Dick Cheney Dies at 84—Unfortunately Not at The Hague

Former vice president and architect of the war on terror Dick Cheney passed away Monday at the age of 84 from complications of pneumonia and cardiac and vascular disease.

According to a statement from his family, Cheney “was a great and good man who taught his children and grandchildren to love our country, and to live lives of courage, honor, love, kindness, and fly fishing.”

The rest of the country, however, knows him for being one of the most powerful vice presidents in U.S. history, helping to lead the United States after the 9/11 attacks into a myriad of military campaigns, including Iraq and Afghanistan, and having the U.S. commit torture and extrajudicial assassinations across the world.

Cheney was unapologetic about his actions during his tenure as vice president, saying in an interview in 2014, “Torture, to me … is an American citizen on his cellphone making a last call to his four young daughters shortly before he burns to death in the upper levels of the Trade Center in New York on 9/11.”

When pressed about the CIA’s interrogation program from those days, which included waterboarding, prisoners shackled in stress positions, and people of mistaken identity tortured, Cheney said, “I’d do it again in a minute.”

Cheney also expressed no regrets over leading the U.S. into the Iraq War, calling it “the right thing to do” more than a decade later, even after it plunged the U.S. into debt, killed hundreds of thousands of Iraqis at a minimum, and destabilized the country so much that the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria, or ISIS, was later able to gain a foothold.

Later in life, Cheney was critical of the Republican Party, breaking with Donald Trump along with his daughter, former Representative Liz Cheney, and later endorsing Kamala Harris in 2024. But he died without facing any accountability for his earlier actions.

This story has been updated.

Did Kash Patel make up a terrorist plot? The lawyer for one of the accused seems to think so.

The FBI director announced Friday that the Federal Bureau of Investigation had thwarted a potential terror plot in Dearborn, Michigan. Patel said that multiple young men had been arrested in a raid for plotting a “violent attack” on “pumpkin day,” which investigators believed referred to Halloween.  

But Amir Makled, an attorney representing Mohmed Ali, one of the men facing criminal charges in connection to the plot, claimed that after reviewing the case, he believed there had never been a terror plot to begin with, the Associated Press reported Monday.

“If these young men were on forums that they should not have been on or things of that nature, then we’ll have to wait and see,” Makled said. “But I don’t believe that there’s anything illegal about any of the activity they were doing.

“I don’t know where this hysteria and this fearmongering came from,” Makled said. 

“We are confident that, once the facts are reviewed objectively, it will be clear there was never any planned ‘mass-casualty’ event or coordinated terror plot of any kind,” he told CNN Sunday. He said that three men had been arrested, and two were taken in for questioning. 

Hussein Bazzi, an attorney representing another suspect arrested in the raid, told CNN that “pumpkin day” may have referred to “online gamer chat that was misinterpreted.”

Attorney General Pam Bondi released a criminal complaint Monday alleging that two men, Ali and Majed Mahmoud, had planned a “major ISIS-linked terror plot.” The pair face charges of “receiving and transferring, and attempting and conspiring to transfer, firearms and ammunition knowing and having reasonable cause to believe that the firearms and ammunition would be used to commit a Federal crime of terrorism,” according to the complaint. 

Makled pointed out that the firearms were all legally bought and registered. “The reality here involves a small group … with a lawful interest in recreational firearms, not a terrorist cell or organized attack,” he told CNN. 

After the arrests were first made public Friday, MSNBC’s Ken Dilanian reported that something had been off about the timing of the announcement. “There seems to be consternation within the FBI that the director announced these arrests prematurely,” he wrote on X.

The timing of Patel’s seemingly heroic feat was quite convenient, as it landed amid a firestorm of backlash after he reportedly used a government-funded jet to visit his girlfriend.

Neo-Nazi livestreamer Nick Fuentes is tearing the Heritage Foundation apart.

Ryan Neuhaus, the Heritage Foundation president Kevin Roberts’s chief of staff, has walked away from the conservative think tank. Neuhaus’s departure comes during an internal maelstrom sparked by Roberts’s defense of Tucker Carlson and the ex–Fox News host’s decision to interview Fuentes, a known white supremacist and Hitler fan.

“Ryan was not fired. He offered his resignation, which was accepted,” a Heritage spokesperson confirmed to The Hill Monday. “Ryan is a good man, we appreciate his service, and we have no doubt he will serve the movement in another capacity.”

Carlson extended his national platform to Fuentes last week, offering the fringe influencer a chance to swim in the MAGA mainstream. The interview has since come under fire from several corners of the Republican Party, highlighting that the former primetime TV host threw the antisemite a string of softball questions while failing to challenge Fuentes’s radical and violent beliefs.

