Former Vice President Kamala Harris declared herself to be a ‘historic figure’ on Tuesday and touted that there will be a marble bust of her constructed in Congress.

Harris made the statement during an interview with The New York Times regarding her upcoming book, ‘107 Days,’ telling the newspaper that she no longer feels ‘burdened’ by the need to achieve a place in history.

‘I understand the focus on ’28 and all that,’ she told the Times. ‘But there will be a marble bust of me in Congress. I am a historic figure like any Vice President of the United States ever was.’

‘Thousands of people are coming to hear my voice. Thousands and thousands,’ she added about her book tour. ‘Every place we’ve gone has been sold out.’

Harris’ comments reference a tradition in the Senate of commissioning a bust of vice presidents after they leave office. The tradition has held strong since the late 1800s.

The former vice president has used the release of her upcoming book as a chance to settle scores with figures throughout the Democratic Party, from Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro to former President Joe Biden himself.

Harris writes in her book that Shapiro had asked her staff lots of questions, including ‘how he might arrange to get Pennsylvania artists’ work on loan from the Smithsonian.’ She also accused him of wanting to be involved in every decision and said she reminded him, ‘a vice president is not a co-president.’

Many political observers had scratched their heads when Harris selected Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz over Shapiro to be her running mate.

‘She wrote that in her book? That’s complete and utter bull—-,’ Shapiro said in an interview with the Atlantic. ‘I can tell you that her accounts are just blatant lies.’

‘I did ask a bunch of questions,’ he continued. ‘Wouldn’t you ask questions if someone was talking to you about forming a partnership and working together?’

‘I mean, she’s trying to sell books and cover her a–,’ he said, before backtracking. ‘I shouldn’t say ‘cover her a–.’ I think that’s not appropriate.’

‘She’s trying to sell books. Period,’ he concluded.

The book also blames Biden’s White House for sidelining her and failing to support her throughout their term in office and during her contest against Trump.

‘Getting anything positive said about my work or any defense against untrue attacks was almost impossible,’ her book reads.

She also argued the White House was happy to let her ‘shoulder the blame’ for the border crisis.

Fox News’ Hannah Panreck contributed to this report.

While Senate Republicans work to coalesce behind a fix to expiring Obamacare subsidies, one Republican has a plan that he says bridges Democrats’ desires and GOP demands.

Sen. Roger Marshall, R-Kan., detailed his plan, dubbed the Marshall Plan, in an interview with Fox News Digital that he pitched as a starting point that could bring both Republicans and Democrats to the table to hash out a bipartisan solution to the subsidies, and further, Obamacare as a whole.

Boiled down, Marshall’s legislative package would do two things: extend the enhanced subsidies as they are for one year, and then convert those subsidies into health savings accounts (HSAs).

That approach, in broad terms, bridges the gap between Senate Democrats’ desire to extend the subsidies and the GOP’s wishes to pivot the subsidy money into HSAs, which has the backing of President Donald Trump.

‘We want to turn patients into consumers again. That’s the whole key here: My plan doesn’t impact just the 24 million people on Obamacare. It’s going to impact everybody’s cost of health care,’ Marshall said. ‘So if we pair bumping up savings accounts with price tags, we’re going to turn patients into consumers again, and they’ll do magic things out there. I think of this being like the magic shopping weeks, Black Friday and Cyber Monday.’

Along with extending the enhanced subsidies and transitioning them to HSAs, Marshall’s plan would also eliminate zero-cost premiums by requiring a minimum payment of $5 per month, require people to provide a government-issued ID in a bid to eliminate fraud, and include stricter enforcement of Hyde Amendment requirements that taxpayer dollars don’t fund abortions by denying the premium credits from being used on abortion procedures.

Abortion funding has proven a tricky situation in ongoing bipartisan talks, a point Marshall acknowledged but countered that he couldn’t understand ‘why by just stating what the law is and making it even clearer,’ Democrats object to it.

The plan would also bar gender transition procedures from being covered by plans on the Obamacare exchange and permanently fund cost-sharing reduction payments, which Marshall and several economists who reviewed his plan estimated would save $30 billion on healthcare and lower premiums by roughly 11%.

