A conservative commentator was hit with a quick fact check on CNN after excusing President Donald Trump’s interference in the Texas redistricting mess.
Border Patrol agents poured into downtown Los Angeles as California Gov. Gavin Newsom and other Democrats outlined plans to redraw California’s congressional map in response to a Republican push to do the same in Texas to their own advantage, and conservative journalist Rob Bluey told “CNN This Morning” that the situations in the two states were completely different.
“It’s important also to point out that we’re talking about two different sets of facts,” Bluey said. “The whole situation in Texas stemmed from a lawsuit and a decision by the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals.”
Fellow panelist Sabrina Singh, a former deputy Pentagon press secretary under Joe Biden, quickly pushed back.
“That’s still caught up in the courts,” she said. “What Gov. [Greg] Abbott is taking a Sharpie pen and just redoing the maps. That’s not from the lawsuit that’s been brought.”
Bluey argued the GOP governor’s actions were justified by changes to the state’s population since the last census was conducted five years ago.
“Texas has also had 2 million new residents move into the state since the last census,” he said. “The census made errors. Texas was cheated out of a seat and an electoral vote and Florida was cheated out of two because the census made errors. There were a number of problems that have happened over the last couple of years that could lead people to that conclusion that [host Audie Cornish] just made, that their vote is in some ways not [being counted].”
Cornish expressed skepticism, asking whether states should simply call for a new census and redraw their congressional maps if they didn’t like the results of the head count conducted under constitutional authority, and Bluey eagerly took the bait.
“I think states should do their own census,” Bluey said. “Maybe each state and the federal government can do this in collaboration. By the way, in the 1970s they amended the law and they said that you could do a mid-decade census, so it’s not that Donald Trump’s doing anything unusual, it’s just that the federal government hasn’t done it before.”
Singh poured cold water on Bluey’s argument, saying the president’s insistence on changing a state’s congressional map to favor his own party was indeed unusual.
“Each state has their own different constitution, but the lawsuit that you’re referring to is not why Gov. Abbott decided to draw the map, redraw the maps,” Singh said. “He decided to do that because Donald Trump put pressure on him. The lawsuit is still in the Texas courts and has not risen to the state level to redraw the map.”
Tag Archives: Pentagon
MSNBC: Fanone to ICE officers: silence is complicity – ‘quit your job’
CNN: A Trump-favored MAGA network praised an increase in women soldiers. Its images were fake
Wednesday evening on the MAGA cable channel OAN, as Defense Department spokeswoman Kingsley Wilson gushed to host Matt Gaetz about an alleged year-over-year increase in female military recruits, four images of women soldiers in combat fatigues were displayed on-screen.
All four images were AI fakes.
The images appear to have been generated using Elon Musk’s Grok, as small watermarks in the bottom corners seem to indicate.
“These numbers are fantastic,” Wilson told Gaetz as the AI images scrolled on-screen. “Under the previous administration, we had about 16,000 female recruits last year; now we’ve got upwards of 24,000,” she continued. “It is a testament to Secretary Hegseth and President Trump’s leadership.” (The Pentagon has not officially released detailed data on female recruitment, but it told Fox News those same figures.)
A DOD spokesperson said the images were not provided by them, so CNN asked OAN whether its staff generated the photos and if the network has any policy regarding AI-generated content. The far-right network did not respond.
OAN, short for One America News, launched in 2013, and during Trump’s first administration, it quickly morphed into a conspiracy-heavy, MAGA-boosting outlet.
The little-watched cable channel has become best-known for promoting Trump’s 2020 election lies, and it has settled multiple defamation lawsuits resulting from those on-air claims. Last year, the network settled a lawsuit from voting technology company Smartmatic alleging the channel boosted the election lies in order to “increase viewership and revenue.”
The network also settled a defamation suit from a Dominion Voting Systems executive, but it still faces a separate defamation lawsuit from the company.
OAN’s viewership and revenue have dwindled since DirecTV dropped it in 2022. However, earlier this year, it received a PR boost when Kari Lake, Trump’s pick to run a hollowed-out Voice of America, claimed that OAN will provide “newsfeed services” to VOA and other US-funded international broadcasters.
MAGA = one big lie after another

https://www.cnn.com/2025/08/15/media/oan-gaetz-ai-images-women-military-kingsley-wilson
SpaceX Gets Billions From the Government. It Gives Little to Nothing Back in Taxes.
Elon Musk’s rocket company relies on federal contracts, but years of losses have most likely let it avoid paying federal income taxes, according to internal company documents.
SpaceX, Elon Musk’s rocket and satellite internet company, has received billions of dollars in federal contracts over its more than two-decade existence.
But SpaceX has most likely paid little to no federal income taxes since its founding in 2002 and has privately told investors that it may never have to pay any, according to internal company documents reviewed by The New York Times.
The rocket maker’s finances have long been secret because the company is privately held. But the documents reviewed by The Times show that SpaceX can seize on a legal tax benefit that allows it to use the more than $5 billion in losses it racked up by late 2021 to offset paying future taxable income. President Trump made a change in 2017, during his first term, that eliminated the tax benefit’s expiration date for all companies. For SpaceX, that means that nearly $3 billion of its losses can be indefinitely applied against future taxable income.
