The U.S. Secret Service said Monday it is investigating an officer-involved shooting near the White House. The shooting occurred at 15th Street and Independence Avenue in Washington, D.C., which is about one mile from the White House. “One individual was shot by law enforcement; their condition is currently unknown,” a Secret Service spokesperson said in a statement. The incident resulted from a confrontation between an armed individual and Secret Service Police. Metropolitan Police said the scene of the shooting was secure, but urged people to avoid the area due to road closures. UPDATE: 1 person shot by law enforcement near the White House. Circumstances still unclear. pic.twitter.com/rdWhudrwFM — BNO News (@BNONews) May 4, 2026 President Trump was giving remarks at a small business summit in the East Room of the White House at the time. Secret Service agents evacuated reporters from their camera positions on the north lawn and gathered them in the briefing room. U.S. Secret Service just evacuated us from our camera position at the White House north lawn. We’re now gathering in the briefing room. No indication as to what’s going on pic.twitter.com/G49ZVayIHx — Megan Cassella (@mmcassella) May 4, 2026

WASHINGTON—Secretary of State Marco Rubio will head to Rome this week to smooth things over with the Vatican amidst tensions between the United States and Pope Leo over the Holy Father’s criticisms of Operation Epic Fury. Rubio’s visit to Italy will take place from Wednesday, May 6, to Friday, May 8, and is formally intended to “advance bilateral relations with Italy and the Vatican,” the State Department said on Monday, noting that Rubio will “meet with Holy See leadership to discuss the situation in the Middle East and mutual interests in the Western Hemisphere.” The Holy See says Rubio will meet privately with Pope Leo, who is the first pope from the United States. He will also meet with Pietro Parolin, the Vatican’s secretary of state. The meeting comes amid high tensions between the White House and Pope Leo, who has repeatedly criticized President Donald Trump’s administration. The president has aggressively hit back at the pope, even suggesting that the Vatican chose him as a response to Trump’s presidency — and that “they thought that would be the best way to deal with President Donald J. Trump.” “If I wasn’t in the White House, Leo wouldn’t be in the Vatican,” the president said in a fiery Truth Social post. Trump’s sentiment that Pope Leo was chosen to meet the second Trump administration, though generally considered to have been articulated too aggressively towards the head of the Catholic Church, is also widely held to be true. The most recent bump in the road came in the form of Pope Leo’s appointment of a bishop to West Virginia: that bishop, according to the Washington Post, was illegally smuggled into the United States in the trunk of a car and has been vocal in his criticisms of the Trump administration’s immigration policies. Things took a more hopeful turn of events when the pope downplayed reporter suggestions that he was warring with Trump, saying in late April that the “narrative that has not been accurate in all of its aspects” and that it was “not in my interest at all” to argue with Trump. Vice President Vance took another step towards reconciliation with a social media post that praised the pope for his words: “I am grateful to Pope Leo for saying this. While the media narrative constantly gins up conflict — and yes, real disagreements have happened and will happen — the reality is often much more complicated.” “Pope Leo preaches the gospel, as he should, and that will inevitably mean he offers his opinions on the moral issues of the day,” Vance added. “The President — and the entire administration — work to apply those moral principles in a messy world. He will be in our prayers, and I hope that we’ll be in his.” Last May, both Rubio and Vice President JD Vance attended the pope’s inauguration and spoke privately with him. Vance led the delegation to Rome during that trip, on which they also extended an invitation to Pope Leo from President Donald Trump inviting the pope to the White House. This time around, Vance is staying home and is heading out to Iowa on Tuesday to message for the Trump administration. Both Vance and Rubio are practicing Catholics and considered top contenders for the 2028 Republican presidential nomination: Vance is currently leading that field by wide margins, though Rubio has notably gained in popularity and name recognition in recent months. Some critics of the vice president are now arguing, in light of the visit, that Vance is being “sidelined” from the conversations with Pope Leo. Kevin Roberts, president of the Heritage Foundation, doesn’t see it that way. Rubio’s meeting with the pope is just one “productive” step in what will hopefully be the healing of the relationship between the Holy Father and the White House, he suggested. “I think ultimately it needs to be 3 people, but it’s very good that the Secretary of State is going,” he shared in a phone interview with The Daily Wire. Roberts, also a Catholic, stressed that the most important part of the dynamic is that Pope Leo and President Donald Trump meet and spend time together, “especially considering they’re both great leaders and great Americans.” “In the meantime, I think the greatest tag team, for the conservative movement internationally, is Vice President Vance and Secretary Rubio,” he said. “So, no doubt, Rubio