Democrats Demand Kash Patel Take Alcohol Disorder Test

House Judiciary Democrats want to force FBI Director Kash Patel to take the Alcohol Use Disorders Identification Test after The Atlantic reported that his drinking was “a recurring source of concern across the government.”

“There are numerous accounts that you consume alcohol to the point of illness, direct profanity-laced outbursts at support staff, and pass out drunk behind locked doors in episodes making you so unreachable that agents have had to fetch SWAT-level breaching equipment to awaken you,” the Democrats wrote in a letter to Patel on Tuesday. “These glimpses of your relationship to alcohol would be alarming to see in an FBI agent; for us to see them in the FBI Director himself is shocking and indicative of a public emergency.”

The Atlantic article is pretty damning. A litany of sources detailed Patel’s excessive drinking in private clubs across the country with White House staff, which often led him to push meetings for his hangovers and in one instance even forced the FBI to request SWAT-level “breaching equipment” because he was unresponsive behind a locked door. Patel of course has denied all of these allegations, stating that he’d never been drunk on the job and filing a $250 million defamation lawsuit against The Atlantic.

Patel has yet to respond to House Judiciary Democrats’ demand, which had a deadline of 5 p.m. Tuesday.

Do Donald Trump’s legal prosecutors know what they’re doing? According to the chief of staff for the former top MAGA prosecutor in the country: No, they really don’t.

As part of an article on Todd Blanche’s time as acting attorney general, CNN asked Chad Mizelle, Pam Bondi’s former chief of staff, why her “Weaponization Working Group”—which tried to investigate former government prosecutors Trump believed were politically motivated—never produced anything substantial.

“Part of the reason the weaponization work has been difficult is that you need people who are MAGA and who are really competent,” Mizelle said. “Many career prosecutors are not interested in this kind of work. It’s a very small group of people.”

Presumably this was said without a whiff of irony. The quote is a perfect encapsulation of one of the few joys one can take from our present political situation: Trump’s staff is simply too dumb to carry out most of their assignments.

Harmeet Dhillon, another Trump prosecutor who recently lost her fifth consecutive case trying to acquire a state’s voter rolls, gave CNN another doozy: “There are many prosecutors out there who are opposed to the president’s agenda and are not interested in doing the kinds of cases that are important to the White House.” Hmm, I wonder why.

Trump has weaponized the Department of Justice like no president before, using it almost exclusively to attack political enemies. CNN reports that doing this kind of work “took a toll on Bondi, who sources said believed that she was at times being asked to do the impossible.”

In fact, Bondi may have been unceremoniously fired because Trump believed she was going too soft on his enemies.

Bondi’s biggest failure in the eyes of the public was her handling of the Jeffrey Epstein files, in which the rollout of information on the convicted sex trafficker was repeatedly delayed. She told Fox early last year that Epstein’s client list was “on her desk”—before her department backtracked and said the list never existed.

After the files were released, some victims’ names were mistakenly left visible, while key information that might have actually led to some justice being done was redacted. No one has been arrested in the U.S. for involvement in Epstein’s sex-trafficking ring, even with tons of publicly available documents for use as evidence. And of course, there are also 2.5 million files that have not been released yet.

Blanche is continuing the Trump administration’s targeted legal agenda, releasing a report alleging that Biden’s DOJ was biased in persecuting anti-abortion protesters, and fighting to get a few Proud Boys off the hook for their January 6, 2021, actions. But like Bondi, he has not yet successfully prosecuted a high-profile Trump opponent. Long may the ineffectualness continue.

Employees at the Department of Homeland Security are weeks away from losing their paychecks.

Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin told Fox News Tuesday that the agency’s funding has all but run dry, 66 days into the partial government shutdown.

Donald Trump signed a memorandum earlier this month that authorized the release of $10 billion in emergency funds from the 2025 One Big Beautiful Bill Act, but that money will be gone by the first week of May. Mullin noted that between DHS’s 22 agencies, the department spends roughly $1.6 billion on wages every two weeks.

“So the money is going extremely fast, and once that happens, there is no emergency funds after that,” the DHS chief told Fox. “After we get through April … I’ve got one payroll left and there is no more emergency funds, so the president can’t do another executive order for us to use money because there’s no more money there.”

