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Politico is launching in Australia
Semafor • 3 weeks ago

Politico is launching in Australia

The company is preparing to launch a Canberra Playbook newsletter before the next parliamentary cycle later this year, Politico’s CEO told Semafor.

White House Throws Kristi Noem’s TSA PreCheck Plan Under the Bus
New Republic • 3 weeks ago

White House Throws Kristi Noem’s TSA PreCheck Plan Under the Bus

The Department of Homeland Security went back on its decision to suspend TSA PreCheck as part of the partial government shutdown after the White House got involved. The Washington Post reported Monday night that the idea to pause the program, which allows travelers who pay a fee and complete a background check to get through airport security faster, was hatched by Secretary Kristi Noem and her chief aide (and rumored boyfriend) Corey Lewandowski. DHS announced the suspension Saturday, but then the Trump administration told them to pull back. Otherwise, the pause would have gone into effect on Sunday at 6 a.m. In a statement, a DHS spokesperson told the Post, “We decided to handle TSA pre-check on an airport-by-airport basis depending on workforce and resource strain instead of a blanket policy. If the government stays shutdown, we will be forced to implement these emergency measures nationwide to mitigate resource and workforce strain. This political game by the Democrats is putting strain on our TSA workers who are working without pay.”The back-and-forth caused confusion at airports on Sunday, and is yet another example of chaotic decisions from Noem and Lewandowski at DHS. Noem’s decision to demolish historic buildings at DHS headquarters in Washington, D.C. has exposed DHS employees to asbestos, and a new tool to help federal agents identify noncitizens is full of bugs. ICE, which is overseen by the department, has been exposed for drastically reducing the amount of training its agents are required to get, and the immigration agency may have also ignored warnings about the reckless use of force before two U.S. citizens were killed in Minnesota last month. Coast Guard officials are reportedly upset at how DHS is using their resources for deportations, and the agency has lost the support of most Americans, according to polls. Noem’s personal conduct has also made the news, from her alleged relationship with Lewandowski to the fact that she fired and rehired a pilot over a missing blanket. She’s pulled P.R. stunts at a notorious prison in El Salvador and made up a crazy story about deporting a cannibal. It’s little wonder that Democrats, including Trump-friendly Senator John Fetterman, want her impeached.

Epstein Was Secretly Under Investigation by DEA, New Files Show
New Republic • 3 weeks ago

Epstein Was Secretly Under Investigation by DEA, New Files Show

Years before the FBI and the New York district attorney opened probes into Jeffrey Epstein’s child sex trafficking ring, the Drug Enforcement Administration was reportedly examining the glitterati socialite for suspicious money transfers they believed could be linked to illegal drug purchases.Recently discovered documents from the DEA reveal that Epstein was a part of a sprawling investigation, referred to internally as “Operation Chain Reaction,” examining the wire transfers of 15 individuals.“DEA reporting indicates the above individuals are involved in illegitimate wire transfers which are tied to illicit drug and/or prostitution activities occurring in the U.S. Virgin Islands and New York City,” reads a 69-page memo dated from 2015.The document was marked “sensitive” for law enforcement, and was a component of a request from the DEA to a drug enforcement fusion center in Virginia for more information on the investigation’s targets, the names of whom—beside Epstein—were mostly redacted. All in all, the report depicts approximately $50 million in suspicious wire transfers between the 15 individuals. Epstein was suspected of transferring more than $5.6 million for the purpose of acquiring narcotics. The document was released by the Justice Department as part of its rollout of the Epstein files.Just one other individual was named as a target in the memo: Mariana Idźkowska, a Polish fashion model who allegedly made $2 million in transfers, according to the DEA memo. Her name has appeared elsewhere in the Epstein files, outlining her travels through dozens of emails between herself and Epstein between 2014 and 2015. Idźkowska was 28 years old at the time, frequently called him on Skype, flew to New York on Epstein’s dime, and visited his island, according to Polish Radio.The DEA file indicates that the drug enforcement bureau opened its investigation on December 17, 2010. At the time of its drafting, the investigation was still “judicial pending,” indicating that it was still underway five years later. An unidentified law enforcement official told CBS News that the status could have meant agents were waiting on court approval for search warrants to proceed. Another unidentified law enforcement official told the network that it could indicate someone was arrested.

