Politics
Oklahoma measure seeks to make school district superintendents an elected position
Oklahoma will consider a new measure to make the role of school district superintendent an elected position in response to a spate of controversial situations involving scholastic leaders, Fox News Digital has learned.
There have been allegations and news reports about several issues: the refusal to remove “pornographic books” from school libraries, the dismissal of a teacher for failure to comply with a COVID-19 face mask mandate, and media coverage of “nothing [being] done” in response to reports a school football coach was bragging about sexual conquests with parents.
In 2021, Oklahoma Gov. Kevin Stitt called firings of mask-averse teachers “preposterous” and said their talents are needed more than ever.
“This is about a school district not following state law — this isn’t a debate about masks,” he said, after the Oklahoma City district reportedly fired multiple educators, adding the state previously banned such firings.
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In February, Oklahoma State Superintendent of Schools Ryan Walters — who is an elected official himself — threatened to lower the accreditation of Edmond, Oklahoma, schools if it didn’t remove the books “The Glass Castle” and “Kite Runner” from its high school libraries.
Walters called the inaction “subversion of accountability,” though Edmond’s superintendent said the state lacked authority to remove the books based on a 1997 district policy.
In another case, in Edmond, Republican Sen. Ted Cruz from neighboring Texas, among others, blasted videos showing a portion of a school fundraiser wherein students were licking each other’s toes.
In a public statement, school officials appeared to celebrate the event:
“This afternoon, Deer Creek High School announced a grand total of $152,830.38 raised for Not Your Average Joe Coffee, an organization created to ‘inspire our community by including students and adults with intellectual, developmental and physical disabilities,” school staff wrote.
“All participants in the assembly were students who signed up for the game(s) they played ahead of time. No Deer Creek faculty or staff participated in any of the games during this Clash of Classes assembly,” a portion of the latter part of the statement read.
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Walters called the fundraiser “filth,” and Cruz said it was “child abuse.”
In another district on the Arkansas line, now-former Muldrow Superintendent Leon Ashlock resigned after driving drunk and crashing a school vehicle on Creek Turnpike. Two 100-proof bottles of cinnamon schnapps were found in its console, according to KOCO.
Walters told Fox News Digital on Wednesday that a case involving a school’s response to an athletic director’s criminal exploits with a student also drew his attention.
“Even in a conservative state like Oklahoma, where voters have overwhelmingly made clear they want the radical progressive policies of the left out of public schools, we continually see superintendents defying their will, ignoring their concerns, and refusing to take action necessary to improve education outcomes while protecting Oklahoma children,” Walters said.
“This has to end.”
“And, the best way to do that is by requiring superintendents to be elected by the voters.”
Walters called the legislation a common-sense solution to efforts to improve education for Sooner State children.
Walters previously made headlines when he led his state in becoming the first to appropriate funding toward supplying a Bible to each school. The official said the move blunts “woke curricula” and provides students a “historical document” that the founders used to form their government.
Politics
A bright spot for Democrats as voters shifted right: Flipping 3 House seats in California
The electoral map in November was largely a sea of red, but there is a bright spot — or really, three — for Golden State Democrats.
In the Central Valley, the Antelope Valley and Orange County, a trio of Democratic congressional challengers unseated Republican incumbents as the party narrowed the GOP’s razor-thin majority in the House of Representatives.
The victories of Adam Gray, George Whitesides and Derek Tran — and a few Democratic House pickups elsewhere — were a silver lining for their party in a year that Republicans won both houses of Congress, Vice President Kamala Harris lost to Donald Trump in all seven swing states, and California voters backed away from progressive ballot measures and criminal justice reform favored by many Democrats.
“If you told me all that, I’d ask: How many seats did California Democrats lose?” said Paul Mitchell, a Democratic campaign consultant and vice president of Political Data Inc. “The petri dish was so inhospitable to Democratic gains, but Democrats still somehow still gained.”
In the aerospace-heavy Antelope Valley, Whitesides ran on his biography as a former NASA chief of staff and Virgin Galactic chief executive to oust GOP Rep. Mike Garcia.
In Orange County, Tran narrowly defeated Republican Rep. Michelle Steel to become the first Vietnamese American candidate to win the congressional district that includes Little Saigon.
And in the Central Valley, Gray — a moderate Democrat and longtime Modesto lawmaker — beat GOP Rep. John Duarte by a wafer-thin margin of 187 votes. The photo-finish race, called Tuesday, was the last in the country to be decided.
“These candidates told amazing stories about their districts and they were reflective of the districts they’re representing,” said Rep. Pete Aguilar (D-Redlands), the No. 3 Democrat in the House.