Tax experts consulted by The Times said that not having to pay tax on $5 billion in taxable income was substantial and notable for a company that has relied on contracts with the U.S. government to an unusual degree. SpaceX works closely with the Pentagon, NASA and other agencies, giving it a vital role in national security. In 2020, federal contracts generated almost 84 percent of the rocket maker’s revenue, according to the documents, a figure that had not been previously reported.
Larger tech companies — including some that have taken advantage of the tax benefit — often pay billions in federal income taxes. Microsoft, for one, said it expected to pay $14.1 billion in federal income taxes in its last fiscal year.
Tax F’Elon!
Tax SpaceX!
Fund Social Security!
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/08/15/technology/spacex-musk-government-contracts-taxes.html
CNN: US military deploying over 4,000 additional troops to waters around Latin America as part of Trump’s counter-cartel mission
The US military is deploying more than 4,000 Marines and sailors to the waters around Latin America and the Caribbean as part of a ramped-up effort to combat drug cartels, two US defense officials told CNN — a dramatic show of force that will give the president a broad range of military options should he want to target drug cartels.
The deployment of the Iwo Jima Amphibious Ready Group (ARG) and the 22nd Marine Expeditionary Unit to US Southern Command, which has not been previously reported, is part of a broader repositioning of military assets to the SOUTHCOM area of responsibility that has been underway over the last three weeks, one of the officials said.
A nuclear-powered attack submarine, additional P8 Poseidon reconnaissance aircraft, several destroyers and a guided-missile cruiser are also being allocated to US Southern Command as part of the mission, the officials said.
A third person familiar with the matter said the additional assets are “aimed at addressing threats to US national security from specially designated narco-terrorist organizations in the region.”
On Friday, the US Navy announced the deployment of the USS Iwo Jima, the 22nd MEU, and the two other ships in the Amphibious Ready Group — the USS Fort Lauderdale and the USS San Antonio — but did not say where they were going.
One of the officials emphasized that the military buildup is for now mostly a show of force, aimed more at sending a message than indicative of any intention to conduct precision targeting of cartels. But it also gives US military commanders — and the president — a broad range of options should Trump order military action. The ARG/MEU, for example, also features an aviation combat element.
The deployment of the Marine Expeditionary Unit, however, has raised concerns among some defense officials who worry that the Marines are not trained to conduct drug interdictions and counter drug-trafficking. If that is part of their mission set, they will have to lean heavily on the Coast Guard, officials said.
MEUs have been instrumental in the past in supporting large-scale evacuation operations; a MEU was stationed for months in the eastern Mediterranean, for example, amid tensions between Israel, Hamas and Iran.
A Marine official told CNN that the MEU “stands ready to execute lawful orders and support the combatant commanders in the needs that are requested of them.”
The US military deployed destroyers to the areas around the US-Mexico border in March to support US Northern Command’s border security mission and reinforce the US’ presence in the western hemisphere. The additional assets being moved now, however, will fall under US Southern Command, and are set to support SOUTHCOM for at least the next several months, one of the officials said.
CNN previously reported that a memo signed by Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth earlier this year stated that the US military’s “foremost priority” is to defend the homeland, and instructed the Pentagon to “seal our borders, repel forms of invasion including unlawful mass migration, narcotics trafficking, human smuggling and trafficking, and other criminal activities, and deport illegal aliens in coordination with the Department of Homeland Security.”
The same memo also formally asked Pentagon officials for “credible military options” to ensure unfettered American access to the Panama Canal, CNN reported at the time.
So when do we invade Mexico, our future 52nd state (after Canada)?

https://www.cnn.com/2025/08/15/politics/us-military-deploying-caribbean-latin-america-cartel-mission
Alternet: Trump’s worst crimes and destructions haven’t even happened yet | Opinion
The worst crimes of Donald Trump and dangers to America from the unstable, monomaniacal, lying outlaw in the White House have yet to come. He is not satisfied with tearing apart our country’s social safety net for tens of millions of Americans (e.g., Medicaid and food program cuts); wrecking our scientific/medical systems, including warning people about pandemics. He is, by wrecking FEMA et al, failing to address the impact of mega-storms, wildfires, and droughts; and allowing cybersecurity threats to increase while giving harm-producing big corporations immunities from the law, more subsidies, and more tax escapes. Recall how he always adds to his attacks on powerless people that “This is just the beginning.”
He just took the next step in his march to madness and mayhem by announcing more concentration camps holding immigrants, arrested without due process, for deportation to foreign countries that want U.S. taxpayer cash for each deportee.
Recent immigrants are crucial to millions of small and large businesses. Consider who harvests our crops, cares for our children and the elderly, cleans up after us, and works the food processing plants and construction sites. Already, businesses are reducing or closing their enterprises – a political peril for Dangerous Donald.
If all immigrants to the U.S. from the last ten years, documented and undocumented, went on strike, our country would almost shut down. Yet Trump, who hired 500 undocumented workers for just one of his construction sites in New York, and had similar laborers at his New Jersey golf course, promises deportations of millions more.