DOJ Removes Accusations Against Trump From Epstein Files
New Republic • 3 weeks ago

DOJ Removes Accusations Against Trump From Epstein Files

The Department of Justice withheld multiple documents including allegations against President Donald Trump from its release of files on alleged sex trafficker Jeffrey Epstein, according to an investigation by NPR.The Department of Justice failed to release documents relating to three interviews the FBI conducted between July and October 2019 with a woman who accused Trump of sexually assaulting her as a child. Only the first interview, conducted on July 24, 2019, is available to the public. In that conversation, she doesn’t mention Trump at all.However, the woman’s allegations against the president still appeared in a 21-page slideshow included in files. “[REDACTED] stated Epstein introduced her to Trump who subsequently forced her head down to his exposed penis which she subsequently bit,” the FBI said. “In response, Trump punched her in the head and kicked her out.” This allegedly occurred in the mid-1980s when she was “approximately 13-15 years old.”A record of the FBI interviews does appear in the files—on a list of discovery files given to Epstein’s accomplice Ghislaine Maxwell before her trial. By allowing Maxwell to retain information that the public does not have, Trump’s DOJ has enabled her to maintain potential blackmail over the president, according to independent journalist Roger Sollenberger.The details of the woman’s story appeared to match details from a victim lawsuit from December 2019. In a publicly available interview, “Jane Doe 4” claimed that she was “brutally and forcibly battered, assaulted, and raped,” by prominent men she met through Epstein. On one occasion, one of these prominent men forcibly slapped Jane Doe 4 in the face after she was forced to perform oral sex on him. This same man forcibly raped her, penetrating her both vaginally and anally.These aren’t the only documents mentioning Trump that went missing from the DOJ’s release.The Department of Justice removed another interview report with a second survivor of Epstein’s abuse, in which the woman recalled meeting Trump when she was a minor. “EPSTEIN told TRUMP, ‘This is a good one, huh,’” the interview report reads. The file was removed after its initial publication on January 20, and then republished on February 19.Multiple other interviews conducted by the FBI mention the second woman’s meeting with Trump. One interview with a brief mention of Trump was briefly removed and restored last week, and another interview with the second woman’s mother was removed and is still unavailable, NPR reported.In that conversation, the second woman’s mother recalled hearing that “a prince and DONALD TRUMP visited EPSTEIN’s house,” which made her “think that if they are there then how could EPSTEIN be a criminal,” according to NPR’s copy of that interview.The Department of Justice has removed and re-uploaded dozens of documents in order to redact names that were wrongly made public.Attorney General Pam Bondi claimed that the government has “released all ‘records, documents, communications and investigative materials’” related to Epstein, insisting that no records were withheld “on the basis of embarrassment, reputational harm, or political sensitivity.” A recent analysis suggested that the DOJ has released just 2 percent of its total files on the sex offender.

GOP Rep. Faces Calls to Resign From His Own Party After Alleged Affair
New Republic • 3 weeks ago

GOP Rep. Faces Calls to Resign From His Own Party After Alleged Affair

Calls for the resignation of GOP Representative Tony Gonzales are growing as more details emerge regarding an ex-staffer who set herself on fire after he ended their alleged affair.Regina Ann Santos-Aviles was a 35-year-old wife and mother who served as the regional director for Gonzales’s Uvalde, Texas, office. In 2024, just one day after Gonzales’s primary victory, Santos-Aviles made her affair known to the rest of the staff, and was seemingly punished for her admission. Meetings she set were canceled, and Gonzales stopped traveling to Uvalde—something he had previously done regularly. Santos-Aviles’s husband also became aware of the affair, adding to her distress. She spiraled into depression and started taking medication for it in the summer of 2025. In August, she self-immolated with gasoline and died a day later at Brooke Army Medical Center in San Antonio.Gonzales skipped the funeral and consistently deflected blame when asked. But on Monday, 24SightNews revealed screenshots of Gonzales pressing Aviles for nude photos in 2024, leading to five of Gonzales’s Republican colleagues—most of them women—to call for his resignation. “The entire Texas delegation, as well as every single other Member of Congress, should be condemning a sitting Member of Congress asking for explicit photos of their staff,” MAGA Representative Anna Paulina Luna wrote on Monday. “As a woman, this is really disgusting to see. Not to mention, it brings dishonor on the House of Representatives. I am so sick of people not calling this crap out. Again, like I’ve said before, this is not the only case of this crap up here. @RepTonyGonzales, shame on you.”“Stop being predatory freaks and get OUT of office. YOU DO NOT BELONG HERE. This behavior is reprehensible and a poor reflection on the Republican Party, and I will not tolerate this type of moral rot in my own party,” she wrote in another post without mentioning Gonzales by name.“.@RepTonyGonzales, RESIGN!” MAGA Representative Lauren Boebert wrote.Representative Tim Burchett called on Gonzales to “do the right thing” and step down.Representative Nancy Mace took it a step further. “We’ve filed a resolution directing the Ethics Committee to preserve and publicly release records and reports on all of their investigations into Members of Congress for sexual harassment and unwelcome sexual advances. Tony Gonzales is just the tip of the iceberg,” she said Tuesday. “There is no place for sexual harassment or unwelcome sexual advances in the House of Representatives. And we won’t let the Washington establishment keep protecting its own. End of story.”“I’m joining Nancy Mace, Lauren Boebert, and Anna Paulina Luna in calling for Representative Tony Gonzales to resign immediately,” Representative Thomas Massie chimed in. “Where are the other men in the GOP? Trump is infamous for making terrible endorsements—this is one and it should be revoked.”Gonzales is currently running for reelection this November.This story has been updated.

