Rep. Chip Roy, R-Texas, on Wednesday, erupted during an interview and called for Congress to reject further funding for ‘that smirking son of a b—-‘ Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas.

Roy, a border and deficit hawk, told KSEV radio host Chris Salcedo that Republicans in the House must withhold funding from the Department of Homeland Security until the crisis at the southern border is resolved. His heated remarks come after House Speaker Kevin McCarthy floated a short-term continuing resolution to extend Congress’ Sept. 30 deadline to fund the government.

McCarthy’s proposal is largely considered a ‘nonstarter’ for Roy and other conservative House Freedom Caucus members, who want Congress to cut back spending to pre-coronavirus pandemic levels. 

‘I will use every tool at my disposal to stop a continuing resolution structured that way,’ Roy vowed. He said Republicans must confront the Biden administration and force policy changes at the border by leveraging the power of the purse. 

‘We as a people, as a country, should stop it. And we as a Republican Congress should put our entire careers and our entire ownership of the House of Representatives on the line to stop funding that smirking son of a b—- Alejandro Mayorkas, who is the secretary of Homeland Security and shouldn’t be,’ said Roy. 

‘Not only should he be impeached, the entire organization should have funding withheld until we stop what’s happening at the border,’ he added. ‘Until these gutless losers in Washington recognize we’re supposed to use the power of the purse to stop it, nothing is going to change.’ 

The U.S. has seen record migrant numbers at the border since 2021, and while those numbers dipped in June, they have started accelerating again in July — with much of the traffic of humans and drugs across the border controlled by the cartels.

The Biden administration has taken several steps — including a collaborative law enforcement anti-smuggling campaign last year that led to thousands of arrests — to crack down on cartel smuggling. It has also made over 170 sanction designations of cartel leaders and members, often working with Mexico to do so. Last week, officials announced the sanctioning of three cartel members, including one nicknamed ‘The Anthrax Monkey.’

Republicans have called for more action, including military action against cartels in Mexico itself — which in turn brought a rebuke from Mexican President Andrés Manuel López Obrador. 2024 presidential candidate Will Hurd announced a plan on Saturday to treat cartels and smugglers like terrorists.

López Obrador has also targeted Texas Gov. Greg Abbott in recent weeks for Texas’ move to establish a floating border barrier along with the Rio Grande to prevent migrants from making the dangerous journey across the river. That barrier is also facing a lawsuit from the Department of Justice.

Fox News’ Bill Melugin and Adam Shaw contributed to this report. 

Arizona Rep. Ruben Gallego, who is running for Senate as a Democrat, says that owning a gun has become as much a part of Republican culture as ‘little cow nuts’ on lifted pickup trucks.

Fox News Digital exclusively obtained the video footage of Gallego making the claim during a Thursday campaign event at Chalice Christian Church in Gilbert, Arizona.

Gallego was responding to an audience question on addressing gun violence, in particular school shootings.

The Arizona Democrat said ‘school shooting-level casualties happen every day in the streets of America’ and that ‘we don’t focus on trying to stop everyday gun violence because a lot of politicians are afraid of the NRA and the gun lobby.’

‘And also, even beyond the gun lobby, there is now weapons — and I don’t really call them guns. As a Marine, I call them weapons,’ Gallego continued. ‘Weapons have now become more of a cultural thing.’

‘It’s like, if you’re a Republican, you have to have a bunch of guns, a jacked-up truck with some of those little cow nuts hanging in the back,’ he said.

‘That’s your cultural identity now,’ he added.

Gallego said it’s ‘harder to pass’ gun restrictions because guns have ‘become part of an identity of a portion of America.’

‘But when you really put this out there, most Americans are for universal background checks. Bad people should not have weapons,’ Gallego said. ‘If you have been convicted of domestic violence, you should not have weapons; if you’re under a protective order, you should not have weapons.’

Gallego told Fox News Digital that his time defending America as a Marine during the Iraq War made him believe ‘weapons of war’ do not belong in children’s classrooms.