Always bear in mind the self-defined characteristics of corporatist Trump’s feverish, hateful, outlaw mind: (1) He has declared he “can do whatever he wants as President,” proving his serial violations of law and illegal dictates every day; (2) He always doubles down when indicted, convicted, caught, or exposed, falsely accusing his accusers of the exact transgressions they are reliably charging him with; (3) He brags about lashing out at criticism with foul defamatory invectives; (4) He never admits his disastrous mistake; (5) He boasts that he knows more than leading experts in a dozen major areas of knowledge (see, “Wrecking America: How Trump’s Lawbreaking and Lies Betray All”); and (6) He asserts that every action, policy, or program he launches is a spectacular success – the facts to the contrary are dismissed.He is gravely delusional, replaces realities with fantasies, breaks promises that are made to defer any reckoning or accountability, and, like an imaginary King, finds no problem with saying “I rule America and the world.”
His ego defines his reactions, which is why every foreign leader is advised to flatter him. Nobody flatters better than the cunning genocidal Benjamin Netanyahu, who at his last regal White House dinner, held up his nomination of convicted felon, woman abuser, Trump for the Nobel Prize. Netanyahu’s preening comes from a politician whose regime has dossiers on Trump regarding his past personal and business behavior. This helps explain why Trump is letting the Israeli government do whatever it wants in its Gaza Holocaust, the West Bank, and beyond with our tax dollars, family-killing weaponry, and political/diplomatic cover.
The approaching greater dangers from Trump will come when he pushes his lawless, dictatorial envelope so far, so furiously, so outrageously, that it turns his GOP valets in Congress and the GOP-dominated U.S. Supreme Court against him. Add plunging polls, a stagflation economy, and impeachment, and removal from office would become a political necessity for the GOP in 2026 and beyond. In 1974, the far lesser Watergate transgressions by President Richard Nixon resulted in Republican Senators’ demanding Tricky Dick’s resignation from office.
Further provocations are not far-fetched. Firing Federal Reserve Board Chairman Jerome Powell, sinking the dollar, and angering the fearful, but very powerful bankers are all on the horizon. Will the sex-trafficking charges involving Jeffrey Epstein and vile abuses of young girls finally be too much for his evangelical base, as well as for many MAGA voters? This issue is already starting to fissure his MAGA base and the GOP iron curtain in Congress. Subpoenas have just been issued to the Justice Department by the GOP Chair of the House Oversight Committee, Rep. James Comer of Kentucky – a close friend of Senator Mitch McConnell.
There is always SERENDIPITY. Trump, the mercurial egomaniac, offers old and new transgressions to stoke the calls for his impeachment. Does anyone believe that Trump would not start a military conflict, subjecting U.S. soldiers to harm, to distract attention from heavy media coverage of unravelling corruption investigations? Draft-dodging Donald has Pete Hegseth, his knee-jerk Secretary of Defense, waiting to do his lethal bidding, despite possible opposition from career military.
If Trump were to be impeached and removed from office, would he try to stay in office? Here is where a real constitutional explosion can occur. He would have to be escorted from the White House by U.S. Marshals who are under the direction of toady Attorney General Pam Bondi. The Supreme Court has held that the Constitution grants “the sole Power” to try impeachments in the Senate and nowhere else. Thus, the courts would provide no remedy to a lawless president wanting to stay in power.
Then what? The country falls into extreme turmoil. The Defense Department, the FBI, and the Department of Homeland Security are in the Trump Dump. Tyrant Trump can declare a major national emergency, invoke the Insurrection Act, and hurl these armed forces and police state muscle against a defenseless Congress and populace. (Recall the January 6, 2021, assault on Congress.) The abyss would have been breached.
With our society in a catastrophic convulsion, the economy collapsing, what would be the next steps? Like the Pentagon that anticipates worst-case domestic scenarios on possible violent “blowbacks” against U.S. military actions abroad, Americans should start thinking about the unthinkable. Such foreshadowings may make us far more determined NOW to thwart, stop, and repeal the fascist dictatorship which Der Führer Donald Trump is rooting ever more deeply every day. Little restraint on lawless Trump from the Congress and the Supreme Court, and only feeble, cowardly responses by the flailing Democratic Party (and the Bar Associations for that matter) thus far, make for the specter of violent anarchy and terror.
Trump has fatalistic traits. Armageddon shapes his ultimate worldview. Ponder that for a dictator with his finger on more than the nuclear trigger.
Again, Aristotle got it right over 2300 years ago, “Courage is the first of human qualities because it is the quality which guarantees the others.”
https://www.alternet.org/trump-s-worst-crimes-and-destructions-haven-t-even-happened-yet
Washington Post: Pentagon plan would create military ‘reaction force’ for civil unrest
Documents reviewed by The Post detail a prospective National Guard mission that, if adopted, would require hundreds of troops to be ready around-the-clock.
The Trump administration is evaluating plans that would establish a “Domestic Civil Disturbance Quick Reaction Force” composed of hundreds of National Guard troops tasked with rapidly deploying into American cities facing protests or other unrest, according to internal Pentagon documents reviewed by The Washington Post.
