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The 29-year-old woman Kristi Noem handpicked to oversee ICE’s billion-dollar budget just lost her nomination bid in an Ohio congressional primary.Madison Sheahan, a former ICE deputy director, was in third place Wednesday when the Associated Press called the state’s 9th district Republican primary for former state Representative Derek Merrin. Republican operatives consider Ohio’s 9th district one of the party’s best chances to flip a House seat, The Washington Post reported. The seat is currently held by Representative Marcy Kaptur, who has held onto it for 22 terms.Sheahan had left her role at ICE to pursue her congressional campaign, shortly before her apparent mentor Noem was unceremoniously fired. In her role, Sheahan reportedly wasted millions of taxpayer dollars on 2,500 custom-wrapped vehicles that read “ICE.” The gaudy cars feature massive ICE logos, red stripes, and a golden decal of President Donald Trump’s name on the back window. The vehicles first appeared in a DHS video intended to make ICE look cool. But the fleet of ostentatious cars proved useless to the masked militia, which prefers to disappear people using unmarked vehicles.On the campaign trail, Sheahan touted her work with ICE, but political analysts found that immigration did not play as large a role in the primaries as economic issues such as the job market and tariffs, the Post reported. Her candidacy was considered an early bellwether for how voters felt about Trump’s handling of immigration policy, and her resounding failure could signal disaster for other candidates too closely tied to the president’s unpopular policy initiatives.

The “gerrymandering wars” have gone better than Democrats expected at the start, but they shouldn’t celebrate yet.

The partnership hands a big win to OpenAI’s biggest competitor at the peak of Musk’s public feud with OpenAI.

“Not the best entry,” Joe Sexton told Semafor, referencing Miami Herald investigative reporter Julie Brown’s 2018 series that effectively reopened the Epstein investigation.

Democrats on the House Oversight Committee claimed Wednesday that Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick lied several times during his testimony about his ties to Jeffrey Epstein. During a closed-door hearing to discuss his ties to the alleged sex trafficker, Lutnick reneged on past claims about Epstein recording his guests’ sexual misconduct and using it to blackmail them, Representative Ro Khanna told reporters after the hearing. Lutnick had previously called Epstein “the greatest blackmailer ever.”“So, somebody obviously got to him, from the administration. In fact, he said he talked to people in the administration and that’s why he’s changed his tune,” Khanna said. “And the question is not just why he’s lying, the question is why he’s covering up. The question is why he’s no longer willing to share what he knows about Epstein’s abhorrent behavior. “If Donald Trump had seen the video transcript he would’ve fired Howard Lutnick. It was very embarrassing,” the California Democrat added.Lutnick swore in an interview last year he did not see Epstein after 2005, but it was then revealed he coordinated a family trip (with his young kids) to the financier’s “pedophile island” in 2012. Lutnick then confirmed he’d kept in touch with Epstein over the years, even after Epstein was convicted of soliciting prostitution from a minor.“Howard Lutnick should resign,” Virginia Representative Suhas Subramanyam told reporters following the hearing. “That was absolutely mind-boggling, what we just heard in the room. He was evasive, nervous. He was dishonest.”“He would not admit to lying, which he clearly did in the podcast,” Subramanyam said, referring to Lutnick’s remarks on the New York Post’s Pod Force One in October 2025, when the secretary claimed that after meeting Epstein, he decided he would “never be in the room with that disgusting person ever again.”“I had to ask him whether he and I were in the same room, just now, because I couldn’t understand his meaning of ‘we were in the same room together,’” Subramanyam said. Lutnick also refused to provide any explanation for why he and his family traveled to Epstein’s island.“We asked him over and over again, ‘Why did you go to the island?’ He says he doesn’t remember, that it was inexplicable, and he simply didn’t know how to answer the question at that point,” Subramanyam said.

The Tennessee GOP’s new election map would eliminate the state’s only Democratic representative and carve up the majority-Black Memphis-area district he represents. The map would gerrymander away Democratic Representative Steve Cohen’s Shelby County district and likely give Republicans a 9–0 majority in the state. The Memphis metropolitan area would be divided up into three separate districts.“This is insane. The GOP’s newly proposed TN Congressional maps would have people in Shelby County all the way to Williamson County—200+ miles apart—being “represented” by the same Congressman,” Cohen wrote on X after the map was announced. “It’s a blatant, corrupt power grab that would destroy the Black community’s and our entire city’s voice.”The redrawn map is the latest in a barrage of Republican gerrymandering efforts in the wake of the Supreme Court’s ruling that crippled Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act last month. Section 2 granted protections to African Americans and other racial minorities against redistricting.The new map is expected to pass in a Thursday vote.

The lavish Obama Presidential Center arrives as millions face economic strain — built by donors who benefited from the very system he once promised to change.