Partisan fights played out publicly in high-profile votes in the Senate this week, but lawmakers are quietly finding common ground in their support of a push to have the unedited footage of Caribbean boat strikes released.

Tucked into the annual National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) is a provision that would require the Pentagon to release the full, unedited footage of boat strikes carried out in the Caribbean in exchange for Secretary of War Pete Hegseth’s travel budget to be fully funded.

The Trump administration has come under scrutiny on Capitol Hill for repeated strikes on alleged drug boats from Venezuela over the last several months, which came to a head last week in the wake of the deadly Sept. 2 double-strike on an alleged drug boat in the Caribbean Sea.

‘I think we need to see all of the video footage, particularly of the second strike from Sept. 2,’ Sen. Rand Paul, R-Ky., told Fox News Digital.

Lawmakers in the upper chamber don’t know who slipped the provision into the colossal legislative package, including Senate Armed Services Committee Chair Roger Wicker, R-Miss., who told reporters, ‘I would imagine that it got added at the leadership level.’

The massive legislative package sailed through the House on Thursday and is set for a series of procedural tests in the Senate beginning on Monday. And many lawmakers broadly support the release of the footage, particularly of the double-tap strike, to Congress.

Sen. Mike Rounds, R-S.D., who is a member of the Senate Armed Services Committee, told Fox News Digital that his committee, and ‘maybe the [Senate] Intel Committee,’ should have complete access to the unedited footage.

‘And then, based upon that, we can decide whether or not we would push further,’ Rounds said. ‘But let us look at the facts first.’

Sen. Tim Kaine, D-Va., who also sits on the Armed Services Committee, told Fox News Digital that he fully supported the provision and noted that Hegseth and the Pentagon had already released partial footage, treating it like ‘almost a commercial.’

‘So you released part of the video, and you’re banging your chest about it,’ Kaine said. ‘You should release the whole thing.’

Sen. Angus King, I-Maine, agreed and told Fox News Digital that it shouldn’t be a roadblock to passage of the broader defense package, either.

‘There’s no excuse for not releasing it. It shouldn’t. If somebody is not releasing something, it usually tells me that they don’t want it to see the light of day,’ he said. ‘I just want the video of the rest of the strike. That’s not me. It’s the American people who need to see this. They need to know what’s being done in their name.’

During the week, the so-called ‘Gang of Eight,’ which includes Republican and Democratic leadership from the Senate and House along with the chairs and ranking members of the intelligence committees in both chambers, met with Hegseth and Secretary of State Marco Rubio for a briefing on the strikes.

Neither Thune nor Senate Intel Committee Chair Tom Cotton, R-Ark., commented on the briefing, but Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., characterized it as ‘very unsatisfying.’

‘I asked Secretary Hegseth, Secretary of Defense Hegseth, would he let every member of Congress see unedited videos of the Sept. 2 strike? His answer, ‘We have to study it well,’’ Schumer said. ‘In my view, they’ve studied it long enough. Congress ought to be able to see it.’

Some Republicans support more transparency on the matter, too, including Sen. Steve Daines, R-Mont., who told Fox News Digital that he didn’t ‘have any problem’ releasing the footage.

But he emphasized that the entire point of the strikes was to combat the flow of drugs into the country.

‘We’re losing sight of the most important narrative, and that is, more Americans have died of illegal drugs in the last seven years than World War I, World War II and Vietnam combined,’ Daines said.

United States Ambassador to the United Nations Michael Waltz recently returned from a Middle East swing, touting the ‘amazing progress’ in the implementation of President Donald Trump’s Israel–Gaza peace deal, and telling Fox News Digital that the situation abroad is ‘night and day to where we were a year ago.’

Fox News Digital spoke exclusively with Waltz Thursday evening, just hours after he returned to the United States from the Middle East.

Waltz traveled from the Lebanese border to the Syrian border, the Egyptian border, Jordan to Israel and beyond.

‘The purpose of the trip was to get on the ground and see the implementation,’ Waltz said. ‘We met with the Jordanians, the king, the prime minister and president of Israel — we met with our troops.’ 

Waltz explained that there is a ‘small contingent’ of approximately 100 U.S. troops in Israel — not in Gaza — to help to pull together humanitarian aid and military coordination.

‘We have had air defense assets in Israel for quite some time to deal with attacks from Iran,’ Waltz said. ‘This is now a small headquarters element to provide a coordination — no one was talking to each other, and the U.S. military is doing what it does best.’

Waltz said the U.S. troops in Israel are working with the United Nations, non-governmental organizations, the Israelis, Egyptians and Arab countries, while having contact with Palestinians and ensuring that humanitarian aid is being delivered.