Gavin Newsom’s Struggle for Everyman Cred
New Republic • 3 weeks ago

Gavin Newsom’s Struggle for Everyman Cred

If you’ve ever enjoyed the lark of visiting a museum dedicated to a single company—say, the Spam Museum (Austin, Minnesota; five stars), the Dr. Pepper Museum and Free Enterprise Institute (Waco, Texas; not recommended), or World of Coca-Cola (Atlanta)—you know well the slight embarrassment of having paid to be propagandized. You surrender the cost of entry, and in return you are shown what amounts to corporate P.R., a well-crafted version of the American success story emphasizing the genius of The Founder, the hard work that led the company to the top, and its generous sense of social responsibility. You take it in knowing exactly the kind of details that might have been left out: the government subsidies, the labor abuses, the environmental carelessness that preceded the more recent Going Green initiative, and so on. The experience must be entertaining and pleasant because, by definition, it cannot be truly informative.That’s political memoir as a genre, minus the entertainment, and Gavin Newsom’s Young Man in a Hurry: A Memoir of Discovery is no exception. There is a place, perhaps, for reflections at the tail end of a long and accomplished career. But as a midlife and midcareer component of a relentless climb toward the top, it cannot but disappoint. No matter how good the writing, the fact that the reader has parted with the cost of a hardcover book to read what amounts to a self-serving press release from the ambitious leaves, at best, the same I-fell-for-it feeling imparted by the threshold of the gift shop at the Caterpillar Visitors Center (Peoria, Illinois; for tractor enthusiasts only).The governor of California is, in his own words, resentful of being depicted in the media as a tool of the billionaire Getty family, with whom he has been close his entire life thanks to his father’s role as a Getty family confidant and manager of the Getty family trust. This narrative, he says, has “robbed me of my own hard-earned story.” With political accomplishments in hand and greater ones in his possible future, this memoir is supposed to set the record straight. It tries to do so in the most puzzling and counterproductive way, with a bizarre mélange of attempts at Everyman credentials (he attended public schools; his mom took in lodgers and juggled multiple jobs alongside parenting) followed by an anecdote from the rarefied world of privilege on almost every page.The Gettys—remember, he is not their creation—take up almost two complete columns in the book’s index. The 270-page book includes 61 different page references for one or more Getty. The Gettys took him on vacation as a boy (highlights include their paying the famed paleontologist Mary Leakey to take them around Kenya, a hot-air-balloon safari, and a week hanging out with King Juan Carlos of Spain to attend Princess Cristina’s debutante events). The Gettys put up the money for 10 of the 11 businesses Newsom started or led. The Gettys either came over on holidays or hosted the Newsoms. Gavin was around so much and was so close with the family that in multiple anecdotes in the book he is mistaken for one of the Getty children. Young Gavin and his sister accompanied their father on a shopping trip intended to cheer up teenage J. Paul Getty III when he returned to the United States minus an ear after his kidnapping. As Newsom (an able storyteller, reportedly with the assistance of ghostwriter Mark Arax) traces his personal history, readers are left to conclude that he wants us to think he is just a regular guy who happened to descend on both sides from people who blend the best characteristics of the Kennedy clan and J.D. Salinger’s Glass family. There are quirky, high-achieving, public-spirited, rich ancestors and connections everywhere. He’s related by marriage to stars from the worlds of politics (the Pelosis, for example), academia, medicine, finance, Hollywood, you name it. Names dropped of people who showed up in his life during childhood and adolescence include Arthur Miller (another Getty vacation guest), NBA legend Rick Barry (Gavin’s hardworking mother found time and opportunity to date him), Jack Nicholson, Ed Asner (married to an aunt), everyone who was ever anyone in California and Bay Area politics, and—the indisputable highlight—he has fond memories of “big bear hugs” from Luciano Pavarotti. Who doesn’t remember those from childhood?But he also had a paper route, so it all balances out.The strange thing is, he didn’t have to mention any of this. The stranger thing is that he did mention it in service of trying to emphasize that he’s not the pampered elite critics say he is. There were and are some legitimately relatable, humanizing points in his personal story, all of which he deals with fairly perfunctorily. He struggled (and struggles) with what seems to a lay reader like severe dyslexia. His father was well connected to privilege but distant and often absent. Gavin struggled with his alcohol intake, as did some of his relatives. His mother died miserably by (illegal at the time) assisted suicide while racked with cancer. His first marriage (to future MAGA ghoul Kimberly Guilfoyle) failed, and he assigns himself much of the blame for it. He admits here to one of what were allegedly several affairs after the collapse of that marriage, including one with a subordinate. The epilogue closes with a heartbreaking event, when he writes of his current wife, Jennifer Siebel Newsom’s miscarriage. There’s something sympathetic to work with here. This story could have been more affecting than it