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(WASHINGTON, D.C.) — After a tumultuous year at the Department of Justice largely defined by her controversial handling of the Epstein files, former Attorney General Pam Bondi is set to participate in a transcribed interview with the House Oversight Committee on Friday.

The second Trump cabinet official to testify behind closed doors as part of the Oversight Committee’s yearlong Epstein probe, Bondi is expected to face questions about reneging on her promise to publicly release the DOJ’s files on convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein, which ultimately prompted Congress to pass the Epstein Files Transparency Act forcing the release of millions of documents.

Trump removed Bondi as attorney general in April after sources said he grew frustrated with her handling of the Epstein files and the unsuccessful prosecutions of his perceived political opponents.

“Pam Bondi is a Great American Patriot and a loyal friend, who faithfully served as my Attorney General over the past year,” Trump wrote on social media announcing her departure. “We love Pam, and she will be transitioning to a much needed and important new job in the private sector, to be announced at a date in the near future.”

Earlier this week, Axios reported that Trump had appointed Bondi to serve on an advisory panel on AI policy, tasked with coordinating cooperation between the government and tech leaders.

In an unusual arrangement, a DOJ spokesperson said that Bondi will be accompanied during Friday’s transcribed interview by Assistant Attorney General for Civil Rights Harmeet Dhillon and other DOJ personnel, in order to “assist the Committee in understanding the Department’s role in implementing and complying with the Epstein Files Transparency Act during her tenure.”

“Because former Attorney General Bondi oversaw the Department at the time the Act was enacted and carried out, DOJ’s presence is solely to ensure accurate representation of Department processes, facilitate any necessary clarifications, and support a complete factual record for the Committee,” a DOJ spokesperson said in a statement earlier this week.

The DOJ originally sought to have Bondi avoid appearing by arguing that the subpoena the committee issued “no longer obligates her to appear” since she left the role of attorney general. Bondi ultimately agreed to testify voluntarily after the top Democrat on the committee introduced a resolution to hold her in contempt for failing to appear.

Shortly after beginning her tenure as attorney general last year, Bondi faced immediate pressure from Trump’s MAGA followers and others to begin releasing the DOJ’s files from its investigations of Epstein and his associates. Speaking to Fox News in February 2025, Bondi said Epstein’s client list was “sitting on my desk right now to review” and said the release of the files was a “directive by President Trump.”

However, when the DOJ released the “first phase” of the Epstein files that month — inviting, with great fanfare, conservative influencers to receive the files — it was determined that nearly every document released was already public. By July, the Department of Justice and FBI said in a joint memo that no further documents would be released, citing victim privacy and the assertion that the documents warranted no further investigations — a decision that sparked backlash from much of the MAGA base.

“To that end, while we have labored to provide the public with maximum information regarding Epstein and ensured examination of any evidence in the government’s possession, it is the determination of the Department of Justice and the Federal Bureau of Investigation that no further disclosure would be appropriate or warranted,” the memo said.

Bondi later defended her statement about Epstein’s client list by clarifying she was referring to the Epstein files generally along with other files released by the Trump administration, including documents related to JFK and MLK Jr. The DOJ/FBI memo also said that their review of the files “revealed no incriminating ‘client list'” and no evidence that Epstein blackmailed prominent individuals.

Despite the memo stating that no further investigation was warranted, Trump in November ordered Bondi to investigate Epstein’s ties to Bill Clinton and other prominent Democrats. At the time, Bondi said the DOJ would “pursue this with urgency and integrity” and assigned the matter to the U.S. attorney in Manhattan.

The Justice Department’s subsequent release of Epstein files following the passage of the Epstein Files Transparency Act prompted bipartisan criticism when the DOJ improperly redacted files — both exposing victim identities while concealing other information — and declined to release millions of additional files by claiming they were duplicative, privileged or contained sensitive victim information.

