Democrats Are Pissed After DOJ Attempt to Indict Them

The Department of Justice tried and failed to indict Democrats in Congress who made a video urging troops not to obey illegal orders. Now the legislators are triumphant, but also furious. 

A federal grand jury on Tuesday refused to indict the members of Congress in the video: Representative Jason Crow, Senator Mark Kelly, Representative Maggie Goodlander, Senator Elissa Slotkin, Representative Chris Deluzio, and Representative Chrissy Houlahan. It’s not clear if all the lawmakers or only some of them were referred to the grand jury, but they’re all pissed.

“Tonight we can score one for the Constitution, our freedom of speech, and the rule of law,” Slotkin said in a post on X Tuesday.  

Kelly, a former Navy captain who has also been targeted by Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, called the attempted indictment an “outrageous abuse of power.”  

“It wasn’t enough for Pete Hegseth to censure me and threaten to demote me, now it appears they tried to have me charged with a crime—all because of something I said that they didn’t like. That’s not the way things work in America,” the Arizona senator said in a statement. 

On X, Deluzio said, “I will not be intimidated for a single second by the Trump Administration or Justice Department lawyers who tried and failed to indict me today.” 

Crow said that Americans “should be appalled by the fact that Donald Trump and his goons at Department of Justice and everywhere else are weaponizing their justice system just to try to silence dissent and to crush political opponents.” 

“Not only should Americans be angry at that—they have chosen the wrong people. If these fuckers think that they’re going to intimidate us and threaten and bully me into silence, and they’re going to go after political opponents and get us to back down, they have another thing coming,” Crow said, adding that the “tide is turning” with Americans “rising up against the corruption and the rank abuse of this administration.” 

In a statement on X, Houlahan said, “This is good news for the Constitution and the free speech protections it guarantees. The grand jury upheld the rule of law—this is a win for all Americans.” 

Goodlander vowed in a statement that “no matter the threats, I will keep doing my job and upholding my oath to our Constitution.” 

President Trump had accused the lawmakers of sedition “punishable by death” simply for exercising their First Amendment rights. Now it seems that he and the DOJ wanted to prosecute them as some kind of petty attempt to prevent criticism of his administration’s disregard for the law. While it failed this time, how much further will Trump go in breaking the law and punishing those who point it out? 

The Federal Aviation Administration will now reopen the El Paso Texas Airport and surrounding airspace, after initially planning to close it for 10 days, a bizarre reversal of an even more bizarre move that would have a massive negative impact on the communities and businesses in the region.

“The temporary closure of airspace over El Paso has been lifted,” the FAA wrote on X Wednesday morning. “There is no threat to commercial aviation. All flights will resume as normal.”

But the FAA had just said late Tuesday that the flight restrictions were being imposed for “special security reasons.”

A Trump administration official told NBC News on Wednesday that the planned 10-day closure was actually because Mexican cartel drones had entered U.S. airspace, but they have since been disabled.

There has been no additional explanation for the decision—or the sudden reversal—but there were multiple theories about why Trump’s FAA would halt all aviation activity above this southern border town of 700,000.

Other possibilities that were floated included a planned military action or exercise, a credible security threat, or a very sensitive package or person that needed to be transported.

“Important context: the El Paso TFR is not like the 9/11 nationwide airspace shutdown. DC & NY restrictions were created later,” CNN’s Pete Muntean said. “A ban on all flights over a U.S. city—including medevac and police helicopters—has no modern precedent.”

What could have merited shutting down a major airport—and a hub of U.S.-Mexico trade—for 10 whole days?

“The highly consequential decision by FAA to shut down the El Paso Airport for 10 days is unprecedented and has resulted in significant concern within the community,” said Representative Veronica Escobar, who represents the El Paso region. “From what my office and I have been able to gather overnight and early this morning there is no immediate threat to the community or surrounding areas.”

This story has been updated.

Yet another member of the American Olympic team has chosen to call out the state-sponsored violence taking place back home.

Richard Ruohonen—a member of the U.S. curling team from Minnesota—separated his love for his countrymen from the government Tuesday, telling reporters that while he’s “proud to represent Team USA” and the country, he did not condone the actions of ICE and the rest of the Trump administration in his home state.

“What’s happening in Minnesota is wrong,” Ruohonen said, citing the Bill of Rights and his 28 years of experience as an attorney. “There’s no shades of gray. It’s clear.

“I really love what’s been happening there now, with people coming out, showing the love, the compassion, integrity, and respect for others that they don’t know, and helping them out. And we love Minnesota for that,” he continued. “I want to make it clear: We are out here, we love our country. We’re playing for the U.S., we’re playing for Team USA, and we’re playing for each other, and we’re playing for our family and our friends that sacrificed so much to get here today.

“What the Olympics means is excellence, respect, friendship. And we all, I think, exemplify that,” Ruohonen added. “And we are playing for the people of Minnesota and the people around the country who share those same values, that compassion, that love, and that respect.”