The candidates mostly talked about kitchen-table issues, he said, and also worked to show that the Republican incumbents had congressional voting records that were “out of step with their districts.”
The Orange County coast also delivered another key victory for Democrats, although not a flip. After Rep. Katie Porter chose not to run for reelection, Democrat Dave Min beat Republican Scott Baugh in the 47th Congressional District, keeping the seat blue.
All four victories were a vindication for California Democrats, who flipped seven House seats in the 2018 “blue wave,” only to lose four seats two years later and again in 2022.
“We knew from the onset how important these seats would be, and so did Republicans,” said Dan Gottlieb, a spokesperson for the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee who worked on West Coast races.
He chalked up their victory to strong candidates with deep ties in their districts, weaknesses with the Republican incumbents and robust fundraising that allowed Democrats to “strain the GOP’s resources” and force them to play defense in more districts.
In the view of the Republican mayor of Newport Beach, however, despite Democrats’ gains, the party and its candidates didn’t spend enough time talking about crime and public safety. “That’s going to come back to bite Democrats really hard in two years, if that’s not a main focus,” Will O’Neill said at a panel at UC Irvine on Friday.
The swing-district candidates cast themselves as moderates who didn’t toe the party line. All four broke with party leaders in Sacramento to support Proposition 36, the criminal justice reform measure that passed with overwhelming support.
Democrats and their outside allies launched their candidates onto the airwaves early on in Southern California’s expensive advertising market — including, in Tran’s case, in Vietnamese-language media.
“We tried to project a message … that we were going to stay focused on kitchen-table issues of economic growth, local job growth, and bringing costs down, and that really resonated with people,” Whitesides said.
He said his fundraising haul of $10 million helped “bring to light my opponent’s record, which past campaigns didn’t have to the same extent.”
Republicans won California’s other two battleground House races by comfortable margins.
In the Central Valley, Rep. David Valadao cruised to reelection, beating Democrat Rudy Salas by a wider margin than two years ago as Kern County swung further right.
In Riverside County, voters reelected longtime GOP Rep. Ken Calvert over Democrat Will Rollins, a former federal prosecutor who raised nearly $12.5 million and sparked a wave of voter enthusiasm.
Rollins came 1 point closer than during his first run against Calvert in 2022. The 41st Congressional District supported Trump by a slim margin in 2020, but shifted nearly 5 points to the right this year.
In all, nine of California’s 58 counties flipped from supporting Biden in 2020 to Trump.
The Republican Party also picked up three seats in the state Legislature, flipping seats in Orange County, Riverside and the Inland Empire, suggesting Democrats in once-safe districts could see bigger fights in the future.
“There’s a massive shift right now in realignment of people willing to vote for a Republican, perhaps for the first time in their lives,” O’Neill said.
He said he would not be surprised if Republicans took back “a number of the seats” in 2026, including Tran’s, and said Min could have a tough path to reelection if Republicans choose the right candidate.
Aguilar said California’s rightward shift is proof that Democrats will need to work more to address, and talk more about, the economy, but a permanent rightward shift isn’t a foregone conclusion.
“They might have been Trump voters in November, but I don’t think these are Republican Party voters,” Aguilar said. “When they see unified control in Washington, and what a Donald Trump agenda looks like, I do think it will make them recoil.”
Particularly in the Central Valley’s 13th Congressional District, voters were saying “we want something different,” Gray said.
“When I went out and campaigned on my record of independence in Sacramento … and being unafraid to take on the political parties, either my own or the opposition, if I needed to — I think that’s what people voted for,” said Gray, a former member of the state Assembly.
Biden dropping out of the presidential race may also have moved the needle for Democratic candidates in some of the state’s most competitive House races — although Harris did not prove to be all that popular in her home state, either.
Although the state’s election data aren’t finalized, voter turnout fell in 2024 among Democrats and Harris received a lower share of the vote — 58.5% — than Barack Obama in 2012, Hillary Clinton in 2016 and Biden in 2020.
“We had an old-guy problem, and after the debate, we had a credibility problem,” said Orrin Evans, a consultant for the Min and Tran campaigns. “We fixed the old-guy problem, but the credibility problem remained.”
After the election, both parties launched massive efforts to hunt down every voter whose mail ballot was flagged for a technicality, such as a missing signature or a signature that did not match the voter’s information file.
Hundreds of volunteers and campaign staffers went door to door, sometimes returning to the same doorstep four or five times, to notify voters and walk them through how to correct the issues, a process known as “ballot curing.”
