Trump Sends FCC After Disney as New War on Jimmy Kimmel Escalates

In the latest escalation of President Donald Trump’s beef with late-night host Jimmy Kimmel, the Federal Communications Commission is motioning toward an early review of Disney’s broadcast licenses, according to people familiar with the matter who spoke with Semafor.  

Trump’s crusade against Kimmel reignited after the television host joked last week that Melania would “glow like an expectant widow” at the White House Correspondents’ Dinner. Days later, a suspected gunman attempted to attack the event, launching the latest round of conservative pearl-clutching and suggestions that the gunman had gotten the idea to assassinate the president from late-night TV. 

The shooter’s supposed manifesto specifically referred to Trump’s lack of respect for Christianity, his decision to cut off funding for Ukraine, and the country being led by “a pedophile, rapist, and traitor” as primary grievances for his actions. Not Kimmel’s joke. 

But in the days after the shooting, Melania Trump, the president, and at least two members of White House staff have attacked Kimmel.

Some of the people who spoke to Semafor noted that it wasn’t a done deal and the FCC could still choose to back off from the review. 

Earlier this month, FCC Chair Brandon Carr publicly suggested that Disney’s broadcast license could be in jeopardy, after launching an investigation into Disney over its alleged efforts to promote diversity, equity, and inclusion. “If the evidence does in fact play out and shows that they were engaged in race- and gender-based discrimination, that’s a very serious issue at the FCC, that could fundamentally go to their character qualifications to even hold a license,” Carr told Fox News.

Disney and ABC have previously bucked the president’s wishes by reinstalling Kimmel after he was temporarily suspended for criticizing the conservative base’s response to Charlie Kirk’s death. Carr threatened the company’s licenses then too. Carr warned on a far-right podcast that if Disney and ABC don’t “take action on Kimmel,” they may see suspension of broadcast licenses.

The United Kingdom’s new ambassador to the United States told a group of British students visiting Washington that America’s only “special relationship” is with Israel, not the U.K. 

Sir Christian Turner’s remarks were leaked to the Financial Times, which reported the news Tuesday as King Charles III visits the U.S. this week. Turner met with the students shortly after his appointment in February, and during a Q&A with them, was asked about the U.S.-U.K. “special relationship.” He described the phrase as “quite nostalgic,” saying that “it’s quite backwards looking, and it has a lot of baggage about it.”

“I think there is probably one country that has a special relationship with the United States—and that is probably Israel,” Turner said at the event prior to the U.S.-Israeli war in Iran. 

Turner also told the students that it was “extraordinary” that the fallout from the release of the Jeffrey Epstein files had “brought down a senior member of the royal family, a British ambassador to Washington, potentially the prime minister, and yet here in the U.S., it really hasn’t touched anybody.”  

Turner’s comments are surprising, but reflect reality in that Israel receives billions of dollars in U.S. aid every year. The State Department has admitted that the Iran war came at Israel’s urging, and U.S.-U.K. ties have gone up and down through the decades for many reasons, including the Iraq War, Trump’s tariffs, and the Iran war. 

Regarding Epstein, the U.S. government’s release of files related to the convicted sex offender has shaken the British government under Prime Minister Keir Starmer, resulting in Turner’s predecessor, Peter Mandelson, being fired and Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor, then Prince Andrew, being stripped of his royal titles.

Turner’s words likely won’t come with any consequences, especially considering that Mandelson was sacked over his close ties to the notorious sex offender. But they do give an insight into what leading foreign officials think of how the U.S. is run under President Trump, and things aren’t good. 

Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche accidentally jeopardized the Trump administration’s entire case against the Southern Poverty Law Center.

In a motion filed in federal court on Tuesday, the SPLC highlighted “the government’s materially false statements,” specifically Blanche’s claim that the civil rights organization did not report to law enforcement information gathered by informants undercover in hate groups like the Ku Klux Klan.

“There’s no allegation or information in the indictment that suggests [the SPLC] shared [the information from the informants] with law enforcement,” Blanche said last week on Fox News’s The Ingraham Angle, in comments highlighted in the court filing. “There’s no information that we have that suggests that the money they were paying to these informants and these members of these organizations, they then turned around and shared what they learned with law enforcement. To the contrary, or else we would have known, from their own words, that they had given this money to these guys. And we didn’t know.”

But the SPLC claims that’s exactly what it did, documenting incidents as far back as the 2017 “Unite the Right” rally in Charlottesville and, as recently as this month, sharing detailed information from paid informants with federal law enforcement.