In standing up to address the injustices taking place across America, Ruohonen effectively placed a target on his back. Within minutes, MAGA-aligned social media influencers were busy tearing him apart, arguing that Ruohonen should stay in Italy, that there should be censors placed on the U.S team, and that the curling team’s sponsors should be boycotted.

But he’s not the first U.S. athlete to announce their discontent with the state of the country. On Sunday, Donald Trump referred to Olympic freestyle skier Hunter Hess as a “loser” after Hess candidly expressed to reporters that he had “mixed emotions” representing the U.S. in the current climate.

“It’s a little hard; there’s obviously a lot going on that I’m not the biggest fan of, and I think a lot of people aren’t,” Hess said at a news conference Friday. “I think for me it’s more I’m representing my friends and family back home … all the things I believe are good about the U.S.”

Hess’s teammate, Chris Lillis, took his criticism a step further.

“I feel heartbroken about what’s happened in the United States. I’m pretty sure you’re referencing ICE and some of the protests,” Lillis said. “I think that, as a country, we need to focus on respecting everybody’s rights and making sure that we’re treating our citizens, as well as anybody, with love and respect.… I hope that when people look at athletes [competing] in the Olympics, they realize that that’s the America that we’re trying to represent.”

Representative Jamie Raskin has claimed that President Trump is named over a million times in the unredacted Epstein files.

“The idea that we could get through a meaningful fraction of them is just ridiculous,” he told Axios Tuesday, after viewing the unredacted files a day earlier. “I mean, there’s tons of redacted stuff.… And [Trump’s] name, I think I put his name, and it appears more than a million times. So it’s all over the place.

“To me, this whole rollout of saying that members can come from nine to five to sit at those four computers, is just part of the coverup,” Raskin continued.

“If this is true, it would mean the Department of Justice redacted more than 96% of the mentions of Trump,” MS NOW’s Matt Fuller wrote.

“Unfortunately the GOP set the line for removal at 2 million mentions,” New York Governor Kathy Hochul’s press office quipped.

The DOJ’s release of the files has been extremely contentious, as it redacted the names of multiple associates and potential co-conspirators of Epstein for no apparent reason, while revealing identifying information about the victims.

One of the more notable files that Raskin and other Democrats who viewed the unredacted files have pointed to is an email chain between Epstein and his primary accomplice, Ghislaine Maxwell, in which Epstein details a phone call between his lawyers and Trump.

“Trump is paraphrased and quoted as saying, ‘No, Jeffrey Epstein was not a member of Mar-a-Lago, but he was a guest at Mar-a-Lago, and no, we never asked him to leave,’” Raskin told reporters on Monday. The exchange is from 2009—two years after Trump supposedly kicked Epstein out of Mar-a-Lago.

A 23-year-old British woman was reportedly shot and killed by her father after arguing with him about Donald Trump.

New testimony offered as part of a coroner’s inquest Tuesday shed more light on the death of Lucy Harrison, who was fatally shot in January last year while visiting her father, Kris Harrison, in a suburb outside of Dallas.

Lucy Harrison’s boyfriend, Sam Littler, who had traveled with her to Texas for the holidays, told an inquest at Cheshire Coroner’s Court that the day the couple was expected to return to the United Kingdom, Harrison and her father got into “quite a big argument.”

He noted that Harrison’s father had previously been to rehab for alcohol abuse issues and that Lucy would often get upset with her father over his gun ownership. But their argument on January 10, 2025, wasn’t about guns—it was about Trump.

Littler recounted that Harrison had asked her father: “How would you feel if I was the girl in that situation and I’d been sexually assaulted?”

Harrison’s father replied that it wouldn’t upset him much considering that he had two other daughters who lived with him, Littler recalled.

A few hours later, Harrison’s father led her into the ground floor bedroom—and then Littler heard a loud bang. “I remember running into the room and Lucy was lying on the floor near the entrance to the bathroom and Kris was just screaming, just sort of nonsense,” Littler said.

It’s not entirely clear what specific “situation” Harrison was referring to in her argument with her father, but Trump has been accused of sexual misconduct by so many women, he once tried to to defend himself by invoking his high rate of accusations after he was found liable for sexual abuse. Trump has also appeared tens of thousands of times in the most recent release of Epstein files.

Harrison’s father was not present at the inquest Tuesday, but in a statement sent to court, he claimed that he’d relapsed on alcohol, drinking an entire bottle of white wine. He claimed that he’d been inspired to show his daughter his Glock 9mm semiautomatic handgun after the two had watched a news segment about gun crime.

“As I lifted the gun to show her I suddenly heard a loud bang. I did not understand what had happened. Lucy immediately fell,” he said. American authorities have previously said they did not intend to press charges related to Harrison’s death.

If Harrison’s death was indeed the result of their earlier argument about Trump, it wouldn’t be the first time the president has been invoked by someone committing or threatening a violent act.