The end of the one-year extension of the subsidies would also include a wind-down transition period until 2032, reducing the enhanced premium tax credits each year by 20%.

The Obamacare issue is one that Marshall has thought about for over a decade and tried to tackle legislatively when he was a member of the House.

‘Forever, it feels like it’s been forever,’ Marshall said. ‘Here we are, 15 years later, premiums have doubled. Out-of-pocket costs — it went from $1,000 a year to $15,000 a year.’

While he hopes for a bipartisan product at the end of the road, Marshall’s main objective is to present a package that can get strong support among his Republican colleagues. Senate Republicans are expected to discuss which option they want to run with during a closed-door meeting on Tuesday.

He noted that bipartisan talks had picked up recently, but that Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., was proving to be a major roadblock.

‘I think the talks are increasing, and they’re getting better, but there’s a political reality to this as well,’ Marshall said. ‘I don’t think Chuck Schumer wants us to be successful. He doesn’t want us to fix Obamacare. He wants this country to be in chaos come November of next year.’

It’s also one of several Republican plans in the mix, with others either focusing only on abandoning the enhanced subsidies for HSAs or extending the subsidies for two years.

And time is running out for Republicans to present their plan to counter Senate Democrats’ proposal, with a vote on the subsidies set for Thursday. That could be a tall task for Republicans, Marshall said.

‘I think it’ll be really hard to have enough momentum to get something that’s going to allow the enhanced premiums to continue,’ he said. ‘I want to emphasize, though the original Obamacare is still in place, and it’s going to cover over 80% of people’s premiums as is. I think we need to do more than just stop the hemorrhaging. Our bill stops the hemorrhaging.’

A bipartisan group of House lawmakers has introduced legislation aimed at keeping COVID-19 pandemic-era Obamacare subsidies alive for another two years.

Reps. Brian Fitzpatrick, R-Pa., and Tom Suozzi, D-N.Y., co-chairs of the Problem Solvers Caucus, have told reporters for weeks that they are working on such a measure as Capitol Hill scrambles to avert skyrocketing health insurance costs for millions of Americans beginning next year.

Democrats in Congress voted twice during the pandemic to expand the availability of premium tax credits for Obamacare, also called the Affordable Care Act (ACA), to make sure more Americans had access to healthcare coverage.

Those enhanced subsidies are set to expire at the end of this year.

A majority of House Republicans have signaled they are not open to extending them, at least not without significant reforms. Conservatives in particular have panned the enhanced subsidies as a COVID-era relic that benefited insurance companies rather than Americans themselves.

But some GOP lawmakers have joined Democrats in warning that failing to extend them at least temporarily at this point will result in millions of Americans seeing their healthcare premiums skyrocket while Congress does nothing to help.

House Republicans are now largely looking to Speaker Mike Johnson, R-La., and their leaders for the next move.

Johnson has said he intends to hold a vote on some kind of healthcare package before the end of this year, while panning Obamacare as a long-broken system badly in need of reforms.

One House GOP source told Fox News Digital that they expect Johnson to lay out a roadmap on healthcare at Republican lawmakers’ weekly conference meeting on Wednesday morning.

The bipartisan bill released Tuesday is being pushed by a group of four Democrats and four Republicans — Fitzpatrick, Suozzi, along with Reps. Don Bacon, R-Neb., Rob Bresnahan, R-Pa., Nicole Malliotakis, R-N.Y., Jared Golden, D-Maine, Don Davis, D-N.C., and Marie Gluesenkamp Perez, D-Wash.

Fitzpatrick called the legislation ‘a practical, people-first fix that protects families now, while preserving the space to keep working toward a stronger, smarter, more affordable healthcare system.’

‘When the stakes are this high, responsible governance means securing 80% of what families need today rather than risking 100% of nothing tomorrow,’ he said in a statement.

In addition to extending the enhanced Obamacare subsidies for two years, the bill also ‘stops unauthorized plan and subsidy changes by requiring consent and prompt notification before any modifications take effect,’ according to a press release.

It would also rein in pharmacy benefit manager (PBM) profits and expand access to health savings accounts (HSAs) — two reforms that other rank-and-file House Republicans have been advocating for.

