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Former U.S. Special Envoy Jonathan Winer warned that President Donald Trump may deploy Presidential Emergency Action Documents, or PEADs — secret directives never reviewed by Congress or courts — to interfere with the 2026 midterm elections.

PEADs were designed to bypass Congressional authorization during national emergencies, authorizing actions such as seizing private property or arresting citizens, with legal challenges arising only after implementation.

A former lawmaker from a red state warned that something ominous is hiding behind the latest "five-alarm fire" from the Supreme Court, according to a new report.

G.K. Butterfield Jr., a former Democratic representative from North Carolina, told The Atlantic recently that the Supreme Court's ruling in Louisiana v. Callais is a "five-alarm fire" for voting rights. The ruling allowed states to gerrymander their maps for partisan purposes, even if there is a racially discriminatory effect from the move, which effectively gutted the last remaining section of the Voting Rights Act that protected minority voters.

A federal magistrate judge tore into the Trump administration for mismanaging the discovery process in their criminal case against former CNN reporter Don Lemon and the protesters at Cities Church in St. Paul, Minnesota.

The protest erupted over the fact that a pastor working for the church had ties to Immigration and Customs Enforcement, during a period of mass deportations that included a bloody federal takeover of neighboring Minneapolis. Trump's Justice Department filed charges against them for disrupting a church service, using a federal statute, the FACE Act, normally used against disruptive abortion clinic protesters, and included Lemon in the charges, although he insists he was just there as a reporter to document the event.

Fox News host Jesse Watters sparked outrage on Thursday after he uttered a "trash" claim about the Voting Rights Act during a segment on the show he co-hosts, "The Five."

During the segments, Watters claimed that Black people don't have enough babies to justify their proportionate share of representation in Congress. He made the claim at a time when the Supreme Court ruled in Louisiana v. Callais that states can gerrymander their maps for partisan purposes, even if there is a racially discriminatory effect. Red states like Louisiana, Florida, and Tennessee have all passed new maps since the ruling that eliminated Democratic seats held by Black representatives and cracked majority Black voting districts.

President Donald Trump's trip to China was billed as a high-stakes diplomatic summit with President Xi Jinping, but with one notable exception: the first lady was nowhere to be found.

Melania Trump, who had attended the 2017 Xi summit and appeared alongside both leaders and their spouses, sat this one out entirely because, according to her office, she was attending the six-month anniversary of an unnamed initiative connected to children and foster care programs. The announcement flabbergasted legal and political commentator Michael Popok, host of the podcast "The Intersection with Michael Popok," who said on a new episode on Thursday that he had no clue what Melania Trump was referring to.

Rick Jackson is running to be the Republican nominee for governor in Georgia — but his wife may have different allegiances.

According to filings from the Federal Election Commission, Melody Jackson, the candidate's spouse, gave a $1,000 contribution to Democratic Sen. Jon Ossoff in February 2025 — a key Democratic lawmaker that Republicans were hoping to seriously contest this year.

CNN commentator Ana Navarro criticized President Donald Trump for including filmmaker Brett Ratner in his official delegation to China, citing Ratner's history of sexual harassment allegations.

Ratner, who directed Melania Trump's documentary for Amazon, traveled on Air Force One as part of the U.S. delegation at taxpayer expense. Navarro noted, "But let us remember, Brett Ratner had been basically banished from Hollywood in 2017 because there were very serious sexual predatory allegations against him."

Wisconsin Democrats are considering a scorched-earth mid-decade redistricting if they win unified control of the state government this year, which would potentially net Democrats four new House seats.

This follows a wave of Republican redraws in the South to chop up and eliminate Black seats in the wake of the Supreme Court making it harder to challenge this under the Voting Rights Act, which has Democrats around the country champing at the bit to retaliate.

A political analyst warned on Thursday that Democrats have reached a "do or die" moment ahead of the 2026 midterm elections as a red state escalates its efforts to gerrymander its map.

South Carolina Gov. Henry McMaster, a Republican, announced on Thursday that he is calling a special session for state lawmakers to redraw their election map ahead of the midterms. The announcement comes after McMaster refused to call a special session earlier this month after the state legislature failed to secure a veto-proof majority supporting the new maps during its regular session.

A photographer discovered never-before-seen photographs of disgraced financier Jeffrey Epstein in his belongings as he was preparing to move to Europe, which he thought had been destroyed after a run-in with Epstein's bodyguard, according to a new report.

Christopher Anderson, the Vanity Fair photographer who took a recent series of eye-popping portraits of officials in President Donald Trump's administration, photographed Epstein in his New York townhome for a story that was eventually spiked. Epstein eventually wrangled the photos from Anderson, but they emerged on an old hard drive that had been tucked away for years, Vanity Fair reported.