Lesley Stahl, who at 84 is older than Joe Biden, has seen a lot of horrible things over the course of her 60 Minutes career, from the Carter administration to 9/11 to the demise of her former colleague Dan Rather.

Apparently none of it can compare to the horror she experienced watching her fellow journalists lose their jobs for being obnoxious. “Oh God, this was awful,” Stahl told Puck when asked about the half dozen producers and personalities who were fired alongside combat veteran Scott Pelley.

“This was by far the worst experience I’ve been involved in, or even witnessed.”

Maine’s embattled Democratic Senate candidate, Graham Platner, praised a “cool pic” of Nazi-aligned troops aiming a rifle during World War II, zeroing in on their “German helmets,” @LevineJonathan reports.
Platner infamously sported a chest tattoo of a distinctive SS skull and crossbones symbol—a “Totenkopf”—for nearly 20 years but claims he was unaware of its meaning.

The since-deleted Reddit post in which Platner immediately identifies “German helmets” casts doubt on that explanation.

Left-wing Senate candidate Graham Platner often touts his role as harbormaster of his Maine town—one he has repeatedly said on the campaign trail he actively “serves” in—as proof of his “working class” bona fides.

“He actually held the role for roughly 18 months before quitting to launch his Senate campaign—and it was largely a ‘clerical’ one, according to local records and people familiar with the position,” @peterjhasson and @alanagoodman report. Platner’s town of Sullivan got by without a harbormaster from February 2022, when Platner’s predecessor resigned, until September 2023, when town officials tapped Platner to serve as “an interim Harbor Master until one could be hired,” records show.

The wife of New York Times columnist Nick Kristof—who along with Kristof worked as a Times correspondent in China and who was recently appointed vice chair of the executive committee of Harvard’s Board of Overseers—is a member of a Chinese government-linked group known for “doing Beijing’s bidding in the US,” @CAndersonMO reports. The group, the New York-based Committee of 100, works to strengthen ties between the United States and China—or “bridge America and China,” as its website states.

As U.S. policymakers highlight the American adversaries that are powering the opposition to data centers, records show that foreign billionaires and nonprofits have funneled tens of millions of dollars to the activist groups fueling data center opposition across the United States, @CAndersonMO reports. Swiss billionaire Hansjörg Wyss has contributed nearly $14 million to four left-wing groups that signed a December 2025 letter calling for a moratorium on U.S. data centers: Indivisible Project, Americans for Financial Reform, the Sierra Club, and Greenpeace USA.

“TrackAIPAC,” the social media account that demonizes lawmakers for supporting Israel and accuses them of acting as “foreign agents,” got its start on X as “California for Warren,” an account dedicated to promoting Elizabeth Warren’s failed presidential campaign, a Free Beacon review found.

At one point, the account described itself as part of the “Warren for President team.” Years before the “AIPAC Tracker” began spewing bile at Israel and maligning Americans who back the Jewish state (according to TrackAIPAC, “a terrorist state, massacring innocents by the hundreds of thousands”), it was California for Warren, according to archives of the account.

THREAD:

New York City mayor Zohran Mamdani (D.) celebrated the Jewish holiday of Shavuot at Gracie Mansion on Monday evening with a bevy of his progressive allies, including anti-Israel Jews such as congressional hopeful Brad Lander and the transgender rabbi who once held an interfaith dialogue meeting with the president of Iran:

Word went out over the weekend in Jewish New York City circles not to attend the event. Influential Jewish groups, such as the UJA-Federation and the Jewish Community Relations Council, urged Jews to boycott it.

That didn't stop Lander, who arrived an hour late from the event's 5:30 p.m. start time and zipped into the ceremony without taking questions. He later exited the event on a Citi Bike—again dodging questions: Transgender rabbi Abby Stein, who played a major role in rallying left-wing Jewish support for Mamdani during the Democratic primary, was also seen swanning into the event.

A stridently anti-Israel Harvard graduate student, Bilal Irfan, is listed as an author on 57 medical journal articles in the year 2025, a rate of more than one per week.

“If that sounds more prolific than humanly possible, that appears to be for a reason,” @IraStoll writes.