The only solution, according to Mullin, is for Congress to pass another funding bill. Republicans and Democrats have been in a stalemate for months, unable to reach a bipartisan consensus on how to fund DHS without tackling the myriad recent abuses by two of the department’s subagencies: Immigration and Customs Enforcement and Customs and Border Protection.

Shortly after federal agents killed Alex Pretti and Renee Nicole Good in Minneapolis, Democrats demanded 10 reforms to the two agencies as a prerequisite for ongoing funding negotiations. Those demands included line items that required agents to identify themselves, take off their masks, and obtain judicial warrants before forcing their way onto private property. Republicans refused.

The conservative caucus, however, is attempting to put forward a new funding package that would address DHS’s financial straits without diverting additional funds toward ICE and CBP. Last year, the two agencies independently received a total of $170 billion in Trump’s “big, beautiful bill”—more than five times their 2024 allotment.

President Trump announced an indefinite extension to his ceasefire with Iran Tuesday as it became evident that peace talks between the two countries were on the brink of collapse.

“Based on the fact that the Government of Iran is seriously fractured, not unexpectedly so and, upon the request of Field Marshal Asim Munir, and Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif, of Pakistan, we have been asked to hold our Attack on the Country of Iran until such time as their leaders and representatives can come up with a unified proposal,” Trump wrote on Truth Social. “I have therefore directed our Military to continue the Blockade and, in all other respects, remain ready and able, and will therefore extend the Ceasefire until such time as their proposal is submitted, and discussions are concluded, one way or the other.”

The announcement came shortly after Vice President JD Vance suspended his travel plans to Islamabad Tuesday to represent the United States at the table. One source told The Wall Street Journal that Vance pulled out because Iranian negotiators hadn’t committed to showing up to the meeting. Iranian Foreign Ministry spokesman Esmail Baghaei confirmed as much, telling Iranian state broadcaster IRIB that the meeting was called off due to “contradictory messages, inconsistent behavior and unacceptable actions by the American side.”

Iranian Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi added that the U.S. blockade of the Strait of Hormuz is an “act of war” and a violation of the ceasefire.

Trump has previously noted that the United States is prepared to simply continue bombing Iran again if no deal is reached, but his latest announcement shows he may be ready to admit he doesn’t hold all the cards here. Meanwhile, the U.S. has accomplished nothing since the war began, as the Strait of Hormuz remains closed and the Iranian government remains unwilling to concede on its enriched uranium.

This story has been updated.

Florida became the first state to criminally investigate an AI model on Tuesday, and Attorney General James Uthmeier’s charges could lead to big changes in how the technology is regulated.

Uthmeier, a Republican, launched a criminal probe into ChatGPT and its parent company, OpenAI, following a mass shooting at Florida State University that took place in April 2025.

Two people died, and six others were injured in the shooting, including at least one student. All of those injured have since been released from hospital, and the suspect, 20-year-old FSU student Phoenix Ikner, is in custody.

Prosecutors reviewed Ikner’s devices and claimed he spoke to the chatbot extensively. While Ikner does not appear to have been driven into “AI psychosis,” as some mentally unstable individuals have, he allegedly talked to the chatbot multiple times about the shooting.

ChatGPT “offered significant advice to the shooter before he committed such heinous crimes,” Uthmeier said. One message involved the suspect quizzing ChatGPT about a gun’s power at close range, and which ammunition was needed to load it.

On the day of the crime, Ikner allegedly asked the chatbot how America would react to a shooting at Florida State, and when the most crowded time was at the student union, the area of the campus where the shooting took place.

“If this were a person on the other end of the screen, we would be charging them with murder,” Uthmeier said at a press conference.

While Florida’s Republican Governor Ron DeSantis isn’t exactly a favorite of the left, he has been at the forefront of state AI regulation. DeSantis has asked the state legislature to come up with legal AI guardrails in a special session next week.

But the country’s executive branch has taken the opposite stance. President Donald Trump has pushed to deregulate AI and force states to comply with federal policy. We’ll see which GOP sect ends up victorious, but Florida’s leadership on the issue is a welcome development.