David Edwards

Workers erected black screening around the drained Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool on Monday, hiding it from public view and fueling accusations of a "cover-up."

"We drained the beautiful 'Reflecting Pool' today in order to fix the scars and damage that was done by the Vandals two weeks ago," President Donald Trump posted on Truth Social late Monday. "The slashes were 300 yards long, and the floor of the pool was cut and then pulled upward, with great force, by these thugs."

But earlier that day — before the screens went up — former CNN anchor Jim Acosta visited the drained pool and found no sign of the damage Trump described.

"There are no signs of any slashes or a 350-foot gash down the middle of the reflecting pool," Acosta reported on Instagram.

"There are signs of a shoddy paint job that was done down here," Acosta added. "You can see some of the splotchy paint marks up and down the bottom of this reflecting pool, but nothing like he has been talking."

Trump ordered the pool painted "American flag blue" ahead of the nation's 250th anniversary, a project that quickly drew complaints of peeling paint and algae blooms, CBS News reported. The renovation cost $14.7 million.

Hours after Acosta's report, workers began installing black screening along the pool's perimeter.

"The great Reflecting Pool cover-up has begun," Thomas Watkins, Washington bureau chief for The National News, wrote on X.

Watkins' post included photos of the screens going up. He noted the view from the Lincoln Memorial staircase still showed the full length of the screened-off pool.

The Reflecting Pool is the latest Washington landmark to be covered with a tarp this month.

The White House's North Portico columns and the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts sign have both been obscured by coverings in recent weeks, Forbes reported.

Trump said the pool "will be refilled and put back into service soon."

A reporter's tribute to the late Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-SC) backfired this week after it unwittingly revealed a request from the lawmaker that left her colleagues aghast.

Following Graham's death of an aortic dissection at 71, Atlantic reporter Ashley Parker — who covered Congress for the New York Times — shared what she called a favorite memory of the senator.

"I have many Lindsey Graham stories," Parker wrote on X. "This is perhaps my favorite."

Parker said she was racing to Charleston in the summer of 2015 to cover Graham's response to the Mother Emanuel church shooting — the deadliest mass shooting in South Carolina history, according to the Emanuel Nine Memorial Foundation — when she arrived still dressed in "what I'd be wearing to work that day."

"He had me meet him at a restaurant, where I told him I needed to shadow him for the next 48 hours," Parker wrote.

"You are sticky. And you are icky. If you want to shadow me, go buy some nice new clothes — maybe a dress — and take a shower, and then we'll talk," Parker recalled Graham telling her.

"I drove to a local big box store, bought a dress (he seemed to have a strong preference for a dress), and spent the next few days with him," Parker wrote.

Her colleagues did not share her fondness for the memory.

"If any politician told me to put on a skirt, if I wanted access to his response to a mass shooting, that story would have been filed to my editor within 10 minutes," Rolling Stone reporter Nikki McCann Ramírez wrote on X.

Journalist Glenn Greenwald called it "one of the most bizarre stories for a journalist to tell about herself" and said it was revealing "of the relationship between corporate journalists and politicians," writing on X.

"Uh, what," Washington Post reporter Evan Hill posted on X, apparently at a loss for words.

"Wait, so Lindsey Graham demanded this reporter wear a dress, and then he was rewarded with a nice story?" journalist David Sirota asked on X.

Writer David Grossman pointed out that Parker's piece was originally supposed to be about "the senator grappling with the unimaginable" — but ended up "fairly different" from what was planned.

"It certainly does not seem like he did much grappling," Grossman added.

President Donald Trump has reportedly found a way to cram even more golden garnish on the Oval Office walls just a day after a photo of his tube of Krazy Glue went viral.

CNN White House producer DJ Judd first spotted the adhesive on Monday evening, as Trump fielded reporters' questions about Iran from behind the Resolute Desk.

The next morning, Daily Mail White House correspondent Jon Michael Raasch also spotted something new on the marble fireplace: two golden seals that hadn't been there in late April, when Trump met King Charles in the same room.

A new book by New York Times reporters Maggie Haberman and Jonathan Swan, "Regime Change," revealed that White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt once walked in to find Trump personally gluing gilded appliqués onto the fireplace mantel.