‘Carrying and using my M16 to defend myself and my fellow Marines in Iraq taught me that weapons of war have no place in our kids’ classrooms,’ Gallego said. ‘The glorification of weapons that are used to massacre kids is sickening.’

‘As a gun owner, I’m all for responsible gun ownership, but it needs to be just that – responsible,’ he continued. ‘The vast majority of Arizonans agree we need commonsense gun reform to keep our communities safe, and I’m committed to getting it done.’

Gallego is running to try and take independent Sen. Kyrsten Sinema’s seat in Congress’ upper chamber.

The toss-up race will be a complex one with Sinema’s status as a former Democrat. Gallego is the leading candidate for the Democrat nomination.

The two left candidates will have to compete to take as much of the blue vote as they can, which will likely split between them if both are on the ballot.

Additionally, the splitting of the Democrat vote may propel the eventual Republican nominee into the Senate.

Currently, the leading declared GOP candidate is Pinal County Sheriff Mark Lamb.

Gallego has also fielded some controversy since launching his Senate campaign.

Gallego twice voted to protect a Biden administration rule that allows pension fund managers to use so-called environmental, social and governance (ESG) factors when choosing investments for workers’ retirement plans, which some lawmakers have likened to ‘woke’ banking practices focusing on left-wing agendas.

Gallego’s move, in turn, also guarded a close friend and donor’s company in which he’s invested. In 2019, the Democrat reported attaining up to $50,000 in non-public stock in Aspiration Fund Adviser LLC, a financial technology company that partners with FDIC-member banks. 

Gallego, however, had failed to divulge the purchase in his financial disclosure report until 2022 despite congressional members having to declare assets valued at more than $1,000.

Aspiration was founded in 2013 as a ‘digital bank for environmentally conscious consumers’ but has since concentrated on selling carbon credits, according to Forbes. It’s also one of only a few financial technology companies ‘fully embracing the booming movement around environmental, social and governance (ESG) investing,’ the publication wrote in 2021.

Aspiration disclosed that nearly 70% of its revenue comes from ESG services in a Securities and Exchange Commission filing from that same year.

The company was co-founded and is co-owned by Joe Sanberg, Gallego’s longtime friend and donor. The pair attended Harvard together, and Gallego took part in Sanberg’s 2021 wedding in Puerto Rico, social media posts show. Sanberg has provided more than $20,000 to Gallego’s campaigns and leadership PAC since 2014, according to a search of federal filings. 

Fox News Digital’s Joe Schoffstall and Aubrie Spady contributed reporting.

EXCLUSIVE: Georgia’s Republican lieutenant governor, Burt Jones, is hitting back at the targeting of him and his role in connection with former President Donald Trump’s alleged effort to overturn the 2020 presidential election in the state, as well as the indictments brought against Trump and others on Monday.

Speaking with Fox News Digital by phone just days after Trump and 18 of his allies were indicted by a grand jury in Fulton County, Jones, who was excluded from District Attorney Fani Willis’ investigation due to a conflict of interest, blasted the indictments and investigation as ‘sickening,’ and ‘partisan driven,’ but said he welcomed ‘the opportunity to speak to someone who is not a partisan actor’ so he could tell his side of the story once a special prosecutor is appointed.

‘I haven’t done anything wrong, and the people who are being indicted in Fulton County, I don’t think they’ve done anything wrong, either,’ Jones said. ‘They were expressing their opinions in a lot of cases, and for them to be charged and booked and fingerprinted, as if they’re common criminals is something that I just — it’s a little disturbing, to be honest with you.’

Jones, seen as a likely front-runner in the race to replace current Gov. Brian Kemp in the 2026 election, was one of the 16 so-called ‘fake’ electors who claimed Trump won Georgia and attempted to conduct a secret meeting at the State Capitol on Dec. 14, 2020, in an alleged effort to overturn President Biden’s victory in the state. Three of the 16 were indicted alongside Trump on allegations of forgery, false statements and impersonating a public officer, among other crimes.

