A federal judge allowed President Donald Trump’s administration to move forward with restructuring the United States Agency for International Development, marking a key early test of his authority to reduce parts of the federal government. United States District Judge Carl Nichols, who was appointed by President Donald Trump, rejected a request from unions representing USAID employees to indefinitely block the administration’s plan to dismantle the agency. In newly filed court documents, Nichols threw out the temporary restraining order that paused Trump’s order that 2,200 USAID employees be put on administrative leave, as the opinion concludes that there is not enough evidence that the agency is being disbanded to justify an extension. The ruling means the White House can press ahead with restructuring the nation’s main foreign development agency, even as lawmakers and union leaders express concerns over stalled or canceled programs. At the same time, supporters argue this approach is necessary to curb excess government spending. Attorneys representing unions for USAID employees argued that key programs have been halted and numerous employees placed on administrative leave, contending that such moves undermine the agency’s day-to-day foreign development functions. Judge Nichols, however, determined that the unions had not met the standard for proving irreparable harm sufficient to block the administration’s plans. “At present, the agency is still standing,” he wrote. PRESIDENTS’ DAY SALE! 40% Off DailyWire+ Annual Memberships With Code DW40 The court’s memorandum also indicated that claims regarding changed work conditions must be addressed through agency-specific grievance procedures rather than through broad lawsuits in federal court. Meanwhile, administration representatives have defended the course of action as a thorough review of current programming and expenditures. Internal memoranda described intentions to suspend or modify activities that the White House believes do not align with broader strategic goals. Executive branch officials insisted that employees affected by administrative leave are still receiving compensation and vital logistical support, especially those based overseas who opt to remain in foreign posts. The unions are expected to appeal the decision, prolonging the dispute over whether the White House exceeded its authority in curbing the agency’s operations. In the meantime, USAID’s leadership has indicated it will continue to implement the restructuring effort in phases, aiming to complete evaluations of major assistance programs before deciding which ones may be reinstated, revised, or ended altogether.

Daily Wire host Michael Knowles defended President Donald Trump on Thursday as the legacy media fumes over the president’s quotation of Napoleon Bonaparte and his social media post that appeared to refer to himself as a king. Knowles appeared on PBS Newshour to discuss a range of political topics with host Amna Nawaz. A main issue Nawaz brought up was Trump’s social media post last week when he wrote, “He who saves his Country does not violate any Law,” a quote attributed to Napoleon. Days later, the president celebrated his administration’s move to end New York City’s congestion prices, writing, “LONG LIVE THE KING!” The White House reposted Trump’s quote alongside an image of Trump wearing a crown. “Does that worry you, that kind of language?” asked Nawaz. “Do you want to see a king-like president?” “It doesn’t worry me at all,” Knowles replied. “To make a comparison with Napoleon, I think there’s a little wink and a nod here from Trump. He makes plenty of jokes.” The Daily Wire host added, “But this line from Napoleon, which is a re-articulation of Cicero and John Locke — two very important thinkers for the founders and framers — this just gets to a basic point about the country, that in times of great national crisis and distress, extraordinary measures can be taken. You saw this with Abraham Lincoln, you saw this with Franklin Roosevelt, you’ve seen this with plenty of American presidents.” I’m disappointed that PBS cut my answer, in which I quoted Cicero’s De Legibus in Latin, but otherwise honored to have been invited on the show! https://t.co/BkMgjwZGmn — Michael Knowles (@michaeljknowles) February 21, 2025 Later in the interview, the PBS Newshour host asked Knowles if he’s worried about the future of the GOP, saying that Trump appears to “push out anyone who disagrees” with him. “Trump is the unifying figure right now, there’s no question about it,” Knowles said. “To say that people are kicked out of the party when they disagree with Trump makes it sound like the party is shrinking,” he added. “But what we saw in 2024 is actually the party is growing. It’s just taking in new people and it’s losing some of the figures who have been members in the past like Liz Cheney or Adam Kinzinger, those kinds of figures.” PRESIDENTS’ DAY SALE! 40% Off DailyWire+ Annual Memberships With Code DW40 Knowles said that Trump “is the singular figure” of the GOP. Asked if the Republican Party can hold without him, Knowles acknowledged, “That remains to be seen.” “I don’t think there’s really any going back to Bushism, and if anyone can pick up the standard of Trumpism afterwards, we’ll have to wait and see,” he said. “But the Republican Party is a different and stronger thing now because of Donald Trump.”

