Daniel Hampton

The data center OpenAI is building in southern Ohio will draw its power from what would be the largest fossil-fuel power plant ever constructed in the United States, and the Trump administration is racing its environmental review to the finish.

According to Heatmap News, the federal review of the PORTS-Pike project's 9.2-gigawatt natural gas plant began July 10 and is slated to wrap by Dec. 23, roughly seven months to clear a facility bigger than five of Ohio's largest existing power plants combined. Regulators are handling it with an "environmental assessment," the lighter of the two federal review options, rather than a full environmental impact statement.

The gas plant would anchor a 10-gigawatt AI campus at the former Portsmouth Gaseous Diffusion Plant, a decommissioned uranium enrichment site on federal land in Pike County. OpenAI signed a 20-year lease for roughly 8 gigawatts last week, backed by a $105 billion guarantee from Nvidia and developed by SoftBank's SB Energy alongside the Energy Department.

OpenAI has cast the project as a rebirth for the region.

"Pike County helped power America's industrial growth in the 20th century and now, with this project, it has another opportunity to play a leading role in the next era of American industrialization," the company said.

The reaction from energy watchers was swift.

Heatmap's Jael Holzman, who broke the story, warned the scale hadn't sunk in: "y'all are not getting how big of a bfd this is yet." Her colleague Emily Pontecorvo laid out the trifecta drawing alarm: "the biggest fossil fueled power plant EVER BUILT IN THE US" getting the lighter review and clearing permitting "in just 7 months."

Energy analyst John Bistline put the size in perspective, noting that 9.2 gigawatts of new gas at one Ohio site is more generating capacity than any of 10 entire states hold — among them Montana, Idaho, Maine, Alaska and Vermont.

Longtime Ohio journalist Darrel Rowland took aim at the rushed review with a nod to the site's fraught history: "Where have southern Ohioans heard this before?"

FBI Director Kash Patel sued The Atlantic to clear his name, and legal analyst Michael Popok was taken aback, as he may have just handed the magazine the keys to his phone.

On his MeidasTouch show Legal AF, Popok picked apart Patel's latest move in his $250 million defamation suit over an April article that alleged excessive drinking, unexplained absences and episodes of being unreachable — claims Patel has called "unequivocally categorically false."

The Atlantic asked Judge Emmet Sullivan to toss the case and to pause discovery until he rules, arguing it could be decided on the pleadings alone. But Patel pushed to keep the case moving, which Popok argued is a gift because discovery is exactly what would hurt Patel most, with depositions under oath, imaged phones and interviews with his own security detail.

"This is like a drowning man asking for another anchor to be thrown at him," Popok said.

If the case proceeds, The Atlantic could comb through the records behind its reporting, material one former prosecutor predicted is "unlikely to be pretty."

"You know who really wants discovery? Which is depositions and questions under oath and documents and emails and text messages and all of that. You know who loves and is rubbing their hands in glee at Kash Patel opposing a motion to stay discovery brought by The Atlantic? The Atlantic Magazine and its writer. I mean, I'm sure there were champagne corks that were popping when Kash Patel would not agree to stay discovery," said Popok.

The magazine has signaled it's ready.

"If Director Patel did not want to face this process, he should not have filed this suit," editor-in-chief Jeffrey Goldberg said.

The Atlantic's motion calls its allegations "inherently plausible," citing more than two dozen sources, including claims that Patel's detail once requested SWAT-style breaching equipment to reach him behind locked doors, and that he panicked when he wrongly believed he'd been fired. Patel denies all of it as a fabricated smear.

The Atlantic noted it's at least Patel's fifth defamation suit against a news outlet, and he has yet to win one.

Army Secretary Dan Driscoll is expected to be gone by the end of the year after he insisted just four months ago he was going nowhere.

Driscoll, a former Army Ranger and close friend of Vice President JD Vance, is expected to step down by year's end, if not sooner, after months of bruising tension with Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, the Wall Street Journal reported Friday, citing people familiar with the discussions. Spokesmen for the Pentagon and Driscoll declined to comment.

It marked a striking reversal from April, when their feud spilled into public view and Driscoll declared: "I have no plans to depart or resign as the Secretary of the Army."

