The Trump administration on Friday intensified its dispute with South Africa, saying no U.S. government official will attend the G20 Summit in Johannesburg in protest of what it describes as state-backed discrimination against White Afrikaners.

‘The lives and property of Afrikaners have been endangered by politicians who incite race-based violence against them, threaten to confiscate their farms without compensation, and prop up a corrupt race-based scoring system that discriminates against Afrikaners in employment,’ State Department Deputy Principal spokesperson Tommy Piggott told Fox News Digital.

‘South Africa must immediately end all government-sponsored discrimination against Afrikaners and condemn those who seek to ignite racial violence against them.’

Trump wrote on Truth Social on Friday that it’s a ‘total disgrace’ the G20, scheduled for Nov. 22 to Nov. 23, will be held in South Africa.

‘Afrikaners (People who are descended from Dutch settlers, and also French and German immigrants) are being killed and slaughtered, and their land and farms are being illegally confiscated,’ the president said. ‘No U.S. Government Official will attend as long as these Human Rights abuses continue. I look forward to hosting the 2026 G20 in Miami, Florida!’

Afrikaners have faced increasing hostility from some politicians who have called for violence against them and the threat of land confiscation.

South Africa’s Expropriation Act of 2024 allows the government to take land for public use, including in some cases without compensation — a policy the government says is aimed at addressing racial inequities in ownership, but one that critics warn could unfairly affect White Afrikaner farmers.

Trump confronted South African President Cyril Ramaphosa at the White House in May, pressing him on ‘White genocide’ in the country. Ramaphosa vehemently denied the claims. 

‘There is just no genocide in South Africa,’ he said. ‘We cannot equate what is alleged to be genocide to what we went through in the struggle because people were killed because of the oppression that was taking place in our country. So you cannot equate that.’

Trump played a video in the Oval Office of white crosses along a highway that he said depicted burial sites of White farmers.

‘Have they told you where that is, Mr. President?’ Ramaphosa asked. ‘I’d like to know where that is because this I’ve never seen.’

A senior State Department official told Fox News Digital that the Trump administration set a refugee cap for fiscal year 2026 of 7,500, with a majority of the spots reserved for Afrikaners fleeing what it describes as government-sponsored race-based discrimination in South Africa.

New York Democrats embraced socialism when they elected Zohran Mamdani to lead the nation’s largest city, but the verdict is still out on whether New York City’s shift to the left is an outlier or the beginning of a broader political realignment.

From California’s redistricting success to gubernatorial races in Virginia and New Jersey, Democrats dominated the most closely watched contests of 2025 – results that could be considered a referendum on President Donald Trump’s sweeping, second-term agenda.

As Mamdani rises to political fame, a slate of fellow progressives are vying to ensure that his victory signals the beginning of a new era in progressive politics.

Aftyn Behn

Aftyn Behn, a former healthcare community organizer and current Democrat state representative, recently secured the Democratic nomination to represent Tennessee’s 7th Congressional District.

The Dickson County Democratic Party described Behn as ‘our very own AOC of TN,’ referring to ‘Squad’ member Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, D-N.Y., according to The Tennessee Star.

On her campaign website, Behn describes herself as a ‘pissed-off social worker’ who was inspired to run for the House of Representatives after Congress passed Trump’s One Big Beautiful Bill Act earlier this year.

Behn is running in Tennessee’s special election on Dec. 2 to replace Rep. Mark Green, R-Tenn., who retired from Congress earlier this year.

Kat Abughazaleh

Kat Abughazaleh, 26, is the progressive Gen Z candidate running for Illinois’ 9th Congressional District next year.

She was indicted on federal charges in October after protesters allegedly attacked an Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) vehicle outside a Chicago suburb facility in September.

Viral videos of Abughazaleh obstructing the ICE vehicle and being shoved the ground by an agent outside the Broadview ICE facility on Sept. 19 became flash points in the divisive debate over Trump’s deportation rollout.

Abughazaleh is a former journalist and activist who frequents protests outside the ICE facility in Broadview, Illinois.

She has accused Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem of perpetrating ‘crimes against humanity.’

Abughazaleh garnered national attention earlier this year for questioning why it’s controversial that illegal immigrants should have access to taxpayer-funded healthcare.

