News for May 20th, 2026
Vance made the disclosure during a White House press conference where he stood in for press secretary Karoline Leavitt. Asked directly by Daily Caller White House correspondent Reagan Reese whether Omar could face an indictment related to alleged immigration fraud, Vance chose his words carefully, but left no ambiguity about where things stand.
The vice president’s remarks mark the most explicit public confirmation from a senior administration official that Omar faces active federal scrutiny. Neither Omar’s congressional office nor the DOJ Office of Public Affairs responded to the Daily Caller’s request for comment before publication.
What Vance said, and what he didn’t
Reese framed her question around a previously referenced anti-fraud task force and Vance’s own prior statements about Omar:
“I want to ask you about the anti-fraud task force. You previously mentioned that Ilhan Omar seemed to have committed immigration fraud. Do you anticipate an indictment against her, an indictment related to that situation?”
Vance responded with a statement that balanced procedural caution with unmistakable direction:
“So Reagan, I don’t want to prejudge an investigation. You read the things about Ilhan Omar, and about who she married, and whether she didn’t marry this person or that person. It certainly seems like something fishy is there. But everyone is entitled to equal justice under the laws.”
He then went further, confirming the DOJ’s active role:
“So we’re going to investigate it, we’re going to take a look at it. If we think there’s a crime, we’re going to prosecute that crime, and that’s something that the Department of Justice is looking at right now.”
Three phrases stand out. “Right now”, not in the future, not under review, but active. “If we think there’s a crime, we’re going to prosecute”, a conditional framing, but one that signals intent rather than reluctance. And “something fishy”, a colloquial assessment from the second-highest official in the executive branch, directed at a sitting member of Congress.
A probe with roots in the Biden era
This is not the first time federal investigators have turned their attention to Omar. The New York Times previously reported that former President Joe Biden’s DOJ launched a probe into the congresswoman in 2024. That investigation, led by Washington, D.C., federal prosecutors working with the DOJ integrity unit, reportedly began in June 2024.
The scope of that earlier probe was broad. It examined Omar’s campaign expenditures, personal finances, and alleged contacts with a non-U.S. citizen. But the investigation stalled. One person briefed on internal deliberations, speaking anonymously, told the Times that agents did not discover evidence justifying further investigation. The probe fizzled out.
What changed between then and now remains unclear. Vance’s comments suggest the current DOJ is taking a fresh look, or perhaps a harder one, at material the Biden-era department set aside. Whether new evidence has surfaced, whether the scope has shifted, or whether the investigation simply benefits from different leadership at the Justice Department are all open questions.
Omar’s financial record has drawn sustained scrutiny well beyond federal prosecutors. Her financial disclosure filings revealed a $30 million discrepancy that raised questions about possible felony exposure under congressional reporting requirements.
A pattern of unanswered questions
Trump settles $10 billion IRS lawsuit, secures apology and $1.776 billion fund for Americans targeted by government
President Trump dismissed his $10 billion lawsuit against the IRS on Monday in exchange for a formal government apology and the creation of a $1.776 billion compensation fund open to any American who believes federal agencies were turned against them for political reasons, including, remarkably, Hunter Biden.
The settlement resolves a case Trump, his sons Don Jr. and Eric, and the Trump Organization filed on January 29 after the government failed to protect their confidential tax returns from being leaked to the New York Times in 2019. In its place now stands the Justice Department Anti-Weaponization Fund, a board-governed mechanism designed to hear claims, issue apologies, and distribute monetary relief to people who were unfairly targeted by any administration.
Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche announced the fund’s formation Monday with a statement that left little ambiguity about the settlement’s purpose.
“The machinery of government should never be weaponized against any American, and it is this Department’s intention to make right the wrongs that were previously done while ensuring this never happens again.”
Trump and his family receive no compensation from the fund. They get the apology. Everyone else, from January 6 defendants to political targets of prior administrations, gets a place in line.
How the fund works
Five board members, all appointed by Blanche, will oversee the Anti-Weaponization Fund. One of the five will be selected in consultation with House Speaker Mike Johnson and Senate Majority Leader John Thune. Blanche had not yet named his appointments as of the announcement.