Bondi’s deputy and successor, now-acting Attorney General Todd Blanche, acknowledged the release of sensitive victim information was “horrible” and “inexcusable.”

He said the DOJ is finished investigating Epstein.

“And so I think that to the extent that the Epstein files was a part of the past year of this Justice Department, it should not be a part of anything going forward,” Blanche said in April.

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(NEW YORK) — A new economic report identified a “remarkable” rise in food insecurity, potentially explaining gloomy consumer outlooks despite strong economic fundamentals.

The Federal Reserve Bank of New York released a report on Wednesday identifying uncertain access to adequate food and consumer pessimism on the rise in certain vulnerable groups across the country.

The report, which relies on newly collected data from the Survey of Consumer Expectations (SCE), found a “remarkable increase in food insecurity, particularly among lower-educated and lower-income households and households with young children.”

It also identified “a contemporaneous increase in pessimism among the same groups, along with a sharp decline in job-finding expectations.”

The report found that between late 2025 and early 2026, there was an increase in households reporting they had to skip meals, use food banks, rely on SNAP benefits or dip into savings to cover groceries, which are up 2.9% from a year ago, the Bureau of Labor Statistics noted earlier this month.The survey showed that the percentage of those who didn’t have enough food or kids missed a meal more than doubled from June 2020 to early 2026.

More specifically, it found that, of households with income under $50,000 a year, 16% reported not enough food or kids missing meals in late 2025 and 19.7% recorded those circumstances in early 2026. That’s up from just 6.7% in mid 2020.

The survey noted that 40.1% of the same subset of respondents reported dipping into their savings in early 2026 versus 37.8% in late 2025 and 29% in mid-2020.

Among respondents with a high school diploma, the survey found 10.7% had received food donations in mid-2020, compared to 18.8% in late 205 and 20.9% in early 2026.

Food insecurity, the SCE report notes, “is associated with poor health outcomes as well as lower educational attainment, worker productivity, and lifetime earnings.”

The report also highlighted the existence of “solid economic fundamentals,” such as “low unemployment, historically high household net wealth, and resilient consumer spending” despite a growing sense of consumer pessimism, suggesting “a ‘K-shaped’ economy, in which consumption growth in recent years has been driven largely by higher-income and college-educated households while lower-income households have seen fewer gains.”

It says the findings concerning food insecurity are likely a helpful guide to understanding generally low consumer sentiment, despite an economy with “solid economic fundamentals.”

“While not necessarily causal, the observed positive association between food insecurity and overall consumer pessimism, together with the increase in the incidence of food insecurity, especially among households at the bottom of the K-shape, point to a potential explanation for the unusually low recent levels of consumer sentiment at a time when the hard economic data paint a more positive picture,” the report reads.

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(WASHINGTON) — Farms all over the country are bracing for the impact of drought after months of little precipitation, experts told ABC News.

More than 60% of the continental United States has been under moderate drought or worse conditions since April 7, according to the U.S. Drought Monitor.

The nation as a whole has experienced a dry, warm period that began in the early autumn of 2025 and has pushed into recent weeks, Brad Rippey, a U.S. Department of Agriculture meteorologist, told ABC News.

Long-term drought trends have put Midwest crops at risk

Farms in the Midwest that produce winter wheat have been especially impacted, Rippey said. The largest region that produces winter wheat — the Great Plains stretching from Montana to Texas — has been hit the hardest by drought as well as some spring freezes, Rippey added.

Up to 44% of this year’s winter wheat is rated as very poor to poor, according to the latest data from the USDA’s National Agricultural Statistics Service (NASS), released on Tuesday. Nebraska is at the top of the list, with 82% of its winter wheat crop rated very poor to poor, but states like Colorado, Oklahoma, Texas and Kansas are experiencing high rates of poor crop as well, according to the NASS.

While there was good moisture when the winter wheat was planted in the fall, extremely dry conditions from the beginning of March through the first half of May prevented optimal growing conditions, Brad Fuller, president of the Western Horizons Corporation and a consulting agronomist to many farms in Kansas, told ABC News.