‘I don’t have health insurance, and I’m running for Congress,’ the young progressive’s campaign website reads.

Saikat Chakrabarti

Saikat Chakrabarti arrived on the political scene during the rise of the ‘Squad,’ running Ocasio-Cortez’s successful 2018 congressional campaign and then serving as her chief of staff.

The progressive met Ocasio-Cortez when he launched ‘Justice Democrats,’ a political action committee committed to recruiting a new generation of leaders.

Now, Chakrabarti has become the generational candidate himself. Earlier this year, he announced his campaign to challenge House Speaker Emerita Nancy Pelosi for her congressional district in San Francisco.

On Thursday, Pelosi announced her intention to retire from Congress at the end of next year, teeing up an already competitive Democratic primary expected with state Sen. Scott Wiener also in the race to replace Pelosi. 

Chakrabarti said it was time for ‘totally new leadership’ in Washington, D.C.

His policy platform includes a long list of progressive promises, including Medicare for All, a wealth tax on the ultra-rich, millions of units of housing, a ban on congressional stock trading and an end to military funding to Israel.

During a phone interview, Chakrabarti told Fox News Digital that his main focus is fixing the ‘underlying economic anxieties that most Americans are facing’ — the same ‘plan for bold, sweeping economic change’ that landed Trump back in the White House last year and was successful for Mamdani this year. 

Chakrabarti’s said a new generation of candidates, like himself, have been inspired to run since witnessing ‘the complete failure of the Democratic political establishment.’

‘I think the people are feeling that the Democratic Party, the establishment, is just sort of weak and slow moving and unable to face the moment,’ he added.

Chakrabarti’s first campaign commitment, according to his website, is to stop Trump’s ‘authoritarian coup.’

The congressional candidate described Trump’s ICE-led deportation rollout as ‘a flagrant violation of our constitutional rights and the freedom of speech and everything we hold dear in this country.’

When asked if the party is moving to the left in response to Trump’s second term, he said, ‘It’s not really a left versus right thing.’

‘I think people are looking for real solutions to the problems. People are looking for a change to the system, and I don’t think Donald Trump is doing it, but that’s what Donald Trump articulated in his campaign.’

Overall, Chakrabarti said voters are ‘very sick and tired of corruption’ and the ‘old guard’ that he described as only looking out for themselves, rather than their constituents.

Chakrabarti congratulated Mamdani’s win in a social media post on Tuesday, telling his followers that Mamdani won because he stood for ‘real, bold change.’

‘That’s what we’re doing here in San Francisco,’ Chakrabarti said, comparing his own campaign to Mamdani’s.

Dr. Abdul El-Sayed

Dr. Abdul El-Sayed is one of several progressive candidates vying for Michigan’s open U.S. Senate seat next year.

‘Abdul literally wrote the book on Medicare for All,’ according to his campaign website. He wrote ‘Medicare for All: A Citizen’s Guide,’ explaining how the U.S. healthcare system can provide affordable care to all Americans.

El-Sayed led Detroit’s Health Department after its bankruptcy and restructured Wayne County’s Department of Health, Human & Veterans Services. In 2020, he helped President Joe Biden craft policies to help lower prescription drug prices.

He believes in abolishing medical debt and that students deserve debt-free and tuition-free two-year apprenticeship programs or a four-year college education.

Abdul El-Sayed celebrated Mamdani’s success on social media this week, when he wrote, ‘Yesterday, voters reminded us how big America can be.’

Graham Platner

Graham Platner is challenging Sen. Susan Collins, R-Maine, in 2026. He is a Marine and a U.S. Army veteran and an oyster farmer.

On Nov. 4, he said he would not be mourning the death of former Vice President Dick Cheney.

‘As a veteran of the Iraq war, I am going to say: No, not this time.’

Between 2020 and 2021, Platner posted and has since deleted Reddit posts calling himself a ‘communist,’ which he recently said he was ‘joking’ about.

Platner has faced calls for him to drop out of the Senate race, and a top campaign staffer resigned after he faced backlash for photos revealing that he had a tattoo resembling the Totenkopf used by Hitler’s SS paramilitary forces.

According to his website, among his campaign promises, Platner supports Medicare for All and ‘a clear-eyed condemnation of the Gaza genocide.’

Fox News Digital reached out to Behn, Abughazaleh and Platner for comment but did not immediately receive a response. 