Republicans had 70 staff members working on the ballot-curing operation, finding and fixing more than 10 times as many ballots as they had in 2022, the party said. On the Democratic side, the campaign used hundreds of volunteers and paid canvassers, including some who drove from San Francisco and Los Angeles.
Pablo Rodriguez, who ran an independent expenditure committee that supported Gray, said his organization focused on turning out Latina voters and voters without a party preference in the 13th District, including following up during the ballot-curing process.
“It’s not anything complicated,” Rodriguez said. “The hard part is the labor-intensive part of finding folks and making sure they have a desire to have their vote counted, given that so much of the news has already told them: ‘The election is already over, this is already done.’”
Mitchell said state data showed that 1,310 registered Republicans fixed technical issues and had their flagged ballots counted, as did 2,186 Democrats — far more voters than the 187-vote margin of victory.
Times staff writer Hailey Branson-Potts contributed to this report.
Politics
Special Counsel Jack Smith required to submit Trump findings to DOJ before leaving. What happens next?
Special Counsel Jack Smith is required to submit to the Justice Department a report summarizing the results of his dual investigations into President-elect Trump — an action that will put a formal end to his two-year probe and one that will punt all next steps, including whether to make public the results of the report, to outgoing Attorney General Merrick Garland.
Smith — a longtime prosecutor who worked in The Hague and at the Justice Department, including as chief of the DOJ’s Public Integrity Section — was tapped by Garland in 2022 to investigate both the alleged effort by Trump and his allies to overturn the results of the 2020 election, as well as Trump’s keeping of allegedly classified documents at his Florida residence.
Justice Department regulations mandate that a special counsel submit to the attorney general a confidential report detailing the findings of their investigation after it is concluded, and explaining any prosecution or declination decisions they reached as a result of the probe.
In Smith’s case, the prosecution decision is immaterial, given Trump’s status as president-elect and longstanding Justice Department policy against bringing criminal charges against a sitting president.
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But he still must outline the investigation and its findings in his report to Garland, who will then decide whether to share it publicly.
Notably, Garland has opted to release the reports from two other special counsels whose investigations concluded during his tenure — publishing both the summary reports submitted by John Durham, who was tapped by then-Attorney General Bill Barr in 2019 to review law enforcement and intelligence gathering during the 2016 presidential campaign and the origins of the Trump-Russia probe, as well as the final report from Robert Hur, a former U.S. attorney whom he tapped in 2023 to investigate President Biden’s handling of classified documents.
These reports were made public at the same time as they were shared with members of Congress. But it is unclear whether Garland will move to do the same with Smith’s findings, given their sensitivity and Trump’s status as president-elect.
The Justice Department declined to respond to Fox News’s request for comment on the status of the report or whether Garland plans to share it publicly.
Smith has long pointed to Dec. 2 as the deadline for his team to submit their final status reports to the federal judges in the D.C. and the 11th Circuit Courts summarizing the results of their investigations into the cases against Trump, which were dismissed without prejudice late last month.
Under Justice Department regulations, a special counsel is required at the conclusion of their work to “provide the Attorney General with a confidential report explaining the prosecution or declination decisions reached.”
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Garland has the authority to decide whether to make Smith’s report public before Biden leaves office, or whether to punt it to the incoming Trump administration.
It is unclear how he will act, however, and the Justice Department did not respond to Fox News Digital’s request for more information on the matter.
Smith had indicted Trump in D.C. earlier this year on charges stemming from the former president’s alleged efforts to overturn the 2020 election outcome, and his team also brought federal charges against Trump in Florida in the classified documents case.
Trump, for his part, had railed against the special counsel investigation as a politically motivated “witch hunt” and vowed during his presidential campaign to fire Smith “within two seconds,” if elected. Smith, for his part, is expected to resign before Trump’s inauguration, and his team of prosecutors has moved in recent weeks to wind down their cases against Trump.
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Late last month, Smith filed motions to vacate deadlines in both cases against Trump following his election, citing an Office of Legal Counsel memo that states it is against Department of Justice policy to investigate a sitting president for federal criminal charges and is a violation of the separation of powers doctrine.
They have also cited a July Supreme Court decision that widened the criteria for immunity for sitting presidents.
Smith’s team stressed in their most recent court filing that their motion to vacate the case is based solely on the Office of Legal Counsel policy, and not on the merits of the investigation itself.
“That prohibition is categorical and does not turn on the gravity of the crimes charged, the strength of the Government’s proof, or the merits of the prosecution, which the Government stands fully behind,” Smith’s office wrote in their motion to dismiss the election interference case.
“The Government’s position on the merits of the defendant’s prosecution has not changed. But the circumstances have,” they added.