“The Free Beacon put the texts of those articles through five different programs designed to detect the use of artificial intelligence. Several of the papers were flagged by multiple scanning programs as having a 100 percent likelihood of being AI-generated.” Those papers include “Will There Be A Future For Newborns In Gaza?” published in the British medical journal Lancet in November 2024.

In the paper, Irfan sounds off on the “ongoing Israeli military assault on Gaza,” stating, “The world cannot remain silent any longer. The time for action is now—to restore access to health care, to protect women and children, and to uphold the sanctity of life.”

The University of California, Los Angeles was slapped with a lawsuit Tuesday for stonewalling a public records request related to “activist-in-residence” Lisa Gray-Garcia, who demanded during a mandatory lecture at UCLA’s medical school that students pray to “Mama Earth” and chant “Free, Free Palestine,” @aaronsibarium reports. The Goldwater Institute, a conservative nonprofit, filed the request on Oct. 31, 2025, seeking Gray-Garcia’s contract with UCLA, any course syllabi she’s prepared, and emails she’s sent mentioning terms like “Israel,” “Palestine,” “genocide,” or “Zionist.”

NEW:

The dean of Berkeley Law is facing blowback from a Jewish advocacy group that says he is undermining a newly finalized legal settlement, reports @jessicaschwalb7. @jessicaschwalb7 The Louis D. Brandeis Center for Human Rights Under Law announced an agreement on Thursday that supposedly resolved its lawsuit against Berkeley Law over student organizations that banned Zionist speakers.

NEW:

A seminary affiliated with Columbia University has hired two left-wing, anti-Israel academics who abruptly resigned from Harvard as they faced criticism for their anti-Israel bias and efforts to “dezionize Jewish consciousness,” @jessicaschwalb7 reports. @jessicaschwalb7 Union Theological Seminary announced that Diane Moore and Hussein Rashid, who led Harvard’s Religion and Public Life program, will lead a new program by the same name at UTS aimed at teaching students how religion “can be instrumental in just peacemaking.”

A front-page piece from veteran New York Times White House and national security correspondent David Sanger, long the enforcer of Democratic foreign policy dogma, claims that military action against Iran is “the ultimate war of choice.”

To support that claim, Sanger undercut a major report in the Times from late June (to which he “contributed reporting,” natch) that argued Operation Midnight Hammer failed to seriously set back Iran’s nuclear program.

Back then they claimed the bombing wasn’t successful, that Trump had failed to degrade Iran’s nuclear capabilities. Now, Sanger says Iran posed no imminent threat.

It’s the latest example of the Times’s vast and unwieldy White House team writing contradictory attack articles. @Ira Stoll writes: ⬇️ Sanger writes that Trump “was not driven by an immediate threat. There was no race for a bomb. Iran is further from the capability to build a nuclear weapon today than it has been in several years, thanks largely to the success of the president’s previous strike on Iranian nuclear enrichment sites, in June.”

NEW:

Virgin Islands delegate Stacey Plaskett repeatedly visited Jeffrey Epstein at the St. Thomas-based office he used to run a massive tax-fraud scheme against the Virgin Islands government, raising fresh questions as the Democrat reportedly eyes a run for governor of the territory. Emails and court filings reviewed by @ChuckRossDC show that Plaskett met Epstein at the office of the “Southern Trust Company” in August 2014, January 2019, and May 2019—just two months before Epstein was charged with trafficking dozens of underage girls for sex.

NEW:

How did disgraced Penn president Liz Magill—ousted after she laid a stink bomb in a congressional hearing on campus anti-Semitism—land on her feet as Georgetown Law School’s next dean?

The search committee that selected her was dominated by Democratic donors who have collectively contributed nearly $80,000 to left-wing candidates and causes, as well as by academics who study race and gender, @CAndersonMO reports. Eleven of the 14 committee members have donated to Democrats at the federal level.

Seven of them gave to Kamala Harris’s presidential campaign, including committee chairwoman and law professor Eloise Pasachoff. Joel Hellman, dean of Georgetown’s notoriously anti-Israel School of Foreign Service, gave to Joe Biden’s 2020 campaign, as did Associate Vice President Alison Spada.

NEW:

A senior Biden administration official who helped create the Department of Homeland Security’s controversial Disinformation Governance Board has been appointed to advise the secretive Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, a move that is drawing sharp criticism from Republican lawmakers. The presiding judges of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court and Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court of Review appointed Jennifer Daskal as an amicus curiae on Feb. 1.

