Robert F. Kennedy Jr. was given extra time at the end of a House Judiciary Select Subcommittee on the Weaponization of the Federal Government hearing, sparking an argument among members.

During the hearing, Stacey Plaskett – the Democrat delegate from the Virgin Islands – accused RFK Jr. of aligning himself with ‘MAGA Republicans’ through a super PAC named Heal the Divide.

‘The MAGA Republicans know that [former President Donald Trump] benefits when Russia interferes. The same super PAC that supports Mr. Kennedy and has raised significant funds on his behalf is run by a man named Jason Boles,’ Plaskett said during the hearing.

She continued, ‘Jason Boles isn’t just a MAGA supporter. He also ran the super PAC for MAGA Republicans Marjorie Taylor Greene, Lauren Boebert, George Santos, and in 2022, he supported Herschel Walker. So, the person behind Mr. Kennedy’s super PAC is an individual who personally and professionally wants the Republican Party to succeed. Yet, Mr. Kennedy is running as a Democrat.’

RFK Jr., given time to respond by Republican Rep. Greg Steube of Florida immediately afterward, said he did not know the Super PAC to which Plaskett was referring.

‘I’ve never heard of Mr. Boles and I’ve never heard of that super PAC,’ RFK Jr. said.

At the end of the hearing, Chairman Rep. Jim Jordan, R-Ohio, began to close the proceedings when RFK Jr. asked if he may make an additional comment.

‘No, you may not,’ Plaskett said. ‘You may not.’

‘I haven’t adjourned the hearing, and I don’t think you’re the chairman,’ Jordan replied to Plaskett. ‘It’s chairman’s discretion, we’re going to let Mr. Kennedy …’

‘I know it’s your discretion, but he has had so much additional time. Why?’ Plaskett asked.

‘Let him address the defamatory comment that was made about him that is untrue,’ Republican Rep. Mike Johnson of Louisiana interjected at one point.

‘That was not defamatory, that is a legal definition that was not met,’ Plaskett responded.

It is not immediately clear which ‘defamatory’ comment was being debated by Johnson and Plaskett.

Given time to speak, RFK Jr. quickly revisited the subject of Heal the Divide, reaffirming that he has never heard of it and saying that it has only a tangential connection through a third party unaffiliated with his campaign.

‘I want to acknowledge information about the super PAC that you mentioned,’ he told the committee after being given the extra time. ‘I’ve just been told that that super PAC is connected to somebody that we have a connection to. It’s not a super PAC I’ve endorsed, and it’s not one, as I said, I’ve ever heard of.’

Jordan thanked him for the statement and then formally adjourned the meeting.

RFK Jr., who is running for the Oval Office against President Biden, was invited by Republicans to testify at the Weaponization of the Federal Government subcommittee hearing.

Early in the debate – after his opening remarks – Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz of Florida moved to take the hearing into executive session to discuss RFK Jr.’s alleged violation of a House rule aimed at banning testimony that defames or degrades others.

Wasserman Schultz said the witness made ‘despicable’ antisemitic and anti-Asian comments in the last few days, referring to his comment that COVID-19 may have been ‘ethnically targeted’ because those who are most immune to COVID appear to be Ashkenazi Jews and Chinese people. RFK Jr. later said he was not accusing anyone of deliberately engineering COVID to spare certain ethnic populations.

Wasserman Schultz’s move to halt the hearing and go to executive session was voted down, 10-8, thanks to the Republican majority in the committee. Some Democrats made comments like ‘no to hate speech’ as they voted against the GOP push to kill Wasserman Schultz’s motion.

Fox News Digital’s Peter Kasperowicz contributed to this report.

Republican Kansas Attorney General Kris Kobach is pushing forward in a legal bid to prevent sex changes from being listed on state driver’s licenses.Five transgender Kansans represented by the state’s ACLU chapter requested to intervene in the lawsuit. Kobach opposes the motion.‘It’s a pretty cut-and-dried case,’ Kobach said to reporters.

The Republican attorney general in Kansas is working to keep transgender people from intervening in his state-court lawsuit against changing the sex listings on their state driver’s licenses. His efforts already will block further changes until at least November.

