Leaked Texts Expose Max Miller’s Habit of Holding Child’s Toy Hostage

Ohio Representative Max Miller has denied holding a little blue bunny hostage—but a series of messages shows the alleged abuser has a pattern of stealing his two-year-old daughter’s toy.

Miller has been accused of physically abusing his ex-wife Emily Moreno, daughter of Senator Bernie Moreno, for years. Amid the many abuse allegations against Miller, the lawmaker has taken the time to refute one distressing detail about his relationship with his daughter.

Speaking to the press Monday, Senator Moreno claimed that over the weekend, Miller had refused to return his daughter’s blue bunny. “This girl is crying at night because she can’t sleep without her little blue bunny. His answer is ‘I’m just not gonna give it to you,’” Moreno said.

“This is the level of total and complete depravity,” he added.

Miller denied withholding his daughter’s beloved bunny, claiming that he’d scheduled it to be picked up from his mailbox through the family’s parental coordinator, Dr. Deborah Koricke.

However, a series of screenshotted messages obtained by Mother Jones’s Abby Vesoulis suggest that Miller has a history of keeping the blue bunny hostage.

In one email dated March 19, 2025, Emily Moreno begged Miller to return the toy. “Can [redacted] please have her bunny back? She’s had it since birth, sleeps with it every night, carries it with her around the house, and sees it as a source of comfort,” Moreno wrote.

She also urged Miller not to “punish” their daughter because he was upset with his ex-wife.

In a text message exchange from May, Senator Moreno asked if the bunny had been left behind, and Miller replied that the family could go through the parent coordinator to retrieve it. “I have no notes or record of what you are referring to,” Miller added.

“It’s the blue bunny she sleeps with, but got it,” Moreno said.

In an email from August 3 (right after the weekend Senator Moreno mentioned), Moreno’s attorney reached out to Miller’s lawyers in an attempt to have the bunny returned. “Why must this be a controversy? This is totally ridiculous. Please have Max return the bunny forthwith,” the attorney wrote.

In another text message from an unknown date, the family’s parent coordinator claimed that Miller “adamantly refuses” to leave the toy in the mailbox for Senator Moreno to retrieve.

The blue bunny-napping is bad, but the rest is worse.

Moreno has accused Miller of assaulting her, throwing a pot of boiling water on her, holding a gun to her head, and breaking their daughter’s collarbone. This week, Miller defended accidentally sharing a nude image of his daughter as part of his efforts to exonerate himself.

The $400 million luxury jumbo jet that the Qatari royal family gifted President Trump may not go to his presidential library after all.

The New York Times reported Wednesday that the Trump administration and others involved in his library planning don’t currently have plans to move the Qatari jet into Trump’s upcoming presidential library, contradicting what the president said last year.

“It would go directly to the library after I leave office,” Trump said in May 2025. “I wouldn’t be using it. No.”

This plane has been the subject of controversy from the moment it was gifted. Trump insisted that at the time it was a gift for the Department of Defense, not him personally. Then the jet required millions of dollars of upgrades to make it safe enough to serve as the new Air Force One—so much so that Trump ended up ditching the plane in the United Kingdom last month, claiming that he wanted U.S. soldiers stationed in Europe to get a good look at it. In reality, the new jet was left behind over security concerns regarding its lesser defensive, command, and control capabilities.

With all of this in mind, if this massively expensive “gift” that taxpayers helped upgrade won’t be going to Trump’s library, where will it be going? The best guess is that he’s planning on keeping a plane gifted to him by a foreign government for personal use.

The Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee voted 8–5 along party lines Thursday to hold Dr. Anthony Fauci in contempt of Congress.

The former director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases repeatedly pleaded the Fifth Amendment during his congressional appearance last week.

“There will be repercussions for your refusal to testify,” warned Committee Chair Senator Rand Paul at the time. Paul has long sought to punish Fauci for his role in overseeing America’s response to the Covid-19 pandemic.

Fauci testified before Congress countless times over the course of his 38-year career atop the health agency. He advised seven U.S. presidents over that time, and oversaw research on a range of issues including HIV/AIDS, Ebola, influenza, Zika, and finally, the coronavirus.

Paul charged Fauci with lying to Congress during a July 2023 hearing on Covid. Paul’s claim was never proven, and the issue was eventually wiped away via a pardon to Fauci issued by former President Joe Biden.

