Congressman Ro Khanna says enabling ‘genocide in Gaza’ cost the Democrats the 2024 election
Congressman Ro Khanna, a progressive Democrat from California thought to be considering a run for the presidency in 2028, joined the criticism of the Democratic National Committee’s reluctantly released, incomplete postmortem on the party’s disastrous 2024 election defeat.
In a social media video, Khanna said: “There’s not a single mention of Gaza in the 192-page DNC autopsy report that was just released today. As someone who campaigned in Michigan and Wisconsin, let me tell you: one of the reasons we lost is our blank check to Israel and Netanyahu while they committed genocide in Gaza. We must speak and confront hard truths if this party is to win in 2028.”
Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, the Democratic congresswoman from New York many progressives want to run for the presidency in 2028, told reporters she too was stunned by the omission of any mention of Gaza, Israel or the Uncommitted movement in the report.
“I think it’s pretty unbelievable that Gaza would not be mentioned once in the autopsy report,” the congresswoman said. “I think it was very clearly a major dynamic and a major thread that was happening in 2024. Regardless of how one feels about that issue, the fact that it’s not even addressed, I think, is a major oversight.”
Ocasio-Cortez said in February that the Democratic party’s next presidential nominee should enforce laws barring US aid to countries that violate human rights, since unconditional aid to Israel had “enabled a genocide in Gaza”.
Key events
Closing summary
This concludes our live chronicle of the second Trump administration for the day. Here are the latest developments:
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The three top House Democrats, Hakeem Jeffries, Katherine Clark and Pete Aguilar, called the Republican leadership “cowardly” for cancelling a scheduled vote on a war powers resolution to end US hostilities in Iran that would likely have passed.
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Progressive House Democrats Ro Khanna and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez said they were stunned that a draft 192-page autopsy of the Democratic party’s 2024 election loss did not mention Gaza once.
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Republican congressman Tom Kean Jr, who represents New Jersey but has not been seen for more than two months, spoke by phone on Thursday to David Wildstein, a former aide to New Jersey governor Chris Christie.
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Dan Pfeiffer, a former senior advisor to Barack Obama who is now a host of the Pod Save America podcast, called on Thursday for the chair of the Democratic National Committee, Ken Martin, to resign or be fired over the botched autopsy of the party’s 2024 election loss.
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The Senate refuses to vote on funding for US Immigration and Customs Enforcement as up to 25 Republican seantors objected to a $1bn proposal for security measures tied to Trump’s White House ballroom and his $1.8bn “anti-weaponization” fund.
Democratic senator calls for investigation into transportion secretary Sean Duffy’s ‘Great American Road Trip’ reality show
Senator Patty Murray, a Washington Democrat, called for the Department of Transportation’s independent inspector general to open an official investigation into transport secretary Sean Duffy, a former Republican congressman, Fox News host and and reality TV star, over his involvement in the Great American Road Trip, a reality TV show starring his family that was paid for by the many of the corporations his agency regulates.
“The Secretary of Transportation spent 24 days over several months recording a ridiculous promotional TV show about himself—an all-expense paid vacation—sponsored by the very corporations he is tasked with regulating,” Murray said in a statement. “The companies he regulates—Shell, United, Toyota, Boeing, Royal Caribbean, among others—paid for his family’s vacation.”
Although the filming of the show was conducted in secret, earlier this month the Department of Transportation released this trailer for the program, which includes a scene in which Duffy takes his children to the location of a home he lived in 1997 as a cast member of MTV’s Real World: Boston. A year later, as a cast member of Road Rules: All Stars, Duffy met his future wife, Rachel Campos, a star of another Real World show.
Both went on to host Fox News shows. In 2024, Rachel Campos Duffy was the Fox & Friends host who asked then presidential candidate Donald Trump if he would pledge to release the Epstein files.
“Yeah, I would,” Trump answered, before equivocating. “I guess I would. I think that, less so, because you don’t want to affect people’s lives if it’s phony stuff in there because it’s a lot of phony stuff with that whole world. But I think I would.”
The Fox co-host sitting next to Campos Duffy during that awkward interview, Pete Hegseth, is now the US defense secretary.
Missing Republican congressman speaks
Republican congressman Tom Kean Jr, who represents New Jersey but has not been seen for more than two months, spoke by phone on Thursday to David Wildstein, a former aide to New Jersey governor Chris Christie who now edits the politics website the New Jersey Globe.
