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Adam Kredo, WFB The chief oversight body responsible for tracking U.S. foreign assistance says United Nations agencies are stonewalling a probe into their ties to Hamas. The agencies have…

Rich Schapiro & Ani Ucar, NBC The man targeted vintage furniture dealers and influencers. Then they banded together to try to take him down.

Sophia Cai & Finya Swai, Politico

By Ben Casselman, New York Times

Maya Yang & Dani Anguiano, Guardian US president makes baseless claims about fraud in blue states and says JD Vance will lead clampdown as ‘fraud czar’

The trio of PBS News Hour anchor Amna Nawaz, The Atlantic staff writer David Brooks, and MS NOW host Jonathan Capehart appeared ready to pronounce defeat on Friday as they juxtaposed President Trump’s Iran speech earlier in the week to the day’s news that saw an American F-15 and Black Hawk helicopter go down in Iran.

Nawaz began with Brooks and suggested there was a contradiction between Friday’s news and Trump’s speech, “David, all of this is just two days after the president said in an address to the nation that the U.S. had crippled the Iranian military and the war was nearly over. What’s your reaction to all of this?”

 

PBS is ready to declare defeat in Iran with host Amna Nawaz asking David Brooks about Friday’s F-15 and Black Hawk shoot downs “All of this is just two days after the president said in an address to the nation that the U.S. had crippled the Iranian military and the war was nearly… pic.twitter.com/SNtPomWlpa
— Alex Christy (@alexchristy17) April 4, 2026
 

The correct answer for the conservative half of this segment would have been to point out that the reason why this is such a big news story is because it is so rare. It took Iran over a month to get its first confirmed shoot down, but instead, Brooks took Nawaz’s framing and ran with it, “Yeah, that’s one of the disadvantages of having a huckster for president, that he does just—he can’t tell the American people that, when you’re going to war, it’s horrible, and that Iran is a serious country that’s been preparing for this for nearly half-a-century.”

Brooks claimed that while he was initially somewhat supportive of the decision to attack, the benefits no longer outweigh the costs, “To me, what happened—I have been somewhat, moderately hoping there’d be some positive outcome. And I think there has been some. We have had to go to the Middle East for almost every decade for the last 50 years because of radical Islam, which the Iranian regime typifies. But this is clearly the week when the costs of the war are so exponentially larger than the benefits of what we’re getting in these marginal weeks.”

With references to how high oil prices enrich Iran and Russia, the state of the world economy, and of NATO, Brooks concluded, “The costs are just exorbitant now, not to mention the human suffering. And so, if Trump doesn’t see that we’re losing every day he continues this thing, he’s going to just face more and more political problems, military problems, and all sorts of problems. And so he just needs to admit that—what’s going on. And I doubt he has the mental ability to do that.”

As for Capehart, he pulled out an interesting analogy to try to paint a dire picture, “I mean, this is a war of choice. We didn’t need to do—take this action now. What’s funny, but not funny, playing on cable right now on a loop is Top Gun: Maverick. And if anyone has seen that movie, the whole plot is about a U.S. military operation deep inside Iran, and two fighter pilots have to eject out of their planes.”

According to Capehart, “There was more of a plan in the fictional plot of Top Gun: Maverick than there appears to be in this very real, very live situation in the United States’ war with Iran.”

 

Jonathan Capehart then claimed “There was more of a plan in the fictional plot of Top Gun: Maverick then there appears to be in this very real, very live situation in the United States’ war with Iran.”
As for Trump’s speech, “What he should have done was told the American… pic.twitter.com/Xyuq1pDFc9
— Alex Christy (@alexchristy17) April 4, 2026
 

The plot of that movie revolved around an unnamed country—which was clearly meant to be Iran—and its nuclear program. It was more analogous to the single mission in June’s Operation Midnight Hammer than the wider campaign of Epic Fury. The U.S. lost no aircraft in Midnight Hammer because while Top Gun: Maverick was a good and entertaining movie, the point of the climatic bombing run was meant to develop characters and themes, not to show realistic combat tactics.

Nevertheless, Capehart returned to Trump’s speech, “Look, I applaud the president for finally addressing the American people, but he is a month too late, and told us nothing we had not already heard from him, from his administration through—in various ways. What he should have done was told the American people really why we went, how we’re getting out, and then spend more than half-a-phrase on the 13 service members who lost their lives in this war of choice, his choice.”

Friday featured tragic events and reminded the country why we admire those who serve, but we should also keep things in perspective and be appreciative that these events have been so rare. Brooks and Capehart can have their own opinions about the costs and benefits of this war, but they can’t apply a standard to Trump that has never been applied to previous wartime presidents.

