroom for the White House,” he said. “Which is something they’ve been trying to get as you know for about 150 years, and it’s gonna be a beauty, it’ll be an absolutely magnificent structure.”

As many have pointed out, this kind of project is what Trump actually cares about. He’s more concerned with projecting opulence and pomp than he is about governing. The White House is traditionally considered “the people’s house.” Now, there will be a massive ballroom next to it that “the people” will likely never step foot in, unless they have a couple hundred million dollars to throw at it. Above all, this ballroom shows that Trump really wants the White House to be just another Mar-a-Lago.

New Jersey’s only public television station, NJ PBS, is anticipated to shutter in just over nine months thanks to President Trump’s budget cuts.

As first reported by The New Jersey Globe this week, WNET, the company that has operated the station for 14 years since former Republican Governor Chris Christie shut down the state-run New Jersey Network, did not reach an agreement to extend its contract with the state beyond June 30, 2026.

The network relied on about $1.5 million in federal funding from the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, but the Republican-controlled Congress in July passed the Trump administration plan to cut all federal support for PBS and its member stations

Earlier this year, state funding was also cut, from $1 million to $250,000, under a spending plan signed by Democratic Governor Phil Murphy.

“The recent cuts by the federal government and New Jersey state government have been very significant,” NJ PBS said in a statement.

“I believe that the State’s intransigence or maybe even apathy, coupled with federal funding cuts and new media challenges, likely influenced WNET’s decision” not to renew, suggested NJ PBS Chairman Scott Kobler in an op-ed.

New Jersey’s Democratic senators, Cory Booker and Andy Kim, lamented the move, with Booker calling it “a loss for all of us who live here,” and Kim excoriating Congressional Republicans for voting “to take money from Elmo and Daniel Tiger and give to billionaires.”

“NJ PBS doesn’t just have kids’ shows and trusted, local news programming, but also critical emergency notification systems that kept residents safe during disasters,” noted Democratic gubernatorial nominee Mikie Sherrill, who promised to “find new ways to fund public media” if elected in November.

“NJ PBS shutting down is more than a station dying,” said Jersey City Mayor Steven Fulop, “It’s a warning about who holds power when oversight fades. Without free public media, we lose the lens that keeps those in power honest.”

State Senators John Burzichelli and Andrew Zwicker called for “a top-to-bottom analysis of public television in New Jersey to determine what can and should be done to maintain the type of services the network has provided.”

Months after Elon Musk departed his position at the Department of Government Efficiency, Social Security is suffering extensive damage from the fledgling office’s onslaught of cuts.

Earlier this year, DOGE slashed the Social Security Administration’s workforce by 12 percent, leaving an already understaffed agency in a state of upheaval. The cuts have hit local field offices the hardest, reported The New York Times Wednesday.

Local branches are responsible for serving the 74 million Americans on Social Security, many of whom come to field offices for identity verification when applying for benefits and other in-person assistance. But due to cuts, people who need Social Security cards have had to wait multiple weeks to get an appointment.

And in every office that can’t meet demand, there are frontline workers struggling to manage more responsibilities with fewer resources.

“In my 24 years, I have never seen it so bad to the point that a lot of us are medicated,” said one Social Security technical expert in the Midwest who spoke anonymously to the Times. “We joke about it, because what else can you do?”

In addition to general staff cuts, the agency has shuffled local workers to the national hotline, leaving even fewer employees available for face-to-face communication. And for people seeking help over the phone, the added representatives aren’t making enough of a dent: Many callers still spend hours on hold.

Rebekah Walker, a 41-year-old woman who’s lived with heart abnormalities since childhood, has been fighting to get a payment issue resolved with the agency for three months. She’s had to borrow money for rent and postpone medical help.

“It’s as if I am not a real human being,” Walker told the Times. “I have three children. I’m a single mom.”

Jeffrey Epstein’s self-described “pal” Donald Trump apparently can’t grasp why the pedophile’s crimes are so upsetting for the American public.

Trump complained to aides regarding the intense public scrutiny over his failure to produce Epstein’s so-called client list, claiming that “Palm Beach in the 90s was a different time,” The Wall Street Journal reported late Wednesday.