“My doctors are confident that I’m on the road to a full recovery,” Kean told Wildstein. “I understand the need for public transparency, and I appreciate the support of my constituents.”
Kean, however, was less than transparent about what condition he is suffering from, merely saying his prognosis is positive, and expects it to have no long-term impact on his physical or cognitive health.
“I anticipate that in the next couple of weeks, I’ll return to voting and to the campaign trail,” said the congressman, who has been quietly running for reelection without being seen or heard for over two months.
Wildstein came to political journalism late in his career, after a career in politics which ended when he pleaded guilty in 2015 to masterminding the so-called Bridgegate scandal.
According to Wildstein, he came up with a scheme to punish the Democratic mayor of Fort Lee, New Jersey for refusing to endorse Christie, a Republican, for governor, in which the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey blocked lanes of traffic near the George Washington Bridge to flood Fort Lee with traffic.
The Christie administration and the authority said the lanes were closed to study traffic patterns, but an email later made public showed that Christie’s deputy chief of staff to Mr. Christie, Bridget Anne Kelly, had written to Wildstein the month before the lanes were closed: “Time for some traffic problems in Fort Lee.”
Pod Save America host Dan Pfeiffer says DNC chair Ken Martin ‘has to go’
Dan Pfeiffer, a former senior advisor to Barack Obama who is now a host of the Pod Save America podcast, called on Thursday for the chair of the Democratic National Committee, Ken Martin, to resign or be fired over the botched autopsy of the party’s 2024 election loss.
In a post for Message Box, his Substack newsletter, Pfeiffer noted that Martin was forced to release the incomplete report after “an incredibly viral interview on Pod Save America” in April in which the DNC chair argued to Jon Favreau, a former Obama speechwriter, that the report was useful but releasing it would distract from the upcoming midterm elections.
Then, after CNN obtained and published portions of the report, Martin relented and admitted that while he had “commissioned a comprehensive review of the 2024 election”, when he received the report late last year, he discovered that it was poorly done and decided to shelve it rather than start the process over.
“I am not proud of this product; it does not meet my standards, and it won’t meet your standards. I don’t endorse what’s in this report, or what’s left out of it,” Martin said in a preface to the draft report he finally released on Thursday.
Pfeiffer’s response to Martin’s admission was scathing:
In other words, the autopsy wasn’t released because the political crony that Martin hired to do the job didn’t really do the job. He failed to speak to many of the top decision makers and never really wrestled with the tough questions like Biden’s decision to run for reelection, his age, or the impact of his Gaza policy.
The final product was a joke. Not good enough to be released, so Ken Martin just lied about it until he got caught.
This is the final straw.
Ken Martin is not up to the job, and his continued presence is going to make the DNC woefully ineffective heading into the midterms and then the critical 2028 primaries, where the DNC plays a major role.
He should step down for the good of the party, and if he won’t, the DNC should fire him.
On the Pod Save America YouTube channel on Thursday, Pfeiffer’s podmates, Favreau and Tommy Vietor, a former national security spokesperson for Obama, suggested that Martin had to go for not just lying about his reasons for not releasing the report, but “gaslighting” critics.
Vietor pointed out that the 192-page autopsy included “zero mentions of the word Israel, Palestine or Gaza; not even examining the impact of that issue on the results is crazy.”
The former Obama aides suggested that the party could replace Martin with a transitional figure, should he resign before the midterms, and also discussed the odd fact that Martin only came on the podcast to discuss the report after heatedly confronting the hosts in person at a Grindr-sponsored party ahead of this year’s White House Correspondents’ dinner.
Among the names they suggested as possible interim leaders of the committee were Roger Lau, a former Elizabeth Warren campaign manager, Addisu Demissie, who has run campaigns for Gavin Newsom and Cory Booker, and Faiz Shakir, a Bernie Sanders advisor who founded More Perfect Union, a progressive nonprofit newsroom.
One name they did not put forward was that of Ben Wikler, who ran the Wisconsin Democratic Party from 2019 to 2025 and finished second to Martin in the 2025 election for DNC chair despite the backing of the Pod Save America hosts.
Wikler (who, in the interest of full disclosure, I should say I worked with briefly at Air America in 2004) has a new book out in July, titled, “This is the Plan: How to End America’s Meltdown and Save Democracy”.
