Marco Rubio Punishes Palestinians Who Dared Ask for War Crimes Inquiry

According to Secretary of State Marco Rubio, Palestinians seeking international justice for Israeli human rights abuses mustn’t go unpunished. The State Department on Thursday announced sanctions on three top Palestinian rights groups that asked the International Criminal Court to investigate Israel for war crimes, including genocide.

Al Haq, the Al Mezan Center for Human Rights, and the Palestinian Centre for Human Rights—which all document human rights abuses in occupied Palestine—drew America’s ire for having “directly engaged” in ICC efforts “to investigate, arrest, detain, or prosecute Israeli nationals, without Israel’s consent.”

In November 2023, the three groups called the tribunal’s attention to various Israeli abuses in Gaza, including strikes on its civilian areas, forced displacement of its population, the use of toxic gas, and the denial of necessities like food and water.

“These actions amount to war crimes and crimes against humanity, including genocide and incitement to genocide,” the groups wrote in a press release at the time. They encouraged the issuance of arrest warrants for Israeli Prime Minister Benyamin Netanyahu and then Defense Minister Yoav Gallant.

A year later, the ICC issued warrants against Netanyahu and Gallant for “the war crime of starvation as a method of warfare; and the crimes against humanity of murder, persecution, and other inhumane acts.” (The ICC also issued an arrest warrant for a former Hamas commander.)

On Friday, the three groups issued a joint statement condemning the U.S. sanctions.

“Threatened by the impact and role of our advocacy, legal research, and documentation in exposing Israel’s ongoing international crimes, the United States has resorted to punishing individuals and organisations seeking to uphold the legal system upon which the international community was founded,” the statement says. “The implications go beyond Palestine: by protecting Israel from accountability, they are dismantling the international legal order and undermining the possibility of justice for victims of grave crimes anywhere.”

The Trump administration in February imposed sanctions on the International Criminal Court, and last month slapped ICC officials with sanctions, giving the same rationale then as this week.

Fox News is struggling to find a spin as President Trump’s economy continues to perform worse than expected. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the United States added only 22,000 jobs this month—a massive decrease from the previous month’s numbers—and unemployment has risen, both warning signs for a rough economy ahead.

“Twenty-two thousand jobs added in the month of August, that was much less than the expectation of 75,000, guys; the July number was revised, I will get to the revisions in a moment,” said Fox Business’s Lauren Simonetti on Friday morning. “Unemployment rate coming in as expected, 4.3 percent.… Again, 22,000 jobs added in August.… For June and July together, combined 21,000 jobs lower than previously reported.”

That 22,000 number isn’t just “weaker than expected,” it’s awful—and it once again raises fears of that awful word Trump keeps avoiding: recession. Economists had forecast 75,000 jobs would be added this month.

The coping continued on Fox.

“But again, that 22,000 number, Charles, it’s a weaker than expected number, and these revisions are pretty brutal,” Fox Business host Cheryl Casone said.

“Yeah, extraordinarily,” host Charles Payne replied. “I’ve mentioned health care, 31,000—the 12-month average is 42,000. That had been obviously a massive driver, and we know the demographic situation there. Just a little disappointed in manufacturing, was hoping to maybe see something there.”

Casone then asked guest and “motivational leader” Joanie Bily to share her thoughts on the labor force participation rate, which is at 62.3 percent.

“We’re not seeing much movement in that number, which is disappointing. And surprising, to be honest with you, Cheryl.… We’ve lost jobs again in the professional business service sector, we’ve lost jobs in this report in the temporary help sector, which is not a good sign, so there’s a lot of concern even though the private payroll number is 38,000, that is still a pretty weak number.”

Maybe Trump slashing the health care system and kneecapping the economy with a trade war was the problem all along, and not the BLS commissioner he fired for being too “woke” after last month’s terrible jobs report. What will Fox News say when we’re actually in the recession?

“Weak job growth. Rising unemployment. Soaring costs,” Colorado Representative Jason Crow wrote. “Donald Trump’s ‘Golden Age’ is screwing working people.”

The Bureau of Labor Statistics on Friday released a dismal jobs report for the month of August.

According to the report, the labor market added 22,000 jobs in August—a far cry from the 75,000 new jobs economists had forecast for the month. The unemployment rate rose slightly, to 4.3 percent, which is the highest it’s been since late 2021.

Revisions to prior months paint an even drearier picture, showing, for instance, that 13,000 jobs were actually lost in June (as opposed to the 14,000 gain in jobs initially reported). Before then, job numbers hadn’t been in the negatives since December 2020, when Donald Trump was finishing his first term and the economy was still ravaged by the pandemic.

