Dem senator flies to El Salvador to visit alleged gangbanger in prison — only to be denied
Sen. Chris Van Hollen, D-Md., was denied a visit with a Salvadoran migrant and accused MS-13 member who was deported to El Salvador, after flying to the country on Wednesday morning.
Van Hollen intended to visit Kilmar Abrego Garcia, 29, who was deported to the El Salvadoran mega prison “Terrorism Confinement Center” (CECOT) for being an alleged MS-13 gang member, though his attorneys maintain he does not have any gang ties.
Van Hollen spoke to reporters from El Salvador on Wednesday afternoon, when he vowed to continue pressing for access to Abrego Garcia.
He met with Vice President Félix Augusto Antonio Ulloa Garay because President Nayib Armando Bukele Ortez was out of the country, though Van Hollen said he was grateful to speak about the case of Abrego Garcia.
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“I asked the vice president if I could meet with Mr. Abrego Garcia, and he said, ‘well, you need to make earlier provisions to go visit CECOT,’” Van Hollen said.
He told Ulloa that he was not interested in taking a tour of CECOT and that he just wanted to meet with Abrego Garcia.
“He said he was not able to make that happen,” Van Hollen said of Ulloa.
When Van Hollen asked if he could come back next week to see Abrego Garcia, Ulloa told him he could not promise that, either. Ulloa also told the U.S. senator that he could not even arrange for him, or Abrego Garcia’s family, to speak with the inmate over the phone.
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The senator said the situation in El Salvador is “unjust,” and he accused the Trump administration of lying about Abrego Garcia.
“I am going to keep pressing,” Van Hollen said. “I will keep pressing in my remaining time here, and I will keep pressing beyond that if necessary.”
The Supreme Court last week upheld a lower court’s decision to facilitate the return of Abrego Garcia from CECOT, where federal officials have sent hundreds of suspected criminals and gang members.
The Trump administration agreed to clear any administrative obstacles keeping Abrego Garcia from coming back to the U.S., but Attorney General Pam Bondi has said that returning him is “up to El Salvador. If they want to return him. That’s not up to us.”
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This has caused no small outrage from Democrats, with Van Hollen being the first to announce plans to travel to El Salvador to help secure Abrego Garcia’s release.
“Mr. Abrego Garcia was illegally abducted by the Trump Admin and, by their own admission, wrongly deported to El Salvador,” Van Hollen posted to X on Tuesday.
“He shouldn’t have to spend another second away from his family,” he went on. “I’m flying to El Salvador tomorrow morning to check on his condition and discuss his return.”
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Van Hollen’s visit to El Salvador comes just two days after another illegal immigrant from El Salvador, Victor Antonio Martinez-Hernandez, was found guilty of murdering Bel Air, Maryland, resident Rachel Morin in August 2023.
Morin, a 37-year-old mother of five, was jogging along the Ma & Pa Trail in Bel Air when Martinez-Hernandez ambushed, strangled and beat her to death.
White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt said Van Hollen’s visit to El Salvador was “appalling and sad,” saying he and other Democrats plotting trips to the Central American country are “incapable of having any shred of common sense or empathy for their own constituents.”
“Nobody knows this more than the woman standing to my right, Patty Morin, whose beautiful daughter Rachel was brutally maimed and murdered at the hands of an illegal alien in August 2023,” Leavitt said while introducing Rachel Morin’s mother. “Patty no longer has her daughter because of the failed Democrat Party’s open border. And these are policies that President Trump is bringing an end to.”
Patty Morin spoke to reporters about her daughter’s final moments, saying that “she was not planning on dying. She wasn’t planning on walking to her death. She was planning on going to the grocery store with her girls afterwards.”
“Victor Martinez, he waited for her. He waited for her to come closer. He saw her. He saw that there was nobody around. He attacked her,” Patty said.
She continued, describing the gruesome photos presented to her by prosecutors making their case against Martinez-Hernandez.
