Mike Johnson Proves It Doesn’t Take 50 Days to Swear In a Rep.

House Speaker Mike Johnson swore in Matt Van Epps to Congress Thursday morning, less than two days after Van Epps won a special election for the Tennessee 7th congressional district seat.

The time it took to swear in Van Epps, a Republican, was much shorter than the seven weeks Johnson waited before swearing in Representative Adelita Grijalva, a Democrat. Grijalva won a special election to represent Arizona’s 7th congressional district on September 23 to replace her father, Representative Raúl Grijalva, who passed away in March. She was only sworn in on November 12.

Johnson initially refused to swear in the younger Grijalva for days, and once the government shut down at the beginning of October, claimed that he couldn’t do so until that impasse was resolved. The more likely reason was that Grijalva would have been (and later became) the deciding vote on a petition that would trigger a House vote on the government releasing the Jeffrey Epstein files.

Van Epps’s vote is critical for the narrow House Republican majority, and since Congress and President Trump have now approved the Epstein files, Johnson doesn’t see the need to drag his feet. Van Epps, a former commissioner of the Tennessee Department of General Services and Army helicopter pilot, was endorsed by Trump. However, he defeated his Democratic challenger Aftyn Behn by a much smaller margin of victory than expected, leading national Republicans to worry about the 2026 midterm elections.

This story has been updated.

The two survivors who clung to the wreckage of the Pentagon’s September 2 airstrike on a boat in the Caribbean were still actively trying to advance their drug mission—at least, that’s what Admiral Frank “Mitch” Bradley is expected to tell Congress Thursday.

Bradley plans to spill how he and his advisers determined that the pair of survivors were still aboard the damaged vessel alongside packages of narcotics, supposedly making them legitimate targets for a second attack, according to defense officials that spoke with The Wall Street Journal.

Bradley is meeting lawmakers for a closed-door briefing Thursday as pressure ramps up in Washington to hold someone accountable for the merciless killing. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth has faced enormous heat over the last week for the September double tap. But in an apparent effort to save Hegseth and his post from further scrutiny, the White House has redirected blame toward Bradley, who was in charge of the Joint Special Operations Command at the time of the attack.

Since early September, the U.S. has destroyed at least 20 small boats traversing the Caribbean that Trump administration officials deemed—without an investigation or interdiction—were smuggling drugs. At least 83 people have been killed in the attacks.

The September 2 attack was the first such attack. But it is also the only known instance in which survivors were deliberately targeted and killed.

The entire debacle could be swept under the rug if Bradley’s account is deemed accurate. Geoffrey Corn, a former military lawyer who now directs the Center for Military Law and Policy at Texas Tech, told the Journal that if the survivors were genuinely capable of threatening U.S. military personnel after the first strike, then the Defense Department would have a “legitimate explanation for the second strike.”

The attacks have been condemned by U.S. lawmakers on both sides of the aisle and foreign human advocates alike, including the U.N. human rights chief, who said in October that the strikes “violate international human rights law.” The needless deaths have also pushed congressional Republicans to consider whether Hegseth should be stripped of his position altogether.

Donald Trump, however, is still backing Hegseth. The president has so far brushed off the widespread anger at his Defense Department pick, telling inquiring reporters Wednesday that “this is war.”

Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth pushed out four-star Admiral Alvin Holsey after months of conflict.

The Wall Street Journal reports that, contrary to Hegseth’s announcement in October that Holsey was retiring a year into his tenure, the defense secretary asked Holsey to resign. Tensions between the two began since Donald Trump’s inauguration in January and increased with the administration’s campaign to bomb boats in the waters near Central America, ostensibly to target boats smuggling drugs.

Holsey was concerned about the legality of the strikes, former officials told the Journal, and soon afterward, Hegseth announced the admiral’s retirement. The move to push out a highly decorated Naval officer raises questions about whether military leaders are on board with the boat bombings, and if their concerns are even being heard.

While other military leaders have been pushed out during Trump’s second term, Holsey is the only commander to be dismissed during the current military operation in Central America.

“Having [Holsey] leave at this particular moment, at the height of what the Pentagon considers to be the central action in our hemisphere, is just shocking,” Todd Robinson, who was assistant secretary for international narcotics and law enforcement affairs until January, told the Journal.

