Hegseth Struggles to Explain That “Imminent Threat” From Iran

Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth went before the Senate Armed Services Committee on Wednesday to defend the mammoth $1.5 trillion budget request submitted by the Department of Defense. But under questioning from Representative Adam Smith of Washington, the Christian nationalist and noted drunkard struggled to provide basic information regarding the DOD’s main money pit: the ongoing Iran war.

Hegseth began by saying the U.S. wants to get Iran “to the table” and get them to give up their nuclear capabilities.

Smith noted that Iran doesn’t appear ready to do that, and that since the war started, Iran’s nuclear arsenal has “not been weakened in any way.”

“Well, their nuclear facilities have been obliterated,” Hegseth said, apparently referring to the Trump administration’s drone strikes on Iranian nuclear sites in June 2025.

“Woah, woah, woah,” Smith cut in. “Reclaiming my time for just a quick second here. We had to start this war—you just said 60 days ago—because the nuclear weapon was an imminent threat. Now you’re saying it was completely obliterated?” (Hegseth indeed justified the war back in March by saying Iran was close to having a nuke.)

“They had not given up their nuclear ambitions,” Hegseth said. “They had a conventional shield of thousands of missiles—”

“So Operation Midnight Hammer,” Smith said, referring to the June 2025 drone strikes, “accomplished nothing of substance?“

Hegseth began to waffle: “President Trump saw Iran at its weakest moment, took an action to ensure—in a way that only the United States of America could do, with our Israeli partners—to ensure their conventional shield was brought—”

“Yet they still haven’t given up their nuclear [capabilities],” Smith said.

Hegseth’s flip-flopping over whether Iran was close to nuclear weapons does not give one confidence in the officials managing this unpopular and unauthorized war. Adding financial insult to injury, the Pentagon also announced at the hearing that the Iran war has cost the nation a staggering $25 billion so far.

Pam Bondi may think that being fired as attorney general gets her out of a congressional subpoena, but the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform disagrees.

After missing her scheduled deposition April 14, Bondi will now testify before the committee on May 29, the committee announced Wednesday. At the same time, Democrats on the committee announced that they have filed contempt of Congress charges against Bondi, saying that she has “illegally defied our committee, skipped her deposition, and has refused to cooperate.”

“Bondi has extensive personal knowledge about the Trump Administration’s handling of the Epstein files, and regardless of her job title, her testimony and cooperation are crucial,” the committee’s ranking member, Representative Robert Garcia, said in a statement.

The Republican majority on the committee called the charges “theater and completely unnecessary” in a post on X, but stuck by its order to Bondi to testify.

“They were happy giving the Clintons a free pass for months,” the committee said, although President Bill Clinton and former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton have already testified before the committee. “We have secured Bondi’s appearance for May 29. Today, we’re marking up legislation to tackle fraud at the federal level and all Democrats can talk about is Epstein.”

Earlier this month, after President Trump fired Bondi, a spokesperson for the committee said Bondi would not appear for her April 14 deposition “since she is no longer Attorney General and was subpoenaed in her capacity as Attorney General.”

Until Wednesday, Republican Oversight Chair James Comer had drawn the ire of the committee’s Democrats for remaining silent on whether Bondi would testify, as well as for making drastic changes to the hearing process. It seems that he either was putting off the announcement until the last minute or was forced to announce a date after Democrats filed charges.

In either case, Bondi has a lot to answer for considering how the DOJ mishandled its files on Jeffrey Epstein on her watch. The DOJ’s Inspector General’s Office and the Government Accountability Office are both investigating the department’s rollout of the files. On Monday, journalist Katie Phang sued the DOJ for a “brazen, shocking, and ongoing violation” of the Epstein Files Transparency Act by failing to publish all of the government’s files on the convicted sex offender.

On Wednesday, the Supreme Court ruled 6–3 to render the Voting Rights Act obsolete.

Louisiana v. Callais was first brought to the court in 2025 by a group of white voters, who argued that a congressional map drawn to create a Black-majority district in Louisiana was unconstitutional. The conservative judges ruled that while Section 2 of the 1965 Voting Rights Act outlaws race-based gerrymandering, Louisiana’s map did not fit the bill, and in fact unnecessarily employed racial statistics when drawing borders.

Justices Elena Kagan, Ketanji Brown Jackson, and Sonia Sotomayor all dissented. In a scathing 48-page opinion, Kagan, joined by her fellow liberal justices, warned the ruling “demolishes the foundational right Congress granted of racial equality in electoral opportunity.”

