(Headline USA) A man was arrested on Thursday in the FBI’s nearly 5-year-old investigation into pipe bombs placed outside the headquarters of the Republican and Democratic national parties in Washington on the eve of the Jan. 6, 2021, riot at the Capitol and has been charged with an explosives offense, prosecutors said.
The arrest marks the first time investigators have identified a suspect in an act that had long vexed law enforcement.
The suspect in custody has been identified as Brian Cole Jr., according to Attorney General Pam Bondi. He has been charged with the use of an explosive device, and more charges are possible as part of the ongoing investigation.
“Let me be clear: There was no new tip, there was no new witness. Just good diligent police work and prosecutorial work,” Bondi said.
Calls to relatives of Cole listed in public records were not immediately returned on Thursday. Hours after Cole was taken into custody, unmarked law enforcement vehicles lined the Virginia cul-de-sac where Cole’s home is while FBI agents helped shoo away onlookers. Authorities were seen entering the house and examining the trunk of a car nearby.
The pipe bombs were placed on the evening of Jan. 5, 2021, near the offices of the Democratic and Republican national committees. Nobody was hurt before the bombs were rendered safe, but the FBI has said both devices could have been lethal.
Seeking a breakthrough, the FBI last January publicized additional information about the investigation, including an estimate that the suspect was about 5 feet, 7 inches tall, as well as previously unreleased video of the suspect placing one of the bombs.
The bureau had for years struggled to pinpoint a suspect despite hundreds of tips, a review of tens of thousands of video files and a significant number of interviews.
The FBI’s top two leaders, Bongino and Director Kash Patel, sought to breathe new life into the investigation.
In a long Nov. 13 post on X, Bongino wrote that the FBI had brought in new personnel to examine the case and “dramatically increased investigative resources” along with the public reward for information “to utilize crowd-sourcing leads.” He said in the same post, addressed to Rep. Thomas Massie, R-Ky., that “a week of near 24-hour work on RECENT open source leads in the case has yet to produce a break through.”
Public attention over the years had centered in part on surveillance video taken the night before the riot showing the suspect spending close to an hour moving through the surrounding blocks, pausing on a park bench, cutting through an alley and stopping again as a dog walker passed.
The person wore a light sweatshirt, dark pants and sneakers, with a dark backpack slung over one shoulder. Investigators have long said the gait suggested the person was a man, but a surgical mask and hood rendered the face all but impossible to see.
Agents paired their video review with a broad sweep of digital records. They gathered cell tower data showing which phones were active in the neighborhood at the time and issued subpoenas to several tech companies, including Google, for location information.
Investigators also analyzed credit card transactions from hobby shops and major retailers to identify customers who had purchased components resembling those used in the two explosive devices — each roughly 1 foot (0.3 meters) long and packed with gunpowder and metal, according to two law enforcement officials familiar with the investigation.
Another avenue of the investigation centered on the suspect’s shoes, believed to be Nike Air Max Speed Turfs. After learning from Nike that thousands of pairs had been distributed through more than two dozen retailers, agents filed subpoenas for credit card records from Foot Locker and other chains as they worked to narrow down potential buyers. Still, for years, they had no solid breakthroughs.
The compound sits on 206,000 square meters, or about 50 acres, and cost about $800 million to build, and is a sign that the US is planning long-term involvement in Iraq. The country also hosts the largest US embassy in Baghdad, which sits on about 104 acres in the heavily fortified Green Zone.
“We have significant opportunities in the coming period to demonstrate the return on America’s investment in this new consulate by delivering tangible outcomes that make America safer, stronger, and more prosperous through a partnership that delivers value for our America First agenda,” Michael Rigas, US deputy secretary of state for Management and Resources, said at an opening ceremony, according to Rudaw.
The ceremony was also attended by Kurdistan officials, including the region’s president, Nechirvan Barzani, who said the consulate shows that the US is “committed to working with us in efforts toward peace and stability.”
The opening of the consulate comes after the US confirmed that it doesn’t plan to withdraw all of its troops from Iraq despite a deal with the Baghdad-based Iraqi government to end the mission of the US-led anti-ISIS coalition. The US is keeping troops at the Ain al-Asad airbase in western Iraq and an airbase in Erbil, and a small number of military advisors will be based at the embassy in Baghdad.
