A Democratic whistleblower told the FBI that Adam Schiff approved leaking classified information in order to discredit President Donald Trump, according to newly-released documents.

The documents, which were obtained by Just The News, were recently handed over to Congress by FBI Director Kash Patel. 

The whistleblower reportedly worked for Democrats on the House Intelligence Committee for over ten years, and reported Schiff’s alleged behavior to the FBI in 2017.

According to the report, the intelligence staffer called the leaking ‘treasonous’ and ‘illegal,’ in addition to being unethical. He was most recently interviewed by the FBI in 2023.

The staffer also said that he personally attended a meeting where Schiff greenlit the leak.

‘When working in this capacity, [redacted staffer’s name] was called to an all-staff meeting by SCHIFF,’ the documents state, per Just The News. 

‘In this meeting, SCHIFF stated the group would leak classified information which was derogatory to President of the United States DONALD J. TRUMP. SCHIFF stated the information would be used to indict President TRUMP.’

‘[The whistleblower] stated this would be illegal and, upon hearing his concerns, unnamed members of the meeting reassured that they would not be caught leaking classified information,’ the report added.

John Solomon, who co-authored the piece with Just The News’ Jerry Dunleavy, appeared on Fox News Channel’s ‘Hannity’ to discuss the report.

‘This is the first of several major leak investigations we’re going to see over the next several days,’ Solomon said. ‘You’re going to see other major people that were clearly identified by the FBI, having leaked classified secrets.’

‘Their own staff turned them in when interviewed by the FBI. Nothing, again, happened,’ he added. ‘It’s a common pattern. The question now is, in Donald Trump’s Justice Department, does that dynamic change?’

Soon after the report was published, Patel shared it on X, saying that the FBI ‘found it [and] declassified it.’

‘Now Congress can see how classified info was leaked to shape political narratives – and decide if our institutions were weaponized against the American people,’ Patel’s post read.

Fox News Digital’s Brooke Curto contributed to this report.

In a lengthy and beautifully crafted address on Independence Day, July 4, 1821, then-President John Quincy Adams delivered an extraordinarily detailed and learned lesson on the founding of America. It’s one that still deserves repeated and close reading — though much of it will simply not be understood by most Americans today, for it is dense in references to history no longer taught widely in the United States. 

Adams’ most memorable sentences are often quoted:

‘[America] has, in the lapse of nearly half a century, without a single exception, respected the independence of other nations while asserting and maintaining her own. She has abstained from interference in the concerns of others, even when the conflict has been for principles to which she clings, as to the last vital drop that visits the heart. She has seen that probably for centuries to come, all the contests of that Aceldama the European world, will be contests of inveterate power, and emerging right. Wherever the standard of freedom and Independence, has been or shall be unfurled, there will her heart, her benedictions and her prayers be. But she goes not abroad, in search of monsters to destroy. She is the well-wisher to the freedom and independence of all. She is the champion and vindicator only of her own. She will recommend the general cause by the countenance of her voice, and the benignant sympathy of her example.’

The declamation that America ‘goes not abroad in search of monsters to destroy’ is a favorite text of both the pre-World Wars One and Two isolationists in America, but of course both global conflicts reached out and drew the United States into them. 

Now, far, far more than in 1917 and 1941, the assumptions of our sixth president simply no longer apply. 

There is no longer any ‘abroad.’ 

The idea of an ‘abroad’ about which Americans could be either indifferent or at most the subject of a distant approval or remote scorn, is dead.

To repeat: There is no such thing as ‘abroad.’ 

Not even remotely. 

What remained of the concept after Pearl Harbor was shattered by Sputnik in 1957, and then by successive generations of missile technology.  With the rise of hypersonic missiles only fools would believe that there is an ‘abroad’ anywhere on the globe that the United States can disregard. 

Beijing’s hypersonic arsenal can reach Washington, D.C. in two hours or less, and that margin is going to shrink rapidly. Russia’s hypersonic missiles can reach the lower 48 even sooner and Alaska in a blink. 

Other nations will inevitably add to the number of potential adversaries that can change the world via hypersonic missilery and wreck enormous, perhaps Republic-ending damage on the country. 

Of course, America possesses a ‘second strike’ capability deep under the seas in our Ohio-class submarines, and even an enormous fusillade of thousands of hypersonic missiles would be unlikely to cripple all of our B-2s and B-21s or ever missile silo. The United States would take down with it all of the evil powers that combined to strike it first, just as it did from 1941 to 1945. 

But there would be no ‘Marshall Plan’ waiting for anyone or any country on the other side of such an unimaginable catastrophe. Thus it must be deterred. Deterrence is only accomplished by the reality of American military power and the military power of the allies on which it can rely.