Last month, House Oversight Committee Chairman James Comer warned Fauci that the pardon would not cover his latest congressional hearing. He then posted hundreds of pages from Fauci’s pandemic-era diary to his website, summarizing the unredacted collection with a conspiratorial slant and a pink pen, which Fauci said was “aimed at embarrassing and intimidating” him.

Exactly what comes next for Fauci is not clear, even to the Republicans trying to charge him.

“There is not a lot of precedent for a lot of this, but it isn’t law so there isn’t any exact procedure that it has to follow,” Paul told CNN on Tuesday. “It’s a referral, it’s a recommendation.”

Thursday’s decision will likely be passed along to Vice President JD Vance, who as the de facto president of the Senate will need to sign off on the atypical request. It’ll then be passed to the Justice Department, which will determine on its own accord whether to bring formal charges against Fauci. But legal experts have already warned that the charges are unlikely to succeed in court.

If the DOJ moves in that direction, it will likely boil down to a long, tumultuous legal battle.

This story has been updated.

President Donald Trump is crashing out about a report that he confronted Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth over the U.S. military’s depleted munitions stockpile.

Trump took to Truth Social less than an hour into Thursday to hit back at The Washington Post for reporting that tensions between Hegseth and the president had “boiled over” on the sidelines of a Cabinet meeting at Camp David last week.

“The U.S. has massive amounts of ‘munitions,’ especially of certain types,” Trump wrote. “Additionally, large amounts are being manufactured and shipped to the U.S. as needed. Defense companies are building the largest number of plants and factories in our country’s history.”

“The ‘leakers’ of these treasonous statements are being hunted down. Long term jail sentences will be sought!” Trump wrote. Notably, Trump didn’t deny unloading on Hegseth.

This isn’t the first time the Trump administration has challenged reports that the country’s weapons stockpile is low, and still managed to threaten the leakers with jail time. If the story is false, then why would it be treasonous to tell it?

The shortages of long-range guided missiles and air-defense interceptors caused Trump to pull back from launching any massive strikes against Iran, one source familiar with discussions told the Post. On Monday, the president claimed he’d changed his mind about launching “the biggest attack since World War II.”

Meanwhile, White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt insisted that the confrontation “literally never happened,” but didn’t respond to the claims about the U.S. weapons stockpile.

“This B.S. story was shopped to many outlets by someone clearly out to disparage the Secretary, for whatever reason. Unfortunately for them, the President loves the Secretary and thinks he’s doing a tremendous job. FAKE NEWS!” she wrote on X.

Assistant Secretary of Defense Sean Parnell joined in, writing on X, “We told the Washington Post the same thing. They ran with the fake, anonymously sourced B.S. anyway. Complete & total Fake News.”

It’s been more than five months since Trump launched his military onslaught against Iran, and multiple reports have raised concerns that the United States is running out of weapons.

Donald Trump’s “liberation day” tariffs have come back to bite him.

In a court filing submitted in the U.S. Court of International Trade Tuesday, Customs and Border Protection official Brandon Lord wrote that as of July 31, the government had allocated approximately $100 billion for companies that had to pay higher import fees due to the president’s illegal levies.

The memo also noted that, as of July 31, the CBP entity created to track and deliver tariff refunds had received more than 252,000 refund declarations for 25.1 million import entries.

While the refund figure is steep, it still doesn’t cover everything the Trump administration owes. In another legal filing, Lord revealed that the government generated roughly $166 billion from the tariffs. That would mean the government is currently repaying 60 percent of what it owes, and that there are still significantly more funds to be doled out.

The filing was submitted in response to a class action lawsuit brought by a coalition of small businesses that suffered under Trump’s tariff plans. Collectively, they claim that there are still obstacles to obtaining the refunds they’re legally owed through CBP.

Trump’s tariffs were one of his major second term policy points. But the ultraconservative Supreme Court ruled in February that his tariff plan—which was introduced under the International Emergency Economic Powers Act—was beyond the power of his office, effectively dismantling the president’s foreign and economic agendas in one fell swoop.

Yet the president was still trying to spin his costly, unconstitutional tolls as a win during an interview with Fox News Tuesday.

“Tariffs have been incredible. We’ve taken in hundreds of billions of dollars,” he told the network. “Supreme Court gave us a little shot, but we’re allowed to do it in a different manner.”

But Trump’s other unconventional tariff attempts are also facing legal challenges. Last month, Trump was sued mere hours after he attempted to invoke new duties under Section 301 of the Trade Act of 1974, which some economic law scholars told CNBC would likely not pass muster with the courts since the president is “using the statute in a fundamentally different way.”