Democrats Demand “Reckoning” With Probes Into Noem on Every Front

Democrats are preparing to launch investigations into Kristi Noem’s conduct at the Department of Homeland Security.

Noem was removed from her post Thursday by President Trump, who has appointed her as the newly created special envoy for “The Shield of Americas.” But now, Democrats in Congress as well as Minnesota Governor Tim Walz are taking aim at Noem for the widespread misconduct and lawless behavior at DHS under her watch.

“We need a reckoning with the fact that there were murders that took place under her watch,” Representative Jamie Raskin told NBC News Thursday after her removal. “There was mass violence and violation of people’s civil rights and civil liberties. There’s been intense corruption, and there’s been rampant lying in the courts and disobeying of court orders.”

“She abused her power. She engaged in corruption. She spent millions of taxpayer funds on a luxury jet fleet with beautiful bedrooms, and her masked federal agents killed Americans,” Representative Ted Lieu said. “We’ll definitely investigate anyone within DHS who violated criminal law.”

Senator Richard Blumenthal, the ranking member of the Senate’s permanent subcommittee on investigations, wants the panel to investigate Noem for perjury because at a hearing Tuesday, she denied that her aide and rumored boyfriend, Corey Lewandowski, had any say in how DHS handled its funding.

“Her firing doesn’t absolve her or relieve her of potential liability for perjury,” Blumenthal said. “We are going to pursue an investigation of the evidence that she lied, because it relates to corruption in the administration.”

Blumenthal sent a letter to Noem Wednesday pointing out that DHS records showed Lewandowski personally signing off on agency contracts, with DHS personnel seeing his signature at departmental approval. “There are criminal penalties for knowingly and willfully making materially false statements or representations to Congress,” Blumenthal wrote.

Referring to DHS operations in his state that left two Americans dead, Walz said on MS NOW Thursday, “I would just say at this time that former Secretary Noem should probably get used to spending more time in Minnesota because I have a pretty good feeling in the future she may be doing that because we have got to get accountability.”

Walz isn’t the only state governor who thinks Noem should face consequences. Governor JB Pritzker of Illinois said in a video statement, “I can guarantee you you will still be held accountable,” while California Governor Gavin Newsom posted on X, “Firing her is not enough.” With all of these officials looking to hold her accountable, Noem may spend the rest of Trump’s presidency trying to escape criminal charges.

On Thursday, Texas GOP Representative Tony Gonzales dropped his reelection bid in Texas’s 23rd district amid an ethics investigation into reports that he had an affair with one of his staffers who later killed herself. His primary opponent—and now de facto GOP nominee—is Brandon Herrera, who is going viral for being a Nazi apologist.

Herrera, a right-wing, pro-gun YouTuber who goes by “The AK Guy,” has plenty of troubling red flags.

On Friday, a recent podcast clip began circulating featuring Herrera joking about Adolf Hitler’s Mein Kampf.

“That’s my copy at my house next to a bunch of the German stick grenades,” Herrera said, showing a co-host a picture on his phone. “I got the 1939 edition printed in English, just because I thought it was wild that you couldn’t buy it on Amazon, but you could buy The Communist Manifesto and Das Kapital.” Mein Kampf is very much available on Amazon, making Herrera’s lazy and ahistorical equivocation all the more troubling.

In other past clips, Hererra has goose-stepped to a Nazi song, expressed affinity toward the white supremacist Dutch settlers who fought against locals and Communists in the Rhodesian Bush War, and referred to the Civil War as the “war of Northern aggression” while wearing a Confederate-flag shirt.

“I stand by it, this shit was funny as hell,” Herrera remarked on Friday, referring to the Nazi goose-stepping reenactment.

One man tied to a massive ethics breach and brutal suicide switched out for a man who has an unhealthy obsession with the far right and its weapons. Just another day in the MAGA-verse.

Immigration and Customs Enforcement are trying to deport a journalist covering immigration, in one of the most egregious attacks on freedom of speech under Donald Trump’s administration so far, Migrant Insider reported Friday.

Estefany Maria Rodríguez Flores, a reporter who’d been covering a series of immigration raids in Nashville, Tennessee, was headed to the gym with her husband Wednesday when her vehicle was swarmed by federal agents. Her car bore the name of her newsroom, Nashville Noticias.

The agents did not produce a warrant for her arrest, her attorney told Migrant Insider. They simply presented her with a Notice to Appear—the first of many steps toward deportation.

Rodríguez Flores, who entered the country legally in 2021 and later married a U.S. citizen, was in the process of applying for permanent residency. When her recent appointment with Immigration and Customs Enforcement was canceled and an agent was unable to find her name in the system, she got a handwritten note rescheduling her for a meeting March 17—in less than two weeks.

It wasn’t immediately clear where Rodríguez was taken.

