RFK Jr. and Rand Paul Caught Using Taxpayer Money for Private Travel

Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has been given access to military aircraft to fly around the country—including to campaign for Republicans last month, The Washington Post reported Friday.

Kennedy flew on an Air Force-operated Gulfstream jet from Washington, D.C., to Des Moines, Iowa, on August 17, where he attended an event with Representative Mariannette Miller-Meeks. The Defense Department charges $9,000 per hour to operate these jets, while federal workers are able to book commercial flights to Des Moines for as little as $250.

Several people told the Post that Kennedy rarely uses military aircraft, even after White House officials and lawyers for the Department of Health and Human Services signed off on the secretary’s access. Two of the people said that the jet’s flight path just happened to coincide with Kennedy’s travel plans. It’s not clear how many times Kennedy has opted to travel on military aircraft.

Kennedy’s exorbitant travel accommodations are particularly unprecedented considering that during Donald Trump’s first term, the president pushed out former Health Secretary Tom Price over reports he’d been flying on private jets from Washington to Philadelphia.

Kennedy isn’t the only one in Washington facing backlash over his flight plans.

Senator Rand Paul is in hot water following a report that six of his staffers traveled by private jet from Washington to Pittsburgh in the days after Trump’s attempted assassination in Butler, Pennsylvania, Politico reported Friday. A direct flight to Butler takes little more than an hour, while driving takes just five hours. Paul’s staffers’ private jet cost taxpayers $17,827.

Paul, who was then the top Republican on the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee, preaches fiscal conservatism but has a history of spending lavishly on travel.

A spokesperson for Paul released a statement claiming that the private jet was “the most efficient and effective means for the entire investigative team to participate in the investigative activities that day.”

Nearly 3,000 people lost their lives on September 11, 2001. 25 years later, the families of some of those lost memorialized the tragedy by calling out America’s continued ties to Saudi Arabia.

The families apparently went rogue during an event at the memorial in New York Friday. At least two individuals excoriated the Trump administration and previous presidencies for obfuscating Saudi Arabia’s connection to the terrorist attack.

Terry Strada, the widow of 9/11 victim Tom Strada and the national chair of 9/11 Families United, rhetorically asked her husband, “How can it be 25 years and still we have no justice for the role that Saudi Arabia played in your murder?”

Strada’s remarks elicited spontaneous applause from the audience. (Trump was not in attendance, reportedly because he had been told he was not allowed to speak at the ceremony.)

“Yes, we finally made it into a court and have proved that the kingdom of Saudi Arabia fomented a rancid culture of anti-American terrorism around the globe and then sent its agents to support the radical Islamists hijackers so they could attack you and all of our loved ones,” she continued. “But, for 25 years, administration after administration, including leaders in front of us here today, chose to protect the Saudis instead of standing with the 9/11 families?”

“They withheld evidence. They vetoed JASTA,” Strada said, referring to a 2016 law that allowed U.S. citizens to sue foreign governments. “They broke promises, both public and private. It has been one betrayal after another. President Trump can still change that. Tell the Saudis to stop lying.”

“Tell them that if they want to be friends with the U.S.A., they cannot continue to deny all of this, all of the pain, all of the destruction that we have all been suffering through,” Strada added.

Fifteen of the 19 hijackers who conducted terrorist attacks on 9/11 were Saudi citizens. Evidence that emerged in a lawsuit brought by a coalition of survivors and their families against the Saudi government revealed in 2024 that some low-level Saudi officials were in contact with the hijackers prior to the attack. Until that finding, U.S. presidential administrations had largely dismissed Saudi involvement in the attack. A FBI-CIA report released in 2005 by the Bush administration said that there was no evidence “the Saudi Government or members of the Saudi royal family knowingly provided support” for what happened that day.

But Strada was not the only person to speak out. The nephew of Lisa Marie Terry, another 9/11 victim, also urged Trump to do something about the country’s longstanding defense for Saudi Arabia.

“For 25 years, the deep state has hidden the truth about what happened that day, 25 years ago. President Trump: You’re our last hope. Release the unredacted files that implicate Saudi Arabia while what’s left of the victims’ families are still alive to see it,” he said.

But Trump has done much to further intertwine America’s dependence on Saudi Arabia, perhaps most notably a $1 trillion economic and defense agreement that he signed last year with Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman.

President Trump used his speech at the Pentagon on the twenty-fifth anniversary of the September 11 attacks to promote his ill-advised war in the Middle East.