The plan calls for 600 troops to be on standby at all times so they can deploy in as little as one hour, the documents say. They would be split into two groups of 300 and stationed at military bases in Alabama and Arizona, with purview of regions east and west of the Mississippi River, respectively.
Cost projections outlined in the documents indicate that such a mission, if the proposal is adopted, could stretch into the hundreds of millions of dollars should military aircraft and aircrews also be required to be ready around-the-clock. Troop transport via commercial airlines would be less expensive, the documents say.
The proposal, which has not been previously reported, represents another potential expansion of President Donald Trump’s willingness to employ the armed forces on American soil. It relies on a section of the U.S. Code that allows the commander in chief to circumvent limitations on the military’s use within the United States.
The documents, marked “predecisional,” are comprehensive and contain extensive discussion about the potential societal implications of establishing such a program. They were compiled by National Guard officials and bear time stamps as recent as late July and early August. Fiscal 2027 is the earliest this program could be created and funded through the Pentagon’s traditional budgetary process, the documents say, leaving unclear whether the initiative could begin sooner through an alternative funding source.
It is also unclear whether the proposal has been shared with Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth.
“The Department of Defense is a planning organization and routinely reviews how the department would respond to a variety of contingencies across the globe,” Kingsley Wilson, a Pentagon spokeswoman, said in a statement. “We will not discuss these plans through leaked documents, pre-decisional or otherwise.”
The National Guard Bureau did not respond to a request for comment.
While most National Guard commands have fast-response teams for use within their home states, the proposal under evaluation by the Trump administration would entail moving troops from one state to another.
The National Guard tested the concept ahead of the 2020 election, putting 600 troops on alert in Arizona and Alabama as the country braced for possible political violence. The test followed months of unrest in cities across the country, prompted by the police murder of George Floyd, that spurred National Guard deployments in numerous locations. Trump, then nearing the end of his first term, sought to employ active-duty combat troops while Defense Secretary Mark T. Esper and other Pentagon officials urged him to rely instead on the Guard, which is trained to address civil disturbances.
Trump has summoned the military for domestic purposes like few of his predecessors have. He did so most recently Monday, authorizing the mobilization of 800 D.C. National Guard troops to bolster enhanced law enforcement activity in Washington that he said is necessary to address violent crime. Data maintained by the D.C. police shows such incidents are in decline; the city’s mayor called the move “unsettling and unprecedented.”
Earlier this year, over the objections of California’s governor and other Democrats, Trump dispatched more than 5,000 National Guard members and active-duty Marines to the Los Angeles area under a rarely used authority permitting the military’s use for quelling insurrection. Administration officials said the mission was necessary to protect federal personnel and property amid protests denouncing Trump’s immigration policies. His critics called the deployment unnecessary and a gross overreach. Before long, many of the troops involved were doing unrelated support work, including a raid on a marijuana farm more than 100 miles away.
The Trump administration also has dispatched thousands of troops to the southern border in a dramatic show of force meant to discourage illegal migration.
National Guard troops can be mobilized for federal missions inside the United States under two main authorities. The first, Title 10, puts troops under the president’s direction, where they can support law enforcement activity but not perform arrests or investigations.
The other, Title 32, is a federal-state status where troops are controlled by their state governor but federally funded. It allows more latitude to participate in law enforcement missions. National Guard troops from other states arrived in D.C. under such circumstances during racial justice protests in 2020.
The proposal being evaluated now would allow the president to mobilize troops and put them on Title 32 orders in a state experiencing unrest. The documents detailing the plan acknowledge the potential for political friction should that state’s governor refuse to work with the Pentagon.
Some legal scholars expressed apprehension about the proposal.
The Trump administration is relying on a shaky legal theory that the president can act broadly to protect federal property and functions, said Joseph Nunn, an attorney at the Brennan Center for Justice who specializes in legal issues germane to the U.S. military’s domestic activities.
“You don’t want to normalize routine military participation in law enforcement,” he said. “You don’t want to normalize routine domestic deployment.”
The strategy is further complicated by the fact that National Guard members from one state cannot operate in another state without permission, Nunn said. He also warned that any quick-reaction force established for civil-unrest missions risks lowering the threshold for deploying National Guard troops into American cities.
“When you have this tool waiting at your fingertips, you’re going to want to use it,” Nunn said. “It actually makes it more likely that you’re going to see domestic deployments — because why else have a task force?”
The proposal represents a major departure in how the National Guard traditionally has been used, said Lindsay P. Cohn, an associate professor of national security affairs at the U.S. Naval War College. While it is not unusual for National Guard units to be deployed for domestic emergencies within their states, including for civil disturbances, this “is really strange because essentially nothing is happening,” she said.
“Crime is going down. We don’t have major protests or civil disturbances. There is no significant resistance from states” to federal immigration policies, she said. “There is very little evidence anything big is likely to happen soon,” said Cohn, who stressed she was speaking in her personal capacity and not reflecting her employer’s views.
Moreover, Cohn said, the proposal risks diverting National Guard resources that may be needed to respond to natural disasters or other emergencies.
