White House to host GOP lawmakers as resistance to security funding grows
Source: Washington Examiner · Bias: Center Right
Summary
EXCLUSIVE — Republicans will head to the White House on Thursday afternoon for another classified briefing with the Secret Service as the Trump administration intensifies its push to salvage a controversial $1 billion security funding request facing growing Republican skepticism on Capitol Hill. A source familiar with the meeting told the Washington Examiner that lawmakers […]
White House to host GOP lawmakers as resistance to security funding grows
Center Right
EXCLUSIVE — Republicans will head to the White House on Thursday afternoon for another classified briefing with the Secret Service as the Trump administration intensifies its push to salvage a controversial $1 billion security funding request facing growing Republican skepticism on Capitol Hill. A source familiar with the meeting told the Washington Examiner that lawmakers […]
Ken Griffin, the billionaire founder of hedge fund Citadel, urged business leaders to resist the socialism of New York City Democratic Mayor Zohran Mamdani, warning that the Big Apple's business environment will otherwise be destroyed.
The post Business Leader Calls on New York City to Resist Mamdani appeared first on The Gateway Pundit.
A Fox News host uncorked a bizarre on-air tirade against Democratic Senate candidate James Talarico, calling him a "demon in human skin."Emily Compagno appeared to lose her composure on Friday's edition of "Outnumbered" while discussing Talarico, a 37-year-old state representative now in a statistical tie with embattled Republican nominee Ken Paxton. Compagno was reacting to a conservative PAC attack ad featuring Talarico calling the American flag a "complicated" symbol for many Americans."Every single voter [in Texas] needs to understand exactly who they would vote into office, which is an anti-business, anti-commerce, anti-capitalist, anti-Texas Texan," Compagno railed.She then escalated sharply."This person is a demon in human skin, and they need to make sure he does not go anywhere — to the nation's capital, where he can actually do some real damage other than his horrible words that he keeps spewing," she said.A Talarico spokesman responded that the campaign could confirm the candidate is "in fact a human, and not a demon in human skin."The outburst lands as the race tightens into a genuine toss-up. A New York Times/Siena survey released Monday found Paxton and Talarico deadlocked at 47 percent among likely voters, with Talarico leading 58-31 among independents and 61-29 among Hispanic voters.Paxton defeated four-term Sen. John Cornyn in a May 26 primary runoff after President Donald Trump threw his backing to the state's scandal-plagued attorney general. Paxton was impeached by the Texas House in 2023 before being acquitted by the state Senate, and he has faced years of criminal securities fraud allegations and accusations of abusing his office.Trump himself has appeared unsettled by Talarico's rise. In a Truth Social post after the runoff, the president refused to use the Democrat's name, instead branding him "Alfred E. Neuman" and "the worst TEXAS candidate I have ever seen."On "Outnumbered," Compagno added that Talarico's past remarks were "patently disqualifying for any American senator."Compagno on Talarico: This person is a demon in human skin pic.twitter.com/BM5nohCvxT— Acyn (@Acyn) July 3, 2026
On Friday, Fox News host and political analyst Brit Hume offered a prediction that President Donald Trump is unlikely to appreciate. If the Democrats come out ahead in the midterms, the chief executive could find himself paying big for his "breathtaking" crypto corruption. Hume's forecast comes in the wake of the president's 2025 financial disclosures earlier in the week, which revealed that his family raked in a shocking $1 billion from its cryptocurrency ventures while Daddy Trump regulated the market. As Mediate explains, "The filing reported roughly $500 million in income from World Liberty Financial, the crypto company founded with his sons Eric Trump, Donald Trump Jr., and Barron Trump, along with approximately $635 million from sales of the $TRUMP meme coin through CIC Digital LLC. The disclosure also detailed hundreds of millions of dollars in income from Trump’s real estate holdings and millions more from licensing deals and other business ventures. The president made more than $2 billion overall."Another Fox News host, John Roberts, called the numbers "eye-popping," prompting Hume to respond, "It is, John, and I think the right word for this is unseemly, for a president to profit while in office.”He continued, "Now, it’s not fair to say that he profited from the office, although, you know, that’s surely gonna be subject to investigation — particularly if the Democrats get control of one or both branches of Congress. But, if you wanted seemliness in the White House, Donald Trump was not your man, and if you wanted a guy that wasn’t very rich in the White House, he wasn’t your man for that either. The fact is that he’s a very rich guy, and when you hold the kind of holdings he has, you do get richer. This amount from crypto seems breathtaking, but as the point was made by you and [Treasury Secretary] Scott Bessent, not illegal. So, the people that don’t like Trump won’t like this. The people that do like Trump won’t care very much, in my judgement."Hume is only partly true in regards to that last assertion. While much of MAGA has remained loyal to the president regardless of his financial improprieties, he's had pushback from some high-profile supporters. The New York Post, for example, which is typically complimentary toward Trump, declared that a recent story involving his sons' profiting off a Kazakhstan mining deal their father struck "stinks to high heaven." According to the Post, "The Lutnick [sons of Treasury Secretary Howard Lutnick] and Trump boys have been sloshing around in the muck since their dads came to power 18 months ago. They’ve profited handsomely from cryptocurrency deals while the government their fathers control were setting crypto policy.”
