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Kristi Noem riled up White House officials by referring to meetings she led at the Department of Homeland Security as “cabinet meetings,” according to a report.

Noem, dubbed “Ice Barbie” for her love of cosplaying in uniform roles, seemed to be playing presidential dress-up by referring to internal DHS meetings with subagency heads by the same name as high-level gatherings between the commander-in-chief and top Cabinet officials.

Donald Trump’s aides viewed Noem’s labeling of her DHS get-togethers as meetings of her “cabinet” as a troubling sign that the homeland security secretary was more focused on her own presidential ambitions than on advancing the administration’s message, sources told The Wall Street Journal.

Trump was also reportedly “annoyed” after Noem set aside $200 million from the department’s budget to fund an ad campaign—in which she herself starred—warning immigrants in the country illegally to “leave now.”

The president asked White House staff where Noem had secured the funding for the ads, with insiders telling the Journal they believed the campaign was another signal she was laying the groundwork for a future presidential run.

archive article: https://archive.is/2BYQs

Attorney General Pam Bondi’s disastrous handling of the Epstein files has added a new screwup to its list with the unmasking of an undercover FBI agent. The error came to light after CNN published footage from the latest dump of files, a 2009 video of an FBI undercover operation aimed at securing Epstein’s so-called “black book” of contacts. The news outlet reports that the Justice Department reached out after the video went up to ask for the undercover agent’s face to be obscured, acknowledging that it had failed to conceal the agent’s identity before releasing the files.

Thousands of active-duty military personnel may have been “pressured” into seeing the Melania documentary at cinemas around the country, a watchdog has warned.

The $75 million Amazon film opened last week to $7 million at the box office—despite universally terrible reviews.

According to the Military Religious Freedom Foundation, those numbers have been artificially inflated by pressure from MAGA-aligned officers leaning on their troops to buy tickets.

“People are scared,” Mikey Weinstein, president and founder of the MRFF, said. Weinstein said he has received letters from members of the U.S. military at eight facilities worldwide, complaining that their superiors encouraged or pressured them to see the film.

“Nobody that I know wanted to go except for those that did not want to get jacked up by our unit commander for not attending,” one of those members told Weinstein in a letter seen by journalist Jonathan Larsen.