Some of the photos, she said, showed Rachel’s body against the bloody outline of her body against a wall, where blood ran down as Martinez-Hernandez raped her before strangling her so she could not live to tell the story.
“These are the kind of criminals President Trump wants to remove from our country. These are the kind of criminals that we need removed from our country,” Patty said. “We are American citizens. Why should we allow people like this, violent criminals that have no conscience at all, to murder our mothers, our sisters, our daughters?
“Why are we not protecting our children?” she continued. “And to have a senator from Maryland who didn’t even acknowledge or barely acknowledge my daughter, and the brutal death that she endured, leaving her five children without a mother and now a grand baby without a grandmother, so that he can use my taxpayer money to fly to El Salvador to bring back someone that’s not even an American citizen. Why does that person have more rights than I do for my daughter? For my grandchildren?”
Still, Van Hollen is not the only Democrat discussing visiting Abrego Garcia and other imprisoned migrants. Far left Reps. Maxwell Frost, D-Fla., and Robert Garcia, D-Calif., issued a joint letter in which they said they are “prepared to travel as soon as possible.”
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In their letter, which was sent to House Committee on Oversight and Accountability Chair James Comer, R-Ky., on Tuesday, Frost and Garcia requested authorization to send a congressional delegation to visit CECOT to “conduct a welfare check” on Abrego Garcia and other deported migrants at the prison.
Former FAA contractor admits to leaking US intel to Iran for years
A naturalized U.S. citizen living in Great Falls, Virginia, pleaded guilty on Wednesday to working with Iranian government and intelligence officials on their behalf in the U.S. as a contractor for the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) between 2017 and 2024.
The Department of Justice (DOJ) said 42-year-old Abouzar Rahmati pleaded guilty in federal court to conspiring to act and acting as an agent of the Iranian government in the U.S. without prior notification to the Attorney General.
Rahmati previously was an Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) 1st Lt., a branch of the Iranian Armed Forces, from June 2009 to May 2010. The IRGC is a designated terrorist group by the U.S. government.
Court documents show that from at least December 2017 through June 2024, Rahmati worked with Iranian intelligence operatives and government officials on their behalf in the U.S.
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During that period, Rahmati met with Iranian intelligence in Iran, communicated with Iranian authorities using a cover story to hide his conduct, obtained employment with an FAA contractor with access to sensitive, non-public information about the U.S. aviation sector, and obtained and provided open-source and non-public materials about the solar energy industry in the U.S. to intelligence officers.
The DOJ said Rahmati offered his services to Iran in August 2017 through a former colleague who was a senior Iranian government official who previously worked at the country’s Ministry of Intelligence and Security.
Rahmati traveled to Iran four months later and met with intelligence operatives and government officials, the DOJ said. He also agreed to gather and provide Iranian officials with information about the solar industry in the U.S.
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When he returned to the U.S. in early 2018, Rahmati obtained private and open-source materials related to the U.S. solar industry, then provided them to the office of Iran’s Vice President for Science and Technology.
While working as an FAA contractor in the U.S., Rahmati downloaded at least 175 GB of files, including sensitive access-controlled FAA documents relating to the National Aerospace System (NAS), NAS Airport Surveillance Radar systems and radio frequency data, the DOJ said.
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Rahmati stored the files on removable media, which he took to Iran in April 2022 and provided to government officials, according to the DOJ.
He also provided additional information about solar energy, solar panels, the FAA, U.S. airports, and U.S. air traffic control towers to his brother living in Iran in April 2022, the DOJ added, so his brother could provide the files to intelligence officials on Rahmati’s behalf.
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Rahmati is scheduled to be sentenced on Aug. 26, and he faces a maximum of 10 years in prison for acting as an agent of a foreign government, and up to five years in prison for conspiracy.
Michelle Trachtenberg’s cause of death revealed after ‘Gossip Girl’ star’s passing at 39
Michelle Trachtenberg’s official cause of death has been revealed as complications from diabetes, authorities confirmed on Wednesday.
The New York City Office of Chief Medical Examiner confirmed to Fox News Digital that she died naturally of complications from diabetes mellitus, citing lab results.
