The White House said Friday that a ninth U.S. telecommunications company has been hacked as part of a Chinese espionage campaign that gave the country’s officials access to private texts and phone conversations of Americans.

The Biden administration said earlier this month that at least eight telecommunications companies and dozens of nations had been impacted by the Chinese hacking operation known as Salt Typhoon.

On Friday, deputy national security adviser Anne Neuberger told reporters that a ninth victim had been identified after the administration released guidance to companies about how to locate Chinese hackers in their networks.

The hackers compromised the networks of telecommunications companies to gather customer call records and access the private communications of a limited number of people, officials said.

The FBI has not publicly identified any of the victims, but officials believe senior U.S. government officials and prominent political figures are among the victims whose communications were accessed.

Neuberger said officials did not yet have a precise sense of how many Americans overall were targeted by Salt Typhoon, in part because the hackers were careful about their methods, but she said that a ‘large number’ of the victims were in Washington, D.C., and Virginia.

Officials said they believe the hackers wanted to identify who owned the devices and spy on their texts and phone calls if they were ‘government targets of interest,’ Neuberger said.

Most of the victims are ‘primarily involved in government or political activity,’ the FBI said.

Neuberger said the hacking showed the need for required cybersecurity practices in the telecommunications industry, which the Federal Communications Commission is set to look at during a meeting next month.

She also said, without offering details, that the government was planning further action in the coming weeks in response to the hacking campaign, though she did not say what they were.

‘We know that voluntary cybersecurity practices are inadequate to protect against China, Russia and Iran hacking of our critical infrastructure,’ she said.

The Chinese government has denied responsibility for the hacking campaign.

The Associated Press contributed to this report.

In much of the English-speaking world, but not America, the day after Christmas is called Boxing Day. For reasons that are entirely unclear, DOGE bros Vivek Ramaswamy and Elon Musk decided to take the occasion to don boxing gloves and throw haymakers at native-born American workers.

What started off with Musk saying on his social media platform X, and not for the first time, that he needs more foreign-born geniuses to work for him quickly morphed into Ramasawamy dressing down American families for indulging their children with sleepovers and trips to the mall.

Apparently, big tech needs foreign workers because we raise our kids the wrong way.

Ramaswamy insisted on X that native-born families need ‘more math tutoring, fewer sleepovers. More weekend science competitions, fewer Saturday morning cartoons. More books, less TV. More creating, less ‘chillin.’ More extracurriculars, less ‘hanging out at the mall.’’

The former presidential candidate says he is just telling us ‘hard truths’ by suggesting every family should emulate some South Asians, who he points to as a shining example.

But guess what? The United States of America is a nation, not simply a farm system for big tech. And by the way, the very reason that China steals innovation from us, not the other way around, is that our backward, hayseed attitudes create free thinkers, not drones. At least when we aren’t playing the banjo on the porch. 

Every native-born American kid applying to college this year is going to compete against students from foreign lands, including communist China, who will be extended a red carpet to use the American educational system. And when those American kids graduate, they may find themselves passed over for entry-level jobs because of foreign competition.

Musk says that American tech workers aren’t good enough. Well, then maybe we need to stop giving away thousands and thousands of spots at top schools and do a better job of teaching our own.

When I went to Springfield, Ohio, in September, I heard factory owners there claim they need 15,000 Haitian migrants because, unlike Americans, they show up on time, pass their drug tests, and willingly work overtime. It was downright insulting to American workers, but no more so than Musk and Ramaswamy mocking the native born and their cultural traditions.

And, not for nothing, big tech has the added advantage that workers brought in with H-1B visas lose their immigration status if they lose their job. That’s a lot of leverage that the tech bosses don’t have over American workers.

Now, it seems like MAGA has its first, full-blown civil war since Trump won the election almost two months ago, but looks can be deceiving. In fact, both Ramaswamy and Musk are, thankfully, walking back their ill-advised duet.

That’s because outside of nouveau-right sushi hotspots in Palo Alto, nobody in the America First Trump coalition thinks replacing American workers is a boffo concept.

This unfortunate moment was an unforced error, but no serious damage was done. Sometimes the math guys need a dose of the humanities, or at least a trip around the block.

The Department of Government Efficiency, with which President-elect Donald Trump has entrusted Musk and Ramaswamy, has to understand that our country is not a corporation, or as Musk put it, an NBA team looking to win. 

The role of the government of the United States is to ensure the right of Americans to live as they see fit, not to fit as a cog into the machinations of billionaire geniuses, domestic or foreign. And Americans have a right to ensure that the institutions they pay for are actually advancing Americans. 

This is a learnable moment for two bright, brilliant and brash stars who embrace freedom to understand that life and liberty are a pulsing heart rate, not a bottom line.