The Red Cross was given the alleged body of Shiri Bibas, according to Hamas officials and Israel, the Jerusalem Post reported. The second handover comes after Hamas gave Israel a Gazan woman’s body on Thursday, claiming it was Bibas. In a statement, the Israeli Defense Forces said that representatives have been in contact with the Bibas family. The body is expected to be escorted to the Forensic Medicine Institute to undergo an identification process. The quiet handoff stands in contrast to Hamas’s public propaganda spectacle on Thursday, when the terror group paraded the unidentified body along with the corpses Kfir Bibas, Ariel Bibas, and Oded Lifshitz on stage in front of cheering crowds. Hamas said the situation with the first body was due “error or mix-up in the bodies which may have resulted from the occupation’s targeting and bombing of the location where the family was present along with other Palestinians.” The remains of Kfir and Ariel Bibas were confirmed by Israeli officials who said a forensic assessment shows terrorists killed the young boys “with their bare hands.” Kfir was nine-months-old when he was kidnapped, and Ariel was four. In a statement, Spokesperson Rear Admiral Daniel Hagari said Hamas’ claims that the brothers were killed in an IDF airstrike are false. “Ariel and Kfir Bibas were murdered by terrorists in cold blood,” Hagari said. “The terrorists did not shoot the two young boys—they killed them with their bare hands.” He added that the terrorists “committed horrific acts to cover up these atrocities.” According to the IDF, Hamas attempted to make the bodies appear as if an airstrike had killed them. Hagari cited the forensic findings and intelligence to support his assessment. The IDF concluded from intelligence and from the forensic findings that Ariel and Kfir were brutally murdered in captivity in November 2023. Hagari said the findings were shared with Israel’s global allies so “the entire world will know exactly how the Hamas terrorist organization operates.” “The abduction and murder in captivity of Oded, Ariel, and baby Kfir, all innocent civilians, are crimes against humanity,” Hagari said. “The whole world must condemn these barbaric acts of terror. We demand that Hamas release Shiri in accordance with the agreement.” The Lifshitz family received final confirmation that Oded’s body had been identified only hours after he arrived for identification. “503 agonizing days of uncertainty have come to an end,” the family said in a statement. “We had hoped and prayed so much for a different outcome. Now we can mourn the husband, father, grandfather, and great-grandfather who has been missing from us since October 7. Our family’s healing process will begin now and will not end until the last hostage is returned.” The news of the death of Ariel and Kfir has sparked international outrage and brought the total number of children from Israel who have died in the fallout of the October 7 attacks to 55.

'DEI would’ve ruined our country — and now it’s DEAD'

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Americans who believe the Fourth Amendment protects them from warrantless government searches may be surprised to learn that this protection only applies to about 4% of privately owned land in the United States. A 1924 ruling by the Supreme Court in Hester v. United States established what is known as the “Open Fields Doctrine,” which states that Constitutional protections regarding real estate only apply to a person’s home and “curtilage” (meaning a yard or garden), but did not apply to “open fields” (meaning any other property a person owns). In 2024, the nonprofit Institute for Justice conducted a study to determine how much of Americans’ private land fell into the “open fields” category that government could search without a warrant.  The answer, it found, was 96%. “The ‘Open Fields Doctrine’ blows a massive hole in Fourth Amendment protections for Americans,” Joshua Windham, an Institute for Justice senior attorney, told The Daily Signal. “What that means is that the government can enter and roam around and surveil all of the property entirely without Constitutional limits, and that presents a grave threat to our most basic Fourth Amendment rights–our right to be secure in our property, our right to privacy from unreasonable government intrusion.” This is not simply a question of legal theory, he said, it affects “everyday Americans who are going about their lives, running farms, walking nature trails on their properties, camping on their properties, doing all sorts of things that Americans across the country do every day on their private land, and all of that is subject, not just to government intrusion, but unlimited government intrusion.” One case involves Tom Manuel, who owns timberland in East Feliciana Parish, Louisiana, and says he was hunting on his property in 2023 when a game warden approached him, looking for violations. “I asked him if he’d wait for me at the [roadside] gate, and he didn’t want to do that,” Manuel said. “He said that would make their job harder and they’d never catch anybody.” The official asked Manuel to hand over his rifle, which he refused. He was questioned but no charges were filed and no citation was issued. Weeks later two state game wardens entered and searched his property again. “I told them a good bit about private lands, about getting warrants, but that kind of fell on deaf ears,” Manuel said. “None of them particularly