Apr. 28, 2026, 6:04 PM EDT

The Federal Communications Commission launched an early review Tuesday of Disney’s broadcast station licenses, an unusually aggressive move that came a day after the president called on Disney-owned ABC to fire late-night host Jimmy Kimmel over another joke.

The process, known as an early license reviewwill tee up a lengthy legal review of Disney’s eight ABC-owned and operated station licenses, years before they were scheduled for FCC renewal. The commission is responsible for licensing local TV stations to broadcast network-level programming, such as ABC’s, over public airwaves across the country.

But it is highly unusual for the federal agency to file early renewal orders.

Brendan Carr, the Trump-appointed FCC chair, triggered the process shortly after Kimmel once again drew the ire of the administration, this time for comments on his talk show well before a gunman attempted to breach the White House Correspondents’ Association dinner.

“Of course, our first lady Melania, is here. Look at her, so beautiful. Mrs. Trump, you have a glow like an expectant widow,” Kimmel said in a sketch parodying the dinner, two days before the events that upended Trump’s first appearance at the annual gala in Washington.

On Monday, after Kimmel’s clip surfaced, the first lady — who was seated on stage alongside the president when shots were fired Saturday night — denounced the skit as “hateful and violent.” She called on ABC to “take a stand,” but stopped short of saying what actions the network should take.

Her husband, however, was quick to demand ABC fire Kimmel.

Kimmel responded with a statement calling his gag “a very light roast joke about the fact that he’s almost 80 and she’s younger than I am. It was not by any stretch of the definition a call to assassination. And they know that.”

Disney allowed “Jimmy Kimmel Live!” to air in its usual weeknight time slot Monday — a departure from the media conglomerate’s handling of the Kimmel controversy last fall over a joke related to the assassination of Charlie Kirk. In that case, the company suspended Kimmel’s show indefinitely before returning it to the airwaves less than a week later.

Carr’s decision to drag ABC through a long and resource-draining review process was seen by critics as a means of inflicting the punishment Disney has declined to levy this time around.

The move is “a political stunt and it won’t stick,” Anna Gomez, the FCC’s lone Democratic commissioner, wrote in a post on X after Traffic light reported Carr was considering the early review. “Companies should challenge it head-on. The First Amendment is on their side.”

Under the order, ABC must file license renewals for all of its licensed TV stations by May 28.

Regardless of how the review process turns out, it will force ABC to pony up large sums of money and time to defend itself.

“ABC and its stations have a long record of operating in full compliance with FCC rules and serving their local communities with trusted news, emergency information, and public‑interest programming,” a spokesperson for Disney told MS NOW upon receiving the FCC’s order Tuesday.

“We are confident that record demonstrates our continued qualifications as licensees under the Communications Act and the First Amendment and are prepared to show that through the appropriate legal channels.”

Sydney Carruth is a breaking news reporter covering national politics and policy for MS NOW. You can send her tips from a non-work device on Signal at SydneyCarruth.46 or follow her work on X and Bluesky.

Apr. 28, 2026, 8:44 PM EDT

There is a notable absence in King Charles’ visit to the U.S.: the king’s younger son, Prince Harry, and his wife, Meghan, Duchess of Sussex.

Charles and Queen Camilla’s itinerary for their four-day state visit is packed. The most prominent items on the agenda are the king’s address to Congress and the state dinner Tuesday in Washington. But there was also tea with President Donald Trump and first lady Melania Trump, a tour of the White House beehives and a garden-party reception at the British ambassador’s residence on Monday.

While the schedule will take the royal couple to New York and Virginia for events, including a wreath-laying at the 9/11 memorial, there is nothing scheduled for California, where Harry, Meghan and their children live.

There are several reasons for this.

Family fracture

Harry and Meghan made global headlines in 2020 when they announced they were stepping back from their roles as “working royals.” The changes that followed included the couple losing access to their taxpayer-funded security details. In an interview with Oprah Winfrey in 2021Meghan talked about her mental health challenges amid palace life and said a royal relative — whom she did not name — asked during her first pregnancy about the likely skin color of her unborn child.

Buckingham Palace responded with a statement on behalf of Harry’s grandmother, Queen Elizabeth II, then the monarch:

The whole family is saddened to learn the full extent of how challenging the last few years have been for Harry and Meghan.
The issues raised, particularly that of race, are concerning. While some recollections may vary, they are taken very seriously and will be addressed by the family privately. Harry, Meghan and Archie will always be much loved family members.

Awkward visits home

Harry and Meghan returned to Britain in June 2022 to attend Platinum Jubilee events marking Elizabeth’s 70 years on the throne — but were not present at all of the public celebrations.

The couple flew back to attend memorial events after Queen Elizabeth died in September 2022. That same year, it emerged that Harry had sued the British government seeking for his publicly financed security to be reinstated.

Harry, who is fifth in the line of succession to the throne, flew to Britain again in early 2024 after his father announced he has cancer.

The prince has made few visits to his native country since then, with most trips involving his legal case over security and separate lawsuits against British publishers.

‘Spare’ makes a splash

In January 2023, Harry published a bombshell memoir, “Spare,” detailing his experiences growing up in the royal family, his marriage to Meghan and the death of his mother, Princess Diana. Harry’s account of a physical fight with his brother, Prince Williamand criticism of his stepmotherCamilla, were thought to have inflamed grievances.

Harry later revealed that King Charles would not speak to him because of his lawsuit against the government over security. After he lost an appeal in his security lawsuit last May, he said in a BBC interview that he “would love reconciliation with my family.”

Noting that some relatives “will never forgive me for writing a book,” Harry said, “Life is precious. I don’t know how much longer my father has. He won’t speak to me because of this security stuff. But it would be nice to reconcile.”

