Pete Hegseth Claims Sailors Deployed to Middle East Are Doing Fine

Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth denied that military servicemembers aboard the USS Abraham Lincoln are dealing with poor conditions, saying Thursday that reports describing such conditions were “completely misrepresented.”

“We make sure every ship, every crew, every captain has everything we can provide them at every single moment,” Hegseth said to reporters while on a visit to Panama. “Some deployments are longer than others and I have more respect and gratitude for those sailors than anybody. What they do in those high seas in those austere conditions with fewer port calls—it’s incredible.”

Multiple outlets, including the Military Times and Stars and Stripes, have reported low morale and mental health concerns among sailors as the Abraham Lincoln’s deployment stretches well beyond its initial end date in May. The aircraft carrier is reportedly experiencing water contamination, plumbing problems, disruptions in mail delivery, and food shortages, with pictures of meager, tasteless-looking meals going viral.

The situation has led to safety issues, exhaustion, and burnout among servicemembers, and multiple sailors have reportedly tried to jump overboard or otherwise harm themselves. Hegseth didn’t mention those reports Thursday, despite family members of crewmembers stationed aboard the ship explicitly raising them during heated town hall meetings last week with military leaders, including acting Navy Secretary Hung Cao. One spouse reportedly told officials at a meeting that her husband had messaged her earlier that day saying “he hopes he doesn’t wake up tomorrow.”

Democratic Senator Richard Blumenthal wrote a letter to Hegseth Wednesday demanding answers about conditions on the Abraham Lincoln and to visit the ship.

“The Lincoln’s extended deployment raises broader questions about the Navy’s ability to sustainably generate carrier forces while preserving servicemember well-being, maintenance schedules, fleet readiness, and the capacity to respond to future contingencies,” Blumenthal wrote.

The Wall Street Journal reported Thursday that the USS George Washington aircraft carrier will soon be deployed to the Persian Gulf from Japan to replace the Abraham Lincoln, which has been deployed for 250 days and hasn’t had a port call for a record 200 days. The change, which U.S. officials told the Journal is part of a previously scheduled rotation plan, will come as a long-awaited relief to the beleaguered sailors on the Lincoln.

The Trump administration has lost roughly one quarter of the country’s MQ-9 Reaper drones as part of the president’s ongoing war against Iran. 

Three U.S. officials told The Washington Post Thursday that the U.S. military had lost at least 45 Reaper drones. Each low-flying surveillance and attack drone costs between $30 million and $50 million to produce, depending on what type of sensor each machine carries, placing the potential total cost of the missing or destroyed Reapers at up to $1.3 billion.  

A fourth U.S. official told the Post that not all of the Reapers were shot down—some of them crashed after the operators’ connection to the drone failed. 

At the beginning of the war, there were approximately 185 Reapers in the U.S. military fleet, including 165 in the Air Force and 20 in the Marine Corps. Marines spokesperson Lt. Col. Joshua Benson said that none of the Marines’ Reaper drones had been lost. 

In May, Air Force Lt. Gen. David Tabor told the Senate that the number of remaining drones had fallen to roughly 135, noting he was “concerned” about the losses. 

Reaper drones join the growing list of weapons that the U.S. is shedding faster than it can replace. A report from the Center for Strategic and International Studies published in May estimated it will take until at least 2030 to restore the U.S. missile stockpile to pre-war levels, leaving a multi-year “window of vulnerability” for the United States in potential future conflicts. Since that study was published, the United States has only continued to execute military strikes, and Trump’s war against Iran has racked up a total estimated bill of more than $100 billion.

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. Trump administration officials have denied the reports, even after they reportedly sent the president into a rage. 

Despite insisting that the U.S. weapons stockpile is far from depleted, the Trump administration has launched a desperate campaign to boost weapons manufacturing. 

Last week, Deputy Defense Secretary Steve Feinberg gave industry leaders three weeks to submit their plans to “drive significantly faster, more aggressive delivery schedules and/or increased production for critical capabilities.”

Pentagon spokesman Sean Parnell said that the department was actively focused on boosting munitions acquisitions to provide “the weapons our warfighters need at the pace the threat demands,” but he claimed the effort predated Trump’s seemingly endless war. 

On August 2, Ohio Republican Representative Max Miller accidentally shared images of his two-year-old daughter’s genitalia while attempting to discredit other accusations against him—like holding a gun to his ex-wife’s head, scalding her with boiling water, and breaking said two-year-old daughter’s collarbone.

Now, his ex-wife Emily Moreno—daughter of GOP Senator Bernie Moreno—is suing him for exposing their daughter to online pedophiles earlier this month.

“Defendant Congressman Max Miller, and Miller’s lawyer, Defendant Aaron Minc of Defendant Minc LLC, recklessly published and disclosed to the world a nude image of the child depicting her genitalia,” Moreno’s lawyer, Subodh Chandra, wrote. “Faced with a mostly self-inflicted dumpster fire of public attention to his reputation for abusive behavior, Miller so desperately wanted to salvage his political job, that he recklessly and intentionally provided [his attorney Aaron Minc] a trove of documents and photos, indifferent about what they contained or how they were used.”

Miller’s own lawyer was accused of initially lying about “the seriousness of their offense,” before he admitted to releasing the pictures himself.

“Unfortunately, I missed the last three pages of a 40+ page document with sensitive content. It was completely unintentional and a mistake.... To be clear, this was completely my fault. I am solely responsible for what happened. I was the only person responsible for assembling, creating, reviewing, adding, deleting, redacting, or making any changes to the information and files that were in this folder,” Minc wrote days after the incident.

