Bipartisan lawmakers demand action after Raw Story mail crime investigation

ALSO READ: Republicans admit plot to evade historic third Trump impeachment

As United States Postal Service letter carriers face increasing violence and assaults on the job, the police officers who could protect them have been sidelined by the government, a new Raw Story investigation revealed.

With letter carrier robberies skyrocketing by 543 percent between 2019 and 2022, the issue has spurred a bipartisan group of Congress members to introduce legislation aimed at providing more secure mailbox equipment and better protecting letter carriers.

Rep. Brian Fitzpatrick (R-PA), who introduced the Protect our Letter Carriers Act last week, said Raw Story's investigation should urge Congress to turn the bill into law.

“The concerns highlighted in this story only increase the urgency needed in Congress to pass the bipartisan Protect our Letter Carriers Act," Fitzpatrick said in a statement to Raw Story. "The United States Postal Service must have the resources to update its outdated arrow keys and harden mailboxes. We must also increase the prosecution and lengthen sentences of individuals arrested for assaulting and robbing letter carriers. I will do whatever is necessary to work with my colleagues on both sides of the aisle to pass this crucial piece of legislation.”

A 2020 statute reinterpretation by the Postal Service curtailed uniformed postal police officers' ability to patrol the streets where mail crimes typically occur, restricting them to working on postal property such as post offices and distribution centers. Meanwhile, the number of postal police officers overall has shrunk from a high of more than 2,600 in the 1970s to about 450 officers today.

In a phone interview with Raw Story, Del. Eleanor Holmes Norton (D-DC) said mail theft is "rampant" in her district and is an issue she's heard about across the country from her colleagues. Postal police officers aren't currently "doing any good being confined to postal property," Norton said.

"The spike in mail crime only reinforces my notion that we need to have postal police go wherever the crime is," Norton said.

If postal police officers began patrolling the streets again, there would be "a better chance of restricting crimes for the Postal Service," said Norton, who is a co-sponsor of the House version of the Postal Police Reform Act alongside Reps. Andrew Garbarino (R-NY), Ken Calvert (R-CA) and Bill Pascrell (D-NJ).

Calvert himself lost nearly $10,000 in campaign cash last year because of mail theft, Raw Story first reported.

"I think the bill has a good chance of passing not only because of what we're experiencing in the district but because this issue is nationwide," Norton said.

There's a Senate version of the Postal Police Reform Act, as well, introduced by Sens. Dick Durbin (D-IL) and Susan Collins (R-ME), along with 10 other co-sponsors, including Sen. Ben Cardin (D-MD).

“Postal carriers routinely deliver lifelines to Marylanders and others across the country. They should not be left vulnerable to dangerous situations that leave them and mail recipients in potential danger – from theft and the lost items," Cardin told Raw Story in a statement. "This is a growing problem that Congress should address, preferably in partnership with the USPS.”

Read Raw Story's full investigation: Letter carriers face bullets and beatings while postal service sidelines police

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'New and disturbing' tech may soon pose devastating threat for Trump: analysis

President Donald Trump's poker-table approach to Iran — using oil blockades to force negotiation — fundamentally misunderstands how modern asymmetric warfare has transformed geopolitics, according to a new analysis.

The 79-year-old president insists Iran has "no cards," but two months of conflict demonstrate otherwise, wrote New York Times columnist Tom Friedman, as smaller powers now leverage information-age and emerging intelligence-age tools to create devastating disruption against militarily superior opponents.

"Iran is betting that by choking off the Strait of Hormuz — and driving up gasoline and food prices for Americans and all their allies — Trump will eventually act in accord with his TACO label: Trump Always Chickens Out," Friedman wrote.

The columnist compared the ongoing stalemate to a competition to see who can hold their breath the longest, but he said the fact that Iran hasn't gasped yet was extremely telling.

"How in the world has Iran’s regime lasted this long — two months — against the combined military might of Israel and America?" Friedman wrote. "The answer: Trump does not understand how much asymmetric warfare has reshaped geopolitics in just the last few years."

Trump isn't alone, however, Friedman said. Ukraine has held up against Russia using the same tactics, and Hamas and Hezbollah have done the same against Israel, and he warned that China could pose similar risks to the rest of the world.

Ukraine destroyed approximately 20 Russian strategic bombers worth tens of millions of dollars using 117 cheap drones smuggled in trucks. Iran's Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps deployed $35,000 Shahed-136 drones to destroy Amazon Web Services data centers in the UAE, disrupting banking across the Persian Gulf. Hamas fashioned rockets from salvaged materials and unexploded ordnance, forcing Israel to deploy $4 million Patriot missiles for interception.