liked having their authority questioned.” Represented by Institute for Justice attorneys, Manuel brought suit in Louisiana courts, where state law offers more protection for private land than federal law–at least regarding what state officials can do without a warrant. In addition, the Institute for Justice currently has cases moving through the courts in Pennsylvania, Louisiana, and Virginia, but these cases also only apply to state agencies. Federal agents continue to have free rein on private lands due to the ruling in Hester and subsequent Supreme Court decisions that reaffirmed it. The Supreme Court decisions focus on the specific items listed as protected under the Fourth Amendment. These include “persons, houses, papers, and effects,” for which court warrants and probable cause of a crime are required for government searches to occur. “The Supreme Court has always looked at that phrasing and said, ‘Well, land is not a person; land is not a house; land is not a paper; land is not an effect,’” Windham said. For this reason, many states, like Tennessee, have replaced the word “effects” with “possessions” in their state constitutions, to also protect land from warrantless searches. The Institute for Justice won a case in Tennessee last year against state wildlife officials putting surveillance cameras on private land without probable cause. Windham argues that America’s Founders always intended for land to be protected under the Fourth Amendment. “When the country was founded, it was illegal for any individual to trespass on closed private land, which is private land that is marked or fenced so as to exclude intruders,” he said. “That was true of government officials as well, and the only way that government officials could indemnify themselves against trespass liability was to have a valid warrant to enter the property.” The Institute for Justice calculated that the percentage of private land considered “open fields” and subject to warrantless searches was about 1.2 billion acres across the United States. Using sophisticated mapping software, the Institute for Justice analyzed the number of acres of land in each state that is privately owned and not in the immediate “curtilage” of a home or building. “We made very conservative assumptions and just assumed that 100 feet in every direction from every building in that data set would be afforded protection from warrantless searches,” David Warren, who conducted the analysis for the nonprofit public interest law firm, told The Daily Signal. “That’s where we came up with the figure that just 4% of private land is afforded these protections.” Because what the government deems curtilage might not actually extend that far from homes, he said, the amount of land protected from government surveillance is likely less than 4%. Beyond the physical possessions that courts have decided are not protected by the Fourth Amendment, Americans’ personal data have also been ruled to be outside the scope of constitutional protection. In addition to the “Open Fields Doctrine,” another Supreme Court decision spawned the “Third Party Doctrine,” which ruled that when Americans share information with a third party such as a bank, they surrender their Constitutional right to privacy from warrantless government searches. Under the Third Party Doctrine, “the government has essentially unfettered access to all your financial information that is shared with your bank and your other financial services providers,” Jennifer Schulp, director of financial regulation studies at the Cato Institute, told The Daily Signal. The 1970 Bank Secrecy Act and subsequent financial surveillance laws effectively eliminated Americans’ rights against warrantless searches of their bank accounts by requiring banks to routinely report to a Treasury Department agency called FinCEN any transactions over $10,000 or any other activity they deem “suspicious.” These laws were challenged for violating the Fourth Amendment, but the Supreme Court upheld the Bank Secrecy Act in 1976 in the case of United States v. Miller, which established the Third Party Doctrine as precedent. Initially enacted to fight money laundering and detect particularly large money transfers, the Bank Secrecy Act now tracks fairly routine financial activity by everyday Americans. A 2023 study by Thomson Reuters reported that banks delivered more than 3.6 million “Suspicious Activity Reports” to the government in 2022 under the Bank Secrecy Act. Americans who are among these millions would not know it, however, because federal regulations prohibit banks from informing customers that their information has been handed over to the government. Those who advocate for allowing law enforcement to search without warrants say the cumbersome process of showing probable cause and getting court approvals impedes their ability to fight crime and makes Americans less safe. But critics of this point of view argue that the Fourth Amendment strikes a proper compromise between fighting crime and protecting citizens from “unreasonable searches and seizures.” “Law enforcement is an important interest, but so is protection of peoples’ information from the government, and the Fourth Amendment balances that by requiring law enforcement to have a warrant in order to access that information,” Schulp said. “That’s how the framers determined we would be protected from crime.” More recently, courts are beginning to show more support for the Fourth Amendment. In 