The US has been pressuring Baghdad to disarm the Popular Mobilization Forces (PMF), a coalition of mostly Shia militias that formed in 2014 to fight ISIS. US Ambassador to Turkey Tom Barrack visited Iraq this week and reportedly warned that Israel was preparing to escalate in Lebanon and that if the Iraqi Shia militias did anything in response, Iraq would face Israeli attacks.
Led by Gregory Bovino, chief patrol agent of the El Centro Sector of U.S. Customs and Border Patrol, Charlotte’s Web began in earnest on Nov. 15 and carried through most of the next week. Conflicting announcements about its continuation climaxed the following Thursday.
Homeland Security’s statement Wednesday saying 425 arrests were made also indicated the operation is continuing. In context, it is believed the volume of federal agents in the area has decreased, and a spotlight on removing people illegally in the country has not decreased for the federal authorities routinely present.
Democrats have the mayor’s office in Charlotte – Vi Lyles – and the majorities on the city’s council and county’s commission. Theirs were the leading voices among sympathizers to immigrants both lawfully and unlawfully present, with first-term Democratic Gov. Josh Stein and U.S. Senate candidate Roy Cooper – a former four-term state attorney general and two-term governor – joining them.
Public engagements through social media since mid-November have often below the “high road” of professionalism, headlined by Bovino receiving a “f— you” response from Chairwoman Anderson Clayton of the North Carolina Democratic Party.
Criminal records for some of those arrested included domestic violence, battery, aggravated assault, assault with a dangerous weapon, assault on a police officer, breaking and entering, larceny, driving while intoxicated, and hit-and-run.
Homeland Security said among those arrested were Manual Vasquez-Gavarrete, a Honduran and 18th Street gang member; and Humberto Pozada-Rodriguez, another Honduran and MS-13 gang member. Barrio 18, as 18th Street is also known, and MS-13 are rivals.
The U.S. Department of Justice says Barrio 18 is known for “acts of murder, kidnapping, assault, robbery, witness intimidation, and firearms and narcotics trafficking to fuel the gang’s violent operations.” The Justice Department says “MS-13 operates through the use of intimidation and violence, including murder, and enriching members and associates through criminal activities, including breaking into houses and stealing firearms, jewelry, cash, and other items of value, and selling narcotics.”
The Justice Department believed MS-13 to have more than 10,000 members in 10 states and Washington, D.C. – roughly between 20% and 33% of its global membership. Barrio 18 is reportedly in 28 states with 30,000 to 50,000 members.
U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement in November said 450,000 migrant children nationwide are being sought in order to reunite them with families.
In a statement, Homeland Security said, “There is absolutely no excuse to continue allowing criminal illegal aliens to terrorize our American communities. These are violent assailants, gang members, and repeat offenders who have zero regard for the rule of law in our country. They are here illegally and should never have been here in the first place.
“Under President Trump and Secretary Noem, we are removing the worst of the worst criminal illegal aliens from our communities once and for all.”
Second-term Republican President Donald Trump has sent the National Guard to the cities of Washington, Los Angeles and Memphis, with authorizations for Chicago and Portland blocked by judges. Throughout his second term since Jan. 20, regional offices of Enforcement and Removal Operations, the FBI led by Kash Patel, and Homeland Security led by Secretary Kristi Noem have spotlighted removal by the thousands of people illegally in the United States.
In North Carolina, three members of the U.S. House of Representatives on Nov. 5 asked Stein to deploy the National Guard to Charlotte. The former two-term state attorney general refused.
Homeland Security has since opened Catahoula Crunch in New Orleans.
(Sarah Roderick-Fitch, The Center Square) An Afghan national accused of providing support to the Islamic State was arrested Wednesday in Virginia, according to the Department of Homeland Security.
Immigration and Customs Enforcement arrested Jaan Shah Safi in Waynesboro, Va., with DHS accusing the suspect of providing support to the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria-Khorasan. In addition, he has been accused of providing weapons to his father, a commander of a militia group in Afghanistan.
The arrest comes one week after two National Guard members were shot blocks from the White House, leaving one guardsman dead and another fighting for his life. The suspected gunman, Rahmanullah Lakanwal, an Afghan national, was admitted to the U.S. in 2021 following the pullout of American forces in Afghanistan.
