Ukraine Loses Starlink Access Again as Jared Kushner Heads to Russia

Is Elon Musk messing with Ukraine’s Starlink access,again?

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy claimed Thursday that the country’s Starshield, the military-grade version of Starlink communication systems, had once again experienced “significant disruptions” over Russian-occupied areas of Ukraine for the past “several days.”

“The Ukrainian military have already investigated the circumstances, and these are not random errors but systematic speed restrictions,” Zelenskiy wrote in a statement on X.

News of these disruptions came as U.S. envoys Jared Kushner and Steve Witkoff arrived in Moscow Thursday morning to continue peace deal negotiations with Russian President Vladimir Putin.

Last month, SpaceX also interrupted the country’s military-grade Starlink terminals, blinding the Ukrainian government. That disruption came just days after President Donald Trump publicly criticized Ukraine for continuing to attack Russian oil refineries in the wake of the U.S. lifting sanctions on the sale of Russian oil.

Initially, SpaceX CEO Elon Musk claimed that it was Trump’s idea, while the president played dumb. The order to slow the service reportedly came directly from the White House, and later reporting suggested that Musk approached Trump about disrupting his own military communications service in Ukraine.

In a separate post on X Thursday, Zelenskiy said that the Starshield disruptions directly affected Ukraine’s ability to intercept Russian jet-powered drones with drones of their own. “This means more Russian strikes get through, and more of our people are killed by Russia,” he wrote.

“We are trying to get the details from the American side, but so far, we know very little,” he wrote. “If someone in America is making decisions that basically treat Ukrainian territory as if it is not Ukrainian, then this tells us where things are going.”

Some Republican lawmakers are clearly fed up with their “stupid” GOP colleagues who refuse to learn from the party’s sweeping losses in the midterm elections.

Following total disaster in the midterm elections, Republican lawmakers have responded by refusing to impeach Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, whose leadership of the unpopular Iran war contributed greatly to Republican losses, and choosing Representative Jim Jordan, a MAGA extremist, to serve as the new House minority leader.

Republican Senator John Kennedy slammed anyone who tried to downplay the disastrous midterm during an appearance on Fox News’s Hannity Thursday.

“This was not a normal midterm election loss. If you think that, congratulations, you’re stupid,” Kennedy said. (Of course, host Sean Hannity was among the figures who had attempted to minimize the Republicans’ midterm massacre.)

Rather than simply stay home, Kennedy claimed that voters had actively rejected the MAGA agenda. “They voted for Democrats, and we’ve gotta get Toby and Edith back,” he said.

Earlier on the Senate floor, Kennedy said Republicans were basically urinating on themselves.

“A smart man washes his hands after he urinates. A wise man doesn’t urinate on his hands. We need to stop urinating on our hands.... We Republicans in the Senate need to stop thinking we’re so smart,” Kennedy said.

Kennedy wasn’t the only Republican who appeared frustrated with the response from his party.

Republican Representative David Joyce spoke to CNN’s Manu Raju Wednesday, about Republicans who’d signaled their intention to double down on the MAGA agenda.

“They can’t double down on stupid,” Joyce said.

“What happened to us was a message, clear and very loud, that people don’t like the way we’re been moving in the wrong direction, and you can’t lie to people about the things that they feel,” he said. “They feel it at the pump. They feel it at the grocery store. They feel it in their kids’ education, in the potential for losing their jobs to AI. And we haven’t done anything to address those.”

Republicans are turning on Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick after he stalled a crackdown on companies suspected of diverting Nvidia chips to China. Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang has been at the center of the news cycle after it was revealed he had an affair with a Chinese spy.

Politico reports that Republican leaders are criticizing Lutnick for not taking action against Megaspeed, the Singapore-based firm with ties to the Chinese government whose executive was in a relationship with Huang. Several Republicans say they want Lutnick and his deputies to answer their questions, possibly in sworn testimony.

“The obvious question is why did [Lutnick] choose to sell advanced chips?” Republican Senator John Kennedy told Politico Wednesday. “Secretary Lutnick needs to answer that in front of God and country. If I were he, I’d call a press conference this afternoon and explain what happened and why he agreed to sell them chips, and I would stop doing it.”