Neuhaus’s critical error was in resharing a number of social media posts backing his boss’s defense of Carlson, including one that appeared to attack his Heritage Foundation co-workers by arguing that those “virtue signaling” over the Fuentes interview should “resign if so outraged” and that it would be an “addition by subtraction for the institution.”

Roberts released a video on X Thursday in support of Carlson and Fuentes, noting that while he disagreed with Fuentes’s beliefs, he did not believe that “canceling” the Christian nationalist Holocaust-denier was an appropriate reaction to the interview.

A handful of Heritage staffers, including Jason Bedrick, Jay Greene, and John Peluso, have since retweeted criticism of Roberts’s message. Conservatives outside of the institution also condemned Roberts’s perspective, including Texas Senator Ted Cruz, prompting a follow-up statement by Roberts in which he clarified that he did not condone Fuentes’s antisemitic views.

“Our task is to confront and challenge those poisonous ideas at every turn to prevent them from taking America to a very dark place. Join us—not to cancel—but to guide, challenge, and strengthen the conversation, and be confident as I am that our best ideas at the heart of western civilization will prevail,” Roberts wrote in a social media post.

House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries had some tough words for Republicans in a press conference Monday about the government shutdown.

When asked by a reporter about working with someone who has been obstructing the release of the Jeffrey Epstein files, Jeffries said that “the Trump administration and Mike Johnson are running a pedophile protection program.”

“That’s what they’ve been doing. And that’s the reason why they refuse to swear in Representative-elect Adelita Grijalva, for weeks now,” Jeffries added, referring to the congresswoman who won a special election on September 23 to replace her late father, Representative Raúl Grijalva. “She was elected in late September decisively.”

Jeffries said that Grijalva hasn’t been sworn in by House Speaker Johnson because she would be the deciding vote on legislation requiring the Department of Justice to release the Epstein files.

“Week after week after week have gone by, and Representative-elect Adelita Grijalva is unable to serve 800,000 people in the state of Arizona all because of the pedophile protection program being run by Mike Johnson and House Republicans at the direction of their boss, Donald J. Trump,” Jeffries added.

Jeffries has faced criticism, along with other Democratic leaders like Senator Chuck Schumer, for failing to mount an effective opposition to President Trump and the Republican Party, so taking a tougher tack against the GOP makes political sense. During the month-long government shutdown, the polls have consistently shown that Americans are more upset with Trump and Republicans than with Democrats, and Senator Bernie Sanders, among others, is urging the party not to back down.

Johnson has set a record by how long he is taking to swear in Grijalva and is refusing to do so until the government reopens. Meanwhile, Trump is trying his best to dismiss the files’ importance, likely because he’s mentioned in them, and the GOP continues to cover for him.

Donald Trump’s MRI timeline isn’t adding up.

A former White House physician has challenged the president’s retelling of his recent medical scans, arguing that the amount of time Trump spent at Walter Reed National Military Medical Center in early October suggests he could have gotten additional work done than initially stated.

The administration spent much of October dodging questions about Trump’s visit to Walter Reed. The White House said that the president was in “excellent overall health,” while the physician to the president Sean Barbabella recorded in a memo that Trump’s cardiovascular vitality was “approximately 14 years younger than his chronological age.”

The stubborn cover-up wasn’t impervious to Trump’s own mouth, however. Ultimately it was the president who let slip that the appointment was for an MRI scan, a medical tool typically used to assess tumors, joint injuries, or heart conditions.

But former White House physician Jeffrey Kuhlman, who served under former President Barack Obama, noticed a disconnect between the procedures Trump claimed to receive and the four-hour window when he was at Walter Reed.

“Most any procedure scope, I had the capabilities there at the White House. The only thing I couldn’t, that I’d have to [go to] Walter Reed for, is advanced imaging,” Kuhlman told The Hill.

Trump is the oldest person to be elected president. It wouldn’t be unusual for a 79-year-old to require a second checkup, according to Kuhlman, but what is odd is the amount of time it took. Aside from the MRI scan, Kuhlman remarked that routine tests and preventative screenings for Trump shouldn’t have taken more than 15 minutes.

“It’s about an eight-minute helicopter ride from the South Lawn to Walter Reed,” Kuhlman told the publication. “So we know that he at least had four hours available to undergo medical care. There’s a disconnect there.”

There’s no legal requirement for a presidential administration to be upfront or transparent about medical issues affecting the commander in chief, but Trump’s health has been a topic of concern since he was on the campaign trail, when reports circulated that he couldn’t remember the contents of the cognitive exams he claimed to ace. 

Since then, the president has been spotted with odd discolorations on his hand, routinely appears discombobulated and lethargic during critical meetings with world leaders, and had a drooping expression during 9/11 ceremonies in September that onlookers suggested could be a  sign of a stroke.

