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In an exclusive Raw America report, Republicans are becoming increasingly skeptical of Pete Hegseth after a top Pentagon official walked out the door this week. Federal prosecutors just charged an ICE officer with lying about a Minneapolis shooting. Ted Cruz gave a wild firsthand account revealing how Donald Trump blew up in the Oval Office after learning Elon Musk said he was in the Epstein files. And a respected election forecaster just gave Republicans a dire warning about the midterms.
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An increasing number of Republicans are now casting doubt on Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth’s capability to lead the Pentagon following this week’s high-profile exit of Army Secretary Dan Driscoll, Raw America can reveal.
The former part-time weekend Fox News host-turned-defense secretary has been publicly blamed for pushing out top generals and respected military leaders while America is in the midst of a war with Iran that doesn’t seem to be anywhere near its end. Hegseth is also now under new scrutiny following the bombing of a wedding in Iran, which came months after the missile strike on a girls’ school in Minab, Iran that killed 150 people, including 120 young schoolgirls.
This week also marked the one-year anniversary of Hegseth’s bombings of boats in the Caribbean, which have killed more than 220 people to date. None of those people were ever publicly named by the Pentagon or charged with crimes before they were killed. The embattled defense secretary has also been shackled with blame for the deplorable conditions on board the U.S.S. Abraham Lincoln, with many service members complaining of meager food supplies, inadequate laundry facilities, extensive internet outages cutting them off from the outside world and other factors that even led at least one sailor to attempt jumping overboard before others intervened to stop him.
“It’s amazing he’s lasted this long,” one former defense and intelligence official who served in the Obama administration told Raw America White House reporter Brian Karem.
Miles Taylor, who served as the Department of Homeland Security’s chief of staff in President Donald Trump’s first administration, told this outlet that while Hegseth was “on shaky ground,” it’s still “no shakier than it was when his nomination looked like it was in peril.”
“Trump’s orbit is always as chaotic as his own mind,” Taylor said. “Judging by the deleterious effects of aging, that’s only going to get worse.”
One unnamed Republican congressional staffer lamented to Karem that “there’s always something to deal with” when it comes to Hegseth. Sen. Thom Tillis (R-N.C.), who is not running for reelection, described Hegseth’s personnel decisions as “amateur hour at best and deadly at worst.” A separate congressional staffer said Driscoll’s exit was particularly devastating for troops, saying he “speaks on the behalf of a lot of veterans and those currently serving.”
Sen. Mike Rounds (R-S.D.), who is a senior member of the Senate Armed Services Committee, told reporters this week he was also frustrated with the departure of Driscoll and other top Pentagon leaders. He suggested that his committee could soon question Hegseth after the Senate returns from its summer recess on September 14, saying the firings will be among “questions that we’re going to be asking when we get back.”
A U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agent is finally being held accountable in a shooting case, though critics say it’s nowhere near enough.
Federal prosecutors have charged ICE officer Christian Castro with lying to investigators about a shooting back in January during ICE’s Operation Metro Surge in Minneapolis. Castro fired his weapon through a closed door and shot Venezuelan national Julio Sosa-Celis in the leg.
At first, the Justice Department charged Sosa-Celis with assaulting agents. Those charges were dropped once officials confirmed that the agents lied about the shooting. Castro claimed under oath that Sosa-Celis attacked him. Surveillance footage told a different story entirely.
Sosa-Celis’s attorney, Robin Wolpert, said the federal charges still fall well short of what actually happened. She argues the evidence supports additional civil rights charges and emphasized that her client wants full accountability.
Castro also faces state assault charges in Minnesota, though a federal judge in Texas recently ruled against keeping him in custody pending extradition, allowing for him to walk free. Texas officials say they’ll help facilitate Castro’s arrest.
This is all part of a larger pattern of impunity for ICE. Federal agents have shot at more than 20 people during the Trump administration’s immigration crackdown, including killing two U.S. citizens in Minnesota. Just un July alone, ICE agents killed two more immigrants in Houston, Texas and Biddeford, Maine. No agents had body cameras in either case.
Republican Senator Ted Cruz of Texas recently described the moment in which Donald Trump learned that Tesla and SpaceX CEO Elon Musk tweeted that Trump was mentioned in the Epstein files. Cruz was in the Oval Office talking about school choice when Natalie Harp walked in.
Harp is known as Trump’s human printer, because of her habit of handing him articles and social media posts throughout the day. Cruz said on a recent podcast appearanceHarp handed Trump a printed copy of Musk’s post. He described watching Trump’s knuckles turned white while he read the post.
The Texas senator said he had no idea what was on the page until he saw Trump’s furious reaction. Cruz joked that he learned curse words that day he didn’t even know existed. The school choice discussion was over as soon as Trump saw the post, and the president reportedly spent the rest of the meeting venting about Elon Musk.
Trump has been dogged by the Epstein issue since of May 2025, when then-Attorney General Pam Bondi privately told Trump his name appeared numerous times in the Epstein files. Both Bondi and Todd Blanche, who was deputy attorney general at the time, both said they had no plans to release the documents to the public.
That changed last November, when Congress voted almost unanimously to pass the Epstein Files Transparency Act, which Trump then signed into law. But the DOJ missed the law’s statutory December deadline to release all of the files, prompting a federal judge later to rule the Trump administration directly violated the law. Litigation to release the remainder of the Epstein files — which includes handwritten FBI notes from an interview with a woman who accused Trump of assaulting her when she was a teen — is still playing out in the courts.
Election forecaster Charles E. Cook of the Cook Political Report is out with new midterm predictions that are among the roughest yet for Republicans.
Cook says Republicans face three possible scenarios that he categorizes as, “Bad,” “Really Bad” and “Truly Horrible.” His most likely outcome has Republicans losing 26 to 35 House seats and four to five Senate seats, both of which are enough to hand control of both chambers to Democrats. Even in Cook’s more optimistic scenario — which assumes that aggressive Republican gerrymandering efforts will keep some seats in GOP hands — Cook still has Democrats picking up significant gains in November.
In every version of Cook’s forecast, Republicans lose the House of Representatives.
Cook also made the argument that Elon Musk’s ownership of X is likely distorting how journalists and political forecasters perceive the country’s ideological positions, since Musk’s algorithm is tilted in favor of the far right. He added that platform culture can make a fringe, extreme opinion feel like a mainstream one shared by the majority of Americans.
Think about why you had to come to Raw America to read half of these stories. Not only did we bring you exclusive quotes from Capitol Hill sources about how Pete Hegseth is in hot water, but we also covered how an ICE agent is now facing potential jail time for lying about shooting a man in Minnesota. These stories don’t fit the desired narrative of MAGA billionaires like David Ellison want at CBS or that Jeff Bezos wants at his Washington Post. But Raw America answers only to our readers, meaning we don’t have anyone forcing us to bury the truth.
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I’m British Chris, with Raw America. Please take a few seconds and click the ❤️ and restack this newsletter so we can reach the people who need to hear these stories. thanks for reading, and thanks for supporting independent media. We’ll see you tomorrow.