"As he was known to prefer his own aesthetic handiwork to anyone else's," the authors write, "the sight of the president squeezing glue onto gilded appliqués and mounting them on the wall himself surprised no one in his inner circle."

Photos from the Oval Office show it has been filling up with gold since Trump returned to the White House in January 2025 — gold cherubs above the doors, gilded Rococo mirrors, golden eagle statues, and gold-framed portraits crowding the walls.

Washington Post senior critic Robin Givhan told NPR that the effect runs counter to what the room has always stood for.

"Part of the power of the Oval Office has always come from the fact that it didn't need all of these elements in order to convey authority," Givhan said. "The authority came from the people and from democracy."

New York-based interior designer Tommy Landen criticized the "overwhelming" gold ornamentation in an interview with Newsweek.

"When you overload it and just keep adding more and more, it becomes overwhelming," Landen said. "It becomes gaudy and tacky."

During a Fox News tour of the White House, Trump insisted the decorations are made from 24-karat gold. But HuffPost reported that at least some of the curlicue moldings resemble a polyurethane item made in Taiwan and sold at Home Depot for $58.

A civil rights lawsuit filed on Tuesday accuses White House Deputy Chief of Staff Stephen Miller of orchestrating a deportation conspiracy with a group its own spokesperson allegedly called "a vigilante force."

The suit was filed in federal court in New York under the Ku Klux Klan Act of 1871 — a Reconstruction-era law designed to give federal courts power over conspiracies to strip people of their constitutional rights through terror and intimidation.

The plaintiff is Mahmoud Khalil, a Palestinian permanent resident and former Columbia University student.

He was arrested by plainclothes U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents in March 2025 and held for 104 days in a Louisiana detention facility more than 1,300 miles from his pregnant wife.

The defendants include Miller, Secretary of State Marco Rubio, and a constellation of private organizations — among them Betar, a nationalist group the lawsuit says bragged about running "a vigilante force."

In January 2025, according to the court filing, a representative of the Betar "vigilante" group admitted to communications directly with Miller and Rubio to hand over a pre-selected list of Palestinian activists it wanted the Trump administration to arrest and deport.

The day after Khalil's March 2025 arrest, Betar posted on X to boast about its role in the arrest.

"As we said 5 weeks ago, Khalil is on our deport list... We have provided information on many others who will shortly as well be detained and deported," the post stated, according to the filing.

That same day, Miller warned on X that those "who sympathize with terrorism are unwelcome on our shores" and "will be denied entry or sent home."

The suit also names Victoria Coates, a Heritage Foundation official who co-authored "Project Esther" — the blueprint the complaint says Miller helped develop for the deportation campaign.

The filing quotes her book, published the year before the arrests began, as saying Palestinians' "default mechanism is sadistic savagery."

The filing alleges Miller worked collectively with Coates to build that blueprint, shared her anti-Palestinian views, and was "public about his work with the Heritage Foundation" before returning to the White House.

In an April 2025 Fox News interview, Miller was asked directly whether Khalil would be deported.

"Yes, he will," Miller said. "As will anyone who preaches hate for America."

A federal judge in a related Massachusetts case had already described the broader operation in starker terms — agents "snatching" people off the street using tactics "akin to the despised Ku Klux Klan," designed to "terrorize Americans into quiescence."

President Donald Trump's pick to oversee Pentagon spending was confronted over the $3.2 billion in defense contracts tied to his sons Donald Trump Jr. and Eric Trump since he took office.

Acting Pentagon Comptroller Jules W. Hurst III faced the confrontation Tuesday at his Senate Armed Services Committee confirmation hearing — the official process to make his role permanent.

Sen. Elissa Slotkin (D-MI) pointed out how the Trump family had benefited during Donald Trump's second term.

"We know that the president's sons have gotten $3,200,000,000 in contracts from the federal government since he became president," Slotkin told Hurst at the hearing. "Do you understand that even the appearance of a conflict of interest makes you subject to an IG report — an inspector general investigation — and that you will be in charge of approving these major contracts as they go out the door?"

"I have great faith in the department's ability to control for any kind of bias or injustice in awarding contracts," Hurst dodged.