Holsey’s background lends itself to the military’s current operation. A former Navy helicopter pilot, the admiral has experience in intercepting drug shipments and had expressed interest in increasing interceptions. In his confirmation hearing in September 2024, Holsey told senators that he wanted a stronger approach to “dismantle the drug cartels.”

“My first deployment to the Southcom area of responsibility was over 33 years ago conducting counterdrug missions,” the admiral said at the time.

Hegseth and Holsey were on good terms at times during the past year, with the admiral preparing military plans after Trump said he wanted to reclaim the Panama Canal. At other times, though, Hegseth thought Holsey was a source of leaks from the DOD. But by the time the boat strikes began in September, the secretary had already lost confidence in the admiral, according to the Journal.

Holsey’s last day is December 12, and he has not spoken publicly about stepping down. But Hegseth is facing increased scrutiny over the legality of the strikes from Congress, including Republicans, and the admiral’s dismissal is going to reflect poorly on Trump and his secretary of defense.

The U.S. economy has seen 1.1 million layoffs this year—the most since the Covid-19 pandemic—even as President Donald Trump constantly proclaims us to be the “hottest country anywhere in the world.” 

Consulting firm Challenger, Gray & Christmas reported Thursday that there were 71,321 layoffs in November. This brings the year’s total up to 1.17 million, which is a whopping 54 percent higher than last year and the highest layoffs have been since the pandemic hit the economy in 2020. Employers have also seen a 35 percent decrease in hires from last year. 

This negative economic news comes as new Politico polling shows that nearly half the country thinks that the cost of living is the worst they’ve ever seen—and they hold Trump directly responsible for it. 

Trump ran on affordability, on helping working-class Americans left behind by globalization. But as his economy sputters, he continues to attack the very notion, calling affordability a “Democrat scam.” 

If the scale continues to tip in the wrong direction while Americans continue to struggle with higher prices and stagnating wages, it could spell a very rough 2026 midterm for the GOP.  

America’s news media companies are not taking the Pentagon’s new press restrictions laying down.

The New York Times named several key Trump officials in a sweeping lawsuit Thursday, including Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth and Pentagon spokesman Sean Parnell. The newspaper argued that the Pentagon’s new rules—which effectively forced out dozens of highly lauded legacy journalists and replaced them with fawning, far-right upstarts—actually “violates the Constitution’s guarantees of due process, freedom of speech and freedom of the press.”

The suit further argued that the punitive policy violated the First Amendment by seeking “to restrict journalists’ ability to do what journalists have always done—ask questions of government employees and gather information to report stories that take the public beyond official pronouncements.”

Under Hegseth’s new rules, credentialed Pentagon reporters were required to pledge that they would not report on anything from the department that had not been approved for official release. The new policy, announced in October, forced journalists to choose between reporting government-sponsored propaganda or having their press credentials revoked.

Dozens of journalists walked away from their desks at the Pentagon as a result, refusing to capitulate to Hegseth’s new standard. In turn, Pentagon officials offered those newly vacated spots to conservative outlets ideologically aligned with the Trump administration, including One America News, The Federalist, and LindellTV, a new outlet formed by Mike Lindell, the My Pillow CEO who practically bankrupted himself by broadcasting conspiracies about the 2020 presidential election.

The Times’ legal complaint seeks a court order to suspend Hegseth’s new rules, as well as a declaration that the initiative “targeting the exercise of First Amendment rights” was illegal.

In a press briefing Wednesday, a senior attorney for the Times said that the paper had discussed a joint lawsuit with other news organizations similarly affected by the policy, but ultimately decided to proceed alone.

The Defense Department’s decision to kill the two survivors of a boat bombing in the Caribbean Sea—which may very well be a war crime—was all part of Secretary Pete Hegseth’s contingency plan, The New York Times reported.

The Hegseth-approved plan involved rescuing any helpless survivors and killing them if they tried to contact a “cartel” member. The Defense Department is alleging that the men killed on September 2 did the latter, initiating the second half of the contingency plan.

The White House has insisted the violence is justified, as the administration accuses the boats of trafficking narcotics to the U.S. from Venezuela and Colombia. Of course, the government has yet to provide evidence that the men they murdered contacted a cartel, or that they were trafficking drugs at all. But this plan once again begs the question: Who was actually responsible here?

