Pentagon IG finds Hegseth could have endangered troops with Signal chat, sources say

(WASHINGTON) — President Donald Trump claimed that he is granting a “full pardon” to Tina Peters, a former Mesa County, Colorado, clerk who was sentenced to nine years on state-level charges for election interference during the 2020 election.

However, the president does not have jurisdiction over state charges, and Colorado officials are pushing back, contending that the president’s promise of a pardon is unconstitutional. Trump’s announcement, which he made on social media Thursday, now likely sets up a legal battle for Peters, who has been seeking a pardon from Trump.

Peters was convicted in August 2024 for giving an individual affiliated with MyPillow CEO Mike Lindell, a Trump ally, access to the election software she used for her county. Screenshots of the software appeared on right-wing websites that promoted false theories that the 2020 election was fraudulent.

Despite President Trump’s repeated assertions that the election was rigged, there were no proven cases of major fraud that affected the outcome.

Trump has repeatedly called for Peters to be released from her nine-year sentence, and on Thursday night said on social media that he was “granting Tina a full Pardon for her attempts to expose Voter Fraud in the Rigged 2020 Presidential Election!”

“Tina is sitting in a Colorado prison for the ‘crime’ of demanding Honest Elections,” he said.

Trump’s announcement came as the administration attempted to move Peters to federal custody in order to have more jurisdiction over her. The move was denied by the courts.

In August, the president said in a social media post that if Peters wasn’t released, he would “take harsh measures.”

Colorado officials, however, questioned Trump’s authority over Peters’ conviction and pushed back against his claims.

“One of the most basic principles of our constitution is that states have independent sovereignty and manage our own criminal justice systems without interference from the federal government,” Colorado Attorney General Phill Weiser said in a statement Thursday.

“The idea that a president could pardon someone tried and convicted in state court has no precedent in American law, would be an outrageous departure from what our constitution requires, and will not hold up,” he added.

Colorado Secretary of State Jena Griswold added that Peters “was convicted by a jury of her peers for state crimes in a state Court. Trump has no constitutional authority to pardon her.”

“His assault is not just on our democracy, but on states’ rights and the American Constitution,” she said in a statement.

As of Friday morning, no legal action has been taken against the Trump Administration over the president’s announcement.

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(NEW YORK) — Amid the news that the U.S. carried out a “large scale strike” on Venezuela overnight Saturday and captured the country’s leader, Nicolas Maduro, Americans may be wondering why Trump, who promised voters no more wars, would launch a risky ground operation to capture a foreign leader.

So far, Trump and his top aides have offered shifting explanations since Trump’s military buildup in Latin America began earlier this year.

Initially, Trump defended his military operations near Venezuela as keeping drugs out of the US, although experts say the cocaine that passes through Venezuela winds up mostly in Europe while fentanyl is sourced from China.

Trump also accused Maduro of emptying Venezuela’s prisons and “mental institutions” into the U.S., although there’s no evidence of that either. According to the nonpartisan Migration Policy Institute, hundreds of thousands of Venezuelans have settled in the U.S. in recent years due to economic and political instability in their home country.

By mid-December, Trump accused Maduro of “stealing” U.S. oil and land. Trump appeared to be alluding to work done in the 1970s in Venezuela by Western oil companies before the government there opted to nationalize its reserves, eventually forcing out American companies.

In a Dec. 17 social media post – around the same time sources say Trump was making a decision to greenlight the Jan. 3 military operation — Trump said the U.S. military threat to Venezuela will “only get bigger, and the shock to them will be like nothing they have ever seen before — Until such time as they return to the United States of America all of the Oil, Land, and other Assets that they previously stole from us.”

Trump aide Stephen Miller made a similar claim.

“American sweat, ingenuity and toil created the oil industry in Venezuela. Its tyrannical expropriation was the largest recorded theft of American wealth and property,” Miller wrote on X.

Two days later at a press conference, Secretary of State Marc Rubio offered a more general explanation than access to oil reserves, calling Maduro’s presidency “intolerable” because it was cooperating with “terrorist and criminal elements” instead of the Trump administration.

Rubio, the son of Cuban immigrants, has staked much of his political career as opposed to the communist Cuban government. He has long blamed Maduro as a primary source of instability in the region, including in Cuba where the regime still relies on Venezuela’s cheap oil.

“There is a regional threat, and in the case of Venezuela we have no cooperation,” Rubio told reporters Dec. 19. “To begin with, it is an illegitimate regime. Second, it is a regime that does not cooperate. It is anti-American in all its statements and actions. And third, it is a regime that not only does not cooperate with us, but also openly cooperates with dangerous, terrorist and criminal elements.”

The Venezuelan government issued a statement condemning what it called “the grave military aggression perpetrated by the current government of the United States of America.”

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(WASHINGTON) — The Senate is poised to vote on Thursday on two separate plans aimed at addressing a spike in health care costs that are expected for tens of millions of Americans who receive enhanced Affordable Care Act tax credits unless Congress acts.

