More details emerge about Rob Reiner and wife Michele’s killings

President Donald Trump came under fire on Monday from both parties' leadership in the Senate Judiciary Committee over his refusal to include them in the briefing about the operation to capture Venezuela's Nicolás Maduro.

In recent months, Democrats have complained that the administration is sidelining their elected officials from participating in Venezuela briefings while keeping Republicans in the loop. This time, however, Trump is simply not including the Judiciary Committee at all, prompting Chairman Chuck Grassley (R-IA) and ranking member Dick Durbin (D-IL) to release an outraged statement.

The Trump administration has repeatedly insisted that the operation was a law enforcement action, not a military one, partly because the former would not require congressional approval — but, Grassley and Durbin pointed out, if it's a law enforcement action, the Judiciary Committee should at least be briefed on things.

"President Trump and Secretary Rubio have stated that this was a law enforcement operation that was made at the Department of Justice's (DOJ) request, with assistance from the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) and the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA)," they wrote. "The Senate Judiciary Committee has jurisdiction over DOJ, FBI and DEA, and all three agencies are led by individuals who our Committee vetted and processed. The Attorney General herself will be present at today's briefing."

"There is no legitimate basis for excluding the Senate Judiciary Committee from this briefing," they wrote. "The administration's refusal to acknowledge our Committee's indisputable jurisdiction in this matter is unacceptable and we are following up to ensure the Committee receives warranted information regarding Maduro's arrest."

The capture of Maduro, while it has been broadly met with support from the GOP, has caused divisions among key pro-Trump factions who backed the president as a noninterventionist, and the administration's approach to the transition of power has generated further controversy.

"I want your attacks. I'm going to take you on because you are for the deep state and the Democratic Party"

The post Alex Jones Goes to War With Candace Owens: ‘You Work For The Deep State!’ first appeared on Mediaite.

An in-depth report published by the Washington Post on Tuesday offers new details about the damage being done to the Social Security Administration during President Donald Trump’s second term.

The Post, citing both internal documents and interviews with insiders, reported that the Social Security Administration (SSA) is “in turmoil” one year into Trump’s second term, resulting in a customer service system that has “deteriorated.”

The chaos at the SSA started in February when the Trump administration announced plans to lay off 7,000 SSA employees, or roughly 12% of the total workforce.

This set off a cascade of events that the Post writes has left the agency with “record backlogs that have delayed basic services to millions of customers,” as the remaining SSA workforce has “struggled to respond to up to 6 million pending cases in its processing centers and 12 million transactions in its field offices.”

The most immediate consequence of the staffing cuts was that call wait times for Social Security beneficiaries surged to an average of roughly two-and-a-half hours, which forced the agency to pull workers employed in other divisions in the department off their jobs.

However, the Post‘s sources said these employees “were thrown in with minimal training... and found themselves unable to answer much beyond basic questions.”

One longtime SSA employee told the Post that management at the agency “offered minimal training and basically threw [transferred employees] in to sink or swim.”

Although the administration has succeeded in getting call hold times down from their peaks, shuffling so many employees out of their original positions has damaged the SSA in other areas, the Post revealed.

Jordan Harwell, a Montana field office employee who is president of American Federation of Government Employees (AFGE) Local 4012, said that workers in his office no longer have the same time they used to have to process pay stubs, disability claims, and appointment requests because they are constantly manning the phones.

An anonymous employee in an Indiana field office told the Post that she has similarly had to let other work pile up as the administration has emphasized answering phones over everything else.

Among other things, reported the Post, she now has less time to handle “calls from people asking about decisions in their cases, claims filed online, and anyone who tries to submit forms to Social Security—like proof of marriage—through snail mail.”

Also hampering the SSA’s work have been new regulations put in place by Tesla CEO Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency that bar beneficiaries from making changes to their direct deposit information over the phone, instead requiring them to either appear in person at a field office or go online.

The Indiana SSA worker told the Post of a recent case involving a 75-year-old man who recently suffered a major stroke that left him unable to drive to the local field office to verify information needed to change his banking information. The man also said he did not have access to a computer to help him change the information online.

“I had to sit there on the phone and tell this guy, ‘You have to find someone to come in... or, do you have a relative with a computer who can help you or something like that?’” the employee said. “He was just like, ‘No, no, no.’”

Social Security was a regular target for Musk during his tenure working for the Trump administration, and he repeatedly made baseless claims that the entire program was riddled with fraud, even referring to it as “the biggest Ponzi scheme of all time.”