Fox News Digital’s Anders Hagstrom contributed to this report.

The battle for control of the House is set to kick into high gear with the 2025 elections in the rearview mirror, and both sides are optimistic about their chances after Tuesday night.

Democrats are flying high after their victories in key elections in Virginia, California and New Jersey, celebrating those wins as a decisive rejection of President Donald Trump’s administration. But Republicans are still confident in their chances of keeping the House next year and are poised to use the far-left’s success in New York City as a nationwide political cudgel.

‘Yesterday was a big night for America and a big night for the Democratic Party, as candidates across the country, up and down the ballot, decisively defeated MAGA Republicans in an extraordinary rejection of the extremism that the American people have been experiencing since Day 1 of Donald Trump’s presidency,’ House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries, D-N.Y., said at a press conference Wednesday.

A memo circulated by the Jeffries-aligned House Majority PAC and obtained by Fox News Digital exuded confidence: ‘With less than one year until Election Day, Democrats remain poised to take back the House in 2026 and elect Leader Hakeem Jeffries as the next Speaker.’

But Jeffries’ counterpart, House Speaker Mike Johnson, R-La., had a very different interpretation.

‘There’s no surprises. What happened last night was blue states and blue cities voted blue. We all saw that coming, and no one should read too much into last night’s election results. Off-year elections are not indicative of what’s to come,’ Johnson said at his own news conference. ‘I think that when we go into next year in the midterms, we’re very bullish about the outcome. We have an extraordinary record to run on.’

A House GOP campaign operative who spoke with Fox News Digital was also confident about Republicans’ ability to keep the majority next November, arguing the key lies in voter turnout.

‘I think we actually had a good turnout night. They just had a monster one,’ the GOP operative said of New Jersey, where Democratic Rep. Mikie Sherrill defeated Republican Jack Ciattarelli.

‘They had midterm turnout in an off-year [governor] race. And so I think it comes down to us continuing to do the work to show that we need people to show up when the president is not on the ballot.’

They also dismissed Democrats’ inroads with Hispanic and Latino voters in New Jersey as recoverable for the GOP.

‘I think it goes back to, across-the-board, getting our voters to show up,’ the GOP operative said. ‘With Hispanic voters specifically, keep putting in the work, and we can’t take them for granted… it’s felt like, in some of those races, that they were not making the attempt to talk to them on our side.’

On the other side, an operative familiar with House Democrat campaigns said they’re taking lessons from a renewed surge of enthusiasm by two groups — Hispanic voters and women.

And while acknowledging the groups were not monolithic, the Democratic operative said most Americans were all focused on the same issue: cost of living.

‘I think it’s just like a very helpful reminder to double down on the issues that people care about most. Poll after poll, public and private, is telling you that Americans in any district care most about the cost of living and rising costs and being able to afford things,’ they said. ‘I think those are the solutions that people want to hear, and we should be proactive in speaking to them.’

The Democratic operative argued that issue drove the successes of Sherrill and former Rep. Abigail Spanberger, who defeated GOP Lt. Gov. Winsome Earle-Sears in Virginia and became a main facet of House Democrats’ most contentious campaigns.

Another issue being viewed in opposing lights by both sides is the victory of socialist Zohran Mamdani in the New York City mayoral race.

‘The biggest takeaway I have is that not a day should go by when a Republican candidate, a member on the trail, a member of leadership, whoever, whatever branch they’re in, whether state, local, federal, House, Senate, governors, whatever, should talk about Zohran Mamdani,’ the GOP operative said. ‘I think he is the party now, frankly.’

The Democratic source said, ‘We just kind of saw a proof point that it’s not effective, because they were trying this in races across the country here, and it didn’t work.’

They pointed to Republicans’ attempts to tie Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, D-N.Y., to vulnerable Democrats nationally after her upset victory in 2018.

‘It just doesn’t work,’ they said. ‘Somebody in the Virginia Beach area of the country does not give a s— about who the mayor of New York City is. They care about the cost of living.’

House Speaker Mike Johnson, R-La., sharply diverged from his Senate counterpart on Thursday as the upper chamber continues to negotiate a way out of the government shutdown.

Johnson said he would not commit to holding a vote on extending COVID-19 pandemic-era enhanced Obamacare subsidies, which are set to expire at the end of this year without congressional action.