Attorney General Kris Kobach, his legal team and lawyers for the Kansas Department of Revenue were in court Thursday to set a schedule for the lawsuit. The department’s motor vehicles division issues driver’s licenses and has changed the sex listing for more than 900 people during the past four years.

Kobach argues that changing driver’s licenses to reflect transgender people’s gender identities violates a state law rolling back transgender rights that took effect July 1. He sued two top Department of Revenue officials earlier this month after Democratic Gov. Laura Kelly announced that the changes would continue despite the new state law.

Five transgender Kansas residents represented by the state’s American Civil Liberties Union chapter are asking District Judge Teresa Watson to allow them intervene in the lawsuit. Kobach said Thursday he is opposing their request, and Watson plans to rule on it after an Aug. 16 hearing.

Earlier this month, Watson granted Kobach’s request to block driver’s license changes while his lawsuit moves forward. Both Kobach’s office and the Department of Revenue’s attorneys agreed it should stay in place at least until another hearing, now set for Nov. 1.

During Thursday’s hearing in Shawnee County, home to the state capital of Topeka, Kobach unsuccessfully pushed Watson to move ahead with a full trial of his lawsuit as early as next month.

‘It’s a pretty cut-and-dried case,’ Kobach told reporters. ‘The statute means what it says. They have a different interpretation of the statute.’

Because of Kobach’s lawsuit, Kansas is among only a few states not allowing transgender residents to change their driver’s licenses, along with Montana, Oklahoma and Tennessee. In a separate federal court case, Kobach also is trying to stop changes in the sex listings on Kansas birth certificates.

The new Kansas law defines male and female based on a person’s sex assigned at birth and says those definitions apply to any other state law or regulation, ending legal recognition of transgender people’s gender identities. Kobach contends it requires Kansas to undo past changes in its records. The Republican-controlled Legislature enacted the law over Kelly’s veto.

ACLU attorneys argue that the new law violates transgender people’s rights under the Kansas Constitution, including their rights to privacy and bodily autonomy.

‘When we’re trying to make this about something very simple like statutory interpretation, what we’re doing is ignoring the reality that transgender Kansans are going to face every single day in this state,’ Sharon Brett, the ACLU of Kansas’ legal director, said after the hearing.

In interviews, transgender Kansas residents have said having a driver’s license with a sex listing that doesn’t match their gender identity complicates getting through airport security, dealing with a traffic stop or even using a credit card. They also have said interactions with others out them publicly as transgender — and potentially jeopardize their safety.

In a court filing, Kathryn Redman, a 62-year-old Kansas City-area resident, said that before she changed her Kansas driver’s license in 2021, she was subjected to ‘invasive pat downs in the genital area of my body’ before getting on flights.

‘I frequently received rude comments and I was always uncomfortable in public settings where showing my license was required,’ she said.

Kobach said after Thursday’s hearing that the transgender people’s legal claims are premature because Watson hasn’t ruled on whether driver’s license changes violate the new state law. He said he sees the first task as considering the new law’s meaning.

‘There will be more than adequate time for constitutional questions to be considered,’ he said.

The Department of Revenue’s attorneys have argued that the new law conflicts with an older law specifically dealing with driver’s licenses and that the agency remains bound to follow the older one. The department supports allowing the transgender people to intervene in the case.

‘We’re not in a position as the Department of Revenue to appropriately address those concerns,’ Pedro Irigonegaray, one of the attorneys, said after Thursday’s hearing.

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Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas on Thursday said that the Chinese communist regime ‘bears responsibility’ for helping tackle the fentanyl crisis in the U.S. – pointing to areas in which China can assist the U.S. in stopping the drug getting into the country.

Mayorkas was asked at the Aspen Security Forum about whether China bears some responsibility for the U.S. fentanyl crisis, given that the precursor chemicals originate there.

‘The precursor chemicals, many of which have legal use, the precursor chemicals, the pill presses that are used to manufacture fentanyl, it’s extremely easy to manufacture, it’s extremely quick, it’s easy to conceal,’ he said. ‘We seized vertical, long vertical candles that were hollowed out with pills. China bears responsibility. We need their assistance in interdicting the chemicals and pill presses that are going in volumes that don’t reflect legitimate use.’

