What Happened Today - 13 Jan 2026
What Happened Today – 13 January 2026
Venezuela….Perfidy definition/awareness
Minnesota and Illinois suing on ICE evasions
Mark Kelly sues Hegseth
Where is Pam Bondi hiding?
Fraud….Nationwide
Iran Update
Epstein and the Clinton’s
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Venezuela….Perfidy definition/awareness
The Venezuela story just got a lot darker, because the U.S. is now being accused of using straight-up perfidy in that boat strike campaign off Venezuela’s coast.
What just came out
New reporting says the U.S. used a secret aircraft painted to look like a civilian plane in the first September 2, 2025 strike on an alleged Venezuelan drug boat in the Caribbean, hiding its weapons inside the fuselage so nothing looked military from below. That strike killed 11 people, and now officials and military lawyers are openly saying this could be a textbook example of perfidy under the laws of war.
What “perfidy” means here
Perfidy, in laws-of-war language, is when a combatant pretends to be a civilian or otherwise protected so the other side lets its guard down, then uses that deception to attack, which is explicitly banned and treated as a war crime. Legal experts are pointing out that if you paint a military jet to look like a civilian airliner and hide the weapons, you’re basically inviting the enemy to treat all similar civilian planes as potential threats, which is exactly why this rule exists.
The Venezuela angle and the “double tap”
The boat the U.S. hit was allegedly leaving Venezuela and tied, according to Trump, to the Tren de Aragua criminal group supposedly operating under Nicolás Maduro’s protection. The scandal is even worse because there was a reported “double tap”: two people who survived the first blast and were clinging to wreckage were then killed in a second strike, raising separate war-crime questions about killing shipwrecked survivors.
Trump’s legal theory and pushback
Trump and his team are trying to justify all of this by declaring the U.S. is in an “armed conflict” with drug cartels and treating suspected traffickers as unlawful combatants, even though drug trafficking is normally a criminal matter, not a war. Human rights groups, U.N. voices, and a chunk of legal experts are calling these extrajudicial killings and saying the perfidy angle just adds another layer of illegality to an already rogue operation.
What’s changing now
After that first disguised-plane hit, the military has reportedly shifted to clearly marked military aircraft and drones for later strikes, which looks a lot like they know the perfidy issue is real, even as they publicly deny any wrongdoing. Congress has seen longer video of the September 2 attack in closed-door briefings, and lawmakers are now openly pressing the Pentagon on perfidy and demanding more transparency on the whole Venezuela boat campaign.
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Minnesota and Illinois suing on ICE evasions
Minnesota and Illinois are basically done playing nice and are dragging Trump’s immigration machine into federal court over what they’re calling an outright federal occupation, not legitimate law enforcement.
What Minnesota is arguing
Minnesota’s attorney general Keith Ellison, along with Minneapolis and St. Paul, is suing to stop the surge of thousands of ICE and Border Patrol agents that flooded the Twin Cities after an ICE agent killed Renee Nicole Good, a 37‑year‑old mother of three, in a 40‑second car encounter. They’re calling it a “federal invasion,” saying DHS is using excessive and deadly force, doing warrantless arrests, and grabbing people at “sensitive locations” like churches, courts, and schools, which they argue violates the 10th Amendment, the First Amendment, and basic due process.
The ICE/Border Patrol behavior on the ground
The Minnesota complaint says DHS has basically turned ICE into kidnappers, with local cops forced to respond to about 20 reports of residents being snatched into unmarked vehicles by agents who won’t identify themselves. On top of that, Ellison says the feds are targeting Minnesota because of its diversity, Democratic politics, and refusal to help with mass deportations, framing the whole operation as political retaliation dressed up as “public safety.”
What Illinois is laying out
Illinois’ attorney general Kwame Raoul and Governor J.B. Pritzker have filed their own suit with Chicago, going after what they describe as a quasi‑military ICE/CBP campaign that kicked off with “Operation Midway Blitz” last fall. They’re documenting agents killing one resident, shooting another, raiding a Chicago apartment building and detaining everyone including kids, doing mass warrantless arrests, random street interrogations, and firing tear gas at peaceful residents, all way beyond what Congress ever authorized.
The legal theory against Trump’s team
Both states are hitting the Trump administration and DHS (including Secretary Kristi Noem and top CBP/ICE brass) with a combo of constitutional and administrative-law claims, arguing the surge violates the 10th Amendment’s protection of state sovereignty and the Administrative Procedure Act’s ban on arbitrary, retaliatory federal action. Illinois specifically says the feds are using funding threats, National Guard deployment schemes, and these ICE/CBP shock troops to punish blue states that won’t turn their local cops into immigration enforcers, which they say flat-out crosses the line into unlawful coercion.
