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A grand jury in Oklahoma uncovered evidence that Gov. Kevin Stitt pulled strings behind the scenes to get a political donor released early from prison, KOSU reported on Friday.

"In 2023, Sara Polston was driving in Norman with a blood alcohol level nearly twice the legal limit. While traveling 66 miles per hour in a 25 mph zone, she crashed into another car, grievously injuring a 20-year-old woman," said the report. "Late last year, Polston was sentenced to eight years in prison and seven years on probation. But after just 73 days in prison, she was released as part of an electronic monitoring program that uses GPS to track offenders."

Republican businessman and Ohio gubernatorial candidate Vivek Ramaswamy is once again facing criticism and mockery for remarks that cast doubt on his authenticity.

Ramaswamy, an ally of Trump who ran for president alongside him in 2024 and helped him craft the Department of Government Efficiency project, was born in Cincinnati — but had constantly faced accusations he doesn't have a solid connection to the state, buttressed by his recently resurfaced comments in 2023 that Ohio is "a good state" but "I can't say it's the best state."

Washington Post readers launched a wave of criticism Friday after the Jeff Bezos-owned publication published a Mother's Day column attributed to Melania Trump.

Titled "Mothers are America's strength," the piece prompted hundreds of comments expressing skepticism about authorship, with readers questioning if President Donald Trump wrote the column instead.

Republican Sen. Ted Cruz said during a public conference this week that the so-called Trump Accounts established under the GOP’s 2025 budget law represent a viable path toward Social Security privatization—something the Texas lawmaker described as a “dirty little secret.”

During a panel discussion at the Milken Institute Global Conference in California, Cruz said that “conservatives in America, for 50 years... have been trying to do Social Security personal accounts.” Cruz, who lamented the failure of Bush-era efforts to privatize Social Security, described such personal accounts as vehicles into which the payroll taxes that finance current Social Security benefits could be diverted.

A federal judge in Massachusetts fired a warning shot at a lawsuit filed by far-right Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton's office against the Democratic Party fundraising platform, ActBlue.

According to Texas-based political reporter Bayliss Wagner, U.S. District Judge Richard Stearns "ruled that ActBlue's countersuit against Texas AG Ken Paxton is likely to prevail on the merits, including their allegation that his lawsuit against the Dem fundraising behemoth violates the First Amendment."

Fox Business host Dagen McDowell warned that Americans had "every right to be upset" because President Donald Trump's second term had "gone the wrong way."

During a Friday panel discussion, McDowell agreed with contributor Steve Forbes that Trump was right to pursue fraud within the government. Still, she insisted that alone was not enough to turn the economy around.

President Donald Trump responded angrily to ABC News senior correspondent Rachel Scott's question about his focus on renovation projects in Washington, D.C., during an ongoing war in Iran and rising gas prices.

Scott asked, "Why focus on all these projects as gas prices soar?" Trump defended the work, stating, "I want to keep our country beautiful and safe."

President Donald Trump handed a nearly $7 million no-bid contract to renovate the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool to a contractor he said had worked on his private swimming pools — but the company's own website shows no expertise in swimming pools whatsoever, according to a New York Times investigation published Friday.

Trump gave the contract to Atlantic Industrial Coatings, a Virginia-based firm that had never previously held a federal contract. The company's website shows it specializes in waterproofing highway culverts, pipes, roofs and chemical and water storage tanks — with no mention of swimming pools anywhere.

President Donald Trump and his allies have been banking hard on the belief that his tariff policy conveys a "populist" message to American workers and shores up his coalition. But time and time again, he has been proven wrong, conservative writer Dan McLaughlin argued for the National Review in an article published on Friday — and there's a bigger picture he's utterly missing.

Trump's first set of "reciprocal tariffs" was struck down by the Supreme Court earlier this year. He responded with a new 10 percent global tariff under a different statute, but that too was voided by the U.S. Court of International Trade this Thursday.