Senate Majority Leader John Thune, R-S.D., however, had been floating a vote on such an extension in exchange for Democrats voting to end the shutdown — which is now in its 37th day.

‘Leader Thune has bent over backwards. He’s offered them a vote. You know what they told him in response? ‘No, we need you to guarantee the outcome of that vote.’ Well, that’s ridiculous,’ Johnson said when asked about holding such a vote by a guaranteed date in the House if the deal succeeds in breaking the logjam.

When pressed again on a vote, he said, ‘No, because we did our job, and I’m not part of the negotiation.’

‘The House did its job on Sept. 19. I’m not promising anybody anything. I’m going to let this process play out,’ Johnson said.

The issue of enhanced Obamacare subsidies has been a matter of debate within the GOP, with some Republicans in more moderate districts calling for at least a year-long extension to give lawmakers time to create a new healthcare deal in its place.

But House conservatives are rejecting any such extension out of hand. Fox News Digital first reported that leaders of the 189-member Republican Study Committee issued an official position earlier Thursday demanding the credits not be extended.

It’s been a key ask for Democrats, however, that such an extension be paired with any federal funding bill before they agree to help end the shutdown.

Senate Democrats are huddling on Thursday afternoon to discuss what they could and could not accept out of a deal to end the government shutdown.

There are a dozen in the caucus who have been meeting to find a way out of the shutdown, but following Democrats’ Tuesday night election sweep, many in their caucus feel emboldened that their shutdown strategy is working and don’t want to let up yet.

Sen. Chris Murphy, D-Conn., said he believed Tuesday’s election was ‘having an impact’ on the caucus.

‘It would be very strange for the American people to weigh in, in support of Democrats, standing up and fighting for them, and then within days, for us to surrender without having achieved any of the things that we’ve been fighting for,’ Sen. Chris Murphy said.

The majority of the caucus demands a guarantee on a deal rather than the promise of a process, given that a proposal to extend the expiring subsidies from Democrats without major reforms to the program would likely fail in the Republican-controlled chamber.

But Thune has remained adamant that he can’t promise anything more than a vote and can’t predict an outcome.

‘I made this very clear to them, I can’t guarantee them an outcome,’ Thune said. ‘I can guarantee them a process, and they can litigate the issue, get the vote on the floor, and presumably they have some way of getting a vote in the House at some point, but I can’t speak for the House.’

Russian President Vladimir Putin said Wednesday his country will draw up plans to conduct nuclear tests after President Donald Trump announced the U.S. would do the same last week.

The Kremlin leader said he has asked relevant departments to ‘submit coordinated proposals regarding the possible commencement of work to prepare for nuclear weapons testing.’

‘Russia has always strictly adhered and continues to adhere to its obligations under the Comprehensive Nuclear-Test-Ban Treaty (CTBT), and we have no plans to deviate from these commitments,’ Putin said at a meeting of the Russian national security council.

The treaty was signed but never ratified by the U.S.

If the U.S. or other signatories of the treaty begin nuclear testing, ‘Russia would also have to take appropriate and proportionate responsive measures,’ Putin added.

In the past week, Trump has both announced the U.S. will reignite nuclear testing and suggested he is working on a deal to denuclearize with Russia and China.

‘We redid our nuclear — we’re the number one nuclear power, which I hate to admit, because it’s so horrible,’ Trump said during a speech at the American Business Forum in Miami.

‘Russia’s second. China’s a distant third, but they’ll catch us within four or five years,’ he added. ‘We’re maybe working on a plan to denuclearize, the three of us. We’ll see if that works.’

Last week, Trump announced on Truth Social, ‘because of other countries testing programs, I have instructed the Department of War to start testing our Nuclear Weapons on an equal basis. That process will begin immediately.’

The War Department handles the testing of nuclear-capable weapons, while the Energy Department’s National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA) would be responsible for testing explosives.

Some 1400 workers, 80% of the NNSA, are currently on furlough due to the government shutdown.

The U.S. regularly tests nuclear-capable vehicles, missiles and rockets, but the U.S. has not conducted an explosive nuclear test since 1992. Russia’s last known test was in 1990.

Russia last week did claim to test two delivery vehicles: an undersea torpedo known as Poseidon and a nuclear-powered cruise missile.