The cause and manner of death was amended after a review of her laboratory test results.
Her cause of death had previously been listed as “undetermined.”
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Her family said after her death they didn’t want an autopsy, and the medical examiner’s office agreed because foul play wasn’t suspected.
The “Gossip Girl” star was found unresponsive in her Manhattan apartment on Feb. 26. She was 39 years old.
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Trachtenberg began her career in Nickelodeon’s “The Adventures of Pete and Pete.” In 1996, she made her film debut, playing the title role in “Harriet the Spy.”
The actress moved on to star as Dawn Summers on “Buffy the Vampire Slayer” for three years. The series ran from 1997-2003.
Trachtenberg had met Sarah Michelle Gellar, the show’s lead, while working on “All My Children” in 1994, and the two remained close before the actress joined “Buffy” in its fifth season.
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“I had known Sarah since we worked together on ‘All My Children,'” Trachtenberg previously told the BBC. “We worked together for about two and a half years, and we had kept in touch through the years when she moved to Hollywood and began building her career from that point.”
Trachtenberg gained additional fame as Georgina Sparks on “Gossip Girl.” She starred alongside Blake Lively, Leighton Meester, Ed Westwick, Chace Crawford and Penn Badgley on the hit drama series.
She also starred in “The Ice Princess” and “EuroTrip.”
Reporter confronted on ‘morally good’ comment about alleged healthcare CEO killer
Former New York Times reporter Taylor Lorenz said her comments about alleged UnitedHealthcare CEO murderer Luigi Mangione weren’t about her defense of him but about the mentality of his supporters.
Lorenz spoke with Fox News host Sean Hannity Wednesday in an interview where she attempted to clarify remarks she made about Mangione and his appeal to Americans upset with the healthcare system.
“What I’m describing, and if you watch the full segment, not just the clip, you’ll see that I’m just describing the mentality of these fangirls [who] show up outside Luigi’s court and show up outside his jail cell,” said Lorenz. “Those girls are not me, OK? We have very separate belief systems. But I was describing how they believe.”
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The former Washington Post columnist told CNN’s Donie O’Sullivan last week about Mangione’s support among women, arguing he’s a “revolutionary, who’s famous, who’s handsome, who’s young, who’s smart.”
“He’s a person who seems like he’s this morally good man, which is hard to find,” Lorenz said.
Brian Thompson, the healthcare executive who was gunned down in midtown Manhattan in December, was a 50-year-old father of two.
He’d been on the job for nearly four years before he was assassinated outside the New York Hilton.
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Hannity asked Lorenz if she would agree that anyone who praises Mangione lacks “a soul, a conscience and a heart.”
“Well, what I will say, Sean, once again, is that I believe in free speech. I don’t believe in things like, you know, religious things like souls and all of these things,” she answered.
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“If you can’t have sympathy for a dead father and husband, do you lack a conscience, a soul and a heart? That’s a simple question. You’re a smart woman,” Hannity responded.
Lorenz reiterated the challenges within the U.S. healthcare system, citing nearly 70,000 Americans dying each year due to a lack of health insurance.
“You want to talk about the assassination of innocent people? I believe that the tens of thousands of Americans [who] die each year because of the lack of health insurance. That is, to me, a violence in itself. That is assassination,” the Substack writer explained.
Hannity asked Lorenz one final time if she condemns Mangione’s supporters and the people who praise him for allegedly murdering Thompson.
“The people [who] are showing up outside to support Luigi, they’re exercising their right to speech. They’re talking about the fact that over 320,000 people died from [a] lack of health insurance in the first two years of the pandemic alone,” she said.
“There are major things we need to acknowledge if we ever want to fix our system. We have a violent, violent healthcare system, Sean, and it needs reform. And that’s what we should be focusing on.”
U.S. Attorney General Pam Bondi announced in early April that she was directing federal prosecutors to seek the death penalty in Mangione’s case.