‘Those were the most high-profile folks on there, and that’s who it looks like ended up getting indicted, was people who had either titles or name recognition. And it goes back to what I’ve said before, it is seemingly a self-serving political act by a district attorney here in Fulton County,’ Jones told Fox.

Jones’ exclusion from the investigation that led to the indictments came after Fulton County Superior Court Judge Robert McBurney ordered Willis to drop him in July 2022 because she hosted a fundraiser for Democrat Charlie Bailey, who was running against Jones for lieutenant governor in the general election that November.

As a result of that order, Georgia Prosecuting Attorneys Council Executive Director Pete Skandalakis decided to wait until an indictment was handed down before choosing whether to appoint a special prosecutor to investigate Jones.

‘You read the news outlets — for them to portray that this is something new — it’s not,’ Jones told Fox, saying he knew a special prosecutor would ultimately be appointed following any indictments in the investigation.

When asked what he thought could happen to Trump as the trial progresses alongside the 2024 race for the White House, including potential jail time for the former president, Jones expressed hope that ‘truth will ultimately prevail.’

‘I don’t have a lot of faith in the process that I’ve witnessed so far in Fulton County. I do have faith in the justice system, and I do still believe we have the best justice system in the world,’ he said. ‘I think it’ll be a long, drawn out process, but I believe that the truth will ultimately come forward, and they will have a favorable ruling.’

Jones went on to blast Willis and the millions in taxpayer money he said had been spent on her investigation, along with the manpower involved — all while crime was on the rise across Atlanta.

Jones then ripped what some questioned as the suspicious timeline between the indictments against Trump coming almost immediately after revelations surrounding alleged corruption committed by the Biden family.

‘It’s not much different than Hillary Clinton and the mysterious whitewashing of the hard drive on computer that seemed to get zero attention,’ he said. ‘And now you fast-forward to Joe Biden and Hunter Biden.’ 

‘Joe Biden has been a career politician. He has been in public service for his entire adult life. But somehow he’s managed to amass a multimillion dollar estate on a $170,000 annual government salary. You tell me how that happens. I think he learned how to game the system, and I think his son —  the apple hasn’t fallen far from the tree. I think he’s learned how to do it himself,’ he added.

Fox News’ Landon Mion and The Associated Press contributed to this report.

President Biden made an off-the-cuff remark Wednesday involving children and ice cream, just before touting his administration’s accomplishments. 

The president was about to begin his speech in front of an audience in the East Room of the White House on the one-year anniversary of the Inflation Reduction Act when he briefly deviated. 

‘I want to say one thing to your children. I know some really great ice cream places around here and daddy owes you, so talk to me afterwards,’ Biden said. 

He then began touting his administration’s response to the rising costs of everyday necessities from groceries to gas as many Americans continue to feel the financial pinch of inflation. 

Biden has been criticized in the past for remarks some have deemed creepy. In October 2022, he drew criticism from conservatives on social media over a comment he made to a young teenager in California where he told her ‘no serious guys until you’re 30.’

A month prior, he again came under scrutiny for a remark he made in the middle of a speech to the National Education Association, the nation’s largest teachers’ union.

He addressed a woman in the crowd he apparently knew long ago. 

‘We go back a long way,’ he said. ‘She was 12 and I was 30, but anyway. This woman helped me get an awful lot done. Anyway.’

Fox News Digital has reached out to the White House.

President Biden’s Special Envoy for Iran who was placed on leave in June amid an investigation into his security clearance has landed a teaching gig at Princeton University’s School of Public and International Affairs.

The department said Robert Malley will teach a graduate course this fall on foreign policy decision-making, and one to two undergraduate courses in the spring that will focus on diplomacy, negotiation, and foreign policy. 

President Biden tapped Malley in January 2021 to try to revive the 2015 Iran nuclear deal, under which Tehran agreed to limit its nuclear program to make it harder to obtain a nuclear weapon in return for economic sanctions relief. 

