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A three-judge federal appeals panel overturned the lower court ruling that had freed Mahdawi from ICE custody.

A Republican state delegate and teacher from West Virginia has been charged with seducing a 15-year-old girl who is a student at his school.Investigators have accused David Elliott Pritt of using Snapchat and the multiplayer game Roblox to start talking to the girl outside of school during the 2024–2025 school year, when she was in eighth grade. At the end of that year, he allegedly told the child that he “loved her,” and sent her a picture of himself in pajama pants and asked for pictures of her in return. When the girl replied with normal pictures, Pritt requested more explicit ones, and she obliged. Pritt eventually enticed the girl to repeatedly have sex with him in the classroom, and they continued to exchange explicit photographs up until just this month.Pritt was reported to police by the girl’s family on July 9, and calls for his resignation were raised immediately from both sides of the aisle. “The West Virginia House of Delegates simply will not tolerate conduct that even approaches what is alleged in the public filings released by federal law enforcement today,” West Virginia House Speaker Roger Hanshaw said. “I urge Elliott Pritt, for the benefit of his family and the people of his District, to spare his students and his colleagues at every level the continued embarrassments and distractions and to resign from elected office as soon as he is able.” The West Virginia GOP also said Pritt should resign, calling the allegations “shocking, sickening, and deeply disturbing.” What makes this horrific matter even worse is that in his legislative career, Pritt has earned political capital from his supposed opposition to the sexual abuse of minors. He offered perhaps the most spirited, emotional defense of Raylee’s Law, a bill that would force the state to stop removing students who are the subjects of child abuse investigations from school, stating then that “we have an opportunity here tonight to do something to protect children.” And when Pritt won his delegate seat in 2022, he beat an incumbent, Austin Haynes, who was accused of sexual harassment—saying that Haynes’s loss was a “moral decision” that West Virginia voters made. “No one is perfect, but there are some mistakes and lapses in character and judgment that just cannot be overlooked or ‘go away,’” Pritt said about Haynes at the time.

House Republicans are trying to file criminal charges against former special counsel Jack Smith.Representative Jim Jordan, chair of the House Judiciary Committee, sent a criminal referral for Smith to the Department of Justice Wednesday, urging the department to investigate Smith for making false statements to Congress during congressional testimony in December.At issue is a line of questioning in which Smith was asked whether he sought a search warrant for the content of text messages from members of Congress, to which Smith replied that he did not. Last week, Senator Chuck Grassley posted on X that he had “received records [from] DOJ confirming Jack Smith’s investigative team reviewed the contents of text msgs sent by 44 MEMBERS OF CONGRESS.”But Grassley’s post and the questions Smith was asked were two different categories of documents, as legal experts such as Lawfare’s Anna Bower and Politico’s Kyle Cheney pointed out on X. Smith requested information from Congress on toll records, which concerned the time and date of text messages, not their content.There was a separate instance in which Smith’s team gathered text messages from the National Archives from White House phones. Some of those records included exchanges with members of Congress. But Republicans never asked about that.“[T]here’s zero ambiguity here,” Bower said. “Nothing in the Grassley docs raises any real question of perjury.”House Democrats quickly responded to Jordan’s letter Wednesday. Representative Jamie Raskin called Jordan’s letter a “baseless and vindictive criminal referral” that “deliberately distorts and misstates the facts, including what questions the Republicans actually asked at Mr. Smith’s interview.”Smith’s lawyers have also responded to Jordan’s letter with one of their own, saying his accusations are based on a “spurious claim.”“The referral is made not because Mr. Smith made a false statement, which the letter concedes, but because he did not proactively disclose information that was not responsive to a question asked,” Smith’s lawyers wrote. “During his testimony, Mr. Smith provided truthful, responsive answers and candidly discussed his work.”

The vice president is losing faith in his personal Secret Service detail.One of the Secret Service agents assigned to protect JD Vance was placed on administrative leave over concerns that he was leaking information to the press, CNN reported late Wednesday. The action followed an intimate recounting of Vance’s recent travel by MS NOW, in which the news outlet reported that Vance’s Secret Service agents “groused” and complained about the vice president’s decision to use a military helicopter to take his son to a golf lesson at Joint Base Andrews.“Agents have shared concerns internally about Vance and his office pressing them for trips and assignments that some agents consider an inappropriate or even unprecedented use of government resources compared to prior vice presidents,” MS NOW reported on July 15.The Secret Service’s internal affairs department is reviewing the agent’s conduct. It is currently unclear if the agent will face administrative consequences or criminal charges, according to an internal source that spoke to CNN.Donald Trump has been so fixated on internal criticism and media leaks that some of his administration’s countermeasures have tested the boundaries of the First Amendment. During his first term, Trump considered wiretapping the Homeland Security Department to identify the source of his bad press. That attitude has only escalated in the years since—aided by the sycophantic behaviors of Trump’s new government entourage. Earlier this month, CNN reported that FBI Director Kash Patel and White House chief of staff Susie Wiles were personally overseeing a crackdown at the White House to determine who leaked that the ultra-luxury jet gifted to Trump by Qatar lacked the security specs to be considered for use in Air Force One. So far, Wiles and Patel’s probe has forced government officials to hand over their phones—causing some agencies to pit their own attorneys against the White House—and issued subpoenas to four New York Times journalists who reported the story.

Israeli American Holocaust scholar Omer Bartov says Israel’s assault on Gaza predicts “the future of genocide,” with the perpetrator not only enjoying impunity for crimes against humanity but also profiting from the death and destruction. He says Israeli leaders will almost certainly escape accountability because international allies, including the United States and many European states, have failed to uphold international law. “The denial of what Israel has done is ubiquitous because there is no [accountability] mechanism that kicks into place,” he says. “If you don’t bring people to account, you’re sliding back into what the international community tried to prevent after 1945.”