“Any parent—and any lawyer—knows the grave danger of posting nude photos of a toddler on the public web for pedophiles and bad actors to download,” Moreno’s lawyer continued. “They victimized an innocent child to score political points, and we intend to hold them fully accountable under federal and state law.”

This is just one of many, many fires for Miller. His father-in-law Senator Bernie Moreno has been virtually the only Republican to call for his resignation, saying he needed “serious psychological help.”

“He is a danger to my daughter, and I hold my breath every minute he has custody of my granddaughter,” Moreno wrote on X. “If there are any basic standards of character required to hold elected office, Max Miller fails them.” Miller also received a restraining order from his ex-girlfriend and former Trump White House press secretary Stephanie Grisham.

Miller has done his daughter—whose collarbone he’s already been accused of breaking—an incredible disservice, regardless of the outcome of this lawsuit. Even still, the entirety of GOP leadership from Trump to House Speaker Mike Johnson has stood steadfastly behind Miller as a House Ethics Committee investigation commences.

Members of Congress are outsourcing their work to artificial intelligence without much, if any, oversight or limits.

Staffers and legislators are using AI chatbots to write speeches and news releases, manage mail from constituents, draft questions for congressional hearings, and even draft amendments, The Washington Post reports. The Senate and House have cleared staffers to use ChatGPT, Microsoft’s Copilot, and Google’s Gemini, with the House also approving Claude. Last year, the House bought 6,000 Copilot licenses, encouraging staffers to use them.

Senators and representatives regularly use the services themselves. Republican Senator Tommy Tuberville asks ChatGPT questions about issues such as Medicare and Medicaid while driving across his home state of Alabama.

“It’s kind of like you can sit there and talk to an expert,” Tuberville told the Post. “You don’t know whether or not they’re 100 percent correct. But they put you on the right path.”

Republican Representative Mike Flood asked a chatbot where private equity was buying single-family homes while working on a bipartisan housing bill last year. Democratic Senator Elizabeth Warren, who supports stricter regulations on tech companies, has used ChatGPT to look up demographic information.

Congressional staffers aren’t clear about if there are limits on using the bots. One staffer uses Copilot to draft bill amendments, while another fed all of his phone contacts and text messages going back years into Claude and told it to build a database of reporters, including what he pitched them, what they accepted, and what went badly. Claude also runs the communications budget of that congressional office, overseeing taxpayer-funded mailers and all ads sent to constituents.

That staffer isn’t sure what congressional rules allow for AI use.

“You’re still not supposed to put constituent data into AI,” he told the Post. “There are weird things around where the rules are. I don’t know all of them.”

In reality, Congress’s own rules are that AI can’t be used to make deepfakes, make personnel decisions, handle sensitive information such as constituent information, or finalize legislation. AI can be used to help draft a bill, but humans have the final review of it. And chatbots can be used to draft a response to a constituent, but aren’t allowed to be told who the constituent is.

Most of the staffers who spoke to the Post said they didn’t know these rules, and enforcing them is left to staffers self-policing or reporting their colleagues. This has already caused problems, such as when Republican Representative Anna Paulina Luna proposed an amendment to a defense bill earlier this summer.

One of her staffers included a summary of the proposed change with the amendment, and the first line began with “increasing example specific factors. Identical to H.R. 100 (118th Congress).11:25 AM????Claude responded:”, which was clearly lifted from a chatbot. Until rules and enforcement are tightened, incidents like this, and worse, will continue, and the public might not ever know.

A federal judge on Thursday dismissed the Trump administration’s Title VI lawsuit against Harvard University.

Donald Trump accused Harvard in March of violating civil rights laws by allowing a “hostile educational environment” for Jewish and Israeli students over the course of “several years.” Harvard denied the allegations and moved to dismiss the lawsuit.

In a new filing, U.S. District Judge Richard G. Stearns found that most of the incidents the Trump administration had cited all took place between 2023 and 2024, and the remaining three took place in March 2025—a full year before the complaint was filed.

“Without diminishing any concern arising from these occurrences, the court finds them, singly and collectively, to be too isolated and episodic to support a plausible inference that any institutionalized noncompliance with Title VI persists at Harvard to this day,” Stearns wrote.

The lawsuit was “devoid of any factual allegations plausibly establishing that any events that might be construed as evidence of noncompliance occurred after June 30, 2025,” he added.

The original lawsuit alleged that students were stopped from entering campus buildings by “antisemitic demonstrators” in 2023 and 2024, and that some Jewish students felt pressured into wearing baseball caps to hide their yarmulkes.

The federal government claimed this was evidence that Harvard had violated civil rights laws, and demanded the return of “billions of dollars of taxpayer subsidies awarded to a discriminatory institution.” But clearly, the administration has failed to prove in court that the university has done anything wrong.

This is the latest blow to the president in his ongoing battle with the Ivy League school. Since the start of his second term, Trump has denounced Harvard as an example of an institution infecting American youth with liberal ideas and has attempted to freeze its federal funding.

In June 2025, Trump officials tried to prohibit Harvard from admitting international students before a judge stopped the plan. In September 2025, Harvard won a lawsuit against the administration after the latter froze billions in federal funds from the school. In that case, a federal judge said the administration had “used antisemitism as a smokescreen for a targeted, ideologically motivated assault on this country’s premier universities.”

This lawsuit was the second time the Trump administration has sued Harvard this year. In February, the Justice Department sued the school for allegedly not handing over its admissions records.