House Paid Astonishing Sum to Make Sexual Harassment Claims Disappear

The federal government secretly used your tax dollars to settle sexual harassment claims against House members for decades.

According to documents from the Office of Congressional Workplace Rights and Republican Representative Nancy Mace, who recently forced the release of those documents through a subpoena, the federal government paid out more than $338,000 from 2004 to 2017 to secretly settle sexual harassment claims against six House members or their offices. The following year, Congress banned the federal government from paying off settlements for sex pests.

Mace said she plans to release the records publicly “once we confirm that personally identifiable information of victims and witnesses has been properly redacted.... Accountability is not a threat,” she said. “It is a promise.”

According to Mace’s calculations, those implicated include former Democratic Representatives Eric Massa ($115,000) and John Conyers ($77,000), and Republicans Blake Farenthold ($84,000) and Patrick Meehan ($39,000), whose misconduct was already public but not the exact sums. Less public settlements included an $8,000 payout on behalf of the late Democratic Representative Carolyn McCarthy’s office and a $15,000 payout for former Republican Representative Rodney Alexander. Alexander claimed the settlement had to do with accusations against one of his staffers at the time, while a former McCarthy aide did not respond to a query from Politico.

These payouts—which have received even more scrutiny in the wake of allegations of misconduct against former Representatives Eric Swalwell and Tony Gonzales—demonstate the massive lack of accountability for members of Congress. Our leaders are hiding behind our money instead of actually having to acknowledge their misdeeds.

The war in Iran has done very little damage to the country’s nuclear capabilities, according to U.S. intelligence assessments.

So far, America has been at war with Iran for more than nine weeks and spent at least $25 billion in the process. The regional conflict has damaged strategic alliances, stalled global trade, and thrust the world into an energy crisis due to the blockade on the Strait of Hormuz. It has also killed thousands of people.

And yet assessments of Tehran’s nuclear program remain largely unchanged from roughly a year ago, when Donald Trump ordered strikes on three of Iran’s nuclear sites, hitting Fordo, Natanz, and Isfahan on June 22.

Prior to the June attack, U.S. analysts believed that Iran had the capacity to build a nuclear bomb within three to six months, according to three sources familiar ‌with the matter that spoke with Reuters Monday night. Afterward, U.S. analysts estimated that the attack—internally referred to as Operation Midnight Hammer—changed the Islamic Republic’s nuclear timeline back to about nine months to a year.

That estimate is still the same, according to Reuters’s unnamed sources.

Since February 28, the majority of U.S. and Israeli attacks have focused on hitting conventional military targets in Iran. The stagnant timeline suggests that such a strategy is not effective at diminishing Iran’s nuclear capabilities. To do that may require the destruction or removal of Iran’s remaining stockpile of highly enriched uranium, or HEU, reported Reuters.

Iran lacked a single bomb’s worth of uranium in 2018, three years after former President Barack Obama brokered the Iran Nuclear Deal to limit the country’s enormous uranium stockpile. But that changed when Trump withdrew the U.S. from the pact and imposed a series of tough economic sanctions against the Middle Eastern country.

By 2025, Iran had curated an 11-ton stockpile of enriched uranium, the whereabouts of which remain largely unknown. The total HEU stockpile could create as many as 10 bombs if fully enriched, according to a 2025 assessment by the International Atomic Energy Agency.

Trump has previously stated that his primary objective in the war was to completely eliminate Iran’s nuclear capabilities, but his administration has not been consistent in relaying its mission progress to the general public.

In the immediate aftermath of Operation Midnight Hammer, Trump and his administration claimed that Iran’s nuclear production was set back by multiple “years.” Yet former National Counterterrorism Center Director Joe Kent suddenly resigned over the issue in March, writing in his resignation letter that he could not “in good conscience” support the war in Iran because the country “posed no imminent threat to our nation.”

Another Republican governor is refusing to bend to Donald Trump’s demand to rig their state’s elections in his favor.

South Carolina Governor Henry McMaster, a longtime Trump ally, is not preparing to call a special legislative session to redraw his state’s congressional map mid-decade, his office told Palmetto Politics.

McMaster’s office told the outlet that he had been in communication with the White House following the Supreme Court’s decision to gut the Voting Rights Act last week, but the governor’s office rejected the idea it was being “pressured” by the Trump administration. His office insisted that it was part of “ongoing coordination” with the White House and the talks were simply part of the “regular communications” the governor enjoys with Trump.

Shortly after the Supreme Court’s decision, McMaster suggested that it could be worth reviewing South Carolina’s congressional map, noting that it had been upheld as recently as 2024. “In light of the Court’s most recent decision on the Voting Rights Act, it would be appropriate for the General Assembly to ensure that South Carolina’s congressional map still complies with all requirements of federal law and the U.S. Constitution,” he wrote in a post on X.

South Carolina currently has six Republicans and one Democrat in the House of Representatives.

Last week, Georgia Governor Brian Kemp, another Republican, also said that he wouldn’t pursue mid-decade redistricting in light of the recent Supreme Court decision. Meanwhile, Trump has continued to threaten red states that refuse to rig their elections in his favor.

Republicans are now trying to get $1 billion in taxpayer funding for President Trump’s ballroom.

Senator Chuck Grassley, chair of the Senate Judiciary Committee, included a request for the funds in a reconciliation package released Monday night. The $1 billion would go to the Secret Service for “security adjustments and upgrades” related to the ballroom’s construction. An additional $30.7 billion for Immigration and Customs Enforcement and $3.5 billion for Customs and Border Protection were also included in the budget item.

In a statement Monday, Grassley said, “Republicans won’t allow our country to be dragged backwards by Democrats’ radical, anti-law enforcement agenda.

“The Senate Judiciary Committee is taking action to help provide certainty for federal law enforcement and safer streets for American families. We will work to ensure this critical funding gets signed into law without unnecessary delay.”

The reconciliation process allows for a simple majority in the Senate, meaning that if there is no Republican opposition, Trump will get the ballroom funds. It’s quite an increase from the $400 million in tax dollars that Senate Republicans asked for last month, and from the zero dollars from taxpayers that Trump promised. But he must have his ballroom, whether the American people want it or not.

President Trump is still beefing with Pope Leo XIV, accusing the first American pope of “endangering a lot of Catholics,” on The Hugh Hewitt Show on Monday.

Trump attacked the pope unprovoked after Hewitt said perhaps the pope could speak up about China’s detention of Hong Kong billionaire Jimmy Lai.

“Well, the pope would rather talk about the fact that it’s OK for Iran to have a nuclear weapon.… I don’t think that’s very good,” Trump said. “I think he’s endangering a lot of Catholics and a lot of people, but I guess, if it’s up to the pope, he thinks it’s just fine for Iran to have a nuclear weapon.”​

It’s clear that Trump has been extremely bothered by the pope’s very measured criticism last month, and consumed with this one-sided beef ever since. Trump is claiming that Pope Leo is “endangering” Catholics because he wants Iran to have a nuclear weapon. Pope Leo XIV never said anything close to that. Instead, he simply criticized Trump’s war on Iran and his genocidal threats accompanying it, and the president has been crashing out since, calling him “weak on crime” and putting words in his mouth to cope.