Nancy Mace Fails to Silence Claims She Made Staffers Buy Her Booze

South Carolina Representative Nancy Mace wants to claim that a genetic condition means she wouldn’t have sent staffers on late-night booze runs, but a former staffer is calling bullshit—and they brought receipts.

In response to a sweeping profile, including claims that Mace dispatched staffers on after-hours trips for alcohol, the Republican lawmaker claimed that she was physically incapable of drinking in excess.

“I have a lifelong condition called hemochromatosis, a genetic disease where my body absorbs too much iron. I can only get rid of iron by bleeding it out. So I have a lot of phlebotomies. Any and all alcohol makes it worse,” Mace wrote on X Tuesday.

Natalie Johnson, who previously served as Mace’s director of communications, was quick to point out that Mace’s claim was not only ridiculous but even worse than what was previously reported.

“Nancy Mace claiming she doesn’t drink alcohol might be the funniest, most brazen lie she’s told to date,” she wrote on X Tuesday. “The woman drank so much she’d have interns or junior staff run to Congressional Liquor during the work day so she could imbibe during telephone town halls.”

Johnson left Mace’s office in 2021, during a turbulent six-week stretch that cost the congressperson multiple staffers.

Johnson shared multiple photographs of Mace holding alcoholic beverages, and even looking inebriated in a separate X post. “Cheers!” Johnson wrote.

Johnson also shared Mace’s own X post from February 2025 celebrating “National Drink Wine Day.”

Members of Congress are explicitly barred from instructing their staffers to run personal errands, and staffers are not permitted to purchase alcohol for their boss’s personal consumption. One staffer has alleged Mace’s excessive drinking and marijuana use became an issue at work.

Ryan Routh, who attempted to assassinate Donald Trump at his golf club in West Palm Beach, Florida, in September 2024, was sentenced Wednesday to life in prison.

The ruling was handed down by U.S. District Judge Aileen Cannon, a Trump appointee who has a history of biased rulings in favor of the president. Prosecutors had been seeking a life sentence to “send a message that seeking to assassinate a Presidential candidate will result in the most severe punishment,” they wrote in a memo before the sentencing.

Routh had planned the assassination for months, prosecutors said, adding that he was willing to kill anyone who attempted to stop him and didn’t express remorse. Routh sought to have Cannon recuse herself from the case, citing her dismissal of Trump’s classified documents case in 2024, but his motion was rejected.

The sentence is not surprising, considering that Routh represented himself while on trial in September last year. He ended up being found guilty on all five charges related to the assassination attempt, and reportedly tried to stab himself with a pen moments after the verdict. Cannon’s response was to appoint a new lawyer to represent Routh.

Routh’s lawyer last month sought a reduced sentence of 27 years to “meet the need for punishment, provide the defendant with correctional treatment and provide for mental health treatment in a custodial setting.” Instead, Routh, who turns 60 in two weeks, will now spend the rest of his life behind bars to set an example.

This story has been updated.

Two Minnesota school districts and an 89,000-member teachers’ union filed a lawsuit Wednesday against the Department of Homeland Security, accusing federal agents of breaking their promise not to conduct raids inside or around schools during Operation Metro Surge.

“The Department of Homeland Security scrapped that policy without explanation, without using the proper procedures,” attorney June Hoidal told MPR News. “And that’s not how federal agencies get to act.”

The lawsuit, filed by Fridley and Duluth districts and the state teachers’ union Education Minnesota, claims that agents “conducted enforcement operations in or near schools and school buses, and detained minor students.”

It also refers to a January incident in which Border Patrol agents pepper-sprayed, tackled, and handcuffed people on the grounds of Minneapolis’s Roosevelt High School, just hours after ICE officers shot and killed Renee Nicole Good. “This conduct has caused direct harm to the regular functioning of school districts and teachers, as well as the students they serve,” it read.

