“I Don’t Know”: Mike Johnson Ducks Key Question About Shutdown Layoffs

House Speaker Mike Johnson claimed Monday he had no idea that President Doanld Trump’s sweeping layoffs of federal workers had gutted the department overseeing special education. 

During a press conference, Johnson was asked if he was “comfortable” with cuts that had reportedly decimated special education services at the Department of Education. 

“I haven’t seen the specifics of that and I don’t know,” Johnson said. 

“I do know that each of the Cabinet secretaries were asked to assist OMB to determine what the most essential programs are, and what the priorities are for the policies and all of that. And I’ve been so busy on all this I’ve not had a chance to dig into the details of each division, and how it’s happened,” he said. 

But those so-called “details” Johnson overlooked are quickly coming to light—and they’re a huge problem.

Rachel Gittleman, the president of the American Federation of Government Employees released a statement Monday saying: “We believe that all remaining offices in Office of Special Education + Rehabilitative Services (OSERS), incl. the Office of Special Education Programs (OSEP) + the Rehabilitation Services Administration (RSA), have been eliminated.”

The Education Department laid off practically every employee responsible for administering funding through the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act, which authorizes grants to states, schools, and nonprofit organizations, one agency staffer told USA Today. The Biden administration had requested $14.4 billion for these grants for FY2025, including $545 million for the Grants for Infants and Families program.

Secretary Linda McMahon, who presumably directed the cuts, has previously suggested that the office would be better positioned in the Department of Health and Human Services, where Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. recently said he hopes to manufacture proof of his outlandish claims about the causes of autism. 

It’s still unclear how many positions were terminated within the special education office. The Education Department fired 466 employees as part of Trump’s broader reduction in force of some 4,200 jobs amid the ongoing government shutdown. 

Johnson seemed content Monday to defend Trump’s massive cuts, purportedly without even knowing what they are. He claimed that federal agencies were “in a triage situation” as a result of the government shutdown and blamed Democrats for the massive layoffs executed by the executive branch. 

But in past government shutdowns, including in the previous Trump administration, federal workers were furloughed, not laid off en masse. It seems clear that Trump is simply using the shutdown as an excuse to carry out a long-planned reduction in force and obliterate essential programs he doesn’t like.  

Throw out the history books—even settled modern American history is up for MAGA revisionism.

Despite the fact that he’s since won the 2024 presidential election and, presumably, has bigger fish to fry (see any rotating issue: the government shutdown, the rise in political violence, the stumbling economy, or escalating domestic and international tensions), Donald Trump once again took to social media Sunday to gripe about his impeachments. But this time, he opted to rebrand a little more history than usual by suggesting that Watergate was another supposed “hoax.”

“The Ukraine Impeachment (of me!) Scam was a far bigger Illegal Hoax than Watergate,” Trump posted on Truth Social. “I sincerely hope the necessary authorities, including CONGRESS, are looking into this! Adam ‘Schiffty’ Schiff was sooo dishonest and corrupt.

“So many laws, and protocols, were violated, and just plain broken!!!” he wrote.

Rewriting the national recollection of Watergate will take more than one social media post. Nearly 50 years later, the involvement of President Richard Nixon’s aides in the break-in at the Democratic National Committee headquarters still lives on as one of the most seismic scandals to shake the office of the president—so much so that simply adding “gate” to the end of an event can suggest another political calamity.

Watergate, and Nixon’s forced resignation in the face of certain impeachment, resulted in the end of his political career. But in the last several months, Trump has taken some concrete steps to rewrite his own impeachment history.

Trump is the only U.S. president to be impeached twice, in 2019 and 2021. In August, the Smithsonian removed Trump from its exhibit on impeachments under direct pressure from the White House, in the wake of an art director’s ousting. That left the exhibit focusing on Presidents Nixon, Andrew Johnson, and Bill Clinton, effectively returning the exhibit to the way it looked in 2008. The “American Presidency” wing’s revised signage explained that “only three presidents have seriously faced removal” over the course of American history. The change was the result of a White House–initiated content review.