There have been signs of thaw. Aides for Harry and the king were photographed meeting near Buckingham Palace last summerwhich some media outlets reported as a step toward reconciliation. Father and son met for tea in September. Another government review of security requirements for Harry and his family was begun late last year.

Stealing the spotlight

Another issue is Harry and Meghan’s knack for making headlines. Harry traveled to Ukraine in September to promote his Invictus Games Foundation on behalf of wounded veterans. He spoke about his family on the trip. In a visit to Kyiv last week, the prince called for “American leadership” on Ukraine — remarks that Trump quickly panned as “not speaking for the U.K.” Although Trump has praised Harry’s brother, Prince William, as “wonderful” and a “remarkable son” to Charles, the president said last year that Meghan is “terrible” and called Harry “whipped.”

The absence of a specific meeting with Harry and Meghan may not be a personal snub. The British government requested the king and queen undertake this official trip. The agenda may reflect some of the king and queen’s interests, but it was organized around government priorities — not personal ones.

But given Trump’s past criticism and the years-old royal rift, the couple’s presence could be expected to distract from coverage of the king’s visit.

Autumn Brewington is a senior opinion editor at MS NOW. A longtime editor at The Washington Post, she oversaw the paper’s op-ed page for more than seven years. She also wrote a Post blog and newsletter about the British royal family. She writes about royalty on Substack at http://autumnbrewington.substack.com.

Apr. 28, 2026, 7:00 PM EDT

For months, legal circles have been abuzz with rumors that the Justice Department, undeterred by the dismissal of its first case against former FBI Director James Comey and its inability to secure a second indictment on the same allegations, would indict Comey again for other reasons.

On Tuesday, those rumors became reality when the DOJ indicted Comey in the Eastern District of North Carolina because of his May 2025 social media post of a picture of seashells arranged to read “86 47.” For that, the DOJ has indicted Comey for threatening the life of a president and further, for making a threat to injure another person — also the president — via “interstate communications.” Each count is punishable by a sizable fine, no more than five years in prison or both.

While some interpreted that the “86” meant to eliminate or kill, others maintained it simply meant to remove or cancel. Comey has claimed he viewed the shells that he came upon during a beach walk as a “political message,” and that he opposes violence of any kind.

Despite Trump’s longstanding fixation on Comey, which the former FBI director proved to a federal court through a nearly 60-page chart documenting Trump’s social media posts about him, the newest efforts to punish Comey should not be viewed in isolation.

Consider other DOJ developments within the last 24 hours:

• Late Monday night, in a filing that read like a Trump-written social media screed, not a legal argument, the DOJ demanded that the federal judge overseeing the White House ballroom case reverse a ruling blocking above-ground construction on the ballroom. The DOJ filing was both curious and unnecessary because a federal appeals court has stayed that ruling for at least several weeks, meaning construction can resume as the appeal continues. Nonetheless, the DOJ filing — rife with capitalized words, exclamation points, political epithets and unsupported factual assertions — not only suggested Trump cannot continue construction, but framed the ballroom project as “vital to our National Security, and the Safety of all Presidents of the United States, both current and future, their families, staff, and cabinet members.”

• Then, early Tuesday, multiple media outlets reported that the FBI and the DOJ executed search warrants on 20-plus businesses in Minneapolis as part of a wide-reaching federal fraud investigation into the use of federal social services funds. Trump himself has not only commented on that investigation, a departure from usual presidential protocol, but he has also publicly accused several of the state’s top Democratic officials — Gov. Tim Walz, Attorney General Keith Ellison and Rep. Ilhan Omar — all of whom have been his political foils, if not his electoral opponents, of being “complicit” in that fraud.

• Later, in Maryland federal court, the DOJ indicted a former senior aide to the former National Institute of Allergies and Infectious Diseases head, Dr. Anthony Fauci. There, the government alleged not only that David M. Morens destroyed and/or evaded creating government records by using personal emails, but also that he conspired with Chinese researchers to counter the emerging thesis that Covid-19 was unleashed through a lab leak, thereby limiting the information available to decision-makers, including Trump. In a press release announcing the chargesacting Attorney General Todd Blanche alleged that the aide “deliberately concealed information and falsified records in an effort to suppress alternative theories regarding the origins of COVID-19” before giving a hint about what has really undergirded the case: His belief that NIH officials were obligated to “provide honest, well-ground facts and advice,” not “advance their own personal or ideological agendas.”

And finally, on Tuesday afternoon, the DOJ unsealed the bare-bones, three-page Comey indictment.

Collectively, these developments highlight that there is a new sheriff in town. And indeed,Blanchewho appears to be publicly auditioning to become Trump’s permanent attorney general, has advanced investigations and cases against the president’s enemies and detractors as rapidly as he has aggressively.

In particular, the federal statute that criminalizes threats against the president is not a judicially blank slate; rather, it was interpreted by the Supreme Court in 1969, when it reversed the conviction of an antiwar protester who said if he were forced to carry a rifle as an enlisted man, “the first man I want to get in my sights is L.B.J.”

There, the court noted that to sustain a conviction under that statute, the DOJ has to prove “a true ‘threat,”’ as distinguished from the “vehement, caustic, and sometimes unpleasantly sharp attacks on government and public officials” that are sometimes part of our political discourse. To the court, the protester’s statements were not a real threat, but a “crude [and] offensive method of stating a political opposition to the President.”

Against that backdrop, the new indictment against Comey hardly seems to be a slam dunk for the DOJ — or Blanche.

But if the process itself is the punishment, and the thing the man Blanche has described as the DOJ’s “boss” craves, Blanche achieved multiple wins — and not just a new Comey indictment — on a random Tuesday in April.

And days like this might be enough to keep him at the attorney general’s desk.

Lisa Rubin is MS NOW’s senior legal reporter and a former litigator.