But it’s not clear yet if House GOP leaders would put the bill on the floor for a chamber-wide vote, nor if it has the backing of their Democratic counterparts.

Still, there are ways to force a vote on legislation without leadership’s approval. One of those methods is called a discharge petition, which requires signatures from a majority of House lawmakers to override leaders’ wishes to vote on a given bill.

Fox News Digital asked Fitzpatrick last week if a discharge petition could be filed, but he did not give a direct answer, instead saying that the bill would be released imminently.

Bacon told Fox News Digital on Tuesday that a discharge petition is a realistic possibility but cautioned, ‘It would be wiser to see if we have 60 votes in the Senate first.’

The plan is one of several put forward by House Republicans to deal with the looming healthcare cliff.

Republican Study Committee Chairman August Pfluger, R-Texas, introduced legislation last week to allow states to opt out of Obamacare altogether while radically expanding the availability of HSAs.

And late last week, a bipartisan group of House lawmakers introduced a plan to extend the enhanced Obamacare subsidies — with income caps and extra guardrails against fraud — for a year.

The Senate, meanwhile, is expected to vote this week on Democrat-led legislation to extend the enhanced subsidies, though it’s likely to fail. It’s not yet clear if Senate Republicans will put up their own counter-proposal.

A federal judge has ruled the Justice Department can release investigative materials from the criminal prosecution of Ghislaine Maxwell, citing the Epstein Files Transparency Act.

Judge Paul Engelmayer has granted the DOJ’s motion to unseal the grand jury transcripts and exhibits in Maxwell’s criminal case with some redactions. 

Engelmayer’s ruling comes just ahead of the Dec. 19 deadline to release records related to the Epstein case. 

‘In the case of the Maxwell and Epstein grand juries, under the Act, public disclosure of such materials is the rule, subject to the limited exceptions set out in the Act. The Act thus requires the Attorney General to make public the Maxwell grand jury materials, subject to the withholdings and redactions that the Act permits,’ Engelmayer’s ruling reads.

Maxwell, who was convicted of sex trafficking charges in December 2021, is currently serving a 20-year prison sentence. Her attorney said that she took no position on the requested unsealing of records but noted that the release could harm Maxwell’s plan to file a habeas petition, according to The Associated Press.

Engelmayer’s decision is the second in the past week approving the release of Epstein-related files. Last week, Judge Rodney Smith moved to allow the DOJ to release transcripts from an abandoned federal grand jury probe from the 2000s.

The Epstein Files Transparency Act requires the DOJ ‘to publish (in a searchable and downloadable format) all unclassified records, documents, communications, and investigative materials in DOJ’s possession that relate to the investigation and prosecution of Jeffrey Epstein.’ The act was passed in November and paves the way for the public to have more insight into the infamous cases against the late disgraced financier.

There is a possibility that a judge could rule to release grand jury transcripts from the 2019 Epstein criminal case prior to the deadline under the Epstein Files Transparency Act. The AP noted that attorneys for the Epstein estate did not take a position on the unsealing of records.

The DOJ is reportedly working with survivors and their attorneys to redact records to protect survivors’ identities and prevent the dissemination of sexualized images, according to the AP.

Fox News Digital reached out to the Justice Department for comment.

The Associated Press contributed to this report.

This is a developing story, please check back for updates.

White House science and technology advisor Michael Kratsios opened a meeting of G7 tech ministers by urging governments to clear regulatory obstacles to artificial intelligence adoption, warning that sweeping new rule books or outdated oversight frameworks risk slowing the innovation needed to unlock AI-driven productivity.

Kratsios, the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy director, spoke Tuesday at the G7 Industry, Digital and Technology Ministers’ Meeting in Montréal, Quebec.

‘The United States is committed to promoting private-sector-led development of AI systems, applications, and infrastructure, to protect and foster innovation. This primarily requires us to throw off regulatory burdens that weigh down innovators, especially in the construction of the infrastructure that undergirds the AI revolution,’ said Kratsios in a draft of his remarks obtained by Fox News Digital.