Agriculture experts are expecting a 32% abandonment of winter wheat in the U.S. this year, according to the USDA’s Wheat Outlook. Such a high abandonment rate has only happened once since the Dust Bowl era in 1933 — in 2022 when drought conditions were at record highs, Riddey said.

The issues have also extended to the cattle industry due to poor rangeland and pasture conditions as a result of the dry conditions, Riddey said.

“A lot of the rangeland and pastures out in the middle section of the country are also in pretty rough shape heading into the key hay production season,” Riddey said.

Farmers in the Midwest are holding out hope for the spring-planted crops. But conditions were so dry in recent weeks that some growers skipped planting crops like corn or sorghum, Fuller said.

“We’ve had places in southwest Kansas that have gone well over 200 days without more than a half an inch of rain,” he said.

Farms in the West could be at risk as well

The West is facing dry, hot conditions in the near future, coming off “devastatingly” warm months in March and April, Riddey said. To exacerbate the situation, some reservoirs — especially Lake Mead and Lake Powell, the largest in the country — are experiencing low water levels due to the lack of snowpack during the winter.

These reservoirs are crucial for farms in the West that supply the rest of the country, Steven Fassnacht, a professor of snow hydrology at Colorado State University, told ABC News. About 75% of the nation’s lettuce and leafy greens are grown in California, according to the state’s Department of Food and Agriculture.

When there’s less surface water, farmers in California will turn to groundwater, Amanda Fencl, director of climate science for the Union of Concerned Scientists, told ABC News. But overuse of groundwater can decrease the water quality and lower the groundwater table, causing the land above it to sink. Overuse of groundwater can also alter the soil moisture, making it drier and lower, Fassnacht said.

Lake Mead could reach a record-low level of 1,036 feet of elevation in 2026, according to the 24-month study released by the Bureau of Reclamation last week. Lake Powell is also projected to drop to a new record-low level in the coming months, surpassing the previous record of around 3,520 feet set in 2023, Cody Moser, senior hydrologist at the Colorado River Basin Forecast Center, said during a webinar on May 7. The Colorado River basin as a whole is currently sitting at 49% of storage of its historic average, Riddey said.

“There are a lot of pieces of pie for that limited Western water,” Riddey said.

Small, family-run farms would be most impacted by water shortages, Fencl said. They may be faced with having to take certain crops out of production or changing which crops they decide to harvest.

Drought conditions typically lead to lower yields and loss in profits, Fencl added.

What will climate conditions be like in the near future?

While it has been raining in the Midwest in recent days, it’s not nearly enough to make up for the dry conditions over the last eight months, Riddey said.

“It’s not going to recover from just a couple of rain events,” he said. “It will take some time.”

But there is a light at the end of the tunnel. Monsoon season is expected to start in early July and last through August and September. After that, the development of El Niño conditions in October will bring more drought relief into the fall, winter and spring of 2027, Riddey said.

“All indications are we should see a pretty active monsoon that could provide some relief, but we have to get between now and monsoon onset,” he said.

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(PLAINFIELD TOWNSHIP, Mich.) — A man is dead and a woman was critically injured after a home exploded in Plainfield Township, Michigan, on Tuesday, according to the sheriff’s office.

The home was completely destroyed with debris on fire when deputies and fire personnel responded to the scene after nearly 50 calls reported an explosion and house fire around 4 a.m., according to the Kent County Sheriff’s Office.

“The fire was intentionally set, we believe, by the husband at this point, intending to be a murder-suicide at the residence,” Kent County Undersheriff Bryan Muir told reporters.

Officials have not released the names of the man and woman in the explosion, but said they believe “the husband” set the fire, Muir said. The woman was associated with the address, according to authorities.

Two neighbors — a teenager who lived next door and another man who lived nearby — pulled the injured woman from the home after the explosion, according to the sheriff’s office. She was treated on the scene and taken to the hospital in critical condition, the sheriff’s office said.