To repeat a third time: There is no ‘abroad.’ 

This very dangerous word will only grow more so with the years. President Trump’s decision to destroy the Iranian nuclear weapons program alongside Israel’s blows against that fanatical theocracy’s ballistic missile capability shielded the entire world from the most unstable and terror-addicted regime in the world obtaining the ability to threaten all of the West and beyond with Armageddon. 

For a time, at least, the precise and purposeful application of American military force to the missile and nuclear arsenal of an enemy on the brink of ‘breakout’ kept the number of nuclear powers stable. 

Bravo, President Trump and Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. Whatever criticisms come their way on whatever other subject, the most important mission of their careers is complete. (Though both men may be obliged by the fanatics in Tehran to do it again.)

The West still has enemies, of course, and the most formidable one is the Chinese Communist Party that dominates the People’s Republic of China, and its ruthless leader, Xi Jinping. Xi and the CCP are followed in second place by Xi’s equally ruthless if not quite as powerful ally in Putin’s Russia, not to mention the unstable nuclear powers of North Korea and Pakistan. 

The West’s nuclear arsenal —distributed among our allies Great Britain and France and especially alongside that of Israel and our sometimes friend India— combines with our own prodigious, yet in-need-of-modernization nuclear arsenal to hold the most dangerous enemies at bay. 

There are only four actual superpowers in the world —the quartet of nations that can project nuclear power far beyond their borders and which possess intelligence and espionage capabilities that are unmatched except by each other’s capabilities: The United States and Israel on the side of the West and the PRC and Russia on the side of despotism. All others in the ‘nuclear club’ have limitations imposed by their own chaotic domestic politics or lack of deliverable firepower and the will to use it. 

That’s national security realism in a nutshell. 

When two of the leaders of any of these four nations meet, it is a significant occasion. It is a very good thing that President Trump and Prime Minister Netanyahu have met three times in 2025 and have spoken far more frequently than that. 

Xi and Putin have only met in person twice in this year, but their ‘partnership’ is very close even though Xi is to Putin as Trump is to Netanyahu: the senior partners to their powerful but not nearly as powerful junior partners. 

This is the basic geopolitical structure of the world and only with that understanding of reality can analysts judge what President Trump gets out of his meeting with the Russian tyrant this week —if anything is even made public afterward. It will take months, if not years, to assess what happens this week. 

Putin has attempted to play every American president since Bill Clinton, sometimes successfully, sometimes fooling them only for a time. The temptation to ‘strike a deal’ with Putin is the same as the apple on the forbidden tree in Genesis. That way lies ruin. But sizing up the tree and the apple at close range can have benefits. 

President Trump has met with Putin six times prior to this week and has spoken with him often. The real estate developer-turned-television force-turned president has as much of the skills set anyone could have to deal with such a stone-cold killer as Putin. Trump survived not just two assassination attempts in 2024 but years of lawfare preceded by the plots of the permanent left embedded in our vast administrative state during his first term. 

Trump is as tough and as resilient as any president since Richard Nixon. There will be no hot mic whisperings of weakness, nor will there be blunt assessments spoken like that of former Vice President Dick Cheney: ‘[W]hat I see [in Putin is] a KGB colonel.’

Trump is a realist, just like his friend of old from New York in the 1980s and early 1990s, RN. Trump is as tough as W standing in the ruins of the Twin Towers, as tough as the genuine war hero H.W., as tough as Reagan, Ford and Ike. 

If Trump can bring an end to the savagery underway in Ukraine on terms acceptable to President Zelensky, it will be an achievement greater than his interventions to stop the hostilities between India and Pakistan, the Democratic Republic of the Congo and Rwanda, Thailand and Cambodia and last week’s peace agreement between Armenia and Azerbaijan.   

Trump’s destruction of the Iranian nuclear program is the biggest building block of his legacy, rivaled only by the Abraham Accords.  If he can bring a ceasefire to Central Europe that is acceptable to our allies and the Ukrainian people, it will be the third pillar of his legacy, with the fourth —the rebuilding of the American military into so potent a force that no one, not even China’s Xi, dares to risk a confrontation with us— as his fourth. On top of those four pillars can rest an era of prosperity and renewed American growth and innovation. 

If anyone is hoping for the president to fail in this endeavor as described, they are not patriots but partisans blind to the realities of the world. There are a lot of those sorts of partisans in the U.S., and increasingly our NATO allies are showing themselves to be unreliable. 