2018, the Supreme Court ruled in Carpenter v. United States that the government should not have unfettered access to Americans’ cell phone activity. Despite the courts’ view that handing over personal data to a third party is voluntary and therefore not entitled to Fourth Amendment protections, many legal experts are now coming around to the realization that it is virtually impossible to function in modern society without sharing personal information with a bank, a stock broker, a phone company, a credit card company, an internet service provider, or any number of apps, Schulp said. In his opinion on the Carpenter case, Justice Neil Gorsuch wrote that “the use of technology is functionally compelled by the demands of modern life,” and  “just because you haveto entrust a third party with your data doesn’t necessarily mean that you should lose all Fourth Amendment protections in it.” This potential reevaluation of Fourth Amendment decisions comes at a time when government officials are increasingly intent on surveilling ever more aspects of peoples’ private lives. In addition to government’s warrantless surveillance of Americans’ banking activity under the Bank Secrecy Act, the Securities and Exchange Commission in 2023 ordered stock brokerages to hand over “every order, cancellation, modification and trade execution for all exchange-listed equities and options across all U.S. markets,” allowing it to collect data on Americans’ stock investments. In 2024, credit card companies Visa, Mastercard, and American Express jointly agreed to track firearm and ammunition purchases and report them to law enforcement, in order to comply with a newly enacted California law. Previously the card companies had announced they would do so nationwide, but paused the effort when numerous Republican-led state legislatures banned it. In addition, federal intelligence agencies were recently found to be buying Americans’ private online data from data brokers–companies that comb the internet and assemble databases on peoples’ online activity. “This data also finds its way into exhaustive dossiers, compiled by data brokers, that reveal the most intimate details of our lives: our movements, habits, associations, health conditions, and ideologies,” Emile Ayoub and Elizabeth Goitein, attorneys with New York University’s Brennan Center for Justice, stated in a 2024 report. Asked why the government should be so fixated on gathering information on its citizens’ most intimate activities, Windham said, “I think it probably goes back to the old adage of knowledge is power; the more the government knows about us, the more power it has over us.” The post Precious Little Remains of Americans’ Fourth Amendment Protections, Studies Find appeared first on The Daily Signal.

There was a time, not all that long ago, that CBS’ “60 Minutes” was widely regarded as the gold standard of broadcast journalism. Regrettably, not so much anymore. With the luxury of being able to do long-form, in-depth reporting, rather than the typical mainstream media hit-and-run headline-and-sound bite journalism, “60 Minutes” could and did present thorough, thoughtful, and evenhanded reports on controversial topics. It still does from time to time, notably just two months ago on Dec. 15, when it aired a pair of riveting reports: One about life in post-Assad Syria, now that it’s no longer under the boot of deposed dictator Bashar Assad; the other exposing how artificial intelligence-powered dark-web sites are enabling the deepfake “pornification” of photos of teenage girls. Those reports represent what journalism could be—and should be. But in the past several years, “60 Minutes” has all-too-often aired reports with a left-wing bias nearly indistinguishable from what you would find on MSNBC. This past Sunday night, for example, correspondent Scott Pelley narrated a 13-minute segment, titled “28 Days,” about the first four weeks of President Donald Trump’s second term. The show’s opening tease—with its trademark stopwatch ticking, in this case almost as if it was a time bomb—previewed the ominous tone of the report this way: “It’s too soon to tell how serious President [Donald] Trump is in defiance of the Constitution, but in just 28 days, he’s reinterpreted the 14th Amendment and closed agencies that Congress mandated by law.” It was all downhill from there, beginning with two federal contractors lamenting how they had been dismissed with little notice from their jobs at the U.S. Agency for International Development. USAID was the first federal department to be targeted for downsizing and ridding of waste by Trump and Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency. But Pelley devoted not so much as a single word to the widely publicized list of USAID programs that have squandered hundreds of millions of dollars on wasteful and fraudulent programs abroad, many of them promoting radical DEI and LGBTQ+ agendas. He then doubled down by letting leftist Georgetown law professor Steve Vladeck dismiss what he called Trump and Musk’s “claims of fraud” to be just “fig leafs” to mask a power grab on their part. Pelley, a former “CBS Evening News” anchor also failed to identify one of the two distraught, dismissed USAID consultants he interviewed as Kristina Drye. Drye was a speechwriter for President Joe Biden’s USAID chief, Samantha Power—hardly an objective source. “Twelve days ago, people knew where their next paycheck was coming from. They knew how they were going