Like Lakanwal, Safi was also admitted under former President Joe Biden’s “Operation Allies Welcome.”
DHS claims Safi is an “illegal alien terrorist” who entered the country on Sept. 8, 2021, in Philadelphia, Pa., adding that he applied for Temporary Protected Status; however, his application was “terminated” after TPS was ended for Afghans.
“[The DoD] found that Afghan evacuees were not vetted by the National Counter-Terrorism Center (NCTC) using al DoD data prior to arriving in CONUS,” the report said.
The report also noted, during an “analytic review, NGIC personnel identified Afghans with derogatory information in the DoD ABIS database who were believed to be in the United States.”
Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem accused the Biden administration of bringing Safi into the country, underscoring the administration’s decision to allow nearly 200,000 “unvetted” Afghans into the U.S.
“The Biden administration created one of the worst national security crises in American history. Biden let into our country nearly 190,000 unvetted Afghan aliens – only determining who they were and their intentions when they were already on American soil. President Trump has been working every day since January 20 to clean up this unmitigated national security crisis,” Noem said in a statement.
Safi’s arrest marks the third Afghan national who entered the country under “Operation Allies Welcome” arrested in a week.
One day before the deadly attack in Washington, D.C., Mohammad Dawood Alokozay was arrested by the FBI’s Joint Terrorism Task Force, accused of making bomb threats in Fort Worth, Texas, after posting a video on TikTok, “indicating he was building a bomb.” He was charged with making “terroristic threats.”
In July, The Center Square asked border czar Tom Homan about the report and whether the Trump administration would investigate the individuals who had not been vetted.
Homan vowed the Trump administration would thoroughly vet Afghan refugees and would be doing things the “right way” by revisiting the vetting process.
“We’re going to re-vet them because we don’t think the last administration properly vetted them. … This administration will do things the right way, we’ll make sure everyone is vetted properly,” said Homan.
After last week’s shooting in Washington, D.C., President Donald Trump vowed to pause migration from certain countries, including Afghanistan.
Trump claimed “reverse migration” is the answer to years of mass migration and said he plans to “permanently pause migration from all third world countries to allow the U.S. system to fully recover.”
Trump also appeared to consider removing migrants who have become U.S. citizens. He said he will “remove anyone who is not a net asset to the United States, or is capable of loving our Country.”
He said the federal government will end all “benefits and subsidies to noncitizens, denaturalize migrants who undermine domestic tranquility, and deport and foreign nation who is a public charge, security risk, or non-compatible with Western Civilization.”
(Headline USA) One of Jeffrey Epstein and Ghislaine Maxwell ‘s most vocal accusers urged judges on Wednesday to grant the Justice Department’s request to unseal records from their federal sex trafficking cases, saying “only transparency is likely to lead to justice.”
Annie Farmer weighed in through her lawyer, Sigrid S. McCawley, after the judges asked for input from victims before ruling on whether the records should be made public under a new law requiring the government to open its files on the late financier and his longtime confidante, who sexually abused young women and girls for decades.
Farmer and other victims fought for the passage of the law, known as the Epstein Files Transparency Act. Signed last month by President Donald Trump, it compels the Justice Department, FBI and federal prosecutors to release by Dec. 19 the vast troves of material they’ve amassed during investigations into Epstein.
The Justice Department last week asked Manhattan federal Judges Richard M. Berman and Paul A. Engelmayer to lift secrecy orders on grand jury transcripts and other material from Epstein’s 2019 sex trafficking case and a wide range of records from Maxwell’s 2021 case, including search warrants, financial records and notes from interviews with victims.
“Nothing in these proceedings should stand in the way of their victory or provide a backdoor avenue to continue to cover up history’s most notorious sex-trafficking operation,” McCawley wrote in a letter to the judges.
The attorney was critical of the government for failing to prosecute anyone else in Epstein and Maxwell’s orbit.
She asked the judges to ensure that the orders they issue do not preclude the Justice Department from releasing other Epstein-related materials, adding that Farmer “is wary” that any denial could be used “as a pretext or excuse” to withhold information.
Epstein, a millionaire money manager known for socializing with celebrities, politicians, billionaires and the academic elite, killed himself in jail a month after his 2019 arrest.
