President Donald Trump’s administration barred CNN from traveling aboard Air Force One on Saturday, just two days after a federal judge ordered the White House to restore the network’s access.
CNN had been scheduled to serve as the television pool for Trump’s trip to Knoxville, Tennessee, where he was set to attend a college football game between the University of Tennessee and the University of Texas. Instead, White House guidance listed conservative network Real America’s Voice News for the trip.
Real America’s Voice is not a member of the five-network television pool, which rotates responsibility for recording presidential events and sharing the footage with other news organizations.
The latest restriction came less than 48 hours after U.S. District Judge Timothy Kelly temporarily blocked Trump’s ban on CNN, MS NOW and Politico from White House grounds. Kelly, whom Trump appointed during his first term, found that the administration had failed to provide the outlets with due process before revoking their access.
Reporters from all three organizations returned to the White House following the ruling.
CNN also resumed its role in the television pool Friday, providing coverage as Trump and Chinese President Xi Jinping visited the National Archives. The other four television pool members had refused to participate after CNN was barred last week, leaving several presidential events without the usual network video coverage.
Kelly’s temporary order specifically addressed the outlets’ White House “hard passes” and did not directly address Air Force One or pool assignments. The news organizations have argued that the court’s ruling should apply to their pool access as well.
Trump, meanwhile, renewed his attacks on CNN Saturday morning.
“Why should perpetrators of FAKE NEWS, like CNN and MSDNC, be allowed access to a very sacred place, the White House?” Trump wrote on Truth Social.
The president also complained about negative coverage of his administration, days after criticizing CNN for supposedly failing to cover his events during the media standoff.
CNN correspondent Kaitlan Collins disputed that claim after Trump confronted her during the United Nations General Assembly in New York, where the White House had no authority over her credentials.
“We never said we were never going to cover the president,” Collins said.
Trump announced last week that CNN, MS NOW and Politico would no longer be permitted at the White House, accusing the organizations of spreading “fiction and lies.” The three outlets sued, alleging the ban violated their First and Fifth Amendment rights.
The dispute also disrupted the White House television pool. ABC, CBS, NBC and Fox News declined to provide substitute crews after CNN was removed from its scheduled assignments, temporarily leaving the administration without the network equipment normally used to distribute video and audio of the president.
Normal pool operations had only resumed Friday. And as of Saturday morning, CNN was off the rotation again.
President Donald Trump said Saturday that he rejected Iran’s proposal to reopen the Strait of Hormuz, days after publicly calling on Tehran to reopen the critical shipping route and suggesting a deal could end the seven-month war.
“They made a proposal, but I rejected it,” Trump told reporters outside the White House on Saturday.
Iranian officials unveiled the proposal during a week of diplomacy surrounding the United Nations General Assembly in New York. The plan would reopen the Strait of Hormuz within seven days and pause fighting across the region while the two sides pursued broader negotiations.
In exchange, Tehran sought an end to the U.S. blockade of Iranian ports, sanctions relief and access to frozen Iranian assets, according to reports. Iranian Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi said Friday that the proposal had been transmitted to U.S. officials through mediators.
The Wall Street Journal first reported that Trump had rejected the proposal, citing U.S. officials. The newspaper also reported that Trump has told aides he expects the United States to resume bombing Iran after the November midterm elections.
Trump’s rejection comes just days after he used his address before the U.N. General Assembly to demand that Iran reopen the strait while threatening the country with “annihilation” if it failed to reach an agreement with the United States.
“I have a big decision to make,” Trump told world leaders Tuesday, presenting Iran with a choice between a deal that would allow the country to rebuild or further U.S. military action.
Trump also predicted that an agreement with Tehran could come after the midterms, while insisting that the November elections were not influencing his decisions on the war.
Iranian President Masoud Pezeshkian responded from the same U.N. stage Wednesday, saying Tehran remained open to diplomacy but would not negotiate under threat. U.S. and Iranian officials also communicated through Qatari and Pakistani mediators during the gathering, contacts Secretary of State Marco Rubio described as significant despite the limited progress.
The Strait of Hormuz remains one of the world’s most important energy corridors, and its closure during the war has disrupted global oil shipments and contributed to higher energy prices.
Trump appeared to have another idea for the waterway Friday, sharing a map on Truth Social in which the Strait of Hormuz had been relabeled the “TRUMP STRAIT.”
