Politics

The Bidens keep pushing 2024 into the spotlight, to Democrats’ dismay

Published

1 month ago

May 28, 2026

Democrats want to move on from 2024. The Bidens won’t let them.

Former first lady Jill Biden put a glaring spotlight back on the debate that ended her husband’s political career while promoting her new memoir. Former President Joe Biden is drawing attention again to his audio interviews with Special Counsel Robert Hur as he sues the Justice Department to prevent their release. And his scandal-ridden son Hunter Biden, whose past Republicans repeatedly weaponized on the campaign trail, is making headlines again — this time for appearing on a podcast with flame-throwing conspiracy theorist Candace Owens.

Jill Biden’s stunning admission this week that she thought her embattled husband was having a stroke on the debate stage in June 2024 stood in stark contrast to her positive spin and staunch defense in the moment. And it ripped open barely healed wounds from Democrats’ disastrous effort to hold the White House, setting off a fresh round of backward-looking fingerpointing less than a week after the party’s botched autopsy of the 2024 presidential election.

Leading Democrats say it’s an unnecessary distraction as they push to keep their party focused on a critical midterm — and what voters truly care about.

“We don’t need to be distracted by what the DNC says about the autopsy. I don’t need to be distracted about anyone’s book,” New Mexico Gov. Michelle Lujan Grisham, a Democrat, told reporters on the sidelines of a Democratic National Committee meeting in Washington on Thursday. “What I need to do is to focus on making a difference in the lives of people. And that’s what I think they’re getting really frustrated about, is all this nonsense. I don’t think the average Democratic voter, honestly, particularly in New Mexico, gives a damn about that book or the debate anymore.”

Lujan Grisham, who sat on the national advisory board for the 2024 Biden-Harris campaign, stressed that she didn’t mean “any disrespect” to Jill Biden and later said she is a “big Joe Biden fan.”

Former President Joe Biden speaks to a crowd during a fundraising event with the South Carolina Democratic Party on February 27, 2026.

Still, Jill Biden’s confession that she was “frightened” by her husband’s debate performance landed with a thud among former Biden White House and campaign staffers who were told in the moment to treat the then-president’s halting and haphazard debate performance as little more than a blip.

Meghan Hays, a former special assistant to Joe Biden in the White House who left before the 2024 reelection bid, cautioned that the timing and context of the former first lady’s memoir risks dealing Democrats a setback at a time when they’re on an electoral hot streak.

“I think that they need to sell books, and I think that Dr. Biden wants her story out there,” she said on C-SPAN’s “Ceasefire,” hosted by Blue Light News’s Dasha Burns.

“It is not welcome from Democrats,” Hays said. “We have a lot of momentum in our favor … and when we get pulled back into conversations about age and the election in ‘24, it’s never gonna be a good place for Democrats. I think it’s a tough place to be.”

Hays wasn’t the only former Biden official who expressed frustration.

“My reaction was basically: ‘Welcome to the club.’ Every person across America and in your administration wondered the same thing, and instead of acknowledging that, we were told for days to ignore it — that it was just a bad night, just an anomaly,” said another former Biden White House staffer, granted anonymity to speak candidly.

Still, several prominent Democratic strategists, former party leaders and past Biden-Harris officials downplayed the significance of this latest bout of 2024 relitigating, dismissing it as little more than white noise that wouldn’t have much effect on the party’s prospects in 2026 or 2028.

“Let everyone finish venting about ‘24 now and get it out of their systems,” former Rep. Susan Wild (D-Pa.), who narrowly lost her reelection that year as Trump carried her state, said in a text message to Blue Light News, adding that “voters won’t remember any of this in 2028.”

But, she added, “I am a bit unhappy about the DNC’s delayed release of the autopsy of 2024. We don’t need those reminders in writing and we certainly don’t need to give the Republicans any more oppo to remind voters of everything we did wrong in 2024.”

A spokesperson for the Bidens declined to comment. A former Biden White House and campaign staffer, granted anonymity to speak candidly, said in a text message that the party writ large has moved on.

“While it feels painful and traumatic for those who had to deal with this at the time, the public is focused on the current president and related concerns: high gas prices, immigration concerns, [Jeffrey] Epstein,” the person said.

The renewed firestorm around the two-year-old debate comes as other moves by the Biden clan force Democrats to again confront his decline in real time.