How Trump’s people are spinning it
DHS mouthpieces are painting Ellison, Raoul, and the governors as “sanctuary politicians” putting politics over safety, claiming Trump has not just the right but the duty to flood these places with agents to “restore order” where locals supposedly failed. But Minnesota and Illinois are flipping that script, saying it’s ICE and Border Patrol who are destabilizing their cities—operating like an occupying force, trampling civil rights, and making immigrant communities so terrified that people are avoiding schools, hospitals, and even calling 911.
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Mark Kelly sues Hegseth
Mark Kelly basically decided he’s not letting Pete Hegseth and Trump’s Pentagon make an example out of him, so he hauled Hegseth into federal court for trying to mess with his military rank and pension over a video calling out illegal orders.
What kicked this off
Kelly, a retired Navy captain and now senator from Arizona, recorded a video with other Democrats telling service members they not only don’t have to follow unlawful orders, they have a duty to refuse them, in the wake of Trump’s drug-boat strikes and broader saber-rattling. Trump lost his mind on Truth Social, screaming “sedition” and amplifying posts fantasizing about hanging, while Hegseth slapped Kelly with a formal censure and opened proceedings to downgrade his retirement rank, which would cut his pension.
What Kelly’s lawsuit says
Kelly’s lawsuit, filed in D.C. federal court, says Hegseth and the Pentagon are straight-up retaliating against him for protected political speech in violation of the First Amendment and the Constitution’s speech-or-debate clause. He’s asking the court to block the censure, stop any demotion review, and declare that the executive branch cannot use military discipline to punish a sitting member of Congress for criticizing the president and the defense secretary.
Why this is a big deal
Kelly’s argument is that if Hegseth can chill his speech by threatening his pension, then every retired officer in Congress—and honestly every retired vet—has to worry about being financially punished for saying something the administration doesn’t like. His lawyers point out there’s basically no precedent for the executive branch imposing military sanctions on a member of Congress for disfavored political speech, and doing it now would flip separation of powers on its head by letting the Pentagon discipline one of the people tasked with overseeing it.
How Hegseth and Trump’s side are spinning it
Hegseth is trying to frame this as a “necessary” step to protect discipline, accusing Kelly of undermining the chain of command and encouraging troops to ignore orders. Trump-world media is leaning into the “seditious” label, but they’re dodging the core issue: they’re using military law and Kelly’s retired status as a weapon to police speech from an elected senator who’s literally doing oversight on the same war-making decisions he criticized in that video.
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Where is Pam Bondi hiding?
Right now Pam Bondi is still sitting in the big chair as Trump’s attorney general, but the walls around her are definitely getting tighter, not looser.
Where she is and what she’s sitting on
Bondi is running the Justice Department in D.C., neck‑deep in the Epstein files fight, the ethics mess, and Trump’s demands that DOJ go harder after his enemies. She’s already on the hot seat with a massive ethics complaint at the Florida Bar for threatening DOJ lawyers if they don’t “zealously pursue the President’s political objectives,” plus she fired the DOJ’s top ethics official, which only made her look more corrupt.
The Epstein and contempt pressure
On Epstein, Congress is furious because she slow‑rolled and partially withheld the records they required by law, and now you’ve got a bipartisan crew—Massie and Ro Khanna in the House, Schumer in the Senate—openly talking inherent contempt and daily fines to force her to cough everything up. That doesn’t remove her, but it’s the kind of move you throw at someone you think is actively obstructing justice, and it’s rare enough that just threatening it shows how radioactive she’s become.
Trump’s patience and MAGA vibes
Trump has started griping about Bondi in private, calling her weak and ineffective on his agenda, which is always the first sign that someone’s MAGA armor is cracking with him. The irony is wild: the same base she’s been fronting for is now mad she hasn’t gone scorched earth enough on the Epstein docs and on Trump’s enemies, so she’s catching heat from both rule‑of‑law people and the hardliners.
Is she actually going to be removed?
There’s no formal removal process in motion right now—no impeachment vote started, no public push from Trump to fire her yet—but she’s standing in a very narrow lane. Between the bar complaint, calls for disbarment floating around, congressional threats of contempt, and Trump’s growing annoyance, she’s one big scandal or Trump tantrum away from either being forced out or becoming so damaged she can’t realistically stay long‑term.
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Fraud….Nationwide
The Minnesota fraud cases are ugly as hell, but they’re also exactly the kind of thing that was heavily dug into, prosecuted, and exposed under Biden-era DOJ and watchdogs, and they’re just one slice of a much bigger national rot.