Illicit fentanyl is typically created in Mexico by cartels in labs with the use of precursors shipped over from China. The U.S. has called for an international coalition to combat the crisis and has appealed for help from both China and Mexico.

The drug is 50 to 100 times stronger than morphine and is often cut with other drugs and pressed into pills, meaning that the user doesn’t know they are ingesting fentanyl. It kills more than 70,000 Americans a year.

The amount of drugs seized at the southern border has shot up to more than 22,000 pounds so far this fiscal year, up from 14,000 pounds in fiscal year 2022 and just 5,600 pounds in fiscal year 2020.

Republicans have said the amount of fentanyl being seized is a consequence of the border crisis bringing more drugs and migrants to the border. The administration has touted the increase in seizures as a sign of the success of its efforts in increasing detection. Mayorkas on Thursday said that ‘some have used the border as a cudgel and conflated migration and the trafficking of fentanyl’ but noted that the majority of seizures happen at ports of entry.

Mayorkas said he recently visited JFK International Airport in New York City and saw the number of small packages stopped that contained drugs and firearms.

‘We are addressing the supply side from an enforcement perspective. We are harnessing artificial intelligence to advance our capacity to interdict drugs, to be able to see anomalies in passenger vehicles, commercial trucks. I will say the creativity of the smugglers is extraordinary,’ he said. ‘And yet our ingenuity in building response protocols is also extraordinary.’

The U.S. isn’t the only country to put pressure on the Chinese to do more to tackle the fentanyl threat. Mexican President Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador urged Chinese President Xi Jinping to do more this year in a letter in which he couldn’t resist taking a shot at American politicians critical of his own handling of the cartels that are running rampant in Mexico.

‘I write to you, President Xi Jinping, not to ask your help on these rude threats, but to ask you for humanitarian reasons to help us by controlling the shipments of fentanyl,’ he said.

Fox News’ Aubrie Spady contributed to this report.

A prominent Democrat and Jewish leader who served for decades as a New York lawmaker and now leads a group committed to fighting antisemitism announced Thursday he’s leaving his lifelong political party and becoming a Republican, arguing Democrats have become ‘radicalized’ and ‘turned their back’ on the Jewish people.

‘It’s official: My wife and I have switched our party affiliation from Democrat to Republican!’ Dov Hikind, who spent 36 years in the New York State Assembly and later founded Americans Against Antisemitism, tweeted.

‘[People] have long been asking, ‘Dov, when are you gonna leave the Democratic Party?’ Well, the time has come [because] the Dems have turned their back on Jews & Israel, so it’s officially done!’

Hikind’s tweet included a video of him and his wife, Shani, explaining their decision to join the Republican Party.

‘I have been a lifelong Democrat — my family, my parents. But that’s over. That’s finished,’ said Hikind. ‘I have decided to register as a Republican. Unfortunately, the Democratic Party has become so radicalized … that people who are moderates or conservative Democrats are not welcomed in the Democratic Party, and I’ve had enough.’

Hikind added the Democratic Party ‘turns its back on its friends like Israel,’ criticizing the Biden administration for its policies toward the Jewish state.

‘I am delighted to join the Republican Party,’ Hikind added. ‘This is about sending a message — a message to the Biden administration, a message to the Democratic Party. We’re losing the American people because you are not representing our values. You are not representing the Democratic Party that my parents were so proud of.’

Hikind’s announcement came one day after some progressive Democrats boycotted a speech by Israeli President Isaac Herzog, who addressed a joint meeting of Congress to mark the 75th anniversary of Israel’s founding. During his speech, Herzog gave a thinly veiled rebuke to members of the House for recent attacks on Israel.

‘Criticism of Israel must not cross the line into negation of the state of Israel’s right to exist,’ said Herzog. ‘Questioning the Jewish people’s right to self-determination is not legitimate diplomacy. It is antisemitism. Vilifying and attacking Jews, whether in Israel, in the United States or anywhere in the world, is antisemitism.’

