• Trump talks peace with Putin and Zelensky: “They’re dying, Russians and Ukrainians,” Donald Trump said during a 2023 town hall. “I want them to stop dying.” Trump then promised to end the war “in 24 hours” if elected, but it was never going to be that easy. Still, the president is pushing hard, and yesterday we got wind of a possible breakthrough. Trump explained that he’d spoken with both Vladimir Putin and Volodymyr Zelensky, and the result is a high-stakes summit tomorrow in Munich, Germany. Vice President JD Vance and Secretary of State Marco Rubio will lead the American delegation in the wake of Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth’s announcement yesterday that Ukraine wouldn’t be granted NATO membership and would likely need to cede Crimea and the Donbas as part of a peace deal. “It is time to stop this ridiculous War,” said Trump. “God bless the people of Russia and Ukraine!”

• Gabbard confirmed: Yesterday, the Senate voted 52-48 to confirm Tulsi Gabbard as director of national intelligence. One Republican, Mitch McConnell, voted against Gabbard, arguing that she has “a history of alarming lapses in judgment.” The former Senate GOP leader specifically objected to Gabbard’s past support for and refusal to condemn Edward Snowden as a traitor for stealing and indiscriminately disseminating top secret documents. Despite McConnell’s objection, Gabbard successfully won over the rest of the Republicans. Senate Majority Leader John Thune supports her “plans to focus on identifying and eliminating redundancies and inefficiencies to restore the office to what it was originally designed to be.” What likely proved to alleviate GOP concerns was her commitment to support FISA Section 702, which allows for government surveillance of foreign nationals living outside the U.S. without needing a warrant.

• Hamas blinks, says it will hold to original deal: Hamas has announced that it will release three more Israeli hostages this Saturday in accordance with the original negotiated ceasefire. This sudden change comes after Donald Trump and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu gave Hamas an ultimatum to return all hostages by Saturday or face an immediate renewed offensive. Hamas had ended its return of hostages last week, dubiously claiming that Israel had violated the ceasefire agreement. Egyptian and Qatari mediators are taking credit for convincing Hamas to return to the original deal, which took effect on January 15. There is no word yet as to whether the Israelis will accept this or are holding to the full hostage release ultimatum.

• Buyout closed, layoffs begin: Donald Trump’s federal worker buyout offer that a federal judge temporarily halted has now been unpaused. U.S. District Judge George O'Toole ruled in the White House’s favor, concluding that labor unions who challenged the offer “are not directly impacted by the directive.” Following yesterday’s decision, a spokesman for the Office of Personnel Management stated, “As of 7:00 PM tonight, the program is now closed.” Roughly 75,000 federal employees took the buyout offer, which gives them eight months of continued salary and benefits. Meanwhile, an email from OPM stated that widespread layoffs of government workers, or “reduction in force,” will continue.

• AG Bondi charges NY “sanctuary” officials: Attorney General Pam Bondi yesterday announced lawsuits against New York Governor Kathy Hochul, AG Letitia James, and DMV Commissioner Mark Schroeder, whose sanctuary policies have fueled our nation’s illegal immigration catastrophe. “New York has chosen to prioritize illegal aliens over American citizens,” Bondi said. “It stops. It stops today.” Is New York free to do what it wants on immigration? Constitutional law professor Jonathan Turley says the state’s so-called “tip-off” provision, by which it warns suspected illegals if they learn that the federal government is planning to apprehend them, is especially dubious. Echoing the actual complaint, he says, “That’s more than refusing to cooperate. That’s actually frustrating federal enforcement.” According to the complaint: “A State’s freedom to stand aside is not a freedom to stand in the way. And where inaction crosses into obstruction, a State breaks the law.”

• Dems dismiss USAID waste: In the face of revelations uncovered by DOGE of widespread corruption and the misuse of American taxpayers’ dollars by USAID to push a radical leftist agenda, Democrat lawmakers have elected to play the ostrich by sticking their collective heads in the sand. “I’d like to see the evidence,” huffed Senator Elizabeth Warren in response to $75 million that USAID spent pushing DEI overseas. Representative Hank Johnson accused DOGE of peddling “mis- and disinformation” while asserting that even if true, it didn’t matter because “the value of the expenditures outweighs by far any mistakes that may have been made in terms of individual line items.” Representative Jan Schakowsky echoed Johnson, saying, “I don’t know that I would defend all of the programs or not, but overall, this has just been a fantastic thing that the United States does, and I support it.”

• A trillion dollars in COVID fraud? Democrat lawmakers are fighting furiously against Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency, but it’s hard to sympathize with them when one considers the abominable waste of taxpayers’ money by our federal government. Exhibit A could well be the astounding levels of criminal theft of government benefit funds during the COVID pandemic. “Outdated government systems permit criminals to access unlimited sums of money,” said Haywood Talcove, CEO of Lexis Nexis Risk Solution and a witness at a House DOGE subcommittee hearing yesterday. “During the pandemic, they stole $1 trillion dollars. Seventy percent of those dollars went overseas. Shockingly, it’s just not criminals exploiting the system, it’s the flawed system itself acting as the accomplice.” Talcove added that our federal government “will continue to lead the world in funding cyber criminals” if it doesn’t get its act together.

• American pirates to fight the cartels? Utah Senator Mike Lee recently burnished his reputation as a Constitution nerd by dusting off that document’s Article I, Section 8, Clause 11, which talks about “grant Letters of Marque and Reprisal.” These, he says, allow Congress “to designate a particular enemy or a problem zone to authorize what are called privateers — essentially pirates operating with the permission of the United States government.” What might be the purpose of such language? Think about the asymmetric threat posed by non-state entities like the Mexican drug cartels that traffic in deadly fentanyl, or the Houthi pirates who plague the vital shipping lane of the Red Sea. Now imagine retired special operators and other rough dudes being able “to go out and attack and undermine those entities to retrieve spoils [and] keep a cut of the value of the loot they recover.” We’d bet Erik Prince could find a few volunteers.

Headlines

• Robert F. Kennedy Jr. confirmed as HHS secretary (NY Post)

• Kash Patel’s nomination to lead FBI clears first major Senate hurdle (Fox News)

• House GOP finally unveils budget plan for Trump’s agenda with space for at least $4.5 trillion in tax cuts (NY Post)

• Wait until you see how the federal government stores retirement files (Townhall)

• Apple adds Gulf of America to its maps (NY Post)

• Israel reportedly planning to launch “significant strikes” against Iran nuclear sites (Daily Wire)

• Dozens injured after Afghan national plows car into crowd in Germany (Daily Wire)

• Humor: Democrats furious Republicans trying to control government just because they won election (Babylon Bee)

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