Top Trump Advisers Totally Undermine His Main Boat Strike Claim

The U.S. military has conducted at least 25 strikes on boats in the Caribbean and eastern Pacific on the basis that the small watercraft were trying to smuggle drugs into the United States. But as it turns out, even top Trump officials don’t think that’s true.

So far, at least 95 people have been killed since the attacks began in early September. The White House has defended the violence, chalking it up to allegedly necessary efforts to thwart the pipeline of fentanyl into the country. Donald Trump has simultaneously leveraged the aggression to try to shove Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro out of power, something that he attempted and failed to do in 2019.

Yet America’s senators are hearing an entirely different rationale for the military offensive. Recalling details of a classified meeting held Tuesday, Connecticut Senator Chris Murphy said that Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth and State Secretary Marco Rubio admitted that no fentanyl is coming out of Venezuela. Instead, the boats are carrying cocaine—bound for Europe.

“I can tell you this,” Murphy said, noting he wasn’t discussing classified information. “The administration had no legal justification and had no national security justification for these strikes.

“And so we are spending billions of your taxpayer dollars to wage a war in the Caribbean to stop cocaine from going from Venezuela to Europe,” he said. “That is a massive waste of national security resources and your taxpayer dollars.”

Murphy underscored that Trump had overstepped his authority by attempting to use the seemingly fabricated drug threat to wage war against Venezuela without the express permission of Congress.

“Only Congress, only the American public, can authorize war,” he said. “And there is just no question that these are acts of war.”

Another Republican is retiring from Congress, in what is becoming an exodus before next year’s midterm elections.

Representative Dan Newhouse, whose Washington district is a safe Republican seat, announced Wednesday morning that he would not be running for reelection in 2026. Newhouse, who voted for President Trump’s impeachment after the January 6, 2021, insurrection, had survived primary challenges to his seat in 2022 and 2024.

Newhouse was also one of 35 Republicans who voted to establish the January 6 commission to investigate the Capitol insurrection, so it’s telling that after surviving two elections after that, he now thinks his time is up. Newhouse’s retirement means that only one Republican who voted to impeach Trump in Congress, Representative David Valadao of California, remains in office, although he has a tough election in a battleground district.

Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene, a strong supporter turned critic of the president, announced her own resignation last month. She told CNN’s Kaitlan Collins Tuesday night that she thinks “the dam is breaking” regarding Republican support for Trump.

“Many Republicans may not have called him out, but last week 13 Republicans voted with Democrats to overturn one of President Trump’s executive orders which enabled him to fire federal workers,” Greene said, referring to Trump’s deranged post criticizing Rob Reiner after he and his wife were killed in their home Sunday.

“We also saw Indiana Republicans vote against redistricting. He didn’t call any of them traitors and call for primaries against them,” Greene added. “I would like to say that that is a sign, where you’re seeing Republicans … entering the campaign phase for 2026, which is a large signal that lame-duck season has begun and that Republicans will go all in for themselves in order to save their own reelections.”

Greene’s assessment, along with Newhouse’s resignation, seems to indicate that Republicans can see the writing on the wall for 2026, and it’s not good for them. Almost all of the off-year elections that have already taken place have been big wins for Democrats, or narrow victories for Republicans. In less than one year, the same shifts could happen in congressional races and Democrats could take over the House.

President Donald Trump signaled he plans to go after former FBI Director Christopher Wray and former Attorney General Merrick Garland.

Trump took to Truth Social Tuesday to personally respond to a Fox News report on the 2022 raid of Mar-a-Lago, which was part of the investigation into his alleged mishandling of classified documents. According to Fox News, in the weeks leading up to the raid, FBI and Justice Department officials voiced concerns they had not dug up enough evidence to establish probable cause.

“Unreasonable Search and Seizure!!! That was the FBI’s CRIMINAL RAID on Mar-a-Lago. This can never be allowed to happen again!!!” Trump wrote on Truth Social.

Trump then shared a post from Truth Social user Jay Anthony, who wrote: “Someone should be arrested. Wray & Garland.”

“… And many others!!!” Trump added.

It seems that Trump’s revenge tour against his so-called “deep state” enemies will soon turn to those involved in the August 2022 raid.

It’s worth noting that the story about probable cause isn’t new. During Trump’s classified documents trial, Judge Aileen Cannon rejected the notion that dissent among the ranks at the FBI invalidated the probable cause used to obtain a search warrant for the president’s residence, an exceptional finding for the judge who would later toss out Trump’s 42 felony charges.

MAGA isn’t buying White House chief of staff Susie Wiles’s excuses for humiliating Donald Trump’s team.

Wiles tried Tuesday to explain away revealing her unfiltered opinions about several Trumpworld figures in an interview with Vanity Fair. She claimed the article was a “disingenuously framed hit piece” that “disregarded” context to “paint an overwhelmingly chaotic and negative narrative.”

While members of Trumpworld leaped to Wiles’s defense, MAGA wasn’t quite as forgiving. Lara Logan, a discredited former CBS correspondent and prominent figure in far-right media, slammed Wiles’s apparent naïveté.

“It is too late in the game for this to be a defense. Anyone close to the President should know that Vanity Fair leads the way in the information war for Trump’s most powerful & despicable enemies,” she wrote on X.

“If you do not know this, you are not qualified to be in a junior role let alone a senior one,” Logan added.

Joel Pollak, the opinion editor at the conservative tabloid California Post, also questioned Wiles’s decision to speak with Vanity Fair in the first place. “I don’t know why Republicans continue to give privileged access to mainstream media or center-left publications determined to destroy them,” he wrote on X, calling publications such as Vanity Fair and The New York Times “Democrat agenda-driven outlets.”

Mike Cernovich, a right-wing commentator with more than 1.4 million followers on X, accused Wiles of doing “glam interviews with Bolshevik media.”

In another post, Cernovich offered Wiles some advice: “You don’t have to do the media interview. You don’t have to talk to anyone. They will say, ‘We are going to write about you whether you cooperate or not.’ Who cares. Far worse than some hit piece (which don’t even work anymore) is hanging yourself with your own words.”

ICE agents violently restrained a woman in Minneapolis on Monday, dragging her through the snow and pinning her face down as onlookers shouted that the woman was pregnant.

During what was supposed to be a “targeted vehicle stop,” according to ICE officials, protesters swarmed the agents. Esme Murphy, a WCCO reporter, was on the scene, where she saw ICE holding a woman on the ground.

“Please let her go! She’s pregnant!” one onlooker shouted.

“Get her off of her fucking stomach,” another said.

In response to this, one agent fired a Taser into the crowd. “Who wants more?” he taunted, according to WCCO.

“We kept yelling, ‘She is pregnant, she’s pregnant,’” resident Tonika Deutch told Murphy. “They put their knees on her. We kept telling them, ‘She can’t breathe, let her up, let her up.’”

The woman was then dragged by one arm, as the crowd continued to yell and plead with the ICE agents. Bystanders threw snowballs, and ICE agents fired pepper spray into the crowd—hitting Murphy, the reporter, as well as her photographer.

ICE called the Minneapolis Police Department for backup. Once they arrived, the officers determined there was “no violence occurring” against the agents. “We have been training our officers for the last five years very, very intensely on de-escalation, but unfortunately that is … often not what we are seeing from other agencies in the city,” Minneapolis Police Chief Brian O’Hara told WCCO.

According to ICE, they succeeded in arresting the targets of their operation: a young Ecuadorian couple who were abducted from their car, its windows shattered by agents. The woman is currently in custody in Illinois, and it’s not known where her husband is being held. Two U.S. citizens were also arrested for assaulting federal officers, according to CBS.