Despite Trump’s rejection of Iran’s latest proposal, indirect diplomacy has not formally ended. An American official described this week’s mediated discussions as “positive and constructive,” while Iranian officials said Saturday they were awaiting an official U.S. response.
For now, however, the proposal that could have reopened the strait within a week appears to have met a considerably shorter response from the president: no.
In the mid-2000s, “Dateline NBC” correspondent Chris Hansen became a national sensation for his hidden-camera sting show, “To Catch a Predator.” Shortly after, he became a meme.
Given the nature of “To Catch a Predator” — where Hansen applied his stern, lilting newscaster intonation to horrific online chat logs between grown men and what they assumed were teenagers — this blur between revulsion and comedy was practically inevitable. Hansen, along with the entire “To Catch a Predator” production, had a way of making the off-putting internet shorthand that men used in these archaic web chats to describe their sexual proclivities seem comical. As repulsive as the correspondence was, chat typos and ludicrous fetishes often made the predators look like bumbling fools, desensitizing viewers to their alleged crimes and downplaying the severity of their actions. As a form of ritual humiliation for its subjects, who were subsequently arrested and detained after being interrogated by Hansen in Tuscan décor kitchens around America, the show gave viewers the thumbs-up to turn its investigations into online fodder. Who were they hurting by making a joke out of those trying to hurt others?
Lance Oppenheim’s new film “Primetime,” in which Robert Pattinson assumes Hansen’s enigmatic role, reveals the answer — sort of. Pattinson portrays Hansen as a caricature of himself, accentuating the journalist’s unmistakable vocal cadence to remove any distance between “To Catch a Predator” and the man behind the show. The effect is something like uncanny sketch comedy, dredging laughs from Hansen’s stilted expressions and intense demeanor, regardless of a scene’s emotional gravity.
(A24) Robert Pattinson in “Primetime”
“Primetime” poses no questions about Hansen’s ethics that haven’t already been asked, making the entire affair feel guilty of the same sensationalism as Hansen’s original show.
When the film’s second trailer dropped, Pattinson’s delivery of the notable Hansen-ism, “You see how this looks, right?” instantly became a reaction video itself; a meme of a meme of a meme. Soon after, the film’s distributor, A24, posted a production photo of Pattinson styled to look like Hansen’s headshot, the source of innumerable jokes during the aughts when memes were just two blocks of text in Impact font. At a pop-up event, A24 sold “Primetime” merch featuring another Hansen quote: “What would’ve happened if I wasn’t here?” For a film ostensibly about how “To Catch a Predator” self-destructed by catering to people tuning in for laughs and entertainment, it’s disconcerting that the movie’s marketing would play into the exact culture it’s commenting on.
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But perhaps that’s the point. “Primetime” presents itself as a story about Hansen’s callous quest for ratings and notoriety at the expense of his tact, but the portrait is unfinished. Not even “Predators” — the 2025 documentary on this very subject that not only beat “Primetime” to the punch but has far more to say about Hansen’s effect on culture — can complete the image. We, the audience, are the final piece of the puzzle, the culpable players who not only ate up the original “To Catch a Predator,” but all the media and memes that spun off it.
Now, “Primetime” (and its marketing) exposes itself as a continuation of that culpability, turning “To Catch a Predator” back into a spectacle for the viewer to gawk at, spoon-feeding them shallow bromides between handfuls of popcorn. The film poses no questions about Hansen’s ethics that haven’t already been asked, making the entire affair feel guilty of the same sensationalism as Hansen’s original show. “Primetime” isn’t a film so much as it is a final exam testing what we’ve learned over the last 20 years. The answer? Not much.
Set in late 2006, “Primetime” takes place in the shadow of Saddam Hussein’s collapsing regime, a context the film repeatedly emphasizes by reminding the audience that Hansen — though darting between Florida condos and Jersey Shore houses — is first and foremost a telejournalist. He senses the world changing in real time and doesn’t want to get left behind, lest his reporting and notoriety succumb to oblivion. With “To Catch a Predator” already a hit, NBC execs decide to move the show to a primetime slot to capitalize on its success. All Hansen has to do is deliver the high-impact predators: prominent pedophiles who can prove the show has a reach beyond the creeps who linger too long outside schoolyards. To do it, Hansen forges forward with all the ardent conviction of an American soldier, clinging to the belief that his definition of good is the greater good, too.