“[W]e salute the service members working right now to ensure the world’s number one sponsor of terror, the Islamic Republic of Iran, will never, ever, have a nuclear weapon,” Trump said to scattered applause.

Trump’s comments came shortly after Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth also used the 9/11 memorial event to push war with Iran. “Over the past six months, we have laid waste to the world’s most prolific state sponsor of terrorism,” Hegseth said. “Our warriors have fought an Islamic theocracy that has wished us death for nearly half a century, that cheered on 9/11.” (Iran officially condemned the attacks in 2001.)

Using the 9/11 attacks as a justification for bombing Iran is disturbingly in line with American policy the last 25 years. President George W. Bush responded to Al Qaeda’s attacks on the World Trade Center and Pentagon by launching decadeslong wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, and a wider “war on terror” that caused the deaths of thousands of U.S. service members and millions of innocent civilians.

That war on terror has seemingly never ended. While Afghanistan’s Taliban regime was initially pushed out nearly a quarter-century ago by the U.S.-led campaign, it is now back in power. Iraq has struggled to recover from the U.S. invasion, enduring an insurgency and the rise of the Islamic State. National security restrictions and mass surveillance have grown unabated in the U.S. in the last few decades.

More recently, the war with Iran has disrupted the global economy and killed 18 U.S. service members as well as up to 8,000 civilians across the Middle East, wounding countless more. It shows no signs of stopping, with periodic ceasefires ultimately collapsing. Despite criticizing the war in Iraq and Afghanistan to start his political career (reversing earlier opinions), Trump appears to be restarting the blunders of those two campaigns and is in danger of creating a worse quagmire in Iran.

The Justice Department prosecutor leading the “grand conspiracy” case against President Trump’s perceived enemies resigned suddenly on Thursday—and Trump hasn’t said a word about it.

Counselor to the attorney general Joe diGenova was essentially responsible for finding proof of Trump’s baseless claims that investigations against him—from the 2016 probe into Russian election interference all the way to his federal indictments after he left office in 2021—were actually part of a larger conspiracy against him. DiGenova was formerly Trump’s personal attorney and helped lead Trump’s 2020 lawsuits claiming widespread election fraud, which he lost.

“I did resign today by letter to the attorney general. I said that it was a privilege and an honor to serve the president and the department, and I was very grateful,” diGenova told the New York Post Thursday. According to their sources, the Trump administration began to lose confidence in him, claiming that he was “slow-rolling” indictments of Trump’s perceived enemies—like former President Barack Obama, former CIA Director John Brennan, and former FBI Director James Comey—and going down “rabbit holes.” After five months on the job, DiGenova still hadn’t charged anyone.

“If you want indictments where there’s no evidence, you have an ethical problem,” he said—which suggests that the investigation was a fraught, overzealous exercise from the start.

DiGenova later clarified that comment to the Associated Press.

“There’s plenty of evidence in all of these cases to prove the theories of prosecution. It just takes time to get there, and some people want to get there a little faster than others—and you can’t do that.”

The Justice Department has not commented on the prominent departure, nor has the White House.

Texas Senator Ted Cruz brushed off a convention attendee shouting to kill Democratic politicians and candidates.

During his speech at the Republican midterm convention Thursday night, Cruz failed to address an audience member calling for New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani, Michigan Senate candidate Abdul El-Sayed, and Texas Senate candidate James Talarico to be shot.

Cruz began: “When Mandami [sic] says he wants to seize the means of production—,”

“He should be shot!” someone interrupted from the crowd.

“He means it,” Cruz continued. “When Abdul El-Sayed says he has a quote ‘obligation’ to comply with Sharia law—”

“He should be shot!”

“He means it,” Cruz said. “And when James Talarico says he wants to dismantle capitalism—”

“He should be shot!”

“He means it!” Cruz continued.

If Cruz were anything resembling a real leader, he would have condemned the violent language, particularly as the comments fell on the one-year anniversary of Charlie Kirk’s death.

Clearly, Republican outrage at violent language only goes one way. Cruz himself has repeatedly condemned Democrats for using “hateful rhetoric” to criticize President Donald Trump’s sweeping immigration crackdown. Republicans have claimed that the left has a monopoly on doxing and calling for assassinations—all while the Trump administration has deleted government research showing that the right is responsible for far more political violence. Not to mention, Republicans regularly ignore Trump’s outlandish statements, whose own violent language has done little to lower the national temperature.