‘However, we also recognize the benefits of AI will not be fully realized by complete de-regulation. Regulatory and non-regulatory policy frameworks that safeguard the public interest while enabling innovation are necessary to earn the public trust in AI technologies that will allow broad deployment and fast adoption.’

The U.S. official told Fox News Digital that the White House wants its allies to build a ‘trusted AI ecosystem defined by smart, sector-specific regulations tailored to each nation’s priorities and designed to accelerate innovation.’ 

‘Together, we can deliver transformative growth, keep critical data secure, and ensure the future of AI is built on freedom and human ingenuity,’ Kratsios added.

President Donald Trump has put artificial intelligence at the forefront of his administration, appointing David Sacks as his ‘AI czar’ and issuing an executive order in January that rolled back many of the federal government’s previous AI safety and oversight policies in an effort to speed deployment — a move critics say could weaken safeguards and increase risks as the technology spreads.

Trump wrote on his Truth Social platform Monday that he will issue a ‘One Rule’ executive order later this week to establish a single national framework for artificial intelligence regulation, arguing that U.S. dominance in the technology will be ‘destroyed in its infancy’ if he doesn’t.

‘We are beating ALL COUNTRIES at this point in the race, but that won’t last long if we are going to have 50 States, many of them bad actors, involved in RULES and the APPROVAL PROCESS. THERE CAN BE NO DOUBT ABOUT THIS!’ he said in part. ‘You can’t expect a company to get 50 Approvals every time they want to do something. THAT WILL NEVER WORK!’

Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis criticized the notion of stripping states of jurisdiction to regulate AI, arguing on X in November that it amounts to a ‘subsidy’ to Big Tech and would prevent states from ‘protecting against online censorship of political speech, predatory applications that target children, violations of intellectual property rights and data center intrusions on power/water resources.’

‘The rise of AI is the most significant economic and cultural shift occurring at the moment; denying the people the ability to channel these technologies in a productive way via self-government constitutes federal government overreach and lets technology companies run wild,’ DeSantis added. ‘Not acceptable.’

A House Republican is mounting an effort to make it easier for women to keep and raise their babies after birth.

Rep. Ashley Hinson, R-Iowa, is unveiling a bill called the Supporting Healthy Pregnancy Act that would ensure pregnant mothers get financial support from the father even before their child is born, Fox News Digital learned first.

It’s an effort by the Republican Party to affirm its pro-family ideology as Democrats continue to accuse the GOP of being anti-choice while also being unwilling to support women who keep their babies.

Hinson’s bill would require states to establish systems where the biological father of a child is required to pay at least 50% of out-of-pocket costs for medical expenses associated with a pregnancy and delivery, including health insurance premiums.

There are certain limitations on costs incurred, however, and abortion costs are excluded altogether.

The payments must also be requested by the mother before the father is legally obligated to make them.

Single mothers are currently eligible to request a legal order for child support beginning at birth in most states, meaning many are left to deal with the costs associated with pregnancy.

It’s the latest piece in a package of bills Hinson introduced related to helping women through maternity.

Another bill Hinson introduced would mandate that pregnant women in higher education institutions know what rights and resources they have on campus in an effort to give them more options aside from abortion.

A bipartisan bill co-led with Rep. Kristen McDonald Rivet, D-Mich., would expand access to and career training for midwives, particularly in underserved parts of the country.

‘I’m a mom on a mission to make life easier for my fellow moms and families. That’s why I’m working to expand access to maternal care, ensure women have resources throughout pregnancy and beyond, and improve child care options for growing families,’ Hinson, who is running for Senate in Iowa, told Fox News Digital.

‘Strong families make a strong nation, and we should work together to support the parents and women who are building America’s future,’ she said. ‘As a mom of two, I’m proud to be a leader in that fight for Iowa and for families nationwide.’

Senate Republicans appear to be closing in on a plan to counter Senate Democrats’ proposal to extend expiring Obamacare subsidies as a vote on credits at the end of the week draws closer.

Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions chair Bill Cassidy, R-La., and Senate Finance Committee Chair Mike Crapo, R-Idaho, unveiled their proposal to tackle the Obamacare issue that would abandon the subsidies for Healthcare Savings Accounts (HSAs).

