You Won’t Believe What One of the Boats Trump Struck Was Carrying

Detritus from one of the Caribbean boat strikes has washed up on the Colombian peninsula, and it’s not what the White House claimed.

The boats apparently wrecked in a November 6 strike arrived on Colombia’s Indigenous-governed Guajira Peninsula two days later with two mangled bodies and torched jerrycans. But at least one of the vessels also carried evidence of the drugs it was smuggling onboard, reported The New York Times: emptied packets of marijuana.

The Trump administration has justified its unfettered air strike campaign on the basis that small watercraft in the Caribbean were funnelling fentanyl into the U.S. To further legitimize the militaristic response—which so far has killed at least 107 people since early September—the president purported that the boats were run by “narcoterrorists” from Venezuela, and designated fentanyl as a “weapon of mass destruction.”

But marijuana, a drug synonymous with the “peace and love” movement of the 1960s, is about as far from a tool of war as you can get. The substance is already legal in the vast majority of the U.S.: 40 states permit its use for medicinal purposes, while 24 states allow residents to get high for any reason whatsoever.

Earlier this month, Trump himself signed an executive order to expedite the process of reclassifying weed from a Schedule I drug—which are considered to have high abuse rates with little to no medical application—to a Schedule III drug under the Controlled Substances Act.

Overall, there seems to be little evidence that the boats have been headed toward the United States. In a classified meeting with U.S. lawmakers two weeks ago, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth and State Secretary Marco Rubio revealed that the Trump administration was aware the boats were bound for Europe rather than America. They also disclosed that the administration had no intelligence indicating that fentanyl was coming out of Venezuela, but rather that some of the boats were believed to be carrying cocaine.

Paul Ingrassia, the failed Trump nominee with a self-described “Nazi streak,” has been making enemies at the General Services Administration—where he crash landed after even Senate Republicans rejected his bid to head the Office of Special Counsel due to his leaked countless racist, bigoted messages.

“I don’t know what he is or is not, but no one cares for him,” one anonymous GSA staffer told Politico in a story published Tuesday, adding that Ingrassia hasn’t been given anything “meaningful” to do because “[GSA] leadership doesn’t really want him.”

“What are we? A halfway house for bigots who can’t find jobs anywhere else in this administration?” another staffer said, going on to mention how incredibly unqualified Ingrassia was compared to his predecessor, Russell “Rusty” McGranahan. “Rusty was well qualified and served the administration well. I just want the government to be staffed with experienced people who are taken seriously.”

The Trump administration, however, seems to think Ingrassia is just the man for the job.

“Paul Ingrassia is a well-regarded attorney who has provided outstanding service to President Trump and will continue to do so as GSA’s acting general counsel,” GSA spokesperson Marianne Copenhaver said. “The GSA has complete confidence in his ability to further both its mission and the president’s priorities.”

For the uninitiated: Ingrassia made headlines back in October for a series of deeply hateful statements he made in a group chat.

“No moulignon holidays.… From kwanza [sic] to mlk jr day to black history month to Juneteenth,” he wrote in one text, using an Italian slur for Black people in the beginning of the message. “Every single one needs to be eviscerated.”

“MLK Jr. was the 1960s George Floyd and his ‘holiday’ should be ended and tossed into the seventh circle of hell where it belongs,” he said in another text. He also mentioned that he had a “bit of a Nazi streak” and to “never trust a chinaman or Indian. NEVER.”

Ingrassia was also accused of sexually harassing a coworker at the Department of Homeland Security.

This is the man the Trump administration deemed to be “well-regarded”—although it’s clear that his peers think otherwise.

White House Chief of Staff Susie Wiles might have revealed more than she ought to about the Epstein files.

The Vanity Fair profile on the president’s famed “ice maiden” has continued to haunt the administration weeks after its publication, in large part thanks to Wiles’s candid responses. Now, Democratic Senators Sheldon Whitehouse and Dick Durbin have demanded answers regarding a particularly lurid detail that came out of the article: Wiles’s apparent familiarity with the contents of the Epstein files.

In a joint letter made public Tuesday, Whitehouse and Durbin questioned which components of the investigation she had reviewed, how she obtained the sensitive material, and “under what authority” she gained access to it.

The lawmakers asked Wiles a series of questions, requesting her responses by January 5.

“Had material in the file you reviewed been presented to a grand jury? When did you first gain access to ‘the Epstein file’ and what was the schedule of your review of it? For what purpose did you gain access to this information?” they inquired.

The duo also questioned if she had shared any of the information with Donald Trump, and asked her to explain what role she had in “any process related to the review, redaction, withholding, or release of material in the ‘Epstein file,’ including any processes involving the Department of Justice or Federal Bureau of Investigation.”