The Smithsonian has since re-added Trump to the impeachment exhibit, but with some changes to how the proceedings against him are described, most notably regarding his actions during the January 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol.

Federal agents terrorized Chicago citizens over the weekend, as part of “Operation Midway Blitz,” President Donald Trump’s law enforcement crackdown on a major Democratic city.

On Friday, Border Patrol agents violently arrested Deborah Brockman, a producer for Chicago television station WGN-TV. Two agents held down Brockman while zip-tying her hands, before multiple agents shoved her into an unmarked van. Her arrest seemingly violated a temporary restraining order made the day before barring agents from detaining journalists. 

DHS Assistant Secretary Tricia McLaughlin alleged in a statement that Brockman had thrown objects at the agents’ vehicle and was “placed under arrest for assault on a federal law enforcement officer.” Brockman was later released, and WGN told Newsweek that no charges were brought against her. 

As the vehicle carrying Brockman drove away, it slammed into a seemingly stationary vehicle before continuing on. 

McLaughlin claimed that “several violent agitators” had attempted to block the vehicle from leaving. “In fear of public & law enforcement safety, officers used their service vehicle to strike a suspect’s vehicle and create an opening,” McLaughlin said in a statement, adding that the incident “reflects a growing and dangerous trend of illegal aliens violently resisting arrest and agitators and criminals ramming cars into our law enforcement officers.”

In a video of the incident, multiple bystanders berated the officers, but none appeared to approach them or their vehicle. 

DropSite News’s Ryan Grim said that McLaughlin’s justification was “Orwellian.” 

“To explain why ICE rammed its car into another vehicle, the spokeswoman says it ‘reflects a growing and dangerous trend of … agitators and criminals ramming cars into our law enforcement officers,’” he wrote in a post on X. “Um, the opposite happened. Clearly. So weird.”

On Saturday, at least 15 people were arrested while protesting at an ICE processing center in Broadview, a neighborhood of Chicago. Detainees reportedly face charges ranging from criminal damage to government property to disobeying police orders. 

One of the individuals arrested was Elias Cepeda, an organizer and martial arts instructor who has reportedly been on the lookout for ICE agents in his neighborhood since the beginning of the school year. He and other advocates hoped to warn residents of Pilsen, where many Mexicans reside, about ICE activities so that they could avoid arrest or violence. 

DHS claimed Cepeda, who was armed at the time of arrest, was a “violent rioter” with “suspected ties to antifa and previous social media posts calling ICE Nazis.”

In a viral video posted Saturday by Joshua Reed Eakle, an executive director at Project Liberal Action, four law enforcement vehicles swarmed a car on a suburban Chicago street. An agent pulled the driver from her car as she pleaded with officers that she was only 15 years old. The arresting officer then threw her to the ground and appeared to put his knee on her neck as he restrained her hands behind her back. Block Club Chicago reported the arrest took place in Hoffman Estates.

Meanwhile, roughly 400 protesters gathered in Rogers Park Saturday after a tamale vendor and at least three others were arrested nearby earlier in the week, Block Club Chicago reported.   

And on Sunday, federal agents released tear gas on residents responding to a violent arrest during a protest in Albany Park, the Chicago Sun-Times reported. 

Attorney Samay Gheewala said he was among many residents forcefully pushed to the ground by federal officers, after he’d approached to do “usual lawyer stuff” on behalf of people being arrested. Federal agents reportedly gave no warning before administering tear gas canisters, despite a temporary restraining order issued last week that required officers to issue two warnings before using riot control weapons.

Alderman Rossana Rodriguez-Sanchez and state Senator Graciela Guzmán came running with a group of rapid responders, but by the time they arrived, one man had already been taken.

“This is part of the chaos they like to bring to our communities,” Guzmán said. 

Rodriguez-Sanchez told the Sun-Times that one person “was saved due to the efforts of our communities, but unfortunately, somebody was [still] kidnapped from our neighborhood today.”