"I just want to make sure we are understanding that you will be responsible for putting your stamp of approval on the movement of that money for contracts that could be linked directly to the president's sons," Slotkin pressed.

"The comptroller does not award contracts for the entire —" Hurst said before being interrupted.

"You move the money!" Slotkin shot back.

"We give program offices money or services money," Hurst demurred.

"I was at the Pentagon," Slotkin said, hinting at her service as acting assistant secretary of defense. "If you don't want that money moving, it doesn't move."

"...your name will be on that, for these contracts, these historic contracts that are being let to the president's sons," the senator concluded as her time expired.

The Trump brothers have built their defense windfall through two investment funds, the Post found. Donald Trump Jr. is a partner at 1789 Capital, a self-described "patriotic capitalism" venture firm that has backed over a dozen defense tech companies since his father's reelection.

A Washington Post analysis published Sunday found companies tied to both brothers have raked in $3.2 billion in federal contracts, with $3.1 billion more in potential future contracts.

Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito could use a retirement announcement to interfere in the midterm elections, a new analysis warns.

A new analysis by Off Message writer Brian Beutler found a risk that Alito could use an unconventional retirement announcement to influence the outcome of November's election. Beutler called it "LEGAL judicial election interference, and another heist."

CBS News confirmed in April that neither Alito nor Justice Clarence Thomas, 78, plans to retire — leaving President Donald Trump without a fourth Supreme Court nomination before the midterms.

Alito is 76, and both men want younger conservative replacements, Beutler noted. But a Democratic Senate would slam that door shut for years, Beutler warned.

Democrats could "embargo Trump's judicial nominees — deny them fair hearings just as Republicans denied a fair hearing to Merrick Garland in 2016," Beutler wrote.

Alito and Thomas would "have to hang on for dear life, well into their eighties," Beutler wrote — through 2032 at the earliest.

If both justices retired or died under a Democratic president and Senate, the court's 6-3 conservative supermajority would flip to a 5-4 liberal majority, Beutler noted.

Republicans proved they will break any norm to prevent that outcome, Beutler noted, when Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg died in September 2020 — then-Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) rammed through Justice Amy Coney Barrett's confirmation in weeks, just days before Trump lost re-election.

"The Senate GOP knows how to get a Supreme Court confirmation done in less than six weeks," Beutler noted — shorter than the lame-duck window after November's vote.

So if Democrats win and Republicans can't overturn the results, Beutler wrote, "either man or both men can retire in November, and give way to 40-year-old MAGA justices before Christmas."

If Republicans hold the Senate, Thomas could wait. He is already the second-longest-serving justice in history, per the Brennan Center, and could yet claim the record.

But Beutler predicted the justices could "be even more mischievous" — going straight into electoral interference.

"What if Alito thought he could time his retirement announcement to help Republicans get out the vote?" Beutler asked.

Critics zeroed in on photos of tire tracks scarring the floor of the newly drained Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool, where the presidential motorcade drove weeks earlier.

President Donald Trump drained the pool Monday, insisting vandals had left a 300-yard gash in its lining. But reporters and on-the-ground onlookers told CNN they saw no gash.

Photos of the scene that appeared to show tire tracks on the pool's floor quickly went viral on social media.

Back in May, Trump's motorcade had rolled across the freshly sealed pool floor, leaving tire marks caught on camera. When the pool drained Monday, Washington, D.C., photographer Joe Flood posted images of the basin floor showing two long parallel lines in the blue coating.

"...for Reflecting Pool fans: take a look at the drained sections. If there's a 350-foot cut in it, I don't see it yet," Flood wrote on X, including photos showing what appeared to be tire tracks.

The criticism was instant, with political commentator Keith Edwards highlighting the photos on X to his 1 million viewers. "BREAKING: Trump drained the reflecting pool, and it DID reveal damage... tire marks," Edwards said.

Attorney and political commentator Seth Abramson connected the damage to Trump's motorcade visit.

"Evidence has mounted that the supposed 'gash' in the Reflecting Pool is... tire tracks Trump caused by insisting his many-ton presidential convoy drive on the pool's fragile surface. Why? He was too lazy to walk. Per his own edict, he must now do 10 years in federal prison," Abramson wrote on X.