will have a great productive congenial visit with the Holy Father, and no doubt, at some point, the vice president will visit the Holy Father again, and no doubt, at some point, the president and Holy Father will visit again.” Tensions escalated in early April when the Free Press published an “exposé” describing a reportedly contentious January meeting between a Vatican diplomat and Pentagon officials. The report, citing unnamed sources, claimed that the Pentagon’s Elbridge Colby summoned Cardinal Christophe Pierre, then the Vatican’s Apostolic Nuncio, chastised him and insisted the United States “has the military power to do whatever it wants — and that the Church had better take its side.” Notably, the story claimed that Colby invoked the Avignon Papacy, a period in the 14th century in which the Holy See moved from Rome to France, where a series of popes were largely bent to the will of the French monarchy. It also cast Colby as belonging to “a cadre of Catholic and ostensibly dovish officials” allied with Vice President JD Vance, who are “struggling to reconcile their isolationist instincts with the aggressive posture of a president who, within a single year, has bombed eight countries — with no sign of stopping.” Allies of the vice president and some conservative commentators took the story as a sign that Vance’s critics sought to ostracize Vance from Catholicism, just war, and Pope Leo himself. The Vatican, the Pentagon, and the American Ambassador to the Holy See all denied the Free Press report, saying it was cordial and respectful. Michael Caputo, a longtime Catholic and advisor to President Donald Trump, reflected that both Vance and Rubio bring a different flavor of Catholicism to the table. Vance, a new convert, brings fresh perspective and evangelical zeal. Rubio was baptized Catholic as a baby, spent a few years in the LDS church in Las Vegas as a child, and returned to the Catholic Church by his early teens. Caputo stumbled on Rubio’s memoir “American Son” during a particularly dark period when he was being targeted by the Biden DOJ, and he was incredibly impressed by Rubio’s reverence for the Catholic sacraments. That one specific chapter of “American Son” “drew me into my faith as Russia gate sucked my family in,” he shared. “Marco and JD are two very different Catholics and Catholicism needs them both,” said Caputo. But he argued that it is “Marco Rubio’s deep and binding understanding of the sacraments and the role they played in connecting people to Christ” that “will make a difference as he comes to the Vatican.” Rubio has cautioned respect for the Vatican, encouraging the public to see the office not as political but as spiritual. “I understand there’s this temptation to cover the papacy as a political office,” Rubio told reporters in May 2025 of the pope. “It is not a political office. It is a spiritual office, and it is one that – it has social teachings that are aligned with the faith and with the gospel.” But he has also been unafraid to point out when the Vatican’s public posture on issues like immigration does not match its own actions. “I don’t mean this to be snarky, but the Vatican has rules about who can come in and who can stay,” he noted that same day. “So every place has that. It’s just — it’s what you do to protect your sovereignty.” Rubio was also formerly the chair of the Senate Foreign Relations Subcommittee on the Western Hemisphere and has spent much of his career focused on that hemisphere — as has Pope Leo. Though the pope is from Chicago, he has been heavily focused on Latin America. That means there is a “common language between the two men,” Caputo stressed, “a deep and abiding concern for the hemisphere,” a granular level of understanding of the region, and it makes Rubio the right guy for Pope Leo to be talking to. The pope has repeatedly condemned the war with Iran, saying in late April aboard a flight back to Rome, “As a pastor, I cannot be in favor of war,” and “I would like to encourage everyone to make efforts to look for answers that come from a culture of peace and not from a place of hate and division.” His previous remarks on the war in Iran prompted President Donald Trump to publicly scold him and accuse him of being “WEAK on Crime, and terrible for Foreign Policy.” “I don’t want a Pope who thinks it’s OK for Iran to have a Nuclear Weapon,” Trump said. “I don’t want a Pope who thinks it’s terrible that America attacked Venezuela, a Country that was sending massive amounts of Drugs into the United States and, even worse, emptying their prisons, including murderers, drug dealers, and killers, into our Country. And I don’t want a Pope who criticizes the President of the United States because I’m doing exactly what I was elected, IN A LANDSLIDE, to do, setting Record Low Numbers in Crime, and creating the Greatest Stock Market in History.” “I have no intention of getting into a debate,” Leo said in response in late April. Catholics in the U.S. are also sensitive to the fact that the pope has said he has no plans to return to the United States to celebrate the country’s 250th anniversary. “He has as much work to do as our friends who are public officials in the United States, in fact, I would strongly encourage him as a Roman Catholic and as an American, to visit the United States, his native country during America 250,” Roberts told The Daily Wire. “A lot of us conservative Catholics are slighted that the 1st American pope doesn’t have any plans to visit us this year.”