‘From an ‘America First’ standpoint, the United States shouldn’t be doing this alone,’ Waltz said. ‘Burden-sharing is a key component and dozens are helping under President Trump’s leadership.’

Waltz led the charge at the United Nations, implementing the now-adopted resolution that endorses the Board of Peace, sets parameters for Gaza’s transitional governance and launches the International Stabilization Force outlined in Trump’s 20-point Gaza peace plan.

Trump’s plan to end the Gaza conflict calls for Gaza to be a de-radicalized, terror-free zone that does not pose a threat to its neighbors. It also calls for Gaza to be redeveloped for the benefit of the people of Gaza and more.

Under the peace plan, Israeli forces would withdraw from the region, and a temporary transitional governance of a technocratic, apolitical Palestinian committee, responsible for delivering the day-to-day running of public services and municipalities for the people of Gaza will be created.

That government will be under the oversight of a new international transitional body called the Board of Peace, chaired by Trump and other members and heads of state.

The resolution makes the plan international law.

‘At the end of the day, Hamas has to go,’ Walz explained. ‘What we cannot let happen is Hamas survives, and the international community pours billions of dollars into the situation — Hamas attacks Israel again, as they previously pledged to do, and Israel responds, and we are in the same situation — we cannot let that happen again. That’s why we are doing things differently this time.’

Waltz pointed to the Board of Peace led by Trump, as well as the newly formed stabilization force, with troops from countries like Indonesia and Azerbaijan — as well as the technocratic committee responsible for turning government services back on.

‘This has never been done before,’ Waltz said. ‘My job was to get the United Nations and the international community to bless that, and we did.’ 

‘The bottom line is this: this was not a big symbolic thing or deal for the president,’ Waltz continued. ‘He is serious about bringing Middle East peace once and for all.’ 

Waltz explained that the ‘next strategic step will be an extension of the Abraham Accords,’ which he described as the president’s ‘true objective.’

Waltz explained that the implementation of the peace deal ‘unlocks the next round of the Abraham Accords.’

‘There are a number of great conversations ongoing,’ he said.

‘We have to remember where we were a year ago, and see everything in perspective,’ he explained. ‘You had Iran marching towards a nuke; Hezbollah launching rockets on Israel; hostages in tunnels, and now you have hostages out; Lebanon has the best chance in a generation; and Iran had its nuclear capabilities obliterated in Operation Midnight Hammer—all in ten months.’

Waltz added: ‘It is truly incredible. It is night and day to where we were a year ago.’

MINNEAPOLIS, MN – Republican John Nagel, who is running against Dem. Rep. Ilhan Omar in her Minneapolis district, spoke to Fox News Digital about the responsibility she holds in the unfolding massive fraud scandal that has garnered national headlines.

‘Where did this actually start?’ Nagel told Fox News Digital. ‘She passed legislation. Her legislation actually started and it allowed people to get into Feeding Our Future. If you look at where the fraud is, it’s primarily her [5th Congressional District], the district that I’m running in against her. And it’s really odd to think that you know all the fraud just happened in a particular area, and it was a bill that she, you know, particularly put together.’

Nagel is referring to allegations that the free meals at the center of the massive fraud scandal were made possible by the 2020 MEALS Act, introduced by Omar and passed with bipartisan support. He told Fox News Digital the public deserves to know who helped her craft that legislation.

Members of Omar’s inner circle personally profited from the $1 billion welfare fraud scandal in her district that has placed her Somali constituency under a White House microscope, Nagel said. He also said that Omar held events at one of the restaurants, Safari Land, which was named in the fraud case, knew one of its now-convicted owners and had a staffer who was also convicted.

‘If you look at the Safari Land restaurant, if you’re gonna be in politics, you need to go through the people at the Safari Land restaurant,’ Nagel said. ‘They kind of control the politics. She had all of her fundraising things. I mean, that was sort of her hangout. That’s where she spent money, got donations.’

Guhaad Hashi Said, sometimes referred to as an ‘enforcer’ for Omar’s campaign, is one of the over 70 people who have been indicted for his role in the Feeding Our Future scandal. Nagel told Fox News Digital the public deserves answers on that relationship and what Omar knew about the fraud.

‘There’s a lot of really deep, deep ties,’ Nagel said.

‘I think time will tell with the investigation. But again, there’s just too much circumstantial evidence to look at this and say, she had to have known something, or what staff member knew something?’

The Small Business Administration is investigating a network of Somali groups in Minnesota that it says is tied to the scandal, and a House Oversight Committee has opened an investigation into Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz’s role.

President Donald Trump last week criticized Omar and blamed the Somali community for the scope of fraud occurring in Minnesota. 