The lawmakers have been leading Senate Republicans’ planning for a counter-proposal to Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., and Senate Democrats’ legislation, which would extend the Biden-era subsidies for three years.

Cassidy and Crapo pitched the legislation as ‘an alternative to Democrats’ temporary COVID bonuses, which send billions of tax dollars to giant insurance companies without lowering insurance premiums.’

The long-awaited proposal would funnel the subsidy money directly to HSAs rather than to insurance companies, an idea that has the backing of President Donald Trump and is largely popular among Senate Republicans.

‘Instead of 100% of this money going to insurance companies, let’s give it to patients. By giving them an account that they control, we give them the power,’ Cassidy said in a statement. ‘We make health care affordable again.’

Crapo contended that the legislation would build off of Trump’s marquee legislative package, the ‘big beautiful bill,’ from earlier this year and would ‘help Americans manage the rising cost of health care without driving costs even higher.’

‘Giving billions of taxpayer dollars to insurers is not working to reduce health insurance premiums for patients,’ he said in a statement.

Whether the bill gets a vote in the upper chamber this week remains in the air, given the growing number of Obamacare subsidy plans floated by Senate Republicans. But Senate Majority Leader John Thune, R-S.D., signaled that he thought their plan could work.

‘It represents an approach that actually does something on affordability and lowers costs,’ Thune said.

‘But there are other ideas out there, as you know, but I think if there is going to be some meeting of minds on this, it is going to require that Democrats sort of come off a position they know is an untenable one, and sit down in a serious way,’ he continued.

Cassidy and Crapo’s plan would seed HSAs with $1,000 for people ages 18 to 49 and $1,500 for those 50 to 65 for people earning up to 700% of the poverty level. In order to get the pre-funded HSA, people would have to buy a bronze or catastrophic plan on an Obamacare exchange.

The legislation also ticks off several demands from Senate Republicans in their back and forth with Senate Democrats over the subsidies that are unlikely to gain any favor from Schumer and his caucus.

Shortly after the legislation was unveiled, Schumer charged in a post on X that ‘Republicans are nowhere on healthcare, and the clock is ticking.’

Included in Cassidy and Crapo’s bill are provisions reducing federal Medicaid funding to states that cover undocumented immigrants, Requirements that states verify citizenship or eligible immigration status before someone can get Medicaid, a ban on federal Medicaid funding for gender transition services and nixing those services from ‘essential health benefits’ for ACA exchange plans, and inclusion Hyde Amendment provisions to prevent taxpayer dollars from funding abortions through the new HSAs.

Senate Republicans are expected to discuss the several options on the table, including newly-released plans from Sens. Susan Collins, R-Maine, and Bernie Moreno, R-Ohio, and Sen. Roger Marshall, R-Kan., respectively, during their closed-door conference meeting Tuesday afternoon.

When asked if there could be a compromise solution found among the proposals, Cassidy said, ‘That’s going to be the will of the conference, if you will.’

‘The U.S. struggle with China is the single greatest competition the United States has ever faced,’ defense analyst Seth Jones writes in his new book The American Edge.

And in an interview with Fox News Digital, Jones warned that if war broke out over Taiwan, the United States could burn through key long-range missiles ‘after roughly a week or so of conflict’ — a shortfall he says exposes how far behind the U.S. industrial base remains as Beijing moves onto what he calls a wartime footing.

Jones is a former Pentagon official and president of the Defense and Security Department at the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS). He argues the United States isn’t dealing with a superpower like the Soviet Union, whose system was brittle and economically isolated. China’s economy, he noted, is roughly the size of the U.S. and deeply tied into global production. That economic weight is fueling a military buildup across every major domain, from fifth- and sixth-generation aircraft to an enormous shipbuilding sector he describes as ‘upwards of 230 times the size of the United States.’ The effect, he said, is unmistakable. ‘The gap is shrinking.’

In ‘The American Edge,’ Jones lays out how great powers historically win long wars through production, not just innovation — and that’s where he believes the U.S. has the most to worry about. China’s missile forces now field a wide range of weapons designed to hold U.S. ships and aircraft at risk far from Taiwan. That makes stockpiles and throughput central to any American strategy in the Indo-Pacific.

