Marjorie Taylor Greene

Oct. 17 (UPI) — President Donald Trump on Friday night said he commuted the sentence of George Santos, freeing the former Republican U.S. House member after just three months in federal prison.

Santos, who served in the House for less than one year, was sentenced to more than seven years in prison after pleading guilty to charges of committing wire fraud and aggravated identity theft. Santos, 37, reported to a federal facility in Fairton, N.Y., on July 25.

Santos also gained prominence for lying about his employment history and education, and information about his family.

“George has been in solitary confinement for long stretches of time and, by all accounts, has been horribly mistreated,” Trump posted on Truth Social. “Therefore, I just signed a Commutation, releasing George Santos from prison, IMMEDIATELY. Good luck George, have a great life!”

Trump left the White House on Friday to spend the weekend in Florida. He’s the keynote speaker Friday night at a fundraiser for the super PAC MAGA Inc.

A senior White House official told NBC News that Trump decided to help Santos this week and “many people wrote to him about it.”

Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, R-Ga., had sought a pardon, which erases the legal consequences of a crime. A commutation only reduces the severity of the punishment.

Greene told NBC News this week that she had been in contact with the Department of Justice in recent weeks regarding the possibility, saying the sentence was overly harsh.

“George Santos never raped anybody, never murdered anybody, is not a child sex-trafficker. Why is he in solitary confinement?” she said. “That is an extreme treatment for someone for the crimes that he was convicted of.”

CNN didn’t receive comments from his lawyers.

Santos, before reporting to prison, told a Saudi outlet, Al Arabiya English, that he asked Trump for a pardon.

“I did not spend time in D.C. making friends,” Santos said. “I never made it to the president. I got stonewalled by the gatekeepers.”

From prison last week, Santos wrote a letter to Trump published in The South Shore Press: “Mr. President, I am not asking for sympathy. I am asking for fairness — for the chance to rebuild. I know I have made mistakes in my past. I have faced my share of consequences, and I take full responsibility for my actions. But no man, no matter his flaws, deserves to be lost in the system, forgotten and unseen, enduring punishment far beyond what justice requires.”

Trump took notice of Santos’ situation.

“George Santos was somewhat of a ‘rogue,’ but there are many rogues throughout our Country that aren’t forced to serve seven years in prison,” Trump posted on Truth Social. “I started to think about George when the subject of Democrat Senator Richard ‘Da Nang Dick’ Blumenthal came up again.”

Trump explained that Blumenthal, who has served as a U.S. senator serving Connecticut for 14 1/2 years, lied about his military involvement.

“He was ‘a Great Hero,’ he would leak to any and all who would listen — And then it happened! He was a COMPLETE AND TOTAL FRAUD. He never went to Vietnam, he never saw Vietnam, he never experienced the Battles there, or anywhere else. … This is far worse than what George Santos did, and at least Santos had the Courage, Conviction, and Intelligence to ALWAYS VOTE REPUBLICAN!”

Santos fabricated parts of his biography, including falsely, saying that he was a “star” player on a championship volleyball team.

Santos was raised Catholic but claimed his mother had a Jewish background and that his maternal grandparents were Jewish refugees from Ukraine who survived the Holocaust. His grandparents were born in Brazil.

He also said his mother died in the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, though she wasn’t in the United States at the time.

Santos took office on Jan. 3, 2023, serving in New York’s 3rd Congressional District.

On Nov. 16, 2023, Santos announced he would not seek re-election for the seat that serves parts of Long Island and Queens.

That day, the House Ethics Committee found that he “violated federal criminal laws.” The funds were used for personal purposes and he filed false campaign reports, the report said.

Despite a slim Republican majority and relying on his vote, the House expelled Santos the next month on Dec. 1, 2023. The 311-114 vote surpassed the required two-thirds majority.

He was the sixth lawmaker to be forced out of the chamber.

On March 7, 2024, he announced he would run as a Republican in the 1st Congressional District and 15 days later, Santos said he would seek the office as an independent. A month later, on April 23, he withdrew his candidacy.

He pleaded guilty on Aug. 19, 2024, in federal court in Central Islip, N.Y., and was sentenced on April 25.

“I deeply regret my conduct,” Santos said in court during his conviction and sentence. “I accept full responsibility for my actions.”