“We don’t know where she is,” her husband, Alejandro, who is still in Tennessee with their child, told Migrant Insider. He hasn’t been able to speak to her since Wednesday.

The ICE detainee locator originally placed her in Alabama, but then she disappeared altogether, the outlet reported. She now appears to have been transferred to the Central Louisiana ICE Processing Center, where detainees have alleged repeated sexual assault.

Rodríguez is a reporter for Nashville Noticias, a local Spanish-language outlet that serves as a lifeline to immigrant communities most affected by the Trump administration’s sweeping deportation scheme. Rodríguez often reported critically on immigration policy, her attorney told Migrant Insider.

Her abduction follows the shocking arrests of former CNN host Don Lemon and local journalist Georgia Fort, who were reporting on a protest at Cities Church in Minnesota. In October, Mario Guevara, an Atlanta-based Spanish-language reporter, was deported after being arrested at a No Kings protest. Guevara’s removal was widely criticized as the first case of a journalist being deported in retaliation for their work under the Trump administration.

President Donald Trump on Friday demanded Iran’s “UNCONDITIONAL SURRENDER,” but what does that look like? According to White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt, that’s up to Trump himself and not Iran.

“What the president means is that when he as commander in chief of the U.S. armed forces determines that Iran no longer poses a threat to the United States of America and the goals of Operation Epic Fury has been fully realized, than Iran will essentially be in a place of unconditional surrender, whether they say it themselves or not,” Leavitt said Friday, in response to a reporter asking whether Trump means that “the regime has to fully relinquish control.”

“Frankly, they don’t have a lot of people to say that for them because the United States and the State of Israel have completely wiped out more than 50 leaders of the former terrorist regime, including the supreme leader himself,” Leavitt added.

It’s absurd to demand a surrender and then claim that “no, we will decide when you’ve surrendered,” but that appears to be the stance of the Trump administration at this time. Trump himself told Axios Friday that “unconditional surrender could be that [the Iranians] announce it. But it could also be when they can’t fight any longer because they don’t have anyone or anything to fight with.”

Reading between the lines, it seems that Trump wants to unilaterally decide when hostilities with Iran are over, and would prefer to inflict heavy damage on the country’s defenses first. But considering that the U.S. was apparently spurred to attack Iran by Israel, surrender may be moot as long as Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu still sees advantages in bombing Iran. Whether Iran “surrenders” or not, the bombings will continue until Trump and Netanyahu decide otherwise.

American forces are no longer capable of supplying missiles to U.S. allies amid its war with Iran.

Andrius Kubilius, the European Union’s defense and space commissioner, said Friday that the continent is facing a “huge challenge” in stepping up its defense production to adequately fill the gap left by the U.S. with regards to Ukraine.

“It’s very clear that after the Iranian crisis ... it became more urgent for us in Europe to ramp up production of air defense and anti-ballistic missiles,” Kubilius said in Warsaw. “Americans really will not be able to provide enough of those missiles, both for the Gulf countries, for [the] American army itself, and also for Ukrainian needs.”

For the winter season alone, Kubilius estimated that Ukraine needs 700 Patriot, PAC-2, and PAC-3 missiles, which he noted is “more or less equal to the number of missiles that American manufacturers are capable of producing in a year.”

Polish defense minister Władysław Kosiniak-Kamysz was in lockstep with Kubilius’s assessment, informing reporters Friday that the situation in Europe “is really critical.”

“It is clear that we are going to have to develop our missile production very quickly and very urgently,” he said.

Kosiniak-Kamysz noted that the U.S. will prioritize replenishing its stockpiles in the Middle East, adding to delivery delays to Europe, especially if the war drags on.

Military officials have stressed since Sunday that fighting Iran has already drastically depleted America’s missile defense systems.

In a closed-door meeting with lawmakers Tuesday, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth and Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff General Dan Caine reportedly said that Iran’s Shahed attack drones had proved a more difficult problem than initially predicted.

One source told CNN that the U.S. has been “burning” through long-range precision-guided missiles.

It’s not clear exactly how long the conflict is expected to go on. Per Trump’s own estimates, the war could rage for a few days, or several weeks, or “forever.”

So far, six U.S. soldiers have been killed in the conflict, as have more than 20 Iranian officials, including Ayatollah Ali Khamenei. Eighteen American soldiers have also been seriously injured. More than 1,200 Iranian civilians have been killed, including 176 children, dozens of whom were at a girls’ school in the country’s south.

On Friday, White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt told Fox News that reports of Russia giving Iran intelligence to target U.S. assets didn’t matter—a baffling answer given that Iran has already killed multiple U.S. service members in retaliation.

“We have confirmed reports from U.S. officials that Russia is providing intelligence to Iran to help it target U.S. assets in the region,” Fox News’s John Roberts asked Leavitt. “I’m sure this is something that does not please the president whatsoever. Has he spoken to Putin about it?”