Hegseth reportedly viewed Driscoll, once floated as his own potential replacement, as a threat, and after the White House told him he couldn't fire the well-connected secretary, he went after Driscoll's allies instead. In April, Hegseth abruptly forced out Army Chief of Staff Gen. Randy George in a phone call lasting less than a minute, with no explanation, while Driscoll was away in North Carolina.

Over the summer, Driscoll and his family moved out of the stately home reserved for the Army secretary near Arlington and relocated to North Carolina. He moved into a smaller apartment on base.

His exit would leave the Army without a Senate-confirmed leader in the middle of Trump's war with Iran.

The revelation comes after the president sang Driscoll's praises last month.

"With that beautiful smile, but he's actually a killer," Trump said at a defense conference. "He's a killer. Would you believe it? Those are the best guys, actually."

President Donald Trump is in no rush to hand the White House podium to Scott Jennings, and on Friday he made a point of dropping a new name into the mix.

Asked about his search for a press secretary to replace the departing Karoline Leavitt, Trump gave the CNN pundit a lukewarm nod before pivoting.

"Scott Jennings is good," Trump said, according to CBS News reporter Kathryn Watson. "What do you think of Margo? Maybe Margo." He added, "I have never had so many job applications in my life."

The "Margo" in question is Margo Martin, a longtime Trump spokeswoman who serves as a special assistant to the president and communications adviser, who was photographed boarding Marine One with Trump that same afternoon. The idea drew a quick booster: "I might get into trouble with Margo, but she would make a great press sec," posted Katie Miller, a former DOGE official and wife of top White House aide Stephen Miller.

The public flirtation is the latest sign that Jennings — reported to be the frontrunner after secret meetings with chief of staff Susie Wiles — may not be the lock some coverage suggested. Jennings has spent weeks in what critics called a public audition, sending clips of his Trump-friendly CNN hits to White House staffers, though no offer has been extended.

Behind the scenes, some in Trump's orbit have reportedly worked to sink his chances over his ties to ailing Sen. Mitch McConnell.

"It's not going to be him," one source told the New York Post, calling the search "an open book."

When DHS officials got on a call with Nevada's election officials to discuss the Trump administration's claims of noncitizens on the state's voter rolls, the state's top elections official had a lot to push back on, including the mispronunciation of his state.

As a DHS official spoke, Nevada Deputy Secretary of State for Elections Mark Wlaschin cut in.

"Sorry, super quick. I'd be remiss and every fellow Nevadan would lose their mind if I didn't correct you. It's said Nevada, not Nevahda," he said, according to a recording reported by the Guardian's Sam Levine. "I grew up on the East Coast, I'm sure I got it wrong at first, but Nevada, if you don't mind, please."

Nevada officials have spent weeks pressing DHS to substantiate Secretary Markwayne Mullin's claim that nearly 16,000 noncitizens are registered to vote in the state — part of a sweeping assertion of more than 250,000 across four states that Mullin billed as proof of widespread fraud.

So far, the numbers have come up short. In records Nevada released and recordings obtained by CNN and MS NOW, DHS officials acknowledged they had "confirmed" just 185 potential noncitizens through manual review and had yet to examine more than 14,000 other flagged names.

The shortfall lands as DHS has threatened to prosecute election officials and withhold federal money from states that won't turn over voter data — pressure that Nevada Secretary of State Francisco Aguilar and voting experts have called baseless. "I can't take something that's made up out of thin air and try to justify it," Aguilar told CNN.

New York Times White House correspondent Maggie Haberman declined to render a clinical verdict this week on whether President Donald Trump is in cognitive decline, but she drew a pointed distinction between the president's age, which she said plainly shows, and the behavior critics call erratic, which she insisted is nothing new.

Haberman, co-author of the bestselling "Regime Change," sat down on The Jim Acosta Show, where Acosta asked point-blank: "Maggie, do you think that he's all there?"

Her answer was hedged and deliberately incomplete.

"I have no indication that he's, I mean, obviously that I'm not a doctor and we don't see him as often as we used to," she said, before running through the physical questions trailing the 80-year-old president.

Haberman cited hand bruising that has persisted for close to two years, an aspirin regimen she said is unusually large based on what she has read from experts, swelling ankles, and the episodes of eye closure at public events — "either sleeping or transcendental meditation or God knows what."

She acknowledged watching Trump sleep during his 2024 criminal trial and flagged the shrinking transparency around his health, including more frequent Walter Reed trips and a physical conducted by 22 specialists the White House would not explain.

