Secret Service Agent Punished Over Leaks on Vance’s Annoying Behavior

The vice president is losing faith in his personal Secret Service detail.

One of the Secret Service agents assigned to protect JD Vance was placed on administrative leave over concerns that he was leaking information to the press, CNN reported late Wednesday.

The action followed an intimate recounting of Vance’s recent travel by MS NOW, in which the news outlet reported that Vance’s Secret Service agents “groused” and complained about the vice president’s decision to use a military helicopter to take his son to a golf lesson at Joint Base Andrews.

“Agents have shared concerns internally about Vance and his office pressing them for trips and assignments that some agents consider an inappropriate or even unprecedented use of government resources compared to prior vice presidents,” MS NOW reported on July 15.

The Secret Service’s internal affairs department is reviewing the agent’s conduct. It is currently unclear if the agent will face administrative consequences or criminal charges, according to an internal source that spoke to CNN.

Donald Trump has been so fixated on internal criticism and media leaks that some of his administration’s counter-measures have tested the boundaries of the First Amendment. During his first term, Trump considered wiretapping the Homeland Security Department to identify the source of his bad press.

That attitude has only escalated in the years since—aided by the sycophantic behaviors of Trump’s new government entourage. Earlier this month, CNN reported that FBI Director Kash Patel and White House Chief of Staff Susie Wiles were personally overseeing a crackdown at the White House to determine who leaked that the ultra-luxury jet gifted to Trump by Qatar lacked the security specs to be considered for use in Air Force One.

So far, Wiles and Patel’s probe has forced government officials to hand over their phones—causing some agencies to pit their own attorneys against the White House—and issued subpoenas to four New York Times journalists that reported the story.

President Donald Trump is desperate to sell Americans on his landmark nuclear deal with Saudi Arabia that would loosen restrictions for the close U.S. partner.

In a post on Truth Social Thursday, Trump declared that there would be “no enrichment of material” as part of his nascent nuclear deal, which would allow U.S. companies to make billions building and running nuclear power plants in Saudi Arabia.

But surprise, surprise: That’s not the whole story.

The United States has offered Saudi Arabia a special deal that is reportedly far less restrictive than other agreements under Article 123 of the U.S. Atomic Energy Act of 1954—namely, this deal leaves the door open for enrichment down the line.

The Saudi agreement reportedly states that the two countries will conduct a two-year fuel cycle study on the economic feasibility of domestic enrichment in Saudi Arabia. If, after the study, the two sides agree that it’s feasible, then the U.S. would build an enrichment facility in Saudi Arabia. If not, Saudi Arabia would not be allowed to build its own domestic enrichment for 10 years, while blocking Saudi access to sensitive technology. If approved, the decision on whether or not to build would be made in two years—when Trump is still president.

Trump also claimed in his post that the agreement would require Saudi Arabia to agree to join the Abraham Accords.

Initial reporting about the deal suggested that the agreement would not require Saudi Arabia to recognize Israel. Unsurprisingly, Israel has voiced strong concerns about its closest ally cutting a deal with its enemy.

There are other reasons to be concerned about Trump’s deal. The president’s mishandling of nuclear negotiations is well documented, including his decision to detonate the U.S.-Iran nuclear deal struck by President Barack Obama, and the careless wording of last month’s memorandum of understanding between the U.S. and Iran, which shortly after crumbled in the Strait of Hormuz.

The BBC has hit President Trump with his third whammy in 24 hours—with the broadcast news organization this time renewing its demand for the release of records showing how Trump lost his “executive privilege” claims during former special counsel Jack Smith’s investigation into January 6.

The BBC noted in a reply memorandum Wednesday that it has already sent multiple “requests to government agencies seeking to obtain the same evidence the Special Counsel gathered and described as ‘evidence establish[ing] that the violence [on January 6] was foreseeable to Mr. Trump, that he caused it, that it was beneficial to his plan to interfere with the certification, and that when it occurred, he made a conscious choice not to stop it and instead to leverage it for more delay.” 

But the Trump administration rejected those requests, claiming executive privilege. The BBC demanded more information on how Trump lost those same claims during Smith’s probe.

“The government errs in characterizing the Executive Privilege Decisions as ‘information that might be incrementally helpful in litigating a potential future discovery dispute.’ Instead, unsealed decisions will likely be crucial to obtaining information that could be dispositive of President Trump’s lawsuit, as the BBC expects them to show that President Trump’s assertions of executive privilege have already been rejected,” the BBC wrote. “The Court should therefore further unseal the Executive Privilege Decisions and prevent the injustice that would arise from President Trump using already-rejected privilege claims to withhold such vital information.”

This all stems from a $10 billion lawsuit Trump filed last year against the BBC over a 2024 episode of Panorama that he claimed was defamatory because it spliced together sections of his January 6, 2021, speech, highlighting his call for supporters to “fight like hell,” while omitting his request for peaceful protest. If the BBC can prove that Trump was aware of the violence he was fomenting, his whole defamation case falls apart.