It’s a role that allows her to advise judges on legal issues tied to foreign surveillance warrants in sensitive national security cases.

NEW:

Former North Carolina governor Roy Cooper agreed to fast-track the release of 3,500 inmates as part of a racial equity settlement with the NAACP—and the list included 51 convicts serving life sentences for murder or rape, @AndrewKerrNC reports.
@AndrewKerrNC The “early release” list, obtained by Cox’s WSOC-TV as Cooper campaigns for the state’s open Senate seat, came as part of a 2021 settlement with the NAACP, which sued the state over crowded prisons during the pandemic.

NEW:

New York City mayor Zohran Mamdani’s pick to run the Department of Health and Mental Hygiene comes with a controversial political résumé:

Alister Martin, the city’s new health czar, founded Vot-ER, a left-wing nonprofit that promotes voter registration in psychiatric hospitals where patients are being treated for schizophrenia, suicidal ideation, and severe addiction, @aaronsibarium reports. Some of those patients were involuntarily committed, raising serious questions about consent and the politicization of clinical care.

NEW:

When the mother of a black Texas middle schooler claimed in 2021 that a group of white students made her son drink urine, media outlets from NBC to CNN and ABC covered the story.

“Texas authorities investigating allegations of racism and bullying of a 13-year-old by his classmates during sleepover,” a CNN headline blared.

Nearly five years later, we’re learning it was a giant hoax. None of the outlets that covered the case have written follow-up stories despite the lurid (and defamatory) nature of the allegations, which included not just the urine but also that the boy was shot with a BB gun and called racial slurs. Last month, a Texas district court judge in Collin County, in suburban Dallas, ordered the “victim’s” mother, Summer Smith, and her attorney, Kim Cole, to pay $3.2 million in damages to the white student they accused of bullying. A racially diverse jury ruled that they cooked up the allegations to raise their profiles and rake in nearly $120,000 in GoFundMe donations at the height of the BLM hysteria.

WATCH:

Amherst College, founded over two centuries ago to prepare young Christian men for the ministry, has become a hotbed of administratively sanctioned sex performances and "sexual skills" programs, with a focus on "queer" and transgender students and on free-sex practices such as polyamory.

The graphic nature of school-sanctioned sex events has made many current Amherst students deeply uncomfortable, according to students who spoke to the Free Beacon. Every year, first-year students are instructed, as a part of orientation, to attend an event—dubbed "Voices of the Class"—in which they are familiarized with Amherst’s "code of conduct" through a theatrical performance scripted using out-of-context excerpts from their own admissions essays. An entire section of the performance is dedicated just to sex.

YES, ILHAN OMAR MARRIED HER BROTHER:

President Trump has drawn Rep. Ilhan Omar into his commentary on the vast fraud perpetrated by dozens of Somali immigrants in Minnesota, charging that the Somali-born congresswoman “does nothing but bitch” and “married her brother” to get into the country.

“Trump may have garbled the specifics, but he got the upshot of the story right,” says Scott Johnson, the OG reporter on the Omar marriage story, which dates back to 2016.

Johnson has been covering the sordid saga for Power Line, the Minnesota-based website he cofounded. Sources say Omar married her brother, Ahmed Nur Said Elmi, in an effort to extract him from a gay lifestyle in London, where he had been granted asylum.

EXCLUSIVE:

Maryland governor Wes Moore has a sparkling résumé that has made him a prospective 2028 presidential candidate. He’s a football player, a Rhodes scholar, and an Army veteran.

His political career began in 2006 when he won a prestigious White House fellowship. In his application, he said he earned a master’s degree from Oxford and described himself as a “foremost expert” on radical Islam.

Just one hitch.

Moore said in his application for the fellowship that he earned his master’s degree in 2003 and then, elsewhere in the application, that he earned it in 2004. Oxford says it was 2005, when Moore says he was serving in the 82nd Airborne Division in Khost, Afghanistan.
Beyond that, Moore’s thesis is nowhere to be found and there’s no evidence he was ever a doctoral student, @AndrewKerrNC exclusively reports. Oxford administrators told Kerr they couldn’t find “any trace” of Moore’s thesis because he “has not submitted” it to the library, and Moore’s office declined to provide a copy.