"We’re already in a new era in which small powers and small groups can leverage information-age tools — guided by GPS and digitally controlled — to gain asymmetric advantages," Friedman wrote.

"Here’s what’s truly new and disturbing," he added. "We are rapidly moving from the age of asymmetric warfare based on 'information-age tools' that can wreak mass disruption to ... an age of asymmetric warfare based on 'intelligence-age tools' that can cheaply wreak disruption at a much larger scale anywhere on demand."

Anthropic's Mythos and OpenAI's GPT-5.4-Cyber can identify system vulnerabilities that "represent a gold mine for hackers." Despite restrictions, unauthorized users already accessed Mythos.

When democratized AI reaches hostile actors, super-empowerment becomes inevitable. A Stanford biosecurity expert's encounter with an AI chatbot explaining pathogen modification and bioweapon dispersal demonstrates the nightmare scenario. Iran gaining access to advanced AI cybersecurity models would exponentially amplify its destructive capacity beyond current drone capabilities.

The geopolitical imperative is clear: US and Chinese AI superpowers must cooperate to neutralize these asymmetric intelligence-age threats — mirroring Cold War nuclear proliferation controls. Otherwise, neither power nor anyone else remains safe.

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Journalist dismantles Trump admin’s narrative on WHCD shooting: ‘Don’t see a muzzle flash’

Jeanine Pirro, the U.S. attorney for Washington, D.C., released video Thursday of the suspected White House Correspondents’ Dinner gunman rushing a security checkpoint and insisted it showed him “shoot a U.S. Secret Service officer,” but on Friday, MS NOW’s Ken Dilanian raised serious questions about that claim.

“This suspect is in a room, and there's an officer with a canine that appears to be interested in following him, but the officer pulls the canine back,” Dilanian said, reviewing the video captured at the Washington Hilton on April 25.

“A second later, the suspect rushes out of the room, sprints through the metal detector past the first tranche of officers, and the question is whether he fired his shotgun on that video," Dilanian explained.

The suspected gunman, who has since been identified as Cole Tomas Allen and was charged with the attempted assassination of President Donald Trump, was seen in the aforementioned video rushing through a security checkpoint past several law enforcement officials. One officer in the video can clearly be seen discharging their firearm several times in the direction of Allen.

And, while Pirro insisted that the video showed Allen shooting a Secret Service officer – with one Secret Service officer hospitalized for being shot – Dilanian pointed to several inconsistencies that were visible in the video that suggested Allen may have not discharged his weapon at all.

“Jeanine Pirro, the U.S. attorney in Washington, D.C., asserts that this video shows him firing a shotgun, but you don't see a muzzle flash,” Dilanian said.

“There is some evidence of a disturbance in the ceiling that some people have interpreted as potentially the firing of a shot, but this is a big deal because it's a question of whether he shot – he hasn't been charged with actually shooting an officer. And then the question about whether the Secret Service agent who was hit in the vest was actually hit with a part of a buckshot from this man's shotgun," he added.

Questions have swirled surrounding the security lapses at the event. Remarks made moments before the incident sparked an online frenzy, while additional scrutiny followed reports that journalists were permitted to move freely through the scene within hours.

“This video is really not definitive,” Dilanian continued. “Still up in the air – we haven't seen conclusive ballistics that shows that he actually fired a shot. And the second question, whether, if he did, if any of the fragments of that buckshot struck that agent who was hit in the vest.”

'Oppressed': Bannon attacks protections for Black voters in rant

MAGA strategist Steve Bannon asserted that a law empowering Black voters had "oppressed" Southern states since the days of the Civil Rights movement.

During his Friday War Room broadcast, Bannon reacted to the Supreme Court's decision that rolled back Voting Rights Act protections for Black and Latino voters. The ruling effectively gutted the law by declaring majority-minority districts to be unconstitutional and paved the way for additional white Republican representatives in the South, something he argued the GOP would need to retain its majority and control of Congress.

"We're not gonna hold the House without this," the MAGA influencer noted. "Let me just be blunt. That's why this fight's so important."

"Because you can see those people that are MAGA and those people that are — what's so outrageous and I find so offensive is the South has been oppressed by this since the 1960s or '70s," he continued. "It was clearly unconstitutional. Finally, people in Louisiana had the gumption to fight all the way through the Supreme Court."

Bannon insisted that Republican-controlled legislatures move to redistrict their states "right away."

"And for those that are getting on with it, good on you," he remarked. "And for those of you like [Georgia Gov. Brian Kemp] and these people in Georgia, it's just once again, their hatred of Trump, because they think they don't get these seats flipped, he's got a chance to get impeached."

"And that's what Kemp and these guys want," Bannon insisted. "That's what the establishment wants."

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