The Trump administration has not publicly explained why the motorcade needed to cross the unfinished pool floor. Three days before the May 7 drive, Trump had boasted the coating was indestructible.

"If you had a knife, you can't even cut it," the president said on May 4. "So strong, so powerful. It's like powerful rubber."

After Trump's vandalism theory didn't hold up to scrutiny, White House spokeswoman Taylor Rogers dismissed it as "dumb and unfounded."

On Monday night, Trump doubled down in a post on Truth Social. "We drained the beautiful 'Reflecting Pool' today in order to fix the scars and damage that was done by the Vandals two weeks ago. The slashes were 300 yards long, and the floor of the pool was cut and then pulled upward, with great force, by these thugs," he wrote.

Hours later, he posted again, attacking "ABC Fake News for fact-checking his vandalism claims.

"ABC Fake News and its shaky anchor, David Muir, said that the Reflecting Pool was drained to address Peeling Paint (there is no paint, it was slashed with a knife, or box cutter, high grade colored waterproofing liner - it was VANDALISM!) and Algae Blooms (also caused by Vandals, but removed long ago!)," Trump wrote.

While Trump pointed fingers at vandals, one of the six people he had arrested was three-time Olympian David Hearn, 67, who says he briefly touched a loose flap of coating on a bike ride and was held for five hours. Hearn has pleaded not guilty to a felony charge that carries up to 10 years in prison — Abramson argued that Trump should face the same sentence.

"Per his own edict, he must now do 10 years in federal prison," Abramson said.

Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche faces a proposed $1,000-a-day fine for refusing to comply with a federal judge's order to release more Epstein files.

The motion, filed Monday by independent journalist Katie Phang's legal team in Washington, asks U.S. District Judge Emmet Sullivan to hold Blanche in contempt — meaning the court would punish him for defying its order.

The filing lands two days before Blanche is set to appear before the Senate Judiciary Committee for his confirmation hearing as attorney general.

Sullivan ruled in June, as Politico reported, that Blanche had "conceded" he was violating the Epstein Files Transparency Act, a 2025 law Trump signed requiring the full public release of Justice Department files on convicted sex trafficker Jeffrey Epstein. Sullivan had ordered Blanche to unredact emails, release FBI interview notes, and publish a log explaining every redaction — and Blanche refused.

"The Attorney General refuses to review foreign-language documents," the filing states. "He refuses to produce an explanation for his redactions. And he refuses to produce documents he concedes contain no victim information."

According to the filing, when Sullivan ordered Blanche to begin reviewing foreign-language Epstein documents that the Justice Department had never reviewed at all, Blanche claimed he didn't have to—arguing that because he had told Congress it was "impracticable" and Congress hadn't complained, he was off the hook.

"This isn't how the law — any law — works," Phang's attorneys fired back.

Phang's filing argues Blanche told the court he had already satisfied the requirement for a redaction log — a public, document-by-document explanation for every blacked-out name or piece of information.

The court document also argues that Blanche had only sent Congress a vague summary, rather than what Congress required.

Phang's claim notes that Blanche refused to release documents he concedes contain no victim information — including emails about a so-called "torture video."

"The Acting Attorney General has not conceded anything," a Department of Justice spokesperson told CBS News. "Judge Sullivan's perverse interpretation appears to be focused on driving misleading headlines."

Monday's filing accuses Blanche of "brazenness" that "fits a pattern of dishonesty, delay, and obfuscation" and asks the court to fine him $1,000 a day until he fully complies.

Blanche's Senate confirmation hearing is scheduled to begin Wednesday.

Investigators descended on a drained Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool on Monday as witnesses on the ground reported no sign of President Donald Trump's claimed 350-foot "gash."

Trump ordered a $14.7 million renovation of the pool this spring, painting the bottom what he called "American flag blue" ahead of the nation's 250th birthday, according to PolitiFact.

The pool reopened in early June — and within days was covered in algae with its new lining peeling off, ABC News reported.

Trump blamed vandals. He claimed they had slashed a massive gash into the pool's rubber lining using knives and razors — and said arrests had been made.

"An inspection or investigation teams (sic) is at work at the Reflecting Pool this afternoon," DC freelance photographer Andrew Leyden wrote on X on Monday afternoon.

