Illinois Gov. JB Pritzker (D) suggested the Trump administration is preparing the Texas National Guard for deployment to Chicago amid the president’s threats to federalize law enforcement in the Windy City.

“We have reason to believe that the Trump administration has already begun staging the Texas National Guard for deployment in Illinois,” Pritzker said during a Tuesday press conference.

President Trump had warned Pritzker in recent weeks about getting crime under control in Chicago before saying on Tuesday he would be sending the National Guard into the city in a matter of time.

“Well, we’re going in. I didn’t say when. We’re going in,” Trump said Tuesday. “Look, I have an obligation. This isn’t a political thing. I have an obligation.”

The Illinois governor has made his distaste for the idea well known, warning Chicago residents not to “take the bait” when the National Guard does get deployed.

“I want to be very clear on this point … that the Trump plan is to use any excuse to deploy armed military personnel to Chicago. If someone flings a sandwich at an ICE agent, Trump will try and go on TV and declare an emergency in Chicago,” Pritzker said, appearing to reference an incident in Washington, D.C., during which a man threw a sandwich at a Customs and Border Protection agent at the beginning of Trump’s crime crackdown.

“I’m imploring everyone, if, and when, that happens, do not take the bait,” he added.

The White House has hailed the success of Trump’s federal crime crackdown in D.C. since he brought in the National Guard last month, including by touting comments from D.C.’s Democratic Mayor Muriel Bowser.

“The Mayor’s fellow Democrats should take note, working with President Trump means safer communities and less crime — no one in their right mind could seriously oppose that,” White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt said in a statement.

The sponsor of the discharge petition seeking to publicize all the government files on Jeffrey Epstein said Tuesday that he’s confident the motion will secure enough signatures to force a vote on his bill. 

“I’m not really engaged in a massive whipping effort. I just assume we’ll get the votes,” Rep. Thomas Massie (R-Ky.) told reporters in the Capitol. 

Hours earlier, Massie had introduced a discharge petition designed to force a floor vote on legislation requiring the Department of Justice (DOJ) to release virtually all of its files on the Epstein case. As of Tuesday night, four Republicans had signed the petition: Reps. Nancy Mace (S.C.), Lauren Boebert (Colo.), Marjorie Taylor Greene (Ga.) and Massie. 

To hit the magic number of 218, two more Republicans would have to endorse the measure, assuming all 212 Democrats sign on, as expected. 

Massie’s confident prediction came as Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.) and other GOP leaders are hoping to defuse the GOP outcry over the Epstein case — and to discourage Republican lawmakers from endorsing Massie’s petition. 

With that in mind, Republicans on the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee on Tuesday evening released a large number of documents and videos delivered by the DOJ under subpoena from the panel. 

Democrats on the committee have dismissed that effort, arguing that virtually all of that material had been made public previously. And Massie offered a similar assessment, saying the documents he’s seen from that trove “were just completely redacted pages.” 

“The DOJ’s curating all of that, and they’re releasing what they want to release. And I think it’s going to be like the binders that Attorney General [Pam] Bondi released [earlier in the year],” he said. 

“People are going to go through them and say, ‘Hey, wait. There’s nothing new here. This is stuff we already knew.’ And then that will only incite people to be more upset that there’s no transparency.”

There are 12 Republican co-sponsors of Massie’s underlying bill to force the DOJ disclosures, which is sponsored with Rep. Ro Khanna (D-Calif.). It’s unclear, however, how many of those GOP lawmakers are willing to take the longer step in bucking President Trump by signing the discharge petition. 

Rep. Jeff Van Drew (R-N.J.), for instance, has co-sponsored the Massie-Khanna bill but is rejecting the discharge petition, citing a concern that it could lead to sloppy disclosures that could harm people who were connected to Epstein but did nothing wrong.  

“There are good people that can be hurt, and we also have to protect the victims. So it should go through committee in a more careful and thoughtful way,” Van Drew said. “I’m not going to sign the discharge petition, but I do support the bill. And that’s where I’ve been from the beginning.”

