Mine Games

Good afternoon. This is the Final NOTUS newsletter for April 23, 2026. You can get it in your inbox every day by signing up here — it’s free!

THE LATEST

Iran continues to lay mines in the Strait of Hormuz, Axios reports, while Donald Trump is threatening to up the ante after the U.S. military seized another tanker the Department of Defense said was transporting Iranian oil.

• “I have ordered the United States Navy to shoot and kill any boat, small boats though they may be … that is putting mines in the waters of the Strait of Hormuz,” he wrote on social media this morning. “There is to be no hesitation.”

• The DOD denied that it would take six months to clear the strait of mines, contradicting a classified department assessment given to the House Armed Services Committee and reported yesterday by The Washington Post. A DOD spokesperson told NewsNation that the report was “cherry picking” and called a six-month closure “an impossibility.”

The sudden departure of Navy Secretary John Phelan has lawmakers raising alarms over infighting and shake-ups during the conflict, coming just weeks after the ouster of the Army’s chief of staff, Randy George.

• “I’m concerned that the secretary of defense is more interested in having people that just say ‘yes’ than they are in having people that give their honest opinion,” said Rep. Austin Scott, a Republican on the panel. He called Pete Hegseth’s firing of George “reckless.”

The DOJ’s inspector general has opened an investigation into whether the department followed the law in its release of files relating to Jeffrey Epstein.

• “Our preliminary objective is to evaluate the DOJ’s processes for identifying, redacting, and releasing records in its possession as required” by the Epstein Files Transparency Act, the IG’s office said in a statement.

THE HILL

Mike Johnson and House GOP leadership finally released the bill text for a three-year extension of a key section of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act — without the warrant requirements that conservative privacy hawks have been demanding. The revised Section 702, which empowers U.S. intelligence to spy on the communications of foreign nationals outside the country without obtaining a warrant, includes new oversight powers and stepped-up penalties for violations of the law, though it’s unclear whether the hard-liners will sign off on it.

• Complicating matters: House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries said today that Democrats are unlikely to back any extension as long as Kash Patel remains as FBI director.
• Next up: The bill is scheduled for a procedural vote next week in the House Rules Committee before it can be sent to the full chamber for final approval.

Republicans probing ActBlue, the Democratic-aligned fundraising juggernaut, want its CEO to testify in May about its donor-vetting process — a move The New York Times called “a significant escalation in public pressure on the Democratic Party’s biggest financial engine.”

• The organization responded by calling the investigation a “partisan attack on a political opponent at a pivotal moment in the electoral cycle.”

THE WHITE HOUSE

The White House announced a drug-pricing deal with Regeneron, the last holdout in the Trump administration’s yearlong pressure campaign on pharmaceutical companies to discount drugs in exchange for tariff relief, NOTUS first reported. The company has agreed to reduce Medicaid prices for current and future medications.

• The announcement featured 2-year-old Travis Smith, who successfully regained his hearing after receiving a recently FDA-approved gene therapy from Regeneron.

THE ADMINISTRATION

Trump plans to nominate longtime transportation executive David Cummins to lead the Transportation Security Administration, CBS reports.

The DOJ is planning a hearing to ‘fully reschedule marijuana’ as a lower-risk drug, acting Attorney General Todd Blanche announced. The department is also reclassifying FDA-approved and state-licensed marijuana as a lower-risk drug.

The Trump administration is pushing to strip nearly 400 naturalized Americans of their citizenship by placing their cases in front of U.S. attorneys across the country, The New York Times reports. The unusual move represents a major attempt to speed up the typically rare denaturalization process and set a precedent that could be used in the future.

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