Joe Biden is suing the Trump administration in an effort to block the release of recorded interviews with a ghostwriter that were obtained by the Justice Department during a now-shuttered probe of whether he had mishandled classified information. But his effort to stop the tapes and transcripts from going public is dredging up another painful encounter that derailed his second term hopes.

Hur chose not to charge the president in that investigation because he believed jurors would likely see Biden as an“elderly man with a poor memory,” a moment that set off a political firestorm. The audio of Hur’s interviews with Biden, released last year, backed that up.

As Biden tries to keep those tapes under wraps, his son made recent moves to draw more attention to himself and his family.

Hunter Biden has triggered a raft of headlines in recent days after he taped a podcast with Owens, the conspiratorial conservative influencer who has repeatedly attacked the Biden family and the former president’s mental capacity. In the interview, Owens promised not to disparage Joe Biden and even commended Hunter Biden for defending his father. But the widespread media coverage still generated backlash within the party.

Hunter Biden departs from federal court, Monday, June 10, 2024, in Wilmington, Delaware.

Some Democrats are simply ready to sweep the Bidens into the dustbin of history so their party can move forward.

“Nobody wants to relitigate the worst debate performance since the Greek Republic. Why are we talking about this? Why are we talking about Hunter Biden? Why is Hunter Biden talking about Hunter Biden?” said Pete Giangreco, a longtime Democratic strategist who worked on Barack Obama’s campaigns but was not involved in Joe Biden’s or Kamala Harris’ bids.

“Your time has passed, move on. … The Republicans and all their super PACs are going to outspend us three-to-one, four-to-one — that’s what we need to be focused on,” he added.

But the Bidens — and Harris — show no signs of slinking back into the shadows. Harris, who released a book last year criticizing the president with whom she served, has signaled she could mount a third presidential bid in 2028. Joe Biden, for his part, has begun endorsing his former administration officials who are running in midterm contests; one of his picks, former Atlanta Mayor Keisha Lance Bottoms, won her gubernatorial primary last week in the key swing state of Georgia. Jill Biden is embarking on a book tour to promote her work.

And other Democrats say they’re less frustrated at the Biden family itself than they are with their party’s most vocal factions, which descend into a circular firing squad with each drip of new information about 2024.

“I would rather not have to talk about it. But they both have the right to do what they’re doing,” Maria Cardona, a prominent Democratic strategist who backed Biden’s reelection bid, told Blue Light News on the sidelines of the DNC meeting. “But we also are in control with how we react to it. So let them do their thing. They are no longer in control of the party. We don’t have to rehash every single word that comes out of it.”

Politics

The Croatian team’s favorite singer is a fascist salute away from the mainstream

Published

3 minutes ago

July 2, 2026

Blue Light Newsroom

BELGRADE, Serbia — When Croatian supporters flooded Toronto and Philadelphia this summer, draping city halls in the red-and-white checkerboards found on the Croatian coat of arms and belting out one power ballad after another, the loudest songs, as always, belonged to Marko Perković.

“He’s become an inseparable phenomenon anytime Croatia plays or participates in any kind of competition, especially sporting events,” said Hrvoje Klasić, the leading Croatian historian focused on the legacy of World War II.

“People both at home and abroad view him as synonymous with love for one’s country,” he continued.

Better known as Thompson, after the submachine gun he carried in the Balkan wars of the 1990s, he is the country’s most popular singer — and its most enduring embarrassment.

Croatian fans have made his song, “Lijepa Li Si,” the unofficial anthem of the team and a fixture at every match, a song whose chorus salutes the wartime Croat statelet in Bosnia whose leadership was convicted of war crimes.

Thompson’s wider catalog is more explicit still. One track opens with “Za dom spremni,” the salute that functioned as Croatia’s answer to “Sieg Heil” during the World War II Ustashe regime.

In the past, his concerts have been banned or canceled in the Netherlands, Switzerland, Slovenia, Austria and Germany.

None of this is fringe within Croatia, however. Last summer Thompson drew more than 500,000 people to a single Zagreb concert, the largest in the country’s history, where fans chanted the same Ustashe slogan while the authorities looked away.

In 2018, when Croatia nearly won the World Cup, the second-placed team was welcomed back with Thompson aboard the victory bus and star midfielder Luka Modrić personally asking for him to perform.