Nagel also asserted that there was a money trail potentially funneled to Omar from her associates tied to the Feeding Our Future fraud scandal, and he said that she has returned some of the money but not all of it.

‘A whole lot of people that were convicted donated a whole lot of money. Omar says that she gave the money back,’ Nagel said. ‘Well, if you go into public records, she gave some money back, but there’s a whole lot more money there that she didn’t report. And I think if people were just to go through the everyday records that are out there, you’ll find out that her involvement in the money that she has is questionable.’

Nagel told Fox News Digital, ‘If she truly cared about the fraud, her name wouldn’t be attached all over to these other people. She came on and she made a statement about how terrible it is to basically steal food from children. Yeah, okay, that’s a really nice thing to say, but you have way too many people that you’re associated with that actually did that. Now she yells racism anytime somebody puts any pressure on her.’

Fox News Digital asked Nagel what can be done to fix the fraud issues. He said, first and foremost, Minnesota must elect a new governor.

‘The things that we can do to fix this is you get yourself a new competent, honest governor, you get yourself a new honest, competent AG,’ Nagel said. ‘We get rid of Ilhan Omar, and we put people in the state of Minnesota that actually want to do the right thing. They’re not in it for the money, they’re in it because they’re great state employees and they’re serving the public. That’s what we’re gonna have to do. You’re gonna have to entirely root the Democratic Party, and then anybody that’s been appointed to a position, we’re gonna have to root them out too, to find out if you know they’ve been letting things slide.’

Nagel described the fraud situation in Minnesota as a ‘cancer’ that will continue to ‘spread’ unless ‘you cut the entire cancer out.’

Fox News Digital reached out to Omar’s office for comment. 

‘I think what happened is that, you know, when you have these kind of new programs that are, um, designed to help people, you’re oftentimes relying on third parties to be able to facilitate. And I just think that a lot of the COVID programs that were set up — they were set up so quickly that a lot of the guardrails did not get created,’ Omar said last week.

Fox News Digital’s Louis Casiano contributed to this report.

There is still a desire to solve the looming healthcare cliff after dueling votes in the Senate on partisan Obamacare fixes crashed and burned Thursday, but both sides of the aisle are still miles from finding a middle ground.

The enhanced Obamacare subsidies are set to expire by the end of the year, and Congress is gearing up to leave Washington, D.C., at the end of next week until the new year. There are several options on the table, including numerous Senate Republican proposals or just moving ahead with a short-term extension of the subsidies.

But lawmakers have to land on what exactly they want to do, and what could pass the 60-vote filibuster threshold, first.

‘I think the question is, ‘Do the Democrats, after they got their messaging vote done, actually want to engage in a real conversation about this?’’ Senate Majority Leader John Thune, R-S.D., said. ‘Because it didn’t seem like they had a real high level of interest in reforms, but there are some who do. I don’t know if there are enough, but I think we’re going to get a sense of that here very soon.’

Thune echoed what many Republicans in the upper chamber believed: Senate Democrats’ three-year extension of the subsidies was never meant to succeed, but only served as a political messaging exercise.

Still, four Senate Republicans crossed the aisle to vote for Democrats’ plan. Sen. Lisa Murkowski, R-Alaska, argued that she voted for both proposals not because both were exactly what she wanted, but because she wanted to get the ball rolling toward a solution.

‘Sometimes around the Senate, we have to demonstrate what we can’t do first before we can get to what we need to do,’ she said. ‘Today was the first step in that process of demonstrating what we can’t do now. Let’s get on with it and fix it.’

Conversely, the GOP’s first attempt wasn’t going to pass muster with Senate Democrats, either. Some in the upper chamber are mulling a short-term extension to the subsidies, be it six months to a year, but that idea doesn’t tackle the several reforms Senate Republicans have demanded for their support.

‘Discussions will continue,’ Senate Majority Whip John Barrasso, R-Wyo., told Fox News Digital. ‘Both parties are going to find a solution to actually lower the cost of care and put patients in charge and get rid of the waste and the fraud and the abuse and the corruption that has run rampant in Obamacare.’

Whatever happens next will likely be the product of rank-and-file negotiations, not top-level decisions between Thune and Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y.

But there is a growing sense that President Donald Trump should get more involved and dictate exactly what he wants to be done. Trump previously signaled that he wants to move ahead with health savings accounts (HSAs) but in recent weeks has largely stayed an arms’ length away from the Obamacare turmoil in the Senate.

When asked how lawmakers get out of the healthcare jam, Sen. Chris Murphy, D-Conn., told Fox News Digital, ‘We don’t.’

‘Not until Donald Trump decides we get out of it,’ Murphy said. ‘He’s the President of the United States, his party controls the House and the Senate, so the only way we save people from healthcare disasters for Donald Trump, the leader of the Republican Party, is to decide to fix this.’