Hegseth has made a point to shift the blame for the actual decision to strike the boat a second time—the potential war crime—onto Admiral Frank “Mitch” Bradley.

“I didn’t stick around [after the first strike],” Hegseth told reporters at Donald Trump’s Tuesday Cabinet meeting. “Couple of hours later, I learned that … Admiral Bradley made the correct decision to sink the boat and eliminate the threat.… It was the right call, we have his back.”

Hegseth is trying so hard to distance himself from the attack that he’s claiming he wasn’t even in the room when it happened. Regardless, his version of events made no mention of the report that he approved the contingency plan that Bradley followed.

This saga has drawn the ire of both the left and right.

“This is an act of a war crime. Ordering survivors—who the law requires be rescued—instead to be murdered,” Newsmax host and current Hegseth co-worker Judge Andrew Napolitano said on Tuesday. “There’s absolutely no legal basis for it. Everybody along the line who did it, from the secretary of defense to the admiral to the people who actually pulled the trigger, should be prosecuted for a war crime for killing these two people.”

Bradley is expected to meet with House and Senate Armed Services Committee members on Thursday to clear up exactly what happened.

It seems that Pete Hegseth’s brilliant response to the watchdog report finding that the defense secretary had directly endangered U.S. troops is just to lie and say he didn’t.

Pentagon spokesperson Sean Parnell didn’t even try Wednesday to spin the results of the inspector general’s report on a major scandal earlier this year, when Hegseth sent highly sensitive information in a nonsecure Signal group chat.

“This Inspector General review is a TOTAL exoneration of Secretary Hegseth @PeteHegseth and proves what we knew all along—no classified information was shared. This matter is resolved and the case is closed,” Parnell said in a statement, per Trump acolyte Laura Loomer.

Sources had previously told CNN that Hegseth sent messages detailing materials marked classified at the time. One message from Hegseth—“This is DEFINITELY when the first bombs will drop”—seemed obviously classified. But the war chief has maintained that he had the power to unilaterally declassify information discussed, though no documentation of that actually happening seems to exist.

A classified version of the inspector general’s Signalgate report was sent to Congress on Tuesday night, finding that Hegseth should not have used the app at all. Four sources familiar with the report told CNN that Hegseth had risked compromising sensitive military information and could have potentially endangered troops and mission objectives.

A declassified version of the report is expected to be released to the public Thursday.

Donald Trump is still backing Pete Hegseth, despite growing scrutiny over reports that the defense secretary issued orders to mercilessly kill survivors of a September 2 airstrike on a small boat in the Caribbean.

“If it is found that survivors were actually killed while clinging on to that boat, should Secretary Hegseth, Admiral [Frank M.] Bradley, or others be punished?” asked a reporter at the White House Wednesday.

“I think you’re going to find that this is war, that these people were killing our people by the millions, actually, if you look over a few years. I think last year we lost close to 300,000 people were killed. That’s not mentioning all the families—have you seen what happens with the families?” Trump said.

The White House has insisted the violence is justified, broadly accusing the boats of trafficking narcotics to the U.S. from Venezuela and Colombia while vaguely and inaccurately referring to the death toll caused by fentanyl, a synthetic opioid 50 times stronger than heroin.

Fentanyl overdoses in the U.S. were on the rise for a decade before falling slightly in 2023, when more than 72,000 people died from the synthetic opioid, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

U.S. lawmakers on both sides of the aisle have been more than skeptical of the White House’s theory—particularly since several of the boats were thousands of miles away in international waters, and since the attacks were conducted without prior investigations or interdiction. Pentagon officials reportedly haven’t been concerned with identifying the people on the boats before attacking.

“I think you’re going to find that there’s a very receptive ear to doing exactly what they’re doing taking out those boats,” Trump said. “And very soon we’re going to start doing it on land, too. Because we know every route, we know every house, we know where they manufacture this crap, we’re going to put it all together.”

“So to be clear, you support the decision to kill survivors after—” the reporter pressed, before Trump interjected that he “supports the decision to knock out the boats.”

“Whoever is piloting those boats, they’re guilty of trying to kill people in our country,” Trump added, referring to the alleged drug mules, who would be the lowest and least significant participants on the drug trade totem pole.