Over the weekend, Progressive Caucus Chair Pramila Jayapal, D-Wash., caused an uproar by calling Israel a ‘racist state.’ Though she walked back her comments somewhat, they were still met with fierce criticism from both sides of the aisle.

The furor led Republicans to force a vote on a resolution that said Israel was neither a racist nor an apartheid state. The measure was overwhelmingly supported by all but ten Democrats — nine who voted ‘no’ and one who simply voted ‘present.’ Jayapal voted with the majority that said Israel was not racist.

On Thursday, the same day as Hikind’s announcement, Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, D-N.Y, doubled down on calling Israel an ‘apartheid’ state.

Hikind is hardly the first former or current Democrat lawmaker to recently switch parties.

Earlier this month, Mesha Mainor, a Democrat who has represented District 56 in the Georgia House since January 2021, announced she will switch her party registration to Republican.

‘When I decided to stand up on behalf of disadvantaged children in support of school choice, my Democrat colleagues didn’t stand by me,’ Mainor told Fox News Digital at the time. ‘They crucified me. When I decided to stand up in support of safe communities and refused to support efforts to defund the police, they didn’t back me. They abandoned me.’

In April, state Rep. Jeremy LaCombe announced he had left the Democratic Party and would be registering as a Republican. At the time, he was the second Louisiana Democrat in less than a month to switch party affiliations after Louisiana state Rep. Francis Thompson gave Republicans in the state House a supermajority by switching his party affiliation.

The ‘modern-day Democratic Party has become unrecognizable to me and others across the state,’ North Carolina State Rep. Tricia Cotham said of her decision to switch parties. ‘I will not be controlled by anyone.’

Overall, more than one million Americans have switched their party affiliation from Democrat to Republican in the last 12 months.

A former Democrat New Hampshire state representative who identifies as transgender was charged by a federal Massachusetts court Tuesday with child exploitation.

According to a press release from the office of the U.S. District Attorney for Massachusetts, Stacie-Marie Laughton, 39, a biological male who identifies as female, was charged with one count of sexual exploitation of children, as well as aiding and abetting. 

The release stated Laughton has been charged alongside former ‘intimate partner’ Lindsay Groves, a daycare worker in Tyngsborough, Massachusetts, who a preliminary forensic review showed had more than 10,000 text messages between the two ‘that included discussion about, and transfer of, explicit photographs that Groves had taken of children while employed at Creative Minds daycare.’

Those messages included sexually explicit images of children who appeared to be approximately three to five years old, and ‘explicit descriptions’ of sexual contact with each other, as well as children, the release said.

The investigation is ongoing.

Laughton was initially arrested in June for allegedly distributing ‘sexually explicit images of children,’ the latest in a string of run-ins with the law that includes making bomb threats and stalking.

After being elected to the New Hampshire legislature in 2012, Laughton was unable to serve due to still being on probation for a 2008 felony conviction of credit card fraud.

Laughton was also arrested for making a bomb threat against the Southern New Hampshire Medical Center in 2015 and was arrested again in 2021 on charges related to the misuse of the state’s 911 texting system.

Despite Laughton’s criminal past, the candidate was elected for a second term to represent Nashua, New Hampshire, in the 2022 elections, but was never seated after being jailed again for multiple stalking-related charges.

According to the press release, Laughton will appear in federal court in Boston at a later date.

Fox News’ Aubrie Spady contributed to this report.

Democratic U.S. Rep. Dan Goldman, N.Y., on Wednesday appeared to accidentally reveal that President Biden had discussed Hunter Biden’s foreign business deals with him during a hearing in which two IRS whistleblowers testified before the House Oversight Committee. 

Goldman pressed IRS supervisor Gary Shapley, who previously blew the whistle on alleged political influence surrounding prosecutorial decisions throughout the federal probe into the president’s son, about whether the president had any connection to his son’s business dealings. 

‘Hunter told his dad, according to (Biden family business associate) Rob Walker, ‘I may be trying to start a company or try to do something with these guys,” Goldman said. ‘Now let me ask you something. That doesn’t sound much like Joe Biden was involved in whatever Hunter Biden was doing with the (Chinese oil and natural gas company) CEFC if Hunter Biden is telling him that he’s trying to do business with them, does it?’