The board can issue apologies, grant monetary relief, or request additional information from both claimants and relevant federal agencies. Approved claims will be subject to FOIA laws and federal audits and must be reported to the attorney general. The president retains the power to remove board members without cause.
The fund sunsets on December 15, 2028. Any money left over reverts to the federal government.
A senior administration official told the Post the fund is not designed to hand out windfalls. The goal, the official said, is restoration.
“The point of this isn’t to make every January 6-er a millionaire. The point is to compensate, and to give entitled people back some of their dignity and some of what they lost, including money, whether it’s for legal fees or other costs associated with what they went through.”
The Hunter Biden wrinkle
The most politically charged detail in the settlement is its breadth. Hunter Biden, convicted of federal tax and gun charges, then pardoned by his father, former President Joe Biden, is eligible to apply. The former first son accumulated millions in legal fees during his prosecutions, and his reported debts and unpaid legal bills have been well documented.
A senior administration official acknowledged that a Hunter Biden application would not be surprising.
“I potentially expect it. Whether the commissioners will agree with that, and feel like he needs to be compensated, is something that, I think we’ll have to see.”
The official explained the administration’s reasoning for not excluding Biden’s son from eligibility. The fund was deliberately left open to anyone who believes the Justice Department was used as a weapon against them, regardless of which administration did the targeting.
“We didn’t limit it in that way, because we really viewed it as, and actually this is what the president has said, which is that the Department of Justice was used as a weapon for reasons that are totally wrong, and if Hunter Biden believes that the Department of Justice was used as a weapon against him, he’s allowed to apply.”
That framing carries a certain irony. Hunter Biden publicly defended his own pardon while criticizing Trump’s clemency record. Now the same administration he criticized is offering him a chance at compensation.
The IRS leak that started it all
The lawsuit Trump settled grew out of a genuine breach. IRS contractor Chaz Littlejohn pleaded guilty to one count of unauthorized disclosure for leaking Trump’s confidential tax returns. Littlejohn was sentenced to five years in prison in January 2024. He also leaked tax documents belonging to thousands of other wealthy Americans to ProPublica.
The Trumps filed their $10 billion suit charging the government failed to safeguard their records. The case was approaching a deadline this week at which the Justice Department would have needed to justify why it should proceed. Instead, the settlement replaced litigation with a broader remedial structure.
The leak itself was a clear-cut government failure. A contractor with access to some of the most sensitive financial records in the country walked out the door with them, and the public learned about it only after the damage was done. The five-year sentence Littlejohn received hardly matched the scale of the breach.
Meanwhile, the IRS whistleblowers who flagged political interference in Hunter Biden’s tax investigation have their own story of government dysfunction. Gary Shapley and Joseph Ziegler reached an undisclosed settlement with the DOJ over alleged illegal retaliation tied to their disclosures about the Biden tax case.
Shapley and Ziegler said they came forward because Hunter Biden “almost escaped prosecution for his crimes because he was the President’s son.” They noted that Biden ultimately pleaded guilty, was pardoned, and then dropped his own lawsuit against the IRS that had targeted the whistleblowers themselves.
That chain of events, buried evidence, retaliation against truth-tellers, a presidential pardon, is precisely the kind of institutional rot the Anti-Weaponization Fund is meant to address.
JD Vance confirms DOJ investigation of Rep. Ilhan Omar during White House press conference
Vice President JD Vance told reporters Tuesday afternoon that the Department of Justice is actively investigating Democratic Minnesota Rep. Ilhan Omar, and that if prosecutors find evidence of a crime, the administration intends to pursue charges.
Vance made the disclosure during a White House press conference where he stood in for press secretary Karoline Leavitt. Asked directly by Daily Caller White House correspondent Reagan Reese whether Omar could face an indictment related to alleged immigration fraud, Vance chose his words carefully, but left no ambiguity about where things stand.
The vice president’s remarks mark the most explicit public confirmation from a senior administration official that Omar faces active federal scrutiny. Neither Omar’s congressional office nor the DOJ Office of Public Affairs responded to the Daily Caller’s request for comment before publication.
Reese framed her question around a previously referenced anti-fraud task force and Vance’s own prior statements about Omar:
“I want to ask you about the anti-fraud task force. You previously mentioned that Ilhan Omar seemed to have committed immigration fraud. Do you anticipate an indictment against her, an indictment related to that situation?”
