The Department of Homeland Security has launched an immigration and fraud crackdown in Minneapolis amid a welfare-abuse scandal in Minnesota.

CBS and CNN reported that around 2,000 federal agents have been deployed in the Twin Cities area as part of a 30-day surge in operations.

On Tuesday, the department's official account wrote “GOOD MORNING MINNEAPOLIS!” – the first in a series of posts about operations in the region.

In a post on her own X account, DHS Secretary Kristi Noem is pictured overseeing arrests, and promising to “expose and deliver accountability for the rampant fraud and criminality happening in Minnesota.”

The push comes amid new allegations of fraud by some day care centers run by Somali residents in Minnesota following claims by a right-wing influencer.

via Associated Press

The White House has served up a revisionist history of the Jan. 6 insurrection, blaming Democrats and the Capitol Police for the violence that left 140 police officers injured and five dead.

On the fifth anniversary of the attack on the U.S. Capitol on Tuesday, a new page on the official White House website spells out a timeline of the day's events that's radically at odds with reality.

It claims it was the Democrats “who staged the real insurrection by certifying a fraud-ridden election,” and accuses then-Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi of “security lapses.”

Under a heading titled “Capitol Police Response Escalates Tensions,” officers are said to have “aggressively” fired “tear gas, flash bangs, and rubber munitions into crowds of peaceful protesters.”

In line with Trump's comments earlier on Tuesday, the page portrays the president as a dove who “repeatedly” called for “peace, tweeting support for law enforcement and releasing a video telling supporters 'go home in peace.'”

Five years ago, a violent mob stormed the Capitol after they were told by Trump to “fight like hell” to stop the certification of a fair election.

A week after the violent events, Trump faced the most bipartisan presidential impeachment in U.S. history as ten Republicans crossed party lines to condemn his actions on Jan. 6.

via Associated Press

Several of the lawmakers who survived the attack on the U.S. Capitol testified before Congress on Tuesday, including lawmakers who have, for the last five years, kept a civil lawsuit against President Donald Trump alive despite Trump’s best efforts to shut it down.

They seek to hold him accountable for his role in the events of Jan. 6, 2021, namely, that he allegedly violated the Ku Klux Klan Act by intimidating them from doing their duties to certify the 2020 election.

A judge presiding over the case is expected to rule soon on whether Trump can be held liable at all. The judge is currently reviewing evidence in the case. Trump has demanded through court filings in recent days that certain evidence be kept out, including any findings from the now-shuttered House Select Jan. 6 Committee.

Read more here.

Proud Boys leader Enrique Tarrio said Thursday that President Donald Trump owes more to his supporters who stormed the Capitol on Jan 6, 2021.

“I am very happy with what the man that sits behind that desk has done. But it’s not enough,” Tarrio said at a rally at the Ellipse by the White House.

Tarrio, whose prison sentence was commuted while 1,500 rioters received pardons, noted that people who prosecuted him and his fellow Proud Boys haven’t been charged with crimes.

“The Justice Department needs to take action,” he said.

Rep. Doug LaMalfa, the California Republican announced dead at age 65 on Tuesday, died following an aneurysm and a heart attack he had during emergency surgery, a lawmaker and two others familiar with the matter told Politico.

The Butte County Sheriff’s Office also announced that LaMalfa died during surgery at a Chico area hospital, where he was taken Monday night following a medical emergency at his house.

via Associated Press

Hearing that pardoned rioters planned to march through Washington on the anniversary of the Capitol Attack, and further, that some are claiming to honor fallen U.S. Capitol Police Officer Brian Sicknick today — Sicknick died one day after injuries he sustained on Jan. 6 — former U.S. Capitol Police Officer Harry Dunn’s reaction was blunt.

“They’re full of crap honoring Brian Sicknick, they don't give a damn about him. They don’t,” he said.

He had no interest in discussing or giving attention to Proud Boys traipsing around D.C., either.

“I’m only interested in making sure the people who enabled and supported Donald Trump don't see office,” he said. “People who are running for office around the country that are supporters of Donald Trump and toting a MAGA endorsement, I want to get them out of office. That’s what accountability for Jan. 6 looks like to me now.”