This unfortunate moment was an unforced error, but no serious damage was done. Sometimes the math guys need a dose of the humanities, or at least a trip around the block.

American college grads deserve a fair shake; They shouldn’t have to compete with H-1B visa competition, and no American should be training their cheaper H-1B replacement.

The first order of business for the Trump administration is to close the border and deport criminals. After that, the nuanced negotiations over legal immigration can begin.

But there must be one important caveat. The American worker has to be treated with respect. Because without him or her, we have no country.

Americans don’t celebrate Boxing Day, and we don’t celebrate rich people knocking the working man. Hopefully, for Vivek Ramaswammy and Elon Musk, this unforced error is a lesson learned.

President Biden still regrets dropping out of the 2024 presidential race last summer after mounting pressure from Democrats to step aside, according to a report. 

The president recently told people that he still believes he could have beaten Trump in the November election, despite his rough debate performance in June and his low approval numbers that forced him to leave the race, according to the Washington Post, citing people familiar with the conversations. 

Following the June 27 debate, more and more Democrats began to call for him to drop out every day, so another person could run in his place. 

The president also saw much of his funding dry up last summer as donors began to doubt his chances of beating Trump. 

Biden left the race on July 21, and endorsed Vice President Kamala Harris, who had just over three months to campaign before the election. 

Trump beat Harris by 2.2 million votes. 

Biden has been careful not to blame Harris while insisting to aides that he could have won, the Post reported. 

Even when he dropped out, Biden still believed he could beat Trump – whom he defeated for his first term in 2020, according to the New York Times in September.

Rep. James Clyburn, D-S.C., may disagree. 

Clyburn, who met with Biden earlier this year, told the Post that he had told the president, ‘Your style does not lend itself well to the environment we’re currently in,’ while speaking of style versus substance. 

Biden national security advisor Jake Sullivan told the Post: ‘How to govern at this moment to set the U.S. up for long-term success has one answer, and how to govern to deal with midterm and presidential elections in the very short-term might have a different answer. The president went with doing the things that really put America in a strong position.’

Among acknowledgments of other mistakes – including his debate performance – Biden has also said that he regrets picking Merrick Garland as attorney general, the Post reported. 

Convinced to do so by aides who said that Garland would be a consensus pick, Biden has privately said that he feels Garland moved too slowly on prosecuting Trump, while also claiming his son Hunter had been prosecuted too aggressively.

Fox News Digital has reached out to the White House for comment. 

The Republican attorneys general of Virginia and Montana recently filed an amicus brief asking the Supreme Court to require TikTok to sever its ties with the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) as the fate of the social media platform in the U.S. remains uncertain.

The amicus brief, filed Friday, came the same day President-elect Trump filed an amicus brief of his own, asking the Supreme Court to pause the TikTok ban and allow him to make executive decisions about TikTok once he is inaugurated.

In an announcement, Virginia Attorney General Jason Miyares said he, along with Montana Attorney General Austin Knudsen and other state legal officials, had recently petitioned the Supreme Court to uphold the divest-or-ban law against TikTok.

The social media company has been intensely scrutinized over its parent company, ByteDance, which is connected to the CCP. In his brief, Miyares argued whistleblower reports prove ByteDance has shared sensitive information with the CCP, including Americans’ browsing habits and facial recognition data.

‘Allowing TikTok to operate in the United States without severing its ties to the Chinese Communist Party exposes Americans to the undeniable risks of having their data accessed and exploited by the Chinese Communist Party,’ Miyares said in a statement. ‘Virginians deserve a government that stands firm in protecting their privacy and security.

‘The Supreme Court now has the chance to affirm Congress’s authority to protect Americans from foreign threats while ensuring that the First Amendment doesn’t become a tool to defend foreign adversaries’ exploitative practices.’

Trump’s brief said it was ‘supporting neither party’ and argued the future president has the right to make decisions about TikTok’s fate. Steven Cheung, Trump’s spokesman and the incoming White House communications director, told Fox News Digital Trump’s decision-making would ‘preserve American national security.’

‘[The brief asked] the court to extend the deadline that would cause TikTok’s imminent shutdown and allow President Trump the opportunity to resolve the issue in a way that saves TikTok and preserves American national security once he resumes office as president of the United States on Jan. 20, 2025,’ Cheung said.

Trump’s brief notes he ‘has a unique interest in the First Amendment issues raised in this case’ and that the case ‘presents an unprecedented, novel, and difficult tension between free-speech rights on one side, and foreign policy and national-security concerns on the other.’

‘As the incoming Chief Executive, President Trump has a particularly powerful interest in and responsibility for those national-security and foreign-policy questions, and he is the right constitutional actor to resolve the dispute through political means,’ Trump’s brief said.

Fox News Digital’s Brooke Singman contributed to this report.