Politics
Video: Defense Officials Give No Timeline for War in Iran as U.S. Boosts Forces
new video loaded: Defense Officials Give No Timeline for War in Iran as U.S. Boosts Forces
transcript
transcript
Defense Officials Give No Timeline for War in Iran as U.S. Boosts Forces
At a Pentagon news conference, top defense officials said that the U.S. military was sending more forces to the Middle East and expects to “take additional losses.” Earlier, President Trump said that the U.S. could continue striking Iran for the next four to five weeks.
-
“We didn’t start this war, but under President Trump, we are finishing it. This operation is a clear, devastating, decisive mission. Destroy the missile threat. Destroy the navy. No nukes. President Trump has all the latitude in the world to talk about how long it may or may not take. Four weeks. Two weeks, six weeks. It could move up. It could move back. We’re going to execute at his command the objectives we’ve set out to achieve.” “We expect to take additional losses. And as always, we will work to minimize U.S. losses. But as the secretary said, this is major combat operations.” Reporter: “Are there currently any American boots on the ground in Iran?” “No, but we’re not going to go into the exercise of what we will or will not do. I think — it’s one of those fallacies for a long time that this department or presidents or others should tell the American people. This — and our enemies by the way — here’s exactly what we’ll do. Why in the world would we tell you, you, the enemy, anybody, what we will or will not do in pursuit of an objective?”
By Christina Kelso
March 2, 2026
Politics
DHS shutdown breakthrough comes at cost for Republicans as funding fights nears end
NEWYou can now listen to Fox News articles!
Congress is one step closer to ending the Homeland Security shutdown after the Senate advanced a new, last-minute deal, but it came at the price of Republicans ceding ground, temporarily, to Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y.
The Senate unanimously advanced a deal to reopen most of the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) in the wee hours of Friday morning, 42 days into the shutdown that was spurred by the Trump administration’s immigration operations in Minnesota.
It was an agreement that largely gave Schumer and Senate Democrats what they wanted — no funding for Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and parts of Customs and Border Protection (CBP). But it lacked the stringent reforms they desired, like requiring judicial warrants or requiring agents to unmask.
SCHUMER, DEMS BLOCK DHS FUNDING AGAIN, TRUMP INTERVENES TO PAY TSA AGENTS
Senate Majority Leader John Thune, R-S.D., said that Republicans had made what was likely their “final” offer to Democrats to reopen DHS. (Stefani Reynolds/Bloomberg via Getty Images)
While the deal mirrors previous attempts by Democrats to pass similar legislation that carved out immigration funding, Thune argued that Democrats are still walking away empty-handed in the policy fight over immigration enforcement.
“We’ve been trying for weeks to fund the whole thing,” Thune said. “And, I mean, in the end, this is what they were willing to agree to. But again, it’s different that it has zero reforms in it. I mean, they got no reforms on DHS, which they could have had if they had been willing to work with us a little bit on that.”
Schumer said that if Republicans hadn’t blocked their initial attempts, “this could have been done three weeks ago.”
“This is exactly what we wanted,” Schumer said. “This is what we asked for, and I’m very proud of my caucus. My caucus held the line.”
The DHS funding deal now heads to the House, where Republicans aren’t enthusiastic about not funding key components of President Donald Trump’s immigration crackdown agenda.
The latest plan came after Senate Democrats blocked a seventh attempt to reopen DHS, after back-and-forth talks throughout the day on Thursday appeared to yield little progress toward a resolution. Trump also announced his intent to sign an order that would pay Transportation Security Administration (TSA) agents as major airports are rocked with staggering lines and eye-popping wait times amid the shutdown.
DEMS BLOCK DHS FUNDING AFTER GOP REJECTS THEIR COUNTER, THUNE SAYS SCHUMER ‘GOING IN CIRCLES’
Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., and Democrats rejected Republicans latest deal to reopen DHS, and have promised a counteroffer with reforms in return. (Alex Wong/Getty Images)
While a further concession to Democrats, in part, the underlying argument Republicans have made all along is that if Schumer and his caucus wanted reforms, they would have to agree to fund immigration enforcement.
And ICE and CBP are still flush with roughly $75 billion in cash from Trump’s “big, beautiful bill,” giving the agencies a buffer for a time.