This is where “To Catch a Predator” divides. Some view the show as a public service; others see it as an illegitimate operation that lures creeps into a sting, allowing audiences to see the moment subjects realize their lives as they knew them are essentially over. On “To Catch a Predator,” there is no differentiation between the levels of danger the men pose; no mercy for those who understand they’re sick and desperately plead for rehabilitation. The show makes the final judgment call, with Hansen serving as executioner.
(A24) Robert Pattinson in “Primetime”
This total lack of regulation begets unchecked power. And it’s this scarcity of restrictions that contributed to the suicide of Bill Conradt, a former Texas district attorney who shot himself in November 2006 when police and NBC cameras forcibly entered his home. Eager to catch his biggest fish yet and keep the show highly rated, Hansen made the fatal mistake of pursuing the predator, rather than trapping him. Hence the film’s clunky equivalence of Hansen’s dogged chase to that of the American army.
The film seems to suggest that we — the audience to this specious display of white-knighting nobility — are monsters who can act just as heinous as the criminals. After all, the public drove up the “To Catch a Predator” ratings; they turned Hansen into both a hero and a joke. Perhaps we’re just as responsible for trivializing the show’s subject matter as the show itself.
These cultural comparisons would and should be interesting, if not for screenwriter Ajon Singh’s frustratingly shallow screenplay and Oppenheim’s stylish yet one-note direction. Whenever “Primetime” comes close to a deeper truth, the film backs off entirely, deferring to Pattinson to deliver the intended magnitude. And though his impersonation is spot-on, even a stellar character actor like Pattinson can’t voice his way out of platitudinous dialogue. “There used to be a pillory in every civilized town,” Pattinson’s Hansen remarks about the state of justice. “Now there’s a television with me on it.” Oh, brother.
But though “Primetime” fails to be a deservedly introspective analysis of its subject matter, it does tee up fair questions about its own existence. At one point, Hansen tells a “Predator” decoy, Dan (Skyler Gisondo), about a reporting trip to India, where he observed villages searching for a string of missing children. With no leads, the residents turned on each other to enact justice by their own hands. Hansen uses this as a metaphor for the “To Catch a Predator” conceit. But it’s a far better analogy for how viewers rallied behind the show, making Hansen and his questionable methods a sensation that could be replicated after their mutual cancellation.
Discussing his India trip, the “Primetime” version of Hansen remembers an alleged witness to the kidnappings, who describes the perpetrator as a monstrous ancient evil lurking in the dark. Hansen believes that by targeting predators, he is helping rid the world of such an entity. Later in the film, Oppenheim depicts a brief glimpse of said figure, lurking in the bushes outside of Conradt’s home in the wake of his suicide. The image is at once hokey and compelling, suggesting in unwieldy terms that the monster Hansen has been chasing is like a Hydra: cut off its head, and it’ll regenerate with two more.
Peering back at Hansen from the shrubbery, the film seems to suggest that we — the audience to this specious display of white-knighting nobility — are monsters who can act just as heinous as the criminals. After all, the public drove up the “To Catch a Predator” ratings; they turned Hansen into both a hero and a joke. Perhaps we’re just as responsible for trivializing the show’s subject matter as the show itself, and the fact that anyone is eager to see this movie points to the unfortunate truth that we haven’t learned from our actions in the last two decades.
And while that is true to some degree, the curious viewer can’t shoulder the blame for the film’s shortcomings. All the memes and merch exist on the movie’s fringes. If the movie had more to offer than frivolous musings about the fame machine and its sickly products — complex ideas that warrant real digging instead of ironically superficial investigation akin to Hansen’s — it might successfully catch us in its trap. But unlike the show it’s scrutinizing, “Primetime” lets its prey walk free.
When I graduated from college, I aspired to be a war correspondent and report on the humanitarian crises shaping our time. My life, too unconventional for a husband and kids, would be lived out of suitcases, a dog-eared passport forever in my back pocket. My family would be the other journalists embedded with me in military zones.
That’s not what happened.
I failed the test the Associated Press gives to prospective foreign reporters. Instead of being wedded to my work, I got married to a finance guy from Boston, had twin daughters and wound up working in the creative department of a New York City ad agency as a copywriter. After 15 years in the business, the logistics and expense of childcare became overwhelming and I left advertising for the one job I never imagined for myself: stay-at-home-mom.
