Matt Gaetz's ex-girlfriend to cooperate with federal authorities in sex trafficking investigation  —  Washington (CNN)Federal authorities investigating alleged sex trafficking by GOP Rep. Matt Gaetz have secured the cooperation of the congressman's ex-girlfriend, according to people familiar with the matter.

Ted Cruz turns up the trolling to fill the Trump Twitter void  —  On Nov. 8, 2016, the people of the United States of America elected a Twitter troll as our president.  Yes, that's rather reductive — Donald Trump is certainly many other things — but it's also true.

U.S. seizes $90,000 from man who sold footage of U.S. Capitol riot  —  U.S. authorities have confiscated roughly $90,000 from a Utah man who sold footage of a woman being fatally shot during the Jan. 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol by supporters of former President Donald Trump, according to court filings.

In echo of Arizona, Georgia state judge orders Fulton County to allow local voters to inspect mailed ballots cast last fall  —  A Georgia state judge on Friday ordered Fulton County to allow a group of local voters to inspect all 147,000 mail-in ballots cast in the 2020 election in response …

The New Furies of the Oldest Hatred  —  Take a good look at who is speaking out against Jew-hate.  And who is staying silent.  —  6 hr ago  —  The furies have been unleashed.  They were everywhere you looked these past two weeks, though you won't read about them much in the papers.

Trump is sliding toward online irrelevance.  His new blog isn't helping.  —  The former president's aides said his new online presence would ‘redefine the game.’ But his heavily promoted blog is seeing few visitors.  —  On the Internet, former president Donald Trump is sliding toward something he's fought …

The ‘gaffe machine’ gets a tuneup: Joe Biden stays surprisingly on message as president  —  WASHINGTON - Joe Biden was four months away from declaring his candidacy for president when an interviewer asked him about his well-documented history of saying precisely the wrong thing at precisely the wrong time …

Patrick Leahy signals he'll run for ninth Senate term  —  The Senate's longest-serving Democrat, long assumed to be on the cusp of retirement, is leaning toward giving it another go.  —  Sen. Patrick Leahy (D-Vt.), who has served since 1975 and is in the line of presidential succession …

PolitiFact retracts Wuhan lab theory ‘fact-check’  —  An awful lot of people in the press were eager last year, maybe a little too eager, to dismiss the theory suggesting the COVID-19 virus originated in a lab in Wuhan, China.  —  It was foolish then to reject the theory outright without any conclusive evidence.

The Jewish man who was the victim of a gang assault in New York says the level of hatred was troubling  —  Jewish man attacked in a ‘gang assault’ in New York City  —  (CNN)A 29-year-old Jewish man, who was attacked in a New York City gang assault said Friday that he could not understand why there was so much hate directed at him.

How the GOP lies about the US Capitol insurrection and 2020 election are related  —  (CNN)The events of January 6 and its aftermath can be difficult to fathom.  A number of Republicans don't seem to comprehend them at all.  They have fallen back on the lies that the riots we all saw …

US Rep. Debbie Dingell undergoes emergency surgery for perforated ulcer  —  WASHINGTON — Michigan Democratic Rep. Debbie Dingell underwent emergency surgery for a perforated ulcer, her office announced Friday.  —  Spokesperson Mackenzie Smith says Dingell's surgery took place …

Republicans Move to Limit a Grass-Roots Tradition of Direct Democracy  —  Through ballot initiatives, voters in red states have defied legislators' wishes and produced liberal outcomes in recent years.  Republicans want to make the practice harder, or even eliminate it.

Epstein guards to skirt jail time in deal with prosecutors  —  The two Bureau of Prisons workers tasked with guarding Jeffrey Epstein the night he killed himself in a New York jail have admitted they falsified records, but they will skirt any time behind bars under a deal with federal prosecutors, authorities said Friday.

Abuse of power by Biden's Justice Department: Let Arizona conduct its own election audit  —  President Joe Biden's Department of Justice is being run by ideologues with a history of partisan enforcement of civil rights laws.  —  The latest offender is Principal Deputy Assistant Attorney General Pam Karlan.

So wrong: Chicago mayor declares she will only grant interviews to ‘journalists of color’  —  “I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character.”  — Martin Luther King, Jr., Aug. 28, 1963.

Risk of Nuclear War Over Taiwan in 1958 Said to Be Greater Than Publicly Known  —  The famed source of the Pentagon Papers, Daniel Ellsberg, has made another unauthorized disclosure — and wants to be prosecuted for it.  —  WASHINGTON — When Communist Chinese forces began shelling islands controlled …

We Don't Need a Commission to Investigate the Capitol Riot  —  This Democrat-driven project would be hopelessly politicized.  —  NRPLUS MEMBER ARTICLE  —  W  —  hy do we need a commission for this?  —  That's one of the questions Rich Lowry and I batted around on The McCarthy Report podcast a couple of Fridays ago.

America's rich people could have saved local journalism — and perhaps democracy.  They refused.  —  It didn't have to turn out this way.  —  Local investors — especially in a prosperous town like Chicago — could have stepped forward to block a hedge fund from gaining control of several of the nation's top daily newspapers.

Support for Black Lives Matter Surged Last Year.  Did It Last?  —  This article is part of a special section on George Floyd  —  and America, a year after his death.  Read more about this project  —  in a note from deputy Opinion editor Patrick Healy in our Opinion Today newsletter.

Same Data, Same Strategy: A New Look at How the Trump Campaign and Russian Intelligence Operated in 2016  —  The recent Biden administration sanctions on the Russian government are part of an ongoing effort to push back against the Kremlin's malign influence campaign against the West.