On Tuesday, a judge allowed the BBC to move forward with subpoenas against Trump’s closest advisers and confidants—like family members, Stephen Miller, and Steve Bannon—to better determine what Trump’s actual goals were on January 6. The judge also ordered Trump to hand over his financial records, opening yet another lane of exposure against the president.  

The Trump administration has canceled millions of dollars’ worth of federal grants to organizations running teen pregnancy education programs nationwide, suggesting that the widely effective underage pregnancy prevention services were inappropriately promoting premarital sex.

The funding did not align with the Office of the Assistant Secretary for Health’s outlined priorities, according to a government fact sheet that specified the office would not support “content that encourages, normalizes or promotes sexual activity for minors.”

One such organization interrogated by the assistant secretary—South Carolina nonprofit Fact Forward—was accused of including lessons with “advice on making condom use more pleasurable” and promoting discussions that normalize “use of pornography,” according to a copy of the letter obtained by The New York Times.

“That information was just not true,” Rena Dixon, who runs the group, told the Times. Dixon added that Fact Forward had never used the lessons or materials to which the assistant secretary referred.

Other program directors that spoke with the Times also said that the government had distorted the materials they were using in order to make erroneous claims about their education plans. Several noted that the grants they won required them to use “courses from a federally approved list shown by research to be age-appropriate and effective,” according to the Times.

The federal government first got involved in preventing teen pregnancy in 2010, allocating roughly $100 million to the cause and eventually creating the Office of Adolescent Health and the Teen Pregnancy Prevention Program, or OAH.

At the time, teen birth rates were already in decline, yet the program’s influence still caused rates to fall faster than ever. The government-funded programs advanced the waning trend by investing in proper sex education and increasing access to reproductive health care in communities suffering from disproportionately high rates of teen pregnancy.

But Donald Trump and his allies have nonetheless abhorred the effort. Last month, a spokesperson for Health and Human Services revealed that the agency had canceled 53 out of 67 grants—totaling $68 million—alloted to the pregnancy prevention program. The impact was broad, affecting more than two dozen states across the country.

It’s unclear if the effort will hold up in court. Trump took similar actions during his first term, suddenly canceling dozens of grants issued under the Obama-era program in 2017, though his efforts did not succeed.

In April 2018, Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson—then a U.S. district judge—ruled that HHS had violated its own regulations by prematurely ending the grants without an adequate explanation, ordering the agency to restore the terminated funds.

The Presidential 1776 Award competition was set up by the Trump administration to honor America’s 250th birthday with a civics contest for high school students.

But the family of 15-year-old Aangad Singh believes he may have been kept out of the competition’s final because of his Sikh background and visible turban, NOTUS reports.

Singh, a rising high school junior who lives in Connecticut, entered the competition in February just like other high school students around the country. He scored well enough to reach the finals in Washington, D.C., at the end of June and make the final eight. But his elimination after that left his family—and many of his competitors—puzzled.

The Singh family didn’t think Aangad had performed poorly, but there wasn’t a live scoreboard. Other contestants told them after the competition that they were sure Aangad had won and were shocked that he wasn’t in the top three. When Aangad’s mother, Ramandeep, asked an official with the Department of Education, which helped run the contest, for the final scores, the official told her that was proprietary information.

So the Singh family waited until the competition was televised on CBS three weeks later, and Aangad was shocked to learn some of his correct answers were labeled wrong.

In one instance, Aangad was asked to give four examples where federal courts have jurisdiction, as outlined in Article 3 of the Constitution.

Two of his answers—“Parties of state and citizens of another state,” and “Case with state and foreign nation”—were marked wrong. He showed his father a copy of the Constitution proving that his answers were right.

In another instance, during a lightning round, Aangad was asked, “Which amendment ended slavery?” and his answer was marked wrong. Initially, he thought his pronunciation of “Thirteenth” was bad and that his th sounded like an f. But he was reassured when the TV subtitles proved that he said the correct answer.

After the round ended, each contestant was interviewed by host Mario Lopez before he announced the three finalists, and Aangad gave an answer about being proud to share his knowledge about the country’s founding principles. Then he watched white contestants from Michigan, Washington, and Wyoming announced as the winners.

Singh’s family thought that he was robbed, and weighed taking action. To his mother and uncle, it seemed like Aangad was being kept out of the spotlight—and a visit to the Oval Office to meet President Trump—because he was a brown kid with a turban. They didn’t care as much about getting a share of the $250,000 in scholarship money as much as Aangad being recognized for his hard work.

The Wyoming winner was a homeschooled girl who would later be touted by the Department of Education for culture-war propaganda, and the Washington state winner told Trump at the White House that she wanted to attend Hillsdale College, a politically conservative school, to which Trump said he could give a recommendation.

Aangad’s father, Bhalindar, reached out to the Department of Education twice by email, but has yet to get a response. The department told NOTUS that the questions in the competition were “developed, judged, and scored independently by the James Madison Memorial Fellowship Foundation.” NOTUS sent the foundation a detailed list of questions, but also hasn’t heard back.

Minutes before NOTUS’s deadline, the Department of Education responded, saying that the competition’s rules stated that judges would “exercise independent good faith judgement [sic]” in selecting finalists and winners, and that, by participating, contestants “agree that the decision of the judges is final and binding.”