Both plans, one put forward by Democrats and the other championed by Republicans, are almost certain to fail.

After they do, lawmakers will have only a matter of days remaining to address the expiration of the enhanced tax credits, and there’s little indication that any sort of breakthrough is on the horizon.

Democratic plan: 3-year extension of expiring enhanced tax credits

The Democratic plan that will receive a vote on Thursday proposes a three-year extension of the enhanced Affordable Care Act subsidies that are otherwise set to expire on Jan. 1. The enhanced subsidies were originally put in place during the COVID-19 pandemic.

During remarks on the floor Wednesday, Minority Leader Chuck Schumer called the Democratic plan the “only realistic path left” to address the looming premium spike. 

“We have 21 days until Jan. 1. After that, people’s health care bills will start going through the roof. Double, triple, even more,” Schumer said. “There is only one way to avoid all of this. The only realistic path left is what Democrats are proposing — a clean direct extension of this urgent tax credit.”

Even though Democrats are in the minority, they are getting a vote on their proposal, as part of a deal struck by a small group of Senate moderates to re-open the federal government after a 43-day shutdown, which centered around Democrats’ efforts to address the expiring tax credits.

“What we need to do is prevent premiums from skyrocketing and only our bill does it is the last train out of the station,” Schumer said.

But any health care proposal in the Senate will require 60 votes to pass, which means members of both parties would need to lend votes to approve a plan.

Majority Leader John Thune made clear Wednesday that Republicans will not support the Democratic plan. 

Thune called the Democratic proposal a “partisan messaging exercise” and said that Democrats’ claim that their plan would lower health care costs represented a “tour of fantasy land.”

Republicans have for months been saying that the premium subsidies require reform. Without changes, Republicans say, the enhanced subsidies create opportunities for waste, fraud and abuse and have driven up the overall cost of premiums.

The nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office estimates that the Senate Democrats’ proposal would add nearly $83 billion to the federal deficit over the next decade. CBO also estimates that enacting the Democrats’ legislation would increase the number of people with health insurance by 8.5 million people by 2029.

Pointing to the cost of extending the subsidies, Thune said, Democrats ought to put forward a program that makes modifications to the program.

“That’s not what they did … No changes,” Thune said. “Just continue to run up the cost. Run up the cost in the individual marketplace like that — but have the American taxpayers pay for it and then go tell people that you’re trying to keep their premiums down,” Thune said. “This does nothing, nothing, to lower the cost of health insurance.” 

Republican plan: Do away with the enhanced tax credits and create HSAs

Republicans will offer an “alternative” plan on the Senate floor on Thursday.

The Republican proposal, championed by Senate Health Committee Chairman Bill Cassidy and Senate Finance Committee Chairman Mike Crapo, would do away with the enhanced tax credits and instead take the extra money from those tax credits and put it into health savings accounts for those who purchase bronze-level or “catastrophic” plans on the ACA exchanges. Republicans say this will help Americans pay for out-of-pocket costs.

Under the plan, individuals earning less than 700% of the federal poverty level would receive $1,000 in HSA funding for those between age 18 and 49 and $1,500 for those age 50-64. Republicans say these funds could be used to help cover the higher deductibles on lower cost plans. 

Republicans say that their plan will reduce premiums through cost-sharing reductions and tout that the plan stops payments to insurance companies. Thune called it a “very different business model” than what Democrats are proposing.

“The question is do you want the government deciding this, ordo you want to put this power and these resources in the hands of the American people?” Thune said on the Senate floor on Wednesday. “American taxpayers. Patients. That’ what we’re about.”

This bill is also unlikely to pass the Senate on Thursday. Schumer called it “dead on arrival”.

“I want to be very clear about what this Republican bill represents, junk insurance,” Schumer said. “Let me tell my Republican colleagues: it is dead on arrival. The proposal does nothing to bring down sky-high premiums; it doesn’t extend the ACA premiums by a single day. Instead, Republicans want to send people $80 dollars and pretend that is going to fix everything.” Schumer said.

Cassidy this morning called Schumer’s categorization of his plan as a “junk plan” “so ironic.”

“These are Obamacare plans. These are the plans they put in place, except that when they did the plans, they’ve got $6,000 deductibles, or $7,500 deductibles. We addressed that deductible. We make these plans better,” Cassidy said. “We Republicans are trying to make it better. We want money in your pocket for your out-of-pocket [costs], and they want you to front the whole thing.”

Democrats also take umbrage with provisions in the GOP bill that prevent funds from being used for abortions. Schumer, on the Senate floor, called it a “poison pill.”

Sen. Patty Murray, the top Democrat on the Senate appropriations committee, was asked if she saw any way that Democrats could support the bill today.

“Not with the choice issues in it, where they have made it that women cannot get access to an abortion through their plan,” Murray said. “I don’t see any way that this helps the people that are being hurt right now by the tax credits going away.”

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