Georgia Gov. Brian Kemp has set a March 10 special election to replace former Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene.

The announcement comes a day after Greene's final day in Congress. The once diehard MAGA Republican announced her resignation in November following her spat with President Donald Trump.

Around two dozen people are already vying to represent Georgia's 14th district, which is solidly Republican. Candidates include District Attorney Clayton Fuller and state Sen. Colton Moore.

via Associated Press

Rep. Rose DeLauro (D-Conn.) spoke at Tuesday's hearing commemorating the Jan. 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol and relived the horrors she and so many other lawmakers experienced that day.

At one point, she heard gunshots and then heard Capitol Police tell her and other lawmakers with her to “hit the floor.”

“Which we all did. And Rep. Jason Crowe told us to take off our pins, take off any form of identification. We held hands going around that Capitol gallery. I had my phone and I was afraid to call my husband because I recalled 9/11 when people made that last phone calls to their loved ones. But I did call… I said they’re going to get us out of there. And the Capitol police did get us out of there,” she said.

When police gathered the lawmakers and then opened a door to evacuate them, she recalled seeing “insurrectionists lying on the ground” as Capitol Police held guns over them.

“They hurried us down the steps. I wanted them to get my staff member and they said, no ma'am, we can't do that,” DeLauro said.

Her staffer, she said, took months to get over the trauma and terror and return to the Capitol.

“We faced hell on Jan. 6 and despite overwhelming violence, they protected our democracy and saved our Capitol,” she said.

Icelandic singer Björk has weighed into the controversy over Trump's threat to annex Greenland by lending her support to the island's “fight for independence.”

In a social media post Monday, the "It's Oh So Quiet" performer urged Greenlanders to break free from the Kingdom of Denmark just as her native country did in 1944.

Greenland has been a semi-autonomous Danish territory since the 1950s.

While the former The Sugarcubes frontwoman did not mention Trump's recent allusions to bringing Greenland into U.S. control, her comments appear timed as a response to the takeover talk.

The entertainer, who was born Björk Guðmundsdóttir, wrote that “colonialism has repeatedly given me horror chills up my back, and the chance that my fellow Greenlanders might go from one cruel colonizer to another is too brutal to even imagine."

via Associated Press

Rep. Madeleine Dean (D-Pa.) asked former Rep. Adam Kinzinger (R-Ill.)— who isn’t in Congress anymore — what it would take for his fellow Republicans to finally “part company with this man of lies and corruption," Donald Trump?

A candid Kinzinger said he believed what kept so many in his party clinging to Trump’s patently obvious lies about the insurrection was their desire to protect their own power.

“When you’ve invested so much of yourself in helping to advance the lie, you now take ownership of it, if you have to admit that’s what it is,” he said.

The only Republicans now left in Congress, he said, are those “willing to bow down and offer everything to the Great Donald Trump.”

“It ends in three years,” Kinzinger said. “Power is the one thing that can wake them up and they're going to lose it and it’s going to be a bad day for them when they do.”

Rep. Dean emphasized that Trump “invited the mob, incited the mob and then exploited the mob” and expressed a still-intense incredulity at Trump’s failure to call for help for 187 minutes on Jan. 6.

“Are you kidding me?” she exclaimed. “Could you imagine a president waiting five minutes when his vice president and members of the House and Senate are under such an attack?”

“We’re going to face the same problem again,” she added.

via Associated Press

Former Rep. Adam Kinzinger, (R-Ill.), a former Jan. 6 committee member, returned to Washington Tuesday to remember the attack on the Capitol and urged Americans to push back against the “alternate reality of conspiracies” Trump continues to promote about the insurrection.

“Trump decided America’s legacy of a peaceful transfer of power was beneath him. He aimed to destroy America’s self-determination,” Kinzinger said.

And today, Trump and his supporters continue to weave that tapestry of lies, promoting debunked theories for their own gain.

“They say police opened doors for rioters when video shows officers were being attacked and run down with rioters literally stepping over injured officers to get inside,” he said.