After longtime allies whipped up a furor over the dismal Epstein files rollout on the second day of a Turning Point USA Conference in Tampa, Trump wanted to know: “Why is everyone so fixated on the issue?” the Journal said he asked influential allies. “What would make it die down?”

Trump claimed he cut off contact with Epstein after the financier was convicted for soliciting underage prostitutes, referring to Epstein as a “creep.” But the pair of Manhattan socialites have shared a long and cozy history together.

Prior to his death, Epstein described himself as one of Trump’s “closest friends.” The duo were named and photographed together on several occassions—including at Trump’s second wedding. The socialites were caught shepherding underaged girls into casinos together, and Trump reportedly flew on Epstein’s jets between Palm Beach and New York at least seven times. Trump penned a salacious letter to Epstein for the sex trafficker’s 50th birthday, and was quoted in a 2002 New York Magazine profile as saying that he had, at that point, known Epstein for 15 years, referring to him as a “terrific guy.”

Much to Trump’s chagrin, the botched rollout of the Epstein files has continued to plague his administration. Instead of simply disclosing the contents of the files, the Trump administration has expended vast resources to reportedly strip the president’s name from the documents. The White House also tapped Epstein’s longtime associate Ghislaine Maxwell to produce a new list of the deceased financier’s associates, which undoubtedly already exists in the Epstein files. The plot granted Maxwell improved living conditions, moving her to a minimum security prison camp in Texas, and gave her time on the national stage to ask Trump for a pardon.

The Epstein story has remained an anomaly in Trump’s political career. For the better part of a decade, the MAGA leader became adjusted to an undyingly loyal base that rarely skews from or challenges his political vision. But Trump’s proximity to Epstein and his heinous crimes has been an outlier, prompting doubts that have undercut Trump’s influence with large swaths of his followers.

Ty Cobb, a former Trump White House attorney, told the Journal that the federal fiasco surrounding the Epstein scandal was “the worst managed PR event in history.” Its handling was unorganized and chaotic, with the Justice Department and the FBI regularly pointing fingers at one another.

At one point, Attorney General Pam Bondi complained that FBI leadership was “trying to destroy her,” according to the Journal.

President Donald Trump’s administration has upped the stakes of a potential government shutdown by threatening mass firings in federal agencies if the shutdown were to occur.

Whereas usually federal workers would be furloughed in the event of a shutdown and re-hired once Congress reopens the government, this order from the White House budget office—first reported Wednesday night by Politico—instructs agencies to permanently eliminate jobs that aren’t consistent with the president’s priorities if the government shuts down.

The Trump administration decision to use the threat of firings as leverage ups the ante in negotiations with congressional Democrats over government funding.

Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer called the move an “attempt at intimidation” but didn’t seem swayed by the threat. He said earlier this month when talking about shutdown negotiations that the Trump administration’s attacks on federal agencies “will get worse with or without [a shutdown], because Trump is lawless.”

Schumer also believes that the firings likely aren’t as permanent as they seem—that they’ll likely be overturned in court, or that the administration will just end up hiring workers back, as they’re aiming to do with employees fired during DOGE cuts.

“Donald Trump has been firing federal workers since day one—not to govern, but to scare. This is nothing new and has nothing to do with funding the government,” Schumer said in a statement.

President Trump was so frustrated by the growing scrutiny around his ties to deceased sexual predator Jeffrey Epstein that he personally tried to kill The Wall Street Journal’s Epstein birthday book story.

The Journal has reported that when Trump first heard about its plans to cover his strange, sultry 50th birthday letter to Epstein, he told aides that it didn’t exist, never happened, and called News Corp chair emeritus Rupert Murdoch personally from Air Force One to get the story pulled. After the story was published anyway, he denied that the letter existed and sued Dow Jones, the Journal’s publisher. (The letter was later released.)

Trump’s attempt to kill that story—and the Epstein saga in general—has been a massive failure, rife with miscommunication and missteps that shocked even Trump staffers, the Journal revealed. When Attorney General Pam Bondi told America that she had the Epstein list sitting on her desk, the White House staff had no idea what she was talking about. And the FBI was caught completely off guard when she brought that gaggle of right-wing grifters into the White House and gave them a photo shoot with those “Epstein Files: Phase 1” binders.