“Weeks before the indictment, undersigned counsel provided information to the government demonstrating unequivocally that the SPLC had shared information from its informants with law enforcement,” the organization wrote in its motion. “The government’s false statement is highly material to the charges. The indictment alleges that the SPLC was paying informants not to dismantle ‘racist groups’ but instead paid informants who were ‘engaged in the active promotion of racist groups.’ In fact, the prosecutors in this case knew of specific instances when the SPLC provided information to law enforcement to thwart, stop, or otherwise help dismantle the activities of those racist groups.”

This gaffe from Blanche—made publicly on Fox News—raises questions regarding the DOJ’s chances of actually winning this case, especially given its recent string of losses.

A federal judge is tapping out of the Trump administration.

Donald Trump appointed Judge Alan Albright in 2018, but last week, the Texas-based judge announced his sudden resignation, revealing that his time on the bench will come to a close in August.

The reason seems to be related to personal fulfillment: Bloomberg Law reported Monday that Albright had given “signs” that he “wasn’t enjoying the job” in the week leading up to his shock retirement.

In his wake, Albright leaves behind one of the largest backlogs of litigation for any federal judge. As of last September, Albright’s lagging pen accounted for 70 percent of the 129 civil cases that were pending in the Western District of Texas for three years or longer. At the same time, Albright had 446 undecided motions, approximately twice the number of any other district judge in the Fifth Circuit. His colleagues in Austin—Robert Pitman and David Ezra—had none, according to Bloomberg.

The 66-year-old also accounted for 63 percent of the 706 civil motions still awaiting decisions for six months or longer.

And that workload isn’t expected to lighten by the time Albright resigns. Instead, the federal judge is expected to push some of the unresolved caseload onto his staff and his successor, immediately hampering whoever is chosen to replace him.

“He has a huge docket that now the other judges are going to have,” Lee Yeakel, a retired judge from the Western District of Texas, told Bloomberg, “because it’s not going to go down appreciably by the end of August, no matter how hard he works.”

So far, over the course of his two terms, Trump has appointed 271 judges across the judiciary. But his recent grip on the judiciary—including a decision to fire and replace more than 100 immigration judges since he returned to office last year—has raised eyebrows and sparked uneasy questions about the governmental branch’s independence from the White House.

The Justice Department has opened a massive recruitment drive to fill the immigration vacancies. In doing so, the agency has tapped some 140 individuals who, for the most part, have no experience practicing immigration law. Instead, some of the newly hired judges include a divorce lawyer who has pledged to “fight exclusively for the rights of men” and believes that women are a “warm, wet hole.”

Other picks are a Minnesota attorney who backed the ICE raids in Minneapolis that resulted in two U.S. citizens being killed by federal agents, and a judge who denied humanitarian protection to a Serbian immigrant because he didn’t look ”overtly gay.”

The Trump administration has detained a staggering number of Cuban immigrants while denying them permanent residency, which could have consequences for Republicans in November.

The Miami Herald, citing an analysis from the libertarian Cato Institute, reports that ICE arrests of Cuban nationals have gone up by 463 percent since December 2024, while green card approvals have dropped by 99.8 percent, nearly ending the program for Cubans in the U.S.

Before President Trump’s second term, Cubans in the U.S. could easily qualify for permanent residence and green cards under the Cuban Adjustment Act. The 1960s law allowed Cubans to apply for permanent residency just 366 days after entering the U.S. But in December, U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services paused all immigration and citizenship applications, including green cards, from 18 countries including Cuba, putting more immigrants, especially Cubans, at greater risk for detention and deportation.

As of 2021, there are 1.3 million Americans of Cuban origin in the U.S., and 64 percent of them live in Florida. Immigration arrests have skyrocketed in the state but have drawn less attention than more publicized federal action in places like Minnesota thanks to agreements with local police.

Republicans count on Cuban American votes in Florida, especially in the Miami-Dade area, and about 70 percent of Florida’s Cuban American population voted for Trump in the 2024 election. But the end of immigration privileges and the sharp increase in deportations for the community is beginning to sour the community on Trump.

“The same Cubans who have been here for years don’t realize that Trump acts the same way as Fidel did,” manicurist Daimarys Hernández, referring to Cuba’s former dictator Fidel Castro, told Spanish news outlet El País in October. Her husband was awaiting deportation from the Krome Detention Center in Florida at the time.

The Trump administration is moving to radically expedite the removal of immigrant children, impeding the work of immigration advocates, CNN reported Tuesday.

Immigration hearings for children are being moved up by weeks or even months, making it increasingly difficult for children to obtain legal resources or relief. These are children who are either unaccompanied minors or are taken into custody after their parents are detained for immigration charges.