‘When you look at the numbers right now of those long-range munitions, we still right now would run out after roughly a week or so of conflict over Taiwan,’ he said. ‘That’s just not enough to sustain a protracted war.’

Jones stressed that China’s strengths often overshadow a major vulnerability: its limited ability to hunt submarines. He said Beijing ‘still can’t see that well undersea,’ a gap the U.S. could exploit in any fight over Taiwan. If China tried to ferry troops across the Strait or impose a blockade, American attack submarines — along with a larger fleet of unmanned underwater vehicles — would pose a serious threat. He called the undersea environment one of the few places where the U.S. retains a decisive advantage, and one where production should accelerate quickly.

China has other problems as well. Jones pointed to corruption inside the PLA, inefficiency across its state-owned defense firms, ongoing struggles with joint operations and command-and-control and the fact the Chinese military hasn’t fought a war since the late 1970s. Its ability to project power beyond the first island chain also remains limited. But none of those challenges, he said, change the broader trajectory: China is building weapons in mass and at high speed — and the U.S. is still trying to catch up.

That theme sits at the center of his book. Jones describes a U.S. defense industrial base constrained by long acquisition timelines, aging shipyards, complicated contracting rules and production lines that aren’t built for a modern great-power conflict. In his view, the United States must rediscover the industrial urgency that once allowed it to surge output in wartime.

That responsibility is now falling to the Trump administration, which has pushed the Pentagon and the services to move faster on drones, munitions and new maritime capabilities. Over the past year, the Army, Air Force and Navy have launched new rapid-acquisition offices and programs aimed at fielding systems more quickly and helping smaller companies survive the long, expensive path to production. Senior defense officials have started using the phrase ‘wartime footing’ to describe the moment — language Jones said is overdue.

‘That is exactly the right wording,’ he said. ‘The Chinese and the Russian industrial bases right now … are both on a wartime footing.’

He said identifying a set of priority munitions for multiyear procurement is a meaningful step, and early moves to streamline contracting are encouraging. But he cautioned that the scale of the problem is much larger than the reforms announced so far. ‘The Pentagon writ large is a massive bureaucracy,’ he said. ‘It’s going to take a lot to break that bureaucracy. There’s been some progress, but it’s trench warfare right now.’

Jones said parts of the new National Defense Authorization Act move the needle in the right direction — especially support for expanding shipbuilding and efforts to strengthen the defense workforce. He also pointed to growing interest in leveraging allied shipyards in Japan and South Korea to relieve America’s overburdened maritime industry. But he argued that Washington is still not investing at a level that matches the threat.

‘As a percentage of gross domestic product, [defense spending] is about three percent,’ he said. ‘It’s lower than at any time during the Cold War. I think we need to start getting closer to those numbers and increase the amount of that budget that goes into procurement and acquisition.’

Artificial intelligence is another area Jones believes will reshape the battlefield faster than Washington anticipates. He noted that missile and drone threats now move at a volume and speed no human operator can manually track. ‘You can’t do things like air defense now without an increasing role of artificial intelligence,’ he said. The same applies to intelligence and surveillance, where AI-driven systems are already sorting vast amounts of satellite and sensor data.

But Jones said the United States will fall behind unless the Pentagon brings commercial AI leaders — companies like Nvidia and Google — more directly into national security programs. He argued that the United States needs the opposite of the consolidation that collapsed the defense industry in the 1990s. ‘We’ve got to get to a first breakfast,’ he said, meaning more tech firms competing in the defense space, not fewer.

Despite his warnings, Jones said the United States still has time to rebuild its industrial advantage. But it must act quickly. The Trump administration is talking about a wartime footing. China, he warned, is already living it.

George Washington Plunkitt was born into poverty in 1842 but rose through the ranks of the Democratic Party machine of New York, the famed ‘Tammany Hall,’ to become a state representative and a state senator. He also became quite wealthy along the way.

Plunkitt always defended his machine and its methods — and the money they made him. Plunkitt would gladly defend the practices of Tammany, rebutting charges of corruption with the standard reply that ‘nobody thinks of drawin’ the distinction between honest graft and dishonest graft. There’s all the difference in the world between the two.’