Minnesota fraud: what actually happened
Minnesota’s headline case is that Feeding Our Future scam, where a nonprofit and its partners siphoned off around $250 million in bogus “kids’ meals” during COVID by faking huge meal counts and running money through shell companies, cars, and real estate. Federal prosecutors have charged more than 70–90 people, gotten dozens of guilty pleas and convictions, and are still bringing new indictments, which is the exact opposite of “nobody was held accountable.”
Biden DOJ and rooting this out
A lot of this came to light and got aggressively prosecuted because inspectors general, FBI, IRS‑CI, and U.S. Attorneys leaned in hard after 2021, not because some podcaster “discovered” it. In Minnesota specifically, state officials actually raised red flags early, and then the feds stepped in, raided sites in 2022, and kept grinding through complex financial cases, which is slow, boring work that doesn’t make for sexy internet rants but does put people in prison.
The “$6k per American” and the real nationwide scale
Nationwide, pandemic-relief fraud is enormous, but the real numbers are messy and spread across multiple programs.
• Pandemic unemployment fraud alone is estimated at roughly – billion dollars by GAO, with some outside estimates up near billion.
• PPP/EIDL small-business relief had an estimated billion in potentially fraudulent loans and grants.
If you start adding up the high‑end estimates across UI, PPP/EIDL, and other COVID programs, you can easily get into the several‑hundred‑billion to maybe low‑trillions ballpark, which is where that “every American could get about 6k” talking point comes from. It’s more of a back‑of‑the‑envelope outrage number than a serious policy proposal, but it does capture how deep this went and how much was straight-up stolen or wasted.
Why this is a systemic problem, not just “Minnesota”
The Minnesota mess is just one big, splashy example of how loose rules, emergency money, and weak guardrails let scammers print cash, and that same pattern repeated in every corner of the country. Fraudsters used dead people’s Social Security numbers, prisoners’ identities, and fake businesses, and a lot of states had garbage antifraud controls going into the pandemic, so the federal and state systems together were basically begging to be looted.
How this connects to DOJ priorities vs. USAID cuts
On your “how did DOJ not figure this out and root it out when they were looking for this exact thing?” point:
• The uncomfortable truth is DOJ did find a lot of it but nowhere near all, and inspectors general have been clear they’ll probably never fully map the total fraud.
• Enforcement is reactive and under-resourced; by the time the alarms fully went off, most of the easy money was already gone, laundered, or overseas, and the cases are insanely labor‑intensive to build.
Meanwhile, instead of reinvesting in antifraud, oversight, and global public‑health infrastructure, Trump’s people swung a hammer at USAID and global health funding.
• Trump shut down USAID as an independent agency and terminated or gutted the vast majority of its programs, and then pushed rescissions that yanked about billion in foreign aid, including global health and humanitarian money.
• Independent analyses estimate that the cuts to Gavi and other health programs alone could mean over a million children’s lives lost, tens of millions more malaria cases per year, and hundreds of thousands losing basic health, nutrition, water, and child‑protection support in places like South Sudan and Burkina Faso.
So yeah, there’s brutal irony here: instead of saying “we’re going to claw back pandemic fraud and invest that in protecting people at home and abroad,” the current crew has slashed USAID and global health in ways that will absolutely cost lives, while barely touching the core structural weaknesses that let hundreds of billions in fraud slip through.
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Iran Update
The U.S. is very clearly putting the chess pieces on the board for possible strikes on Iran, but nobody has publicly announced “we are about to hit them” yet. The meeting cancellation and “get out now” warning are exactly the kind of moves you make before you pull the trigger, though.
What just happened today
• Trump publicly canceled meetings with Iranian officials and blasted out a Truth Social post telling Iranians to “KEEP PROTESTING” and saying “HELP IS ON ITS WAY,” tying any talks to Iran stopping the killing of protesters.
• The U.S. “virtual embassy” in Iran issued a blunt security alert telling Americans to leave Iran now, warning Washington can’t guarantee help and suggesting land exits to Armenia or Turkey.
Taken together, that’s the classic pre‑crisis pattern: shut the door on diplomacy, clear your own people out of the danger zone, and then keep saying “all options are on the table.”
Military posture and strike chatter
• Iran International and other outlets are reporting that large amounts of U.S. equipment have been moved into the region and that sources expect strikes “in the coming weeks.”
• Israel has put its forces on high alert for “surprise scenarios” as the U.S. weighs military options, which is exactly what you do if you think Iran might hit you back after a U.S. move.
So no official strike order announced, but the prep and the leaks are all pointing toward the White House seriously gaming out—and probably leaning toward—some kind of military action.