“We are very proud of them for stepping up and helping someone in need during an extremely dangerous situation,” the sheriff’s office said in a statement.

“Without their actions, it is likely she would have perished in the fire. She has some significant medical-related issues right now and we are hoping for a recovery,” Muir said.

Hours later, a dead man, believed to be the person registered to the address, was found at the scene, the sheriff’s office said.

The cause of the fire has not yet been determined, but investigators preliminarily believe a source of natural gas was released in the basement and used to start the fire, Alpine Township Fire Chief Jeremy Kelly said.

Investigators believe the explosion was a “domestic-related situation at the home,” Muir told reporters.

There are no concerns of any gas leaks or other home explosions in the area, Muir said.

“We want to relay to the family affected by this our deepest sorrows for having to deal with a situation so tragic,” Muir said. 

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(WASHINGTON) — Inflation jumped for a second consecutive month in April as the Iran war drove up gasoline prices and strained household budgets, government data on Thursday showed.

Prices rose 3.8% in April compared to a year earlier, according to the Personal Consumption Expenditures (PCE) Index, an inflation gauge preferred by the Federal Reserve. The PCE stood at 2.8% as recently as February.

Inflation now stands at its highest level since May 2023, the Commerce Department report showed.

The savings rate, meanwhile, fell to 2.6%, its lowest level since 2022, suggesting some strapped consumers are struggling to stash away extra funds.

A persistent increase in consumer prices may put pressure on the Fed to raise interest rates as a means of dialing back inflation. The latest reading comes days after Fed Chair Kevin Warsh began a four-year term atop the central bank.

For now, futures markets overwhelmingly expect the Fed to hold interest rates steady when policy makers meet next month, according to the CME FedWatch Tool, a measure of investor sentiment.

However, markets peg the chances of a quarter-point rate increase by the end of the year at more than one in three, well above where odds of a rate hike stood prior to the war, the tool shows.

The benchmark interest rate stands at a level between 3.5% and 3.75%. That figure marks a significant drop from a recent peak attained in 2023, but borrowing costs remain well above a 0% rate established at the outset of the COVID-19 pandemic.

The Middle East conflict prompted the Iranian closure of the Strait of Hormuz, a maritime trading route that facilitates the transport of about one-fifth of global oil supply. The standoff triggered one of the largest oil shocks ever recorded.

As a result, gasoline prices surged. The price of an average gallon of gas stood at $4.42 as of Thursday, AAA data showed – an increase of $1.44 per gallon since the war began on Feb. 28. That amounts to a 48% price jump in about three months.

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(MINNEAPOLIS) — A suspect has been apprehended after a 26-year-old man was fatally shot while attending a prayer service in Minnesota, authorities said.

Khalid Ibrahim Abdi was shot multiple times just before 10 a.m. Wednesday at the Canterbury Park Expo Center in Shakopee, about 25 miles outside of Minneapolis, the Shakopee Police Department said.

He was taken to the Hennepin County Medical Center and later died from his injuries, police said.

A suspect was taken into custody Thursday morning and is being held pending charges, police said. The suspect’s name has not been publicly released.

Abdi was a member and field representative of the AFSCME Council 5 labor union, according to AFSCME Council 5 executive director Bart Andersen.

“It is with unimaginable sadness and heartbreak to share that we lost our union brother and AFSCME Council 5 Field Representative Khalid Abdi today, who was shot and killed while attending an Eid prayer gathering,” Anderson said in a statement.

“Khalid will be forever remembered for his tenacious organizing spirit, his warm and inviting presence, and his unyielding passion and drive to fight for the working-class and all historically marginalized communities,” Anderson said.

“Please keep Khalid’s family, friends, neighbors, and all of us coworkers in your thoughts,” he continued. “Khalid’s tenacity, heart, and joy lives in all of us forever.”

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