To promote their effort, Massie and Khanna are staging a press conference Wednesday morning at the Capitol with some of Epstein’s victims. Johnson and members of the Oversight Committee had also met with Epstein survivors on Tuesday, but it was done behind closed doors. Wednesday’s event, by contrast, will be public. 

Massie said the difference is significant in dispelling the idea, advanced by Trump, that the Epstein saga is a “hoax.” 

“I do think the game changer here is the survivors speaking tomorrow. Because although I wasn’t in the meeting that they had in the Oversight Committee, I heard it was very emotional,” Massie said. 

“When they say those things publicly, there’s no way you can call this a hoax.”

Rep. Ro Khanna (D-Calif.) condemned the United Kingdom’s arrest of comedian Graham Linehan for his social media posts about transgender people.

The Silicon Valley congressman called the arrest “an offense to anyone who supports free speech,” in a post on the social platform X.

“I guess UK has not learned from the time prosecutors read passages of The Picture of Dorian Gray to convict Oscar Wilde,” Khanna continued.

Linehan, a co-creator of British TV shows “Father Ted” and “The IT Crowd,” said on Tuesday that when he stepped off the plane at Heathrow Airport on Monday, he was greeted by five armed police officers who “told me I was under arrest for three tweets.”

“In a country where paedophiles escape sentencing, where knife crime is out of control, where women are assaulted and harassed every time they gather to speak, the state had mobilised five armed officers to arrest a comedy writer for these tweets,” Linehan said in a statement on Tuesday.

Linehan, who is known for asserting trans women are men, pointed to the posts on X about which police questioned him. One read: “If a trans-identified male is in a female-only space, he is committing a violent, abusive act. Make a scene, call the cops and if all else fails, punch him in the balls.”

London’s Metropolitan Police did not name Linehan but said in a statement to media outlets that a “man in his 50s was arrested on suspicion of inciting violence,” adding, “This is in relation to posts on X.”

The arrest, which has faced fierce backlash internationally, comes ahead of Reform UK party leader Nigel Farage’s scheduled appearance before the House Judiciary Committee’s hearing on free speech.

Judiciary Committee Chair Jim Jordan (R-Ohio) said last week, when he invited Farage to testify, that the hearing will “highlight how European online censorship laws, specifically the United Kingdom’s (UK) Online Safety Act (OSA) and the European Union’s (EU) Digital Services Act (DSA), threaten Americans’ right to speak freely online in the United States.”

Farage told UK news tabloid The Sun that he plans to discuss the Linehan case during his testimony on Wednesday.

“The Graham Linehan case is yet another example of the war on free speech in the UK. I will discuss this, the Lucy Connolly case and the increasing role of our police in non-crime ‘hate’ incidents on Capitol Hill tomorrow. Free speech is under assault and I am urging the USA to be vigilant,” he said in the statement.

Related video: US Navy Strikes Drug Cartel Vessel Off Venezuela, Rubio Confirms

Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth on Tuesday shared a video of what President Trump described as the “kinetic” strike that allegedly took out 11 members of the Tren de Aragua transnational gang on a “drug vessel” in the Caribbean that morning.

Trump announced the U.S. military strike in a post on his Truth Social platform.

Hegseth reposted Trump’s announcement of the strike and included a 29-second “unclassified” video of the alleged strike.

The video features black-and-white footage of the boat traveling in the sea, shot from several angles.

The video shows the boat continuing undisturbed for the first 20 seconds, before a flash of bright light appears on the screen and, for nine seconds, the boat is seen catching fire as smoke envelops the surrounding area.

“Earlier this morning, on my Orders, U.S. Military Forces conducted a kinetic strike against positively identified Tren de Aragua Narcoterrorists in the SOUTHCOM area of responsibility,” Trump said in a post announcing the strike.

“TDA is a designated Foreign Terrorist Organization, operating under the control of Nicolas Maduro, responsible for mass murder, drug trafficking, sex trafficking, and acts of violence and terror across the United States and Western Hemisphere,” the president added in the post.

The strike took place while the boat was in international waters and was transporting “illegal” narcotics. It had departed Venezuela and was en route to the U.S., the president said.

“Please let this serve as notice to anybody even thinking about bringing drugs into the United States of America,” Trump said. “BEWARE!”