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Strip clubs, casinos, designer purses, guns, an Adam Sandler puzzle, 30 different ice cream flavors, and a private performance of Ed Sheeran’s “Hills of Aberfeldy”: Representative Chuck Edwards has a long pattern of creepy behavior, and the House Ethics Committee just detailed all of it.The House Ethics Committee Monday released a 25-page report on the congressman’s inappropriate conduct towards two young women staffers in his office, accusing him of violating House rules related to “sexual harassment and hostile workplaces.”On pages 5 and 6 of the report, the committee lays out, in detail, a long list of Edwards’s inappropriate conduct, which made the women in his employ feel uncomfortable and unsafe. The list includes lavish vacations, expensive gifts, trips to a staffer’s house to do her yardwork, and messages that made both women uncomfortable. In the case of one staffer, he arranged for a private singer to go to her “birthday party to sing Ed Sheeran’s ‘Hills of Aberfeldy’ and say that it was ‘from a special someone,’” after which the staffer told a friend she was “scared lowkey.” After one staffer went to a restaurant the congressman recommended, he texted her: “I’m burning with jealousy because I wanted to be the person to introduce you to it.” After a staffer accompanied Edwards to a work event, he wrote: “You’re so fun to be with, so easy to talk to, and I love listening to you. By all means—let’s explore more of DC together. We seem to have a fondness for many of the same things. Even where we do not, I’ll enjoy the adventure alongside you!”When the same staffer later left Edwards’s office, he read a poem “at her going away party in the congressional office accompanied by a slideshow, during which he cried. Several staffers present testified that they felt uncomfortable, and Representative Edwards acknowledged in his own testimony that he could tell the staff felt uncomfortable.”The House Ethics Committee noted that many messages central to the investigation were mysteriously missing from the congressman’s phone. Edwards also deleted a photograph of 30 different types of ice cream that he had delivered to a staffers house, as well as her response: “Thank you, but this seems a bit excessive.” “You looked like you needed a lot of cheering up!” the congressman texted back. “My heart was breaking seeing you like that.”When the same staffer later wrote “I don’t think dinner is a great idea,” the congressman responded:It’s disappointing to feel something that used to be easy has gotten complicated. Whether we were talking about cat poop, crime plots, or thoughts more meaningful—I’ve always valued the time we shared, and the money we won :) and I thought you might too. I didn’t expect outside chatter to change that. Still, I understand. You get to set the boundaries, and I get to respect them. If you ever feel easy again, I hope you’ll give me the signal.The House Ethics Committee began investigating Representative Edwards in late April for then-unspecified “allegations.” Reports of inappropriate conduct with two young female staffers soon followed, including a handwritten note from the congressman that read, “Your kindness, encouragement, and light-heartedness have written a complex chapter in my heart that I will never stop reading.”Edwards has been married to his wife, Teresa, since 1980.Despite this mountain of evidence to the contrary, Edwards continues to insist that he did nothing wrong.“Representative Edwards has continued to deny any wrongdoing publicly and to the Committee. He has also refused to acknowledge the reality of the power imbalance between a Member of Congress and young staffers,” the report states. “This shows a lack of self-awareness and accountability.”In one staffer’s testimony before the committee, she said that Edwards completely ignored “the fact that [the staffer was] a young female in politics and that [her] image is everything. And while he can navigate rumors like those that are circulating now without concern because he is, I guess, a male in politics, he had no regard for how something like this could impact my career.”Moving forward, the committee intends to “bring a privileged resolution for consideration and vote by the full House.”This story has been updated.

Immigrant rights advocates say more detainees are risking their lives to protest inhumane conditions and legal rights violations

The Department of Homeland Security has drastically ramped up efforts to add DNA from nearly one million immigrants to a massive criminal database. Most of them have no criminal history; some of them are kids. In 2025, Immigration and Customs Enforcement added up to roughly 920,000 DNA profiles into the FBI’s Combined DNA Index System, a database used for conducting criminal investigations, WIRED reported Monday. That’s equivalent to more than 2,700 new profiles every day for an entire year. We know that most of the people added to the database have no criminal record because most of the people who have been detained by ICE as part of President Donald Trump’s massive deportation crusade have no criminal record. New research from Georgetown Law’s Center on Privacy and Technology, published in a report titled “Raiding the Genome: How the United States Government Is Abusing Its Immigration Powers to Amass DNA for Future Policing” uncovered a huge increase in the rate of DNA collection from undocumented immigrants. Customs and Border Protection has historically been responsible for collecting DNA from immigrants entering through the U.S.-Mexico border. Between October 2020 and December 2024, CBP collected the DNA of at least 1.36 million people, more than one dozen times the rate of ICE’s DNA collection during the same period. Even so, CBP’s prior collection rate has been dwarfed by the new data provided by ICE. Among the scores of immigrants whose genomes are now being tracked by the government are the children held at the family detention center in Dilley, Texas, the source of multiple reports documenting unsafe living conditions. “None of the families at Dilley have been convicted of a crime,” Representatives Joaquin Castro, Greg Stanton, and Nanette Barragán said in a joint statement to WIRED. “They do not belong in a database meant for violent criminals, especially children.”The ICE facility in Dilley has been the source of horrific reports about living conditions. Records released to Georgetown by CBP identified 492 children under age 14 whose DNA was sent to the FBI in 2025—including 33 seven-year-olds, 32 six-year-olds, and 21 five-year-olds, WIRED reported. And breaking with past precedent, ICE has also begun charging immigrants who refuse to submit a DNA sample when they are taken into custody. WIRED identified two prosecutions filed in 2025 against people in immigration custody who’d refused DNA collection. In response to questions from WIRED, a DHS spokesperson defended DNA collection and claimed the agency had collected DNA from children in order to verify family relationships. That program is distinct, however, from the DNA collection program centered in WIRED’s reporting.