Trump and his allies claim Jan. 6 was “unpredictable,” but Kinzinger said the evidence bore out the facts of the day.

“Trump sent rioters to the Capitol on Jan. 6 and extremist groups planned their attacks for weeks beforehand,” he said. “It was groups like the Proud Boys and Oath Keepers who started the violence.”

Indeed, juries convicted multiple members of the groups of seditious conspiracy, finding Proud Boy leader Henry Tarrio and Oath Keeper head Elmer Stewart Rhodes guilty of the most serious charge to emerge from the Justice Department’s Jan. 6 probe.

Trump “threw gas on the fire” on Jan. 6 and does it still today, but the former Republican lawmaker said he believes the revisionism will stop and that it’s only a matter of time.

“We may have another few years to battle this misinformation but I guarantee you my kid and his kid and his grandkid will know the truth of what happened that day,” Kinzinger said.

via Associated Press

President Donald Trump continues to lie about the results of the 2020 election and still promotes long-debunked conspiracy theories about the Jan. 6 riots being incited by FBI agents or “antifa.” In the five years since, he has shown no remorse for his actions nor any change in his position, facts and evidence be damned.

But the truth about that day hasn’t changed, either, Rep. Zoe Lofgren (D-Calif.), a former Jan. 6 committee member, said during a meeting marking the bleak anniversary on Tuesday.

“We must see Jan. 6 for what it is: an illegal effort to overturn the Constitution so Trump could have unlimited power,” Lofgren said.

“It was a goal of the mob and Trump… It’s a miracle the vice president and no member of Congress were hurt or killed that day. The same can’t be said of the police officers who defended the Capitol on Jan. 6. The pain of this day has surely not faded for them in the last five years,” Lofgren said.

NASCAR commissioner Steve Phelps announced his resignation on Tuesday after more than 20 years working for the top racing company in the U.S.

Phelps' resignation follows a federal antitrust trial in December, during which text messages revealed his negative thoughts about other top leaders in the company.

In one text, Phelps called Hall of Fame team owner Richard Childress "a stupid redneck" who "needs to be taken out back and flogged."

Phelps said in a statement that he has "immense pride" in his work at NASCAR.

"As a lifelong race fan, it gives me immense pride to have served as NASCAR's first Commissioner and to lead our great sport through so many incredible challenges, opportunities and firsts over my 20 years," Phelps said. "Our sport is built on the passion of our fans, the dedication of our teams and partners, and the commitment of our wonderful employees."

George Conway, the attorney and ex-husband of Kellyanne Conway who because famous as a pundit vociferously opposed to the president his then-wife worked for, is running for Congress in New York's 12th District.

Conway's criticisms of President Donald Trump, who Kellyanne Conway worked for as a top White House aide and 2016 campaign manger, ultimately led him to help found the Lincoln Project, a group of Never-Trump conservatives. (The Conways finalized their divorce in 2023.)

Conway's launch video highlights much of the work he's done to combat Trump, including advising E. Jean Carroll, the writer who successfully sued the president for defamation.

"He doesn't like me," Conway says in the video, referring to Trump. "I don't like what he's done to our great country."

Conway only moved to the staunchly liberal 12th District, which includes much of midtown Manhattan, in recent weeks in order to launch his campaign. He had lived there earlier in his life, but has lived in suburban Washington for the past decade. He decided to run following a friend's encouragement late last year, he told the New York Times.

“I got off the phone and I immediately Googled the 12th Congressional District of New York,” he said. “And I’m thinking, this is my home, I made my career here. I know these people. I know what they think. I know what they think of Trump.”

The seat is open due to the retirement of longtime Rep. Jerry Nadler and has attracted a slew of high-profile candidates, including a Kennedy family scion.

via Associated Press

Mary McCord, an extremism expert and executive director for the Institute for Constitutional Advocacy and Protection, told members of Congress marking the fifth anniversary of the attack on the U.S. Capitol that Trump’s Jan. 6 pardons and revisionist history pose a profound danger to the future safety of America.