Republicans still have several options on the table, including a plan from Sen. Roger Marshall, R-Kan., that marries an extension of the subsidies with HSAs and reforms, and a plan from Sens. Susan Collins, R-Maine, and Bernie Moreno, R-Ohio, that would extend the credits for two years, among others.

There’s also the possibility that the healthcare fight continues on into the next year and goes through the partisan budget reconciliation process, which Republicans used earlier this year to ram through Trump’s agenda.

While that’s an option, many in the upper chamber acknowledge that the best way forward is working with the other side of the aisle.

‘I would rather do it on a bipartisan basis, because that’s the way that Congress is supposed to work,’ Sen. Bill Cassidy, R-La., told Fox News Digital. ‘But if Democrats are intent upon sticking people with either higher premiums and/or $6,000 deductible, we got to do something. So it’s not good for the American people.’

While there are lawmakers who hope the failed votes were the springboard forward, and not a dead end, toward tackling the Obamacare issue, Schumer signaled that it was Republicans’ fault that the subsidies would likely expire.

‘This is their crisis now, and they’re going to have to answer for it,’ he said.

While the world’s attention has focused on Russia’s war in Ukraine and Israel’s war with Hamas in Gaza, Sudan remains the world’s largest displacement crisis, with some 12 million people driven out of their homes.

‘Sudan is under the darkest of clouds, a catastrophe that has, for far too long, been met with paralysis by the international community,’ Rep. Chris Smith, R-N.J., chair of the House Foreign Affairs Africa subcommittee, said during his opening statements during a December 11 hearing on crimes against humanity in Sudan.

Smith said the hearing was a global call to action and that there must be an immediate cessation of hostilities between the warring factions.

‘Crimes against humanity — particularly by the Rapid Support Forces — including mass rape, ethnic targeting and systematic looting, must be investigated, and perpetrators held accountable,’ Smith added.

The conflict in Sudan has received renewed attention after President Donald Trump vowed to secure a peace deal in the African nation following his meeting with Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman in November. 

Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, director-general of the World Health Organization, recently said repeated drone strikes on Dec. 4 in Sudan’s South Kordofan region struck a kindergarten and nearby hospital, killing 114 people, including 63 children.

‘Disturbingly, paramedics and responders came under attack as they tried to move the injured from the kindergarten to the hospital,’ Tedros said in a statement.

Sudan Doctors Network, a medical organization, said the attacks were perpetrated by the Rapid Support Forces.

The conflict in Sudan has been raging since April 2023, when an uneasy alliance between Sudan’s two warring factions, the government-led Sudanese armed forces and the paramilitary Rapid Support Forces (RSF) collapsed following a tenuous power-sharing agreement struck in 2021. 

Sudan’s army and the RSF had collaborated for years under the previous regime of ousted dictator Omar al-Bashir.

The situation has only escalated since fighting first broke out in 2023 and has not garnered the same level of international effort or outrage that the conflicts in Ukraine and Gaza have generated.

‘The war in Sudan has been one of the most gruesome humanitarian catastrophes in world history. However, there has been frequent paralysis by world leaders and international institutions to solve it, in addition to reduced, fluctuating media attention on the conflict,’ Caroline Rose, director of Military and National Security Priorities at New Lines Institute, told Fox News Digital.

‘This could be attributed to the fact that, unlike wars in Ukraine and Gaza, there is not a component of great-power competition or regional contestation,’ she added.

Rose and other observers of the conflict note that there is inhibited ground access, creating challenges not only for journalistic reporting, but also the documentation of war crimes and testimonies. 

The Sudanese armed forces have prevented access to aid workers in territories they control on the basis of sovereignty and have expelled humanitarian workers that had been in the country.

The RSF has also been accused of committing grave human rights violations and reportedly killed over 400 aid workers and patients in October at the Saudi Maternity Hospital in the North Darfur city of El Fasher. The RSF siege of El Fasher caused at least 28,000 people to flee to neighboring towns, and the U.N. Human Rights Office accused the RSF of ‘summary executions, mass killings, rapes, attacks against humanitarian workers, looting, abductions and forced displacement.’

Even as the Trump administration works for a ceasefire between the warring factions, the killings continue. 

Tom Perriello, the former U.S. special envoy for Sudan, said in a September New York Times interview that he believed up to 400,000 have been killed since the outbreak of violence in 2023. A recent article in Foreign Policy put the figure at 100,000 in what it called the ‘forgotten war.’

In addition to the deaths, it’s been estimated by various groups that more than 30 million people are in need of humanitarian assistance and around 21.2 million, or 45% of the population, are facing high levels of acute food insecurity.