“The good news is we anticipated this a year ago. I mean, one of the reasons we front loaded, pre-loaded up the ‘one big, beautiful bill’ with advanced funding for Homeland Security was because we anticipated this was likely going to happen, and it did,” Thune said. “I still think it’s unfortunate. The Dems wanted reforms. We tried to work with them on reforms. They ended up getting no reforms.”
The same process used to pass that colossal legislative package will likely be turned to again fund immigration enforcement.
DHS DEAL IN LIMBO AS DEMOCRATS DEMAND TOUGHER ICE CRACKDOWN DESPITE GOP COMPROMISE
A U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement officer’s badge and gear. (Michael Siluk/UCG/Universal Images Group via Getty Images)
Sen. Eric Schmitt, R-Mo., envisions funding ICE and CBP for several years.
“Democrats are trying to shut down ICE funding for the remainder of the fiscal year — ultimately they won’t be successful,” Schmitt said on X. “In response, I’ll be pushing to lock in funding for deportation operations and salaries for a decade.”
Doing so could be difficult, still, given that Republicans want to dump several other priorities into the mix, including portions of the Safeguarding American Voter Eligibility (SAVE) America Act and funding for the Iran war.
CLICK HERE TO DOWNLOAD THE FOX NEWS APP
And some Republicans are already couching expectations on what can and can’t be accomplished in the party-line process, given that anything in the bill has to pass muster with strict rules in the Senate.
“I think we have to set our sights a little bit lower on this reconciliation bill,” Sen. Roger Marshall, R-Kan., told Fox News Digital. “It’s got to be targeted to fund ICE for 10 years, I think that’s the number one thing to us.”
Politics
Bill Maher on getting the Mark Twain Prize for humor: ‘Like an Emmy, except I win’
It’s like that time Pinocchio became a real boy: News that was labeled “fake” last week is real today, per the Kennedy Center, and Bill Maher will indeed be the 27th person to receive the Mark Twain Prize for American Humor.
The White House strongly dissed the Atlantic’s reporting (followed by unreporting) last week that Maher was the next in line for the 2026 prize that Conan O’Brien got last year and Kevin Hart picked up the year before that. The Twain honor has been bestowed on comics almost annually since 1998 by the Kennedy Center, a “tired, broken, and dilapidated” building that President Trump slapped his own name on in December and plans to close for two years’ worth of renovations starting July 4 — hence the response from White House flacks.
“Literally FAKE NEWS,” said Steven Cheung, White House director of communications, on his official X account reacting Friday to the Atlantic story. Karoline Leavitt, White House press secretary, said in a statement to the publication, “This is fake news. Bill Maher will NOT be getting this award.”
But People reported Thursday that although the Atlantic’s news was deemed “fake” at the time, according to word from a White House official, the situation had “evolved” in the six days since then.
You say tomato, I say to-mah-to? At any rate, Bill’s getting the Twain, given previously to comedic luminaries including Richard Pryor, Whoopi Goldberg, George Carlin, Lily Tomlin, Steve Martin, Lorne Michaels, Tina Fey and Dave Chappelle.
Maher had no response on social media, perhaps reserving his reaction for the upcoming “Real Time With Bill Maher” episode due out Friday on HBO or his next “Club Random” podcast. But he did issue a dryly amusing statement Thursday in a Kennedy Center news release, saying, “Thank you to the Mark Twain people: I just had the award explained to me, and apparently it’s like an Emmy, except I win.”
(Maher’s show has been nominated for Emmy Awards 22 times, from 2004 through 2024, including 13 nods for variety series and the rest for writing, directing and personal performance. It has won exactly zero of those times. Even Susan Lucci only had to wait through 18 Daytime Emmy nominations before she finally won on the 19th — and proceeded to lose out on two more.)
The comic’s statement continued: “I’d just like to say that it is indeed humbling to get anything named for a man who’s been thrown out of as many school libraries as Mark Twain.”
“For nearly three decades, the Mark Twain Prize has celebrated some of the greatest minds in comedy,” Roma Daravi, vice president of public relations for the Kennedy Center, said in a statement of her own. “For even longer, Bill has been influencing American discourse — one politically incorrect joke at a time.”