Fraud isn’t just happening in the blue cities where you might expect. It’s happening right under the nose of Republican governors. In Ohio, for example, one address was listed for 93 companies — no windows, totally empty — and billed to you, the American taxpayer, for $66 million. Over the last several years, shell companies are fake billing, providing fake services, and covering their tracks until this very instant. Daily Wire has now uncovered, via Luke Rosiak and our investigative team, Medicaid millionaires. In the blockbuster piece, Rosiak points out: Under the guise of health care, Ohio pays people to go to Medicaid beneficiaries’ homes to perform “homemaking” and “chores” like cooking and cleaning. The people performing these “personal services” tasks don’t even have to be health care workers. In 2024, Ohio spent $1 billion on home health care. They literally pay people Medicaid money to go to other people’s houses to perform homemaking and chores. And, as Luke writes, the new welfare queens aren’t the recipients whose low incomes qualify them for poverty programs. They’re the companies getting rich off of them. His overall impression is that 99% of the facilities visited had the hallmarks of waste, fraud, or abuse. We are talking about alleged criminality at a breathtaking scale. An additional characteristic of these fraudulent facilities is that all the windows are covered. Why would you cover all the windows? Because there’s nothing there. According to Luke, what’s inside is 93 different companies signed up to bill Medicaid, each with a tiny office often marked with a sheet of paper proclaiming some generic company name ending in Home Health, LLC, and sometimes another piece of paper claiming the employees had just stepped out for a break. This building, this address, has billed taxpayers over $66 million over the last several years. If you try to track down what exactly is happening at any one of these home health care companies, what you will find is an endless rabbit hole. You’ll find years of unpaid taxes and debts, sometimes criminal records, and an astonishing number of LLCs created in other industries, as if the millions they are making from Medicaid is just a side gig. The government is not, and cannot be, monitoring the people to whom they write million-dollar checks. They all share a combination of just a few names, like Ahmad Mohammed and Mohamed Ahmed. And Columbus, Ohio, has the second-largest Somali population outside Minnesota. They spell their own name multiple different ways within a single document. Many of them have their birthdays listed as January 1 because their birthdates are unknown. Pretty much all of them, according to Rosiak’s reporting, are registered voters. The business model is apparently simple. A 40-year-old Somali gets paid for spending time with, and maybe cooking for, his own 65-year-old mom. The middleman is one of these thousands of home health firms that have an “NPI” number necessary to bill Medicaid, and then the 40-year-old becomes an “employee” of that company. But the only patient is Mom. There’s no way to verify whether he’s providing services unless his mom is willing to rat him out. Maybe he even gives her a portion of the pay as a kickback for allowing her Social Security number to be used. Apparently, all of these home health care companies are owned by foreigners.  When Rosiak asked what home health care companies did, he was threatened. “Journalists? Who cares? Do you guys pay my bills? I’m going to tell everybody you guys are racist.” This is the way the magic works: Defraud our Medicaid systems. Defraud federal taxpayer dollars. And then, when somebody comes knocking on the door, they claim that they are a racist. This poverty program differs from others, such as food stamps, because it doesn’t have a monetary cap. Its extent is not decided by politicians, but by any doctor willing to sign a form saying you could use some help around the home. And one doctor willing to sign and turn out enough of these forms can bankrupt a state. How do we get this information? For decades, Medicaid billing data was a black box. It’s one of the biggest government programs in human history. The public could not see a dime of it.  That changed in February, when the DOJ quietly released data that many people missed. In one case, a landlord who owned buildings with 300 different Medicaid companies billed the federal government $250 million.  For Democrats, this is a feature, not a bug. You’d imagine that there would be Democrats out there who are upset with this kind of fraud. After all, if you’re an advocate for a government program, you should want every dollar of that taxpayer money to go to someone who deserves it. But that’s not what’s happening. Democrats are irritated by the fact that people are uncovering this stuff. The good news for Ohio is its leadership: Republican Governor Mike DeWine is the governor, and Vivek Ramaswamy is very likely to be the next governor. And President Donald Trump is on top of this, and Vice President JD Vance is heading up the waste, fraud, and abuse policing. That is what Americans need. We need accountability. We need prosecutions. We need doors kicked down. We need investigations. Republican governors and federal officials need to fix this, and this is a unique time to do it. The Trump administration has made policing waste, fraud, and abuse possible. This was not going to happen under Democrats.