The Trump administration has agreed to partially fund SNAP benefits for November, in compliance with two federal judges’ orders last week. But it will only provide half of families’ usual monthly payments—and it could take multiple months to be paid out.

Trump officials told a judge Monday that November’s benefits would have to be recalculated, and therefore it would take some states “anywhere from a few weeks to up to several months”  to recalculate the reduced payments. Over 40 million Americans are enrolled in SNAP.

In eleventh-hour decisions, two federal judges ruled on Friday that the Trump administration must use a $5.25 billion emergency fund to pay out some of November’s benefits. Though they encouraged the administration to tap into other funding sources to pay the rest, administration officials declined.

For SNAP recipients looking to feed their families, this decision from the president likely provides little comfort. Receiving half your benefits, months down the line, has little impact on what groceries you can buy right now—especially as we get closer to holiday season and money gets tighter. 

The USDA froze SNAP funding on Saturday for the first time since the program began in 1964. In the past, contingency funds had been used to pay out benefits early, but the Trump administration fought against that option until ordered by judges to adopt it. 

President Donald Trump didn’t seem so disturbed about CBS News editing his interview on 60 Minutes Sunday—in fact, he repeatedly told them it was OK to cut his answers short.

Just months after the Trump administration won a $16 million settlement from Paramount for a supposedly “deceptively” edited 60 Minutes interview of failed Democratic presidential candidate Kamala Harris, Trump appeared open to being edited by CBS News—as long as it cut out his own flubbed comments.

While delivering a lengthy tirade defending his law enforcement crackdown on Washington, D.C., Trump tried to coax interviewer Norah O’Donnell into agreeing that he’d made the city safer. When O’Donnell tried to move on, Trump continued to bait her for an answer, according to the interview’s full transcript.

“I think I’ve been working too hard. I haven’t been out and about that much,” O’Donnell replied.

“Oh, that’s not a fair answer,” Trump interrupted. “You see the difference.”

“I get in my car and go to work and I go home,” O’Donnell said.

“That’s good. You don’t have to use that one. Don’t worry. Don’t worry. I don’t want to embarrass her,” Trump said, insisting that the difference in the capital was “like day and night.”

Later, while ranting about people he doesn’t like in response to a question that had originally been about whom he might support in the next presidential election, Trump made a similar comment while complaining about Harris, who he claimed “could not speak properly.”

“And actually 60 Minutes paid me a lotta money,” Trump said, quickly switching topics. “And you don’t have to put this on, because I don’t wanna embarrass you.” He then changed subjects yet again to compliment Bari Weiss, the bastion of the anti-woke movement who was recently made CBS News’s editor in chief.

Evidently, CBS News thought neither moment was newsworthy and ultimately cut both from the broadcast. Trump’s televised interview was only 28 minutes long, with CBS also releasing a 73-minute extended cut online. But neither video contained Trump’s full answer about Changpeng Zhao, the co-founder and former CEO of cryptocurrency exchange Binance, who received a presidential pardon last week.

It’s worth noting that the edits 60 Minutes had made to the Harris interview were not particularly substantive, switching out one nonanswer about Israel for another. Many speculated that due to the payment of what was essentially a big fat bribe to the Trump administration, the long-awaited merger between Paramount and Skydance had been allowed to proceed.

In September, the freshly merged Paramount Skydance announced that it would no longer air edited interviews on Face the Nation, after Department of Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem attacked the program for editing out her smears about Kilmar Ábrego García.

Donald Trump’s favorite judge is dragging her feet on a report relating to the president’s classified document case, and a federal court is ordering her to get on with it.

A panel of judges on the Eleventh Circuit Court of Appeals ruled Friday that Judge Aileen Cannon needs to rule on motions to release Volume II of special counsel Jack Smith’s report on the classified documents case within 60 days, noting an “undue delay” thus far. The initial motions were filed February 14 and February 25 by the Knight First Amendment Institute at Columbia University after Cannon blocked the report’s release days into Trump’s second term as president.

The petitioner also “filed notification on July 17 and July 10, 2025,” the ruling states, pointing out that Cannon let more than 90 days go by without ruling on the petition. In its petition, the Knight Institute argues that there’s no reason to keep the report secret any longer.

“This report is of singular importance to the public because it addresses allegations of grave criminal conduct by the nation’s highest-ranking official,” Jameel Jaffer, the institute’s executive director, said in a statement last month. “There is no legitimate reason for the report’s continued suppression, and it should be posted on the court’s public docket without further delay.”

It’s perhaps no surprise that Cannon is delaying things, after she seemingly went out of her way to protect Trump throughout the classified documents case. Not only did she try to toss the case out by ruling that Smith’s appointment as special counsel was unconstitutional, Cannon also entertained frivolous motions from Trump’s legal team designed to slow the case down and help him evade legal consequences. Her bias was pointed out by numerous legal scholars, and even from one of Trump’s former lawyers. Now Cannon has just 60 more days to keep one of the last pieces of the legal cases against Trump from the public.