Children as young as 4 years old are subjected to frequent hearings and forced to provide updates on their cases, in some instances without legal help, CNN reported. Emily Norman, the East Coast regional director at Kids in Need of Defense, told the outlet that immigrant children were facing “enormous pressure,” leading some of them to wet themselves in court.

It sounds like advocates are facing increasing pressure too. Norman told CNN that a hearing for one child, originally scheduled for 2027, had been moved up to a week away.

At the same time, the Trump administration has made it increasingly difficult for immigrant children to be allowed to stay in the United States. Sponsors in the U.S. now face stricter documentation requirements and even risk arrest themselves. Another method of securing the children’s release in the United States is to acquire special immigrant juvenile status, or SIJ, a legal process that can put them on the path to receiving a green card if they have experienced abuse or neglect.

Steven Wright, a clinical professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison’s Immigrant Justice Center, told CNN that the process for that can take months. “In order to stop the government from removing the kids, I need to have that SIJ piece of paper. And they’ve given me a deadline that’s made it extremely difficult for me to get that SIJ piece of paper,” he said.

Immigrant children are often subjected to extended stays with the Office of Refugee Resettlement, or ORR, during which they can be subjected to all kinds of alleged mistreatment and abuse, either at government shelters or foster homes.

However, advocates are concerned that accelerated timelines wouldn’t mitigate harm and could result in migrant children being returned to the same conditions they fled in their home countries. At the end of March, there were 2,173 children in the custody of the ORR, and their average stay was more than six months long, according to the Administration for Children and Families.

Andrew Nixon, a spokesman for the Department of Health and Human Services, told CNN the department was “focused on resolving cases involving unaccompanied children as quickly and efficiently as possible, consistent with the law.”

“Many of these children are at risk of trafficking and exploitation, and in some cases are brought across the border by cartels under dangerous and coercive conditions. Moving cases forward helps disrupt those networks and ensures children are returned to safe environments as quickly as possible,” he said. “Reducing time in custody also lowers taxpayer costs and ensures the system is operating as intended.”

CBS News’s 60 Minutes cut out large portions of its interview with President Trump in which he rambled about his ballroom, how hot his Secret Service agents are, and how the No Kings protests are just like the Ku Klux Klan.

An analysis by Decoding Fox News revealed that many portions of the interview, which took place Sunday following the shooting at the White House Correspondents’ Dinner, simply never made it to air.

When CBS’s Norah O’Donnell asked Trump plainly why so many people seemed to want to kill him, Trump pivoted to his usual laundry list of accomplishments, like how the U.S. is the “hottest country in the world,” before going off the rails.

“They emptied our prisons into our country. They have mental institutions, insane asylums, into our country. And I don’t know if that’s controversial to say we have to move those people out, but we have and, but it is from the standpoint you’re doing something and you’re doing something that’s good,” he said. “Things like, men playing in women’s sports, I’m against it. Things like transgender for everyone. I’m against that. There’s so many things that I’m against. I don’t think they’re controversial. I think the other side is controversial, but I do a lot of things and I get things done.”

That wasn’t included in the interview that aired on the network. CBS also cut out the president’s massive rant against the No Kings protests. His broadcast answer was, “Well the, you see the reason you have people like that is you have people doing ‘No Kings’. I’m not a king. What am I, if I was a king, I wouldn’t be dealing with you.” His actual answer was much more troubling.

“You know, I’m not a king.… I see these No Kings which are funded just like the [Southern Poverty Law Center] was funded. You all that Southern Laws, financing the KKK and lots of other radical, terrible groups. And then they go out and they say, Oh, we’ve got to stop the KKK. And yet they give them hundreds of thousands and even millions of dollars. They work. It’s a total scam run by the Democrats. It shows you that, like Charlottesville, Charlottesville was all funded by the Southern Law,” Trump said—a completely outrageous claim given that neo-Nazis and white supremacists like Richard Spencer and Nick Fuentes were there. “That was a Southern Law deal too. And it was done to make me look bad. And it turned out to be a total fake. It basically was a rigged election. This was a part of the rigging of the election.”

Trump also claimed that CBS paid him $38 million in his settlement against the network for their editing of a Kamala Harris interview. They actually agreed to send $16 million to his presidential library.

“I’ve also won a lot of money from fake news media where they write falsely about me. And not that I want to sue people because I don’t. But I bring lawsuits against the fake news and brought lawsuits against your network, and you paid me $38 million because you did something that was so horrible with Kamala,” he said.

The edits CBS made here are severe, and depict a man who is much more petulant and incoherent than the broadcast would suggest. Read the entire transcript in full here.

New Jersey Representative Tom Kean Jr. has finally addressed the public regarding his multiweek absence from Congress.