"These are all valid questions for a president," she said.

But she offered a counterweight that she and co-author Jonathan Swan spent an hour fact-checking their book with Trump and detected nothing amiss.

"I did not notice a difference, but again, we only see what we see," she demurred.

Pressed on whether Trump is simply as erratic as ever, Haberman refused the clinical frame but held firm on the behavior.

"He is exactly who he has always been," she said. "Do I think that he's 80 and that shows? Yes, I do. But that's a different question." The cognition debate, she added, "tends to be clinical about him. And I am not equipped to answer that" — leaving, in her words, "a legitimate conversation out there about whether 80-year-olds are wise to keep electing."

Even if Democrats sweep the midterms, the country could be barreling toward a cascade of crises that no election can head off.

That's the warning from national security journalist Marcy Wheeler, the independent reporter behind the long-running blog emptywheel.

In a post published Thursday, Wheeler argued that "we're at the point where Trump's incompetence is beginning to create snowballing problems" and that Americans should brace for them now rather than pin every hope on November.

She laid out a grim inventory of crises, including a grinding war with Iran and rising oil prices, a Strategic Petroleum Reserve drained to dangerously low levels, Navy carriers pushed to the breaking point, closing hospitals, lost health care and food aid, and a cybersecurity system she contends was gutted and then exploited by Iran. Wheeler also pointed to signs of economic strain that typically signal a crisis. Extreme weather, Wheeler added, could soon collide with wartime pressure to spike food prices or cut power and water for millions.

Her central fear is that these could hit all at once, at a moment when, in her telling, Trump has hollowed out the government of competent people. Citing author Naomi Klein, she argued that disasters left unanswered by the left will be seized on by the right.

Wheeler also cautioned against Democratic complacency. Winning a chamber of Congress looks likely, she wrote, but subpoena power won't be the magic fix many expect, given how Trump stonewalled oversight in 2019. More useful now, in her view: local activism like the fights against ICE raids and data centers, court battles, and grassroots pressure she said doesn't depend on leaders like Chuck Schumer or Hakeem Jeffries.

Michael Cohen, the former fixer who once vowed to "take a bullet" for Donald Trump before helping to convict him, has done the once-unthinkable: he sat down and interviewed the president.

Cohen spoke with Trump by phone for roughly 40 minutes Thursday morning, with portions set to air that evening on his 77WABC radio show, "When You Know, You Know," and the rest on Sunday. It is, Cohen said, "the first public conversation between the president and myself in eight years."

And he is promising fireworks.

"There are things that he said to me that I have never heard before, it was a great interview, and people will be shocked when they hear it," Cohen told NBC News.

The reunion caps one of the most bitter breakups in modern politics.

Cohen pleaded guilty in 2018 to tax evasion and campaign-finance crimes tied to hush-money payments to women who alleged affairs with Trump, served three years, and became the star witness whose testimony helped convict Trump on 34 felony counts in 2024. For years afterward, Cohen called his old boss "a cheat, a liar, a fraud" and worse, while Trump branded him a "rat."

Cohen now casts the thaw as forgiveness.

"We rekindled our relationship because of a shared experience of betrayal," he said earlier this year, adding that "the ice between us, it didn't just melt, it broke."

Trump has leaned on Cohen's recent claims that he felt pressured to testify as he appeals his conviction, and Cohen's WABC home is owned by Trump ally John Catsimatidis.

A venture capitalist aligned with the Trump administration set off a debate online this week with a plea to senior officials: don't leave your young staffers behind.

The post landed amid a steady run of high-profile departures from Trump's orbit, from press secretary Karoline Leavitt's exit to deputy chief of staff Taylor Budowich and deputy press secretary Harrison Fields, who left for a K Street lobbying firm.

In a post on X, Clint Brown, who describes himself as a venture capitalist "investing in critical tech for America" and a former Senate staffer, urged departing senior officials who came from the private sector to help their junior aides land work once the administration ends, and said those who don't will pay a reputational price.

"The anxiety among young staffers about their future employment prospects is palpable," Brown wrote.

He argued the point applies double to those "experiencing economic booms because of this admin," a nod to the record markets Trump touts even as wage growth stalls. "Those of us who came up in politics will never trust you again," he added, noting that "people can only do these jobs so long."

The post drew immediate response across the political spectrum.