 Here is a transcript for the April 3 show:

PBS News Hour

4/3/2026

7:36 PM ET

AMNA NAWAZ: So, as we sit here and speak now, as we reported at the top of the show, there’s still a U.S. crew member from that downed fighter jet missing, a search-and-rescue operation under way. We know Iranians were also able to shoot down another aircraft over the Gulf, shot at a Black Hawk helicopter that returned to base safely. Iranian leaders are looking for that missing crew member on the ground.

David, all of this is just two days after the president said in an address to the nation that the U.S. had crippled the Iranian military and the war was nearly over. What’s your reaction to all of this?

DAVID BROOKS: Yeah, that’s one of the disadvantages of having a huckster for president, that he does just—he can’t tell the American people that, when you’re going to war, it’s horrible, and that Iran is a serious country that’s been preparing for this for nearly half-a-century.

And they’re going to fight back and they’re going to make countermoves like this or like the Straits of Hormuz. To me, what happened—I have been somewhat, moderately hoping there’d be some positive outcome. And I think there has been some. We have had to go to the Middle East for almost every decade for the last 50 years because of radical Islam, which the Iranian regime typifies.

But this is clearly the week when the costs of the war are so exponentially larger than the benefits of what we’re getting in these marginal weeks. The cost to Russia is now getting all this revenue. Iran is getting all this revenue. The European economy and the world economies are in crisis. NATO is in shreds.

And so the costs are just exorbitant now, not to mention the human suffering. And so, if Trump doesn’t see that we’re losing every day he continues this thing, he’s going to just face more and more political problems, military problems, and all sorts of problems. And so he just needs to admit that—what’s going on. And I doubt he has the mental ability to do that.

NAWAZ: Jonathan?

JONATHAN CAPEHART: I mean, this is a war of choice. We didn’t need to do—take this action now.

What’s funny, but not funny, playing on cable right now on a loop is Top Gun: Maverick. And if anyone has seen that movie, the whole plot is about a U.S. military operation deep inside Iran, and two fighter pilots have to eject out of their planes.

I bring that up because there was more of a plan in the fictional plot of Top Gun: Maverick than there appears to be in this very real, very live situation in the United States’ war with Iran.

Look, I applaud the president for finally addressing the American people, but he is a month too late, and told us nothing we had not already heard from him, from his administration through—in various ways. What he should have done was told the American people really why we went, how we’re getting out, and then spend more than half-a-phrase on the 13 service members who lost their lives in this war of choice, his choice.