House Democrats call Republicans ‘cowardly’ for cancelling scheduled vote on war powers resolution to check Trump on Iran
The three top House Democrats, Hakeem Jeffries, Katherine Clark and Pete Aguilar, called the Republican leadership “cowardly” for cancelling a scheduled vote on a war powers resolution to end US hostilities in Iran that would likely have passed.
“For nearly three months, Donald Trump has forced America and our men and women in uniform into a reckless and costly war of choice in Iran. Donald Trump and Pete Hegseth took us to war without clear objectives, an exit strategy, public support or the authorization required by the United States Congress,” the Democrats said.
”The Republican-controlled House continues to behave like a wholly-owned subsidiary of the Trump administration. Republicans cowardly pulled a scheduled vote on a War Powers Resolution—legislation that would have passed with bipartisan support and required the President to end the conflict in the Middle East,” they added.
The vote has been postponed until lawmakers return from a recess in June, but it appears likely that the resolution could pass then.
According to Politico, Brian Fitzpatrick, a Philadelphia-area Republican congressman who broke with his party last week to vote for the last Iran war powers resolution, and was attacked by Donald Trump on Wednesday, said the delay would not stop the resolution from passing soon. “The next time they bring it, it’s passing,” he said.
Among the Republican House members absent on Thursday but expected to be present when the resolution is put to a vote in June was Thomas Massie, the Kentucky congressman who has been a critic of the joint US-Israeli war on Iran. Massie lost a primary election this week to a Trump-backed candidate who was encouraged to run after the president was angered by Massie’s role in forcing the Department of Justice to release investigative files on Jeffrey Epstein, the late child sex offender Trump socialized with for nearly two decades.
Jakub Krupa
Donald Trump announced on Thursday he would deploy an “additional” 5,000 US troops to Poland, just days after the Pentagon controversially halted a long-planned rotation of forces to the largest country on the eastern flank of Nato.
“Based on the successful Election of the now President of Poland, Karol Nawrocki, who I was proud to Endorse, and our relationship with him, I am pleased to announce that the United States will be sending an additional 5,000 Troops to Poland,” Trump said on his social media platform.
It was not immediately clear whether the deployment would be rotational or permanent, or if there was any link to Trump’s previous decision to pull 5,000 troops out from Germany. There are some 10,000 US troops in Poland, but most of them serve on a rotational basis.
The announcement seems to mark a rare U-turn after the Pentagon said last week it would delay a rotation of 4,000 US troops from the 2nd Armored Brigade Combat Team, 1st Cavalry Division to Poland as part of a broader review of the US force posture in Europe.
Trump’s vice-president, JD Vance, defended the decision as recently as Wednesday, telling a Polish reporter that the US wanted Europe to take more responsibility for its defence and security, and adding “Poland is capable of defending itself with a lot of support from the United States.” He criticised the media for “overreacting” over what he said was “a very minor thing” and “a standard delay.”
But the original decision – which appeared to catch Warsaw by surprise – prompted anxious reactions from top Polish leaders worried about the assertive Russian stance in the region amid continuing war in Ukraine, and drew criticism in the US Congress.
Over the years, Poland has sought to position itself as a top US ally in Europe, with its troops serving alongside the US in Iraq and Afghanistan, and the country’s successive government leading the defence spending charts among Nato’s European members.
Announcing the move, Trump pointedly praised his relationship with Poland’s conservative president, Karol Nawrocki, who unexpectedly won last year’s presidential election after being hosted by Trump at the White House in the final weeks of the campaign. The pair has had a close relationship ever since, with Trump regularly referencing the importance of his endorsement for Nawrocki’s election.
Despite the announcement being made late in the evening in Europe, the Polish president immediately thanked Trump “for his friendship towards Poland and for the decisions, the practical dimension of which we see very clearly today.”
“I stand and will continue to stand guard over the Polish-American alliance – a vital pillar of security for every Polish home and for all of Europe,” Nawrocki said.
“Good alliances are based on cooperation, mutual respect, and a commitment to our shared security,” he added.
Poland’s defence minister Władysław Kosiniak-Kamysz also said Trump’s decision “confirms the Polish-American relations are very strong, and that Poland is a model and ironclad ally.”
