The House Armed Services Committee passed a measure deepening cooperation between the Israeli and U.S. militaries, ignoring allegations that Israel committed war crimes and crimes against humanity in its war on Gaza.Democratic Representative Ro Khanna proposed an amendment to eliminate the provision, known as Section 224, in the National Defense Authorization Act, but it failed by a voice vote. Khanna said the provision was another reward for Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu as he tries to call the shots in the war in Iran.“Everyone in America—whether you’re a Republican, an independent or a Democrat—says that we need to tell Netanyahu that America calls the shots, not the prime minister of any other country,” Khanna said. “They want less cooperation and blank checks to Israel, not more. Only the United States Congress would dream up at this moment, ‘Let’s actually do more for Israel.’”Section 224 requires the secretary of defense to “to designate an executive agent responsible for synchronising cooperative efforts between the United States and Israel.” That agent would oversee joint efforts, “including bilateral defence technology research, development, testing, evaluation, integration, and industrial cooperation.” No other country has this privilege with the U.S. military.A voice vote didn’t record the stances of committee members, leaving members of Congress free from scrutiny at a time when Israel’s popularity continues to plummet with the American people. Only one other Democrat, Representative Sara Jacobs, co-sponsored Khanna’s legislation. The NDAA is the main funding bill for the U.S. military, which has to be passed every year.“As political pressure builds to reduce US military assistance to Israel, Section 224 provides the framework for continuing—and expanding—US-Israel military ties by entrenching Israeli technology within the US defense supply chain in a way that would shield it from the annual appropriations process,” the nonprofit lobbying group A New Policy warned last week. “The use of must-pass legislation as the NDAA as a mechanism of integration speaks to the plummeting popularity of continuing unconditional support to Israel.”Netanyahu claims to support ending U.S. military aid to Israel, likely because provisions such as Section 224 would ensure Israel gets American help by other means. A major theme in midterm election races across the country, particularly primary races, has been U.S. aid to Israel and campaign funding from the pro-Israel lobby AIPAC, and the political effect of Section 224 could hurt its backers. It remains to be seen if Section 224 survives when the rest of Congress votes on the NDAA. Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche—who is currently struggling to secure Senate support for his nomination to permanently lead the Department of Justice—revealed he is placing “roadblocks” to make it harder for Democrats to prosecute President Trump and his administration after he’s out of office. Blanche made the declaration in an interview with NewsNation’s Katie Pavlich released Friday.“You said this week that you believe President Trump absolutely faced prison if he hadn’t won the election in 2024. Democrats have been talking a lot about what they call Project 2029—their plans to prosecute the president, administration officials, ICE agents after the term is up if they regain power,” Pavlich asked Blanche while he sat alongside FBI Director Kash Patel. “Do you believe that’s a possibility, and what can be done to prevent this kind of political retribution from Democrats?” “Well, do I believe it’s a possibility that the Democrats will go after President Trump, his family, anybody that knows him, anybody that worked for him? I think they’ve proven that to be true. And what could we do about it is we can just keep on exposing when we learn about the weaponization that happened for many years, we can keep on exposing it, and putting roadblocks in place so it never happens again,” Blanche said.“I worry about Democrats coming out and actually already forecasting what they’re going to try to do if they get leadership again, and that’s something the American people see too. The American people saw them do it for four years and rejected it whole-handedly.” Acting AG Todd Blanche says he's working to install "roadblocks" to prevent Democrats from prosecuting Trump and his associates in the future pic.twitter.com/bbaeRPUu6y— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) June 5, 2026 This is the president’s former lawyer proudly admitting that he is placing obstacles in place to make it harder for Trump, his family, Blanche himself, any ICE agents that have brutalized or killed protesters and immigrants, or anyone else involved in this cabal of an administration to be held accountable. And he might be attorney general soon. Editor’s Pick:Why in the world did the Department of Justice just declare that President Donald Trump has the right to demolish the Statue of Liberty?During oral arguments before the U.S. Court of Appeals in Washington Friday, lawyers for the DOJ presented the government’s case for continuing construction on Trump’s increasingly expensive White House ballroom without the approval