Maher, a self-described liberal who has no love for the Republican Party, found himself in strange-new-respect territory among conservatives in recent years after he started slamming far-left ideology as ruthlessly as he slammed the far right. Then last spring he accepted an invitation for dinner with Trump at the White House, and many heads exploded.
“OK, as you know, 12 days ago, I had dinner with President Trump, a dinner that was set up by my friend Kid Rock because we share a belief that there’s got to be something better than hurling insults from 3,000 miles away,” said Maher, who lives on the West Coast, on the April 11, 2025, episode of “Real Time.”
“And let me first say that to all the people who treated this like it was some kind of summit meeting, you’re ridiculous. Like I was going to sign a treaty or something. I have — I have no power. I’m a f— comedian, and he’s the most powerful leader in the world. I’m not the leader of anything except maybe a contingent of centrist-minded people who think there’s got to be a better way of running this country than hating each other every minute.”
Maher said he brought with him to the dinner a list of almost five dozen epithets the president had hurled his way over the years, intending to ask Trump to sign it for him. Which the president did. And after sharing some anecdotes from the visit, including some snappy retorts, Maher told his audience that Trump was “much more self-aware than he lets on in public.”
“I never felt I had to walk on eggshells around him. And honestly, I voted for Clinton and Obama, but I would never feel comfortable talking to them the way I was able to talk with Donald Trump. That’s just how it went down. Make of it what you will.”
The Mark Twain Prize will be given to Maher at a gala set for June 28, with Netflix streaming the event at a later date, yet to be determined.
Politics
Where Trump Has Installed 2020 Election Deniers in Government
When President Trump sought to overturn his loss in the 2020 election and remain in power, resistance from within his own government helped to stop him.
Top Justice Department officials rejected his specious claims that the vote had been marred by widespread fraud. Senior officials at the Department of Homeland Security refused to go along with his outlandish efforts to seize voting machines. Cybersecurity experts praised the count as secure, and the intelligence community sidestepped his requests to declare that foreign nations had interfered in the results.
But Mr. Trump’s second term looks very different. The president has filled his administration with people who are sympathetic to his baseless claims that the presidential race more than five years ago was stolen.
These officials have been put into positions across the federal government, at the White House and in agencies where they could play a role in undermining the midterm elections and the 2028 presidential cycle.
At the same time, Mr. Trump has maintained allies in Congress and in state governments who could wield significant power over the process of counting votes and the seating of members of the House.
Abigail Jackson, a White House spokeswoman, sidestepped questions about Mr. Trump’s personnel decisions and instead asserted that he was “committed to ensuring that Americans have full confidence in the administration of elections.” She pointed to the president’s efforts to have Congress pass legislation that would require proof of citizenship to register to vote and photo identification to vote, prohibit mail-in ballots and bar the practice of ballot harvesting — having one person turn in mail ballots for several others.
“The vast majority of Americans support President Trump’s common-sense election integrity agenda,” Ms. Jackson said.
Officials from the Department of Homeland Security and the Office of the Director of National Intelligence said that the agencies were focused on keeping elections safe and secure, and were working to carry out the president’s policies on elections. The Justice Department did not respond to a request for comment.
With Mr. Trump consistently seeking to sow doubts about the integrity of elections, the number of election deniers he has installed across the administration means he would face fewer checks on any efforts to undermine an outcome he did not like, and could more easily amplify baseless claims of fraud.
Here is a look at some of the key players.
The White House has no formal or legal role to play in administering elections, but Mr. Trump recently created a presidentially appointed position to oversee election integrity and security.
That job has largely been involved in investigating the 2020 election.
What happened in 2020
Mr. Trump has always been the government’s most avid promoter of false claims that the 2020 election was rigged against him. And in 2020, he routinely used the force of the Oval Office — albeit unsuccessfully — to strong-arm state officials and federal appointees to act on his claims.
Kurt Olsen
Director of election security and integrity
Mr. Olsen was central to opening a recent F.B.I. investigation that led to the search of a Fulton County, Ga., election office in January.
Prior support for claims of election fraud
Mr. Olsen was a pro-Trump lawyer who in late 2020 contacted senior Justice Department officials on Mr. Trump’s behalf, pushing them to file a motion to nullify the election with the Supreme Court.