Nicholas Clairmont’s review of Jacob Siegel’s The Information State: Politics in the Age of Total Control (“Tyranny Through Technology,” March 29, 2026) calls it “careful and specific” and “unimpeachably sourced.” I am one of the book’s caricatured villains and I want to address the sourcing and specificity directly.
The heart of Siegel’s “mass censorship” narrative, mentioned in Clairmont’s review, is that the Election Integrity Partnership (EIP) “classified almost 22 million posts as ‘misinformation incidents,'” in what Siegel calls “the largest public-private social media monitoring and censorship initiative in existence.” In the book, Siegel positions this statistic immediately after innuendo about armies of Stanford students flagging tweets to platforms. The implication, which readers and reviewers have fallen for, is that 22 million tweets were sent to platforms. This is false. The facts of the matter, laid out in reports, court filings, congressional testimonies, and tens of thousands of documents released following congressional subpoenas, undercut this wild story completely. They’ve been in the public record for years; any investigative journalist, fact-checker, or ethical author would have acknowledged them. Siegel did not—even though I also personally explained them to him.
During the 2020 election, EIP, not taking any direction from government and with no enforcement ability, flagged roughly 4,800 URLs to platforms, including 2,890 tweets. Sixty-five percent of these were ignored, approximately 25 percent were labeled, and 10 percent were removed. In the end, a few hundred flagged posts were removed by platforms for violating their terms—a far cry from 22 million, and nothing resembling mass censorship.
After the election, we built a dataset of 22 million tweets referencing the election’s most viral rumors. Mike Benz, a figure who worked at the State Department for approximately two months yet whom Siegel called a “whistleblower,” twisted this statistic in a 2022 blog post, claiming that the data gathered postelection represented censorship demands or flags during the election as part of some “Biden censorship regime.” This is nonsense.
Clairmont originally wrote that EIP had “passed almost 22 million ‘takedown requests’ for specific posts to social media companies via a ‘ticket’ system that saw tech platforms responding, on average, in under an hour”—an understandable mistake to make, because that is how Siegel’s positioning framed it. The correction, unfortunately, doesn’t change the errors in Siegel’s book, or how much his thesis relies on the misrepresented number.
The 22 million tweet fabrication isn’t the only problem. Siegel’s claims trace back to the same closed loop of sources. Siegel cites Matt Taibbi, who cites Mike Benz. The Weaponization Subcommittee cites both. Siegel cites the Subcommittee. To a reader it could look like deep research and convergent evidence, but the reality is that it’s recursive footnotes citing a small echo chamber.
Factual errors compound the sourcing problems, and they are not random. In an effort to make me the singular face of “mass censorship,” Siegel attempted to smear me through guilt-by-association, even when the associations were factually wrong. He wrote that I led EIP, but I was on maternity leave for the first six weeks of the project; one of Siegel’s own primary sources, the House Weaponization Subcommittee report, correctly identifies my colleague Alex Stamos as EIP’s creator and lead.
Dates are wrong in the book. People are placed at institutions where they never worked; he puts Meghan Markle on a commission that was actually joined by Prince Harry. Every error goes in the same direction and every mistake inflates the claimed conspiracy, elevates Siegel’s villains, and burnishes his heroes. This is not journalism, it’s ideological argument dressed as investigation. When I reached out, publicly, to three reviewers to correct mistakes about my work, Siegel accused me of “censorship.”
Clairmont credits Siegel with producing a serious structural account of how information power actually works. I share the belief that those questions deserve serious treatment—the relationships between government, NGOs, and platform moderation are genuinely worth scrutinizing; I’ve written about them for years. But Siegel’s book doesn’t do this, it asserts a predetermined conclusion intended to be maximally sensational to an ideological audience—it retrofits suggestive evidence, discards what doesn’t fit, and fabricates what’s missing.
Readers who want to understand how information power works in the digital age deserve an account rooted in what actually occurred. The Information State is not that book.
Renee DiResta is the author of the book Invisible Rulers: The People Who Turn Lies into Reality.
The post Letter to the Editor: Who’s Censoring Whom? appeared first on .

Billions of people around the world are celebrating two of the great advances in human freedom this weekend. Wednesday night marked the start of Passover, the Israelites’ divine rescue from slavery in Pharaoh’s Egypt. This Sunday, Christians will attend Easter services to commemorate Jesus’ resurrection and triumph over death after his execution by Roman soldiers.
These Abrahamic religions focus on the eternal, but they strongly affect earthly matters. The Anglo-American branch of the Judeo-Christian civilization is the dominant force in global affairs today, and this century will be defined by the contest between this branch and a heretical offshoot, the Chinese version of Marxist-Leninism.
The Anglo-American culture is predominantly Christian but uniquely affiliated with Judaism. During the Reformation, common people in England gained access to the Bible in English, and as they read the Old Testament, they encountered Jewish heroes, kings, and holy men. England became more philosemitic and religiously tolerant as it became more Protestant, and a country that had once expelled its Jews welcomed them back in 1656. John Locke and his patron wrote into the constitution for the Carolina colony explicit protections for Jews and proto-Evangelical “dissenters.”
The Judeo-Christian belief that liberty comes straight from the Creator heavily influenced the American Founding. The Declaration of Independence explicitly referenced it. Biblical passages and allusions permeated the Founding Fathers’ speeches and letters, especially the book of Deuteronomy. The Exodus story inspired American champions of liberty, including Frederick Douglass and Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. The term “Judeo-Christian” became popular after World War II, but the affinity Americans have felt for Jews predates that term by centuries.
Americans and their leaders have not always been devout or doctrinaire. George Washington commented that “above all, the pure and benign light of [divine] Revelation” aided the American Revolution, but the Founding generation was unusually irreligious. They and their descendants generally respect the roots of America’s beliefs in liberty and human value though: This is still a country where aspiring politicians exaggerate their religious fervor rather than downplay it.
This civilization’s influence has spread across the world. The British Empire seeded its institutions and culture into its colonies, and many countries have adopted aspects of the American system. Whether from love of liberty or colder self-interest, others have adopted aspects of this Anglo-American culture.
But it has enemies too. New Pharaohs constantly emerge to treat their people like livestock, to be herded and poked and prodded into submission. Ideologues like Friedrich Nietzsche despise the Judeo-Christian “slave morality” and its belief that a good society protects the poor and the weak. Enemies of freedom and of human dignity generally see the United States as their great foe.
The gravest threat to this Anglo-American branch now comes from a heretical offshoot of the Abrahamic faith, Marxist-Leninism. China has been intellectually colonized by a German, Karl Marx, who twisted and warped aspects of the Judeo-Christian message: Salvation would not come from God, but from using the scientific laws of history to create a paradise on earth. Marxism is an anti-civilization that corrupts the good and the beautiful, and destroys what it cannot corrupt. It is a threat to the Judeo-Christian civilization because it is a threat to all civilizations.
The Chinese Communist Party is the most malevolent champion of this heresy. Although it claims to advance Chinese culture, it is at war with much of China’s heritage. Mao Zedong boasted that the CCP had outdone one of the great crimes of Chinese history, the Qin dynasty’s attempt to destroy Confucianism by burning its books and burying alive its scholars. Xi Jinping demands that his cadres adopt Marx’s ideas as a “way of life” and “spiritual pursuit.” He also seeks to subvert Tibetan Buddhism and Chinese Christianity, most recently by arresting Ezra Jin and the other leaders of Zion Church, the largest free church in China. Other Communist parties have moderated their global ambitions, but Xi’s has not.
Many other civilizations will play an important role in this century. Branches of the Judeo-Christian civilization exist in Europe and Latin America. Islam has great potency, but it is internally divided. The Hindu heartland in south and southeast Asia has proven unusually resistant to the global advance of Christianity and Islam, and it seeks equal footing in the world rather than domination.
None pose the threat to other civilizations that Marxist-Leninism does. Judeo-Christianity adapts itself to local cultures, like the Roman one, and preserves them; Marxist-Leninism dissolves them like acid. The CCP has captured China and its immense potential, and if it subjugates others before it devitalizes its host country, the fate of the world could be grim indeed.
The divine author of liberty has not always ordained that His people will triumph. There is much sorrow in Jewish and in Christian history. But Passover and Easter remind us that the God of liberty is mighty, and with His help, the United States can prevail.
The post Duel of the Faiths: Judeo-Christians vs China’s Marxist-Leninists appeared first on .

