Mike Johnson Sends Entire House Home Ahead of Epstein Files Deadline

House Speaker Mike Johnson is conveniently sending Congress home the day before the Justice Department is supposed to release the Epstein files in full. The announcement came Wednesday night.

This looks like yet another instance of Johnson doing every little thing he can either to delay the release of the files or to make it so that his fellow GOPers don’t have to be in town to answer to their complicity in this monthslong campaign to avoid their release—as he did by egregiously delaying the swearing-in of Democratic Representative Adelita Grijalva for weeks.

“Like I said: view all political developments for the rest of the week in light of the fact that the Epstein Files are supposed to be released on Friday,” Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez wrote Wednesday evening on X. “House Republicans just suddenly canceled Congressional session Friday and are sending everyone home Thursday evening.”

While recent releases have produced photos of notable people alongside Epstein—like Bill Clinton, President Trump, Bill Gates, Woody Allen, and Noam Chomsky—it’s unclear what Friday’s drop will reveal. If Johnson has his way, it might not happen at all.

President Donald Trump gave a nonsensical justification Wednesday for his blockade of all “sanctioned oil tankers” coming and going from Venezuela.

Speaking to reporters, Trump appeared to claim that he was simply stealing back oil that already belonged to the United States.

“You remember they took all of our energy rights, they took all of our oil from not that long ago, and we want it back, but they took it, they illegally took it,” Trump said.

At another point, he said, “They took our oil rights. We had a lot of oil there. As you know, they threw our companies out, and we want it back.”

It seems that Trump was referring to when Hugo Chávez ordered the seizure of foreign-owned oil fields in 2007, including land and assets that belonged to U.S. oil companies ExxonMobil, Chevron, and ConocoPhillips.

In the intervening 18 years, Chevron struck a deal with Venezuela (that Trump somehow made worse) while ExxonMobil and ConocoPhillips entered into a lengthy legal battle that is still ongoing to win billions of dollars from the Venezuelan government.

It seems pretty obvious that oil fields located in Venezuela, even if they were previously owned by U.S. companies, don’t actually belong to the United States—but Trump sees things differently. On Tuesday, he wrote on Truth Social that it was time for Venezuela to “return … the Oil, Land, and other Assets that they previously stole from us.”

Trump’s blockade is the second major military escalation targeted at Venezuela’s oil industry, after Venezuela accused the United States of piracy because it seized one of Caracas’s oil tankers. This follows months of extrajudicial strikes on boats in the Caribbean Sea that the U.S. government claims, but won’t bother to prove, are smuggling drugs. White House chief of staff Susie Wiles indicated that these efforts were about forcing Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro to step down.

Earlier this week, Trump manufactured the perfect excuse to invade Venezuela, by ordering fentanyl to be classified as a weapon of mass destruction. For anyone thinking, “I recognize this tune,” it’s because Trump’s newest tactic is just an echo of the U.S. government’s lie that Saddam Hussein had stockpiles of weapons of mass destruction as justification for its invasion of Iraq. It seems that history is repeating itself, as there is reason to believe that America’s growing interest in Venezuela is not about drugs at all: It’s actually about oil.

To President Donald Trump, a picture is apparently not worth 1,000 words. It’s important to get some real words in there too, in case things aren’t clear.

As if Trump’s new hallway of presidential portraits wasn’t enough of an eyesore, he’s now added long, rambling plaques summarizing the accomplishments of each of our past leaders. And they are just as petty, biased, and indelicate as you would expect.

Under Joe Biden’s “portrait”—which is just a picture of an autopen signing Biden’s name—the plaque begins, “Sleepy Joe Biden was, by far, the worst President in American History.” The plaque features a number of totally accurate and not at all exaggerated “facts” about Biden’s tenure, including blaming him for both Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and Hamas’s attack on Israel on October 7, 2023.

For Barack Obama, the plaque reads that he was “one of the most divisive presidents in American History,” and credits him with passing the “‘Unaffordable’ Care Act, resulting in his party losing control of both Houses of Congress.”

Even George W. Bush is catching strays: “President Bush created the Department of Homeland Security, but started wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, both of which should not have happened.”

But, like a shining city on a hill, one president remains above criticism: Ronald Reagan. “Ronald Reagan won the Cold War, and transformed American politics and the Conservative Movement,” the plaque reads. “He was a fan of President Donald J. Trump long before President Trump’s Historic run for the White House. Likewise, President Trump was a fan of his!”

Was this true? The Washington Post seems to think not, as Trump reached out to the Reagan White House with invitations at least six times back in the 1980s, and each time was ignored or rejected. But what does truth have to do with anything when you’re the man who, as Biden’s plaque reads, would “get Re-Elected in a Landslide, and SAVE AMERICA”?

Thank goodness this man isn’t in charge of the Smithsonian—oh, wait.

FBI Deputy Director Dan Bongino, Kash Patel’s woefully underqualified No. 2,  is finally headed for the exit.

The former talk radio announced Wednesday that he will leave his position next month, the AP reported. Bongino reportedly told confidants that he was not planning to return to FBI headquarters at all this year, eight people told MS NOW.

Donald Trump also confirmed Bongino’s exit while speaking to reporters Wednesday. “Dan did a great job. I think he wants to go back to his show,” the president said.

Bongino, who had no prior experience working for the FBI, previously spread conspiracy theories about the bureau where he would later manage day-day-operations. He once claimed that the plot to plant pipe bombs at the Democratic and Republican National headquarters on January 6, 2021, reeked of an “inside job.” 

Patel also reportedly granted Bongino a waiver to bypass getting a key security clearance, but the deputy director was still given access to highly classified information, such as the president’s daily brief, which collates essential information from the intelligence community.

News of Bongino’s potential exit comes after another report that Trump was considering removing Patel, as the hapless leader’s blunders start to pile up. The report also comes amid the FBI’s ongoing manhunt for a mass shooter at Brown University. 

This story has been updated.

The Federal Communications Commission website no longer reflects that the FCC is an “independent” agency after FCC Chair Brendan Carr testified to Congress on Wednesday that he didn’t consider it to be one.

Axios’s Sara Fischer caught the change, and posted about it on X: “This is INSANE. I took this screenshot of the @FCC website at 11:52 a.m. ET where it explicitly states the FCC is an independent agency. 25 minutes later, it has been removed following Carr’s comments during this hearing! See before and after screenshots below.”

As of Wednesday afternoon, there is no mention of the FCC being an “independent agency” on its website, only a “U.S. agency.” (The last publicly available confirmation of the word “independent” appearing on the site was October 1.)

During the hearing, Carr was pressed on whether he considered the FCC to be an independent agency: Though he had previously said himself that the agency was “long ago determined” by Congress to be independent, he claimed on Wednesday that his position had changed, and he now believes it to no longer be independent, since its members are subject to for-cause removal by the president.

One senator even read from the FCC’s website. New Mexico’s Ben Ray Luján said, “Just so you know, Brendan, on your website it just simply says, man, the FCC is independent.... This isn’t a trick question.”

Unluckily for Luján—and for the American people—it doesn’t say that anymore. Whether the change was the Trump administration’s attempt to protect Carr from appearing to lie during congressional testimony, or just a mask-off moment about the sad state of the FCC, it’s clear that the agency can no longer be trusted to act independently of the president.