“Right now, students are afraid to come to school. Parents are afraid to drop them off. Staff are coming to work wondering if today will be the day that something happens in one of our buildings,” Fridley Superintendent Brenda Lewis said Tuesday. “We are seeing attendance impacts. Families are choosing virtual learning, not because it’s best for their child, but because fear has taken over, and this fear is not perceived.… This is justified fear.”

The president has a new appeal for voters ahead of a contentious 2028 midterm election, and it comes in the shape of a violent slaver who never actually stepped foot in the continental United States.

Donald Trump is reportedly planning to erect a statue of Christopher Columbus outside the White House, according to a Washington Post exclusive published Wednesday. It will likely be placed on the south side of the White House grounds, close to E Street and north of the Ellipse, two people with knowledge of the plan told the Post.

The Columbus statue is expected to be reassembled from a Reagan-era piece that was erected in Baltimore in 1984. The statue was destroyed and dumped into the city’s harbor by protesters in 2020, leaving just remnants behind.

Those fragments have been stitched back together thanks to funding from a group of Italian American businessmen and politicians, as well as financial support from local charities and federal grant funding.

The White House refused to comment on the reported plan but affirmed its support for the Italian explorer.

“In this White House, Christopher Columbus is a hero,” White House spokesman Davis Ingle said in a statement. “And he will continue to be honored as such by President Trump.”

Columbus has been officially celebrated in the U.S. since 1934, when President Franklin D. Roosevelt designated Columbus Day a national holiday in an attempt to fold the country’s Italian American immigrants into early American history.

Since then, Columbus has been hailed as the first voyager to reach North America—despite the fact that he never actually landed here. In truth, Columbus’s four voyages all ended up in the Caribbean. Nonetheless, the fifteenth-century explorer is credited with initiating sustained European contact with the Western hemisphere, marking the beginning of the transatlantic slave trade.

Columbus’s legacy became hotly contested in 2020, when a nationwide debate on race swept the country, sparking questions as to whether the historically controversial colonizer’s myriad accolades should be revisited. In 2021, President Joe Biden recognized Indigenous Peoples’ Day instead of Columbus Day, marking a federal shift in the country’s relationship to Columbus.

Trump campaigned, in part, to bring Columbus Day back, and signed a proclamation in October in order to do so.

“We’re back, Italians. OK? We love the Italians,” Trump said at the time.  

Last month, Trump claimed that resurrecting Columbus’s positive memory could win over Italian Americans come election season.

“The Italian people are very happy about it. Remember when you go to the voting booths, I reinstated Columbus Day,” he said.

Among the many layoffs The Washington Post announced Wednesday was reporter Caroline O’Donovan, who covers tech companies and corporate accountability with a focus on Amazon, the company founded by Post owner Jeff Bezos.

O’Donovan, who had worked at the newspaper since 2022, confirmed the news in a post on X. Her last story, published January 28, was ironically about Amazon’s own layoffs last week that put at least 16,000 employees out of work.

The day before, she wrote about tech executives and their relationships with President Trump following the killing of Alex Pretti in Minneapolis by federal agents, notably beginning the article by mentioning how Amazon CEO Andy Jassy attended a documentary screening of Melania with Trump the same evening that Pretti was killed.

O’Donovan also recently traveled to Minneapolis to cover the Trump administration’s immigration crackdown there. Her coverage of Amazon seemed to have slowed slightly in the middle of 2025, but she was still writing about the company just prior to her layoff.

Ever since Bezos took over the newspaper in 2013, critics have raised questions about how the Post would cover his business holdings, chief among them online retail giant Amazon, and whether the billionaire would seek to influence the Post’s coverage. While the Post was criticized at times for failing to disclose Bezos’s ownership in some stories about Amazon, and its coverage of Amazon seemed to fall short in some cases, it never seemed to give the company a free pass.

That might change now that there isn’t a dedicated reporter at the Post covering Amazon. What also might change is the newspaper’s relationship with President Trump, which has softened considerably in Trump’s second term. One thing is for sure: One of America’s foremost newspapers is now considerably smaller and weaker than it was at the beginning of the week.