As GOP lawmakers push "tough-on-crime" policies in Washington, D.C., re-entry advocates argue these backward measures will only increase recidivism, not prevent it.

It’s hard to imagine a more consummate and humiliating debacle than the retreat the Department of Justice was forced to execute last Friday in the Reflecting Pool case. Having staked a large portion of its remaining credibility on the charges against David Hearn, the 67-year-old former Olympic canoeist it had accused of vandalizing the pool back in June, DOJ was reduced on Friday evening to confessing, in a 20-page filing, that its whole theory was false: The pool had been ruined not by vandals but by the administration’s own botched, rushed renovation.Some observers gave the department credit for belatedly doing the right thing, In fact, U.S. Attorney Jeanine Pirro had zero choice. A grenade had been hurled into her office, and she was forced to fall on it. No points here for virtue.Her motion even put her crosswise with the president, a friend and ally since the 1980s, who to this hour insists the pool was slashed with knives and box cutters and wants the case pressed. “I disagree 100% with Jeanine Pirro,” Trump fumed on Truth Social. “I don’t know what she was thinking?” For a prosecutor who has spent this administration as one of Donald Trump’s most reliable instruments, dismissing his pet case and blaming his renovation looks like a rare act of conscience. Don’t believe it.The move that forced Pirro’s hand was the receipt of documents from the Interior Department demonstrating that the pool’s lining was peeling because of a rushed, failed installation—not because David Hearn tugged at a flap of it. That revelation is what we legal types call classic Brady material: exculpatory evidence the government must turn over to the defense at once, in line with the landmark 1963 Supreme Court decision in Brady v. Maryland. Pirro’s own motion piously recites the point, reminding the court that “prosecutors have an affirmative obligation” to produce such evidence—which takes some nerve, given that the reason she was writing was that the Brady bomb had just gone off in her hands.Once those documents surfaced, she had two choices. She could either dismiss the case on her own terms—spinning the story as diligent prosecutors misled by a careless agency—or turn the material over to Hearn’s lawyers and let them present it to Judge Todd Edelman, a former career public defender who, a week earlier, had already warned the government it was “operating at its own peril.” Handed the Interior documents, he would have blown his top and dismissed the indictment himself, in open court. So Pirro’s dismissal was not virtue: It was damage control.The hasty surrender served another purpose: It steered Pirro out of the path of two looming train wrecks, or so she hopes.The first was a grand jury problem. Hearn had filed a motion on July 27 alleging that the government presented the grand jury with no evidence of damages at all. The administration had elevated what elsewhere were misdemeanor charges to a felony on the strength of a single element—$1,000 or more in damage—yet it apparently had no proof of that amount, or any amount. And the hole was not incidental; the grand jurors saw it themselves. They asked the government’s witness about the cost of the damage, and he could not quantify it. He testified, moreover, that the repairs would have been necessary regardless of anything Hearn did—the pool was already leaking more than a million gallons a week, its expansion joints past their service life, the liner already torn. On that record, the grand jury somehow returned a felony. Hearn’s motion would have exposed how the prosecution steered it there. Dismissing the case makes that question go away.The second was Pirro’s own conduct. When the indictment came down on July 2, she did not let the charging document speak for itself, as DOJ norms require. She called a news conference and went well outside the record. “This is not only a priority for the president, but for myself,” she announced—welding her office to Trump’s political grievance—and averred that she had witnesses who saw Hearn do the crime. Prejudicial extrajudicial statements about a defendant are improper in themselves; they are far worse when they are, as these seem to be, whopping lies. A bar complaint over her handling of the case has already been filed in New York.None of this is peculiar to the Reflecting Pool case. It is a method. Across this administration, the Justice Department has brought cases that are built backward, from the outcome the president wanted to a theory that might sustain it. Grand juries now reject this department’s indictments with a regularity once almost unheard of, and Pirro’s office has been a repeat offender.All the bluster gives the episode an element of farce—a Cabinet secretary insisting he could “absolutely” prove vandalism, a president raving about a 300-foot slit cut with a box cutter, a U.S. attorney promising tremendous evidence, all collapsing into a filing that concedes the pool fell apart on its own. But the farce should not obscure the gravity. To prop up a talking point almost everyone knew was false, the government cast a private citizen with no quarrel with Trump and no connection to the pool as the villain of a fiction, and moved to put him in prison for years. The leader tells a lie everyone knows is a lie, and the machinery of the state sets about forcing the rest of us to repeat it—all the way to the felony prosecution of an innocent bystander. That is what makes it the most perfectly Kafkaesque prosecution I can remember outside the annals of fiction.David Hearn went for a bike ride and grabbed at a flap of coating that was already peeling off on its own. For that, the government of the United States tried to take 10 years of his life. He is owed more than a dismissal; he is owed, for starters, an apology. And the rest of us are owed an accounting of how the Justice Department came to be a willing instrument of the president’s vanity, and what misconduct its dismissal may be attempting to obscure.