Like it or not, the near-term security prospects of the West rest on Trump, and serious people must prefer that to the infirmities of President Biden or the illusions of President Obama. 

Trump has confidence in his own abilities and serious analysts of realpolitik should too. At this point, after ‘Midnight Hammer’ and the other ceasefires, after all of the decade since he came down the escalator, there is very good reason to believe he can achieve as much as any other American at the table with Putin. Anyone hoping for his failure should assess their own mental health. It is in the interests of everyone on the planet that knows no ‘abroads’ that stability break out everywhere, beginning in Alaska this week. 

Senate Democrats have undergone a steady tonal shift on Israel, with a recent vote to block arms sales to the Jewish State giving a glimpse at the evolution on the Hill.

More Democrats in the upper chamber than ever before voted alongside Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., to halt the $675 million sale of thousands of bombs and guidance kits for the bombs and to block the sale of automatic rifles to Israel.

Sanders’ push ultimately failed late last month, but over half of all Senate Democrats voted alongside him, with many voting with him for the first time. Meanwhile, all Senate Republicans voted against them.

‘The tide is turning,’ Sanders, who routinely caucuses with Democrats, said in a statement. ‘The American people do not want to spend billions to starve children in Gaza. The Democrats are moving forward on this issue, and I look forward to Republican support in the near future.’

Getting Republicans on board for future attempts, as Sanders hoped would happen, is a stretch at best.

‘Republicans stand with Israel,’ Senate Foreign Relations Committee Chair Jim Risch, R-Idaho, told Fox News Digital in a statement.

‘Senator Sanders’ resolution to block arms sales would have reinstated the failed policies of the Biden administration and would abandon America’s closest ally in the Middle East,’ he continued. ‘We can’t afford to go back there.’

But the change within the Democratic caucus was likely spurred by the release of photos of starving children in the Gaza Strip, which earned shocked reactions from both lawmakers and President Donald Trump.

Many Democrats have pinned the blame on Israel and argued that the Jewish state has put a chokehold on aid that is meant for civilians in Gaza, while Republicans contend that the terrorist organization Hamas is stealing the food.

‘What’s going on is unacceptable, and Israel has the power to fix it,’ Sen. Angus King, I-Maine, told Fox News Digital.

Like Sanders, King typically caucuses with Senate Democrats. But unlike his fellow Independent colleague, he has routinely stood firm in his support of Israel. But the photos and reports of widespread malnutrition prompted him to vote to block arms sales.

‘Israel’s the one that’s not letting the aid get in,’ he said. ‘The humanitarian response is entirely within Israel’s hands, and they’ve been blocking, slowing, starting and stopping, to the point where I just could no longer stand silent.’

And like King, Sen. Jean Shaheen, the top ranking Democrat on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, changed course and voted in favor of blocking arms sales out of concern that food aid was not making its way to Palestinians.

‘I think it’s important to send the message to Prime Minister [Benjamin] Netanyahu and his government that things need to change,’ the New Hampshire Democrat said in an interview with PBS Newshour.

But Republicans charged that it was not Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s fault that food aid was not making its way into Gaza, and instead believed that it was Hamas stealing the food.

Sen. John Kennedy, R-La., said that Israel wants to make sure that the food aid actually makes it to civilians in Hamas.

‘Israel and the US have cut out, cut off most of Hamas’ cash flow,’ Kennedy said. ‘And a lot of their cash flows depends on stealing the food and selling it, sometimes to their own people, absorbing the prices.’

And not every Senate Democrat is on the same page when it comes to their position on the Jewish State.

Sen. John Fetterman, D-Pa., has routinely slammed Democrats for criticizing Israel, and believed that his party was moving further away from his position.

‘What I really fundamentally believe, there’s been a wholesale shift, even within my party, to blame Israel for the situations and the circumstances overall,’ Fetterman told Fox News Digital. ‘And I don’t really understand. It’s like we’ve seen the same pictures and, of course, what’s happened in Gaza is devastating.’

‘But so, for me, I blame Hamas and Iran,’ he continued. ‘And I don’t know why there’s not like a collective global outrage.’

Zohran Mamdani, New York City’s Democratic mayoral nominee, continued his ‘Five Boroughs Against Trump’ tour in Brooklyn on Tuesday, as President Donald Trump’s agenda continues to take center stage on the New York City campaign trail. 

Speaking at the Flatbush Gardens Community Center, Mamdani’s second anti-Trump event of the week was focused on housing, a hot-button issue in the New York City mayoral race as former Gov. Andrew Cuomo has spent days criticizing Mamdani’s rent-stabilized apartment in Astoria. 

