NATO Secretary-General Jens Stoltenberg argued that Ukraine should be able to use American weapons to strike inside Russian territory, in an apparent break with the Biden administration.

“I think the time has come for allies to consider whether they should lift some of the restrictions they put on the use of weapons they have donated to Ukraine because, especially now when a lot of the fighting is going on in Kharkiv, close to the border,” Stoltenberg said in an interview with the Economist over the weekend. “To deny Ukraine the possibility of using these weapons against legitimate military targets on Russian territory makes it very hard for them to defend themselves.”

While the NATO boss did not mention the U.S. or the Biden administration by name, the comments come as the U.S. has continued to ban Ukraine from using American weapons to target Russian territory.

KYIV’S FORCES ARE UP AGAINST A CONCERTED RUSSIAN PUSH IN EASTERN UKRAINE, A MILITARY OFFICIAL SAYS

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy has urged the U.S. to lift the restrictions, calls that have begun to gain favor among some lawmakers on the Hill. Last week, a bipartisan group of lawmakers led by House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence Chairman Michael Turner, R-Ohio, penned a letter to the Defense Department asking that the restrictions on U.S. weapons use be lifted.

“Ukrainians have been unable to defend themselves due to the administration’s current policy,” the letter read.

According to an Institute for the Study of War report, Russia has continued to amass equipment and men at the Ukrainian border for its planned Kharkiv offensive. The bulk of that equipment has remained in reserve on the Russian side of the border, the report noted, far enough away to be out of the reach of much of Ukraine’s arsenal.

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy, second left, looks at a map during his visit to the 110th Mechanized Brigade in Avdiivka, the site of fierce battles with the Russian troops in the Donetsk region. (Ukrainian Presidential Press Office via AP)

SITUATION IN UKRAINE IS ‘DIRE’ AS AMMUNITION SUPPLIES DROP ON US, EUROPE ‘STARVATION DIET’

That could change if Ukraine was able to use HIMARS rocket and ATACMS missile weapons systems provided to the country by the U.S., which the report notes would likely be able to reach the Russian targets.

The recent calls to change that policy have also gained the support of House Speaker Mike Johnson, R-La., who said in an interview with Voice of America last week that the U.S. should not “micromanage” Ukraine’s war effort.

President Biden (Drew Angerer/Getty Images)

“I think we need to allow Ukraine to prosecute the war the way they see fit,” Johnson said. “They need to be able to fight back.”

The White House did not immediately respond to a Fox News Digital request for comment.

On Tuesday evening I was stopped mid-task, stunned, when I saw the subject line on a new fundraising email from Donald Trump: “They were authorized to shoot me!”

By Thursday morning, however, when I got the email that had Trump crying, “I nearly escaped death,” I was savvy to his con. My fear, however, is his most die-hard supporters are not, and that they might be provoked not to send money but to take up arms for him.

It’s happened, you know.

Trump doesn’t care. Over several days, he and his MAGA echo chamber spun a lie — the “Pants on Fire” kind, by Politifact’s reckoning — out of newly unsealed papers in the Florida classified documents criminal case against Trump. Falsely referencing boilerplate language in FBI agents’ plans for searching Mar-a-Lago in 2022, they claimed that President Biden’s Justice Department had authorized the potential assassination of Trump.

“It’s just been revealed that Biden’s DOJ was authorized to use DEADLY FORCE for their DESPICABLE raid in Mar-a-Lago,” he wailed in the Tuesday email and on his social media sites. “You know they’re just itching to do the unthinkable. Joe Biden was locked & loaded ready to take me out & put my family in danger.”

He repeated the claim in Thursday’s post, and his minions amplified it. “Were they going to shoot [Secret Service] then Pres Trump, Melania, and Barron too???,” Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene of Georgia, Congress’ crackpot, wondered on X (formerly Twitter) to her more than 3 million followers. Fox News host Sean Hannity fulminated in prime time. And the Republican National Committee raged that the FBI’s deadly force authority “takes the Biden administration’s weaponization of the law to an entirely new level.”

As Trump lies go, this one was a whopper that crossed all lines: A former president, now the presumed nominee of one of our two major parties, alleged that the sitting president’s administration plotted to possibly kill him. That claim should not have been met with a collective Trump-will-be-Trump shrug.

Yet that’s pretty much what happened. As a headline Thursday on the Bulwark, the anti-Trump conservatives’ website, read: “Donald Trump Is Lying About an Assassination Attempt and Nobody Cares.”

You heard almost nothing from either party in Congress, except for MAGA Republicans who spread the lie. Missouri Sen. Josh Hawley tweeted a 2022 clip in which Atty. Gen. Merrick Garland said he’d “personally approved” the decision to get a warrant to search Mar-a-Lago, and Hawley added that perhaps Garland “would like to come to Congress and explain all this under oath to the American people.”

I’m sure Garland wouldn’t mind at all. And yet it took a reporter’s question at the Justice Department on Thursday before the attorney general, the alleged head of the potential Trump death squad, responded to the slander.

“That allegation is false,” he said, “and it is extremely dangerous.” The phrasing regarding FBI force was standard operating stuff, Garland added, the same protocol that was in place when agents searched Biden’s home for classified papers in early 2023. What he could have added is that the FBI knew Trump wouldn’t be at Mar-a-Lago when the agents showed up.

The attorney general was clearly ready for the question. But his measured, belated denial wasn’t enough. Only the president can command the attention that refuting Trump’s reckless lie demanded.

I get that Biden doesn’t want to react to every Trump fallacy. He doesn’t want to give oxygen to the constant bloviations, accord them the respect of a reaction or further exhaust Americans tired of drama. But in a nation where many of us have memories of political assassinations and assassination attempts, where domestic terrorism is ”metastasizing across the country,” according to the FBI, and political violence is on the rise, Trump’s obscenely fake news deserved stronger, faster push back.