This is the first jobs report since Trump ousted the BLS chief and nominated MAGA partisan E.J. Antoni in her place due to a poor July report.

But even with the messenger having been shot, the message rings louder than ever. Jobs numbers thus far have been insulated from Trump’s meddling, as Antoni isn’t yet at the helm of the BLS, which is being overseen by its deputy commissioner, a BLS veteran.

Perhaps due to this fact, Trump on Thursday evening sought to downplay the importance of the August report.

At a gathering of tech executives at the White House, the president said, of the then-forthcoming numbers: “Well we’re going to have to see what the numbers—I don’t know, they come out tomorrow. But the real numbers that I’m talking about are going to be whatever it is, but will be in a year from now when these monstrous, huge, beautiful places—they’re palaces of genius. And when they start opening up, I think you’ll see job numbers that are going to be absolutely incredible.”

Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth claimed he had the “absolute” authority to conduct a military strike on suspected drug smugglers.

Speaking to reporters Wednesday, Hegseth was asked what legal authority the Pentagon had invoked to carry out its deadly strike on a vessel officials claim was carrying drugs.

“We have the absolute and complete authority to conduct that,” Hegseth said. “First of all, just the defense of the American people alone. 100,000 Americans were killed each year under the previous administration because of an open border and open drug traffic flow. That is an assault on the American people.”

So, in other words, there was no legal authority, as far as we can tell.

“I’d say we smoked the drug boat, and there’s eleven narco terrorists at the bottom of the ocean. And when other people try to do that, they’re gonna meet the same fate,” Hegseth continued.

Hegseth’s response echoes Trump’s claim that the 11 slain crew members were “narco terrorists” who belonged to the Venezuelan Tren de Aragua gang. While the executive branch has labeled Tren de Aragua a terrorist organization, such a designation does not serve as any legal basis for a combat strike.

The New York Times reported Thursday that the Pentagon was still scrambling to invent a legal basis for its own strike—though it appears that Hegseth doesn’t actually think he needs any. But a strike with no legal basis would violate international and domestic law.

Some officials at the Department of Defense have privately expressed concerns that the government had changed details of its story about the deadly strike, which is especially concerning considering that the government has offered no evidence to support its claim that the individuals on the boat were in fact drug traffickers.

The Justice Department on Thursday scrambled to address alleged revelations about the Epstein files published by James O’Keefe—founder of the far-right Project Veritas, known for its hidden-camera stings, in which individuals are secretly filmed disclosing information about the organizations that employ them.

O’Keefe shared a video that, he said, showed an undercover operative eliciting eyebrow-raising statements from a top DOJ official, acting Deputy Chief of Special Operations Joseph Schnitt, about the department’s files on the notorious late sex criminal Jeffrey Epstein, as well as a supposed deal with Epstein’s convicted accomplice, Ghislaine Maxwell.

In the secret recording, Schnitt acknowledges that the Epstein files do exist—“thousands and thousands of pages of files”—and goes on to detail the DOJ’s plan.

“They’ll redact every Republican or conservative person in those files, leave all the liberal, Democratic people in those files,” the official said over lunch. He also noted that Maxwell was “transferred to a minimum-security prison too recently, which is against [Federal Bureau of Prisons] policy because she’s a convicted sex offender.” He added, “They’re offering her something to keep her mouth shut.”

O’Keefe’s supposed bombshells here, as always, warrant skepticism, as they are notoriously sensationalized and often deceptively edited.

According to O’Keefe, the Justice Department provided a statement asserting that Schnitt’s claims were false—but effectively confirming the veracity of the video. The statement said, “Joseph Schnitt had no role in the Department’s internal review of Epstein materials,” and his comments “have absolutely zero bearing with reality and reflect a total lack of knowledge of the DOJ’s review process.”

Later, the official X account of the Department of Justice sought to clear the air in the most bizarre way: by posting an unedited iPhone screenshot (complete with airplane-mode icon and battery percentage) of an email from Schnitt to his superior.

The email states that the recorded meeting took place in August, when Schnitt met twice with a Hinge date who claimed to be “an au pair in Georgetown” named Skylar. She “gave no clues that she was a reporter or recording our dates,” he said, and his comments were based “on what I’ve learned in the media and not from anything I’ve done at or learned via work”

“I have no knowledge of the circumstances surrounding Ms. Maxwell other than what is reported in the news,” Schnitt wrote, per the DOJ’s screenshot. “I also never divulged anything about what I do at work.”