Throwing paint on a statue at Columbia seems like a minor crime, but cops use tremendous resources when pro-Palestine protesters are in the crosshairs. The post NYPD Used High-Tech Surveillance to Find Gaza Paint Splatter Protester, Docs Show appeared first on The Intercept.

The Department of Justice’s move to dismiss its criminal case against Olympian David Hearn exposed just how bad things have gotten inside the Trump administration. In a new episode of his Justice Matters podcast, former federal prosecutor Glenn Kirschner argued that the DOJ’s motion to dismiss revealed just how shoddy its case was to begin with. Kirschner noted that Donald Trump’s DOJ blamed the Department of the Interior for initially claiming that the damage was “entirely caused by vandals” and admitted that the DOJ hadn’t fully investigated the matter. “Talk about finger-pointing,” Kirschner said. “Talk about the refusal to take responsibility for your botched indictment. That is ugly. That is unseemly. As a career federal prosecutor, including decades that I served in that very office, the D.C. U.S. Attorney’s Office, you don’t indict first and investigate later. Nor do you take the word of another agency of government.”In its filing Friday, the DOJ acknowledged that damage to the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool was caused by flawed installation by the contractor—contrary to the narrative Trump has been pushing for weeks.In a statement Saturday, Interior Secretary Doug Burgum scrambled to keep up the story. “The evidence is clear, vandals have repeatedly caused damage to the Reflecting Pool. Some of these acts were even caught on camera,” he wrote on X. Kirschner also slammed the U.S. Attorney Jeanine Pirro for mounting prosecution before fully investigating her own case.“That is not the way prosecution works,” Kirschner said. “Not in the ‘Before Times,’ but in the legal upside-down [world] courtesy of Trump and Todd Blanche and Jeanine Pirro, it is ready, fire, aim, and that is inexcusable. It’s horrific, and it is a gross abuse of prosecutorial discretion and power.”Trump criticized Pirro’s decision to drop the case. In a Truth Social post Saturday, Trump admitted there “may have been some contractor difficulty” in the lining installation, but “the major damage was caused by VANDALS!”“I disagree 100% with Jeanine Pirro, the U.S. Attorney for the District of Columbia, on the Reflecting Pool,” he wrote.

One year ago, an Israeli settler shot and killed the Palestinian activist Awdah Hathaleen in the occupied West Bank. Hathaleen, an English teacher and father of three young children, played a key role in the production of the Oscar-winning documentary No Other Land, which follows Palestinians in the community of Masafer Yatta as they struggle to stay on their land amid violent attacks by Israeli settlers. A new report from the Palestinian human rights organization Al-Haq looks closely at the circumstances of his death and the culpability of his killer, Yinon Levi, who has yet to face any legal consequences for Hathaleen’s death. Since October 7, 2023, about 1,100 Palestinians have been killed by Israelis in the West Bank, says Al-Haq’s Tahseen Elayyan. “None of these [deaths have] been held accountable by the Israeli legal system, which tells us a lot. It tells us that the Israeli occupying forces and the Israeli government are involved in these crimes, and this reflects a state policy … that aims at entrenching Israel’s settler-colonial project in the occupied Palestinian territory.”

One year ago, an Israeli settler shot and killed the Palestinian activist Awdah Hathaleen in the occupied West Bank. Hathaleen, an English teacher and father of three young children, played a key role in the production of the Oscar-winning documentary No Other Land, which follows Palestinians in the community of Masafer Yatta as they struggle to stay on their land amid violent attacks by Israeli settlers. A new report from the Palestinian human rights organization Al-Haq looks closely at the circumstances of his death and the culpability of his killer, Yinon Levi, who has yet to face any legal consequences for Hathaleen’s death. Since October 7, 2023, about 1,100 Palestinians have been killed by Israelis in the West Bank, says Al-Haq’s Tahseen Elayyan. “None of these [deaths have] been held accountable by the Israeli legal system, which tells us a lot. It tells us that the Israeli occupying forces and the Israeli government are involved in these crimes, and this reflects a state policy … that aims at entrenching Israel’s settler-colonial project in the occupied Palestinian territory.”