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Former Republican Rep. Adam Kinzinger (IL) called out the Trump administration for waiting until the week of the Christmas holiday to release files from the Jeffrey Epstein case — even though the documents were required to be shared with the public earlier.

"So you guys may be wondering why it is that they are releasing some of the Epstein files today, you know, Christmas Eve, and tomorrow, Christmas Eve. And I'll tell you a very simple reason, because this is like day one in politics stuff that you learn," Kinzinger explained on Tuesday. "When you want to bury bad news, when you don't want it to get much coverage or when you want it to get like as little coverage as possible, you dump it on a holiday."

The Supreme Court's decision blocking President Trump from deploying the National Guard into American cities has alarmed legal experts who fear the ruling may inadvertently create a pathway for the administration to invoke the Insurrection Act.

Trump and his aides have repeatedly suggested they would invoke the rarely used law, which would be politically unpopular but give him broad authority to deploy the military for domestic law enforcement, and Justice Brett Kavanaugh wrote in a footnote that the court's opinion "could cause the president to use the U.S. military more than the National Guard," reported CNN.

Lara Trump decried the Supreme Court's decision preventing her father-in-law from militarizing the streets of Chicago.

"I think it's such a shame, obviously," Trump told Fox News in a Christmas Eve interview. "You hate to see a ruling like this because our ICE officers around the country have seen an increase of a thousand percent in assaults on them."

Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth was accused of stealing a video of troops wearing Santa hats from a freelance reporter who covers the alt-right and focuses on exposing Nazis.

On Christmas Eve, Hegseth shared a video of National Guard troops dressed in Santa garb. The video did not include any attribution.

The Jeffrey Epstein scandal has hovered like a dark cloud over the first year of Donald Trump's second presidency, and a Republican strategist released a forecast on where the political fallout would land.

The president's longtime association with the late sex offender has periodically exploded into the foreground after backtracking on campaign promises to release investigative files about Epstein's trafficking network, and GOP strategist Malik Abdul told "CNN News Central" that Trump was largely to blame for the scandal's durability.

As the Jeffrey Epstein sex trafficking case files continue to trickle in from the Justice Department under Congressional mandate, allies around President Donald Trump are scrambling for a narrative to reassert control of the conversation, CNN reported on Wednesday — and they can't figure out what to do.

"When the Justice Department released a first batch of Jeffrey Epstein files on Friday that included photographs of former President Bill Clinton, White House officials raced to amplify the importance of the new documents," said the report. "But days later, amid a second trove that contains several references to President Donald Trump, the White House is pushing a different view: Don’t believe everything you see."

Donald Trump’s aggressive use of his presidential pardon powers has reached such a fevered pitch that some White House insiders are getting nervous about blowback that they are not prepared to push back on.

According to a deep dive from the Wall Street Journal’s Rebecca Ballhaus, Josh Dawsey and C. Ryan Barber on the almost weekly presidential announcements of commutations and pardons flying out of the Oval Office, some of the high-profile cases were not vetted and flew under the radar of even some White House insiders.

Rep. Dan Goldman (D-NY) turned up the heat in his demands for House Republicans to allow the closed-door testimony from former special counsel Jack Smith to be released in a post on Wednesday morning.

Smith was in charge of the federal prosecutions of President Donald Trump for the 2020 election conspiracy plot, and for the hoarding of classified documents at Mar-a-Lago, both of which were brought to a halt by Trump's re-election to the presidency.

Ridicule of White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt’s change in appearance since she joined Donald Trump’s administration led a Wall Street Journal columnist to rush to her defense by arguing that, while there are some obvious enhancements at work, there is nothing wrong with it.

On the day before Christmas, columnist Louise Perry argued that the furor of a photo of Leavitt in Vanity Fair last week, where injection marks could be plainly seen around her inflated lips, were hypocritical because women on the left have their own aesthetic that is less obvious, but just as calculated.

Republican lawmakers admitted 2025 was a legislative wasteland, with Congress setting a modern record for lowest output in a president's first year, but some attributed their inaction to a simple explanation: President Donald Trump did much of their work for them through executive orders.

With fewer than 40 bills signed into law, the House and Senate managed historically low productivity, reported the Washington Post. The House cast just 362 votes — barely half the number from 2017, Trump's first year, when Republicans also held the majority. Meanwhile, nearly 60 percent of Senate votes focused on confirming Trump's nominees rather than passing legislation.

Senior White House adviser and speechwriter Stephen Miller blew a gasket on Fox News Tuesday, amid reporting of internal anger at CBS after newly-installed right-wing network chief Bari Weiss put a hold on a long-in-the-works "60 Minutes" investigation into the horrific conditions at the Salvadoran CECOT megaprison where President Donald Trump has shipped hundreds of migrants.

"Every one of those producers at '60 Minutes' engaged in this revolt, fire them," shouted Miller, an anti-immigrant fanatic known to crib Nazi Germany in his speeches. "Clean house, fire them. That's what I say."