Cross-Examination

• Drunk-driving illegal immigrant kills mother and son: Jose Guadalupe Menjivar-Alas should never have been in this country, but he was. And now a mother and her son are dead because of it. Menjivar-Alas, as Fox News reports, was allegedly drunk while driving a pickup truck that crashed into a car driven by 47-year-old Melissa Powell. Powell’s son, Riordan, was also in the car, and they were both killed. This is Joe Biden’s bloody border. An illegal immigrant from El Salvador who’d been arrested multiple times for DWI in Boulder, Colorado, where the deadly crash occurred, Menjivar-Alas was arrested once again after “allegedly” killing this mother and her son. As Fox News continues: “An immigration judge issued Menjivar-Alas’ first order of removal on April 14, 2009. He was then removed from the U.S. in June 2009, June 2013, November 2014 and January 2015. Despite being deported, Menjivar-Alas continued to make his way back into the country, where he was arrested numerous other times.” If you think this is infuriating, imagine being the loved one of the victims. One wonders: Would a border wall and tighter border security have kept Menjivar-Alas out of our country and thereby kept this mother and son safe? We’ll never know because government officials never tried.

• Eighty-five percent illegal alien interior release rate: According to sources present at a recent private meeting between Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas and U.S. Border Patrol agents in Texas, Mayorkas admitted that over 85% of illegal aliens caught crossing into the U.S. are released into the country. Based on that release rate, of the record 302,000 illegal aliens encountered crossing the southern border in December, more than 256,000 of them have been released into the U.S. interior. Furthermore, using that 85% release rate, of the 3.2 million illegal aliens caught crossing the southern border in FY2023, 2.7 million are now residing somewhere within the country. That total of 2.7 million is greater than the population of 15 U.S. states. When questioned about Mayorkas’s admission, a DHS official did not deny that he said it but claimed it lacked the context of the “ebb and flow” of releases. Mayorkas’s admission adds more fuel for House Republicans’ impeachment proceedings that begin today.

• Epps gets slap on the wrist Of the more than 1,200 January 6 protesters who’ve been arrested and charged and had their lives ruined by overzealous prosecution, only one of them, Ray Epps, was actually captured on video telling the masses, “We need to go in to the Capitol!” And yet yesterday, Epps was given a sentence that’s sure to be the envy of every other J6 protester: 12 months probation and a laughable $500 in restitution. That’s it. No jail time. That was the sentence handed down by DC District Court Judge James Boasberg after the Justice Department’s prosecutors had recommended a six-month jail sentence. As journalist Greg Price notes, “While many J6 protesters are rotting in jail for non-violent crimes, Epps escapes a prison term entirely.” Nice “justice” if you can get it. Similarly, independent journalist Julie Kelly had this observation: “Most [Restricted Building or Grounds] 1752 convictions result in some amount of jail time followed by a period of supervised release. Probation only is usually 2-3 years. Real outrage here is that Epps wasn’t charged with more serious offenses to begin with.” That’s the outrage, alright, and it presents an obvious question: Why give such a sweetheart deal to a guy who, more than anyone else, exhorted protesters to breach the Capitol grounds and the building itself? We smelled a rat more than two years ago, and this sweetheart deal doesn’t do anything to change our minds.

• Gay weakened Harvard’s plagiarism policy: Back in 2019, just a year into her position as dean of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences at Harvard University, Claudine Gay greenlighted a change to the school’s faculty plagiarism policy. The rule change effectively excused any professors guilty of unintentional or accidental plagiarism from being sanctioned. It was this new laxer rule that Harvard’s board members cited in their unanimous decision to maintain their support for Gay’s presidency. The school’s prior plagiarism standard for faculty was similar to its current definition for incoming students: “the act of either intentionally OR unintentionally submitting work that was written by someone else.” It further notes that “it’s important to take the time to understand what constitutes plagiarism, why [it] is considered such a serious offense, and how to avoid” it. Harvard’s student guide equates plagiarism to “stealing,” which is “unacceptable in all academic situations, whether you do it intentionally or by accident.” It appears that Harvard’s leadership has engaged in creating that classic elitist double standard — rules for thee, but not for me.

