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President Donald Trump's proposal to relax the federal classification of marijuana is already running into opposition within his own party.

Last week, reporting indicated that Trump is mulling an executive order directing drug enforcement officials to downgrade marijuana from Schedule I, the highest category reserved for dangerous, addictive substances with no medical use, to Schedule III, a less restrictive designation that puts it on the same level as anabolic steroids and some milder prescription painkillers.

The Department of Health and Human Services cut funding for seven grant programs that supported an organization that has criticized Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., according to a new report.

The New York Times reported that the grants had been awarded to the American Academy of Pediatrics for programs that seek to reduce "sudden infant deaths, prenatal substance exposure, birth defects and adolescent mental health problems." In all, the seven programs accounted for $3 million in funding out of the roughly $18 million that the academy received from HHS last year, according to the report.

MAGA fans fumed this week at Republicans who attended a ceremony to install a new statue to replace a Confederate monument that hasn't been up since 2020.

Virginia unveiled a statue of civil rights activist Barbara Rose Johns at the U.S. Capitol on Tuesday, replacing a monument for Robert E. Lee in one of two spaces each state is designating to display historical figures.

Deputy FBI Director Dan Bongino's announcement that he is leaving the Trump administration in January received swift mockery from political analysts and observers on Wednesday.

Bongino announced his resignation about an hour after President Donald Trump praised him for doing a "good job" during a press conference at Joint Base Andrews. His announcement comes at a time when Bongino and FBI Director Kash Patel are facing growing criticism for their handling of high-profile cases like the Brown University shooting that left two students dead and injured nine others.

President Donald Trump met with Alan Dershowitz, a former Harvard Law professor who has represented him in legal matters, to discuss the possibility of running for a third term, the Wall Street Journal reported on Wednesday, and Dershowitz did not foreclose the idea that there might be ways around the 22nd Amendment.

"In an interview Wednesday with The Wall Street Journal, Dershowitz said he told Trump the Constitution wasn’t clear on the issue," said the report. "In a meeting in the Oval Office, Dershowitz handed Trump a draft of the book, titled 'Could President Trump Constitutionally Serve a Third Term?', which is set to be published next year. Dershowitz said the book lays out a host of scenarios in which an individual could serve a third term."

Ghislaine Maxwell, the accomplice of convicted sex criminal Jeffrey Epstein, and her lawyers filed a motion on Wednesday to dismiss all charges against her, according to a new report.

The filing comes months after Maxwell began meeting with officials from President Donald Trump's Department of Justice, like Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche. Blanche interviewed Maxwell multiple times earlier this year about Trump's conduct around Epstein, some of which were released publicly. After the interviews, Maxwell was moved from a maximum security prison to a minimum security facility, something that experts have said is exceedingly rare for someone convicted of sex crimes.

President Donald Trump's administration is gearing up for an unprecedented campaign of stripping foreign-born Americans of citizenship using a rarely used and heavily restricted process known as denaturalization, reported The New York Times on Wednesday.

"The guidance, issued on Tuesday to U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services field offices, asks that they 'supply Office of Immigration Litigation with 100-200 denaturalization cases per month' in the 2026 fiscal year," reported Hamed Aleaziz. "If the cases are successful, it would represent a massive escalation of denaturalization in the modern era, experts said. By comparison, between 2017 and this year to date, there had been just over 120 cases filed, according to the Justice Department."

A Senate Democrat bashed the Trump administration's classified briefing on its strikes against alleged drug boats during an interview on CNN.

On Tuesday, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth and Secretary of State Marco Rubio gave a classified briefing to the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, where they contradicted several key parts of the administration's narrative about the strikes. For instance, they said the boats were likely traveling to Europe, not the United States, as the administration claimed. They also admitted that the ships were likely carrying cocaine and not fentanyl, which President Donald Trump recently declared a "weapon of mass destruction."

A Vanity Fair editor offered a revealing behind-the-scenes account of a tense White House photo shoot tied to the magazine’s bombshell reporting on Donald Trump’s chief of staff, describing sharp elbows, dark humor, and flashes of entitlement from top officials. Global editorial director Mark Guiducci recounted Vice President JD Vance’s crude jokes, self-aware jabs about his own image, and a moment when an aide to Susie Wiles abruptly shut down access to parts of the White House by declaring them “the president’s spaces.”

Watch the video below.

Republicans' lawsuit trying to overturn California's mid-decade redistricting map ran into a brick wall this week, as a three-judge panel grilled them intensively, with a clear indication they weren't moved by the arguments.

Voters approved Proposition 50 in November, a redraw of the congressional lines that seeks to give Democrats five currently Republican-held seats. Gov. Gavin Newsom championed the measure in response to a similar redraw by Republican lawmakers in Texas seeking to make five Democratic seats more friendly to the GOP.