President Donald Trump pivots from the Middle East to peace in Ukraine, Trump intervenes to protect military paychecks amid the Democrat shutdown, and drug cartels declare “open season” on federal agents.

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After Middle East Peace, Trump Turns Toward Russia

Topline: After securing a ceasefire between Israel and Hamas, Trump has shifted his focus to the war in Ukraine.

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky will make his third trip to the White House on Friday since Trump began his second term. The two are expected to discuss supplying Ukraine with more powerful weapons, such as Tomahawk cruise missiles, as well as additional air defenses to counter Russian bombardments.

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The United States has reportedly started to share intelligence on Russian energy infrastructure with Ukraine, increasing Ukraine’s ability to strike deep inside Russian territory.

Trump pushes Putin: The U.S. president has made clear in recent months that he sees Russian President Vladimir Putin as the main obstacle to peace in the Ukraine war. The president is reportedly considering additional sanctions on Russia to increase pressure on Putin to negotiate.

“I’m very disappointed because Vladimir and I had a good relationship,” said Trump on Tuesday. “He just doesn’t want to end that war.”

View from Moscow: Moscow has said that even if Tomahawks were provided to Ukraine, that would not “change the dynamic” of the war. A Kremlin spokesman later added that the missiles would be an “extreme concern.” Putin said that he would increase Russia’s air defense, but he did not mention escalation on his end.

Trump Shuffles Funds In Dem Shutdown To Pay Military

Topline: Two weeks into a Democrat shutdown, and now federal employees are starting to feel the effects. On Wednesday, military personnel were set to miss their first paychecks, but President Trump ordered War Secretary Pete Hegseth to find a way to keep the troops paid.

Morning Wire spoke with Rep. August Pfluger (R-TX), chairman of the Republican Study Committee. (The following transcript has been lightly edited for clarity.)

Morning Wire: Now we’ve crossed one of the first thresholds for missed pay of this shutdown. There were fears that the military would miss a paycheck this week, but then Trump intervened. How did that go down? 

Pfluger: As a veteran and as somebody who served for over 20 years, this is personal to me because I saw it firsthand during previous shutdowns, where you had especially the junior enlisted personnel, those with families and young kids, some of them on food stamps. This puts them in a terrible position, and commanders, instead of focusing on the mission and the threat, readiness and lethality now have to focus on how are their men and women in uniform going to put food on the table? Thankfully, Donald Trump and Pete Hegseth came up with a plan to pay the troops and that is happening mid-month. But it doesn’t last forever, so if Democrats keep up their shenanigans and keep up the shameful approach that they’re using and showing why they don’t really like the military, then I’m not sure that they’re going to get a paycheck on the next pay period.

Morning Wire: To be clear – they managed to pay everyone this time, but this isn’t something that can continue for weeks. 

Pfluger: Yeah, they’re pulling money out of other areas. I mean, the money that they’re using to pay the troops was probably intended to go to operations or readiness or things like that. It was not the bucket that Congress appropriated for military pay, personnel pay, so this isn’t going to last forever.

Morning Wire: Is there any way that Congress could ensure going forward that this doesn’t happen again, particularly with the military? Can we put in place emergency measures for how government shutdowns affect military members?

Pfluger: I sure hope so. I think there’s an appetite for that. And I’d go a step further. I would include Border Patrol. I would include law enforcement, federal law enforcement, all the agencies that are charged with keeping us safe, national security level agencies. I’d go a step further on that. But let me just say this. Where are my Democrat colleagues on the other side of the aisle who served in uniform? Where are they right now? Why are they not standing up and taking the stand and saying enough is enough? … I’d like to see a country where we come back together and we unite and do the right thing. I thought that was going to happen after the assassination of Charlie Kirk, and, obviously, it hasn’t.

DHS Says Cartels Threaten Federal Immigration Agents

Topline: Federal immigration agents carrying out President Trump’s immigration enforcement efforts in Chicago are facing mounting threats stemming from drug cartels in Mexico, according to the Department of Homeland Security. 

Intelligence on threats is coming into federal immigration agencies daily, an agent on the ground in Chicago told The Daily Wire. Mexican drug cartels are recruiting and operating within the city of Chicago to go after ICE and Border Patrol agents. 