Vance responded with a statement that balanced procedural caution with unmistakable direction:
“So Reagan, I don’t want to prejudge an investigation. You read the things about Ilhan Omar, and about who she married, and whether she didn’t marry this person or that person. It certainly seems like something fishy is there. But everyone is entitled to equal justice under the laws.”
He then went further, confirming the DOJ’s active role:
“So we’re going to investigate it, we’re going to take a look at it. If we think there’s a crime, we’re going to prosecute that crime, and that’s something that the Department of Justice is looking at right now.”
Three phrases stand out. “Right now”, not in the future, not under review, but active. “If we think there’s a crime, we’re going to prosecute”, a conditional framing, but one that signals intent rather than reluctance. And “something fishy”, a colloquial assessment from the second-highest official in the executive branch, directed at a sitting member of Congress.
A probe with roots in the Biden era
This is not the first time federal investigators have turned their attention to Omar. The New York Times previously reported that former President Joe Biden’s DOJ launched a probe into the congresswoman in 2024. That investigation, led by Washington, D.C., federal prosecutors working with the DOJ integrity unit, reportedly began in June 2024.
The scope of that earlier probe was broad. It examined Omar’s campaign expenditures, personal finances, and alleged contacts with a non-U.S. citizen. But the investigation stalled. One person briefed on internal deliberations, speaking anonymously, told the Times that agents did not discover evidence justifying further investigation. The probe fizzled out.
What changed between then and now remains unclear. Vance’s comments suggest the current DOJ is taking a fresh look, or perhaps a harder one, at material the Biden-era department set aside. Whether new evidence has surfaced, whether the scope has shifted, or whether the investigation simply benefits from different leadership at the Justice Department are all open questions.
Omar’s financial record has drawn sustained scrutiny well beyond federal prosecutors. Her financial disclosure filings revealed a $30 million discrepancy that raised questions about possible felony exposure under congressional reporting requirements.
A pattern of unanswered questions
The DOJ investigation sits atop a growing pile of unresolved accountability questions surrounding Omar. At the state level, Minnesota lawmakers have pressed her on connections to a massive COVID-era fraud scheme. A convicted fraud ringleader in the $250 million Minnesota COVID meal fraud case publicly claimed that Omar had knowledge of the scheme.
Omar has not addressed those claims under oath. She skipped a state fraud hearing entirely, prompting a Minnesota lawmaker to publicly demand answers from her office.
When a state fraud committee sought to compel her testimony through a subpoena, the effort fell one vote short, leaving Omar free to continue declining cooperation.
Her amended financial disclosures have only deepened the questions. After the original $30 million discrepancy surfaced, Omar filed an amended disclosure that drew sharp criticism for a multimillion-dollar swing in reported wealth, a correction so large it raised more questions than it answered.
Separately, a GOP senator flagged what he described as Omar’s attempt to direct $1 million to a Somali restaurant that had classified itself as a rehabilitation clinic, another thread in a tangled web of financial allegations that have followed the congresswoman for years.
California woman charged with paying Skid Row homeless as little as $2 to register to vote
Federal prosecutors charged a 64-year-old California petition circulator with a felony after she allegedly spent years paying homeless people on Los Angeles’ Skid Row pocket change, cigarettes, and phone charging cords to fill out voter registration forms, and sometimes listed her own former address on the paperwork, Fox News Digital reported.
Brenda Lee Brown Armstrong, a Marina del Rey resident, agreed to plead guilty to one federal felony count of paying another person to register to vote in a federal election. She made her initial court appearance Monday and faces up to five years in federal prison.
The case lands at a moment when election integrity has become a flashpoint nationwide, and when critics of California’s universal vote-by-mail system have warned for years that its loose safeguards invite exactly this kind of exploitation. Armstrong’s alleged scheme was simple, cheap, and, prosecutors say, effective enough to generate registrations that could have routed live ballots to her own home.
The scheme: $2, a cigarette, and a signature
Armstrong worked as a paid petition circulator for roughly 20 years, collecting signatures for official ballot initiatives in the Skid Row area of downtown Los Angeles. She received payment for each registered voter’s signature, with the amount varying by initiative.