WASHINGTON, Sept. 16 (UPI) — As the United States faces shifts stemming from President Donald Trump‘s climate priorities and changes within the Environmental Protection Agency, Republican lawmakers held back-to-back hearings Tuesday to challenge climate intervention strategies and EPA enforcement under former President Joe Biden.

The House Oversight Committee hearings unfolded against the backdrop of major Trump administration moves to roll back environmental oversight.

Since January, the EPA has enacted changes that scrap emissions reporting and dismantle research offices, a signal Democratic lawmakers think the agency is prioritizing industry concerns and cost savings over transparency and scientific independence.

On Tuesday morning, the Delivering on Government Efficiency Subcommittee met to discuss “Playing God with the Weather-A Disastrous Forecast,” which focused heavily on geoengineering and weather modification.

Later in the day, the Subcommittee on Federal Law Enforcement held a hearing on “From Protection to Persecution: EPA Enforcement Gone Rogue Under the Biden Administration,” which focused on instances of the EPA’s involvement in small businesses.

Chairman Marjorie Taylor Greene, R-Ga., opened the morning hearing by placing modern climate intervention in a long tradition of weather control, from Native American rain dances to Cold War era military projects, but warned today’s techniques of cloud seeding, carbon removal and blocking sunlight could pose unpredictable risks to human health and agriculture.

Greene argued that efforts to fight what she called a “climate change hoax” could lead to reckless global experiments.

“Some scientists think they can predict and control the impact of geoengineering, but even the best scientific models will never be able to capture all of God’s wonderful creation and nature’s mysteries,” she said.

Some lawmakers warned of unchecked experimentation with climate interventions, and the administration has signaled it will not pursue new regulatory frameworks for geoengineering research, but instead emphasize transparency and voluntary disclosure.

This was solidified when a video of EPA Administrator Lee Zeldin was shared at the hearing. Zeldin explained his commitment to total transparency by promising to publicly release all geoengineering research so that “baseless conspiracies” will be met “head on.”

On Friday, the agency proposed ending a rule that required about 8,000 facilities to publicly report their greenhouse gas emissions — a program that provided transparency into the country’s biggest polluters.

In the afternoon, the Subcommittee on Federal Law Enforcement looked at the EPA in a different light, focusing on what Republican lawmakers cited as an aggressive policy during the Biden administration.

“Instead of pursuing massive industrial polluters who employ highly paid legal defense teams, EPA under the Biden administration chose to focus on mom-and-pop shops, and with the shops that have limited means to argue their case against the legal might of the Department of Justice backed by the EPA,” Chairman Clay Higgins, R-La, said.

He added: “Often, EPA’s enforcement actions involved raids on shops by teams of armed EPA agents who intimidated small businesses with threats of criminal prosecution.”

The committee showcased small businesses as examples of what GOP
members called EPA’s overreach, including one from Higgins’ home state of Louisiana.

Kory Willis, owner and founder of Power Performances Enterprise Inc. of Baton Rouge, who runs a performance tuning shop, described an almost decade-long legal fight that culminated in a consent decree that nearly put him out of business.

According to an EPA press release in 2022, federal prosecutors described Willis’ company as among the country’s leading developers of “delete tunes” — software that disables emissions controls in diesel trucks.

Court records show his company tuned more than 175,000 vehicles, moving over $1 million in products monthly at its peak, with emissions expected to release more than 100 million pounds of excess pollutants over the lifetime of those vehicles.

Another witness, Eric Schaeffer, former executive director of the Environmental Integrity Project and EPA Office of Civil Enforcement director, subtly questioned Willis in his testimony.

“If you’re stuck behind a diesel truck, or a bunch of diesel trucks, in a traffic jam, and being showered with soot, live in an apartment next to a highway or the is city cooked by smog … don’t you have the right to breathe clean air? We used to think so,” Schaeffer said.

In its press release, the EPA said “Diesel emissions include multiple hazardous compounds and harm human health and the environment. Diesel emissions have been found to cause and worsen respiratory ailments such as asthma and lung cancer. One study indicated that 21,000 American deaths annually are attributable to diesel particulate matter.”

In March 2022, Willis and Power Performances Enterprise Inc. pleaded guilty to conspiracy and Clean Air Act violations, agreeing to pay $3.1 million in criminal fines and civil penalties and to stop selling defeat devices.

Schaeffer noted that the crackdown on defeat devices did not begin with the Biden administration.