to pay for their kids' daycare, their medical bills. And then, all gone overnight,” says Kristina Drye, who was fired in the USAID shutdown. https://t.co/cysOqteb8p pic.twitter.com/bUcOAnhMjs— 60 Minutes (@60Minutes) February 17, 2025 Both were examples of blatant bias by omission. It was clear that the “60 Minutes” producers and CBS had learned nothing from the lawsuit filed against them in late October by Trump, who sued over the program’s deceptive editing of its preelection interview of then-Vice President Kamala Harris. Required by the Federal Communications Commission to release an unedited transcript and the raw footage of the Oct. 7 interview after Trump’s complaint, it was revealed it had been edited in such a way as to make Harris’ answers to correspondent Bill Whitaker’s questions sound more concise and coherent than they actually were. Trump has sued CBS for $20 billion, accusing it of “partisan and unlawful acts of election and voter interference” intended to “mislead the public and attempt to tip the scales” of the Nov. 5 presidential election in Harris’ favor—albeit unsuccessfully. All of that called to mind a masterstroke move by Trump four years earlier, when on Oct. 22, 2020, he released on Facebook his own 37-minute videotaped version of a highly contentious “60 Minutes” preelection interview ahead of its network airing three days later. That presumably was intended to preempt any chance of correspondent Lesley Stahl excerpting and presenting questions and answers out of context to make him look bad. And that was hot on the heels of Stahl’s “60 Minutes” report two weeks earlier on Oct. 11, 2020, “Inside the Lincoln Project’s Campaign Against President Trump,” which portrayed the rabidly anti-Trump group of Republican-in-Name-Only (RINO) grifters in the most favorable light possible. CBS should have been required to file a report with the Federal Election Commission for what amounted to an in-kind contribution to Joe Biden’s campaign a little more than three weeks before the presidential election. Then, on Nov. 8, 2020, just five days after Biden’s election, Whitaker’s report dismissive of Republican charges of voter fraud in Philadelphia was shameless in its one-sidedness and anti-Trump bias. The liberal, pro-Democrat slant of “60 Minutes” has not been directed solely at Trump, however. On April 5, 2021, correspondent Sharyn Alfonsi presented a hit piece on Republican Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, pointedly accusing him of a “pay for play” campaign contribution scheme involving state COVID-19 vaccination contracts. The report was deceptively edited to omit almost all of DeSantis’ lengthy, detailed explanation at a news conference attended by Alfonsi, in which he thoroughly refuted the specifics of her accusation. That detailed explanation wound up on the cutting-room floor at “60 Minutes,” but conservative podcaster Dave Rubin used video footage from The Florida Channel, which had carried the news conference live, to show how egregiously misleading Alfonsi’s report was. It was another case of bias by omission. Alfonsi’s attempted takedown of DeSantis contrasted sharply with a 12-and-a-half-minute glowing puff-piece profile of Sen. Angus King of Maine by correspondent Jon Wertheim that aired three months earlier on Jan. 10, 2021. King, now in his third term, claims to be an independent, but caucuses with Democrats and votes almost invariably in lockstep with the ultraliberal Democratic Party line, as I documented in great detail in this space on Feb. 5. Nor is the liberal bias of “60 Minutes” limited to politicians it favors or disfavors. Pelley’s Jan. 2, 2023, report on global warming (aka climate change) was apocalyptic in its hand-wringing. But he made no mention at all of the innumerable times the climate alarmists have been completely wrong in their prior doomsday predictions dating back to 1967, as Zerohedge.com painstakingly detailed in a report just two days earlier on Dec. 31, 2022: “2022, Same Sh**, Different Year: 55 Years of Failed Eco-pocalyptic Predictions.” There are several other examples of the liberal bias of “60 Minutes” that I could have included here, but won’t, mostly for fear of belaboring the point. But we shouldn’t fail to mention then-correspondent Steve Kroft’s Dec. 11, 2011, softball interview with then-President Barack Obama. It was Kroft’s seventh “60 Minutes” interview of the liberal Illinois Democrat in less than three years, and the program’s (at least) 11th since Obama first emerged on the national political scene in 2004. No other president has enjoyed that kind of “man crush” from Kroft or “60 Minutes” in its 57 seasons on the air. It’s regrettable that “60 Minutes,” once the gold standard of broadcast news, has become liberal fool’s gold. The public’s trust in the legacy media as a whole has cratered, with an October 2024 Gallup poll showing just 31% of respondents expressing a “great deal” or “fair amount” of confidence in the media to report the news “fully, accurately, and fairly.” Some 36% of U.S. adults have no trust at all in the media, and 33% of Americans expressed “not very much” confidence. As a result, more people than ever are getting their news from other sources, and that’s due in no small part to “60 Minutes.” Originally published at The Washington Times The post The One-Sidedness of ‘60 Minutes’: Liberal Bias Taints What Once Was Gold Standard of Broadcast Journalism appeared first on The Daily Signal.