Women’s Olympic Hockey Team Rejects Trump After He Insults Them

The U.S. women’s hockey team has declined an invitation to Donald Trump’s State of the Union address after the president was caught on video whining about having to invite them in the first place.

A spokesperson for the U.S. women’s hockey team—which earned a Gold Medal Thursday during overtime at the Winter Olympics finals in Milan—said that the players were unable to attend “due to the timing and previously scheduled academic and professional commitments.”

“We are sincerely grateful for the invitation extended to our gold medal–winning U.S. Women’s Hockey Team and deeply appreciate the recognition of their extraordinary achievement,” the spokesperson said in a statement. “They were honored to be included and are grateful for the acknowledgment.”

In a video of Trump’s phone call to the men’s team in the afterglow of their own victory Sunday, the president could be heard warning the players that he would be forced to extend an invitation to the women’s team to Tuesday’s State of the Union.

“I must tell you, we’re gonna have to bring the women’s team, you do know that,” Trump said as the entire men’s team laughed with the president. “I do believe I probably would be impeached.”

Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth is bringing in Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei into the Pentagon on Tuesday in an attempt to strong-arm him into lifting restrictions on the Pentagon using its Claude AI program for mass surveillance and unmanned weapons systems.

Claude has been the target of a federal push to make its AI tools available within classified networks—as it’s currently the only AI model available in that capacity. But this partnership is reportedly on life support, as the Pentagon is threatening to void Anthropic’s contract and deem it a “supply chain risk” for not complying.

“Just the DoD persecuting an up-and-coming tech company because they won’t want their product to be used to kill people,” one X user mused.

“Anthropic knows this is not a get-to-know-you meeting,” an anonymous senior Defense official told Axios. “This is not a friendly meeting. This is a shit-or-get-off-the-pot meeting.... The problem with Dario is, with him, it’s ideological. We know who we’re dealing with.”

Amodei has often cited his own qualms about the risks of his technology ending up in the wrong hands, even as he gifts it to Hegseth. But this upcoming meeting will reportedly be an ultimatum that either sees restrictions lifted or business taken elsewhere—a behemoth of a task given how deeply entrenched Anthropic’s AI system already is in the Department of Defense.

Jeffrey Epstein was arrested on July 6, 2019. Five days later, federal authorities told New York detectives to “stand down” in their investigations into the child sex trafficker.

Recently released documents from the Justice Department’s Epstein files reveal a new chronology of the events surrounding Epstein’s final arrest, Just Security reported Monday.

Email exchanges that took place between July 10 and 11, 2019, indicate that the FBI “directed” New York law enforcement to cease their Epstein investigations, including the New York District Attorney’s Office, or DANY, and the NYPD’s Special Victims Unit, or SVU.

“FBI reached out to NYPD leadership already and they were told that SVU has been directed to stand down and that all Epstein stuff needs to go to and through us. DANY could still try to go forward with their own investigators, so I think it is worth a call over,” reads one message obtained by Just Security.

Epstein died in prison in August that year.

The “stand down” directive circulated internally among several FBI agents in January 2020 with regard to investigating Epstein’s longtime criminal associate Ghislaine Maxwell and Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor, the former British prince.

“After our arrest was public some phone calls were made amongst NYPD brass and I’m pretty sure there [sic] investigation was closed and differed [sic] to us. I’m not totally sure of DANY’s involvement into that investigation or if they ever stopped. Our assumption was obviously that they closed anything they had after his death,” the FBI email reads.

“It may be an issue though if DANY somehow was continuing an investigation into Pri[n]ce Andrew or his best friend Maxwell. This is something we may want to figure out I’m hoping they are continuing to differ [sic] this case to us but we may not know without making a few inquiries.”

The concern was apparently over the potential for “competing cases” and internal anxieties that the public—and the FBI’s international partners in the U.K.—would be mixed up by news reports of multiple investigations from different agencies.

The Democratic National Committee’s secret report on why Kamala Harris lost the 2024 election has reportedly found that the Biden administration’s approach to Israel’s massacre in Gaza cost her key votes.

DNC personnel who worked on the report met with the pro-Palestinian IMEU Policy Project in a closed-door meeting, Axios reports, and the group told them that Biden’s and Harris’s support for Israel dampened support from progressives and young voters.

During the meeting, “the DNC shared with us that their own data also found that policy was, in their words, a ‘net-negative’ in the 2024 election,” Hamid Bendass, a spokesperson for the IMEU Policy Project, told Axios.

The report was deliberately buried last year, and now we can see one of the reasons why. The war in Gaza has divided Democrats, as well as the country as a whole, with many Americans agreeing with the conclusions of Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch, and a United Nations commission that Israel committed a genocide of Palestinians in the territory.

While Harris called for a ceasefire during the campaign, she avoided criticizing Israel or calling for any kind of decisive action to end the war, such as an arms embargo on Israel, putting conditions on the billions of dollars of U.S. aid to Israel, or withdrawing support for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who now has an International Criminal Court warrant out for his arrest over Gaza.

The 2024 Democratic National Convention in Chicago was noticeably absent of any Palestinian American representation and barely acknowledged the massive death toll in Gaza, seeming to purposefully sideline pro-Palestinian Democratic voices. Ahead of the 2026 election, pro-Israel groups are already spending millions in Democratic primaries. Keeping this report secret, and refusing to address the issue of unconditional support for Israel, would mean that the Democratic Party has learned nothing from 2024.

Surprise, surprise: Homeland Security Kristi Noem completely made up that far-fetched story about deporting a cannibal, multiple federal law enforcement officials told The Intercept.

Speaking to Fox News’s Jesse Watters in June, Noem recounted a terrible tale she claimed to have heard from a U.S. air marshal about a cannibal who tried to “eat his own arms” while being deported out of the country. Noem later repeated the story as she and Donald Trump toured “Alligator Alcatraz,” the president’s wetland-themed concentration camp in the Florida Everglades.

At the time, the Department of Homeland Security and ICE wouldn’t respond to requests to confirm Noem’s story. Now multiple federal law enforcement officials—including one from the DHS—are saying it’s a lie, The Intercept reported Monday.

“That is completely made up,” a senior federal law enforcement official told The Intercept. “That never happened.”

Two other federal law enforcement officials said there was absolutely no evidence to corroborate Noem’s story. One source told The Intercept that officials went to ICE’s Enforcement and Removal Operations division to ask about the incident. “There was no information about it. It never took place. It’s a lie,” the source said.

When asked about whether they believed the story actually came from an air marshal or the secretary, one official was certain that it had come from the secretary.

The story never sounded particularly true. When pressed for more details at the time of her original telling, Noem couldn’t summon a single one. “He said he was literally eating his own arms. That for him, he was, that is what he did. He called himself a cannibal, ate other people, and ate himself,” she stammered. She said the man was taken off the flight to receive medical attention and then put back into the system.

Noem had used the chronicle of the cannibal as an example of the “kind of deranged individuals” who were being removed as part of Trump’s sweeping deportation efforts.

There is ample evidence to suggest that a cannibal is not the kind of person the Trump administration is deporting. CBS News reported that less than 14 percent of the immigrants arrested by ICE during Trump’s first year back in office have charges or convictions for violent criminal offenses.

Noem’s fake cannibal is just one of the many dangerous lies being peddled by DHS—as calls for her resignation continue to mount.