After 2020, he worked with Mike Lindell, the chief executive of MyPillow and a longtime election denier, to bring many unsuccessful lawsuits challenging the results of other elections and the use of voting machines, based on debunked conspiracy theories. While representing Kari Lake, a former candidate for governor in Arizona, he was hit with sanctions for making false and misleading claims.
Ms. Lake, who tried to reverse her defeat in the 2022 race, has served as the effective head of the U.S. Agency for Global Media. A judge ruled Ms. Lake’s appointment invalid, but the administration says she still works for the organization.
Clay Parikh
Special government employee with a background in cybersecurity
Mr. Parikh is working closely with Mr. Olsen to re-examine claims of fraud in the 2020 election, and was cited as a supposed expert in the F.B.I. affidavit supporting the search of Fulton County’s elections office.
Prior support for claims of election fraud
Mr. Parikh took part in Ms. Lake’s failed efforts to reverse her defeat in the 2022 Arizona governor’s race, and has served as a witness in other cases brought by Mr. Olsen challenging the use of voting machines.
Office of the Director of National Intelligence
In his first term, Mr. Trump issued an executive order that gave the Office of the Director of National Intelligence the ability to make determinations about foreign interference in elections. Such declarations could allow the president to declare national emergencies surrounding elections.
What happened in 2020
Several advisers to Mr. Trump tried to push the intelligence community to determine that foreign entities had meddled in the election, in an effort to justify a move to seize voting machines. The consensus opinion among intelligence agencies was ultimately that countries like China and Russia had not interfered in a significant way.
John Ratcliffe, then the director of national intelligence, disagreed about China’s supposed role, but did not issue his dissent until Jan. 7, 2021, a day after the election had been certified.
Tulsi Gabbard
Director of national intelligence
Ms. Gabbard is helping oversee the Trump administration’s effort to investigate supposed voting irregularities in Georgia, and was present at the F.B.I. search of the Fulton County elections office. Her office also recently seized voting machines in Puerto Rico, to examine them for vulnerability to hacking by foreign entities.
Prior support for claims of election fraud
Unlike others Mr. Trump has installed in government, Ms. Gabbard did not have a history of supporting Mr. Trump’s claims of election fraud. She started to back such claims publicly as the director of national intelligence.
The Justice Department has the power to open investigations into allegations of fraud in elections, a move that could, if nothing else, undermine faith in the results of the upcoming midterms.
What happened in 2020
After the 2020 election, Mr. Trump pressured the department to investigate his baseless claims that the voting had been marred by fraud. He wanted to use those inquiries to persuade state legislatures to refuse to certify his defeat.
Attorney General William P. Barr rejected Mr. Trump’s claims that the count had been compromised, and refused suggestions from the president’s advisers to seize voting machines. Mr. Barr was replaced by Jeffrey Rosen, the deputy attorney general, in late December of that year. He similarly resisted Mr. Trump’s efforts.
Pam Bondi
Attorney general
Last spring, the Justice Department began seeking detailed voter roll data from states, to compile a national voting database. Under Ms. Bondi, it has sued at least 29 states and territories in an attempt to force them to turn over data.
Prior support for claims of election fraud
As a private lawyer, Ms. Bondi helped the Trump campaign seek to overturn the results of the 2020 election in Pennsylvania. She appeared at a news conference with the Trump ally Rudolph W. Giuliani, and falsely claimed that Mr. Trump had won Pennsylvania, even though not all of the ballots had been counted.
Ms. Bondi later served as the litigation chairwoman for the Trump-allied America First Policy Institute, which brought a series of lawsuits seeking to hinder ballot box access or disenfranchise groups of voters.
Kash Patel
F.B.I. director
Mr. Patel is overseeing a criminal investigation into supposed irregularities in the 2020 presidential election that has so far led to the seizure of voting records at the Fulton County election center in Georgia, and the subpoenaing of records in Maricopa County, Ariz.
Prior support for claims of election fraud
During his Senate confirmation hearing last year, Mr. Patel sidestepped questions about whether Mr. Trump had lost the 2020 election, responding only that Joseph R. Biden Jr. had been certified and sworn in as president.