The proposal envisions a rotation of service members from Army and Air Force National Guard units based in multiple states. Those include Alabama, Arizona, California, Illinois, Maryland, Michigan, Mississippi, Missouri, Nebraska, New Mexico, North Carolina, North Dakota, Pennsylvania, South Carolina and Tennessee, the documents say.
Carter Elliott, a spokesperson for Maryland Gov. Wes Moore (D), said governors and National Guard leaders are best suited to decide how to support law enforcement during emergencies. “There is a well-established procedure that exists to request additional assistance during times of need,” Elliott said, “and the Trump administration is blatantly and dangerously ignoring that precedent.”
One action memo contained in the documents, dated July 22, recommends that Army military police and Air Force security forces receive additional training for the mission. The document indicates it was prepared for Hegseth by Elbridge Colby, the Defense Department’s undersecretary for policy.
The 300 troops in each of the two headquarters locations would be outfitted with weapons and riot gear, the documents say. The first 100 would be ready to move within an hour, with the second and third waves ready within two and 12 hours’ notice, the documents note, or all immediately deployed when placed on high alert.
The quick-reaction teams would be on task for 90 days, the documents said, “to limit burnout.”
The documents also show robust internal discussions that, with unusual candor, detail the possible negative repercussions if the plan were enacted. For instance, such short-notice missions could “significantly impact volunteerism,” the documents say, which would adversely affect the military’s ability to retain personnel. Guard members, families and civilian employers “feel the significant impacts of short notice activations,” the documents said.
The documents highlight several other concerns, including:
• Reduced Availability for Other Missions: State-Level Readiness: States may have fewer Guard members available for local emergencies (e.g., wildfires, hurricanes).
• Strain on Personnel and Equipment: Frequent domestic deployments can lead to personnel fatigue (stress, burnout, employer conflicts) and accelerated wear and tear on equipment, particularly systems not designed for prolonged civil support missions.
• Training Disruptions: Erosion of Core Capabilities: Extensive domestic deployments can disrupt scheduled training, hinder skill maintenance and divert units from their primary military mission sets, ultimately impacting overall combat readiness.
• Budgetary and Logistical Strains: Sustained operations can stretch budgets, requiring emergency funding or impacting other planned activities.
• Public and Political Impact: National Guard support for DHS raises potential political sensitivities, questions regarding the appropriate civil-military balance and legal considerations related to their role as a nonpartisan force.
National Guard planning documents reviewed by The Post
Officials also have expressed some worry that deploying troops too quickly could make for a haphazard situation as state and local governments scramble to coordinate their arrival, the documents show.
One individual cited in the documents rejected the notion that military aviation should be the primary mode of transportation, emphasizing the significant burden of daily aircraft inspections and placing aircrews on constant standby. The solution, this official proposed, was to contract with Southwest Airlines or American Airlines through their Phoenix and Atlanta operations, the documents say.
“The support (hotels, meals, etc.) required will fall onto the general economy in large and thriving cities of the United States,” this official argued. Moreover, bypassing military aircraft would allow for deploying personnel to travel “in a more subdued status” that might avoid adding to tensions in their “destination city.”
https://www.washingtonpost.com/national-security/2025/08/12/national-guard-civil-unrest
Defense One: How Trump’s DC takeover could supercharge surveillance
The emergency declaration, combined with new tech, will give government broad new abilities to watch and monitor citizens.
President Trump’s declaration of a “crime emergency” in Washington, D.C., will further entwine the U.S. military—and its equipment and technology—in law-enforcement matters, and perhaps expose D.C. residents and visitors to unprecedented digital surveillance.
Brushing aside statistics that show violent crime in D.C. at a 30-year low, Trump on Monday described a new level of coordination between D.C. National Guard units and federal law enforcement agencies, including the FBI, ICE, and and the newly federalized D.C. police force.
“We will have full, seamless, integrated cooperation at all levels of law enforcement, and will deploy officers across the district with an overwhelming presence. You’ll have more police, and you’ll be so happy because you’re being safe,” he said at a White House press conference.
Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, standing beside Trump, promised close collaboration between the Pentagon and domestic authorities. “We will work alongside all DC police and federal law enforcement to ensure this city is safe.”
What comes next? The June 2020 deployment of National Guard units to work alongside D.C. police offers a glimpse: citywide use of sophisticated intelligence-gathering technologies normally reserved for foreign war zones.
Some surveillance platforms will be relatively easy to spot, such as spy aircraft over D.C.’s closely guarded airspace. In 2020, authorities deployed an RC-26B, a military-intelligence aircraft, and MQ-9 Predator drones. The FBI contributed a Cessna 560 equipped with “dirtboxes”: devices that mimic cell towers to collect mobile data, long used by the U.S. military to track terrorist networks in the Middle East.
Other gear will be less obvious.The 2020 protests saw expanded use of Stingrays, another type of cellular interception device. Developed to enable the military to track militants in Iraq and Afghanistan, Stingrays were used by the U.S. Secret Service in 2020 and 2021 in ways that the DHS inspector general found broke the law and policies concerning privacy and warrants. Agency officials said “exigent” circumstances justified the illicit spying.