Maxwell was convicted in 2021 by a federal jury of sex trafficking for helping recruit some of Epstein’s underage victims and participating in some of the abuse. She is serving a 20-year prison sentence.
In a court filing Wednesday, Maxwell’s lawyer again said that she is preparing a habeas petition in a bid to overturn her conviction. The lawyer, David Markus, first mentioned the habeas petition in court papers in August as she fought the Justice Department’s initial bid to have her case records unsealed. The Supreme Court in October declined to hear Maxwell’s appeal.
Markus said in Wednesday’s filing that while Maxwell now “does not take a position” in the wake of the transparency act’s passage, doing so “would create undue prejudice so severe that it would foreclose the possibility of a fair retrial” if her habeas petition succeeds.
The records, Markus said, “contain untested and unproven allegations.”
Berman, who presided over the Epstein case, ordered victims and Epstein’s estate to respond to the Justice Department’s unsealing request by Wednesday and gave the government until Dec. 8 to reply to those submissions. Berman said he would make his “best efforts to resolve this motion promptly.”
Engelmayer, who’s weighing whether to release records from Maxwell’s case, gave her and victims until Wednesday to respond. The government must respond by Dec. 8, he said, moving up his original Dec. 10 deadline to match Berman’s. Engelmayer said that will enable him “to render an earlier decision on this motion.”
Lawyers for Epstein’s estate said in a letter to Berman on Wednesday that the estate takes no position on the Justice Department’s unsealing request. The lawyers noted that the government had committed to making appropriate redactions of personal identifying information for victims.
Last week, a lawyer for some victims complained that the House Oversight Committee had failed to redact, or black out, some of their names from tens of thousands pages of Epstein-related documents it has released in recent months.
Transparency “CANNOT come at the expense of the privacy, safety, and protection of sexual abuse and sex trafficking victims, especially these survivors who have already suffered repeatedly,” lawyer Brad Edwards wrote.
(Esther Wickham, The Center Square) Legal battles over the display of the Ten Commandments in public schools continue with a new brief filed this week, backed by 46 members of Congress.
First Liberty Institute and Hacker Stephens LLP filed a friend-of-the-court brief this past week at the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 5th Circuit. The brief is supported by congressional members such as U.S. Sen. Ted Cruz, R-Texas, and House Speaker Mike Johnson, R-Louisiana.
The brief supports the constitutionality of displaying the Ten Commandments in public schools.
“[O]ur Nation’s history and tradition acknowledge Moses as a lawgiver and the Ten Commandments as a historical foundation of our system of laws,” the brief states.
“First Liberty’s recent Supreme Court victories in The American Legion v. American Humanist Association and Kennedy v. Bremerton School District make clear that displaying the Ten Commandments in public schools is constitutional,” said Kelly Shackelford, president, CEO, and chief counsel for First Liberty. “Our religious heritage and the best of the nation’s history and traditions acknowledge the Ten Commandments as an important symbol of law and moral conduct with both religious and secular significance. Government hostility to religion and our religious history is not the law.”
Several states have moved to require the display of the Ten Commandments in classrooms following these Supreme Court rulings.
In 2024, Louisiana enacted House Bill 71, mandating that schools and publicly funded colleges display the Ten Commandments.
Nine families sued the state, arguing that the law encourages state endorsement of religion, which they claimed violated the First Amendment.
In Texas, Gov. Greg Abbott signed Senate Bill 10 in June, requiring all public school classrooms to post a copy of the Ten Commandments starting in the 2025-2026 school year. A federal judge in San Antonio blocked the law in certain districts.
A group of 18 multifaith and nonreligious Texas families filed a class-action lawsuit seeking to block the display of the Ten Commandments in public schools not already involved in litigation, according to the American Civil Liberties Union of Texas.
“As a Jewish, Christian and Chinese American family, we teach our children to draw strength from many traditions, not to see one as supreme,” said Mari Gottlieb, one plaintiff whose children attend schools in Carroll, Texas. “Forcing the Ten Commandments on my kids is indoctrination, undermines my right to guide their beliefs, and perpetuates the feelings of exclusion that our ancestors knew all too well.”
Chloe Kempf, attorney with the ACLU of Texas, emphasized the constitutionality of this issue.
