Trump’s FBI Just Arrested a Sitting Judge

FBI Director Kash Patel said Friday the agency has arrested a Wisconsin judge for “obstructing an immigration operation.”

Milwaukee Judge Hannah Dugan was arrested on charges of obstruction after she “intentionally misdirected federal agents away” from an immigrant man, Eduardo Flores Ruiz, to prevent his arrest, Patel wrote in a post on X Friday, which he initially deleted before reposting again two hours later.

Patel said FBI agents “chased down the man on foot,” and he is now in custody.

A spokesperson for the U.S. Marshals Service in Washington, D.C., confirmed Dugan’s arrest Friday morning, as did several Milwaukee judges, The Milwaukee Journal Sentinel reported Friday. 

On Tuesday, the Journal Sentinel reported that the FBI was investigating Dugan over whether she tried to help an undocumented immigrant in her courtroom evade arrest. Federal agents reportedly came to the Milwaukee County Courthouse on April 18 with an arrest warrant. 

Their visit occurred the same day that Flores Ruiz, the man Patel accused Dugan of assisting, appeared in her courtroom for a pretrial conference related to three counts of misdemeanor battery, the Journal Sentinel reported.

“When they went to the chief judge’s office, Dugan directed the defendant and his attorney to a side door in the courtroom, directed them down a private hallway and into the public area on the 6th floor,” the report reads.  

The 30-year-old man originally from Mexico is now being detained by ICE at Dodge Detention Facility in Juneau, according to the federal detainee database. His arrest marks at least the third time in recent months that ICE agents have appeared at the courthouse with arrest warrants, according to the Journal Sentinel.

Dugan’s arrest comes as Trump continues his widespread attack on immigration judges, eight of whom have been fired or put on leave in the last week across California, Massachusetts, and Louisiana.

This story has been updated.

Donald Trump has made a new promise to end the Ukraine war by Wednesday.

Trump repeatedly pledged on the campaign trail he’d end the war in Ukraine by the first day he returned to power. But as he fast approaches his 100th day in office, his inability to find a solution has become an increasingly obvious flaw of his presidency.

After a surprise attack on Kyiv killed at least 12 Ukrainians amid collapsing peace deal negotiations late Wednesday, the president reportedly told aides that he wants to resolve the conflict before his 100th day arrives next week, according to CNN.

Rising frustration over the ongoing conflict—and Russian President Vladimir Putin’s and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy’s deep hatred for one another—has flustered Trump.

On Thursday, the president had resorted to begging Putin to stop the violence. At a White House press conference later that day, Trump claimed that Russia had offered major concessions in a possible peace deal. Those concessions, however, amounted to “stopping taking” the entirety of Ukraine. Senior officials in the Trump administration—including the president himself—have also verbally recognized Crimea as a part of Russia, a remarkable reversal of long-standing U.S. policy that made Kremlin propagandists on state-sponsored television laugh at the downfall of American power.

Trump has since tried to backtrack his initial promises over the war. In a 100-day retrospective with Time magazine, Trump claimed that his pledge to end the war “on day one” was little more than a joke.

“Obviously, people know that when I said that, it was said in jest, but it was also said that it will be ended,” Trump told Time.

But when pressed on when the war would finally end, Trump said, “I don’t think it’s long.”

“I mean, look, I got here three months ago,” he continued, again deflecting blame for the conflict onto former President Joe Biden.

“It’s Biden’s war. It’s not my war. I have nothing to do with it. I would have never had this war. This war would have never happened,” Trump said. “Putin would have never done it. This war would have never happened. [October] 6 would have never happened. [October] 7 would have never happened. Would have never happened. Ever. You then say, what’s taking so long? Do you hear this, Steve [Cheung]? The war has been raging for three years. I just got here, and you say, what’s taken so long?”

The walls seem to be closing in on Pete Hegseth.

The defense secretary—who has drawn ire for his Crusader-level white supremacy, his alcoholism, and his rank misogyny—appears to be losing it as his double Signalgate fiasco just got even worse.

The AP reported Thursday that Hegseth wanted to brag about his war plans on Signal so badly that he installed a “dirty” or public internet connection in his private Pentagon office. This allows him to send messages from that connection without using his Defense Department IP address, effectively making him invisible as a user. This public connection usage also makes the highest-ranking defense official in the country much more vulnerable to hacking and spying.

Hegseth is supposed to use either the Nonclassified Internet Protocol Router Network, the Secure Internet Protocol Router Network, or the top secret Joint Worldwide Intelligence Communications System.

Shortly after, The Wall Street Journal published another damning report. Apparently Hegseth has been filled with anxiety and paranoia as turnover in his inner circle increases with each passing scandal. At least five Pentagon employees have been fired or resigned, and Hegseth even wants some of them to be criminally investigated. One staffer described it as a “revolving door” so bad that they weren’t sure who they were actually working with anymore, as Hegseth was at one point without a chief of staff, deputy chief of staff, or senior adviser.

The Journal reports that Hegseth is on edge, suspects his own staffers of leaking information about his activities, and is more than anything scared of being fired by President Trump. And while Hegseth continues to attribute all of his struggles to some media witch hunt, the scandals continue to pile up.

“I didn’t believe he had the requisite experience and skills to handle the toughest job in the cabinet before he was confirmed, and I have seen nothing in his performance so far that would disconfirm that judgment,” former Republican Pentagon official Eric Edelman told the Journal.