As much as I loved being home with my kids and understood the privilege it was, I was bored. All my friends were at the office. I wondered if I had made the right decision leaving my job. I was good at advertising; I won awards for my work. But now, I seriously doubted anyone was going to hand me a bronze statue for the way I yelled at my kids for not finishing their chicken nuggets. I had gone from making Super Bowl ads to snack bags and I was struggling to find the glory in any of it.
In the middle of this identity crisis, I started to bake. I missed the creative process and dreaming-up desserts seemed like the perfect outlet. The added bonus— I could do all of this between school drop-offs, pick-ups and everything in between.
The first thing out of my oven were chocolate chip cookies. I was floored by what I could create with flour, eggs and sugar. I felt like I was back at the ad agency brainstorming new ways to brand old products — but instead of standing in my all-white office, I was at my kitchen counter concocting bespoke cookies — potato chips and butterscotch, rum and dark chocolate, fresh corn from the cob and cranberries. And then one day, when I had a bunch of almost-rotten bananas sitting on my kitchen counter, I threw them together and made a cake.
Not banana bread— there was no cinnamon, cardamon, nuts or loaf pan involved. Instead, it was a layered cake made from whipping butter and sugar until it was frothy and then sifting in the dry ingredients. Just before everything came together, I folded in sour cream, infusing a bit of tang to balance the sweet. Lastly, I added an abundance of bananas—which gave the cake its classic, all too familiar feeling. Like running into an old friend you didn’t realize how much you missed.
I frosted the cake with a Swiss meringue buttercream that required bringing egg whites and sugar together over a pot of simmering water and then whisking it into stiff peaks. The last step was drizzling a tablespoon of good olive oil over the batter which was a trick I had learned in one of the myriad baking newsletters I now subscribed to.
The result is a crumb that is delicate, every forkful a moist, subtlety sweet bite. Deceptively light, the cake is easily devoured. It was an instant hit.
Since then, I’ve baked the cake for countless weddings, birthdays and gender reveals. It was even flown across the country for an 80th birthday.
A couple in Los Angeles keeps it in the back of their freezer just in case. An NBA player swears it brought him good luck after devouring it the night before a big game. When I was the head baker at my local homeless shelter, I baked it hundreds of times and saw how one slice, served on a paper plate, could become a catalyst for dialogue. It is the cake I overheard a caterer say to himself, Jesus, this is good.
Now, almost 40years later, as I watch people cut into my banana cake, I see it all— independence, grief, hope, joy. I once thought I would have to travel to the frontlines to witness humanity up close. It turns out I am already there.
It’s time to vote in one of the most consequential elections of the year, one only slightly less important than the November midterms. Of course I’m talking about Fat Bear Week, the annual event in which people elect — well, yes, the fattest bear. The candidates are bears in Katmai National Park and Preserve in Alaska, who are currently busy devouring as many calories as possible to fatten up for winter hibernation. Voting officially opened Sept. 22, continuing a tradition started in 2014 to select which bears are the best and most fat using a March Madness-style bracket. You can learn more and vote here, plus read some delightful bios on the bears in the running or peruse its hall of champions.
Something like a million people vote in this event every year, according to the daytime news segment that I caught at the dentist the other afternoon while getting a tooth cleaning. Do I need to fact-check that? Sometimes information just comes at you when you have your mouth wide open and people are prodding their fingers around inside. (It remains a mystery, however, why my dentist has a TV on in every room.)
My point is, everyone is talking about Fat Bear Week, and I encourage it. Growing up, I was one of those reflexively contrarian teenagers who hated anything popular and found value in almost anything obscure, independent or weird. These days I’m much less anti-mainstream, especially when it’s something that brings us closer to our true human nature, which is reflected to some degree in the seasonal behaviors of other species. I, too, will fatten up this winter, whether I want to or not.
I wish Fat Bear Week could be every week. Some people are trying. There’s now a Fat Marmot Week, a similar event inaugurated this year. But I must add that a family of marmots devastated my garden in April and destroyed my precious stargazer lilies (I am not joking about this; it was brutal and saddening), so I’m having a hard time jumping on that bandwagon. But I’ll try! Go fat marmots, go! Plump yourself on the spoils of would-be gardeners. I was a big fan when succulents became a dumb little trend, because at least that was boosting an interest in plants rather than mass-produced ugly dolls from China or something. I can’t stand all this plastic trash we elevate above the natural world. Maybe I have retained my anti-establishment roots after all.