Matt Rein, the Democratic National Committee's creative partnerships director, reported from the pool earlier in the day as crews finished draining it.

"I'm here at the Reflecting Pool, and crews are almost done draining all of the water … no '350 foot' gash found from my vantage point," Rein wrote. "Lots of dirt and grime, though."

"Shockingly, no 350 ft gash in sight at the Reflecting Pool," former White House deputy press secretary Sarah Matthews wrote after also visiting the pool Monday.

However, Trump has repeatedly blamed a "gash" caused by vandals to explain problems with his renovation.

"The 350-foot gash, made by a very sharp knife or razors, is actually numerous slashes over a very long 350-foot length," Trump wrote on Truth Social in June. That same week, he told reporters that criminals had "cut it very violently…"

On a podcast last week, Interior Secretary Doug Burgum said that workers would "[r]epair the vandalism that was done. Fill it back up again."

PolitiFact found Trump described the gash as 150 feet, then 250 feet, then 300 feet, then 350 feet — and the administration never produced photographs or other evidence to back any version of the claim.

President Donald Trump plans to use newly declassified intelligence in a primetime speech Thursday night to revive his long-running claim that a foreign nation interfered in the 2020 election, according to MS NOW.

CIA Director John Ratcliffe, acting Director of National Intelligence Bill Pulte, FBI Director Kash Patel and Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin will join Trump for the address, MS NOW reported.

Earlier Monday, Trump wrote on Truth Social that he "will be making a Speech to the Nation on Thursday evening, at 9 P.M. Eastern" — but gave no details about the topic.

Trump has spent years insisting the 2020 election was stolen from him. Courts, Republican-led audits and federal agencies all rejected that claim.

His best-known argument centered on voting machines made by Dominion Voting Systems. Trump allies — including his lawyers Rudy Giuliani and Sidney Powell — claimed the machines were tied to late Venezuelan president Hugo Chávez and had flipped millions of votes to then-Democratic nominee Joe Biden.

They also alleged that thousands of dead people had voted in key battleground states, the Brennan Center reported.

The Department of Homeland Security's cybersecurity agency, Dominion itself and state officials across the country all said those claims were false, the Brennan Center for Justice reported.

Trump also pressured Georgia's Republican secretary of state to "find 11,780 votes" — the exact number he needed to flip the state — in a phone call that legal experts condemned as an abuse of power, the Brennan Center reported.

An Associated Press investigation found fewer than 475 potential fraud cases out of more than 25 million votes cast in the six disputed states — nowhere near enough to change the outcome.

Now Trump is framing newly declassified intelligence as proof he was right all along, MS NOW reported.

The White House has not said which foreign nation the documents implicate.

The speech airs Thursday at 9 p.m. Eastern.

Videos from a fatal Immigration and Customs Enforcement shooting in Biddeford, Maine, show agents walking beside a slow-rolling car, undercutting the government's claim that the driver tried to use it as a weapon.

The victim was a 26-year-old Colombian man who was authorized to work in the United States, according to the Maine Immigrants' Rights Coalition. He was shot dead Monday morning.

A second video shared by journalist Sam Stein shows ICE agents removing the man's body from the car and dropping it headfirst on the ground. He appeared to have been handcuffed.

The agents involved in the shooting were not wearing body cameras, according to the Portland Press Herald.

"Objectively, this is a video of a car slowly turning and ICE agents walking alongside it," Stein, who shared the first video on X, wrote. "Hard to understand how we could end up with ANOTHER deadly shooting here."

"They still dropped him on the ground and handcuffed him after a bullet through his head," David Bier, director of immigration studies at the Cato Institute, wrote on X in response to the second video.

The missing cameras are part of a broader pattern. After two people were fatally shot by ICE agents in Minneapolis earlier this year, Congress gave the Department of Homeland Security $20 million specifically to buy and deploy body cameras. The agents who killed a man in Houston last week also had none.

Maine Democrat Chellie Pingree confirmed Monday that the Biddeford agents lacked cameras, Stein reported.

Two witnesses who live near the shooting scene described what they saw to the Portland Press Herald.