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He faces charges of using a firearm to commit murder, interstate stalking resulting in death, stalking through use of interstate facilities resulting in death, and one count of discharging a firearm that was equipped with a silencer in furtherance of a crime of violence, according to a press release from the Department of Justice.
Pro fishing tournament canceled after deadly boat accident
A deadly boat incident occurred in Alabama during a Major League Fishing tournament on Wednesday morning.
The incident involved multiple boats on Lewis Smith Lake during the second day of the Tackle Warehouse Invitational, which Major League Fishing (MLF) confirmed was a “serious boating accident,” the organization said in a statement.
WBMA reports that now three have been confirmed dead, while another three are injured after the multi-boat accident. The Alabama Law Enforcement Agency identified one of those killed as 58-year-old Joey M. Broom from Altoona.
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The MLF said that the incident also involved Flint Davis, a competitive angler from Leesburg, Georgia.
“Out of respect for those involved, and to ensure the accuracy of all information, no further details will be released at this time,” the MLF said in its statement. “MLF is working closely with law enforcement and emergency officials. Additional updates will be provided as they are confirmed by the appropriate authorities.
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“Our thoughts, prayers and deepest concern are with everyone affected by this tragic incident.”
Davis also released a statement on his Instagram.
“I want to thank everyone for the thoughts and prayers,” he wrote. “I ask that you keep me and all of the other affected people and families in your prayers. I’ll let you guys know more when I can.”
The fishing tournament, which was supposed to run through Thursday, has been canceled.
Cullman County EMA confirmed the crash in the lake occurred around 7 a.m. near Miller Bottom, CBS 42 reported. There has been no word regarding the number of injuries, or worse, of anyone else involved.
Alabama Law Enforcement Agency is now investigating the crash.
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Davis has one career win on the MLF, with 10 top-10 finishes over 63 career events. He has $127,690 in career earnings.
Flight makes emergency landing after apparent rabbit strike
A United Airlines plane headed from Colorado to Edmonton, Canada, on Sunday had to return to the airport after reportedly hitting wildlife.
The Boeing 737-800 returned safely to Denver to “address a possible wildlife strike,” the airline confirmed to FOX Business.
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Footage of the plane in the air showed bright flashes coming from the engine.
After returning to the gate, United arranged for a new aircraft to take the 153 passengers and six crew members from Denver to Edmonton.
| Ticker | Security | Last | Change | Change % |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| UAL | UNITED AIRLINES HOLDINGS INC. | 66.99 | -0.10 | -0.14% |
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No injuries were reported.
It is unclear what type of wildlife was possibly hit, but other outlets, including the New York Post, reported it may have been a rabbit.
On Friday, the crew of a Hawaiian Airlines flight aborted takeoff from Los Angeles International Airport after reporting a “vibration” in the nose wheel.
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The Airbus A330, bound for Kahului Airport in Hawaii, returned to the gate without incident.
The Federal Aviation Administration is investigating the Hawaiian Airlines incident.
Disney’s ‘Snow White’ remake hits another snag as it’s banned from country
Disney’s live-action “Snow White” remake took another hit this week after Lebanon banned it from screening in the country as the film’s star, Gal Gadot, is Israeli and an activist on behalf of her country.
Variety reported Wednesday that Lebanon’s Interior Minister Ahmad Al-Hajjar made the decision to have the film pulled at the behest of a Lebanese film and media watchdog.
A representative for Italia films, a Middle East company that distributes Disney films throughout the region, confirmed to the outlet that Gadot is on the country’s “Israel boycott list,” and said that any film she has starred in has never been released in the country. Israel has also been conducting airstrikes on Hezbollah forces in the country.
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The news represents another setback for the film that had a dismal opening weekend last month. After earning only $43 million domestically, the film dropped out of the No. 1 spot in its second weekend after earning just $14.2 million domestically, according to Variety — a 66% decline from its opening weekend.
Gadot, who played the evil queen in the film, was born in Israel and served in the Israeli Defense Forces before moving to the United States to begin her Hollywood career.