The U.S. conducted a nuclear-capable weapon test on Wednesday, launching the intercontinental ballistic missile Minuteman III into the air from Vandenberg Space Force Base in California. It landed 4,200 miles away at a U.S. test site in the Marshall Islands.

Dmitry Medvedev, Russia’s former president who holds a top post on its security council, wrote on X that ‘No one knows what Trump meant about ‘nuclear testing’,’ adding, ‘he probably doesn’t himself.’

‘But he’s the president of the United States. And the consequences of such words are inescapable: Russia will be forced to assess the expediency of conducting full-fledged nuclear tests itself,’ Medvedev added.

Russia’s defense minister, Andrey Belousov, said Wednesday that he believes the U.S. in general is ‘actively increasing its strategic offensive capabilities.’

‘We must, of course, focus not only — or even primarily — on statements and remarks made by American politicians and officials, but above all on the actual actions of the United States of America.’

Kazakhstan is expected to join the Abraham Accords, officials confirmed to Fox News on Thursday.

The Abraham Accords, first signed in 2020, currently include three countries that have formalized normalization agreements with Israel: the United Arab Emirates, Bahrain and Morocco.

Sudan signed a U.S.-brokered Abraham Accords declaration in January 2021 but efforts to formalize diplomatic relations with Israel have since been derailed by internal political unrest.

U.S. Special Envoy to the Middle East Steve Witkoff told Fox News chief political anchor Bret Baier that he would return to Washington, D.C., on Thursday night to announce the addition of another country to the accords. Witkoff shared the update during his remarks at the America Business Forum in Miami.

‘This is going to show that the Abraham Accords is a club that many countries want to be a member of and it will be a step for turning the page on the war in Gaza and moving forward towards more peace and cooperation in the region,’ a U.S. official told Axios.

The outlet also reported that Kazakhstan’s President Kassym-Jomart Tokayev is expected to make the announcement during a meeting with President Donald Trump.

Trump had recently signaled that more nations may soon be joining the Abraham Accords, with Syria and Saudi Arabia at the forefront of efforts to expand the historic Israel-Arab normalization pact.

Syria’s interim President Ahmed al-Sharaa is expected to meet with Trump at the White House next week, followed by Saudi Arabia’s Crown Prince Mohammed bin-Salman on Nov. 18.

Justice Department officials in Miami and Washington, D.C., are actively preparing to issue several grand jury subpoenas relating to an investigation into former CIA Director John Brennan, Fox News has learned.

U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of Florida Jason Reding Quiñones is supervising the probe, Fox News is told.

Fox News reached out to the Justice Department, but sources there declined to comment. 

Fox News first reported that Brennan and former FBI Director James Comey were under investigation as of early July 2025. Thursday’s development intensifies that investigation. Comey is fighting his case in court with a trial set for January.

Brennan has not been indicted, and it’s unclear if a grand jury would indict him, but evidence will be presented in South Florida. 

Last month, House Judiciary Committee Chairman Jim Jordan, R-Ohio, referred Brennan to the DOJ, saying that the former CIA chief ‘willfully and intentionally’ made false statements to Congress. 

Jordan accused Brennan of lying in his 2023 Judiciary Committee testimony by denying that the CIA used the Steele dossier in prepping the 2017 Intelligence Community Assessment (ICA) on Russian election interference, and falsely claiming the CIA opposed including the dossier.

The Steele dossier was a series of reports detailing President Donald Trump’s alleged ties to Russia. It was compiled and delivered to the FBI in 2016 by former British intelligence agent Christopher Steele.

This is a developing story. Please check back for updates.

House Speaker Mike Johnson on Thursday sharply diverged from the direction that Senate negotiations were headed in to end the government shutdown.

Johnson told reporters Thursday that he would not commit to holding a vote on extending COVID-19 pandemic-era enhanced Obamacare subsidies, which are set to expire at the end of this year without congressional action.

Senate Majority Leader John Thune, R-S.D., had been floating a vote on such an extension in exchange for Democrats voting to end the shutdown — which is now in its 37th day. He has said he could not guarantee an outcome on the vote or that the House would take it up, however.