“Well, look, I’ll leave that to the president to answer himself, but what I will tell you, John, is we don’t comment on intelligence reports that are leaked to the press,” Leavitt responded. “Whether or not this happened, frankly, it does not really matter, because President Trump and the United States military are absolutely decimating the rogue Iranian terrorist regime.”

Leavitt was quickly rebuked for the tone-deaf statement.

“Dear @PressSec: You need to apologize for your ludicrous statement. Why won’t you condemn Russia for helping Iran?” Representative Ted Lieu wrote on X. “Did the Russian intelligence info help Iran: Kill 6 U.S. soldiers? Hit 11 U.S. bases? Hit U.S. embassies and consulates? Hit U.S. allies?”

“It doesn’t matter if Russia is helping Iran kill US service members??” liberal podcaster Tommy Vietor wrote. “What is this moron talking about?”

Leavitt, perhaps hearing some of the criticism, attempted to clarify her position later that day, with support from the White House Rapid Response X account, which called the situation a hoax—but all Leavitt did was repeat herself.

“Why doesn’t it matter if the U.S. military is being put in danger by Russia? Is that what the president believes, as well?” a reporter asked Leavitt later that day.

“What I meant … is that it clearly is not making a difference with respect to the military operations in Iran because we are completely decimating them. As I said earlier, we’ve taken out nearly 30 of their ships, their navy has been deemed combat ineffective. Ninety percent reduction in ballistic missile retaliatory strikes against the United States and our Gulf Arab partners in the region.… The United States military is the best and most lethal fighting force in the world.”

Leavitt again did not directly address the report that Russia is collaborating with Iran.

The U.S. Army spontaneously canceled a training exercise for an elite team this week, raising concerns that the soldiers may soon be expected to deploy to Iran.

The headquarters element of the 82nd Airborne Division, stationed at Fort Bragg in North Carolina, pulled out of a major training exercise earlier this week. The brigade is a rapid-reaction paratrooper division, comprising up to 5,000 soldiers that are capable of deploying anywhere in the world within 18 hours. They are specialized in missions that include parachute assault, reinforcing U.S. embassies, and enabling emergency evacuations.

The rest of the 82nd Division continued training at Fort Polk in Louisiana.

Deployment orders had not been issued as of Friday, military officials told The Washington Post. The unidentified Army men noted to the Post that the division is expected to deploy a helicopter unit to the Middle East, a plan set before the war began, though that won’t happen until later in the spring.

Nonetheless, military officials are steeling themselves for the worst.

“We’re all preparing for something—just in case,” one official familiar with the issue told the Post.

A spokesperson for the Army referred the Post to a statement that read: “Due to operations security we do not discuss future or hypothetical movements.”

Talk of escalating the conflict with Iran has ramped up in recent days among chief White House officials, at times in a remarkably disaffected way. The president declared on Friday that he wants “unconditional surrender” from Iran, and would not negotiate a peace deal without it.

Republicans are discussing the potentially unavoidable reality of a U.S. ground invasion in Iran; meanwhile, Iranian officials have already said they are “confident” the country could counter a U.S. ground invasion.

When asked by Time if Americans should be worried about Iran attacking them on U.S. soil, Donald Trump responded: “I guess.”

“But I think they’re worried about that all the time,” he continued. “We think about it all the time. We plan for it. But yeah, you know, we expect some things. Like I said, some people will die. When you go to war, some people will die.”

The self-titled “peace president” has so far used his second term to sweep foreign cities, massacre foreign leadership, and indiscriminately bomb civilian targets, such as elementary schools in Tehran.

So far, six U.S. soldiers have been killed in the conflict, as have more than 20 Iranian officials, including Ayatollah Ali Khamenei. Eighteen American soldiers have also been seriously injured. More than 1,200 Iranian civilians have been killed, including 176 children, dozens of whom were bombed at a girls’ school in south Iran.

The conflict entered its seventh day on Friday. Trump has still not directly addressed the American people on the issue.

Trump administration officials scrambled Friday to explain away the latest horrendous jobs numbers, but couldn’t conjure up more than blaming the weather or fake numbers.

The Bureau of Labor Statistics reported earlier in the day that the U.S. job market had shed 92,000 jobs in February, meaning that the U.S. economy has lost 19,000 jobs since April 2025.

National Economic Council Director Kevin Hassett struggled on CNBC to summon an explanation for the “surprisingly negative” report that did not include Donald Trump’s disastrous economic policies.

Hassett blamed a spate of severe winter weather, a massive strike at a major health care provider in California and Hawaii, and a recent update to the BLS’s birth-death model that tracks the opening and closing of businesses.

He urged people to look at the average growth: “If you take the average over a few months we had a surprisingly positive one last month, and a surprisingly negative one this one, but on average it’s about what we expect to be seeing because immigration has gone down so much the break-even employment is probably in the 30 or 40,000 jobs a month range.”