Malley stepped back from his State Department role shortly before Iran’s release of five U.S. citizens to house arrest as part of a deal under which they would eventually leave Iran and $6 billion in Iranian funds in South Korea would be unfrozen.

Malley was not able to resurrect the agreement, which then-U.S. President Donald Trump abandoned in 2018, arguing that its terms were too favorable to Iran and that it failed to place sufficient restrictions on Tehran’s nuclear program.

Malley confirmed in June that his clearance was being investigated, but said he was confident about a positive outcome. According to media reports, Malley’s clearance was suspended amid an investigation of his handling of classified material. 

‘I have been informed that my security clearance is under review. I have not been provided any further information, but I expect the investigation to be resolved favorably and soon. In the meantime, I am on leave,’ Malley said to Fox News at the time. 

‘While I am on leave from the State Department, I am extremely grateful for the opportunity to work with the next generation of public servants,’ Malley said in the statement. ‘I look forward to my time at Princeton and returning to government service in due course.’

It is unclear when or how the review of Malley’s security clearance may be concluded. 

Fox News’ Andrea Vacchiano, Nick Kalman and Reuters contributed to this report. 

Former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., struggled to drum up support amid her remarks about the Inflation Reduction Act (IRA) on Wednesday, insisting the audience should clap throughout certain parts of her speech.

Joined by Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., at the White House to boast about the measure on its one-year anniversary, Pelosi touted what she believes to be benefits of the IRA, which she described as a ‘remarkable accomplishment.’

Pelosi said there is ‘no more urgent task than saving our planet,’ claiming the issue of climate change is a ‘health issue,’ an ‘economic issue,’ and a ‘moral issue.’

‘It’s a moral issue if you believe as I do that this planet is God’s creation. We have a moral responsibility to be good stewards of it. But even if you don’t, we can all agree we have a moral obligation to ensure strong, healthy, resilient communities for future generations,’ she added.

Hearing no applause as she gathered her thoughts, Pelosi said to the tranquil crowd, ‘I think that’s an applause line.’

Later during the speech, while recognizing legislative action taken to address climate change by Sen. Ed Markey, D-Mass., Pelosi told the audience once more, ‘That’s an applause line.’

Waiting and laughing, Pelosi’s statement was met with a round of applause by those in attendance.

Continuing on with the speech, Pelosi also urged the crowd to clap to for House Democrats who worked to pass the IRA.

‘Now let’s hear it for the House Democrats,’ Pelosi told those in attendance as she motioned for the lawmakers to stand up.

Pelosi’s plea for applause at the White House mirrored a similar request she made last September when she failed to ignite a crowd gathered on the White House lawn. Celebrating President Biden’s signing of the Inflation Reduction Act at the time, Pelosi told the audience the same line.

Appearing alongside Schumer at the event last year, Pelosi said the ‘landmark law,’ which Biden signed last August, is ‘driving down costs for kitchen table items for America’s working families.’ 

‘Mr. President, thank you for unifying and inspiring a vision of a stronger, fairer, safer future for all our children. Your extraordinary leadership has made this glorious day possible,’ Pelosi said.

After a brief moment of silence, Pelosi told the audience ‘that’s an applause line,’ eliciting claps from the spectators.

Pelosi’s comments are reminiscent to a statement made by former Republican presidential candidate Jeb Bush, who memorably urged his supporters to ‘please clap’ at a campaign event during the 2016 election.

Back in February 2016, Bush unwittingly became a political trendsetter at a campaign event in New Hampshire.

‘I think the next president needs to be a lot quieter but send a signal that we’re prepared to act in the national security interest of this country, to get back into the business of a more peaceful world,’ Bush passionately said at the time, subtly swiping at then-Republican front-runner Donald Trump.

Facing a lengthy silence from the crowd, Bush then said, ‘Please clap.’ The plea from Bush — the son of former President George H.W. Bush and the younger brother of former President George W. Bush — prompted applause and some cheers.