of Congress. In order to demonstrate Trump’s supposedly far-reaching power to destroy and alter national monuments at whim, the DOJ lawyers claimed that if the president wanted to bulldoze the Statue of Liberty in New York, there would be no one with the standing to challenge him. “If the government decides very quickly to bulldoze the Statue of Liberty, the people whose ancestors—that was the first thing they saw coming to this country, but the government moved too fast—nothing can be done?” Judge Patricia Millett asked, according to Politico’s Kyle Cheney. “I think that’s right, yes,” the government responded. The Statue of Liberty, like the White House, is managed by the National Park Service. Demolishing it would require legislative approval and rigorous public and regulatory review under the National Historic Preservation Act. This argument features in the DOJ’s primary claim that the National Trust for Historic Preservation, the group behind the lawsuit, has no standing to challenge the construction. The DOJ also argued that construction on the ballroom can’t actually be stopped by the courts, and could only be stopped by Congress. All of this further illustrates just how powerful the Trump administration believes itself to be: Its modus operandi is simply to break our nation’s laws with such speed that no one can stop it. Read more about Trump:House Republicans, joined by four Democrats, voted Thursday to cut food aid for pregnant women and children.The House passed a bill 213–210 that reduced funding for the Department of Agriculture and other federal agencies. The bill includes a $141 million cut to food and vegetable benefits in the Special Supplemental Nutrition Program for Women, Infants and Children, which help pregnant and postpartum women and children.Five Republicans voted against the bill, while Democratic Representatives Donald Davis, Adam Gray, Vicente Gonzalez, and Marie Glusenkamp Perez voted for it, ensuring it passed the chamber. The Senate still has to pass the appropriations measure before it heads to President Trump’s desk. The $141 million cut estimate comes from the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities. Another organization, the National WIC Association, estimates that fruit and vegetable benefits would drop from $52 to $13 for nursing mothers and from $26 to $10 for young children.House Republicans attempted to justify the move, with Representative Andy Harris, who chairs the House Appropriations subcommittee on agriculture, saying that there’s more than enough agriculture funding left over for the WIC program, claiming that data “clearly shows” that participation in WIC has gone down this fiscal year.“With lowered participation estimates and increased carryover funding, $8 billion will fully fund the program,” Harris told The Washington Post. “Let me say it one more time.… WIC is fully funded. No woman or their children will lose or be denied coverage.”Three of the Democrats who voted for the cuts, Gray, Gonzalez, and Perez, are members of the conservative Blue Dog Coalition, and Perez has a reputation for often voting against her party. But it’s puzzling why fruit and vegetable assistance for mothers and children was deemed acceptable to cut, especially during an economic crunch. It’s highly likely that WIC enrollment will go up in the coming months, and now, fruits and vegetables will be more expensive.More on what’s happening in Congress:The Trump administration had plans to falsely declare 2.7 million people dead as part of the president’s cruel mass deportation efforts, The Washington Post reported Friday. A 49-page whistleblower disclosure reviewed by the Post detailed how the White House plotted to add the names and Social Security numbers of millions of living, breathing people to the Social Security Administration’s Death Master File, or DMF, which is used to track when a person has died and should stop receiving government benefits.Whistleblower Jeremiah Schofield, who worked at the Social Security Administration for 25 years before leaving in October, told the Post that he’d refused to implement the plan. Schofield said that when he pulled a sample from the 2.7 million names, he found that all of the people marked for death were still alive. Agency lawyers had warned that falsely marking someone as dead could violate federal law, and Schofield realized that the plan’s purpose was to terrorize immigrants. Schofield described one meeting in which a DOGE official revealed the goal of such a cruel plan: to make immigrants so miserable that they would self-deport or try to visit a Social Security office, where they could be arrested. “That call was one of the most disappointing calls I’ve been in in my 25-year career,” Schofield told the Post. “I was shocked. I couldn’t believe what I was hearing.”The Trump administration previously moved more than 6,000 immigrants to the DMF last year. Being wrongly moved to the DMF can have far-ranging effects, as people will no longer be able to access their bank accounts or use their credit cards. The SSA’s website says that the effects of being wrongly included in the DMF can be “devastating to the individual, spouse, and dependent children.”Read more about immigration: