Feds Arrest Top Democratic Leader in Redistricting Fight

Virginia Senate President Pro Tempore L. Louise Lucas, the Democratic leader behind the state’s redistricting effort, was arrested Thursday in connection with an alleged bribery and racketeering scheme.

In a 45-page indictment filed in the Eastern District of Virginia, Lucas and six co-defendants were charged with conspiring to distribute and possess marijuana, conspiring to launder money, laundering money, and committing bribery by distributing large quantities of illegal marijuana under the auspices of her legal medical cannabis business.

Lucas, an 82-year-old great-grandmother, has served in the Virginia Senate since 1992. She faces five of the eight charges included in the indictment. These charges arrive five months after the FBI raided Lucas’s office in Portsmouth, Virginia, and the neighboring cannabis dispensary she co-owns.

Speaking at a press conference, FBI Director Kash Patel claimed that Lucas had accumulated nearly $5 million in ill-gotten gains over the past five years.

Lucas has been a frequent critic of Republicans and President Donald Trump, and is an ally to Virginia’s Democratic Governor Abigail Spanberger. The state senator was a central figure in mounting her party’s redistricting efforts earlier this year, which were ultimately blocked by the Virginia Supreme Court.

Also listed in the indictment were Lucas’s daughters Theresa Lucas-Lamb and Lisa Lucas-Burke, who is currently running for Portsmouth City Council. The DOJ manual prohibits federal prosecutors from timing any action for the purpose of undermining a candidate in an upcoming election.

But speaking at the press conference, Attorney General Todd Blanche insisted that the government’s actions were proper and “consistent with past practices.” When asked whether the investigation was political payback, Blanche said: “We don’t do political paybacks,” and claimed the probe had begun years before Trump reentered office. The A.G. couldn’t offer a good explanation, however, for why he and the FBI director had bothered to give an official press conference for charges related to a declassified drug.

The indictment contains wiretap transcripts illustrating Lucas’s involvement in an alleged illegal money-making scheme. In a phone call in February 2026, Lucas discussed the language surrounding the state’s pending recreational marijuana legislation with an unindicted co-conspirator, according to the charging document. Lucas spoke about the possibility of the co-conspirator receiving a license, and sharing the proceeds with her because “this is our last chance at generational wealth.”

“I’ve got too old to not be greedy,” Lucas said, according to the indictment.

In another phone call a month later, Lucas said she hoped that the cannabis legislation would pass in order to make what she’d done legal, because “when I did it, it was obviously illegal.”

This story has been updated.

The president is tacking on to his White House media ban.

The White House stripped media access from CNN and The Independent’s Andrew Feinberg on Wednesday, despite the fact that both were scheduled to provide pool coverage.

“Today is CNN’s turn to fulfill both in-town and out-of-town TV pool duties, but the White House press office left the network off the list for Donald Trump’s trip to South Carolina, so as a result there will be no pooled TV coverage of the trip,” wrote CNN’s chief media analyst, Brian Stelter, on X.

CNN attorney Ted Boutrous had warned the Justice Department earlier this week that the network would take legal action if the White House continued to exclude CNN from Air Force One.

Boutrous is also representing MS NOW and Politico, which faced the initial wave of Trump’s restrictions alongside CNN last month. He noted in a letter that the White House had until 5 p.m. on Thursday to respond to the developing situation with CNN, or the organization “will be forced to pursue additional judicial relief.”

Semafor’s Maxwell Tani confirmed that Feinberg was also on the outs, sharing on X that “without explanation, the White House told him today that he would no longer be the print pooler on Trump’s Thursday trip.”

The decision came just two days after Trump tore into Feinberg during a White House presser, shushing and demeaning the well-reputed journalist.

“I don’t know who the hell you are, but you better be careful,” Trump said on Tuesday, minutes after Feinberg had introduced himself.

Moments later, Trump called Feinberg a “sick person” and added, “I actually think there’s something wrong with you.”

The president’s official rapid response account on X added fuel to the fire later that day, recirculating the exchange with a new description for Feinberg: “Mongoloid Moron.”

President Trump isn’t done trying to rename things.

The president told a rally audience in South Carolina Wednesday evening that he tried to rename the Atlantic Ocean to “Trump Ocean,” but ultimately decided against it.

“I only like two oceans, the Atlantic Ocean and the Pacific Ocean, I’m not going to put either Trump or America on any other ocean but these two. So, we seriously looked at the Atlantic Ocean and I called Google Maps who were really great with the lake and really great with …” Trump said, trailing off but referring to the Gulf of Mexico.