Now, with federal agencies and entities working with military personnel under declared-emergency circumstances, new gear could enter domestic use. And local officials or the civilian review boards that normally oversee police use of such technologies may lack the power to prevent or even monitor it. In 2021, the D.C. government ended a facial-recognition pilot program after police used it to identify a protester at Lafayette Square. But local prohibitions don’t apply to federalized or military forces.
Next up: AI-powered surveillance
How might new AI tools, and new White House measures to ease sharing across federal entities, enable surveillance targeting?
DHS and its sub-agencies already use AI. Some tools—such as monitoring trucks or cargo at the border for contraband, mapping human trafficking and drug networks, and watching the border—serve an obvious public-safety mission. Last year, DHS used AI and other tools to identify 311 victims of sexual exploitation and to arrest suspected perpetrators. They also helps DHS counter the flow of fentanyl; last October, the agency cited AI while reporting a 50 percent increase in seizures and an 8 percent increase in arrests.
TSA uses facial recognition across the country to match the faces and documents of airline passengers entering the United States in at least 26 airports, according to 2022 agency data. The accuracy has improved greatly in the past decade, and research suggests even better performance is possible: the National Institute of Standards and Technology has shown that some algorithms can achieve 99%-plus accuracy under ideal conditions.
But conditions are not always ideal, and mistakes can be costly. “There have been public reports of seven instances of mistaken arrests associated with the use of facial recognition technology, almost all involving Black individuals. The collection and use of biometric data also poses privacy risks, especially when it involves personal information that people have shared in unrelated contexts,” noted a Justice Department report in December.
On Monday, Trump promised that the increased federal activity would target “known gangs, drug dealers and criminal networks.” But network mapping—using digital information to identify who knows who and how—has other uses, and raises the risk of innocent people being misidentified.
Last week, the ACLU filed a Freedom of Information Act request concerning the use of two software tools by D.C.’s Homeland Security and Emergency Management Agency. Called Cobwebs and Tangles, the tools can reveal sensitive information about any person with just a name or email address, according to internal documents cited in the filing.
Cobwebs shows how AI can wring new insights from existing data sources, especially when there are no rules to prohibit the gathering of large stores of data. Long before the capability existed to do it effectively, this idea was at the center of what, a decade ago, was called predictive policing.
The concept has lost favor since the 2010s, but many law-enforcement agencies still pursue versions of it. Historically, the main obstacle has been too much data, fragmented across systems and structures. DHS has legal access to public video footage, social media posts, and border and airport entry records—but until recently, these datasets were difficult to analyze in real time, particularly within legal constraints.
That’s changing. The 2017 Modernizing Government Technology Act encouraged new software and cloud computing resources to help agencies use and share data more effectively, and in March, an executive order removed several barriers to interagency data sharing. The government has since awarded billions of dollars to private companies to improve access to internal data.
One of those companies is Palantir, whose work was characterized by the New York Times as an effort to compile a “master list” of data on U.S. citizens. The firm disputed that in a June 9 blog post: “Palantir is a software company and, in the context of our customer engagements, operates as a ‘data processor’—our software is used by customers to manage and make use of their data.”
In a 2019 article for the FBI training division, California sheriff Robert Davidson envisioned a scenario—now technologically feasible—in which AI analyzes body-camera imagery in real time: “Monitoring, facial recognition, gait analysis, weapons detection, and voice-stress analysis all would actively evaluate potential danger to the officer. After identification of a threat, the system could enact an automated response based on severity.”
The data DHS collects extends well beyond matching live images to photos in a database or detecting passengers’ emotional states. ICE’s Homeland Security Investigations unit, for instance, handles large volumes of multilingual email. DHS describes its email analytics program as using machine learning “for spam classification, translation, and entity extraction (such as names, organizations, or locations).”
Another DHS tool analyzes social-media posts to gather “open-source information on travelers who may be subject to further screening for potential violation of laws.” The tool can identify additional accounts and selectors, such as phone numbers or email addresses, according to DHS documentation.
Meanwhile, ICE’s operational scope has expanded. The White House has increased the agency’s authority to operate in hospitals and schools, collect employment data—including on non-imigrants, such as “sponsors” of unaccompanied minors—and impose higher penalties on individuals seen as “interfering” with ICE activities. Labor leaders say they’ve been targeted for their political activism. Protesters have been charged with assaulting ICE officers or employees. ICE has installed facial-recognition apps on officers’ phones, enabling on-the-spot identification of people protesting the agency’s tactics. DHS bulletins sent to local law enforcement encourage officers to consider a wide range of normal activity, such as filming police interactions, as potential precursors to violence.
Broad accessibility of even legally collected data raises concerns, especially in an era where AI tools can derive specific insights about people. But even before these developments, government watchdogs urged greater transparency around domestic AI use. A December report by the Government Accountability Office includes several open recommendations, mostly related to privacy protections and reporting transparency. The following month, DHS’s inspector general warned that the agency doesn’t have complete or well-resourced oversight frameworks.