The Trump administration has been pushing Americans to lower their expectations for job growth to reflect a labor market that doesn’t rely on undocumented immigrants. Trump officials have argued that a job market that used to produce 200,000 jobs a month should now be expected to churn out closer to 50,000.

In reality, the average labor market growth in 2025 was only half of what Hassett is selling—closer to an average of 15,000 new jobs per month. Meanwhile, five of the last nine months have seen job losses, indicating a policy-driven downward trend, not one caused by snow or strike.

But Hassett indicated that he was focused on pushing something else entirely: Trump’s violent and illegal efforts to steal oil from foreign nations as a sign that stability was on the horizon.

Labor Secretary Lori Chavez-DeRemer also tried to blame the “bad report” on weather and the strike, before just blatantly lying about the publicly available numbers.

“That has been resolved, so we’re hoping to see those numbers tick back up next month,” Chavez-DeRemer said on Fox Business. “But overall, we’ve gained 60,000 new jobs over the last two months.”

In reality, the latest report saw 126,000 jobs added in January, and 92,000 taken away in February. That’s just 31,000 new jobs. Either Chavez-DeRemer is too stupid to do the math, or she thinks you are. She’s currently under investigation for misconduct.

One of Elon Musk’s former DOGE minions has been tapped to run AI at the Pentagon.

In a post on X, the Department of Defense announced Friday that it was appointing Gavin Kliger, who worked at the Office of Personnel Management last year helping to purge the federal workforce, as chief data officer, “a role that places him at the center of the Department’s most ambitious AI efforts.”

“We are in a global competition for military AI dominance, and America must build on its leadership to extend our advantage over adversaries,” Kliger is quoted as saying in the post. “My mission is to integrate the unparalleled innovation of America’s private sector with the Department’s operational expertise to rapidly deliver advanced AI capabilities to our warfighters. By driving pace-setting projects with wartime urgency, we will ensure cutting-edge technology translates into decisive battlefield advantages for the United States.”

Kliger’s past with DOGE wasn’t pretty. He was assigned to the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau to help DOGE take over and dismantle the watchdog agency. Kliger happened to own up to $365,000 in stocks in seven companies that the CFPB regulated, including Tesla, Apple, Alphabet, Alibaba, and Berkshire Hathaway, as well as two cryptocurrencies. When CFPB’s lawyers told him this was prohibited for agency employees, he fired the lawyers.

Kliger also has a shady record on social media. Reuters reported last year that he has reposted content from white supremacist Nick Fuentes and misogynist Andrew Tate, and expressed racist views as well as xenophobic views about immigrants. Now, he’ll be working with AI as the Pentagon continues Donald Trump’s reckless war with Iran.

The DOD is already using AI to help plan airstrikes in Iran despite an ongoing standoff between the Trump administration and AI laboratory Anthropic. The firm is insisting that Claude, its generative AI model, not be a part of autonomous weapons systems and is seeking guarantees that Claude would not assist in the mass surveillance of U.S. citizens.

But now, someone who had few—if any—ethical scruples over racism, bigotry, misogyny, or purging government employees will be at the center of AI efforts during a war. Kliger will probably be happy to assist in bombing Iran without regard to innocent lives.

As more than 1,000 Iranian men, women, and children lay dead after days of bombardment from U.S. and Israeli missiles, the official White House X account on Thursday evening posted a video edit of scenes from popular action movies spliced with actual strike footage from their war on Iran. The clip, captioned “JUSTICE THE AMERICAN WAY” is the red-pilled, “America, Fuck Yeah” style of edit that an 18-year-old college Republican might repost on TikTok.

The video opens with a clip of Robert Downey Jr. in Iron Man 2 saying, “Wake up, Daddy’s home.” Hypermasculine characters like William Wallace, Maverick Mitchell, John Wick, and Superman make appearances. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth is also featured saying, “FAFO.” The clip ends with the “flawless victory” tag from the Mortal Kombat franchise.

It’s incredibly bleak to watch the Trump administration treat a war with real death and real suffering like it’s a video game.

“Hundreds of people are dead. Little girls are dead. Six Americans are dead. Others are risking their lives. Millions across the Middle East are terrified,” liberal podcaster Jon Favreau commented. “It’s not a video game. It’s not a meme. It’s not another chance to troll the libs. It’s fucking war.”

“Not only wrong, unbalanced, no comprehension [of] the horror of war,” writer Peter Oborne said. “This video is evil.”

“Quite simply one of the most disgusting things I’ve ever seen on here. Whatever you think of the awful Iranian régime, the White House treating bombing raids like a cheap video game is gut-wrenchingly shocking,” European journalist Alex Taylor wrote. “America, your country is going to hell.”