“People can think rationally that if what they do is at the behest of someone like Donald Trump, who has power to absolve them from wrongs they commit, then there is an incentive to commit those wrongs. We’re in a dangerous place right now where he has three more years left on his term and is talking about another term, in violation of the Constitution… These are the seeds of a narrative that could prompt violence,” she said.

While McCord said she doesn’t think the Capitol could be attacked in exactly the same way it was five years ago, “that doesn't mean there won't be similar acts of violence elsewhere.”

Brendan Ballou, a former DOJ lawyer who prosecuted Jan. 6 rioters, said immediately after Trump handed out pardons en masse, he watched rioters become emboldened, including openly proclaiming online how they would buy guns or seek vengeance.

“It's clear what the effect of being told that the law doesn't apply to them is,” Ballou said.

Nearly an hour into an incoherent, rambling speech by President Donald Trump on Tuesday, he assured his audience he was simply doing his famous "weave."

"Let me just finish up, because I weave, I love to weave," Trump said during remarks at the Kennedy Center. "If you ever weave and don’t come back to the point, then that’s a problem. But when you weave and ... always coming back, then you’re in good shape."

Trump has previously bragged about his inability to stay on topic. During a rally in 2024, Trump bragged that "English professors" complimented him on his "weave."

"You know, I do the weave," Trump said at the time." You know what the weave is? I’ll talk about like nine different things, and they all come back brilliantly together and it’s like, and friends of mine that are, like, English professors, they say, ‘It’s the most brilliant thing I’ve ever seen.’ But the fake news, you know what they say? ‘He rambled."

He rambled.

The Atlantic's Shane Harris, Isaac Stanley-Becker, and Jonathan Lemire spoke with Danish officials who predicted how U.S. President Donald Trump could orchestrate a takeover of Greenland.

Read more at The Atlantic:

Progressive oysterman Graham Platner's campaign to challenge Sen. Susan Collins (R-Maine) said he raised $4.7 million in the final three months of 2025, a sign he continued to generate enthusiasm even as stories broke about a Nazi-linked tattoo and ill-advised social media posts.

His campaign did not release a cash on hand number, though he ended September with $2.2 million in the bank, according to Federal Election Commission records.

Axios first reported the fundraising numbers.

Platner is running against Maine Gov. Janet Mills in the Democratic primary for the right to challenge Collins in November. Mills and Collins have yet to release their fourth-quarter fundraising numbers.

via Associated Press

Once known as “MAGA Granny,” Pam Hemphill, a Jan. 6 rioter convicted of a misdemeanor who refused a pardon from President Donald Trump, returned on the fifth anniversary of the attack on the U.S. Capitol with a message.

“Once I got away from the MAGA cult and started educating myself about Jan. 6, I knew what I did was wrong. I pleaded guilty to my crimes because I did the crime. I received due process, and the DOJ was not weaponized against me,” she said.

When Trump pardoned her, she rejected it because “accepting that pardon would be lying about what happened on Jan. 6,” she said.

“I am guilty. And I own that guilt,” she added.

Five years ago, she traveled from Idaho to Washington, D.C., to see Trump speak.

“I had fallen for the president’s lies, just like many of his supporters. Local people had welcomed me into the circle when I was around them. I heard them saying things like the Democrats are trying to turn this into a communist country or the radical left wants to do away with our Constitution. The gaslighting caused a lot of fear, and I was scared,” she said.

“With that fear in my heart, I came here on Jan. 6 and went from Trump's speech to the Capitol because I thought Mr. Trump would go to the Capitol with us. I heard people saying Trump was going to walk down to the Capitol, so I went. As you know, Donald Trump never showed. But the rioters did. And the attack began."

Holding back tears, she said, the police officers “were the heroes” that day and no one could “gaslight” her into believing otherwise.

“They protected the Capitol and everyone inside the Capitol. And even people like me. I was trampled on by the rioters. And if it weren't for the Capitol police helping me that day, I might have died. To the Capitol Police officers sitting here, if I may address you for a minute, I am truly sorry from the bottom of my heart. For being part of the mob that put you and so many officers in danger," she said.