SUBSCRIBE TO OUR FREE NEWSLETTER
Daily news & progressive opinion—funded by the people, not the corporations—delivered straight to your inbox.
5
#000000
#FFFFFF
5
#000000
#FFFFFF
mark warner
Democrats Shut Out of Briefing on Trump 'Murder Spree' in International Waters
"Decisions about the use of American military force are not campaign strategy sessions, and they are not the private property of one political party," said Democratic Sen. Mark Warner.
Oct 30, 2025
The Trump administration on Wednesday cut Senate Democrats out of a classified briefing on the US military's string of deadly strikes on boats that the president and his underlings claim—without any publicly disclosed evidence—were smuggling drugs across international waters.
Sen. Mark Warner (D-Va.), the top Democrat on the Senate Intelligence Committee, said the Trump administration held a "partisan military briefing" with Republican senators on Wednesday and continues to withhold "legally requested information" from Democratic lawmakers.
"Shutting Democrats out of a briefing on US military strikes and withholding the legal justification for those strikes from half the Senate is indefensible and dangerous," Warner said in a statement. "Decisions about the use of American military force are not campaign strategy sessions, and they are not the private property of one political party."
"For any administration to treat them that way erodes our national security and flies in the face of Congress' constitutional obligation to oversee matters of war and peace," he added.
At Wednesday's briefing, Trump administration officials reportedly showed Republican senators a classified memo from the Justice Department's Office of Legal Counsel (OLC), purportedly detailing the administration's legal case for the strikes in waters off Central and South America.
Warner said disclosing the memo only to members of the president's party "is a slap in the face to Congress' war powers responsibilities" that "sets a reckless and deeply troubling precedent."
"The administration must immediately provide to Democrats the same briefing and the OLC opinion justifying these strikes, as Secretary [of State Marco] Rubio personally promised me that he would in a face-to-face meeting on Capitol Hill just last week," said Warner. "Americans deserve a government that fulfills its constitutional duties and treats decisions about the use of military force with the seriousness they demand."
The existence of the OLC memo has been known for weeks, but the administration has ignored calls for its release and the president has publicly expressed contempt for Congress' role in authorizing military action.
"I don't think we’re going to necessarily ask for a declaration of war," Trump, who has said that "we are waging war against" drug cartels, told reporters earlier this month. "I think we are going to kill people that are bringing drugs into our country, OK? We are going to kill them, you know? They are going to be, like, dead."
"The administration has not even named its victims, nor provided evidence of their alleged crimes."
So far, the Trump administration has killed more than 60 people with at least 14 strikes on boats in international waters, and the president has said land strikes are "going to be next."
Administration officials have repeatedly cited unspecified "intelligence" to justify the strikes, as Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth did on Wednesday after the US military bombed a vessel in the eastern Pacific Ocean, killing at least four people.
Daphne Eviatar, Amnesty International USA's director for human rights and security, said in a statement Wednesday that "in the last two months, the US military's Southern Command has gone on a murder spree by following the Trump administration's illegal orders."
"The administration has not even named its victims, nor provided evidence of their alleged crimes," Eviatar said. "But even if they did, intentionally killing people accused of committing crimes who pose no imminent threat to life is murder, full stop."
Keep ReadingShow Less
Millions Kicked Off Medicaid? 'Don't Eat Carrot Cake,' Says Administrator Oz
"Why don't you pry carrot cake out of my cold, dead hands and give us back Medicaid coverage for millions instead," replied Democratic Sen. Mark Warner.
Jul 14, 2025
U.S. Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services Administrator Dr. Mehmet Oz appeared on Fox Business on Monday, where he presented a carrot cake to celebrate Medicaid's 60th birthday and brushed aside concerns about the millions of Americans likely to lose their healthcare coverage under recently passed Republican legislation—by telling people to not eat carrot cake.
Oz—the multimillionaire erstwhile celebrity surgeon, purveyor of "miracle" cures, and failed U.S. Senate candidate—gave Fox Business host Stuart Varney what he called a "MAHA Medi-cake" before proceeding to extol the virtues of Medicaid, the program launched during then-President Lyndon B. Johnson's "Great Society" agenda that provides health insurance to more than 70 million lower-income Americans.
Medicaid "was a promise to the American people to take care of you if you are having problems financially or if you were having an issue because you're older and needed healthcare," Oz said. "And it changed the country in a good way for many reasons."
"But we're all in it together, Stuart," he added, "which means we'll be there for you, the American people, when you need help with Medicaid and Medicare, but you've got to stay healthy as well. Be healthy, do the most you can do to really live up to the potential, your God-given potential to live a full and healthy life, you know, don't eat carrot cake, eat real food."
17 million people are going to lose their health insurance because of the Trump administration.Dr. Oz's advice is “don’t eat carrot cake.”
[image or embed]
— Elizabeth Warren (@warren.senate.gov) July 14, 2025 at 10:17 AM
Social media users roundly ridiculed Oz's remarks, with criticism centered around the estimated 17 million people who will be left uninsured under the so-called One Big Beautiful Bill Act signed by President Donald Trump earlier this month. The legislation contains the largest Medicaid cuts in history.
"Why don't you pry carrot cake out of my cold, dead hands and give us back Medicaid coverage for millions instead," Sen. Mark Warner (D-Va.) wrote on Bluesky.
Another Bluesky user wrote, "Carrot cake didn't give me cancer, dumbass."
Yet another said, "Um... your boss eats McDonald's every chance he gets and you are judging people eating carrot cake," a reference to Trump's legendary fondness for Big Macs, Filet-O-Fish sandwiches, and vanilla shakes.
Still another quipped, "First he came for my crudites, now my carrot cake."
"Carrot cake didn't give me cancer, dumbass."