The administration also notably tried to make the Epstein issue go away by having the FBI declare in July that “no further disclosure would be appropriate or warranted” on the Epstein case. That, of course, had the opposite effect.

“It was like a bomb went off after that statement went out,” a White House official told the Journal.

Now the Trump administration insists that it’s been fully transparent and done everything it could do to make the Epstein files public. That is not at all the case, as Representative Thomas Massie’s discharge petition argues.

“I told Director Kash Patel that the FBI has names of 20 men to whom Jeffrey Epstein trafficked women and girls. This basic fact seemed to surprise him. Why?” Massie said last Saturday. “Is the FBI withholding those names to protect the president’s rich and powerful friends? Release the Epstein files.”

This story won’t be going away anytime soon, no matter who Trump calls. From Massie to Epstein’s victims, to the base’s obsession, there is too much momentum to simply bottle it up and forget about it. And most of this is self-inflicted from the administration.

“This may be the worst managed PR event in history,” said former Trump legal team member Ty Cobb. “You’ve got multiple mouthpieces, and they’re all covering their own ass now.”

Trump’s newly appointed U.S. attorney for the Eastern District of Virginia has been made well aware that her case against former FBI Director James Comey is a dud. But as the president applies pressure to prosecute his political rivals, she’ll reportedly be moving forward with it nonetheless.

The new interim attorney, Lindsey Halligan, has no prior prosecutorial experience. A former Trump personal attorney and longtime Trump loyalist, her most recent claim to fame was serving as the president’s lead Smithsonian censor, as she sought to expose and correct an “overemphasis on slavery” in the museums.

Now she’s been appointed to her new post with the expectation that she will do what her predecessor, Erik Siebert, failed to: aggressively indict the president’s foes, namely, New York Attorney General Letitia James and Comey—evidence be damned.

But while Halligan reportedly plans to ask a grand jury to indict Comey, she faces a glaring issue: The case is so flimsy that, ABC News reports, prosecutors this week, citing insufficient evidence, advised Halligan in a memo to decline to move forward with perjury and obstruction charges against him.

“A monthslong investigation into Comey by DOJ prosecutors failed to establish probable cause of a crime,” ABC News’s sources said, “meaning that not only would they be unable to secure a conviction of Comey by proving the claims beyond a reasonable doubt, but that they couldn’t reach a significantly lower standard to secure an indictment.”

Halligan has had her own qualms about the case, according to ABC News, as has Attorney General Pam Bondi, per The Wall Street Journal.

But Trump has been applying pressure, even publicly, for the cases against his enemies to proceed. The deadline to indict Comey is this Tuesday, when the five-year statute of limitations expires for accusations that he lied to Congress during his 2020 testimony regarding Russian interference in the 2016 election. In a Saturday Truth Social post addressed to Bondi—which praised Halligan—the president called for urgent action on prosecuting the weak cases against Comey, James, and Senator Adam Schiff, lest the administration kill its “reputation and credibility.”

One day after Alex Jones publicly unveiled the Justice Department’s intent to investigate retired FBI Special Agent William Aldenberg, the lawsuit is no more.

Jones presented the inquiry Tuesday as evidence that Trump’s DOJ was willing to go to bat for him. In a letter dated September 15, U.S. Pardon Attorney Ed Martin accused Aldenberg—one of the first responders to the 2012 shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary School—of personally benefiting from the defamation case brought against the InfoWars host by the victims’ families. But by Wednesday, Martin had changed his tune.

“At this time, I write to inform you that there is no investigation of you or your client,” Martin wrote in his new letter to attorney Chris Mattei, who represented Aldenberg as well as the families of Sandy Hook victims, and who was the recipient of Martin’s original letter. “Because of this, I hereby withdraw my request for information from you or your former client.”

The Sandy Hook trial effectively bankrupted Jones, with the conspiracist ordered to cough up $1.3 billion to the victims of the tragedy he branded as a “hoax.” As part of that decision, the court ordered Jones to pay Aldenberg $90 million.

