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Sánchez has alleged irregularities in the count, but he would need nearly 1 million dollars to challenge polling stations with irregular counts. elevation , June 16, 2026

The Senate is moving to officially green-light Donald Trump’s expensive rebrand for the Department of Defense.Buried deep in the Senate Armed Services Committee’s annual defense authorization Tuesday was a measure to redesignate the Department of Defense as the “Department of War.” The measure would also change the titles and acronyms for the secretary of war, assistant secretary, and under secretary, as well as the names of other programs and offices that use the word “defense.” Another clause would ensure that all laws, documents, and records referring to the department or secretary of defense would be understood to apply to the secretary of war. Of course, the Trump administration has already been using its own made-up name for months. So Pete Hegseth is sure to have his new desk placard already.The Congressional Budget Office previously estimated that a statutory name change implemented throughout the department could cost up to $125 million in taxpayer dollars. Trump has made it clear he’s willing to spend millions to make the United States look tough—but in reality, the president appears to be caving to our country’s purported enemies. As The New Republic’s Indigo Olivier pointed out: Trump’s rebrand may be stupid and expensive, but at least it’s honest.

On Tuesday, the Trump administration announced that it would move two key functions of the Department of Education—disability education oversight and the department’s Office for Civil Rights—to the Department of Health and Human Services and the Department of Justice, respectively, in a move that would give HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. oversight over the […]

The vice president has become the main face selling the Trump administration’s US-Iran deal.

Details of the Iran peace deal are still under wraps, even for America’s strongest ally in the Middle East.i24NEWS correspondent Guy Azriel reported Tuesday that Israel was denied access to the informal agreement, which he called a “remarkable and highly unusual development between close allies on an issue of such critical national security importance.”The White House and Tehran signed a peace deal on Sunday, though the exact specifications of the agreement are not yet public and are still being hashed out.The final draft reportedly proposes the immediate reopening of the Strait of Hormuz under Iran’s direction, a commitment from the U.S. not to interfere in Iranian affairs, and a reiteration of Iran’s commitment not to produce nuclear weapons, echoing language included in the 2015 Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, according to a senior Iranian official who spoke with Reuters.One component of the plan has become the subject of much debate: a $300 billion reconstruction fund for Iran, which was originally understood to be provided at cost to U.S. taxpayers. Vice President JD Vance has wavered several times on that particular issue. He first claimed on Saturday that Iran would receive no money at all. He seemingly reversed course on Monday, when he all but confirmed the reconstruction fund to CBS’s Ed O’Keefe. Within hours—and after some monumental backlash from his party—Vance seemed to change his tune again, telling Fox News’s Sean Hannity that Iran would not receive a “single dime of American money.” Instead, Vance claimed that the U.S. would allow Iran to receive foreign aid from its Gulf State neighbors so long as the “Iranians behave.” Vance has not yet elaborated on how the administration plans to manage or gatekeep foreign aid packages intended for Iran.The murky arrangement does not seem to include details on whether Iran will stop enriching its uranium—a highly anticipated component and one of the White House’s most pressing demands.Vance told Hannity that the particulars of the enriched uranium depletion would be figured out over the next two months, “but the basic structure is they can get a lot if they comply with the United States’s demands.”Donald Trump has pledged since the beginning of the war that any peace deal he signs would end Iran’s uranium enrichment program. But now that the deal is actually being negotiated, Trump seems to have lost his bluster, even disengaging from the idea of collecting Iran’s nuclear dust.“You could make the case, ‘Why even bother?’ Because it’s not really valuable, it’s probably half a million dollars’ worth,” Trump said Tuesday while at the G7 summit in France. “It’s not very valuable stuff. But I think, psychologically, we want to get it.”Failing to obtain commitments regarding Iran’s nuclear program would make the deal far weaker than the Obama administration’s JCPOA. Iran lacked a single bomb’s worth of uranium in 2018, three years after former President Barack Obama brokered his deal to limit the country’s enormous uranium stockpile. But that changed when Trump withdrew the U.S. from the pact and imposed a series of tough economic sanctions against the Middle Eastern country. By 2025, Iran had curated an 11-ton stockpile of enriched uranium, the whereabouts of which remain largely unknown. The total stockpile could create as many as 10 bombs if fully enriched, according to a 2025 assessment by the International Atomic Energy Agency.

One of President Trump’s personal lawyers now has a federal judgeship for life, and it’s thanks to multiple Senate Democrats being absent.Justin Smith, 41, was confirmed by the Senate Tuesday in a 48–43 vote, with every Democrat voting against his nomination, while all but one Republican, Lisa Murkowski, voted for him. Nine senators missed the vote: Michael Bennet, Kevin Cramer, John Curtis, Angus King, Ben Ray Luján, Cynthia Lummis, Bernie Sanders, Raphael Warnock, and Mitch McConnell.Bennet, King, Luján, Sanders, and Warnock all caucus with the Democratic Party, and if they had been present to cast a “no” vote, Smith’s vote would have been blocked in a 48–48 tie. Smith will now sit on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Eighth Circuit, overseeing federal district court appeals in Arkansas, Iowa, Minnesota, Missouri, Nebraska, North Dakota, and South Dakota.Smith represented Trump in his presidential immunity case before the Supreme Court and worked on his case to have the Supreme Court overturn the sexual assault and defamation charge against the president brought by E. Jean Carroll. Despite being nominated to the federal bench in March, Smith continued representing Trump in Carroll’s case.In his confirmation hearings in April, Smith refused to say who won the 2020 presidential election, and refused to answer questions about whether he would recuse himself from any cases involving Trump, sparring with Democratic Senator Richard Blumenthal.Smith is now the third of Trump’s personal lawyers to be appointed as a federal judge, and the second to be confirmed. He’ll join Emil Bove, who, while working for the Justice Department in Trump’s first term, told his fellow federal prosecutors to disobey court orders and say “fuck you” to judges who ruled against them.Democratic Senator Dick Durbin, the ranking member on the Senate Judiciary Committee, said on the Senate floor Tuesday that Smith’s conflicts of interest raised “serious questions.”“These are lifetime appointments to federal judgeships—lifetime appointments which have to be given to people who have been carefully scrutinized. We have not done that when it comes to Mr. Smith,” Durbin said.

The new senior global affairs correspondent at CBS, Trevor Phillips, is also a pal of ex-UK ambassador Peter Mandelson, who was fired over his ties to Epstein. Plus: on Iran, MAGA hacks vs MAGA hawks.

But workers are still being fired in violation of their union contract, says the co-founder of Hands Off the Arts.