“The Voting Rights Act is—or, now more accurately, was—‘one of the most consequential, efficacious, and amply justified exercises of federal legislative power in our Nation’s history,’” Kagan wrote. “It was born of the literal blood of Union soldiers and civil rights marchers. It ushered in awe-inspiring change, bringing this Nation closer to fulfilling the ideals of democracy and racial equality. And it has been repeatedly, and overwhelmingly, reauthorized by the people’s representatives in Congress. Only they have the right to say it is no longer needed—not the Members of this Court.”

Kagan noted the ruling functionally eliminates Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act, and allows legislators to wipe out minority districts whenever they feel like it.

“Under the Court’s new view of Section 2, a State can, without legal consequence, systematically dilute minority citizens’ voting power,” Kagan wrote. “Of course, the majority does not announce today’s holding that way. Its opinion is understated, even antiseptic. The majority claims only to be ‘updat[ing]’ our Section 2 law, as though through a few technical tweaks.… But in fact, those ‘updates’ eviscerate the law.”

Kagan continued: “A plaintiff will have to show—contrary to Section 2’s clear text and design—that the legislators were ‘motivated by a discriminatory purpose.’ That, as Section 2’s drafters knew, is well-nigh impossible.”

She concluded: “I dissent because Congress elected otherwise. I dissent because the Court betrays its duty to faithfully implement the great statute Congress wrote. I dissent because the Court’s decision will set back the foundational right Congress granted of racial equality in electoral opportunity. I dissent.”

Assistant Secretary of Defense Jules Hurst finally revealed the Pentagon’s estimated price tag for the U.S. military onslaught in Iran—and it’s a doozy.

“We’re spending about $25 billion on Operation Epic Fury,” Hurst said during a hearing before the House Armed Services Committee Wednesday. “Most of that is in munitions, there’s part of that obviously is [Operations and Maintenance] and equipment replacement.”

Hurst confirmed the Pentagon planned to develop a supplemental funding request through the White House once they had made a “full assessment of the cost of the conflict.” The Department of Defense has previously asked the White House for $200 billion for the war.

Washington state Democrat and Ranking Member Adam Smith, who’d asked the Pentagon representatives to eventually provide an estimate, appeared surprised to get such an immediate response. “I’m glad you’ve answered that question because we’ve been asking for a hell of a long time and no one’s given us that number,” he said.

As Trump’s military campaign in Iran has neared the 60-day mark, the Pentagon has neglected to deliver real cost estimates since it claimed to have spent more than $11.3 billion in the first six days alone. Every dollar spent on Trump’s war has come from American taxpayers, and was spent without congressional approval.

The American Center for Progress previously estimated that the war had reached a $25 billion price tag at the end of March. For context, the group estimated that with that amount of money, the U.S. government could for one entire year pay for Medicare coverage for 3,106,000 people, or provide 29,614,000 children with free school lunches, or shelter 3,147,000 people in Section 8 housing.

Instead, Trump chose to spend it on weapons, all while telling Americans there wasn’t enough money for childcare, Medicaid, or Medicare. For the amount of money the Pentagon has spent on this war, the government could have provided 1,780,000 children with free childcare for a year.

In the words of Dwight D. Eisenhower: “Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies, in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed.”

Justice Department attorneys are decamping from the Trump administration, leaving behind an enormous staffing void within the nation’s top law enforcement agency.

Thousands of experienced attorneys and staff have left the DOJ since Donald Trump returned to office, choosing a hasty exit over the possibility of being forced to prosecute unconstitutional cases at the president’s behest.

“What’s happening is long-term prosecutors are resigning because they’re refusing to go along with vindictive prosecutions, which are by their nature unconstitutional,” Stacey Young, an 18-year veteran of the agency, told MeidasTouch’s Scott MacFarlane. “In some cases, when prosecutors say no, they’re fired from their jobs for doing so, illegally.”

“And we’re also seeing people resign because of the culture those types of prosecutions create. So, the effect, the consequences, are devastating. The DOJ is losing countless lawyers because of it, the rule of law is being eroded, and the reputation of the department has really disintegrated,” Young said.

There were an estimated 10,000 attorneys working across the Justice Department before Trump returned to the White House. By September 2025, that number had been nearly halved: Justice Connection, an advocacy group that tracks DOJ departures, estimated that around 5,500 people (not all of them attorneys) had left the department, either by their own volition, by accepting the Trump administration’s buyout, or by being fired.

Just a fraction of those experienced employees have been replaced, causing a massive backlog of work. The immigration court system—which has been placed under tremendous pressure as a high priority within Trump’s second-term agenda—had a backlog of more than 3.3 million cases by the end of February 2026, according to data from the Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse. In reality, that means that the lives of more than three million people are effectively on pause as they await legal decisions that determine their future, either in or out of the United States.

The Justice Department’s hard-right shift into the MAGA agenda has sparked concern among those in the legal community, who have argued that the agency’s recent politicization has undermined public confidence in the country’s legal system.