Nick Solheim treated it as a serious question, noting that "the 26-year-olds who moved here to staff this administration did it instead of law school, starting a small business, or working on Wall Street." Where they land next, he wrote, "is a question we all should be answering now, not in 2028."

Others were far less sympathetic.

X user Greg McKelvey called the plea "a crafted threat to discourage anyone from participating with the Trump administration wrapped in a pretense of concern." Liberal writer Brian Beutler was harsher, asserting that Trump staffers "know they commit moral and legal crimes everyday, and are worried about accountability." His verdict: "Good."

A pseudonymous account, Dewey, Cheetham & Howe LLP, a fictional law firm that's a pun on "Do we cheat 'em? And how?" mocked the concern outright.

"lol these guys are worried about 'finding employment' post-admin. Buddy, that's going to be the least of your worries," it wrote.

North Korea fired a barrage of ballistic missiles into the sea Thursday, a day after Kim Jong Un's sister poured cold water on President Donald Trump's claim that the two leaders had recently been in contact.

The South Korean military detected roughly 10 short-range ballistic missiles launched from the Pyongyang area, according to CBS News. The launch followed a pointed statement from Kim Yo Jong, the North Korean leader's influential sister and closest political confidante, carried by state media late Wednesday.

Trump had spent the week touting his "very good relationship" with Kim, sharing a photo from their 2019 meeting and telling reporters Wednesday he expected to sit down with the North Korean leader again this year. He also ordered the Pentagon to slash a major annual joint exercise with South Korea, saying the drills sent a "totally inappropriate and hostile" signal to North Korea.

But Pyongyang was unmoved.

"As for reports coming out of Washington that there has recently been communication between the leaders of North Korea and the United States, I know absolutely nothing about it, and it would probably be the only matter related to our supreme leadership's foreign policy of which I am unaware," Kim Yo Jong said, according to The Daily Beast.

She called Trump's concession "not even worth commenting on" and said scaling back the exercises did not change their "provocative and aggressive" nature.

"If the U.S. side calculates that it can portray the measures it has recently taken as some kind of 'goodwill gesture,' it will not get the response it wants," she added.

Her only olive branch was a note that her brother still holds "fond personal memories and feelings" from his earlier meetings with Trump.

The Ulchi Freedom Shield exercise, which began this week, will now end Friday, six days ahead of its original schedule, at Trump's direction.

Trump has pushed aides to arrange a face-to-face with Kim during his planned November trip to Asia, potentially on the sidelines of the APEC summit in Shenzhen, China. He met Kim three times during his first term without securing a denuclearization deal.

The appetite for a diplomatic win has grown as his war with Iran, which he predicted would last only a few weeks when it began in February, drags toward the six-month mark with no end in sight.

President Donald Trump says the war he launched against Iran has never looked better, but Republicans on Capitol Hill can't seem to figure out what he's talking about.

Nearly six months after the first U.S. strikes hit Iran in late February, members of Trump's own party are struggling to explain to voters where the conflict is heading or whether the White House has any plan to end it. This month the frustration boiled over in remarkably blunt terms from one Trump ally.

"For an ongoing war, there's not all that much messaging around it," a Republican strategist told NOTUS, requesting anonymity to speak candidly. "And the messaging around it is just — it's bungled, it's bargled, it's confused."

The whiplash was on full display Tuesday, when Trump abruptly declared peace efforts dead, writing on Truth Social, "There are no talks or conversations going on, or scheduled, with the Islamic Republic of Iran." The reversal landed a day after his son-in-law Jared Kushner told Fox News talks were "more robust than it's maybe ever been."

By Wednesday, Trump insisted the standoff had never looked better.

"Right now, I think the situation is so good," he told reporters, before vowing the "MOST CRUSHING ECONOMIC OPERATION EVER TAKEN AGAINST ANY COUNTRY" — an "ECONOMIC D-DAY" against nations still doing business with Tehran.

Fellow Republicans have demanded answers over slogans, with Sen. Mike Rounds (R-SD) asking, "How do we finish the job? It has not been answered yet." Outgoing Sen. Bill Cassidy (R-LA) wanted to know, "What's the endgame?"

The threats horrified some critics, one of whom called the president "insane." The White House shrugged off any criticism, insisting Trump has destroyed Iran's military and will never allow it a nuclear weapon.