This would be the point in the essay where I introduce some sad facts about falling grizzly population levels or remind everyone that climate change is going to make it harder for bears to exist or something. I definitely need to fact-check that, but I don’t want to. Even coming across news this week that a mining project is being fast-tracked at Lake Clark National Park and Preserve, which neighbors Katmai National Park and could impact bear populations, is not what I need to hear right now. Sometimes we all need some joy in life, such as contemplating the fattest bears without all the other gloomy stuff in the world. I do find plenty of things to be grateful for and optimistic about, even if it doesn’t always come through in my published writing. While I don’t want to ignore all the very important chaos — facts that barely register on the news cycle, like how we keep breaching the planetary boundaries necessary for the flourishing of life — I try not to wallow in it either. That’s what Fat Bear Week means to me, and I think we could all use more stuff like it. Ping me when there’s a Sleekest Dolphin Week, Plumpest Mushroom Monday or the Most Insane Octopus of the Month. Give me the “American Idol” version of meadowlark songs.
I am always humbled and delighted whenever the internet explodes over some recently indexed cat species or a shiny new NASA artifact, like the first images of a black hole or the recent trip around the moon, maybe because the collective awe inspired by stuff like that reminds me that people do feel connected to something larger and more mysterious, whether it’s little red dots in the early universe or bears munching on berries in Alaska. From there, maybe people will take more responsibility for the home we share. There’s not much I can do about grizzly bear populations — which are indeed at greater risk under the Trump administration — but I can show my solidarity; I can vote, not just in fun online elections but in the real, super serious one coming up. And I can dream of — no, demand — a better world for all species. Oh, and by the way, I’m rooting for unnamed bear 909. Read her bio. She’s been through a lot of grief, and I admire her resilience.
There is a striking development buried inside the administration’s escalating confrontation with the press that’s turned a familiar Donald Trump-versus-the-media fight into a potentially consequential rupture inside the right-wing media ecosystem. By banning CNN, MS NOW and POLITICO, the president tried to extract a cost for challenging coverage. The move backfired. Instead, it united competitors behind a press-freedom principle, prompting Fox News — the biggest booster of Trump’s political ascent — to participate in an unprecedented pool-coverage stoppage.
Fox’s own Washington bureau chief, Bryan Boughton, who happened to be chairing the pool this week, sent the note announcing the shutdown. Now Peter Navarro, one of the president’s most loyal foot soldiers, is on a crusade against “the back-stabbing Fox News Corporation” and pushing the White House toward a punitive boycott of the outlet.
Navarro, the president’s senior counselor for trade and manufacturing, is actively orchestrating a campaign to persuade the White House to formally cut ties with Fox News and isolate the network, thereby dismantling its status as the supreme arbiter of conservative media. Calling it “CNN with better lighting, a fake slogan and a flag graphic,” he has accused the network of “helping the other side undermine the president.” In recent days Navarro has argued that Trump’s Cabinet secretaries and senior officials should stop appearing on Fox News and Fox Business. Not only has he attacked network executives, but he has also celebrated Real America’s Voice as a potential replacement for MAGA’s loyalties.
The proximate cause of Navarro’s rage is Maria Bartiromo, the Fox Business and Fox News anchor whose sudden firing earlier this month is key to understanding everyone’s motives in this fight. The longtime business host had been preparing to interview Navarro following Trump’s July 16 primetime speech in which the president made unsubstantiated claims about foreign interference in the 2020, 2022 and 2024 elections. After a Fox executive subsequently instructed her not to cover Trump’s claims, Bartiromo canceled Navarro’s appearance and shared the executive’s message with him. He then passed the communication up the White House chain of command. Fox treated the disclosure as a fireable offense, cutting Bartiromo loose after over 12 years, isolating her from her own staff in her final weeks and firing her executive producer alongside her. Trump himself seemed blindsided, posting that he “can’t believe” Bartiromo no longer has her shows.
Navarro has treated Bartiromo’s exit as proof of a wider “muzzling” of MAGA. He has spent the following weeks constructing an increasingly elaborate theory of Fox as captured territory, run by executives who he claims are secretly sabotaging the president. Writing in the Washington Times and The Daily Caller, he has laid out a rap sheet: Fox News Media CEO Suzanne Scott is, by his account, “the same executive responsible for the decapitation of three of the network’s most intelligent talk heads”: Lou Dobbs in 2021, Tucker Carlson in 2023 and now Bartiromo, all pro-Trump voices who were pushed out while “useful RINO idiots like Karl Rove” enjoy free rein to criticize Trump’s tariffs. Navarro accused Fox of joining the entire White House television pool — which consists of ABC, CBS, CNN, NBC and Fox — to form a “Five Network Cartel” exercising illegitimate “veto power” over what Americans see of their own president. In Navarro’s view, the only acceptable resolution would be a primetime apology from the network to Trump and its viewership.