Earlier this week, Kosiniak-Kamysz sought urgent talks with US defence secretary Pete Hegseth to get clarity on the original decision, telling reporters that he hoped to see “all misunderstandings, or media noise, will be explained in the coming days.”
Hours before Trump’s announcement, US undersecretary of defense Elbridge Colby held talks with a senior Polish official in Washington DC. After the meeting, he said on X that “Poland stands out as a model ally and a leader among our allies,” and said the US would work closely with Warsaw “ensure our presence in Poland remains strong and robust.”
Congressman Don Bacon, a Republican from Nebraska and a retired Air Force Brigadier General, responded to the news saying “this is good news for Poland and our Baltic allies.”
“I’m glad the President reversed the SecDef decision to withdraw the Brigade from Poland. Poland walks the talk and deserves our close partnership,” he added.
The announcement comes just hours before the US secretary of state, Marco Rubio, is due to take part in a Nato ministerial meeting in Sweden after weeks of tense relations between the US administration and its European allies caused by their refusal to get involved in the Iran war.
Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez says ‘it’s pretty unbelievable that Gaza would not be mentioned once’ in DNC 2024 autopsy report
Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, the Democratic congresswoman from New York many progressives want to run for the presidency in 2028, told reporters on Thursday that it was stunning that there was no mention of Gaza, Israel or the Uncommitted movement in the Democratic National Committee’s autopsy of the party’s 2024 election loss.
“I think it’s pretty unbelievable that Gaza would not be mentioned once in the autopsy report,” the congresswoman said. “I think it was very clearly a major dynamic and a major thread that was happening in 2024. Regardless of how one feels about that issue, the fact that it’s not even addressed, I think, is a major oversight.”
“I think that for young people it was a huge part of the environment”, she continued. “I can tell you, for myself as a candidate during that cycle, there’s no way that it was an ignorable issue, or totally immaterial. So I think that it’s a real disservice to not speak to that or include or assess that.”
In February, Ocasio-Cortez said during a Munich security conference panel that the Democratic party’s next presidential nominee should reconsider the country’s military aid to Israel.
She was responding to a question from Hagar Shezaf of the Israeli newspaper Haaretz, who asked the US congresswoman if “the Democratic presidential candidate in the 2028 elections should re-evaluate military aid to Israel”.
“To me this isn’t just about a presidential election,” Ocasio-Cortez replied, “personally, I think that the United States has an obligation to uphold its own laws, particularly the Leahy laws.
“I think that, personally, the idea of completely unconditional aid, no matter what one does, does not make sense,” she added. “I think it enabled a genocide in Gaza, and I think that we have thousands of women and children dead … that was completely avoidable.”
“So I believe that enforcement of our own laws, through the Leahy laws, which requires conditioning aid in any circumstance when you see gross human rights violations is appropriate,” Ocasio-Cortez concluded.
The Leahy laws are two statutory provisions, named for the former senator Patrick Leahy who introduced them in the 1990s, which prohibit the US defense department and state department from providing funds to “units of foreign security forces where there is credible information implicating that unit in the commission of gross violations of human rights”.
Congressman Ro Khanna says enabling ‘genocide in Gaza’ cost the Democrats the 2024 election
Congressman Ro Khanna, a progressive Democrat from California thought to be considering a run for the presidency in 2028, joined the criticism of the Democratic National Committee’s reluctantly released, incomplete postmortem on the party’s disastrous 2024 election defeat.
In a social media video, Khanna said: “There’s not a single mention of Gaza in the 192-page DNC autopsy report that was just released today. As someone who campaigned in Michigan and Wisconsin, let me tell you: one of the reasons we lost is our blank check to Israel and Netanyahu while they committed genocide in Gaza. We must speak and confront hard truths if this party is to win in 2028.”
Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, the Democratic congresswoman from New York many progressives want to run for the presidency in 2028, told reporters she too was stunned by the omission of any mention of Gaza, Israel or the Uncommitted movement in the report.
“I think it’s pretty unbelievable that Gaza would not be mentioned once in the autopsy report,” the congresswoman said. “I think it was very clearly a major dynamic and a major thread that was happening in 2024. Regardless of how one feels about that issue, the fact that it’s not even addressed, I think, is a major oversight.”
Ocasio-Cortez said in February that the Democratic party’s next presidential nominee should enforce laws barring US aid to countries that violate human rights, since unconditional aid to Israel had “enabled a genocide in Gaza”.