From anyone but Trump — imagine any living past president — the assertion that the government would murder political rivals would ignite blanket media coverage, a law enforcement scramble and congressional investigations. (Where are the House Republicans so eager to impeach Biden? Don’t they believe Trump?)

It’s a measure of Trump’s widely perceived clownishness that the nation mostly yawned when the former president screamed in all-caps, “BIDEN’S DOJ WAS AUTHORIZED TO SHOOT ME!” What could be more illustrative of the complacency than Nikki Haley’s decision to betray her anti-Trump Republican supporters and finally announce on Wednesday, amid the assassination lying, that — wait for it — she’d be voting for Trump.

The peril is that not all the nation yawns. Polls and testimonials show that Trump’s hard-core supporters — an overwhelming majority of Republicans — believe his lies. They believe Biden robbed him of reelection in 2020, that Biden operates a crime family from inside the White House and that Biden is orchestrating Trump’s criminal prosecutions. Countless Jan. 6 defendants have testified to the power of Trump’s words in inciting their violent deeds.

Why wouldn’t some of those true believers believe Biden’s Justice Department would gun Trump down? And what might they do about it?

Biden will never convince MAGA loyalists that Trump is lying about anything. But for the sake of us non–MAGA Americans, he should not have ignored such a scurrilous and dangerous accusation. He should have made a forceful case for why Trump’s lies could invite violence and argue, for the sake of his campaign, that anyone who’d tell those lies is unfit for the office.

The president missed his chance. But, alas, Trump is bound to provide him with another.

@jackiekcalmes

TAIPEI, TAIWAN – A group of House lawmakers is in Taiwan this week meeting with its newly elected officials, despite warnings from China to stay out of the region and as Beijing ramps up its military drills around the island.

House Foreign Affairs Committee Chairman Michael McCaul, R-Texas, is leading the multi-day diplomatic trip, which is coming a week after President Lai Ching-te and his deputies took office with a defiant speech emphasizing Taiwan’s independence from Beijing’s ruling Chinese Communist Party (CCP).

“Leading this historic and bipartisan CODEL to Taiwan — the first U.S. congressional delegation to meet with the newly elected Taiwan officials — sends a signal to the Chinese Communist Party that the United States stands with the people of Taiwan and will work to maintain the status quo across the Taiwan Straight,” McCaul told Fox News Digital. “I look forward to meeting senior Taiwan leaders and members of civil society to continue strengthening our bilateral relationship on all fronts.”

The bipartisan group also includes Rep. Young Kim, R-Calif., the panel’s subcommittee chair for the Indo-Pacific, along with Reps. Andy Barr, R-Ky., Jimmy Panetta, D-Calif., Chrissy Houlahan, D-Pa., and Joe Wilson, R-S.C.

CHINA’S FOREIGN MINISTRY BLASTS TAIWAN INAUGURATION, PHILIPPINES STANDOFF IN SOUTH CHINA SEA

Panetta told Fox News Digital the trip sent a critical pro-democracy message throughout the globe.

“Democracies around the world must stand together in defense of our shared values and freedoms,” Panetta said. “This bipartisan delegation to Taiwan is a demonstration of that necessary partnership. I look forward to congratulating President Lai Ching-te on his recent inauguration and continuing to strengthen the bonds between our two nations with an eye toward the challenges and opportunities that lie ahead in the region.”

China’s military, meanwhile, has been exercising a menacing show of force in drills involving “sea assaults, land strikes, air defense and anti-submarine in the airspace and waters to the north and south of Taiwan Island,” Beijing’s Defense Ministry said Thursday.

CHINA SANCTIONS FORMER REPUBLICAN REP MIKE GALLAGHER AFTER TAIWAN PRESIDENT’S INAUGURATION

The trip comes a week after the inauguration of Taiwan’s new President, Lai Ching-te, right, who is pictured standing next to former President Tsai Ing-wen, left. (AP Photo/Chiang Ying-ying)

Beijing’s Defense Ministry said the drills included “joint seizure of comprehensive battlefield control, and joint precision strikes on key targets” and were “a strong punishment for the separatist acts of ‘Taiwan independence’ forces and a stern warning against the interference and provocation by external forces.”

The Taiwanese Defense Ministry said it had tracked 49 Chinese military planes and 19 of China’s Navy ships operating around the Island on Friday. It blasted China’s drills as an “irrational provocation.”

In his inaugural speech, Taiwan’s President Lai said he sought to “neither yield nor provoke” Beijing but pledged to stand firm against China’s encroachment.

LAWMAKERS BRAWL AS TAIWAN’S PARLIAMENT DESCENDS INTO CHAOS

 A screen grab captured from a video shows the Chinese People’s Liberation Army’s Eastern Theater Command launching large-scale joint military exercises around Taiwan with naval vessels and military aircraft in China on May 24, 2024. ( Gui Xinhua / PLA/ China Military/Anadolu via Getty Images)

The Chinese government has rebuked the new leader, and a top CCP official issued a direct warning to U.S. lawmakers not to meet with him or other Taiwanese government officials.

“Any visit by congressional members to Taiwan will seriously violate the one-China principle . . . interfere in China’s internal affairs, undermine China’s sovereignty and territorial integrity and send a seriously wrong signal to ‘Taiwan independence’ separatist forces,” Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesman Wang Wenbin said late last week.

Wenbin called on the U.S. to stop official diplomatic communications with Taiwan, “Otherwise, all consequences arising therefrom must be borne by the U.S.”