A neighbor named Em — who asked that her last name be withheld out of fear of ICE — watched from her window as agents stopped the car and pulled the driver out.

"No one went to him and no one did anything," she said.

Daniel Boucher had been getting ready for work when he heard the shots. He watched agents pull the driver from the car.

"He was bleeding profusely from the head," Boucher said. "He was talking. He said, 'I tried to stop.'"

Boucher recalled watching the man die on the street.

"I wish they had covered the body," he said.

"He was saying he was trying to stop and then he died," Boucher said. "Why? Because he was driving a car?"

Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche walks into his Senate confirmation hearing Wednesday with a federal court order that may bar him from defending the very deal senators plan to grill him on.

U.S. District Judge Kathleen Williams of the Southern District of Florida issued the 56-page ruling Monday, voiding a $1.776 billion IRS settlement Blanche engineered and finding President Donald Trump's lawsuit sparked by a leak of his tax returns was filed for an "improper purpose."

The Senate Judiciary Committee hearing opens Wednesday.

Republican senators had already been demanding answers for weeks about a provision that permanently shielded Trump, his family, and his businesses from IRS audits.

Williams ordered the parties barred from "using, offering, admitting, or citing" the settlement in any "official proceeding." A Senate confirmation hearing is an official proceeding under federal law, per 18 U.S.C. § 1515(a)(1)(B).

Former federal prosecutor Harry Litman called it a "very interesting situation" for Blanche.

"Remember how DOJ tried to silence Jack Smith from even mentioning his report based on Judge Cannon's order?" Litman wrote on X, "Well, Williams has ordered parties that they can't refer to the bogus unconstitutional 'settlement agreement.' Does that mean Blanche is so muzzled Wed?"

The ruling also puts the Justice Department in a corner on appeal. If the department fights back in court, it would have to argue the settlement was legitimate — directly contradicting Blanche's repeated insistence that the fund is "dead, dead, dead," Litman noted.

"No American should be above the law, not even the president — and maybe even particularly the president," Sen. Bill Cassidy (R-LA) told Semafor before Monday's ruling.

"I'm not prepared to vote against him. I'm not prepared to vote for him until I get clarity on that," Sen. John Cornyn (R-TX) said about Blanche and the audit immunity deal.

Sen. Lisa Murkowski (R-AK) was equally skeptical. "I don't like it, and I've asked for more information on it," she told Semafor.

Blanche had insisted the audit bar was "not immunity" and "purely retrospective," but the order found his May testimony claiming there was "no judge" to review the deal was "at best, misleading and, at worst, disingenuous."

The order found the entire arrangement had "no viable basis in law or fact."

Williams directed her order to the New York and D.C. bars — where Blanche and Associate Attorney General Stanley Woodward are members — for disciplinary review. Trump nominated Blanche to permanently lead the Justice Department 16 days after the settlement was announced.

Lindsey Graham's only surviving family member said she was "kind of like devastated" as President Donald Trump publicly pushed her to fill her late brother's Senate seat.

Darline Graham Nordone, 62, of Lexington, South Carolina, was asked Monday about her reaction to the president's suggestion after Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-SC) died Saturday night of an aortic dissection, a tear in the body's main artery. His office announced the death early Sunday.

About a day later, on Monday, Trump wrote on Truth Social that he had recommended Nordone to Republican Gov. Henry McMaster (R-SC) for the seat. McMaster has a 4 p.m. press conference scheduled to announce his pick.

"Actually, I'm just kind of like devastated right now," Nordone told the New York Post in a brief phone call Monday minutes after Trump's post went up.

Their parents died within 15 months of each other in the 1970s, leaving Darline orphaned at 13, according to the Post. Lindsey, then 22 and still in college, became her legal guardian. He later joined the Air Force and eventually used his military benefits to support her.

"He's always been there for me," Darline said in a video posted by Lindsey Graham's office. "No matter what."

Trump called his suggestion a tribute in his Truth Social post.

"This would be a fabulous tribute to Lindsey, who loved her dearly!" he wrote.

Rep. Joe Wilson (R-SC), who said he has known Darline "for years," backed the president's push.

"I have faith in Gov. McMaster that he will make the right decision, but I would support the president's recommendation," Wilson told the Post.