Plunkitt’s brazenness lives on in the modern-day machines of the left, found in the deep-blue jurisdictions of the country. With the focus on the bilking of Minnesota taxpayers by the Somali community of the Twin Cities (many citizens, many not), voters across the country are still in shock as the story has unfolded since 2022. The lights shone on the Gopher State should get much brighter now, and after that, I have a follow-up that will make the swamp of the Twin Cities seem like a puddle.

The Minnesota story has been hiding in plain sight, with superb reporters from one of the original blogs of more than 20 years ago, Powerline, poring over the scandal for years.

Powerline’s founders John Hinderaker and Scott Johnson, and more recently their colleague Bill Glahn, have continued to dig and report, dig and report, dig and report on the ‘Somali connection.’

In recent weeks, the story caught fire with the help of reporting by Ryan Thorpe and Christopher Rufo of the Manhattan Institute’s City Journal and by Fox News. That ‘Minnesota is drowning in fraud,’ as Thorpe and Rufo put it, has now become a national story. Pray that it is the first of many.

‘There’s an honest graft, and I’m an example of how it works,’ Boss Plunkitt would say. ‘I might sum up the whole thing by sayin’: I seen my opportunities and I took ‘em.’

Turns out the defendants, the indicted and the convicted in the Gopher State saw their opportunities as well, and they put Tammany to shame when it came to scale and speed.

The conmen of Minnesota bilked the state out of vast piles of cash through a variety of plays, the most infamous of which is, for the moment, ‘Feeding Our Future.’ It took truly extraordinary efforts by Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz and the state’s attorney general, Keith Ellison, to turn their eyes the other way to allow that scam and soon others to flourish. The possessed girl in ‘The Exorcist’ had nothing on Walz and Ellison when it came to turning their heads.

We have former Attorney General Eric Holder and former White House Counsel Dana Remus to thank for elevating the massive fraud ring run primarily out of the Somali American and Somali community in the Twin Cities to the nation’s attention.

Why? Because that pair made Walz much more than an obscure governor of a deep-blue state. That duo was primarily responsible for ‘vetting’ the 2024 Democratic nominee for vice president as one of Democratic presidential candidate Kamala Harris’ potential running mates. The dynamic duo of Holder and Remus either wholly missed the massive cons run on Walz’s watch or judged them not significant enough to derail his candidacy.

During ‘Brat Summer,’ the legacy media abandoned its past practices and joined in the effort to push the worst pair of candidates to the finish since Alf Landon and Frank Knox got blown out by FDR in the 1936 referendum on Roosevelt’s New Deal.

Holder blessed Walz, and Holder’s fans in the Manhattan–Beltway corridor followed suit. Media elites blessed Holder’s judgment in turn.

Big mistake.

Now Walz is part of the national Democratic Party’s brand and refuses to go away, choosing to concentrate his efforts on running for a third term as governor next year — and apparently hoping he might be the party’s standard-bearer in 2028. Instead, ‘Feeding Our Future’ broke out of the Minnesota news ghetto and onto the national stage.

‘Run Tim Run’ should be the GOP’s chant, alongside ‘Run Gavin Run,’ because just like Walz, California Gov. Gavin Newsom has some industrial-level explaining to do.

No, I’m not referring to the California governor’s French Laundry debacle. And no, not the devastating fires that tore through L.A. in January. Not even his indicted former chief of staff. No, the exact parallel to Walz’s woe is the Newsom administration’s handling of COVID-era relief for the unemployed — a statewide con run by political cons.

The Pandemic Unemployment Assistance program (PUA), like the Lost Wages Assistance plan, was devised and funded by Congress to keep alive Americans left unemployed or with their businesses shuttered by COVID lockdowns. Like standard unemployment programs, these COVID-era programs were primarily run through state unemployment insurance offices and other state agencies.

The COVID lockdowns were unprecedented, and the public health ‘authorities’ responsible for advising and administering them should never be taken seriously again.

Many of those bureaucrats, drunk on new authority, stepped forward when elected officials sought guidance on what to do about the mysterious and deadly disease imported from China. (Their dismissal of the lab-leak theory speaks to their actual, as opposed to presumed, expertise.)