Stephen Miller suggests ‘innocent’ rioters who attacked Capitol police on January 6 are ‘owed’ more than just $1.776bn by US taxpayers
Stephen Miller, the White House deputy chief of staff for policy and homeland security adviser, took three minutes of questions from reporters on Thursday.
He concluded by defending the $1.776bn in taxpayer funds the Trump administration set aside this week to compensate people who claim they were wrongly prosecuted by the federal government, apparently including the hundreds of violent rioters convicted of attacking police officers as they tried to get at lawmakers on January 6 2021 in a failed bid to keep Donald Trump in office after he lost the 2020 presidential election.
Miller was asked about the fact that there was significant pushback over the fund from lawmakers on Thursday, reportedly including 25 Republican senators who objcted to it during a nearly two-hour meeting on Thursday with Todd Blanche, Trump’s former criminal defense lawyer now serving as the acting attorney general.
“That’s a good closing question only because it allows me to say this, which is that the- we lived through four years of– more than four years, actually, but I’ll just say four years in this case, of unimaginable weaponization of the federal government against innocent people,” Miller said.
“We’ve had so many lives- it really goes back to, I would say, further, but so many lives destroyed, so many livelihoods ruined, so many people who were deprived of their fundamental rights and freedoms as American citizens. And this settlement is just a small measure of the justice that they are owed,” he continued.
Having delivered what seemed like his pre-scripted talking points, the influential adviser then immediately concluded the briefing, holding up his hands and saying “anyway, thank you all for your time”, and walking away before any follow-up questions could be asked.
Aura Bogado
The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) has circulated a “Be on the Lookout” alert to law enforcement nationwide, targeting a comedian whose satire of US immigration enforcement went viral.
The subject of the alert, known as a “Bolo”, was Ben Palmer, a Nashville-based standup comedian and prankster who created a parody anti-immigration tip website. His revealing videos of calls with members of the public who thought they were reporting immigrants to US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) have garnered millions of views on TikTok and YouTube.
The DHS bulletin was issued by the department’s Nashville field office in February, about a week before the Washington Post profiled Palmer after a kindergarten teacher reported one of her student’s parents to Palmer’s supposed-tip page on spurious grounds, thinking she was communicating with the government.
The Bolo was then shared by the Illinois State Police to a distribution list of state and local law enforcement agencies. The alert on Palmer was obtained by the Chicago-based journalism nonprofit Injustice Watch through a series of public records requests. It was not immediately clear how many other law enforcement departments around the US may also have shared the federal alert, as Injustice Watch was investigating matters in Illinois.
Even in Greenland, the shadow of Jeffrey Epstein looms over Trump’s ambitions
As our colleague Miranda Bryant reports, hundreds of Greenlanders protested against the opening of a new US consulate in the island’s capital, Nuuk, on Thursday.
The protesters waved Greenlandic flags, held up signs that read “USA ASU” (“USA stop it” in the local Inuit language) and shouted “go home”, one day after Donald Trump’s envoy, Louisiana governor Jeff Landry, toured the capital trailed by a dogged protester who shouted at him: “Colonizer go home! You’re not welcome here! This is Indigenous land!”
Amid speculation that Trump has turned to foreign military adventures at least in part to change the subject from the uproar over his long friendship with the late child sex offender Jeffrey Epstein, photographs and video of the protest in Nuuk showed that Greenlanders were also keen to associate the US president with his friend of nearly two decades.
One pair of signs seen near the front of the march in video and photographs of the protest march featured a 1997 photograph of Trump smiling with his hand on Epstein’s shoulder as the two friends posed together at the future president’s Mar-a-Lago beach club.
As South Carolina proceeds forward in passing the new congressional map that would eliminate the state’s only majority-Black district, Ro Khanna, a Democratic representative from California spoke out in a video post on X.
“We must stand up to this modern day Dred Scott Court,” he said. The Dred Scott court refers to the US Supreme Court’s 1857 decision about Black Americans not being US citizens and hence not being able to sue in federal court, among other limitations to their rights.
“They have unleashed a process that will eliminate the only Black-majority district in the state of South Carolina. South Carolina has a black population of 25% but they would be left with not a single Black majority district or Black political representation in the House,” said Khanna.
Calling out the Supreme Court, Khanna said “We need term limits for these justices now,” adding that the Court should to be expanded from 9 justices to 13 justices.