Last summer, Mr. Patel promoted an unsubstantiated theory on his social media account that thousands of fake driver’s licenses seized by customs officials in 2020 were part of a Chinese plot to throw the election that year to Mr. Biden.
Harmeet K. Dhillon
Assistant attorney general for civil rights
Ms. Dhillon has led the Justice Department effort to obtain complete, unredacted voter roll lists from every state in the country, including suing more than half the states in an attempt to force them to turn over the data.
Prior support for claims of election fraud
Ms. Dhillon advocated efforts to overturn Mr. Trump’s loss in the 2020 election, and encouraged people to donate to his legal defense fund. Shortly after the election, she appeared on Fox Business urging Mr. Trump’s appointees on the Supreme Court to “step in and do something” to help him win the race.
She also served as a campaign lawyer for Ms. Lake and assisted her efforts to overturn her 2022 Arizona governor’s race loss.
Eric Neff
Acting Chief, voting section
Mr. Neff leads the voting section at the Justice Department, which is supposed to enforce the civil provisions of the federal laws that protect the right to vote.
Prior support for claims of election fraud
As a Los Angeles County prosecutor, Mr. Neff was placed on administrative leave in 2022 after basing a prosecution of the chief executive of the election management company Konnech on tips from a right-wing group, True the Vote, which has promoted conspiracy theories centered on election fraud.
Mr. Neff also served at one point as a lawyer for Patrick Byrne, the former Overstock chief executive, who advised the Trump administration to seize voting machines during the 2020 election.
Christopher Gardner
Trial attorney, voting section
Mr. Gardner is taking part in a Justice Department effort to secure voting records from Georgia officials.
Prior support for claims of election fraud
As a private lawyer, Mr. Gardner helped file a lawsuit seeking to prevent officials in Georgia from certifying the state’s 2020 election results. He also worked with other Trump-allied lawyers, including Kenneth Chesebro, John Eastman and Cleta Mitchell, to provide legal advice to a fake slate of electors in Georgia. Those electors claimed that Mr. Trump won the state even though Mr. Biden actually prevailed.
Megan Frederick
Trial attorney
Ms. Frederick participated in a Justice Department effort demanding voter rolls from officials in the District of Columbia.
Prior support for claims of election fraud
Ms. Frederick served as a lawyer representing the Trump campaign during the Dane County, Wis., recount in 2020, and took part in efforts to challenge more than 200,000 ballots in the state.
She also worked as a leader of the Only Citizens Vote Coalition, which is part of the election-denying Election Integrity Network, an umbrella organization run by Ms. Mitchell, a stalwart pro-Trump lawyer who tried to overturn his election loss.
Joseph Voiland
Trial attorney, civil rights division
Mr. Voiland is active in the Justice Department’s efforts to gain access to Wisconsin’s voter registration list.
Prior support for claims of election fraud
Mr. Voiland, a former Wisconsin county judge, served as a lawyer for Mr. Trump’s 2020 campaign, and sought to have thousands of ballots in the state thrown out.
Sigal Chattah
First assistant U.S. attorney in Nevada
Last July, Ms. Chattah pushed the F.B.I. to investigate claims that illegal immigrants in her state had cast ballots in the 2020 election, according to Reuters. After a federal judge ruled that she had been unlawfully appointed as interim U.S. attorney, the Justice Department put her in the role of first assistant and gave her a second title as special attorney.
Prior support for claims of election fraud
Ms. Chattah joined the Republican National Committee in 2023 to advocate taking a more hard-line stance on elections, and to oust its chairwoman, Ronna McDaniel, who was seen by Trump loyalists as not doing enough to help Mr. Trump overturn the election results in 2020.
Ms. Chattah was a defense lawyer for one of the people who served as a so-called fake elector in Nevada in 2020. She also sued unsuccessfully to stop a bill that made it illegal in Nevada to harass election officials.
Jeanine Pirro
U.S. attorney in Washington
Ms. Pirro oversees a key federal prosecutor’s office that handles many matters related to the administration of the government.
Prior support for claims of election fraud
After Mr. Trump’s loss in the 2020 election, Ms. Pirro, then a Fox News host, used her show to amplify false allegations that voting machines made by Dominion Voting Systems had been used to rig the tally. Fox ultimately paid nearly $780 million to settle claims by Dominion that the network had defamed it through its coverage.