“The launching of this enforcement initiative to crack down on the sale of these aftermarket devices started under the Trump administration in President Trump’s first term,” he said, pointing to EPA guidance at the time that warned of criminal penalties and urged companies to self-disclose violations.

Since then, federal courts have consistently upheld that the Clean Air Act covers aftermarket tampering devices.

Democratic members pushed back on the GOP positions, framing the hearing as not an examination of enforcement tools, but instead as part of the broader efforts for this administration to roll back environmental protections.

Rep. Summer Lee, D-Pa., highlighted the dismantling of environmental justice functions, warning that loosened oversight would leave vulnerable communities more exposed to soot, asthma and cancer.

For example, in July, the EPA announced it was dismantling its Office of Research and Development, the branch long responsible for the agency’s core scientific work, laying off many staff.

A new Office of Applied Science and Environmental Solutions will replace it — a change that EPA officials under Trump say will streamline research and save nearly $750 million.

Together, the hearings and EPA’s actions indicated a present and future narrowing of the agency’s enforcement reach, pulling back climate transparency rules and reframing scientific research.

Sept. 3 (UPI) — Survivors of convicted sex-trafficker Jeffrey Epstein, flanked by lawmakers and lawyers, spoke out at a press conference on Capital Hill Wednesday.

President Donald Trump, meanwhile, called the fight for the Epstein files a “Democrat hoax.”

Rep. Thomas Massie, R-Ky., called on Republicans in the House to support the survivors by signing his discharge petition to force a vote to release all the files. But House GOP leaders are pushing members to avoid the petition and support the Oversight and Government Reform Committee, which is working for disclosures from the Department of Justice, The Hill reported.

In a closed-door meeting in the Capitol, Speaker Mike Johnson, R-La., called on GOP lawmakers to instead support the efforts of the Oversight and Government Reform Committee, led by Rep. James Comer, R-Ky., which is seeking more disclosures on the Epstein case from the DOJ, the Epstein estate, and former law enforcement officials who worked on the case.

Massie said of Comer’s committee, “They’re allowing the DOJ to curate all of the information that the DOJ is giving them.”

“I hope my colleagues are watching this press conference,” Massie said. “Hopefully today we’ll get two more signatures on the discharge petition, that’s all we need.”

Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, R-Ga., said she and the others would fight for the victims.

“Today, we are coming forward and we are going to fight like hell for these women, because we have to fight like hell for those that are enduring sexual abuse and are living in a prison of shame,” Greene said.

Trump said in a meeting Wednesday with the president of Poland to a reporter, “So this is a Democrat hoax that never ends. You know, it reminds me a little of the Kennedy situation [assassination], we gave them everything. Over and over again. More and more and more. And nobody’s ever satisfied.”

He said Democrats are trying to distract from his successes as president.

“I know that no matter what you do, it’s going to keep going,” the president said of the focus on the Epstein files.

“I think we’re probably having, according to what I read, even from two people in this room, we’re having the most successful eight months of any president ever,” he said. “And that’s what I want to talk about. That’s what we should be talking about. Not the Epstein hoax.”

Brad Edwards, who represents some of the victims, responded, urging Trump to join the survivors.

“Back in 2009 and several times after that, [Trump] didn’t think that it was a hoax then. In fact, he helped me. He got on the phone, he told me things that were helping our investigation. Our investigation wasn’t looking into him, but he was helping us then,” Edwards said. “So at this point in time, I would hope that he would revert back to what he was saying to get elected, which is, ‘I want transparency.'”

One of Epstein’s survivors, Chauntae Davies, said Epstein was very proud of his friendship with Trump.

“His biggest brag, forever, was that he was very good friends with Donald Trump. He had an 8-by-10 framed picture of him on his desk with the two of them,” Davies said.

Several victims expressed their pain and frustration with the lack of transparency and support at the event.

“Why was he so protected? And why didn’t anyone ever care to stop him?” survivor Haley Robson asked.

She urged lawmakers to “lift the curtain on these files and be transparent.”

Marina Lacerda said she was “one of dozens of girls that I personally know who was forced into Jeffrey mansion … when we were just kids,” CBS News reported.

Lacerda said she was 14 when she met Epstein, after being told she could earn $300 “to give an older guy a massage.”

“It went from a dream job to the worst nightmare,” Lacerda said.