Darline would serve through Jan. 3, the end of Lindsey Graham's current term, according to FITSNews. A special primary is in the works for Aug. 11 to replace him on the November ballot, FITSNews reported.

Lindsey Graham often said his proudest achievement had nothing to do with the Senate. In a 2015 interview with C-SPAN, he reflected on his sister's life.

"Of all the things that have happened in my life, her turning out so well is the highlight of it by far," Lindsey Graham told C-SPAN, per the Post.

Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth faced backlash Monday after announcing a new task force to hunt and prosecute "leakers," drawing an immediate rebuke from CNN anchor Jake Tapper.

Hegseth posted a video to X Monday morning announcing that the Pentagon and the Justice Department had created a joint task force to identify and prosecute anyone who leaks sensitive military information.

"Some call them whistleblowers," Tapper fired back. "When they're alerting the public to government lies and malfeasance, for instance."

"To leak sensitive national defense information and secrets betrays the men and women who wear our nation's uniform," Hegseth said in the video. "Those who betray that trust will be met with the full force of the law."

In a second post, Tapper linked to the Pentagon's own inspector general report on Hegseth's use of Signal, a commercial messaging app. "I know of one leak that put our brave pilots at risk!" Tapper wrote.

That report, released in December 2025, found that Hegseth had shared sensitive strike details — including the quantity and strike times of manned U.S. aircraft over hostile territory — on an unsecured app hours before those pilots launched their mission over Yemen. The Pentagon watchdog concluded Hegseth "did not comply" with department policy. The journalist who received the information had been inadvertently added to the chat by then-National Security Adviser Mike Waltz.

"Not as dangerous as installing an angry adolescent at the Pentagon to play 'Secretary of War' and botch an armed conflict in the Middle East," former CNN White House correspondent John Harwood wrote on X, also pushing back against Hegseth's announcement.

Monday's crackdown was not Hegseth's first. In April 2025, as the Signal scandal swirled and his own conduct was under investigation, Hegseth suspended three senior Pentagon officials he accused of leaking — then went on Fox News to declare: "Once a leaker, always a leaker, often a leaker."

"Accountability starts at the top," Sen. Jack Reed (D-RI) told The Intercept at the time. "Secretary Hegseth has refused to take responsibility for his own mishandling of classified information, but has readily punished others for far less."

Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche faces Epstein survivors at his Senate confirmation hearing this week, with one expert predicting he'll be left "squirming."

Blanche is set to testify Wednesday before the Senate Judiciary Committee, according to The Bulwark. Kristol writes that Democrats intend to call at least one survivor as a witness on Thursday.

Nineteen survivors have already gone on record opposing his nomination, according to CNN. Blanche has refused to meet with any of them, the survivors have said.

Bulwark publisher Sarah Longwell wrote that Democrats will have plenty of opportunities to make Blanche look like a "corrupt, unqualified, incompetent hack" — and that the Epstein files are their sharpest weapon.

"When voters scroll through their social media feeds after the hearing, Democrats should ensure that they get clip after clip of Blanche squirming to justify his handling of the Epstein files," Longwell wrote.

Bulwark editor William Kristol agreed, predicting survivors will show up in force.

"It's also likely that when Blanche testifies on Wednesday, Epstein survivors will be present," Kristol wrote on Monday.

"Will Blanche, who has refused to meet with them, acknowledge them?" he continued. "Will he apologize for the botched redaction process over which he presided that exposed them to further pain and harassment?"

Kristol expects Democrats to call "at least one courageous Epstein survivor" as a witness Thursday — and said that testimony could be the "highlight of the hearing."

The survivors' opposition centers on Blanche's role in overseeing the release of the Epstein files. In a joint statement obtained by CNN, 19 women said Blanche "failed to deliver transparency" and called his nomination "failing upward, plain and simple."

"We have seen consistently over the past year his behavior in regards to the Epstein case is just really concerning," survivor Liz Stein told CNN.

That concern traces back to a Situation Room meeting Blanche attended on July 17, 2025, aimed at containing the political fallout from the Epstein files — first revealed by The New York Times.

"He was in charge of the process and the entire release of the Epstein files," former Attorney General Pam Bondi said in closed-door congressional testimony in May, according to CNN.