MS NOW’s Deadline: White House, or the Nicolle Wallace show, is where Democrats go to hear other Democrats throw rhetorical bombs at the Republicans. No one is any good in the GOP.

On Thursday, Rep. Zoe Lofgren (D-Calif.) greeted Attorney General Pam Bondi’s dismissal with a“good riddance”—then dismissed every potential replacement, all while being encouraged by host Alicia Menendez.

Lofgren didn’t limit herself to criticism of Bondi’s tenure:

LOFGREN: Good riddance to Pam Bondi. But good luck to us for who might come next.

She then turned her disdain on possible successors. Menendez named some rumored replacements — “Lee Zeldin, Jeannine Pirro, Alina Habba” — and asked if any of these people were “actually confirmable” or someone Republicans could “get behind,” Lofgren rejected them wholesale:

LOFGREN: None. None. Not those names . . . These people are jokes.

Lofgren went on to deride multiple figures as “an embarrassment,” claim another “got thrown out of court,” and suggest others were unfit for the role.

Menendez added the name of Sen. Mike Lee (R-Utah): “It was posited to me that his Republican colleagues just want him out of the Senate so badly that they saw an opening.” Even then, Lofgren said Lee was someone she had worked with and could “talk to”—she remained dismissive:

LOFGREN: No. I don’t think he would be a good AG.

Rather than push back, Menendez repeatedly steered the conversation toward further criticism—first by inviting Lofgren to assess confirmability, then by introducing additional names only to have them dismissed.

Dem on MS NOW: ‘Good Riddance’ To Pam Bondi pic.twitter.com/R1v4SgKJqP
— Mark Finkelstein (@markfinkelstein) April 2, 2026

Menendez went further still, raising the prospect of professional consequences and asking what “accountability” should look like for Bondi. Lofgren responded by suggesting Bondi’s conduct could raise questions about her ethics, floating the possibility she could be disbarred.

Later, Menendez pressed Lofgren to elaborate on the “damage” Bondi had allegedly done to the Department of Justice, framing her tenure as harmful even apart from specific outcomes, citing “the time, the money, the pain, the damage to our democratic institutions.”

As usual, Democrats on either side of these interviews pretend that the Justice Department under Biden or Obama was so pristinely apolitical. The result was not simply criticism, but a sustained, host-enabled pile-on—beginning with “good riddance” and extending to blanket condemnation of any potential successor.

The liberal media recently expressed outrage over Donald Trump’s rough remarks on the passing of Robert Mueller. On Deadline: White House, however, a Democratic lawmaker’s “good riddance” drew no pushback—and was instead followed by prompts to escalate the criticism.