She said she had “no way out … until he finally told me that I was too old.”

Lacerda questioned why Epstein was able to “go on with the abuse,” saying she could have testified earlier on to “help stop him.”

“Our government could have saved so many women, but Jeffrey Epstein was too important and those women didn’t matter,” Lacerda said. “Why? Well we matter now. We are here today, and we are speaking, and we are not going to stop speaking.”

A lawyer for some of the victims, Brittany Henderson, said the women want transparency and protection.

“The women here represent hundreds of other women who we have spoken to, many of whom were trafficked from other countries — from eastern European countries — where women don’t have the rights that we have here, women don’t have the protections that we have here. And those women are terrified that their names will be released in those files.”

Rep. Ro Khanna, D-Calif., who is working with Massie on the discharge petition, said, “A nation that allows rich and powerful men to traffic and abuse young girls without consequence, is a nation that has lost its moral and spiritual core.”

Khanna said there are “corrupt, special-interest forces” blocking the release of the full files, saying “There is something that is rotten in Washington.”

Survivor Jena-Lisa Jones said, “Together, we can finally make a change.”

“Whether you are a Democrat or a Republican, this does not matter,” Jones said. “This is not about sides.”

One survivor, Teresa Helm, spoke out against the interview that Attorney General Todd Blanche conducted with Epstein accomplice Ghislaine Maxwell.

“Her voice was elevated way before our voices were elevated here today. And that same calm, manipulative voice that she had, so polite there that day with Todd Blanche, was the same, polite, coercive, manipulative voice that I heard as she was grooming me to then send me off to the home of Jeffrey Epstein, where he would assault me.”

She criticized Blanche’s failure to counter what Maxwell said.

“Does he even have the facts to be able to push back on her? We could sit there and push back. Why didn’t we get to attend that? Why weren’t we there that day? Or why wasn’t even one of us consulted prior to that day in that meeting?” she asked.

“We all work very hard on healing and [Maxwell’s voice] still gets to us after two decades,” she said.

Annie Farmer, a survivor who testified at Maxwell’s trial, said that there are two Americas.

“At a time with record high levels of distrust in our institutions, and a perception that there are two Americas — one for those with power and privilege and one for everyone else, passing this Epstein transparency bill is one important step that can be taken to prove to Americans that the government does not side with sexual perpetrators,” Farmer said.

Anouska De Georgiou, another survivor, said the issue is secrecy.

She called the discharge petition “so essential,” saying it’s “about ending secrecy wherever abuse of power takes root.”

“The only motive for opposing this bill would be to conceal wrongdoing,” she said.

Massie voiced the same concern.

“What’s clear is they’re not redacting just to protect victims; they are redacting to protect reputations,” Massie said. “Some of those people are probably innocent, but some of them are most certainly guilty.”

July 9 (UPI) — Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu on Wednesday met with a bipartisan group of U.S. senators and the Defense Department while Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, R-Ga., works to end funding for Israel.

Senate Majority Leader John Thune, R-S.D., and Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., were among more than a dozen senators who met with Netanyahu while the prime minister was still visiting the U.S. Capitol this week.

The meeting occurred after Netanyahu met with President Donald Trump on Monday and Tuesday evening to discuss Iran and Gaza.

Tuesday’s meeting with Trump mostly focused on Gaza and efforts to secure a cease-fire and an eventual end to hostilities in Gaza that began after Hamas attacked, killed and kidnapped Israeli civilians on Oct. 7, 2023.

Celebrating the end of the war with Iran

In addition to meeting with senators on Wednesday, Netanyahu also toured the Pentagon with Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, while celebrating the end of the 12-day war with Iran.

“Absolute thanks, gratitude and admiration for [Central Command], for the U.S. military, for the secretary of defense and the president of the United States,” Netanyahu said, as reported by the Department of Defense.

Netanyahu told Hegseth the Israeli people, the Israeli government and others around the world are grateful for the June 21 Operation Hammer U.S. aerial strikes against three Iranian nuclear facilities.

Hegseth lauded “the skill of your professionals” in Israel’s military for softening Iran’s defenses and establishing aerial superiority that enabled the successful attacks.

“What was accomplished was absolutely incredible,” Hegseth told the prime minister. “It was an honor to be part of it.”

Netanyahu said the “entire world took note” of the strength of the alliance between Israel and the United States.