When lockdowns became the solution du jour, Congress rightly understood that they were shutting down the livelihoods of tens of millions of Americans and flooded the country with life-saving money — three times.

It was not just the Minnesota Somali community that had ‘seen their opportunities and took ‘em.’ So, too, did the cons of California: the real, honest-to-goodness cons of the California penal system — inmates for whom available time to scheme and scam is abundant.

Ask your favorite AI engine, ‘How much fraud was perpetrated against the California Employment Development Department during COVID?’ The answers will vary, but the floor on the cost of the fraud is $20 billion. The ceiling is more than $30 billion.

The Golden State’s EDD is ‘run’ by a director, and Gov. Newsom, who took office in 2018, has appointed two: Rita Saenz and Nancy Farias. COVID arrived on Newsom’s watch, and he and his appointees should own the fraud that followed. They make the Walz–Ellison team look like pikers when it comes to ignoring fraud.

In his first term, President Trump stood up Operation Warp Speed, and Congress rightly decided to (1) spend federal dollars to lessen the lockdown pain and (2) leave the payment of most public benefits to state agencies, while COVID business loans were handled by private-sector banks as the Federal Reserve and Treasury Department innovated in a variety of ways to prevent an economic crash.

The years following the mishap at the Wuhan lab demonstrated the vast incompetence of the American administrative state but also the necessity of a federal government to pick up the tab when ‘scientists’ lose their collective minds and, for example, counsel the closure of schools.

The official timeline has COVID appearing in Wuhan in December 2019 and reaching U.S. shores a month later. We may never know when the first cases were diagnosed by the Chinese Communist Party, and we are not in a position to investigate the horrific fraud and consequent disaster for which General Secretary Xi Jinping is responsible.

But President Trump could order a six-month deep dive into the financial fraud that followed in the U.S., not just in Minnesota and California — though those are the ‘patient zeroes’ for never allowing a crisis to pass without enriching the state’s worst actors.

Could President Trump stand up a time-limited panel to investigate fraud perpetrated on state agencies during COVID? Yes. Might that panel torch a few GOP reputations along the way? Inevitably.

But the interest in the Minnesota Somali shakedown should be a demand signal for accountability across the country.

President Trump often acts in the mold of Teddy Roosevelt, who, like 45–47, was never afraid of a headline — provided he provoked it.

Now is the time for the president to ask a handful of the smartest, most respected people in the country to sort through the wreckage of the COVID era’s many state governments’ responsibilities and ‘initiatives’ and report in rapid fashion — and in clear English — the scale of fraud perpetrated upon state agencies.

Make your search-and-publicize team smart and fast. Putting Johnson and Hinderaker as co-chairs of a strike team devoted to compiling the facts as we know them today would ensure accuracy and fine writing.

And give them a deadline: Aug. 31, 2026. Voters deserve to know how their state governments worked during COVID — or didn’t — before they vote again.

Republican Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene of Georgia announced Tuesday that she intends to vote against the proposed fiscal year 2026 National Defense Authorization Act, saying the legislation spends too much taxpayer money on foreign priorities. 

Greene said in a post on X that the NDAA is ‘filled with American’s hard earned tax dollars used to fund foreign aid and foreign country’s wars.’

Greene pointed to the rising national debt, which, according to fiscaldata.treasury.gov, is more than $38.39 trillion.

‘These American People are $38 Trillion in debt, suffering from an affordability crisis, on the verge of a healthcare crisis, and credit card debt is at an all time high. Funding foreign aid and foreign wars is America Last and is beyond excuse anymore. I would love to fund our military but refuse to support foreign aid and foreign militaries and foreign wars. I am here and will be voting NO,’ Greene declared in her post.

But House Speaker Mike Johnson has praised the proposed NDAA.

‘This year’s National Defense Authorization Act helps advance President Trump and Republicans’ Peace Through Strength Agenda by codifying 15 of President Trump’s executive orders, ending woke ideology at the Pentagon, securing the border, revitalizing the defense industrial base, and restoring the warrior ethos,’ Johnson said in part of a lengthy statement.

Greene plans to leave office early next month, in the middle of her two-year term.