“The courts are clear that forcing displays of the Ten Commandments on Texas students is unconstitutional,” Kempf said. “Yet Texas school districts won’t stop. Enough is enough. With this class action lawsuit, Texans are coming together to say: Students and families — not the government — should decide how or whether they practice their faith.”
All of these cases have been consolidated and will be heard by judges at the 5th Circuit later this month.
(Money Metals News Service) Mike Maharrey opens this near-100th episode of the Money Metals Midweek Memo by admitting he’s always been bad at math.
But his main point is that math’s weakness as a personal skill doesn’t change its strength as a reality check. Words can spin. Narratives can be massaged.
Numbers can’t. Two plus two is still four, no matter what a politician says.
Tariff Rebate Dreams Versus Federal Reality
There’s growing chatter about tariff rebate checks. Some rumors even suggest payments could go out by year-end.
Maharrey doubts it. Congress would have to approve any checks, and Washington is already neck-deep in red ink. The bigger problem is the claim, pushed by Donald Trump and echoed online, that tariffs can both replace the income tax and help pay down the national debt.
That sounds nice. The math doesn’t cooperate.
Record Tariffs, Record Deficits
In October, customs receipts hit a record. Tariff revenue totaled $31.4 billion, a 330.1 percent increase over October 2025.
At the same time, the federal government spent $689 billion that month. Those record tariffs covered only about 4.5 percent of spending.
Despite the “tariff windfall,” October still produced the biggest October budget deficit on record. The Trump administration ran a $284.35 billion shortfall to kick off fiscal 2026, which began on October 1.
That was about 10 percent higher than the October deficit a year earlier and roughly $200 million worse than the prior October record set in 2020, during the pandemic lockdown era.
“Cuts” That Aren’t Cuts
Some of October’s deficit spike came from calendar effects, with November payments pulled into October. Adjusting for that, the deficit would have been around $180 billion.
That’s smaller, but still among the top four October deficits ever. And it came while the federal government was supposedly “closed” during a shutdown that likely trimmed less than 5 percent of total outlays.
Total October revenue, including tariffs, was about $44 billion, up 24 percent from October 2024. For an individual, a 24 percent raise is life-changing. For Washington, it wasn’t enough to even slow the borrowing.
To close an average monthly deficit using tariffs alone, receipts would need to jump to around $150 billion per month. That’s a 377.7 percent increase over October’s record $31.4 billion. Even then, you’re only covering current spending, not paying down debt or abolishing the income tax.
Washington’s Spending Addiction and the Inflation Tax
Maharrey drives home a simple conclusion: Uncle Sam does not have a revenue problem. He has a spending problem.
In October, the Trump administration spent about $688.72 billion, a 17.9 percent increase from a year earlier. Over the prior year, total federal spending topped $7 trillion, averaging $583.3 billion per month, or about $19.2 billion per day.
Politicians talk about cuts, but most of them are cuts only in the rate of increase. If a program was supposed to rise by $10 and instead rises by $5, they call that a $5 cut. Actual spending still goes up.
Meanwhile, interest on the national debt has become the second-largest budget item after Social Security. The U.S. now spends over $1 trillion per year just on interest. That interest burden is one more reason the Federal Reserve keeps leaning toward easier money.
Borrowing and spending push the Fed toward rate cuts, bond-buying, and quantitative easing. That’s inflationary. Even if your tax bill doesn’t rise, you pay through the inflation tax—at the grocery store, the hardware store, and everywhere else.
From Cash in a Card to Real Money
To make the point vivid, Maharrey recalls getting cash in cards from his grandmother. The amounts rose as he aged, which was her way of adjusting to inflation.
A friend wasn’t so lucky. His grandmother was still giving him $10 bills when he was 20. By then, that $10 hardly bought anything.
Today, a $10 bill tucked in an envelope is close to a token. Its purchasing power shrinks year after year. Maharrey suggests that instead of handing out fiat that will buy less tomorrow, people consider gifting real money—gold and silver—through products offered by Money Metals.
Silver’s Price Surge and Structural Shortage
The back half of the episode turns to silver, where the math is also stubborn.
Silver topped $58 an ounce on Monday, slipped briefly on profit-taking, then bounced back above $59. So far this year, silver has gained over 99 percent, essentially doubling in price.