‘We must remember that Andrew Cuomo has spent more time talking about my apartment than asking why so many New Yorkers are being forced out of theirs. He has spent more time criticizing me than he has in criticizing the legislation that Donald Trump has passed,’ Mamdani said on Tuesday. 

Mamdani began his week-long tour alongside Rep. Jerry Nadler, D-N.Y., in Manhattan on Monday morning. After visiting Brooklyn on Tuesday, Mamdani will travel to Staten Island on Wednesday, the Bronx on Thursday and Queens on Friday, Fox News confirmed. 

The 33-year-old self-described socialist’s tour is a rejection of the Trump administration’s sweeping second-term agenda and his so-called ‘authoritarian’ attack on working New Yorkers, with Tuesday’s event focused on housing.

‘While housing experts are ringing the alarm, Andrew Cuomo is ringing Donald Trump,’ Mamdani said. 

During Mamdani’s events on Monday and Tuesday, reporters peppered the 33-year-old socialist candidate with questions about Cuomo’s latest policy proposal – ‘Zohran’s law.’

The former governor, who lost the Democratic mayoral primary to Mamdani in June, began trolling the assemblyman over the weekend with an edited video of Mamdani admitting he pays ‘$2,300 for my one bedroom in Astoria.’

‘Rent-stabilized apartments when they’re vacant should only be rented to people who need affordable housing, not people like Zohran Mamdani,’ Cuomo told reporters in a video posted on social media. 

Cuomo said ‘Zohran’s law’ was designed to prevent high-income individuals from occupying rent-stabilized apartments.

But Mamdani fired back at Cuomo’s criticism on Tuesday, telling reporters, ‘It pains me to say that in our disgraced former Governor Andrew Cuomo’s mind, these units, these buildings, these tenants are but a political pawn.’

Chief among Mamdani’s now-infamous progressive policy proposals is his commitment to freezing rents. 

‘As Mayor, Zohran will immediately freeze the rent for all stabilized tenants, and use every available resource to build the housing New Yorkers need and bring down the rent,’ according to Mamdani’s campaign website. 

Mamdani has accused incumbent Mayor Eric Adams of appointing Rent Guidelines Board members to raise rents on stabilized apartments. While landlords and advocates argue the freeze would be illegal, Mamdani can accomplish this goal by appointing members to the board who wouldn’t vote to increase the rent. 

Former Mayor Bill de Blasio’s board voted to freeze the rent three times during his tenure. 

Cuomo had previously called the democratic socialist’s plan to freeze rent a ‘politically convenient posture,’ and said such a move would hurt landlords who would be ‘unable to maintain their buildings.’

As Cuomo’s fiery social media posts about Mamdani’s rent-controlled apartment made the rounds, de Blasio – who has yet to endorse a candidate in the race to run the nation’s most populous city – fired back at his former governor. 

‘I did a rent freeze and almost 2 million hard-working New Yorkers benefited. @ZohranKMamdani wants to do a rent freeze. You know who doesn’t want to do a rent freeze? @andrewcuomo, and he thinks he can trick us into forgetting that,’ de Blasio trolled on X.

During the first stop on his anti-Trump tour on Monday, Mamdani responded to Cuomo’s freshly proposed law ‘that will keep the rich out of New York’s affordable housing.’

‘What do we know about this policy proposal beyond the fact that it seeks to evict me from my apartment?’ Mamdani questioned on Monday.

‘Like so much of Andrew Cuomo’s politics, it is characterized by a petty vindictiveness. It leaves far more questions than it has answers. How many New Yorkers would this apply to? How many New Yorkers would be evicted from their apartments? How many New Yorkers would have their lives upended by a former governor who is responding to the fact that he was handily beaten by a tenant of a rent-stabilized apartment?’ Mamdani asked. 

‘I live rent-free in his head,’ Mamdani trolled Cuomo, arguing that he had many years to implement such policies as governor but is now only focused on trying to reckon with a ‘political defeat.’ 

Soon after Mamdani’s criticism, the Cuomo campaign unveiled his proposal to protect rent-stabilized apartments from being occupied by high-income individuals. 

‘Under Cuomo’s proposal, when a rent-stabilized apartment becomes vacant, the incoming individual income would be capped so that the annual rent makes up at least 30 percent of that income. For example, if an apartment rents for $2,500 a month ($30,000 per year), the new tenant’s income could not exceed $100,000,’ according to the plan. 

The Cuomo campaign also clarified that ‘Zohran’s law’ would only apply to vacant apartments. 

Mamdani poured cold water on Cuomo’s plan during the press conference on Tuesday, telling reporters, ‘What is so absurd to me about Andrew Cuomo’s proposal is that it wouldn’t even apply to me. The way that he has put forward this language does not actually apply to me, and yet he uses my name in it.’