Republican Representative Bill Huizenga called on Lutnick to testify before Congress, saying, “I don’t think he’s been very responsive.” He added that the Bureau of Industry and Security, an agency in the Commerce Department that is responsible for blacklisting overseas companies from using American technology, has “been less responsive than they should be.”

Lutnick is also receiving pressure from elsewhere in the Trump administration. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent reportedly criticized him in a White House meeting last week for not taking earlier action on Megaspeed.

“I’d say we want to get to the bottom of the matter and to really have transparency on this,” said Republican Representative John Moolenar, who chairs the House Select Committee on the Chinese Communist Party. Moolenar told Politico that he wants Lutnick and others in the administration to brief Congress on the Chinese government’s influence on Nvidia, and how that in turn influenced U.S. security policy.

Democrats have done the unthinkable and flipped a Senate seat in Mississippi.

Democrat Scott Colom beat incumbent Republican Senator Cindy Hyde-Smith with 49.19 percent of the vote, CNN projected on Wednesday, over one week after the election. Colom leads with more than 4,500 votes.

Colom will be the first Democratic senator in Mississippi in 37 years and the first Black senator in the state since Reconstruction.

In addition to her public backing of Donald Trump, Hyde-Smith really stepped in it when she encouraged people to “pick another protein” if beef was getting too expensive. The viral sound bite became the focus of one of Colom’s attack ads, where Mississippi residents said they’d rather “pick another senator.”

Colom’s victory is an astounding rebuke of the Republican Party in the Magnolia State. In 2024, incumbent Republican Senator Roger Wicker won with 62.81 percent of the vote.

Colom is a 43-year-old Black Democrat and the district attorney for the 16th judicial district in Mississippi. On the campaign trail, he argued that Trump’s tariffs and Iran war caused extreme harm to Mississippians. He also called to raise the minimum wage, expand Medicaid access, support farmers, and address the rural hospital crisis.

This is not just a big win for Democrats, who now have 56 seats in the Senate. It’s also a big win for Colom personally. Just three years ago, Hyde-Smith blocked him from becoming a federal judge.

In 2023, President Joe Biden nominated Colom to be a district attorney in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Mississippi. Hyde-Smith, however, blocked his nomination through the “blue slip” process, a tradition in which a senator can block a judicial nominee from their home state by refusing to return a blue-colored slip to the Judiciary Committee. Hyde-Smith refused to back Colom due to his support for trans rights and her (inaccurate) claim that Colom received funding from liberal philanthropist George Soros.

“I visited with the District Attorney recently, and I recognize that he is smart and well liked in his district,” Hyde-Smith said at the time, explaining her rejection. “However, there are a number of concerns I have regarding his record. As someone with a strong interest in protecting the rights of girls and women, I am concerned about Scott Colom’s opposition to legislation to protect female athletes.”

The Justice Department went after Democratic Representative Ilhan Omar’s former bodyguard in an effort to dig up dirt on one of President Donald Trump’s most outspoken critics.

Federal prosecutors filed criminal charges against Abdullahi Mohamed, who served briefly as Omar’s bodyguard, to try and further the federal investigation into the Somali-born lawmaker’s family history, The New York Times reported Wednesday. 

Earlier this year, prosecutors filed charges against Mohamed, alleging that he’d lied to a government official under oath. Mohamed’s lawyer, Bruce Rivers, said that prosecutors spent months attempting to turn his client into an informant to bolster their nascent case against Omar. Rivers said that prosecutors repeatedly told him and his client that the investigation into the Minnesota Democrat was “100 percent being run by 1600 Pennsylvania Ave.”

“I’ve never seen anything like this in my almost 28 years practicing law in federal court,” River told the Times. 

The Justice Department dropped the charges against Mohamed in September, shortly before Homeland Security agents raided Omar’s Washington, D.C., home as part of a racist campaign to get her denaturalized and deported. The probe centers on questions about Omar and her family’s citizenship status, including baseless allegations that Omar married her brother in order to secure his citizenship, and whether Omar’s father lied on her citizenship application. 

Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin suggested last month that the government was building a RICO case against Omar and her family.  Border czar Tom Homan even suggested the FBI was somehow involved. It’s still unclear what, if any, evidence DHS has found to support its case.

In a statement, the DOJ claimed that the charges against Mohamed were “completely unrelated to any current investigations.”