Department of Homeland Security
The Department of Homeland Security oversees multiple departments that have critical roles in election security, such as the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency.
It has also been leading a review of election records, looking for proof of noncitizen voting. (It has not found much.)
What happened in 2020
In the immediate aftermath of the election, the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency issued a statement saying that the election was “the most secure in American history.” It contradicted claims of interference and noted that there was “no evidence that any voting system deleted or lost votes, changed votes, or was in any way compromised.”
The statement drew the ire of Mr. Trump, who fired the agency’s director, Chris Krebs, days later.
Markwayne Mullin
Secretary of Homeland Security
The Senate confirmed Mr. Mullin on March 23. During his confirmation hearing, he suggested that he supported the federal investigations into the 2020 election.
Prior support for claims of election fraud
After the 2020 election, Mr. Mullin was one of the more prolific voices in Congress calling for further investigations into vote tallies. He signed a letter to Mr. Trump asking him to direct the attorney general to appoint a special counsel to investigate the 2020 election.
Heather Honey
Deputy assistant secretary for election integrity
Ms. Honey has asserted that the Trump administration could declare a “national emergency” to justify dictating new election rules to state and local governments.
Prior support for claims of election fraud
Ms. Honey repeatedly made claims of voting irregularities in Pennsylvania during the 2020 election, and was centrally involved in the recount of Arizona’s vote tally. She also served as a witness for Ms. Lake’s failed 2022 election challenge in Arizona in a case in which Mr. Olsen worked as a lawyer. She was a leader in Ms. Mitchell’s Election Integrity Network.
Marci McCarthy
Director of public affairs at the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency
The agency works to help secure election systems and assets like voting machines.
Prior support for claims of election fraud
Ms. McCarthy also worked closely with Ms. Mitchell’s Election Integrity Network and helped place far-right activists on the local election board in DeKalb County, Ga. She was instrumental in forcing out a member of the Georgia State Election Board who voted against a rule to end mail voting.
Gregg Phillips
Associate administrator of FEMA’s office of response and recovery
While the Federal Emergency Management Agency plays no formal role in assisting elections, its Homeland Security Grant Program has been used for cybersecurity and other election protections in the past, including in 2020, according to the Brennan Center for Justice.
Prior support for claims of election fraud
After the 2016 election, Mr. Phillips claimed without evidence that millions of illegal immigrants had cast votes — an assertion later amplified by Mr. Trump. Leading up to the 2020 election, he worked with the right-wing group True the Vote to attack mail voting as fraudulent.
He also served as the executive producer on the movie “2000 Mules,” a documentary by the conservative commentator Dinesh D’Souza that falsely claimed that a network of “mules” had illegally gathered large numbers of ballots to swing the 2020 election away from Mr. Trump.
David Harvilicz
Assistant secretary for cyber, infrastructure, risk and resilience policy
Mr. Harvilicz oversees policies for maintaining the security of the country’s election infrastructure, including voting machines.
Prior support for claims of election fraud
Mr. Harvilicz has done business with James Penrose, a former intelligence officer who took part in several efforts to seize voting machines after the 2020 election in an attempt to undermine Mr. Trump’s defeat in the race, according to ProPublica. He has also called for doing away with voting machines, and has questioned victories of Democratic candidates.
-
Detroit, MI1 week agoDrummer Brian Pastoria, longtime Detroit music advocate, dies at 68
-
Science1 week agoHow a Melting Glacier in Antarctica Could Affect Tens of Millions Around the Globe
-
Movie Reviews1 week ago‘Youth’ Twitter review: Ken Karunaas impresses audiences; Suraj Venjaramoodu adds charm; music wins praise | – The Times of India
-
Science1 week agoI had to man up and get a mammogram
-
Sports6 days agoIOC addresses execution of 19-year-old Iranian wrestler Saleh Mohammadi
-
New Mexico4 days agoClovis shooting leaves one dead, four injured
-
Texas7 days agoHow to buy Houston vs. Texas A&M 2026 March Madness tickets
-
Tennessee3 days agoTennessee Police Investigating Alleged Assault Involving ‘Reacher’ Star Alan Ritchson