When reached for comment regarding Mamdani’s anti-Trump tour, White House spokeswoman, Abigail Jackson, told Fox News Digital, ‘Comrade Mamdani is the American people’s worst nightmare. His communist policies will crater our economy, increase crime, crowd out Americans with free health care for illegal immigrants, and defund the brave men and women of law enforcement who keep us safe.’

The White House added that ‘Mamdani’s idea of ‘immigration reform’ is no borders and amnesty for all the violent criminal illegal aliens that Joe Biden released into our country. The American people have repeatedly rejected this Communist agenda and the more Mamdani shares his radical policies, the more the American people will recoil.’ 

Fox News’ Marly Carroll and Bryan Llenas contributed to this report. 

Unearthed emails as part of a FOIA request show Biden administration agencies scrapping a plan to visit a vessel at an event because it would have required then-President Joe Biden to take too many steps. 

Records show, as part of a FOIA request by Protect the Public’s Trust obtained by Fox News Digital, that Biden was set to visit a National Security Multi-Mission Vessel (NSMV) while touring a Philadelphia shipyard in July 2023. 

However, according to the emails, that visit to the vessel was scrapped because of ‘how many steps were involved to get on the ship.’

The emails show that the U.S. Maritime Administration (MARAD) was engaged in a major project at the Philadelphia shipyard at the time that Biden was planning to visit to tout offshore wind and clean energy jobs. 

A MARAD official emailed members of the Office of Secure Transportation, with the Department of Transportation cc’d, on July 17, 2023, that said, ‘No visit to the NSMV vessel is planned after the WH realized how many steps were involved to get on the ship. {True – lots of steps on grating}.’

The email exchanges also show a lack of coordination between the White House and MARAD, an agency of the DOT, as the next day an email between DOT officials said, ‘MARAD hasn’t had anyone reach out to them from WH. All info they have received has been from Philly shipyard. S2 team reached out to WH Advance, and that is how we confirmed the visit was scheduled. Nothing else heard and no further call made or received on this event that I am aware of.’

The decision to skip visiting the vessel in the shipyard came a little more than a month after Biden faced questions over his mental and physical sharpness when he stumbled and fell on stage at an Air Force Academy graduation ceremony in Colorado Springs, Colorado, on June 1, 2023.

The White House said at the time that the president tripped over a sandbag and that he was not injured by the fall. 

Around the same time, White House officials were rejecting concerns from conservatives about Biden’s health and insisting he was able to perform his duties at a high level.

Roughly a week after the event in Philadelphia, then-White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre bristled at a question about Biden’s age and whether the White House could assure people there was nothing to be concerned about by outlining the president’s accomplishments.

‘Look, we’ve been asked this question multiple times,’ Jean-Pierre said. ‘And you have a president who — I just went through his Unity Agenda — what we’ve been able to do in a bipartisan way as it relates to issues that really matter to the American people — right? — the Cancer Moonshot, which is actually going to make a difference with people and family — fam- — Americans who have family members dealing with cancer. That is something that this president has been able to do.’

Fox News Digital reached out to Biden’s office and the Philadelphia shipyard for comment.

‘There’s an awful lot wrong here, beginning with the White House planning a presidential visit to one of the most important shipyards in the nation without bothering to give a heads-up to the Department of Transportation, which has major ongoing projects there,’ Protect the Public’s Trust Director Michael Chamberlain told Fox News Digital. 

‘That’s amateurish. Second and far more critical, the president’s staff was proscribing events he couldn’t physically handle more than a year before he dropped out of the re-election race, all while lambasting anyone who claimed he wasn’t fit enough to complete the Ironman Competition. I realize there’s an elevator down to the White House Situation Room, but most voters would like to think they’re pulling the lever for a president who could take the stairs in an emergency.’

A former Biden aide pushed back on that narrative, saying that it is ‘ironic that an organization called ‘Protect the Public Trust’ is more interested in how many steps the former president took than the current president’s cost-raising agenda and close relationship with Jeffrey Epstein.’

‘The group is presenting a deceptive story with this ‘don’t look at Epstein’ bait based on a single email with no context and they know it.’

A former Biden administration official reached by Fox News Digital referenced the massive size of the shipyard and that the size would be considered when planning events like this, adding that the email references steps and not stairs specifically. 

The former official also pushed back on the person sending the email not having spoken directly with someone at the White House and explained that several teams are involved in arranging events like the one at the shipyard, considering accessibility, security risks, visuals and other factors.