• Oh, so much support: Joe Biden isn’t the only candidate running in the Democrat presidential primary, but he might as well be. Minnesota Representative Dean Phillips threw his hat in the ring months ago with the campaign message that Biden was just too old and had to go. Needless to say, Phillips’s campaign hasn’t caught fire and appears to be all but dead. At a recent campaign event in Manchester, New Hampshire, which Phillips dubbed “Government Repair Truck Coffee Conversations,” no one showed up. When questioned about the failed event, Phillips quipped, “Sometimes if you build it, they don’t come.” At least he’s maintained a sense of humor.

• KJP refused to answer 98% of Biden scandal questions: No one ever accused White House Press Secretary Karine Jean-Pierre of candor and straightforwardness, but the impact of her stonewalling behavior hasn’t been fully understood. Until now. In the second half of 2023, when the heat finally began to be turned up on the Biden Crime Family, Jean-Pierre answered only two scandal-related questions from the assembled media. As NewsBusters reports, “That brings the yearly total to a paltry eight such questions that Ms. Jean-Pierre answered across 75 White House briefings.” What, we ask, is the purpose of such briefings if Joe Biden’s flack won’t even answer direct questions from an overwhelmingly friendly media? As NewsBusters continues: “[Our] analysts examined official White House transcripts of every briefing Jean-Pierre conducted in 2023, recording every question she was asked about one of three major scandals faced by President Biden — his alleged mishandling of classified documents as Vice President, the corruption allegations against the Biden family, and the mysterious bag of cocaine found in the West Wing. Of the 337 scandal-related questions that White House reporters asked, Jean-Pierre provided a definitive answer to just eight of them.”

• Good news: Court rules against Biden’s dishwasher regs: The Biden administration’s crusade to impose ever more costly regulations onto Americans’ everyday appliances was handed a loss on Monday. The Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals ruled against the Department of Energy’s move to eliminate a Trump-era consumer choice rule that allowed people the freedom to choose between dishwashers and washing machines that use less water but take longer to wash and those that use more water but clean in less time. In its decision, the court noted that the Biden administration’s rules were counterproductive because they “make Americans use more energy and more water for the simple reason that purportedly ‘energy efficient’ appliances do not work. So Americans who want clean dishes or clothes may use more energy and more water to preclean, reclean, or hand-wash their stuff before, after, or in lieu of using DOE-regulated appliances.” This is a win for the free market, where consumer choice is the best driver of product innovation, efficiency, and cost, not government bureaucracy.

Headlines

• Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin treated for prostate cancer, severe infection (CNBC) | House panel launches probe into defense secretary going AWOL (Daily Wire)

• Donald Trump’s mother-in-law, Amalija Knavs, dead at 78 (National Review)

• Court appears to take dim view of Trump’s immunity claim (Daily Signal)

• Trump stays on Nevada ballot as judge dismisses lawsuit (Las Vegas Review-Journal)

• The Obamas think Biden is going to lose (Washington Free Beacon)

• Biden allies start talking about skipping debates in the fall (National Review)

• Court throws out challenge to Ohio’s voter ID law (The Federalist)

• NYC moves thousands of illegal immigrants to high school gym due to high winds, forcing students to switch to remote learning (Daily Wire)

• AMLO has a list of demands for Team Biden to help with immigration (Hot Air)

• Highest U.S. rookie police salary is in San Francisco at $112,000 — but not even a six-figure sum is enough to entice Gen Z into becoming cops (Fortune)

• Pope Francis calls for universal ban on surrogacy, calls it “deplorable” and “a grave violation of the dignity of the woman and the child” (Not the Bee)

• UN agency teachers cheered Hamas as October attack unfolded, called for execution of Jews in group chat (National Review)

• Yemen’s Houthis launch largest Red Sea drone, missile attack after U.S. warned them of consequences (New York Post)

• Armed men break into a live TV studio in Ecuador, shout they have bombs after powerful gang leader escapes prison (New York Post)

• Earth just had its hottest year ever recorded — by far (NBC News)

• “Satire”: “MAGA is a cult,” says party doing chants for politician inside church (Babylon Bee)

For more editors’ choice headlines, click here.