WASHINGTON, Feb 5 (Reuters) - A January 6, 2021, rioter, who was pardoned by President Donald Trump, pleaded guilty to a harassment charge after being accused of threatening to kill U.S. House of Representatives Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries, prosecutors said on Thursday.

Christopher Moynihan, 35, pleaded guilty to a misdemeanor harassment charge in a hearing in Clinton, New York, and will be sentenced in April. His representative could not immediately be reached.

"Threats against elected officials are not political speech, they are criminal acts that strike at the heart of public safety and our democratic system," Dutchess County District Attorney Anthony Parisi said in a statement.

Moynihan, 34, was charged in October after he sent threatening text messages about an appearance Jeffries was scheduled to make in New York City, according to a complaint filed in New York state court in Clinton.

"Hakeem Jeffries makes a speech in a few days in NYC I cannot allow this terrorist to live. ... I will kill him for the future," the text messages read, according to the complaint.

Assuming it even happens, the process of recovery is not going to be discreet. It’s not going to be painless or easy. It is going to be loud and necessarily bloody. Arms will need to be twisted. Careers will need to be ended. Indictments ought to fly, thick and fast. The republic is going to need radical surgery because the malignancy is everywhere. That is the reality of the next several elections. Any Democratic politician who is not prepared to be merciless is unworthy of support.

WASHINGTON (AP) — Every Homeland Security officer on the ground, including Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers, will be immediately issued body-worn cameras, Secretary Kristi Noem said Monday.

Noem made the announcement on the social media platform X. She said the body-worn camera program is being expanded nationwide as funding becomes available.

“We will rapidly acquire and deploy body cameras to DHS law enforcement across the country,” Noem said in the social media post.

The news of the body cameras comes as Minneapolis has been the site of intense scrutiny over the conduct of immigration enforcement agents. There have been increased calls by critics of Homeland Security to require all of the department’s officers who are responsible for immigration enforcement to wear body cameras.

President Donald Trump said Friday he may impose tariffs on countries “if they don’t go along with Greenland.”

“We need Greenland for national security. So I may do that,” Trump said at the White House.

The comments show Trump considering applying tariffs, one of his favorite tools for leveraging his executive power over foreign countries, to his increasingly aggressive efforts to acquire Greenland for the United States.

The White House did not immediately respond to CNBC’s request for additional information on Trump’s remarks.

Sen. Ruben Gallego introduced legislation that would bar businesses from using personal information they collect about customers to charge people different prices for the same products.

Gallego’s One Fair Price Act would target so-called surveillance pricing, or the practice of using detailed personal information gathered from consumers to create an individualized price.

“They're collecting so much information that it's not really capitalism anymore,” Gallego said. “It's truly exploitative at this point.”

Gallego’s office pointed to early findings released by the Federal Trade Commission in January from the last days of the Biden administration suggesting retailers are using a wide swath of data — from a person’s location to their mouse movements on a website — to create targeted pricing.

More independents lean Democratic than Republican, giving Democrats edge in party affiliation for first time since 2021

WASHINGTON, D.C. — A record-high 45% of U.S. adults identified as political independents in 2025, surpassing the 43% measured in 2014, 2023 and 2024. Meanwhile, equal shares of U.S. adults — 27% each — identified as either Democrats or Republicans.

In most years since Gallup began regularly conducting its polls by telephone in 1988, independents have been the largest political group. However, the independent percentage has increased markedly in the past 15 years, typically registering 40% or higher, a level not reached prior to 2011.
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Last year, more political independents said they lean toward the Democratic Party than the Republican Party, with the 45% of political independents breaking down into 20% Democratic leaners, 15% Republican leaners and 10% non-leaners. That is a shift from 2024, representing a three-point decline in Republican leaners and a three-point increase in Democratic leaners.

Texas officials have turned over the state’s voter roll to the U.S. Justice Department, according to a spokesperson for the Texas Secretary of State’s Office, complying with the Trump administration’s demands for access to data on millions of voters across the country.

The Justice Department last fall began asking all 50 states for their voter rolls — massive lists containing significant identifying information on every registered voter in each state — and other election-related data. The Justice Department has said the effort is central to its mission of enforcing election law requiring states to regularly maintain voter lists by searching for and removing ineligible voters.

Alicia Pierce, a spokesperson for the Texas Secretary of State’s Office, told Votebeat and The Texas Tribune that the state had sent its voter roll, which includes information on the approximately 18.4 million voters registered in Texas, to the Justice Department on Dec. 23.

The state included identifiable information about voters, including dates of birth, driver’s license numbers and the last four digits of their Social Security numbers, Pierce said.