Croatia has spent three decades declining to reckon with the Ustashe past, treating the fascist puppet state’s symbols as heritage rather than crime.

Across post-communist Europe, the end of the Cold War brought a wave of historical revisionism, as nations that felt their identity had been suppressed under communism recast neo-Nazi and far-right figures as patriots. Hungary, Ukraine and the Baltic states, as well as Croatia, have all made a version of this bargain, folding once-condemned nationalists into their modern national myths.

“These nations believe they were robbed of their national identities in the past century or are dissatisfied with their country’s present achievements, so they reach back into the past for themes from a more distinguished past,” Klasić concluded.

Politics

Inside the DHS’s World Cup nerve center

Published

33 minutes ago

July 2, 2026

Blue Light Newsroom

Every day, FBI intelligence officials, weather forecasters, diplomats, security coordinators and people from more than a dozen federal agencies gather on a conference line for what has become one of the most unusual meetings in Washington.

It’s dubbed the “WISLE call” — an acronym that stands for Warning/Weather, Intent, Safety/Security, Logistics/Communications and Event Operations. And it happens every morning around 10 a.m. Eastern during the FIFA World Cup, which is about to enter its fourth week.

From a secure operations floor inside FEMA’s Washington headquarters, officials spend about 30 minutes running through the day’s World Cup matches, touching on everything from extreme heat advisories and fan festivals to cartel activity in Mexico, drone threats, visa issues and stadium security.

On Tuesday, when Brazil played Japan in Houston and Germany faced Paraguay in Boston, the biggest concern on the call wasn’t terrorism. It was the weather.

“The main story over the next couple of days is going to be building heat across the central and eastern United States,” a National Weather Service official told the group. Philadelphia, Boston and New York were all under heat watches, while Houston officials reported temperatures nearing 95 degrees with a heat index above 100.

The daily briefing offers a rare window into the machinery and threat assessments that underpin the largest sporting event ever hosted in North America.

The command center resembles a national emergency operations center more than a sports headquarters. Ten Homeland Security agencies including TSA, Customs and Border Protection, and FEMA work side-by-side on a watch floor staffed around the clock. The State Operations Coordination Center for Event Response — yes another “SOCCER” acronym — is also involved.

About 50 people occupy the physical operations center during 12-hour shifts, from 7 a.m. to 7 p.m. and again overnight, monitoring every match, fan festival and emerging threat across the United States. The center works closely with the International Police Cooperation Center in Leesburg, Virginia, where law enforcement officials from participating countries work alongside U.S. officials. Monday’s “WISLE” call began with intelligence — and, again, concerns about extreme weather.

An FBI official updated participants on the coming heat wave, noting the bureau was coordinating with federal, state and local partners ahead of the July 4th holiday while also tracking security implications as national teams exited the tournament and closed their training camps.

From there, officials moved city by city. In Boston, clear weather for the sellout crowd of nearly 66,000 for Germany-Paraguay. In Houston, preparations were underway for heat-related illnesses for the Brazil-Japan match.

The State Department’s representative dialed in from the Joint Coordination Center at the U.S. Embassy in Mexico City with an update spanning three countries. Mexican police had dismantled a criminal group targeting tourists around World Cup venues, Vancouver’s fan festival had reached capacity during Canada’s match, and officials were monitoring large fan gatherings expected later that evening in both Mexico City and Monterrey.

Despite the long checklist of potential problems, nearly every operational report ended the same way: “All teams are green.”

Andrew Giuliani, executive director of the White House World Cup Task Force, used his remarks to thank FEMA and Homeland Security personnel while highlighting accomplishments across the federal government that extended well beyond soccer.

He praised U.S. Marshals for recovering 35 missing and endangered children during Operation Yellow Card in Boston, noted DEA fentanyl seizures in Kansas City and public health operations led by Health and Human Services and the CDC. He also announced that the mother of the Capo Verde goalkeeper had successfully received a visa to travel to the United States. “The behind-the-scenes work that goes into it,” Giuliani said, “is one of the reasons we’re able to talk now halfway through the World Cup about the incredible success.”

Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin pointed to what he called the largest counter-drone operation ever assembled for a sporting event in the United States, saying officials had confiscated more than 500 drones while also using the tournament’s security posture to pursue human trafficking networks, fentanyl traffickers and counterfeit operations.