Before he ran for office, Trump built his national political relevance through cable television, especially with Fox appearances during his birther campaign against President Barack Obama. Fox has been the top-rated network in total day and primetime cable news viewership every year since January 2002, a 24-year winning streak built precisely on the grievance-driven conservative audience that provided Trump with his political foundation. He, in turn, drove up the ratings even more.
Fox did not build Trump alone, and Trump did not cultivate Fox’s audience alone. But their feedback loop mattered enormously: Each gave the other cultural authority with conservative voters. Members of the president’s Cabinet — from Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, a former “Fox & Friends Weekend” host, to U.S. Attorney for the District of Columbia Jeanine Pirro — were recruited directly from the network’s anchor desks.
Yet as Trump’s second administration reaches a critical turning point, that historic alliance has devolved into open, bitter warfare. The president’s own personal frustration with Fox predates even Navarro’s critique, though it often manifests in petty grievances and public score-settling. On Truth Social, the president has repeatedly vented his annoyance with the network, publicly berating anchor Shannon Bream — and misspelling the insult as “Milktoast” — for using outdated visual graphics of White House ballroom construction and for challenging Attorney General Todd Blanche on legal impartiality. Trump has similarly attacked Bret Baier and the network’s polling unit for displaying “Fake Polls” that reflect his declining national approval ratings.
Trump’s anger at Fox highlights a fundamental vulnerability for both himself and the network. Fox finds itself caught in an unsustainable commercial position; the network’s historically dominant ratings are showing signs of erosion as Trump’s poll numbers decline.
Trump’s anger at Fox highlights a fundamental vulnerability for both himself and the network. Fox finds itself caught in an unsustainable commercial position; the network’s historically dominant ratings are showing signs of erosion as Trump’s poll numbers decline. When Fox hosts attempt to reflect the changing mood of the public or question controversial policies, they face immediate backlash from both the White House and their core audience.
This friction has become acutely visible in recent months as prominent Fox personalities have openly broken with the administration on his war of choice in Iran. Anchors who are generally supportive of the president, including Laura Ingraham and Jesse Watters, have repeatedly questioned Trump’s handling of the ongoing war. The conflict has drawn strong disapproval from a large segment of Trump’s populist base, who are feeling economic pain at the fuel pumps and growing skeptical of the president’s repeated claims that the military engagement is drawing to a close. Former Fox stars like Tucker Carlson and Megyn Kelly have amplified this backlash from the outside, creating an unprecedented wave of right-wing dissent against the administration’s foreign policy.
Domestic economic policy has produced similar ideological fractures on air. Host Will Cain expressed visible frustration over Trump’s recent outreach to New York’s socialist mayor, Zohran Mamdani. Pointing to lip-reading analysis of off-mic exchanges where Trump invited Mamdani to the White House and offered to look after his interests, Cain warned that MAGA and democratic socialism were beginning to blur, citing data showing that over half of young conservatives support government-run grocery stores and more than 40% would welcome a Democratic socialist presidency.
A week after his Oval Office temper tantrum, Trump’s press crackdown has succeeded only in exposing deep ideological fractures within the conservative movement and uniting historically fierce media competitors against his overreach. (On Thursday, a Trump-appointed judge issued a temporary order restoring access of the outlets to the White House for 14 days, while the legal challenge is ongoing.)
The president’s crackdown assumed Fox would play the compliant beneficiary, scooping up airtime and access that CNN and MS NOW no longer had. Instead Fox recognized, correctly, that a press pool that can be selectively gutted by presidential fiat today is also one that offers no institutional protection to others tomorrow, including Fox itself. In fact, after pool coverage resumed on Friday, the White House barred CNN from traveling with Trump on Air Force One.
Instead of establishing Trump’s control over the media, the White House’s attempt at press suppression showed the limits of that control and, in the process, placed Fox News in the crosshairs of the very movement it helped build.
Votebeat is a nonprofit news organization reporting on voting access and election administration across the U.S. Sign up for our free weekly newsletter to get the latest.
For years, Khalwinder Singh Bhengura lived an unassuming life in Arlington, Texas, where the 69-year-old Indian immigrant works a graveyard shift preparing passenger meals for an airline catering company.