Here’s the transcript.

MS NOW
Deadline White House
4/2/26
4:24 pm EDT

ZOE LOFGREN: It’s hard to know with this president what’s motivating him. She completely embarrassed herself. But it could be that she’s failed to convict people, without any cause, people who are his enemies. 

Certainly, the Epstein files have not been handled well. People across the country now believe that there may be a reason why President Trump is trying to hide the files, when before people were giving him the benefit of the doubt. 

So this has been a bad situation for her and for the president, but I don’t assume that her replacement will be something we’ll cheer. 

I understand Todd Blanche is going to be filling in. He’s the guy who went down and coddled Ghislaine Maxwell, who’s serving time for child abuse, moved her to a country club prison after the interview. 

So good riddance to Pam Bondi. But good luck to us for who might come next. 

ALICIA MENENDEZ: Well, let’s talk about some of the other names that are circulating. You referenced Todd Blanche. We’ve also heard from our colleagues Lee Zeldin, Alina Habba, Janine Pirro. The question, of course, who on that list is actually confirmable? Is there someone here Republicans can get behind?

LOFGREN: None. None. Not those names. I mean, Zeldin is violating the law constantly in his current position. He’s been called out on it by myself and others in the Science Committee. Pirro has been — You can indict a ham sandwich, but not Trump’s political enemies. She’s been a failure and an embarrassment. Habba got thrown out of court. 

I mean, these people are jokes. I mean, they cannot be confirmed, I would imagine. 

MENENDEZ: Okay, let me throw one more name into the mix, because there’s reporting today that some senators are trying to pitch Donald Trump on replacing Bondi with Senator Mike Lee. It was posited to me that his Republican colleagues just want him out of the Senate so badly that they saw an opening and thought they could —

LOFGREN: That could be.

MENENDEZ: —  potentially position him. Do you think Mike Lee would make a good AG? 

LOFGREN: No. I mean, I’ve worked with Mike, actually, on some FISA reforms. So, you know, he’s not somebody I can’t talk to. But I don’t think he would be a good AG. 

And I imagine that some of his fellow Republican senators might want to get rid of him. Whether he would take that deal, turn in a Senate seat where he probably could serve for the foreseeable future for a job that, you know, he could get fired in a few months by Trump. He’s so volatile. So would he even take it? I wouldn’t if I were him.

MENENDEZ:  I’m, I’m stuck on something that my colleague Michael Feinberg, who served as a special agent at the FBI, said in our previous block, which was, here you have a president who is frustrated that Pam Bondi has not succeeded sufficiently, in his view in bending the DoJ to his whims and to his will. Michael Feinberg’s argument was that she didn’t just bend it, she broke the institution that once was the Department of Justice. 

In your mind, what does accountability look like for Pam Mondi, even as she returns to being a private citizen? 

LOFGREN: Well, she has to come to Congress. She’s been subpoenaed, and the fact that she’s been fired doesn’t excuse her from complying with that subpoena. She has information that the Congress needs to get about the Epstein files. Whether she will escape bar association accountability, it’s hard to say. 

A number of Trump defenders who are lawyers lost their bar licenses. I don’t know if there’s anything going on in that regard relative to her, but certainly some of her conduct as AG might lead to questions about her ethics and her ability to adequately serve as an officer of the court. 

MENENDEZ: I’m just so struck that if you read the reporting, it seems as though the president’s biggest critique or frustration was her inability to prosecute his perceived enemies. 

But from your vantage point, how much damage did she actually do? Even if she didn’t succeed, if there wasn’t a home run, simply the time, the money, the pain, the damage to our democratic institutions that has been inflicted. How are you going to look back on her tenure? 

LOFGREN: That was the point, I think, to try and harm people who the president doesn’t like and who he considers his enemies, whether or not — they hadn’t committed crimes, any of them, which is why the effort to indict them failed miserably. 

Obviously, if you are a defendant in a matter, it costs money, it’s aggravating. I think in some cases, you know, it may end up helping people. 

They’re now going after my colleague, Eric Swalwell, who is running for governor of California. And I think, you know, since they’ve singled him out as the biggest enemy of Trump, that probably helps Eric in California. People are wondering who among the Democrats they should vote for. And I’ve heard a lot of people say, well, if Trump is against him that much, he must be our guy. 

MENENDEZ: It’s a truly remarkable day in a truly remarkable moment in American history. And Congresswoman Zoe Lofgren, I am so grateful to you for making time today to be with us. 
 

New data shows how a key office hammered by layoffs and cost-cutting referred at most two cases in fiscal year 2025.