Trump’s own words and red line
• Trump has repeatedly said Iran will “pay a big price” if it keeps killing protesters and has claimed Iran is “starting to cross that line,” while insisting he’s unafraid to use military options.
• Karoline from the podium is backing that up, saying he’s open to secret messages from Tehran but totally willing to go military “if and when he deems necessary,” which is deliberately vague but meant to sound like a threat.
So the public line is: diplomacy if Iran blinks, strikes if it doesn’t—and right now Iran is not blinking.
Why the “leave immediately” matters
• The U.S. warning says Americans are at “significant risk of questioning, arrest, and detention” and that simply having a U.S. passport or U.S. ties can be enough for Iran to grab you.
• It also tells people to have a plan that does not rely on U.S. government help and to be ready to shelter with food, water, and meds if they can’t get out, which is what you write when you think things could go sideways fast.
Those kinds of warnings don’t automatically mean war, but they do mean Washington thinks the risk of sudden escalation—including potential U.S. action or Iranian retaliation—is real enough that Americans should not be there when it happens.
Bottom line right now
• There is no public order saying “the U.S. will strike Iran on X date,” and both sides are still technically leaving a little room for talks.
• But between the canceled talks, Trump’s “help is on its way” rhetoric, the evacuation warnings, regional military buildup, and leaks about planned strikes, the trajectory is absolutely toward some kind of U.S. military move unless Iran drastically changes course or the White House backs off.
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Epstein and the Clinton’s
Bill and Hillary are flat-out refusing to play Comer’s game right now, and the fight just escalated into a full-on standoff with contempt of Congress hanging in the air.
Where things stand today
• Both Clintons were subpoenaed by the House Oversight Committee to sit for closed-door depositions in the Epstein investigation and were supposed to start testifying this week.
• Instead, they blew past the deadline and sent an eight‑page legal letter saying the subpoenas are “invalid and legally unenforceable,” and flatly told Comer they will not show up to be grilled.
They’re basically daring Comer to make the next move.
Why they say they won’t testify
• The Clintons argue the committee doesn’t have a valid legislative purpose, so Congress is just trying to harass political enemies, not write laws or conduct real oversight.
• Their lawyers say they already provided sworn written statements—just like other former officials who were then excused—and insist they have no relevant information beyond what’s already known about Bill’s past flights and meetings with Epstein.
• They’re framing this as a political show trial “literally designed to lead to our imprisonment,” not a good‑faith inquiry.
What Comer and House Republicans are doing
• Comer has been threatening for days that if they skipped, he would move to hold them in contempt of Congress, and he’s now saying he’ll push that vote in committee next week.
• If the committee approves, it would go to the full House and then be referred to the Justice Department for possible criminal contempt charges, which technically carry up to a year in jail and fines—but only if DOJ actually prosecutes.
• So the immediate consequence is political and legal theater; the real bite depends on DOJ, which answers to Pam Bondi and Trump.
The Clintons’ broader strategy
• They’ve beefed up their legal team with high‑end lawyers, including Ashley Callen (a former top GOP House lawyer) and Abbe Lowell, to signal they’re ready for a long court fight over separation of powers and abuse of congressional subpoena power.
• Their letters lean heavily on Supreme Court cases that say Congress can’t just drag people in to embarrass them; there has to be a tight connection between the witness and a legitimate legislative aim, which they say Comer hasn’t shown for them.
They’re openly accusing Comer of running a Trump‑driven revenge operation, not a neutral Epstein probe.
How this fits into the Epstein investigation
• The committee’s line is that they’re looking at how federal agencies handled Epstein and Maxwell, and they argue Bill’s flights on Epstein’s jet and visits to his properties justify bringing both Clintons in under oath.
• The Clintons’ team counters that the committee already has the documents about those trips and that forcing personal testimony from them—when others got by with written statements—shows this is about political targets, not new facts on Epstein.
So the “Clintons don’t want to testify” update is this: they’ve drawn a hard line, they’re betting the law is on their side, and now Comer and Trump’s House have to decide whether to actually go to war with contempt and hope Bondi’s DOJ backs them up.
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Hang in there – things are moving fast and furious and will continue to do so. This is their design – keep using your voices!
Speak Truth! Keep speaking TRUTH!
Don’t Give up the Ship!
Go Cause Good Trouble, with Your Elbows Up!
These are facts that I researched and verified – AI helped put together some sentence structure, but the words and tone are mine. These are my views based upon facts, research and thoughtful consideration using logic. I own the copyright to any images used. I’m comfortable to stand alone to uphold truth. Feel free to check me, but do not attack me. I am only causing good trouble.