The Department of Justice said Armstrong regularly offered people between $2 and $3 to complete voter registration forms. Prosecutors said she also offered cigarettes and phone charging cords as inducements, and that the paid-registration conduct began no later than 2025.
Undercover footage captured by investigative reporter James O’Keefe’s O’Keefe Media Group showed Armstrong on camera explaining the arrangement. Newsmax reported that in the footage, Armstrong told people:
“Now because you haven’t registered, I need to register you so I can get paid too. I’m paying you guys, I need to get paid.”
O’Keefe took a victory lap over the indictment, citing his outlet as the first to capture footage of the alleged scheme on Skid Row.
The bluntness of that pitch, pay me so I can pay you, strips away any pretense of civic engagement. This was transactional, and both sides knew it.
Prosecutors raised a second, potentially more serious dimension to the case. Armstrong sometimes provided homeless individuals with her own former Los Angeles address to list on voter registration forms. That registered those individuals to vote in both California and federal elections, at an address Armstrong controlled.
California automatically sends vote-by-mail ballots to every registered voter. Prosecutors said ballots in some individuals’ names could potentially have been sent to Armstrong’s former residence. The DOJ has not stated publicly whether any ballots were actually cast, but the structural opportunity is obvious: stack registrations at a single address, and the system mails the ballots right to you.
The California Secretary of State’s guidance allows homeless people to register to vote if they have a location where mail can be received and can “be properly assigned to a voting precinct.” Armstrong appears to have exploited that provision by supplying her own address as the mailing point.
The case echoes a recent New Jersey case in which a Democratic mayoral candidate pleaded guilty to forging nearly 1,000 voter registration applications, a reminder that voter fraud, while often dismissed by progressive commentators as a myth, keeps turning up in federal courtrooms.
DOJ frames the charge as an election integrity priority
Assistant Attorney General Harmeet K. Dhillon, who leads the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division, announced the charge in a press release Monday. Her statement framed the prosecution as part of a broader commitment to clean elections.
“False registrations undermine Americans’ faith in elections, even more so when payoffs are involved. This Justice Department is committed to ensuring that all U.S. elections are fair and free from illegal meddling, so that all Americans can accept the results with confidence.”
Bill Essayli, First Assistant U.S. Attorney for the Central District of California, was more direct. Essayli’s statement:
“Today’s an example where fraud did occur. Not only did Ms. Brown pay people to register to vote, which is illegal, it is a federal crime.”
That language, “fraud did occur”, is notable. For years, defenders of California’s election apparatus have insisted that systemic fraud is vanishingly rare. Essayli’s words, spoken on behalf of the U.S. Attorney’s office, say otherwise in this instance.
When Fox News Digital reached out to the office of Gov. Gavin Newsom for comment, the governor’s press office directed the outlet to a post on X. The statement read:
“As we said when this was first discovered, anyone caught engaging in this activity should be investigated and prosecuted.”
The phrasing, “as we said when this was first discovered”, raises its own questions. When was the scheme first discovered? The article does not provide a date. If state officials knew about the conduct before federal prosecutors acted, the gap between discovery and prosecution deserves scrutiny.
Fox News Digital also reached out to the California attorney general’s office for additional comment on Monday. No response was reported.
The federal government, not the state, brought this case. That pattern, Washington stepping in where Sacramento does not, has become familiar in California, from DHS barring a former congresswoman from federal funds over alleged FEMA fraud to immigration enforcement that state officials actively resist.
Several important questions remain open. Fox News Digital reached out to the DOJ to clarify which specific ballot initiatives and groups Armstrong was soliciting for, and how much she was paid per initiative. No answers were reported.
The plea agreement, described in court filings, confirms Armstrong worked as a petition circulator for approximately 20 years and received payment for each registered voter’s signature. But neither the case number nor the specific court handling the plea has been publicly identified in available reporting.
Most critically: did any ballots actually get cast using the fraudulent registrations? Prosecutors said ballots “could potentially” have been sent to Armstrong’s former residence. The difference between “could have” and “did” matters enormously, and the DOJ has not yet answered that question publicly.