In June, Sen. Ed Markey, D-Mass., and several co-signers wrote to the Trump White House, “In addition to these concerning uses of sentiment analysis for law enforcement purposes, federal agencies have also shown interest in affective computing and deception detection technologies that purportedly infer individuals’ mental states from measures of their facial expressions, body language, or physiological activity.”
The letter asks the GAO to investigate what DHS or Justice Department policies govern AI use and whether those are being followed. Markey’s office did not respond to a request for comment.
Writing for the American Immigration Council in May, Steven Hubbard, the group’s senior data scientist, noted that of DHS’ 105 AI applications, 27 are “rights-impacting.”
“These are cases that the OMB, under the Biden administration, identified as impacting an individual’s rights, liberty, privacy, access to equal opportunity, or ability to apply for government benefits and services,” Hubbard said.
The White House recently replaced Biden-era guidance on AI with new rules meant to accelerate AI deployment across the federal government. While the updated guidelines retain many safety guardrails, they do include some changes, including merging “privacy-impacting” and “safety-impacting” uses of AI into a single category: “high impact.”
The new rules also eliminate a requirement for agencies to notify people when AI tools might affect them—and to offer an opt-out.
Precedents for this kind of techno-surveillance expansion can be found in countries rarely deemed models for U.S. policy. China and Russia have greatly expanded surveillance and policing under the auspices of security. China operates an extensive camera network in public spaces and centralizes its data to enable rapid AI analysis. Russia has followed a similar path through its “Safe Cities” program, integrating data feeds from a vast surveillance network to spot and stop crime, protests, and dissent.
So far, the U.S. has spent less than these near-peers, as a percent of GDP, on surveillance tools, which are operated under a framework, however strained, of rule-of-law and rights protections that can mitigate the most draconian uses.
But the distinction between the United States and China and Russia is shrinking, Nathan Wessler, deputy director with the ACLU’s Speech, Privacy, and Technology Project, said in July. “There’s the real nightmare scenario, which is pervasive tracking of live or recorded video, something that, by and large, we have kept at bay in the United States. It’s the kind of thing that authoritarian regimes have invested in heavily.”
Wessler noted that in May, the Washington Post reported that New Orleans authorities were applying facial recognition to live video feeds. “At that scale, that [threatens to] just erase our ability to go about our lives without being pervasively identified and tracked by the government.”
Washington Post: Top Hegseth aide tried to oust senior White House liaison from Pentagon
The unusual dispute received White House intervention and appears rooted in deeper frustrations over failed attempts to fill jobs on the defense secretary’s staff.
Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth’s acting chief of staff tried and failed to oust a senior White House liaison assigned to the Pentagon, people familiar with the matter said Monday, detailing an unusual dispute that marks the latest instance of infighting among a staff plagued by disagreement and distrust.
The clash last week between Ricky Buria, Hegseth’s acting chief of staff, and Matthew A. McNitt, who coordinates personnel policy as White House liaison at the Pentagon, appears rooted in Buria’s frustration with pushback from the White House as he has attempted to fill positions in the defense secretary’s office. It coincides, too, with the White House’s refusal to let Buria take over the powerful chief of staff job on a permanent basis.
Those familiar with the situation, which has not been previously reported, spoke on the condition of anonymity to avoid reprisal by the Trump administration.
The dispute between Buria and McNitt appears to have shaken a fragile agreement between Hegseth and the White House, which allowed Buria to serve as chief of staff only unofficially after several other people were considered for the position but declined to take it, the people familiar with the matter said. Officials at the White House, they said, intervened when Buria tried to get rid of McNitt, effectively blocking the move.
Anna Kelly, a White House spokeswoman, said in a statement that Trump is “fully supportive of Secretary Hegseth and his efforts to restore a focus on warfighters at the Pentagon,” rather than diversity efforts and “woke initiatives.”
Ninety percent of political appointments in the Defense Department have been filled, Kelly said, “and all personnel, including Matt McNitt, reflect the administration’s shared mission to ensure our military is the most lethal fighting force in the world.”
The statement did not reference Buria.
It is not clear whether Hegseth supported or approved Buria’s attempt to remove McNitt from the Pentagon, or whether the secretary was even made aware of the power play in advance.
Sean Parnell, a Pentagon spokesman and senior adviser to Hegseth, declined to address questions about the situation, issuing a brief statement instead downplaying the intra-staff upheaval.
“When the Fake News Media has nothing to report to the American people, they resort [to] blog posting about water cooler gossip to meet their quota for clicks,” the statement said. “This kind of nonsense won’t distract our team from our mission.”
McNitt, who served in a handful of roles during the first Trump administration, could not be reached for comment. Buria did not respond to a request for comment.
Their dispute is the latest in a series of fights that has consumed the Pentagon over the first six months of President Donald Trump’s return to office. Hegseth’s tenure has been marked by abrupt firings, personality clashes, threats and other forms of dysfunction that have drawn scrutiny from Capitol Hill and continue to be closely monitored by the White House.
Buria has been at the center of much of the turmoil, seeking to isolate Hegseth from other senior advisers on his staff and assert control over the Pentagon’s inner workings, people familiar with the issues have said. A recently retired Marine Corps colonel, he has served as the de facto chief of staff since April, after Hegseth’s initial choice for the job, Joe Kasper, voluntarily departed to return to the corporate world.