‘Leader Thune has bent over backwards. He’s offered them a vote. You know what they told him in response? ‘No, we need you to guarantee the outcome of that vote.’ Well, that’s ridiculous,’ Johnson said when asked about holding such a vote by a guaranteed date in the House if the deal succeeds in breaking the logjam.

When pressed again on a vote, he said, ‘No, because we did our job, and I’m not part of the negotiation.’

‘The House did its job on Sept. 19. I’m not promising anybody anything. I’m going to let this process play out,’ Johnson said.

His comments appeared to anger Senate Democrats who were negotiating an off-ramp to the shutdown.

‘Mike Johnson is only going to do what one person tells him, and that one person is Donald Trump, who has declared himself basically the speaker of the House,’ Sen. Jacky Rosen, D-Nev., told reporters in response. ‘So we need to be the adults in the room.’

The issue of enhanced Obamacare subsidies has been a matter of debate within the GOP, with some Republicans in more moderate districts calling for at least a year-long extension to give lawmakers time to create a new healthcare deal in its place.

But House conservatives are rejecting any such extension out of hand. Fox News Digital first reported that leaders of the 189-member Republican Study Committee issued an official position earlier Thursday demanding the credits not be extended.

It’s been a key ask for Democrats, however, that such an extension be paired with any federal funding bill before they agree to help end the shutdown.

Senate Democrats are huddling on Thursday afternoon to discuss what they could and could not accept out of a deal to end the government shutdown.

There are a dozen in the caucus who have been meeting to find a way out of the shutdown, but following Democrats’ Tuesday night election sweep, many in their caucus feel emboldened that their shutdown strategy is working and don’t want to let up yet.

Sen. Chris Murphy, D-Conn., said he believed Tuesday’s election was ‘having an impact’ on the caucus.

‘It would be very strange for the American people to weigh in, in support of Democrats, standing up and fighting for them, and then within days, for us to surrender without having achieved any of the things that we’ve been fighting for,’ Sen. Chris Murphy said.

The majority of the caucus demands a guarantee on a deal rather than the promise of a process, given that a proposal to extend the expiring subsidies from Democrats without major reforms to the program would likely fail in the Republican-controlled chamber.

But Thune has remained adamant that he can’t promise anything more than a vote and can’t predict an outcome.

‘I made this very clear to them, I can’t guarantee them an outcome,’ Thune said. ‘I can guarantee them a process, and they can litigate the issue, get the vote on the floor, and presumably they have some way of getting a vote in the House at some point, but I can’t speak for the House.’

Top Democrats emerged from a classified Capitol Hill briefing Wednesday expressing confidence in the intelligence behind recent U.S. strikes on suspected narco-trafficking vessels near Venezuela. But they also faulted the Biden administration for what they called a failure to confront Nicolás Maduro after Venezuela’s disputed 2024 election.

The Office of Legal Counsel presented lawmakers with its written justification for a series of missile strikes in the Caribbean and eastern Pacific that U.S. officials say have killed 63 suspected traffickers. Lawmakers from both parties said the briefing reassured them the targets were legitimate, even as some voiced unease about the broader strategy.

‘The final comment I’ll make is just that nothing in the legal opinion even mentions Venezuela,’ said Sen. Mark Warner, D-Va., the top Democrat on the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence.

‘I think they do have visibility into drug trafficking,’ Warner added, saying he trusted U.S. intelligence assessments but would prefer traffickers be ‘interdicted and taken to court rather than blown up.’

Secretary of State Marco Rubio, War Secretary Pete Hegseth and senior Pentagon lawyers led the closed-door briefing for congressional leaders and the chairs and ranking members of the Intelligence, Armed Services and Foreign Affairs committees.

Lawmakers have complained for days about being left in the dark as the Pentagon launched multiple maritime strikes without first consulting Congress. Officials declined to discuss the intended scope or duration of the campaign and provided few details about who was killed or what evidence tied the targets to narcotics trafficking.

‘Lots of mistakes could get made,’ said Rep. Jim Himes, D-Conn., the top Democrat on the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence. ‘But, again, they are applying the eyes and ears of our intelligence community to these boats. I don’t worry too much that there will be a strike on a fishing boat or a pleasure boat, but that’s always possible.’

Himes said the administration described ‘the process by which these boats are selected’ but did not share photographs or the identities of those killed.