The wide-ranging profile on Wiles’s first year atop the Trump administration sent shockwaves through the political establishment earlier this month, and offered many Americans their first intimate glimpse into the inner machinations of Trump’s White House. Over the course of “many on-the-record conversations,” several of which took place after church on Sundays, documentary filmmaker and author Chris Whipple depicted a Cabinet structure that could not exist without Wiles and her unparalleled knack for translating the president’s agenda.

But her loose lips about her Cabinet coworkers have stirred up quite a bit of trouble in the workplace. Some of those comments include claiming that Trump has “an alcoholic’s personality,” and flagging that Vice President JD Vance’s shift into MAGAworld was opportunistic and “sort of political.”

Immigrations and Customs Enforcement detained more than a hundred people in their Chicago “Midway Blitz” operation in September. But as it turns out, at least half of those people were kidnapped for no reason, as their charges were dropped. Only nine arrests resulted in pending felony charges.

The administration has claimed countless times that ICE agents were harassed, stalked, attacked, and abused by the various protesters—many of them American citizens—they detained during the Midway Blitz. But a Chicago Tribune story published found that these claims were flimsy at best, as was reflected in the numerous failed prosecutions.

Some citizens claimed they were mistreated in detainment, experiencing excessive force, facing false charges, and being driven around for hours in the back of a van or SUV before eventually getting dropped off at some random location such as a gas station with their charges dropped.

One man spent four days in jail before all charges against him were dropped. A Montessori school teaching assistant who survived several gunshots from Border Patrol agents had the felony case against her dismissed.

One detainee, 27-year-old accountant Ian Sampson, told the Tribune he was documenting a protest with his camera when he was detained for not listening to orders from agents to move back. He claimed the instructions were warbled and hard to hear.

During the protest Sampson was documenting, which took place at the ICE processing center in the Chicago suburb of Broadview, agents emerged to move the perimeter farther away from the west suburban facility. Their commands to the crowd to move back were unintelligible, several protesters allege.

“All of a sudden they were there, in your face,” Sampson said. “So I stepped back on the grass.… I tried to move out of the way and then they just grabbed me by my backpack, pulled me down and … I had four or five guys on top of me, putting a knee in my back, smashing my head into the ground.”

It’s apparent that the Trump administration sent militant immigration agents into one of the biggest cities in America to kidnap, beat, and abuse immigrants, citizens, or anyone expressing any kind of opposition to Donald Trump’s “blitz.” And it was almost all for nothing.

“The system isn’t designed to move at a speed like a blitz,” said Christopher Parente, a former federal prosecutor and current lawyer for one of the detained protesters. “The whole point of federal prosecutions, and why they win so many cases, is because they do all the work before they charge and then once they charge a case, it’s rock solid. Here, they sort of flipped that on its head and they charge first, and investigate later. And I think that’s why you’ve seen all the problems you’re seeing.”

Israel is about to break tradition for its highest civilian honor with the 2026, non-Israeli recipient: Donald Trump.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu announced Monday that the award would be given to the U.S. president, marking the second time that the prize has gone to a non-citizen for the first time in its 72-year history.

Trump will receive the award under its newly invented peace category.

“President Trump has broken so many conventions to the surprise of people, and then they figure out, ‘Oh, well—maybe, you know, he was right after all,’” Netanyahu told reporters. “So we decided to break a convention too or create a new one, and that is to award the Israel Prize.”

Trump remarked that the award was “really surprising and very much appreciated.”

The last non-Israeli to receive the honor was Indian conductor Zubin Mehta, who was named in 1991 for his work directing the Israel Philharmonic Orchestra over the span of five decades.

It’s the second instance in which a foreign entity has attempted to cozy up to Trump with a shiny medal masquerading as a respectable peace prize after Trump begged, pleaded, and failed to win the Nobel Peace Prize in October. Earlier this month, FIFA—the global soccer organization—named Trump as the inaugural recipient of their own newly minted FIFA Peace Prize.

Trump has coveted the Nobel Peace Prize for years, going so far as to lie about solving nonexistent international conflicts and phoning Norwegian officials this past summer in lame efforts to snag the title. (Norway’s government has no influence on decisions made by the committee.)

Trump has complained for years that his name has not yet been added to the ranks of the prize’s highly lauded recipients, who span some of the greatest figures of the last century, including Nelson Mandela, Martin Luther King Jr., Mother Theresa, and Malala Yousafzai.

Part of the reason for his desire could be that Trump’s supposed political nemesis, former President Barack Obama, received the award in 2009 for “extraordinary efforts to strengthen international diplomacy and cooperation between peoples.” Three other U.S. presidents have also won a Nobel Peace Prize.