America’s 10 richest billionaires have gotten even richer under Donald Trump, with their collective wealth increasing by nearly $700 billion in the past year, according to a new report by Oxfam America.

Though the report, titled “UNEQUAL: The rise of a new American oligarchy and the agenda we need,” outlines how specific policy decisions by both Democrats and Republicans have exacerbated wealth disparities over the last 30 years, it pinpoints just how dire Trump’s impact has been.

“The Trump administration—largely with the support of the Republican-controlled Congress—has moved with staggering speed and scale to carry out a relentless attack on working-class families, while enriching the wealthy and well-connected,” the report states.

Contrary to what the Trump administration likes to claim, the “big, beautiful bill” does not help everyday Americans. In fact, it was one of the “single largest transfers of wealth upwards in decades” because of its tax cuts for corporations and the rich, according to the report.

While the rich get richer, over 40 percent of Americans are now considered low-income, including over 50 percent of children. Compared to the other wealthiest nations, the United States has the highest rate of relative poverty, according to the report.

“Inequality is a policy choice,” Rebecca Riddell, Oxfam America’s senior policy lead for economic justice, told The Guardian. “These comparisons show us that we can make very different choices when it comes to poverty and inequality in our society.”

In order to stop the spiral into unprecedented inequality, the report recommends four solutions: rebalancing power through community-led efforts and antitrust regulations, taxing the rich and corporations, strengthening the social safety net, and supporting workers’ rights.

This report should be a wake-up call for anyone who voted for Trump out of financial desperation. Unless you can help fund his ballroom, the president doesn’t give a damn whether you can feed your family.

Mike Johnson just claimed he doesn’t know anything about President Donald Trump’s pardon of a cryptocryptocurrency billionaire—but don’t worry, Mr. Speaker, the president doesn’t know anything about it either!

During a press conference Monday, Johnson acted coy when asked about Trump’s 60 Minutes interview the day before. The president claimed he had no idea he’d granted a presidential pardon to Changpeng Zhao, the co-founder and former CEO of cryptocurrency exchange Binance, just months after Zhao did the president’s family’s cryptocurrency a $2 billion favor.

“Does that also concern you?” a reporter asked about Trump’s latest comments, citing Johnson’s previous arguments that all of Joe Biden’s pardons should be rendered “null and void.” House Republicans released a report last week on the previous administration’s alleged autopen use, though the report offered little in the way of actual evidence that the former president was unaware of any of his laws or pardons.

“I don’t know anything about that. I didn’t see the interview. You’re going to have to ask the president about that. I’m not sure,” Johnson said, before taking another question.

Johnson has been on a hot streak of responding to questions with “I don’t know” at his daily government shutdown press conference. The House speaker has conveniently forgotten how SNAP benefits got paid during the previous government shutdown, repeatedly claimed he hasn’t seen any videos of federal agents using excessive force against protesters or ICE arresting U.S. citizens, and even played dumb about who actually runs the government.

When asked on 60 Minutes about pardoning Zhao, Trump replied: “OK, are you ready? I don’t know who he is. I know he got a four-month sentence or something like that, and I heard it was a Biden witch hunt.”

The president then launched into an extended rant that was cut from the official version, where Trump seemed to suggest the decision had really come from his sons, who were “involved in crypto much more” than he is. “I know very little about it, other than one thing. It’s a huge industry,” he said, adding, “So I am behind it 100 percent.”

Trump repeatedly conflated his “opinion” on Zhao with what he was “told” about the case. “I have no idea who he is. I was told that he was a victim, just like I was and just like many other people, of a vicious, horrible group of people in the Biden administration,” Trump claimed.

When host Norah O’Donnell noted that the U.S. government had accused Zhao of “significant harm to U.S. national security,” Trump replied simply: “The Biden government.”

Trump’s comments suggest that his sons may be calling the shots on presidential pardons to the benefit of World Liberty Financial, the decentralized finance platform that is majority owned by a Trump business entity. Trump has served as the company’s “Chief Crypto Advocate,” while Eric and Don Jr. are both Web 3 Ambassadors, and Barron Trump is a “DeFi Visionary.” Binance has repeatedly boosted and incentivized the use of USD1, WLFI’s stablecoin, a cryptocurrency that maintains a value of $1.

Binance provided WLFI with its first significant boon in May, when the platform accepted a shady $2 billion investment from Abu Dhabi–based MGX made in Trump’s stablecoin. That announcement followed an April meeting between Zachary Witkoff, son of special U.S. envoy Steve Witkoff, who is a “promoter” of WLFI, and Zhao in Abu Dhabi where they discussed USD1.