Ghislaine Maxwell—currently serving hard time for helping deceased sexual predator Jeffrey Epstein abuse minors—has been taking secret meetings and receiving special treatment at her new Camp Bryan prison in Texas, only further stoking fears that she is working with the Trump administration to receive a pardon. 

The Wall Street Journal reported on Saturday that in August, Maxwell, who is serving time for sex trafficking and conspiracy until at least 2037, had the prison locked down while she met with unnamed visitors in the prison chapel. A fellow inmate reported that Maxwell returned from the meeting smiling, and said that it had gone “really well.” 

Additionally, Maxwell has been treated like more of a celebrity than a convicted sex trafficker and child abuser since she’s been transferred from her more serious facility in Florida to the grassy, minimum-security Camp Bryan. Her fellow inmates include Theranos’s Elizabeth Holmes and Real Housewives of Salt Lake City star Jen Shah. Shah and Holmes are in Camp Bryan for fraud. And while other inmates have taken to harassing Maxwell for being a “chomo” or sex predator, the prison warden essentially rolled out the red carpet for her visitors. 

One inmate told the Journal that the prison notified them that “someone important was coming to do a walk-through” and did a deep clean of the entire facility before Maxwell arrived. The warden even called a “town meeting” warning other inmates not to harm Maxwell. Since then she has been allowed to eat alone in her dormitory, has a security escort for when she wants to work out, and is allowed to shower well after other inmates are supposed to be in their bunks.  

This is all yet another strange wrinkle in a fairly obvious effort from the Trump administration and the GOP to tie up loose ends and absolve the president (who was quite close with Epstein and appears multiple times in his “files”) while simultaneously attempting to satiate their base’s deep desire for the truth about the Epstein files. 

Just last week President Trump indicated that a pardon for Maxwell was still on the table. 

“Her only chance for getting out of prison is a pardon from you. Is that something—”  CNN’s Kaitlan Collins said before Trump interrupted to ask who was being discussed. “Ghislaine Maxwell,” Collins clarified.

“You know, I haven’t heard the name in so long,” Trump said. “I can say this: that I’d have to take a look at it. I’d have to take a look.”

President Trump—a man regarded by some as the most corrupt president in U.S. history and a flagrant abuser of the presidential pardon power—on Monday called for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to be pardoned for corruption charges.

During a speech before Israel’s Knesset, Trump strayed from his prepared remarks to lobby Israeli President Isaac Herzog for such a pardon.

“I have an idea. Mr. President,” Trump said. “Why don’t you give him a pardon? Give him a pardon. By the way, that was not in the speech, as you probably know, but I happen to like this gentleman right over here [Netanyahu], and it just seems to make so much sense.”

He went on to call the Israeli prime minister “one of the greatest wartime presidents,” asking, “Cigars and champagne, who the hell cares about that?”

Netanyahu has been on trial since 2020 for three cases involving bribery, fraud, and breach of trust. In one, he allegedly granted regulatory favors, to the tune of $500 million, to a telecommunications billionaire in exchange for positive news coverage.

In another, he is accused of accepting nearly $300,000 in gifts—including cigars and champagne, as Trump mentioned while underplaying the allegations—from billionaires including film producer Arnon Milchan, in exchange for actions advancing Milchan’s business interests.

The third case involves the prime minister allegedly negotiating a deal with the owner of an Israeli newspaper, under which Netanyahu would receive positive coverage and enact legislation to weaken a competitor publication.

As Trump has during his own legal battles, Netanyahu dismisses the accusations as a political “witch hunt” and “attempted coup” by his liberal enemies in the judicial system and media.

Trump in June called the charges against Netanyahu “politically motivated”—and the trial a “ridiculous Witch Hunt,” “Horror Show,” and “TRAVESTY OF ‘JUSTICE’”—on Truth Social. “Bibi Netanyahu’s trial should be CANCELLED, IMMEDIATELY, or a Pardon given to a Great Hero,” he wrote.

Netanyahu also faces active arrest warrants from the International Criminal Court on allegations of war crimes and crimes against humanity in Gaza, to which the Trump administration responded with sanctions on ICC personnel.