Bhengura moved to the U.S. and spent 18 years working toward becoming a legal resident, securing his green card in 2022. It was a cause for celebration in the Bhengura family. Then things took an unexpected turn.
In 2024, according to a federal indictment, Bhengura registered to vote and cast a ballot in the November presidential election, even though he’s not allowed to do so without being an American citizen.
On Sept. 10, federal authorities arrested Bhengura and charged him with voting as an alien in a federal election and making a false statement about being a U.S. citizen in order to register to vote. That makes him one of 70 people the Trump administration has charged in voting fraud cases this year, according to Acting Deputy Attorney General Trent McCotter.
The list includes noncitizens from all corners of the globe, residing in all corners of the U.S. It features everyone from a 20-year-old college student from the Philippines accused of voting in Hawaii to a 39-year-old New Jersey restaurant owner from France. And an examination of the defendants and the filings in their cases found no sign of any organized efforts to cheat the American electoral system.
Votebeat reviewed Justice Department press releases and news accounts since June 1st and identified 41 recent cases involving noncitizens accused of voting. At least 23 defendants are legal residents holding green cards. Those charged range in age from 19 to 73 and come from at least 18 different countries, including Russia, Mexico, Australia, Israel, and Nigeria. Eight of the cases involved undocumented immigrants. About half of the cases come from Texas and New Jersey, with others popping up in a dozen other states, from Alaska to Louisiana.
Lawyers for most of the defendants did not respond to requests for comment. The list contains an eclectic assortment of alleged voter fraud cases. For example, one suspect in Massachusetts is accused of falsely impersonating his landlord to vote as part of a long-running feud between the two Chinese nationals.
The Justice Department has also charged American citizens in connection with the crackdown on fraudulent voting. One Pennsylvania man is accused of voting in both Alaska and Pennsylvania in the November 2024 presidential election. A city manager in Oklahoma is accused of signing voter registration forms for 11 residents.
But most of the cases involve immigrants like Bhengura who were on the pathway to U.S. citizenship when they voted in elections over the past decade. Bhengura’s lawyer says he acknowledged voting, but many of the cases involve nonresidents who secured their green cards, voted in elections, and then denied doing so when they were filling out paperwork or doing interviews to get their American citizenship, according to the legal filings.
Joshua Ferrer, an assistant professor of government at American University, said many legal residents charged with improperly voting don’t realize they weren’t supposed to do so.
“It’s likely most of this is the result of confusion on the part of voters or election officials,” Ferrer said.
The fact that there are no indications that these voters were connected as part of any larger scheme “is another sign that the president’s claims of widespread voter fraud aren’t true,” he added.
Bhengura’s case raises a number of unanswered questions. Federal prosecutors said Bhengura registered to vote in 2024 when he applied for a driver’s license. But Texas law requires proof of citizenship or lawful presence to get a license, so it’s unclear how he could have been registered to vote if he had provided the documentation.
Knox, Bhengura’s attorney, defended him as “an honest, hard-working taxpayer and proud U.S. resident. He is terrified to face the government of the same nation that promised liberty and freedom. He prays that justice will prevail.”
Carol Lam, who served as U.S. attorney for the Southern District of California under President George W. Bush, questioned the Justice Department’s choice to prosecute these people. In her opinion, the government shouldn’t try to deport green card holders who didn’t know they couldn’t vote until they became American citizens.
“Our justice system was not created to terrorize people,” she said. “I think voting in national elections when you are not a citizen is a bad thing, but how you deal with these things is the question. If there is good evidence that the person didn’t intend to vote, that would be a slap-on-the-wrist kind of situation, and it’s instead being used to leverage people to be deported.”
Lam acknowledged that every administration has the leeway to decide what crimes to prioritize. But she questioned the Trump administration’s decision to devote so much time and energy to cases like Bhengura’s.
“Taking a 69-year-old grandfather with a green card with no apparent intent to violate the law who may have voted based on bad information and using it as a jumping-off point to deport a person would be at the bottom of my pile,” she said. “We had suspects who actually committed acts of violence, so there were so many more cases where life and limb were actually at stake.”
Dion Nissenbaum is Votebeat’s senior national reporter and is based in Houston. Contact Dion at dnissenbaum@votebeat.org.
Votebeat is a nonprofit news organization covering local election integrity and voting access. Sign up for their newsletters here.
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