Buria’s rapid transition from nonpartisan military officer to political warrior has stunned people who know him and raised questions among some Trump administration officials who remain skeptical of his warm relations with Biden administration appointees in the Pentagon while he served as a junior military aide for then-Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin.
Hegseth and Buria have clashed repeatedly with top generals and admirals serving in some of the Pentagon’s senior-most positions.
Most recently, the secretary rescinded the planned promotion of Army Lt. Gen. Douglas Sims, whose last day as director of the Joint Staff was last week. The decision, first reported last month by the New York Times, was made despite a direct appeal to Hegseth from Gen. Dan Caine, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.
The director’s job, widely considered one of the military’s most important, is being filled on a temporary basis by Marine Corps Maj. Gen. Stephen Liszewski, people familiar with the matter said. Trump in June nominated Navy Vice Adm. Fred Kacher to replace Sims, and he awaits Senate confirmation.
Hegseth, fixated on trying to stop a succession of embarrassing leaks to the news media, earlier this year threatened to have a polygraph test conducted on Sims, a detail reported earlier by the Wall Street Journal. The secretary’s team did briefly conduct polygraph tests against some Pentagon officials in April and early May, but the effort was stopped at the direction of the White House after Patrick Weaver, a political appointee on Hegseth’s team, complained that Buria wanted him to submit to testing despite Weaver’s history of supporting Trump’s agenda.
Buria also has faced scrutiny alongside Hegseth over the secretary’s use of the unclassified chat app Signal. The Defense Department’s independent inspector general has received evidence that Hegseth’s Signal account in March shared operational details about a forthcoming bombing campaign in Yemen, information taken from a classified email labeled “SECRET/NOFORN.”
That designation means defense officials believed disclosure of the information to the wrong parties could damage national security. Among those who received the information were other top Trump administration officials, but also Hegseth’s wife, Jennifer, and personal attorney, Tim Parlatore.
The inspector general’s review is, in part, attempting to establish who posted in those group chats the highly sensitive information shared under Hegseth’s name, people familiar with the matter said. In addition to the defense secretary, Buria had access to Hegseth’s personal phone and sometimes posted information on his behalf, officials have said.
Last week, Hegseth’s team at the Pentagon lashed out at the inspector general’s office in what appeared to be an attempt to undermine the inquiry’s legitimacy even before its findings are made public.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/national-security/2025/08/04/hegseth-buria-white-house-liaison-mcnitt
Daily Beast: Hegseth Posts Video of Pastor Saying Women Shouldn’t Vote
The evangelical leader says in the clip that the America where gay sex was outlawed was “not a totalitarian hellhole.”
Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth has reposted a video that features the leader of the Christian evangelical movement he follows calling to make gay sex illegal.
The segment from CNN focused on Doug Wilson, co-founder of the Communion of Reformed Evangelical Churches (CREC).
“In the late ’70s and early ’80s, sodomy was a felony in all 50 states,” Wilson says in the clip. “That America of that day was not a totalitarian hellhole.”
He adds that he wishes America would bring back those laws, which made sex between people of the same sex illegal. In fact, sodomy was a felony punishable by imprisonment or hard labor in every state until 1962, when Illinois became the first state to remove criminal penalties for consensual sodomy. The Supreme Court invalidated bans on gay sex in its 2003 ruling, Lawrence v Texas.
At other points in the video, Wilson says that some American slave owners were “decent human beings” and suggests that women should focus on having and raising children.
“Women are the kind of people that people come out of,” Wilson says.
The video also features a female congregation member saying that she “submits” to her husband and a pastor from the movement calling to repeal the Nineteenth Amendment, which gave women the right to vote.
“All of Christ for All of Life,” Hegseth wrote alongside the clip. The CNN report noted that Hegseth has publicly declared his support for Wilson in the past.
Asked for comment, chief Pentagon spokesperson Sean Parnell told the Daily Beast that Hegseth is a “proud” member of a church associated with CREC and “very much appreciates many of Mr. Wilson’s writings and teachings.”
During the nomination process for defense secretary, Hegseth’s past comments arguing that women should not be allowed to serve in military combat roles resurfaced as a source of controversy.
Hegseth walked back the comments after it became clear that they might impede his nomination. He was eventually confirmed with a tie-breaking vote cast by Vice President JD Vance.
Since taking over the Pentagon, Hegseth has instituted more stringent fitness standards for women, and removed at least five senior female military officials from leadership roles.
In May, Hegseth sparked controversy when he brought his personal pastor, Brooks Potteiger, to the Pentagon to lead a monthly prayer circle. The pastor praised President Donald Trump as divinely appointed.
Hegseth, despite being a devout Christian, was rocked by reports during the nomination process detailing his repeated infidelity during his first marriage. He has been married three times.
Hegseth also has several controversial pro-Christian tattoos, including one that has been criticized as anti-Muslim, and others that allude to the Crusades.

https://www.thedailybeast.com/pete-hegseth-posts-video-of-pastor-saying-women-shouldnt-vote