She has become a prominent activist for her home country following the Oct. 7 Hamas terror attack and the wave of antisemitism that has risen across the globe in its wake.
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In an interview with Variety in March, Gadot marveled at the wave of “hate” for Israel since the attack, and mentioned it moved her to defend her country.
“I was shocked by the amount of hate, by the amount of how much people think they know when they actually have no idea, and also by how the media is not fair many times,” she said. “So I had to speak up.”
During her Walk of Fame ceremony in Los Angeles later that month, Gadot encouraged others to speak out in defense of Israel and the Jewish people.
“But this is a time when many of us in the Jewish community have had to find our voice and confront the hatred against us, even if it’s extremely uncomfortable,” she said. “Even if speaking up wasn’t really your thing, none of us can ignore the explosion of Jew hatred around the world anymore.”
Anti-Israel protesters clashed with pro-Israel demonstrators near the ceremony, threatening to disrupt the event and resulting in multiple arrests.
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Gadot also spearheaded a Hollywood screening of 47 minutes of Israeli Defense Forces footage of the atrocities committed on Oct. 7 one month after the attack. On the day of the attack, she wrote on social media, “I stand with Israel, you should too,” and condemned the barbaric terrorist act.
Gadot’s pro-Israel stance was also rumored to have caused friction between her and Zegler, who generated controversy for the film by sharing, “And always remember, free Palestine,” on X in August.
Variety also reported that Lebanese censors also blocked the country’s release of “Captain America: Brave New World” in February because the film’s actress Shira Haas is Israeli as well.
Gadot’s reps did not immediately reply to Fox News Digital’s request for comment.
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Gayle King ‘very disappointed’ by response to Blue Origin flight
CBS host Gayle King responded to the backlash over the Blue Origin space flight on Tuesday and suggested the all-female crew was being held to a different standard than men who’ve been to space.
The journalist and talk show host was part of a historic flight on Monday that also carried Blue Origin founder Jeff Bezos’ fiancée, Lauren Sánchez; pop star Katy Perry; film producer Kerianne Flynn; NASA rocket scientist Aisha Bowe; and civil rights activist Amanda Nguyen.
The rocket landed safely after roughly a 10-minute flight. The high-profile trip drew some criticism from those who questioned if the brief flight was a worthwhile use of resources.
King responded to the backlash in comments to Entertainment Tonight on Tuesday, where she compared the Blue Origin flight to the historic space flight taken by American astronaut Alan Shepard in 1961.
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“Have you been?” King scolded critics.
“Please don’t call it a ‘ride,’” she added, claiming people don’t use this term when talking about men going into space.
“We duplicated the same trajectory that Alan Shepard did back in the day, pretty much. No one called that a ‘ride,'” King said. “It was called a flight, it was called a journey.”
“There was nothing frivolous about what we did,” she added.
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“I’m very disappointed and very saddened by it,” the CBS host continued. “And I also say this, what it’s doing to inspire other women and young girls, please don’t ignore that.”
She also addressed liberal critics who complained about the environmental impact, saying that Bezos’ mission with Blue Origin was to discover if the rocket would be able to take waste from Earth into space to “make our planet cleaner.”
“Space is not an either/or. It’s a both/and. And because you do something in space doesn’t mean you’re taking anything away from Earth,” King argued.
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Model Emily Ratajkowski was one of several celebrities who bashed the flight on social media, calling it “beyond parody.”
“You say that you care about Mother Earth, and it’s about Mother Earth, and you go up in a spaceship that is built and paid for by a company that is single-handedly destroying the planet,” Ratajkowski posted to TikTok. “Look at the state of the world and think about how many resources went into putting these women into space. For what? I’m disgusted.”
King previously told critics at a press conference on Monday that anyone bashing the flight “doesn’t really understand” the historical significance of the space flight.
“We can all speak to the response we’re getting from young women, from young girls about what this represents,” she added.
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Despite her sharp words to critics, King said she feels that for the most part the reaction has been positive.
“This is exciting for so many people,” she told Entertainment Tonight.