Maharrey expected a run once silver broke $50, but he didn’t expect it to challenge $60 so quickly. The core driver, he argues, is a multi-year mismatch between supply and demand.
If the world needs 10 ounces of silver and miners only produce 9, that missing ounce must come from existing above-ground stocks. That’s where we are now.
Five Years of Deficits and Weak Mine Supply
Metals Focus projects that 2024 will mark silver’s fifth straight structural market deficit.
Industrial demand hit a record in 2024 and is projected to dip about 2 percent this year due to high prices. That may pull overall demand down roughly 4 percent, but it still leaves total demand close to record levels.
Mine output isn’t keeping up. Production peaked in 2016 at about 900 million ounces. It has not returned to that level. Until last year, output actually declined by an average of 1.4 percent annually. In 2023, mines produced around 814 million ounces.
For 2024, Metals Focus forecasts a 95-million-ounce deficit. That would push the cumulative five-year deficit to roughly 820 million ounces—about a full year of average mine supply.
Going back further, since 2010, the silver market has accumulated a supply deficit of more than 580 million ounces. All of this has been covered by drawing down above-ground stocks, but those stocks are finite and require higher prices to pry metal loose from long-term holders.
Global Squeeze: London, Shanghai, and Beyond
The recent silver squeeze exposed how fragile the system has become.
Ahead of possible U.S. tariffs, large amounts of silver were shipped into the United States to “get ahead” of new taxes. That left London short. Available “free float” silver in London vaults plunged from around 850 million ounces to roughly 200 million, a drop on the order of 75 percent. Metals Focus estimates it may have briefly fallen as low as 150 million ounces.
At the same time, demand in India surged as buyers pivoted to silver with gold at record highs. Lease rates spiked. Money Metals shipped multiple pallets of 1,000-ounce bars to India. Metal eventually flowed back from New York to London, and the immediate panic eased.
But, as Bloomberg and ANZ analysts note, the shortage didn’t vanish. It moved. Warehouses linked to the Shanghai Futures Exchange now report the lowest silver inventories in nearly a decade. Lease rates have climbed again, signaling continued tightness.
Strategic Designation and Fed Tailwinds
Policy shifts add more fuel.
The U.S. recently designated silver as a strategic mineral. Metals Focus director Matthew Piggott told Kitco this will create “far more tightness” in the market. Bloomberg notes that fear of sudden U.S. premiums has made traders hesitant to ship metal out of the country, limiting global relief if conditions tighten further.
On top of that, markets expect the Federal Reserve to keep easing. After some hawkish talk in October, traders have drifted back to expecting another rate cut in December. Lower rates and easier money tend to support both gold and silver.
Letting the Math Work For You
Maharrey closes by returning to his core theme: math wins.
Thirty-odd billion dollars in monthly tariffs will not erase multi-hundred-billion-dollar deficits. A $7 trillion annual budget and more than $1 trillion in interest payments aren’t going away.
You can’t legislate away decades of overspending and money printing. You can’t vote away structural silver shortages.
What you can do is decide how you save. Keeping everything in fiat means letting inflation steadily eat your purchasing power. Shifting part of your savings into real money—gold and silver—lets you step outside that game.
In a world where the numbers no longer add up for the dollar, Maharrey argues, the math still adds up for sound money.
The bill was introduced by Senators Tim Kaine (D-VA), Rand Paul (R-KY), and Adam Schiff (D-CA), who sponsored the previous resolution, and this time they were joined by Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY). According to a press release from Kaine’s office, the new War Powers Resolution is privileged and may be called up for a vote on the Senate floor within 10 days.
The first bill failed last month in a vote of 49-51, with just two Republicans, Paul and Lisa Murkowski (AK), supporting it. Kaine has said he expects the legislation to receive more support now that the US has deployed more military assets near Venezuela and due to the controversy over the September 2 bombing of an alleged drug boat off the coast of Venezuela that involved a second strike to kill survivors.
“We should not be risking the lives of our nation’s servicemembers to engage in military action within Venezuela without a robust debate in Congress. This is why the Framers gave the power to declare war to Congress, not the President,” Kaine said in a statement on the new bill.