House Speaker Mike Johnson also backed the intelligence underpinning the operation.

‘We have exquisite intelligence about these strikes on these vessels,’ Johnson said. ‘We know the contents of the boats. We know the personnel almost to a person.’

Officials told lawmakers there were no plans to expand the maritime campaign to land operations or to target Maduro directly.

‘There are no apparent plans to expand this beyond what they say they are doing,’ Himes said.

Reports that the administration was considering potential strikes on Mexico did not appear to come up in the briefing, which lawmakers said focused almost exclusively on cocaine — some of which is trafficked through Venezuela — rather than fentanyl, Mexico’s top export.

‘It’s as described — to stop the flow of drugs, and, to be clear, to stop the flow of cocaine,’ said Himes.

Still, several Democrats said the Biden administration missed a critical moment last year to rally Latin American allies after Venezuela’s contested election, when independent monitors and several Western governments recognized opposition candidate Edmundo González as the rightful winner.

‘I frankly think the Biden administration didn’t go far enough after the Venezuelan people voted overwhelmingly to get rid of Maduro,’ Warner said. ‘We missed a huge opportunity when Venezuelans — in numbers probably in the mid-sixties percent — came out against Maduro, even under threat of violence. The fact that we didn’t rally the region at that point was, in retrospect, a huge mistake.’

After the July 2024 vote, the Biden administration imposed sanctions on high-level Maduro officials but stopped short of reimposing broad restrictions on Venezuela’s oil sector, a move officials said could have driven up global fuel prices and worsened migration pressures.

By contrast, the Trump administration has taken a harder line. It reimposed sweeping sanctions on Maduro during Trump’s first term and has since increased pressure on the South American strongman in his second. The Justice Department has offered a $50 million bounty for information leading to Maduro’s arrest, and officials have not ruled out whether the current strikes could be intended to pressure him to step aside.

Asked in a CBS interview over the weekend whether Maduro’s days were numbered, Trump said, ‘I would say yeah. I think so.’

Pressed on whether the U.S. would go to war with Venezuela, he added, ‘I doubt it. I don’t think so.’

The Supreme Court cleared the way for the State Department to require people to state their biological sex on new or renewed passports, a victory for the Trump administration as it aims to tighten policies involving transgender people.

The high court found in a 6-3 order temporarily greenlighting the policy that a lower court in Massachusetts had erred in blocking it. 

‘Displaying passport holders’ sex at birth no more offends equal protection principles than displaying their country of birth—in both cases, the Government is merely attesting to a historical fact without subjecting anyone to differential treatment,’ the majority wrote in the unsigned order.

The three liberal justices dissented. Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson, a Biden appointee, blasted her Republican-appointed colleagues in a lengthy dissent for what she said had become a ‘routine’ of siding with the Trump administration on the emergency docket.

The majority ‘fails to spill any ink considering the plaintiffs, opting instead to intervene in the Government’s favor without equitable justification, and in a manner that permits harm to be inflicted on the most vulnerable party,’ Jackson wrote, adding that transgender people have been permitted to state their preferred gender on passports for more than three decades.

The class action lawsuit, brought by a dozen self-described transgender, nonbinary or intersex people on behalf of themselves and others in their situation, will continue to proceed through the lower courts.

The plaintiffs had argued in court papers that passports should ‘reflect the sex [people] live as and express, rather than the sex they were assigned at birth.’

Solicitor General John Sauer wrote on behalf of President Donald Trump that passports effectively communicate information to foreign governments and private citizens cannot force the president to communicate in a way that defies his foreign policy preferences and ‘scientific reality.’

The policy, which reversed the Biden administration’s allowance of an ‘X’ gender option on passports, was implemented as part of a string of executive orders Trump issued when he took office aimed at requiring transgender people to identify as their biological sex in certain situations, including in gender-exclusive sports and in the military.

Attorney General Pam Bondi celebrated that the high court had handed the Department of Justice roughly two-dozen wins this year on the emergency docket, sometimes referred to as a shadow or interim docket, where cases are fast-tracked so that the Supreme Court can potentially offer temporary resolutions until the merits of the cases are examined.

‘Today’s stay allows the government to require citizens to list their biological sex on their passport,’ Bondi said on social media. ‘In other words: there are two sexes, and our attorneys will continue fighting for that simple truth.’