Karoline Leavitt Gives Up Game on Trump’s Fed Chair Investigation

It sure seems that the Trump administration is trying to pull a fast one on Senator Thom Tillis.

Just hours after the Department of Justice announced Friday that it had dropped the investigation into Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell over the renovation of the central bank’s Washington headquarters, White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt claimed that the case was still ongoing.

“The case is not necessarily dropped, it’s just being moved over to the inspector general who has critical tools at their disposal to continue to look into the financial mismanagement at the Fed,” Leavitt said while speaking to reporters.

As a member of the Banking, Housing, and Urban Affairs Committee, Tillis has repeatedly vowed to exercise his ability to single-handedly block Trump’s nominee to chair the Federal Reserve, Kevin Warsh, until the investigation into Powell is dropped. Committee Democrats are united in blocking Warsh, so Tillis’s single “no” vote can tip the scales.

Tillis has said he believes Donald Trump wasn’t behind the investigation into Powell, even though the president has mocked and threatened to fire him repeatedly. Tillis suggested instead that it was the work of “somebody in the DOJ” who was hoping to “maybe garner favor from somebody in the White House,” according to NBC News.

Leavitt didn’t even bother to pretend the president wasn’t behind the investigation. “This has obviously been a priority for the president,” she said. “So the investigation still continues, it’s just under a different authority.”

President Trump has offended U.S. ally India with his racist Truth Social post calling the country a “hellhole.”

On Wednesday evening, Trump posted a screed from far-right commentator Michael Savage railing against birthright citizenship, claiming Indian immigrants had poor English skills and that Indians in the technology industry weren’t hiring white Americans. Trump posted not only a four-page transcript of Savage’s remarks but a video as well.

Among Savage’s remarks was the line, “A baby here becomes an instant citizen, and then they bring the entire family in from China or India or some other hellhole on the planet.”

In a statement on Thursday, a spokesperson for the Indian foreign ministry, Randhir Jaiswal, wrote that Trump’s post was “obviously uninformed, inappropriate and in poor taste.”

“They certainly do not reflect the reality of the India-US relationship, which has long been based on mutual respect and shared interests,” Jaiswal added.

Indians in the U.S. were also offended.

“We are deeply disturbed by @POTUS sharing this hateful, racist screed targeting Indian and Chinese Americans,” the right-leaning Hindu American Foundation posted on X. “Endorsing such rants as the president of the United States will further stoke hatred and endanger our communities, at a time when xenophobia and racism are already at an all time high.”

Trump’s post came despite many Indian Americans being among his supporters, such as Ohio gubernatorial candidate Vivek Ramaswamy and FBI Director Kash Patel. But Trump has long railed against immigrants from what he has called “shithole countries,” making the remark in 2018 and repeating it in 2025. Those racist views are probably why he’s trying to overturn birthright citizenship and demolish pathways to legal immigration.

Just days into the fallout over The Atlantic’s reporting on his alleged drinking issues, FBI Director Kash Patel will now have to answer questions about a 2005 letter, in which he admitted to being arrested twice for public intoxication and public urination.

The letter, which was first reported by The Intercept, was part of Patel’s Florida Bar Disclosure Statement. Patel reported that his first arrest, in 2001, occurred while he was drunk at a basketball game as a student at the University of Richmond. He was escorted out of the game by campus police.

“Upon exiting the arena,” he wrote, “the officer placed me under arrest for public intoxication, as I was not yet of 21 years of age.”

The second arrest was while he was a law student at Pace University.

“We went to a few of the local bars and consumed some alcoholic drinks.… In a gross deviation from appropriate conduct, we attempted to relieve our bladders while walking home,” Patel wrote. “Before we could even do so, a police cruiser stopped the group. We were then arrested for public urination.

“Both of these incidents are not representative of my usual conduct of behavior,” Patel continued. “And it is my hope that the Board views them as an anomaly. I dually apologize for my improper behavior both to the Board and the community at large.”

While neither incident was particularly scandalous, they do not appear to have just been anomalies, as Patel said. The Atlantic’s Sarah Fitzpatrick has not only said she stands by her initial report about Patel’s drinking affecting his performance, but that she’d “been inundated by additional sourcing going up to the highest levels of the government, thanking us for doing the work, providing additional corroborating information.”

Patel has yet to comment on the letter.

The Department of Justice announced Friday that it will resurrect federal firing squads as part of an effort to implement Donald Trump’s day-one executive order to revamp capital punishment.

Trump’s order, signed in January 2025, demanded the attorney general pursue the death penalty on “all crimes of a severity demanding its use,” including murder of a law enforcement officer or any capital crime committed by an undocumented immigrant.

Under former President Joe Biden, Attorney General Merrick Garland had paused federal executions. Trump became furious when, before leaving the White House, Biden commuted the death sentences of 37 prisoners to life without parole.* The Republican kicked off his second term in office with a bloodthirsty decree for more death.

The January order made no mention of firing squads. Still, the DOJ said in its Friday announcement it had directed the Bureau of Prisons to “expand the execution protocol to include additional manners of execution such as the firing squad.”

Some view firing squads as more humane than lethal injection, which do not have a 100 percent success rate and sometimes require multiple doses. However, execution by firing squad can also result in prisoners slowly bleeding to death if they are not immediately killed by the bullet.

In March 2025, the Supreme Court allowed South Carolina to carry out the country’s first execution by firing squad in 15 years. Since 1608, at least 144 prisoners have been executed by firing squads in America, most of them in Utah, according to the Associated Press. Firing squads have not gained much traction outside of Utah because they are considered to be barbaric. Currently only five states—Idaho, Mississippi, Oklahoma, South Carolina, and Utah—allow the use of firing squads in certain circumstances.

* This article previously misstated Biden’s order regarding 37 prisoners on death row.

President Donald Trump’s attempt to ban immigrants from claiming asylum at the southern border was blocked in a federal court Friday.

The U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia ruled 2–1 that Trump could not deport immigrants “under summary removal procedures of his own making” or suspend their rights to apply for asylum, even if they cross the border illegally.

Cornelia Pillard, an Obama appointee, and J. Michelle Childs, appointed by Biden, ruled against Trump, while Trump appointee Justin Walker ruled in the administration’s favor. The three-judge panel upheld a ruling from U.S. District Judge Randolph Moss in July, who said that Trump’s January 2025 executive order ending asylum claims for those who cross the U.S.-Mexico border went against federal law.

“Barring foreign individuals who are physically present in the United States from applying for asylum and, if they make the statutory showing that they are eligible, from being considered to receive it cannot be squared with the statute,” Childs wrote in her ruling.

Last year, Trump adviser Stephen Miller railed against the lower court’s similar conclusion, calling Moss a “marxist judge” attempting to “circumvent the Supreme Court,” which is where the case is likely headed next. Asylum claims have plummeted under Trump, who has fired immigration judges and pushed mass deportations despite multiple defeats in court.