Shapley agreed but noted that it shows that the younger Biden told his father that he was talking to the president about his business. 

‘That is true, Hunter Biden does try to do business,’ Goldman interrupted. ‘That’s correct.’

Goldman asserted that Shapley has no ‘direct evidence’ connecting President Biden to any of his son’s business deals, and that he actually has proof that he wasn’t involved. 

Moments earlier he referred to messages on WhatsApp that said President Biden only sat with his son and never discussed business dealings. 

Another IRS employee, special agent Joseph Ziegler, whose identity was revealed during the hearing, testified before the committee that the president’s youngest son raked in over $17 million from business deals in China, Ukraine and Romania, beginning while his father was vice president.

Those deals included multimillion-dollar payments to Biden family-linked companies from 2014 to 2019, including $7.3 million from Ukrainian energy company Burisma Holdings.

‘This brings the total amount of foreign income streams received to approximately $17 million, correct?’ Comer asked Ziegler.

‘That is correct,’ Ziegler responded.

Zieler and Shapley allege that the officials at the Justice Department, FBI and IRS interfered in the investigation into Hunter Biden, moves they said were politically motivated. 

Fox News’ Jessica Chasmar and Peter Kasperowicz contributed to this report. 

The Senate this week took some initial steps toward regulating the use of artificial intelligence in the government as senators from both parties indicated they would push for amendments to the annual defense policy bill that seek to put some guardrails on the rapidly advancing technology.

Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., said he is pushing for this year’s National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) to contains a package of several amendments that includes one addressing several issues related to AI and national security.

Among the measures being proposed in the AI amendment is a ‘bug bounty’ system that would encourage white-hat hackers to help the Defense Department find vulnerabilities in the AI systems they use. This is an idea that Sen. Mike Rounds, R-S.D., has worked on for more than a year.

‘We’re trying to put together a bounty system, where we find bugs that use AI, that we have alternative ways of protecting against them,’ Rounds told Fox News Digital on Wednesday.

Other ideas in the amendment are aimed at getting a better understanding of how the Pentagon uses AI and how it might defend against AI-generated threats. It includes language aimed at enhancing the government’s knowledge of its current AI capabilities and providing Congress and officials with a direction on where it’s headed by calling for various reports by Pentagon officials as well as financial regulators.

‘Artificial Intelligence is here right now, is used to defend our country today, our adversaries use it as well,’ Rounds said when asked to describe other provisions in the amendment. ‘What we want to do is to find out on a department-by-department basis where they’re using AI today, what their plans are, whether or not they have a series of solutions to protect our country against other people that are using AI.’

‘It’s also telling the Department of Defense that we want to find out what their long-term plan is for not just gathering the data that you can on AI but also in terms of how they’re going to coordinate all the related AI systems that they currently use or plan on using it in the future,’ Rounds said. ‘And finally, we’re talking about personnel … that understand AI and will incorporate AI in the future.’

Schumer has said for months that he wants the Senate to learn more about AI and that a broader bill to regulate AI would be coming soon, some time after more listening sessions take place in the fall. On the Senate floor Tuesday, Schumer praised this first initial step to attack the problem.

‘The Senate has already done important preliminary work to bring ourselves up to speed on this issue,’ he said. ‘But the NDAA will be the Senate’s first opportunity this year to pass real AI legislation.’

Rounds said the basis for the amendment’s proposals came from recommendations in an AI commission report from last year. These measures are not ‘all-inclusive,’ he said, but are a ‘very simple first step’ for the Senate to take.

AI has been a hot topic on Capitol Hill so far this year as tech executives have met publicly and privately with lawmakers who are discussing if and how to start regulating the technology.

Last week, the House of Representatives passed its version of the NDAA and included an AI provision by Rep. Marc Molinaro, R-N.Y., which called for the Pentagon to launch a study into potential weak points in the U.S.’s military defenses that could be exploited by AI weaponized by foreign adversaries.

Other provisions in the House NDAA bill encourage the Defense Department to explore how it can use AI to boost U.S. national security.