In his original letter, Martin had pressed Mattei’s office for information relating to Aldenberg’s former employment at the FBI, the framing of his testimony in Jones’s defamation case, and whether Aldenberg had a relationship with communications firm Berlin Rosen for purposes related to “newsjacking,” which the letter did not define.

“Less than 18 hours after calling out Alex Jones and Ed Martin for their corrupt use of the Department of Justice to harass Sandy Hook families and the heroic FBI agent who ran into that school to save any children he could, I am happy to learn that this so-called inquiry has now been withdrawn, if it ever existed at all,” Mattei told The New Republic in a statement.

“Let this be a reminder: This is not a moment to cower in silence, but to stand up to bullying, lawless misconduct,” Mattei said. “This isn’t over.”

Mattei had previously scorned Martin’s participation in Jones’s ongoing harassment campaign against Aldenberg as “corrupt complicity.”

Jones made his name and living by casting doubt on the reality of the Sandy Hook shooting, which killed 26 people. His supporters, fueled by Jones’s rhetoric, harassed and intimidated the family members of the shooting victims, including an instance in which they urinated on and desecrated 7-year-old Daniel Braden’s grave, according to court testimony.

Jones still has yet to pay the $1.3 billion he owes the victims’ families.

Kennedy Center interim president Rick Grenell sent in a group of gay conservatives to heckle and harass a Black performer during her concert because she was a “liberal.”

Prominent fingerstyle guitarist Yasmin Williams performed at the Kennedy Center on September 18 at a concert she had committed to before the Trump administration’s culture war on the iconic theater.

Washingtonian reported that Kennedy Center workers learned that 50 seats at Williams’s show had been saved for the Log Cabin Republicans, a nonprofit group that seeks to simultaneously “support LGBT issues and conservative values.” The center increased security in the venue as about 20 men in MAGA hats took their seats.

“They said they were concerned for my safety,” Williams told Washingtonian. “There were about 20 guys in suits, and some of them were wearing MAGA hats.”

In their newsletter, the “Bi-Weekly,” Log Cabin Republicans president Andrew Manik told his group that Williams was a “vocal opponent of President Trump,” and ordered them to “make sure the audience is filled with Patriots.” The email also said that some attendees would get tickets for free drinks.

The concert seats were reserved for them by Grenell, multiple Kennedy Center employees said, and one of his staffers directed the Log Cabin Republicans to them when they arrived.

Nevertheless, Williams took the stage.

“I’ve been grappling with whether I should do this show for a while, and I’m here!” she said as she began to strum her guitar. “I decided to do this show to support the people … who made the Kennedy Center the prestigious place that it was. Sadly, I have to say ‘was,’ because of the hostile takeover from the Trump administration. It seems to have tarnished the reputation of this place.”

“I don’t support the new board at all,” she continued. “Especially you, Rick Grenell, I am not a fan of yours at all.”

This was met with claps and a smattering of boos, and one attendee even yelled at Williams to give a shout-out to the recently deceased Charlie Kirk. Eventually, the group moved elsewhere and Williams continued her show.

This was the culmination of months of antagonism from Grenell. In April, Williams emailed the interim president asking him if Trump’s overhaul of the center would lead to any logistical changes. She described what he sent back as “absolutely insane.”

He told her that any artist who canceled a show out of protest “did so because they couldn’t be in the presence of Republicans,” asking Williams, “Who is the intolerant one?”

“Let me remind, YOU reached out to me unsolicited and accused me of being an intolerant. Don’t be a victim now. You asked,” he concluded.

While Grenell’s gambit with the Log Cabin Republicans is absolutely nefarious, the state suppression of art is incredibly commonplace in this administration, as its culture crackdown has reached the Smithsonian and national parks.

Despite video proof of the disruption, the Kennedy Center disputes the claims. “This is an absolutely ridiculous claim. There was no coordinated effort by the Kennedy Center. Grenell had no involvement. We did not even know they were coming,” Kennedy Center spokesperson Roma Daravi told The Washington Post. “They did not heckle and frankly it is defamation of character for her to say that—she however bashed Grenell and the Center from the Kennedy Center stage. Republicans are patrons too and they are welcome at the Kennedy Center just like anyone else.”