Vice President JD Vance said Monday that he is directing the Fraud Task Force to investigate fraud uncovered in his home state, thanks to a Daily Wire investigation. Vance addressed the unfolding story in an X post, first saying he wanted the task force to review the evidence and then, if warranted, take action to put an end to the fraud. “These shocking allegations, if true, show why the Fraud Task Force’s work is so important. I’m directing the task force to look into it and take immediate action to prosecute any fraudsters involved and stop all further payments as appropriate,” he posted, sharing a thread from Daily Wire investigative reporter Luke Rosiak detailing the uncovered fraud. These shocking allegations, if true, show why the Fraud Task Force’s work is so important. I’m directing the task force to look into it and take immediate action to prosecute any fraudsters involved and stop all further payments as appropriate. https://t.co/dg9prv9mYz — JD Vance (@JDVance) May 4, 2026 In the thread that followed, Rosiak explained how he had found one building that purported to house 94 “home health” companies — companies that were supposed to provide the kinds of home health services that keep people out of nursing homes, saving on costs. But the potential for fraud and abuse is massive. “This includes people getting paid to provide ‘companionship & conversation’ to their own relatives. Fraud [is] almost impossible to prove because service happens in private houses,” Rosiak noted, adding, “Home health was supposed to save money because it’s cheaper than being in a nursing home. Problem is, no one fakes their way into a nursing home. But lots of people will claim to be sick if they get to stay at home and get free checks for their family.” In the full report, Rosiak wrote: The business model is simple: a 40-year-old Somali immigrant gets paid for spending time with, and maybe cooking for, his own 65-year-old mother. The middleman is one of thousands of “home health” firms that have the “NPI” number necessary to bill Medicaid. The 40-year-old becomes an “employee” of that company, but has no clients other than his mother. There is no way to verify whether he actually even provided the “services” — unless his own mother is willing to testify against him. Rosiak’s investigation, conducted over two months, uncovered additional examples of fraud, and more details are expected to be revealed in the days to come.

A magistrate judge on Monday apologized to the man accused of attempting to assassinate President Donald Trump at the White House Correspondents’ Dinner (WHCD). Judge Zia Faruqui, in a District of Columbia courtroom, grilled jail officials over the conditions Cole Allen, the suspect, has faced behind bars. “I’m sorry,” Faruqui told Allen, who was reportedly held in solitary confinement. “Whatever you’ve been through, I apologize for the prior week,” according to USA Today. Jail officials placed Allen on a temporary suicide watch that required 24-hour-a-day placement in a padded, lighted cell without access to phone calls, books, religious material, or recreational time. The judge called those measures punitive and not based on any known medical assessment, according to Politico. Faruqui, who has overseen January 6 cases, said Allen was being housed in more extreme conditions and treated more severely than those defendants, who were held in a lower restriction part of the jail called the Central Treatment Facility. “The Jan. 6 defendants all were moved to the CTF,” Faruqui said, according to Politico. “Pardons may erase convictions but they do not erase history … He’s being treated differently than anyone I’ve ever observed.” He continued drawing similarities, comparing the January 6 attack at the Capitol to the White House Correspondents’ Dinner shooting. “This is not the jail’s first go around with people engaged in alleged political violence,” Faruqui said, according to USA Today. Monday’s hearing proceeded despite Allen’s lawyers withdrawing their request after learning he was no longer on “suicide status.” Faruqui said he had “grave concerns” about Allen being held in solitary confinement, according to CBS News. At the end of the hearing, Faruqui directed D.C. jail officials to report back by Tuesday morning on whether — and when — Allen would be moved to less restrictive conditions. Before becoming a magistrate judge, Faruqui served as an assistant U.S. attorney from 2008 to 2020, according to his public LinkedIn profile. He earned his bachelor’s and law degrees from Georgetown University. The Georgetown Pakistan Public Policy Conclave and the Muslim Bar Association of New York have pages highlighting Faruqui’s career.  Monday’s hearing is not the first time Faruqui has tussled with the Department of Justice. Seven months ago, he claimed the DOJ had lost credibility under the Trump administration, which provoked a fiery response from U.S. Attorney Jeanine Pirro.  “Judge Faruqui has never really met someone with an illegal gun that he hasn’t felt some compassion for,” Pirro said at the time. “He should do his job as a judge and leave his politics out of it.” Authorities say Cole Thomas Allen, 31, was armed with a shotgun, handgun, and knives when he charged through a security checkpoint inside the Washington Hilton Hotel, where the WHCD was being held. One floor above the ballroom packed with government officials and reporters, Allen discharged one of his weapons, striking a Secret Service agent before falling to the ground.  Allen faces charges of attempting to assassinate the President of the United States, transporting a firearm and ammunition across state lines with intent to commit a felony, and discharging a firearm during a crime of violence. If convicted, he faces life in prison.