Over on X, one account with over 130,000 followers said: "What an insensitive prick as he brings a piece of carrot cake to Stu Varney during the interview. Republicans seem so gleeful to be hurting Americans. This is why millionaires and billionaires should never be in Congress or the [White House]."
The Occupy Democrats X account also weighed in, posting, "It's not enough for them to take away our healthcare, Republicans want to blame us for getting sick."
"The idea that avoiding carrot cake in favor of healthier foods will somehow render Americans immune to health problems is insulting in the extreme," Occupy Democrats continued. "Rather than 'let them eat cake,' he's telling us 'do not eat cake,' but the sentiment is every bit as out of touch as Marie Antoinette's apocryphal quote."
"MAHA stands for 'Make America Healthy Again,' an Orwellian phrase deployed by an administration that is actively making Americans sicker by stripping away their healthcare," the account added. "This is what Republicans really think of the American people. They ram through policies making our lives worse in countless ways, then they laugh at us and spit in our faces. There has never been a more gleefully spiteful political movement."
Keep ReadingShow Less
Gabbard Fires Intel Officials After Memo Counters Trump Lies About Migrants Sent to El Salvador Prison
Critics called the ousters "ominous" and warned that "an intelligence service will not protect you from real-life threats if its members get fired for not lying."
May 14, 2025
Tulsi Gabbard, U.S. President Donald Trump's controversial director of national intelligence, is generating alarm this week for firing two top officials after a memo contradicting the administration's claims about deported migrants was made public.
As Fox News first reported Tuesday, Gabbard fired Mike Collins, acting chair of the National Intelligence Council, and his deputy, Maria Langan-Riekhof, and moved the NIC from the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) to the Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI).
As The Hill detailed:
Collins has spent nearly three decades in the intelligence community and has served as chief of staff for the CIA's deputy director. He started his career as an analyst focused on East Asia.
Langan-Riekhof also has more than 30 years of experience in the intelligence community, including as an expert on the Middle East. The ODNI previously listed her as an exceptional analyst. She also previously served as director of the Strategic Futures Group at the National Intelligence Council.
While an ODNI spokesperson told The Hill that "the director is working alongside President Trump to end the weaponization and politicization of the intelligence community," critics framed the firings as "the DEFINITION of politicizing intelligence."
"I am concerned about the apparent removal of senior leadership at the National Intelligence Council without any explanation except vague accusations made in the media," Congressman Jim Himes (D-Conn.), the ranking member on the House Intelligence Committee, told The Washington Post. "Absent evidence to justify the firings, the workforce can only conclude that their jobs are contingent on producing analysis that is aligned with the president's agenda, rather than truthful and apolitical."
The NIC leaders were fired after last week's release of an NIC memo confirming that U.S. intelligence agencies never agreed with Trump's claim that Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro controls the criminal gang Tren de Aragua. The April 7 document states that "while Venezuela's permissive environment enables TDA to operate, the Maduro regime probably does not have a policy of cooperating with TDA and is not directing TDA movement to and operations in the United States."
Although, as the Post noted, "it was unclear what, if any, direct role Collins or Langan-Riekhof had in drafting the assessment," its release provoked pushback from Gabbard, who said last week that it was "outrageous that as President Trump and his administration work hard every day to make America safe by deporting these violent criminals, some in the media remain intent on twisting and manipulating intelligence assessments to undermine the president's agenda to keep the American people safe."
Trump has used dubious claims about Maduro controlling the gang to justify invoking the Alien Enemies Act to send hundreds of Venezuelan migrants to El Salvador's notorious Terrorism Confinement Center as part of his mass deportation agenda.
Senate Intelligence Committee Vice Chair Mark Warner (D-Va.) said on social media Wednesday: "Gabbard is purging intelligence officials over a report that the Trump administration finds politically inconvenient. Whatever the administration is trying to protect... it's not our national security."
Other critics called Gabbard's moves "ominous" and warned that "an intelligence service will not protect you from real-life threats if its members get fired for not lying."
The U.S. intelligence community (IC) "provides analysis independent of policy preferences," said James Madison University professor and former CIA analyst Stephen Marrin. "When those in power do not want to hear inconvenient facts and unwanted interpretation and punish messengers that provide it, that undermines the reason the IC was created in the first place."
Jonathan Panikoff, a former career U.S. intelligence officer who is now a director in the Atlantic Council's Middle East Program, said that "having spent five years working at the NIC, I can personally attest the [organization] is the heartbeat of apolitical U.S. all-source analysis, traditionally drawing the best of the IC's analysts together to tackle and produce assessments on the hardest issues. Anything that reduces its independence because policymakers don't like the independent conclusions it reaches, is the definition of politicization they are decrying. Mike and Maria are unbelievable leaders and IC professionals, not political actors."
Eric Brewer, who also worked for NIC, expressed full agreement with Panikoff's "excellent comments" and issued his own warning.
"This is a big deal. The result will be an IC less willing to tell the president and other leaders what they need to know rather than what they want to hear. America will be less secure because of it," Brewer said. "The professionals in the IC can withstand a lot, and will no doubt do their utmost to continue to provide objective assessments. But this act is blatant politicization and will have a chilling effect."
The memo that seemingly led to the NIC firings was revealed as a result of a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request filed by the Freedom of the Press Foundation. Lauren Harper, the group's Daniel Ellsberg chair on government secrecy, shared the Post's reporting about the ousters on social media Wednesday along with an observation.
"The director of national intelligence's FOIA website (which has reappeared after the entire site was briefly down) no longer has a reading room of released documents or links to its FOIA regulations which, were we to be picky, violates the EFOIA amendments of 1996," Harper highlighted. "Amazing timing."
Keep ReadingShow Less
Most Popular