“It was like the roar of two lions,” he said, “and it was heard around the world.”

Greene seeks end of U.S. military funding for Israel

Despite the military success in Iran, Greene on Wednesday sought to end financial support for Israel’s military.

Greene told former Trump administration chief strategist Steve Bannon that she will introduce amendments to remove funding for Israel from the National Defense Authorization Act.

“There are some parts of this NDAA that I cannot support, and that’s continued foreign aid and foreign funding,” Greene told Bannon while being interviewed on his “War Room” podcast, The Hill reported.

Greene said she will introduce amendments that would eliminate $500 million in defense funding for Israel, which she said already gets $3.4 billion in annual funding from the United States.

She called Israel a “nuclear-armed” country that doesn’t need another $500 million from the United States for defense spending.

June 22 (UPI) — Iran and Israel exchanged targeted airstrikes Sunday after President Donald Trump ordered the bombing of nuclear sites in Iran, leaving his administration and lawmakers divided over U.S. involvement.

“We’re not at war with Iran. We’re at war with Iran’s nuclear program,” Vice President JD Vance said in an interview with NBC News’ “Meet the Press” on Sunday. It marked the first major official rhetoric that the United States is indeed “at war.”

Vance declined to confirm that Iran’s nuclear sites were completely destroyed, saying that the U.S. has “substantially delayed” Iran’s ability to develop a nuclear weapon. His comments come after Russia said Sunday that other countries could provide Iran with nuclear weapons.

The strike by the Trump administration has divided his supporters. Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, for example, criticized what she called “neocon warmongers” in a post on social media Sunday afternoon.

“America is $37 TRILLION in debt and all of these foreign wars have cost Americans TRILLIONS AND TRILLIONS of dollars that never benefited any American,” the lawmaker wrote in her post.

“American troops have been killed and forever torn apart physically and mentally for regime change, foreign wars, and for military-industrial base profits. I’m sick of it. I can easily say I support nuclear-armed Israel’s right to defend themselves and also say at the same time I don’t want to fight or fund nuclear armed Israel’s wars.”

Rep. Thomas Massie, another Republican, went as far to call the strike on Iran “not Constitutional” in his own post. He later criticized fellow Republican House Speaker Mike Johnson for stating that Trump “made the right call” with the airstrike.

“Why didn’t you call us back from vacation to vote on military action if there was a serious threat to our country?” Massie said in his remarks to Johnson. He reiterated that point Sunday in an interview with CBS News’ “Face the Nation.”

Massie was joined on “Face the Nation” by fellow lawmaker Rep. Ro Khanna, a Democrat, with whom he worked last week to introduce a war powers resolution to prohibit U.S. forces from striking Iran without authorization from Congress.

Khanna said in the interview that Secretary of State Marco Rubio expressed a desire for Iran to enrich uranium for peaceful purposes but the lawmaker noted that Iran had already been under a nuclear deal that the United States withdrew from.

According to Khanna, under the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, or JCPOA, which was negotiated by Iran, the United States and the European Union in 2015, the International Atomic Energy Agency did not find a single violation.

“In the first Iraq war, the second Iraq war and the war in Afghanistan, Congress first got the briefings. Congress met and debated. It should have been declarations of war, but at least they did an authorization of use of military force,” Massie added. “We haven’t had that.”

The Israeli Defense Forces said in a statement Sunday that the Israeli Air Force used 30 fighter jets to attack dozens of military targets across Iran.

“As part of the wave of attacks, fighter jets first attacked the ‘Imam Hussein‘ strategic missile headquarters in the Yazd region, where long-range Khoramshahr missiles were stored,” the IDF said. “From this headquarters, approximately 60 missiles were launched towards the State of Israel.”

The IDF added that it also hit missile launchers and military sites for the production of air defense batteries, and a drone warehouse in Isfahan, Bushehr and Ahvaz.

Air raid sirens sounded across most of Israel on Sunday as Israeli Police acknowledged impacts from Iranian missiles on Sunday, including a strike in Tel Aviv that left at least six people with minor injuries, while videos shared on social media purportedly showed damage in Haifa.

Meanwhile, Iranian state media reported Sunday that the Houthis — formally known as Ansarullah — expressed support for Iran after the U.S. strikes and would “stand by any Arab or Islamic country against U.S. aggression.”