Because stadium security has remained stable, he said, law enforcement has been able to focus resources elsewhere.

“Because you guys are doing such a good job making sure that the games are going off without any major issues,” Mullin said, “we’re able to focus on other things.”

Politics

Why this year’s World Cup is so pricey

Published

2 hours ago

July 2, 2026

Blue Light Newsroom

Americans are breaking the bank to attend the FIFA World Cup.

This year’s tournament is historically expensive for fans looking to support their favorite teams in person. Tickets for group stage matches routinely cost more than $1,000 in the months before tournament kickoff, reportedly even drawing the ire of President Donald Trump.

Ticket problems don’t end there. A number of states have launched investigations into whether FIFA misled fans over the location and quality of seats they bought to attend matches. Many fans who bought tickets on resale sites have fallen victim to ghost ticketing, in which resellers flog tickets they don’t actually have.

To get a better sense of it all, Blue Light News talked to Florian Ederer, a professor of markets, public policy and law at Boston University’s Questrom School of Business — and a soccer super fan. He’s written extensively about World Cup ticket pricing and access during the tournament, and hopped on the phone the day before his beloved Austria takes on Spain in a knockout match Thursday.

This interview has been edited for clarity.

Why are World Cup tickets so expensive this year?

Well, there are several factors in this. Number one is that this is the biggest sports event in the world. There’s tremendous demand for it. It only happens every four years. FIFA basically has a monopoly on this biggest sports event, there’s nothing that sort of can supplant it. You can’t start a rival league or anything of that sort. Secondly, the event is being held in the United States and in Canada and in Mexico, in particular the U.S. and Canada. These are some of the richest countries in the world, they have also very, very, very large populations, and Mexico does too.

You also talk about another phenomenon, that FIFA has realized this is an opportunity to maximize profits.

It has also adopted two additional things. One is price discrimination, which is that all the group stage matches of previous World Cups were all priced exactly the same. And here, FIFA has taken the approach, well, England vs. Croatia is a more interesting match than Algeria vs. Jordan, and so we’re going to set prices higher for England Croatia than for Algeria Jordan.

They’ve also introduced dynamic pricing, so the price that I get charged for buying a ticket, even if it’s the same ticket for the same game, is going to be different depending on when I buy. Basically like buying a ticket for an airline.

The third tactic that FIFA has engaged in — in addition to price discrimination, dynamic pricing — is that they’ve also done some very opaque supply management, where they’ve not made it clear at all as to how many tickets are actually available at any given time, and they’ve created a little bit this artificial scarcity where they want to keep fans in the dark as to whether they should buy now at higher prices, or just wait until the very end, and maybe get a good deal close to the start of a game.

Then there’s ghost ticketing and other practices out on the secondary market that sometimes leave fans outside a World Cup stadium arena with no tickets, even though they spent the money on a resale platform.

This is something that I think is separate from FIFA. I think the problem there is that the platforms have not used sufficient fines and punishment for resellers that are not fulfilling these promised transactions. The reason they are not fulfilling those transactions is because they resold those tickets for a potentially very interesting match already three months before, and then the prices increase even further, and then the temptation is, of course, to not deliver on that transaction, and instead resell it on another platform for even higher markups. And this is, of course, when these platforms should step in and say, look, you know, somebody was deceived here. We need to institute fines to keep those non-reputable sellers off our platforms.

Are there any steps the federal government could take to make things easier for consumers next time around?

I think there should be much clearer guidance that gives consumers information about how many seats are actually available and what are the prices, and then I think that’s an issue of just consumer transparency and lack of deception that can absolutely pass with legislation. Similarly, with those ghost tickets, I think you should be able to hold the platform liable for these issues, rather than just any particular seller, and the platforms should have to compensate these buyers for other charges that they incurred. If I’m buying a vacation to Dallas to see Austria vs. Argentina, then I’m not just buying the ticket on a platform, but I’m making everything else reliant on that ticket.

—

FIFA President Gianni Infantino has defended the high cost of attendance in recent months, telling an audience at the Milken Institute Global Conference in California in May that the organization was applying “market rates” to its tickets.

“We have to look at the market — we are in the market in which entertainment is the most developed in the world. So we have to apply market rates,” Infantino said. “In the U.S. it is permitted to resell tickets as well. So if you were to sell tickets at the price which is too low, these tickets will be resold at a much higher price.”