Meanwhile, Trump pardoned former Honduran President Juan Orlando Hernández on Monday, freeing a man who was sentenced to 45 years in prison for playing a central role in what the Biden administration deemed to be “one of the largest and most violent drug-trafficking conspiracies in the world.”

Hernández’s case was initially prosecuted during Trump’s first administration.

Donald Trump has taken over the United States Institute of Peace building in Washington, D.C., and put his name on it, even as the legal battle over who owns the building is ongoing.

Independent journalist Marisa Kabas posted about the visible signage on the building Wednesday on Bluesky, showing “DONALD J. TRUMP” in block letters tacked to the building. Kabas reports that Trump plans to use the building to host the signing of a peace agreement between Rwanda and the Democratic Republic of the Congo on Thursday.

The USIP was created by Congress in the 1980s as a nonprofit organization independent of the federal government. The letters making up Trump’s name seem to have been taken from USIP’s sign inside the building, when the Department of Government Efficiency took over the think tank by force in March.

In May, that takeover was blocked in federal court, with U.S. District Judge Beryl Howell ruling that the firing of the USIP’s leadership and staff, their replacement by DOGE-affiliated staff, and the building’s transfer to the General Services Administration were “effectuated by illegitimately installed leaders who lacked legal authority to take these actions, which must therefore be declared null and void.”

But in June, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia granted the Trump administration a stay of Howell’s ruling pending appeal, ordering that the building be turned over to the GSA and restoring the Trump administration’s preferred leadership.

“The President faces irreparable harm from not being able to fully exercise his executive powers,” the three-judge panel wrote at the time.

“Because the Institute exercises substantial executive power, the Government is likely to succeed on its claim that the Board’s removal protections are unconstitutional,” they wrote, referring to the USIP’s governing board.

“We agree with the Government that ‘[f]acilitating the foreign policy of the United States by brokering peace among warring parties on the international stage is plainly an exercise of executive power under our Constitution,’” the judges added. The appeal is still ongoing, but since then, most of the USIP’s staff have been fired and the institute’s website states that it is under maintenance.

The USIP’s building occupies prime Washington, D.C., real estate between the Potomac River and the National Mall, and is worth approximately $500 million, so it’s no surprise that the Trump administration wanted the building. Now it appears that Trump wanted something else with his name on it where he could be feted and praised, and isn’t willing to wait for the legal case to conclude in his favor.

Surprise, surprise: House Republicans don’t want the public to hear what Jack Smith has to say about President Donald Trump—even though the president claims he’d prefer it.

The GOP-led House Judiciary Committee issued a subpoena Wednesday to the former special counsel, demanding he appear for a closed-door interview later this month to discuss his investigations into Trump’s alleged mishandling of classified documents and alleged efforts to overturn the 2020 presidential election. Of course, Smith had already offered to tell them everything they wanted to know—if he could have a public hearing.

It seems House Judiciary Committee Chair Jim Jordan wasn’t really interested in that level of transparency—or accountability.

But it’s not clear that Republicans and Trump are on the same page. During a press conference Wednesday, the president was asked whether he would prefer to have Smith testify in a public hearing.

“I think Jack Smith is a sick man, there’s something really wrong with him. I’d rather see him testify publicly ’cause there’s no way he can answer the questions,” Trump said, before veering into a rant about the autopen.

Smith’s legal team had previously requested that their client be given the opportunity to testify publicly to refute the “many mischaracterizations” of his investigations.

The team responded to the subpoena in a statement to CBS News Wednesday: “Nearly six weeks ago Jack offered to voluntarily appear before the House Judiciary committee in an open hearing to answer any questions lawmakers have about his investigation into President Trump’s alleged efforts to unlawfully overturn the election results and retention of classified documents. We are disappointed that offer was rejected, and that the American people will be denied the opportunity to hear directly from Jack on these topics.”

Recently, some Republicans were incensed by a revelation that Smith had requested Senate Republicans’ phone records from the days before and after the deadly January 6 riot, without their knowledge, in order to see who may have been involved in Trump’s alleged efforts to subvert the election. Trump earned himself four felony counts for those alleged efforts, but those charges were dismissed after he was elected to the White House in 2024.

As part of the budget bill passed to fund the government last month, a pretty petty provision was passed allowing senators who had their phone records accessed to sue the Justice Department. Senators would be able to win $500,000 of taxpayer money per violation.