is. Instead, we get a book full of slightly lumpy anecdotes. He writes that a poor academic record, for instance, left him surprised that he got into Santa Clara University—but he doesn’t mention that the recommendation letter on his application was written by Governor Jerry Brown. We get a book that expects us to find it relatable that his first real job out of college was a winery he founded at 24 with money from Gordon Getty with the advice, “If it fails, so be it.” What a normal person reading this is supposed to be thinking, I cannot fathom.Politics are incidental here but certainly not absent. What role they play in the personal narrative is not flattering. Newsom reveals little but reels off what feels like a checklist of accomplishments across his career, from his election as San Francisco supervisor to mayor, to lieutenant governor of California, to governor. When he does slip and reveal something about what he actually believes, it’s unfortunate. He seems proud of having made progress, as he sees it, with homelessness in San Francisco, telling us he makes no apologies for his belief that the problem requires both “the carrot and the stick.” This is a reference to Proposition N (2002), which cut cash assistance to the homeless and redirected funds directly to housing to prevent the money being spent on drugs. What effect this had on the homeless we have no idea, because it isn’t relevant to his narrative. In his own words, the big lesson he learned from Prop N was that it passed with 60 percent of the vote, “burnishing my credentials for a run at higher office.” What a strange thing to say, out loud and not under torture, about a measure significantly impacting the lives of thousands of the most vulnerable people in society. It ultimately “brought home the lesson that it was better to be aligned with the people than with the pundits.” Which pundits are bleeding-heart advocates for the homeless? Who can say? Newsom certainly doesn’t. As governor-elect in 2018, in the waning days of Newsom’s lieutenant governorship under the same Jerry Brown who was pals with Dad Newsom, we get an inevitable tale of meeting Donald Trump, whose election in 2016 brought him to the conclusion that “dealing with a man of (Trump’s) makeup would require a subtler set of skills—and a determined focus on issues.” At this point, I had to consciously remind myself that this man wrote this book with the apparent intent to burnish his image (which, in a sensational pivot, is currently built on his skill at mocking Trump in the most base but often effective terms on social media). At the same time, Newsom has proven disturbingly accommodating to creatures from MAGA world and the far right besides Trump. He fawned over Charlie Kirk and invites guests like Steve Bannon and Ben Shapiro on to his podcast, This Is Gavin Newsom. It would be bad enough simply to give such people a platform, but the purpose of having them on is often to agree with them. Hosting the far right, and then agreeing that it’s “deeply unfair” to allow transgender girls to play competitive sports, and proclaiming proudly that “I’m glad we’ve established that we do cooperate with ICE in California” is not a good look from someone trying to position himself as the politician with the guts to oppose Trump. Does he actually oppose the things Trump believes and stands for or merely the oafish villain Trump represents in the abstract? That’s an important distinction Newsom seems uninterested in making.If, as with most books by political figures, the goal is simply to generate press and signal his eligibility for a run for higher office, perhaps it will work. But nobody who reads the words between the covers and thinks about them is likely to come away believing that Gavin Newsom is indeed a good old regular fella, that he believes in anything at all except his own greatness and ambition, or that his political instincts are any better than poor. He no doubt believes that his résumé full of achievements demonstrates that those instincts are great, but people born on third base often want us to believe they just hit a triple. What this memoir ends up doing, rather than making any kind of case for Presidential Candidate Newsom, is feed into the destructive tendency of liberal politics to turn into fan culture. The implicit argument here for Gavin Newsom to be president is that we are supposed to think he’s a cool, interesting, nice guy who deserves it. We’re supposed to read this and like him; we are to root for him to get what he wants and accomplish his goals. As a memoir, it may hit that mark with readers already favorably disposed toward him. But if you’re looking for substance, for why this man should be your preferred candidate, you will not find it. This is the soft-focus “get to know the candidate”–type material of, say, an interview with Oprah or an appearance on The View. That’s pretty thin for the $30 cover price new hardcover books carry these days.In short, Young Man in a Hurry is a decently, if unexceptionally, written narrative that does the worst job imaginable of convincing us that the governor is not the preening elite that his haters say he is, and in telling us so little about his politics, it fails as both a memoir and a political testament. Newsom’s putative goal in releasing this as an appetizer to the inevitable 2028 presidential run is to show us who he really is. Unfortunately for him, his book does just that.

Trump On Edge at Bizarre White House Event Ahead of SOTU
1:27:39
Pod Save America • 3 weeks ago

Trump On Edge at Bizarre White House Event Ahead of SOTU

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