Politics
Column: The backlash on the backlash against the Hunter Biden pardon
Days later I’m still seething that President Biden gave a “full and unconditional” pardon to his troublesome surviving son.
And yet, reluctantly, I have to say that I’d have done the same thing — minus some of the self-pitying and misleading passages in Biden’s official statement.
Opinion Columnist
Jackie Calmes
Jackie Calmes brings a critical eye to the national political scene. She has decades of experience covering the White House and Congress.
First the bad stuff. With the pardon of Hunter Biden, who’d pleaded guilty to tax evasion and was separately convicted of lying about his drug addiction on a gun application, Joe Biden put his family ahead of his fealty to the animating pledge of his presidency: to restore governing norms and the rule of law after both were shredded by his predecessor, Donald Trump. Biden, who’s otherwise been stingy in using the Constitution’s mighty presidential power, by his nepotistic act adds to the pile of rancid pardons amassed by modern presidents of both parties, including Trump’s first-term grants to a scofflaw family member, sordid allies, donors and war criminals.
In Biden’s statement justifying his stay-out-of-jail-free card for Hunter, he echoed Trump’s tirades about a weaponized justice system. That alone contributes to many Americans’ loss of faith in their own institutions and gives Trump cover for his false claims of victimhood. Though Hunter Biden’s name does explain why he faced gun and tax charges for which most Americans wouldn’t be similarly prosecuted — as even Republicans have acknowledged — there is a flip side: Hunter traded on that name to peddle his purported influence globally. Despite years of probing by the feds and House Republicans, however, he faced no charges for those dealings.
The biggest reason to oppose the pardon is this: Joe Biden lied to us.
The man who likes to say “I give you my word as a Biden” broke it here, betraying himself and us. He didn’t have to make the “no pardon” promise, or allow his spokeswoman to do so as recently as last month. He could have dodged the question.
Instead, in June, then-candidate Biden said he would “abide by the jury decision” that had just convicted Hunter for the gun lie. Press Secretary Karine Jean-Pierre assured reporters the following month that a pardon was “still a no. It will be a no.” And last month, after Trump’s election and in advance of Hunter Biden’s sentencing scheduled for Dec. 16, Jean-Pierre underscored: “Our answer stands, which is no.”
So Joe deserves the bipartisan backlash he’s getting. But how about some backlash to the backlash? For me, one consideration trumps all others, pun intended, to excuse the president: The deplorable Trump is about to reclaim power.
Had any other Republican in the 2024 mix been elected — say, Nikki Haley or Tim Scott, even Ron DeSanctimonious — there’d be no justification for absolving Hunter. But those Republicans weren’t elected, Trump was, and he’s the vengeful former and future president who vowed last year to “appoint a real special prosecutor to go after the most corrupt president in the history of the United States of America, Joe Biden, and the entire Biden crime family.”
Given such explicit threats, and Trump’s first-term record of trying to politicize the Justice Department and FBI, why should Biden leave his son to Trump’s nonexistent mercies? Especially once Trump showed by his picks of willing enforcers for his new administration just how serious he is about retribution.
The president-elect’s first choice for attorney general, attack dog and former Rep. Matt Gaetz of Florida, fell under the weight of his own legal woes. Then Trump turned to former Florida Atty. Gen. Pam Bondi, a longtime loyalist who has explicitly called for revenge against those deemed responsible for Trump’s legal travails: “The Department of Justice, the prosecutors will be prosecuted. … The investigators will be investigated.”
And on Saturday, Trump tapped MAGA henchman Kash Patel to be FBI director. Patel’s credentials? Last year he produced a literal enemies list for Trump and separately said he’d prosecute Hunter Biden as a foreign agent, never mind past investigations that produced nothing.
As former federal prosecutor and law professor Joyce Vance wrote recently, by way of justifying the pardon, Trump as president could have made Hunter Biden’s life in federal prison “extremely difficult.”
And a Trumpian Justice Department could have redoubled efforts to charge him for foreign dealings going back to his father’s time as veep, as Patel has suggested. The pardon preempts that sort of actual witch hunt.
President Biden has time to make up for the all but unpardonable pardon. He could endorse an effort, even if it’s a pipe dream, to amend the Constitution to repeal or at least reform presidents’ unchecked pardon power.
Better yet — because it’s achievable by Jan. 20 — Biden could put aides to work on a long list of pardons for obscure Americans truly wronged by the justice system and deserving mercy. This pattern of presidents sullying the office as they leave it with clemency for the connected should end, even if the pardon power lives on.
@jackiekcalmes
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