Cross-Examination

• Tim Scott launches GOP presidential campaign: South Carolina Republican Senator Tim Scott will announce his campaign to seek the GOP presidential nomination today. With rumors of his intentions swirling for the past couple months, those rumors became news as Scott officially filed paperwork on Friday. He now becomes the second South Carolinian to jump into the race following former Governor Nikki Haley. Over the weekend, Scott also dropped a promotional video dubbed “Simple Truths” in which he criticizes the current victim culture while promoting embracing personal responsibility.

• Biden’s “nonbinary” former nuke official luggage thief gets arrested: Last month, former Deputy Assistant Secretary for Spent Fuel and Waste Disposition at the DOE, Sam Brinton, a man who identifies as “nonbinary” and was fired after he was caught stealing women’s luggage, escaped jail time. Brinton, who was charged with felony theft and was facing up to a decade in prison and a $10,000 fine, instead received a relative slap on the wrist, as the judge sentenced him to 180 days in jail suspended and ordered him to pay one victim $3,760, the value of the luggage stolen. But the luggage thief may not be so lucky — last week he was arrested in Maryland in connection to an investigation of luggage theft from Ronald Reagan Washington National Airport back in 2018. A judge ordered Brinton held in jail until he can be extradited to Virginia, where he will face trial. He also faced similar charges in Minnesota for stealing luggage there.

• Court shoots down California’s mandated corporate racial diversity law: Last week, the District Court for Eastern California struck down state law AB979, which had mandated that corporate boards contain a number of individuals who have “designated racial, ethnic, and LGBTQ backgrounds.” In its ruling, the court declared the law to be “unconstitutional on its face” and that it violated the Civil Rights Act of 1866, which forbids discrimination on racial grounds. Director of the Alliance for Fair Board Recruitment, Edward Blum, who raised the lawsuit, argued that “racial diversity quotas are not only unconstitutional, they are immoral,” because they judge individuals based upon the color of their skin and not their merit. Had the law been allowed to remain, private and public companies whose boards failed to meet the racial and sexual identity quotas would have been subject to fines of $100,000 for the first violation and $300,000 for any subsequent violations.

• More innocent blood via drone: It appears that the Biden administration has done it again. Last month, U.S. officials claimed they had taken out a “senior Al Qaeda leader” in Syria with a drone strike. Now the Pentagon is admitting it’s not so sure, as an official stated they “are no longer confident we killed a senior AQ official,” however, they “believe the person to be al-Qaeda.” The family of the man killed disputes his supposed al-Qaeda connection, claiming that he was a former bricklayer with 10 children whose “whole life was spent poor.” His brother responded, “If they claim that he’s a terrorist, or that they got someone from al-Qaeda, they’re all liars.” This incident has eerie similarities to the Biden administration’s strike on an aide worker and his family who was misidentified as the terrorist responsible for directing the suicide bombing at the Kabul airport that killed 13 U.S. service members and a hundred Afghan civilians in 2021. A mistake like this happening one time can be chalked up as an unfortunate accident given the chaotic heat of the moment, but when it happens twice, it has become a pattern.

Headlines

• Biden, McCarthy will attempt to salvage debt limit deal (Roll Call)

• Biden insists he is “blameless” if U.S. defaults on debt, instead it would be MAGA Republicans’ fault (Townhall)

• Biden claims credit for “Quad” alliance Trump reinstated in 2017 (Townhall)

• Race-baiting NAACP issues travel warning in Florida: the state “has become hostile to Black Americans” (The Hill)

• Brittney Griner stands for the national anthem after Russian imprisonment (National Review)

• Joe Manchin says he’s a climate moderate. He just voted to confirm radical energy nominee who wants to kill the coal industry. (Free Beacon)

• Rome’s iconic Trevi Fountain latest victim of crazed climate activists (RedState)

• Pregnant race hoax victim to sue for defamation (PJ Media)

• Story of homeless veterans displaced by migrants was false (Times Union)

• Most migrants still caught and released into U.S. after Title 42 (Washington Times)

• State Department offers counseling to misgendered employees triggered by email pronoun debacle (Free Beacon)

• Women refuse to stand at winner’s podium after “transgender” cyclist finishes in first place in women’s category (Fox News)

• Leaked policy exposes Fox News stances on woke ideology (Daily Signal)

• Jeffrey Epstein threatened to expose Bill Gates’ alleged affair with Russian bridge player (NY Post)

• Christian author, famed pastor Tim Keller dead at 72 (Fox News)

• Policy: Biden’s executive overreach kills American energy independence (Heritage Foundation)

• Humor: Governor Newsom to require all toddler race car beds be electric by 2030 (Babylon Bee)

For more editors’ choice headlines, click here.