Hegseth is only four months into his tenure as defense secretary. We’ll see how far he makes it from here.

The White House fired an official because he knew the guy who criticized President Donald Trump in the famous “Anonymous” op-ed in The New York Times seven years ago, The Washington Post reported Friday.

The executive director of the Office of Trade Relations at Customs and Border Protection, George E. Bogden, was abruptly asked to leave his post over apparent ties to Miles Taylor, the author of the anonymous 2018 op-ed, sources told the Post. Taylor was Trump’s chief of staff at the Department of Homeland Security at the time, and the piece revealed he and his colleagues’ internal efforts to thwart parts of the president’s agenda. Taylor made his authorship public in 2020 after leaving his position as chief of staff.

The president has reportedly been obsessed with the op-ed ever since. Bogden was asked to step down from his role, despite his centrality to implementing the president’s absurd tariff scheme. Bodgen’s job was to listen to the trade industry’s complaints and grievances amidst the economic chaos spurred by Trump in recent weeks.

It’s unclear what merited Bogden’s ousting, and there are few ties connecting the two men other than a Facebook photo of Bogden at Taylor’s wedding in 2019, one year before Taylor had revealed he wrote the op-ed. Sources told the Post that Bogden and Taylor “have not been close,” and that “few Trump allies, including Bogden, were aware of Taylor’s role in writing the piece at the time it was published or by the time of the wedding.”

Another source familiar with the story told The New Republic that there was no evidence presented to Bogden other than the Facebook photo, making it seem more like collecting opposition research rather than an investigation.

Taylor’s humiliating revelation to the public clearly instilled a deep sense of paranoia in the president that hasn’t dissipated even seven years later. “From the White House to executive branch departments and agencies, senior officials will privately admit their daily disbelief at the commander in chief’s comments and actions,” Taylor wrote at the time. “Most are working to insulate their operations from his whims.”

As Trump works to rid his administration of any officials acquainted with Taylor, his firing of a years-long supporter like Bogden (while the president continues to defend a Cabinet member who shared national security information over text) is a stark reminder that the president values unwavering loyalty above all else.

This story has been updated.

In the first 100 days of Donald Trump’s presidency, Elon Musk lost nearly twice as much money as he cut in government spending as the head of the Department of Government Efficiency.

Following a particularly humiliating earnings report from Tesla Tuesday, Musk told investors that starting in May, he would be reducing the amount of time he spends in the White House to pay more attention to his struggling electric car company.

In the first three months of the year, Tesla’s profits crashed 71 percent, falling to a mere $409 million, compared with $1.39 billion from the same quarter last year. The drop is undoubtedly a direct result of Musk’s entanglement with Trump’s administration, where Tesla has become a symbol of extreme cost-cutting measures that have led to sweeping layoffs and essential services being gutted.

During his time in the White House, Musk’s net worth has plummeted a whopping $122 billion, nearly twice as much as the $61.5 billion he was able to save the government, according to the Musk Watch DOGE Tracker, which tallies DOGE’s itemized cuts to contracts, grants, and real estate. Only $12.6 billion worth of cuts have actually been verified, according to the tracker.

DOGE still claims a far higher figure of $160 billion in estimated savings, but a closer look at Musk’s activities at DOGE show that the billionaire bureaucrat barely made a dent in the trillions of dollars he set out to slash in government spending.

“DOGE’s verified savings have been less than 1/10 of 1 percent of federal spending,” Jessica Riedl, a senior fellow and budget expert at the conservative Manhattan Institute told Axios Friday. “There have been embarrassing accounting errors, lots of public statements that turned out to be false or misleading, or actions slapped back by the courts.”

Reidl told Axios that Musk’s minute cuts will likely be offset by the Trump administration’s sweeping cuts at the IRS.

“The spending savings are so small that they will be undoubtedly overwhelmed by the significant tax revenue losses which result from gutting IRS tax enforcement,” she said. “It makes a mockery of claims that DOGE is really just about cutting deficits.”

Musk’s net worth began sinking last month after Trump failed to dispel rumors of a recession on the horizon, wiping out $29 billion of his ally’s own wealth. Things only got worse after Trump announced his sweeping “reciprocal tariff” policy at the beginning of April.

Sure, Musk was the biggest individual winner when Trump announced a 90-day pause on tariffs, sending Tesla stock shooting up 23 percent. But his time in the White House has taken a bite out of his wealth and done considerable damage to Tesla’s brand.

“The brand damage caused by Musk in the White House/DOGE over the past few months will not go away,” said Wedbush Securities analyst and beleaguered Tesla bull Dan Ives, according to Axios.

It seems that Musk may not be long for Washington—Trump even referred to him in the past tense Thursday. His status as a special government employee is set to expire next month anyway. And he clearly isn’t getting along with members of the administration, publicly picking fights over the IRS with the treasury secretary and starting rows with Trump’s top trade adviser over tariffs.

But it’s too soon to rejoice at the permanent departure of the billionaire bureaucrat. He told investors that he’d be cutting down to one or two days a week but that he’d have to continue working with the White House at least until Trump’s term had ended. But if Musk is hoping for a brand reset, he may have another think coming. No amount of cutting days in the office can erase the image of Musk gleefully waving a chain saw around.