“I want to thank my constituents and colleagues for their patience as I address a personal medical issue,” Kean said in a statement posted on X Monday evening. “My doctors continue to assure me that my recovery will be complete and that I will be back to the job I love very soon. I expect to return to a full schedule and be at 100 percent.

“I take my responsibilities seriously and have a strong record of showing up and delivering, which makes this absence all the more difficult,” Kean continued, thanking his congressional team for keeping his office in motion—despite his prolonged absence—and offering gratitude for the “patience” of his colleagues in the lower chamber.

Kean hasn’t voted on a single bill since March 5. Yet until yesterday, Kean and his staff never bothered to explain to his constituents why the 57-year-old lawmaker was missing in action.

The Garden State Republican only addressed public concern after members of his own party waged a small pressure campaign to make him speak.

GOP Representatives Chris Smith and Jeff Van Drew—also from New Jersey—were unable to make contact with Kean. Van Drew told Politico last week that it had been “radio silence” from their colleague.

New York Republicans were similarly stumped in their efforts to call and text Kean, while other Republicans—such as Representative Don Bacon—were completely unaware of their ally’s absence until they couldn’t find him on the House floor.

“I was looking for him,” Bacon said last week. “I didn’t know it was that long.”

Their efforts culminated in a call between Kean and House Speaker Mike Johnson, who subsequently explained late last week that Kean had been dealing with an unspecified “personal health matter.”

Kean was elected to represent New Jersey’s 7th congressional district in 2022, and is months away from being thrust into a contentious midterm reelection cycle. He is currently unchallenged in the Garden State’s Republican primary, scheduled for June 2, but is likely to face tremendous opposition from Democrats come November.

Over the last several months, New Jersey’s 7th congressional district has shifted from a “lean Republican” advantage to a total toss-up, according to an analysis by the Cook Political Report.

A federal judge has rejected the Department of Justice’s attempt to dismiss former U.S. Attorney Maurene Comey’s lawsuit challenging her wrongful termination.

Comey alleged that she’d been improperly terminated in July “solely or substantially” because her father is former FBI Director James Comey, a target of President Donald Trump’s reckless revenge scheme.

When she was terminated from her position at the U.S. Attorney’s Office in the Southern District of New York, the notice simply cited Article 2 of the U.S. Constitution, which “vest[s]” the “executive Power” in the president.

Rather than challenge Comey’s allegations outright, the Department of Justice argued that she could not bring her claim to federal court but instead needed to go through the Merit Systems Protection Board. That board was established by the Civil Service Reform Act, or CSRA, of 1978.

In a 27-page order filed Tuesday, District Judge Jesse E. Furman rejected the government’s motion to dismiss the case. “Comey’s case does not fall within the purview of the CSRA’s scheme because she was fired pursuant to Article II of the Constitution, not pursuant to the CSRA itself,” Furman wrote.

Furman ordered the government to answer Comey’s claims within two weeks, and scheduled a pretrial conference in exactly one month.

President Trump is facing opposition to his ballroom from within his own party.

Republican Senator Rick Scott of Florida doesn’t think taxpayers should foot the hefty bill for the White House addition, telling NBC News that the project should be privately funded.

“I don’t know why you would do it” using taxpayer dollars “if it’s all funded,” Scott told NBC. “We have $39 trillion in debt. Maybe we ought to stop spending money.”

Senators Josh Hawley and Rand Paul agreed.

“I think that the donors should all be public, but I don’t know why, if you’ve got private donors who want to do it ... I prefer that to the taxpayer being on the hook,” Hawley said. “But I think it’s a separate question as to whether we need to authorize it.”

“I am always conservative and he already has the money,” Paul told NBC. “And I’m not against putting in reconciliation and doing a nominal amount. I’m not for funding the whole $500 million. I think he’s already raised the money through private means.”

The opposition could jeopardize Trump’s plan to push forward his ballroom. On Monday, Republican Senators Lindsey Graham, Katie Britt, and Eric Schmitt announced a bill to provide $400 million for Trump’s 90,000-square-foot ballroom on the White House grounds.

Trump had initially said that the ballroom’s construction would be paid by private donations from corporations and wealthy individuals. Now costs have ballooned and the project includes an underground military installation, bomb shelters, and a hospital. Democrats are overwhelmingly against the project, arguing that it’s a waste of taxpayer dollars and needs congressional authorization.

“I have not seen a specific request with respect to the ballroom. But needless to say, we have to drive down the high cost of living. Life has become more expensive,” House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries said on Monday. “Not a vanity project that resulted from the destruction—that was unauthorized—of the East Wing of the White House.”