Paul said that the “American people do not want to be dragged into endless war with Venezuela without public debate or a vote. We ought to defend what the Constitution demands: deliberation before war.”
A War Powers Resolution to block an attack on Venezuela has also been introduced in the House, as Rep. Jim McGovern (D-MA) and Joaquin Castro (D-TX) have been joined by Rep. Thomas Massie (R-KY) in co-sponsoring the bill.
“The Constitution does not permit the executive branch to unilaterally commit an act of war against a sovereign nation that hasn’t attacked the United States,” Massie said in a statement. “Congress has the sole power to declare war against Venezuela. Congress must decide such matters according to our Constitution.”
(Dave DeCamp, Antiwar.com) US envoy Steve Witkoff and President Trump’s son-in-law, Jared Kushner, held five hours of talks with Russian President Vladimir Putin and his advisers at the Kremlin on Tuesday to discuss a potential peace plan to end the war in Ukraine, but the meeting ended with no sign of a breakthrough.
Yury Ushakov, a top aide to Putin, said that the talks were “useful, constructive and meaningful” but that no compromises were reached. “Some American proposals are acceptable to Russia, while others are not,” he said.
Ushakov said that the US presented proposals on territorial control, one of the main sticking points in the negotiations, and declined to share more details about the conversation.
“We agreed with our American colleagues not to disclose the substance of the negotiations that took place. The discussion was confidential,” Ushakov told reporters.
The original 28-point US proposal that was leaked to the media required Ukraine to cede what territory it controls in the Donbas, a key Russian demand to end the war. But Ukraine has been resistant to the idea of ceding any territory, and the US proposal was altered during talks between US and Ukrainian officials.
Ushakov said that another meeting between Trump and Putin could happen, but that it required more progress to be made on the potential peace deal. “A possible meeting at the presidential level will depend on how much progress we can make along this line. We will continue [talks] at the level of representatives and assistants,” he said.
Another main sticking point in the negotiations is the issue of security guarantees, and Ukraine’s European backers are insisting on deploying troops to a post-war Ukraine, an idea that’s been repeatedly rejected by Moscow. The insistence on a troop deployment or NATO-style security guarantees could ultimately sabotage the chances of a deal.
(Dave DeCamp, Antiwar.com) Pope Leo XIV has warned the US against invading Venezuela to oust President Nicolas Maduro amid a major US military buildup in the Caribbean and threats of the US launching a regime change war.
Leo was asked about the US threats against Venezuela during a press conference he held on his way back from Lebanon, where he prayed for peace in the war-torn nation that faces the threat of an escalation of ongoing Israeli attacks. The US-born pontiff pointed out to reporters the mixed signals coming from the Trump administration and urged dialogue.
“On the one hand, it seems there has been a telephone conversation between the two presidents; on the other hand, there is this danger, this possibility, that there could be an action, an operation, including an invasion of Venezuelan territory,” Leo said.
“I again believe it is better to seek dialogue within this pressure, including economic pressure, but looking for another way to bring about change, if that is what the United States decides to do,” he added.
Leo also said that bishops in Venezuela, a majority Catholic nation, are “trying to find a way to calm the situation, seeking above all the good of the people, because in these situations it is the people who suffer, not the authorities.”
Leo has previously expressed concern about the US military buildup in the Caribbean, saying that it was raising tensions. Catholic bishops in the Caribbean have harshly condemned the US military campaign and the strikes on alleged drug-running boats in the region, saying it violates the “sacredness” of human life.
The Antilles Episcopal Conference, which represents Catholic dioceses in nations and territories across the Caribbean, said in a statement last month that the “presence of warships and the disruption of marine livelihoods within our Caribbean waters represent real and immediate threats to regional stability and to the welfare of our nations.”
The bishops said that while the “narcotics trade continues to devastate Caribbean societies,” the “arbitrary and unwarranted taking of life cannot be justified as a means of resolution. Such acts violate the sacredness of human life.”
“The disregard for the sovereignty of independent nations cannot be accepted as a reasonable measure in the name of border security. War or the threat of war is never the right solution,” the statement added. “The objectives of securing our borders and the elimination of the narcotics trade must be pursued with the respect for law, the dignity of human life and with a tacit understanding of our region’s deep commitment to peace.”