Trump said he called Google CEO Sundar Pichai and asked him, “I’m thinking of the Atlantic Ocean, can you handle it? ‘No no no, this time I’m not doing it,’ he said.”

The audience and Trump laughed.

“He said, he said, he said, ‘Oceans are different, sir. You know, they cover, they cover a lot of, they cover really a lot of countries. Please, don’t ask us to do that.’ So I’ll probably pass. Should I pass it? I think let’s keep it the Atlantic Ocean,” Trump said.

Trump’s ego knows no bounds if he was seriously considering having Google change the name of the Atlantic Ocean. He has signed executive orders changing the names of the Gulf of Mexico and Lake Ontario to the Gulf of America and Lake America, respectively. He’s proposed renaming the Strait of Hormuz to “Trump Strait,” and earlier this week again mused about renaming New Mexico to “New America.” Meanwhile, the economy is suffering as a result of his failed policies and ill-advised war with Iran, and the Republican Party is facing heavy losses in November’s midterm elections.

Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth’s staff badly damaged former President Dwight D. Eisenhower’s globe while moving it into his office.

The globe, which is now housed in the Pentagon, dates back to the 1930s and was reportedly used by Eisenhower during World War II, making it an extremely delicate artifact that needed to be handled with care. But a task that should have been delegated to archivists or museum professionals was instead handled by Hegseth’s own staff, who dropped the globe when they tried to move it to the defense secretary’s office early this year, The Washington Post reported.

That resulted in a gash “several inches wide” in the shell near Antarctica.

An Army spokesperson admitted to the damage, saying the globe was “detached from the metal mounting that allows it to rotate.”

Hegseth’s office did not respond to the Post’s request for comment.

One anonymous source attributed the gaffe to an “apparent lack of patience.” The mistake has become a source of humor both inside and outside the Pentagon, as the event is a perfect microcosm for the hypermasculine move-fast-break-things mentality that Hegseth has brought to the Defense Department—or the “War Department,” as he insists on calling it.

“Kind of a perfect metaphor for Hegseth’s entire tenure at DOD. Stupid, impulsive, driven by vanity and the result is destruction,” liberal podcaster Tommy Vietor wrote online.

“Hegseth wants an Eisenhower totem to be like Ike, brilliant in war and peace,” retired brigadier general and former West Point military history professor Ty Seidule told the Post. “Hegseth is no Ike. The globe won’t give him Ike’s attributes of humility, intellect and judgment.”

Moments after declaring that the U.S. “gave nothing” to Russia in exchange for the release of imprisoned American Stephen Hubbard, Donald Trump revealed that we did, in fact, give something.

“So we appreciate the fact that we were able to get him. We gave nothing in exchange, which is very rare. We never give anything in exchange,” said Trump during a roundtable at the White House Wednesday.

But just moments later, Trump seemed to refer to bipartisan blowback he had faced earlier this month for striking a diesel deal with Russia and dropping America’s economic sanctions against the global superpower.

“I was in the midst of getting Stephen out of Russia and, if we did what these foolish people wanted me to do, he wouldn’t be coming out right now. He’d be in there for another 20 years,” Trump said. “So the last thing I was going to do was break up that.”

Hubbard, a retired American teacher, had lived in Ukraine for years before he was captured by Russia in the early weeks of the war. Two years later in 2024, he was convicted by a Russian court of serving as a mercenary. Hubbard was released early Wednesday after nearly five cumulative years in detention.

The 74-year-old Michigander’s release was followed by a jarringly obsequious meeting between U.S. special envoy Steve Witkoff and Russian President Vladimir Putin, during which Witkoff referred to the notoriously tyrannical Russian leader as a “humanitarian.”

“You talk so much about my president, President Trump, being a humanitarian,” Witkoff told Putin Wednesday, responding to Hubbard’s release. “You are a humanitarian also, sir, and I salute that, I commend you, and I thank you again.”

Even Republicans had a hard time standing by the Trump envoy’s messaging. Reacting to a video of the exchange on X, North Carolina Senator Thom Tillis slammed Witkoff’s descriptor as an “embarrassing and outrageous thing to say.”

“You should go back to Ukraine and ask the families of the children Putin has kidnapped and murdered whether they agree your friend Putin is a ‘humanitarian,’” Tillis wrote.

Senator John Cornyn of Texas commented that Putin is a “stone cold killer.”

But Trump wasn’t willing to join the choir. When asked to respond to Witkoff’s exchange, Trump told reporters that he didn’t want to “upset an apple cart where we’re getting close to settling a war.”