Fox News’ Joseph A. Wulfsohn contributed to this report.

A special prosecutor will be chosen to investigate Georgia Lt. Gov. Burt Jones, a Republican, in connection with former President Trump’s alleged illegal efforts to overturn the 2020 presidential election in the state.

Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis announced a 98-page indictment Monday night accusing Trump and 18 others of attempting to change the election results in his favor. Among the others indicted were former Trump attorney Rudy Giuliani, former Trump chief of staff Mark Meadows and former members of Trump’s legal team Jenna Ellis and Sidney Powell.

The former president was indicted on 13 counts, including Solicitation of Violation of Oath by a Public Officer, Conspiracy to Commit Impersonating a Public Officer, Conspiracy to Commit Forgery in the First Degree, Conspiracy to Commit False Statements and Writings, Conspiracy to Commit Filing False Documents, Conspiracy to Commit Forgery in the First Degree and Filing False Documents.

Jones, who was not listed in the indictment, was one of the 16 so-called fake electors who falsely claimed Trump won Georgia and attempted to conduct a secret meeting at the State Capitol on December 14, 2020, in an effort to overturn President Biden’s victory in the Peach State. Three of the 16 electors were indicted on allegations of forgery, false statements and impersonating a public officer, among other crimes.

The lieutenant governor has previously denied wrongdoing, claiming he and other electors acted only to preserve Trump’s chances if the former president won in court. He said in a statement Tuesday that Willis’ investigation was ‘a constant media and PR campaign for the sole purpose of furthering her own political career,’ adding that she was pursuing ‘the political vendettas of the past’ when she should have been ‘going after real criminals.’

The grand jury left Jones, a former state senator, out of Monday’s indictment after Fulton County Superior Court Judge Robert McBurney ordered Willis to drop the then-candidate for lieutenant governor from her investigation in July 2022 because she hosted a fundraiser for Democrat Charlie Bailey, who was running against Jones in the general election that November.

‘This scenario creates a plain and actual and untenable conflict,’ McBurney wrote in his order at the time. ‘Any decision the District Attorney makes about Senator Jones in connection with the grand jury investigation is necessarily infected by it.’

Georgia Prosecuting Attorneys Council Executive Director Pete Skandalakis decided to wait until an indictment was handed down before choosing whether to appoint a special prosecutor to investigate Jones.

‘Ultimately, the special prosecutor will make the decision about whether or not to file any charges,’ Skandalakis told The Associated Press.

State Senate Minority Leader Gloria Butler, a Democrat, said she believes applauded the move for a special prosecutor to be selected to examine the scope of Jones’ role in the fake electors scheme.

‘He doesn’t get a pass simply because the Fulton County DA wasn’t permitted to bring charges,’ Butler said in a statement.

Skandalakis said the council will read through Monday’s indictment and ask for a copy of the still-sealed report of the special investigative grand jury that laid the groundwork for the indictments. The council will also speak with Willis about what her investigators may know about Jones, as she was still allowed to ask other witnesses about him despite being ordered not to subpoena him or his records. Skandalakis said he will appoint a special prosecutor but has not made a decision on who that will be.

‘That’s going to be extremely difficult to find somebody,’ he told Fox 5 Atlanta. ‘Not only because of the resources that you need to handle a case like this, but the limitations I have in paying somebody.’

Speaking on whether Jones’ actions warrant an indictment, Skandalakis told The Associated Press, ‘I don’t even know what’s in the investigation.’

Skandalakis does not have to name one of Georgia’s 49 other district attorneys to investigate Jones and can choose anyone with prosecutorial experience. But, he said, finding a prosecutor willing to take the case may be difficult as Georgia does not pay special prosecutors much and offers no money to hire additional staff. This means a district attorney could use their existing staff, but a retired prosecutor would not be able to hire any staff at all.

The Associated Press contributed to this report.

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