A Pennsylvania state representative is calling out Democrats after he was kicked off the House floor for wearing patriotic clothes. Rep. Eric Davanzo showed up to work […]
For America’s 250th birthday, the Washington Examiner is taking you to Virginia’s Historic Triangle, where the story of our nation began. From the Jamestown settlement, the first permanent English colony in America; to the Yorktown Battlefield, where the fight for independence was won; to Williamsburg, where America’s founding principles were debated and shaped. Step back […]
President Donald Trump's controversial new intelligence chief is clearing house, and career officers warn the man swinging the axe doesn't know what he's cutting.Bill Pulte, Trump's loyal acting director of national intelligence, began notifying dozens of intelligence officials of their terminations Thursday, part of a downsizing Trump ordered when he installed Pulte at the office two weeks ago, MS NOW reported Friday. An intelligence official, who spoke anonymously citing fear of reprisal, told the outlet that leadership is targeting workers it believes are "deep state" and accused them of failing to hand up a complete picture of available intelligence.But former officials aren't buying his rationale. Several told MS NOW they had never heard of intelligence officers withholding information from their superiors. "The premise is absurd," one said. Another questioned how Pulte, who ran the federal housing agency and has no intelligence background, could reach such a conclusion within days of arriving.“I have a real question of how he would know this. This isn’t a guy who is familiar with intelligence,” a former official told the outlet. “How is he going to get to the bottom of this and rely on any information with a matter of fidelity? It would be like me taking over a hospital and firing dozens of surgeons in a matter of days.”The cuts follow Pulte's earlier removal of six political appointees who served under his predecessor, Tulsi Gabbard. His arrival has drawn alarm across party lines: he took the post without ever holding a security clearance, and he can stay in the acting role past November's midterms under federal vacancy rules. Critics note his office doesn't collect intelligence of its own, relying instead on the CIA, the NSA and more than a dozen other agencies to supply it.Democrats and some Republicans fear the purge is less about efficiency than about clearing out analysts who might resist Trump's election claims. The ODNI says it is providing "elite, apolitical intelligence that keeps America safe."
Resistance is mounting across the United States against the increasing use of surveillance tech company Flock Safety’s cameras, with a growing number of cities canceling contracts as the artificial intelligence-powered license plate readers are quietly being installed in thousands of locations nationwide.State and local police departments first used the Atlanta-based company’s automated license plate reader (ALPR) systems for standard law enforcement purposes, but they are now being employed for a much broader range of uses, including immigration-related searches and other actions supporting US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) during the Trump administration’s deadly anti-immigrant crackdown.“We have cameras that are used for everything from illegal dumping to drug houses to hotels that are just big problems,” Flock Safety engineer Kevin Cox told prospective customers during a demonstration of the company’s Condor Camera, according to a Thursday report in The Washington Times.“There are endless, endless uses for what we can do with these things,” Cox added.Those uses include spying on constitutionally protected protest activity and enforcing abortion bans by tracking pregnant people’s travel across states—even ones in which the medical procedure is legal.The ACLU—which recently launched a “Get the Flock Out” campaign to “fight creepy ALPR cameras”—says there are currently between 80,000 and 100,000 Flock devices installed nationwide that conduct more than 20 billion scans per month. More than 5,000 law enforcement agencies use the cameras, and some of them keep their locations a secret.“Flock’s ALPR cameras aren’t like your normal traffic cameras,” the ACLU explained. “This surveillance technology records and tracks every car that comes into view, and then an AI algorithm catalogs the make, model, color, license plate number, bumper stickers, and even scratches. This personal information is then uploaded into a nationwide database that any law enforcement agency with a Flock contract can search—with few regulations or oversight on how they use what they find.”The backlash against creeping state surveillance has even transcended the partisan divide.“I think our country is in a kind of uniquely anti-surveillance environment right now, which is to say that, in a time where it seems there is nothing that is not partisan, opposition to government surveillance is nonpartisan,” ACLU privacy and surveillance attorney Chad Marlow told The Washington Times on Thursday.There is growing action—both legal and otherwise—to end the use of ALPRs across the country.According to the public information project Ban Flock Cameras, 82 Flock contracts were terminated across 28 states between August 2021 and May 2026, with 39 of those cancellations occurring in the first five months of 2026 alone.Even Amazon-owned Ring announced earlier this year that it would stop doing business with Flock Safety.Susie O’Hara, a member of Santa Cruz, California’s nominally nonpartisan City Council, told WBUR earlier this year that she grew increasingly concerned about local use of eight Flock cameras last year after learning that police were sharing data gleaned from the cameras with the company’s national network without city officials’ knowledge, a violation of state laws banning the practice.O’Hara became increasingly convinced that Santa Cruz should cancel its Flock contract after an ICE agent fatally shot Renee Good, a US citizen, in Minneapolis in January.“I have goose bumps on my arms thinking about the absolute chaos that was happening in Minneapolis,” she said. “And just the absolute insanity of what we were seeing... It was totally clear to me that we should in no way consciously be in this system at all—just no way.”Less than a week after Good’s killing, the Santa Cruz City Council voted to terminate the city’s Flock contract, becoming the first municipality in California to do so.“For us, the threat to our civil liberties was greater than any benefit we could get from the flawed product,” Santa Cruz Mayor Fred Keeley told KQED at the time.Chad Kemp, who represents District 32 on the nonpartisan Dane County Board of Supervisors in Wisconsin—which in April voted to stop funding two dozen cameras leased from Flock—told The Washington Times that “there’s a public safety issue here, but there is also a privacy issue.”“There are serious concerns about individuals who can be monitored without their knowledge, or if it is even constitutional or ethical to track people without a warrant,” he added.At the national level, US Reps. Robert Garcia (D-Calif.) and Raja Krishnamoorthi (D-Ill.) last year launched an investigation into the use of Flock cameras to track pregnant people across state lines for abortion care and to conduct unauthorized immigration enforcement operations.Krishnamoorthi and Sen.