DHS says cartels are offering up to $50,000 in bounties for the heads of federal officers. On top of that, they are recruiting leftist, anti-ICE agitators who have already been out in the streets, and they’re asking them to help.

According to DHS, cartels are placing armed spotters on top of rooftops in areas where ICE agents are making arrests, and the spotters mark the coordinates of ICE officers and Border Patrol agents and relay their whereabouts.

The threats: The latest allegedly involved a Latin Kings gang member. A leader of that gang was nabbed by the federal authorities in Chicago. He is accused of placing a bounty on the head of Operation Midway Blitz, Chief Gregory Bovino.

On Tuesday, Border Patrol agents were rammed by an illegal alien driver who also had an illegal alien passenger in his car. That brought an anti-ICE riot mob to one of the quiet neighborhoods in Chicago.

The riot forced federal authorities to deploy tear gas. Federal officials were targeted with rocks and other objects.

A Virginia Democrat is attacking the recipient of Democrat Attorney General candidate Jay Jones’ homicidal texts, accusing the moderate Republican of “betrayal” after she confirmed the authenticity of the unsolicited, threatening messages she received from Jones, The Daily Wire has learned.

House of Delegates Speaker Don Scott, a convicted crack dealer who Democrats installed as head of the statehouse, has embarked on an unusual effort to unseat Carrie Coyner, a Republican who is viewed as one of the chamber’s most bipartisan members and whose friendliness with Jones led to him confessing his desire to murder political opponents.

“I’m Speaker Don Scott. I’m here to tell you, Carrie Coyner is no moderate. She’s a MAGA Republican, blocking our agenda for Virginia families. Carrie Coyner has betrayed us too many times,” he said in an ad posted Tuesday by the campaign of Lindsey Dougherty, who is running to unseat Coyner in her Chesterfield, Virginia, district.

Scott went so far as to speak at a church in Coyner’s district on October 5, telling congregants using the pulpit to minimize Jones’ homicidal ideation and electioneer against Coyner, again accusing her of betrayal and linking it to the text messages. Coyner “has done nothing but try to betray the agenda that we’ve tried to move forward,” he said. “We can’t get distracted because they want us to get distracted by the text message here.”

Coyner told the Virginia Scope that Scott’s church appearance was “intimidating,” adding, “I didn’t do anything wrong in this, and I was honest when asked.” She and Gilbert did not return requests for comment from The Daily Wire.

National Review upended Virginia’s election cycle after reporting that in 2022, Jones had texted Conyer, at the time his colleague in the House of Delegates, about how he would rather kill then-Republican speaker Todd Gilbert than Hitler, and how he fantasized about seeing Gilbert’s children, whom he described as “little fascists,” die in their mother’s arms.

The story suggested that Coyner was not the source, but that she had sent screenshots of the conversation to others shortly after receiving them, and she confirmed their authenticity to National Review when asked. The story says Jones called Coyner to double down on the sentiments expressed in the text, which the outlet attributes to a third party with knowledge of the call.

When Democrats took control of the House, Gilbert, the Republican House Speaker whom Jones wanted dead, was replaced by Scott, the allegedly reformed crack dealer. This year, Jones went from being an obscure legislator to a candidate for attorney general, running against incumbent Attorney General Jason Miyares, a Republican.

Democrats, including gubernatorial candidate Abigail Spanberger and lieutenant governor candidate Ghazala Hashmi, have refused to rescind their endorsements of Jones or call for him to step down from the race. They have said they condemn the texts, which Jones has apologized for. But efforts to target the perceived source of the revelation raise questions about whether they’re actually only angry that the public learned about them.

Scott did not reply to The Daily Wire’s questions asking whether the ad was retaliation for Coyner’s role in the Jones scandal, whether he thinks she handled it well, when and why he decided to get involved in her race, and how many other candidates he has cut ads for.

On October 6, the Virginia Scope published an interview with Coyner in which she elaborated on a reference Jones made in his texts to having “told you this before.” She said that in 2020, Jones wanted to change the law so that police officers could be personally sued by alleged criminals, while Coyner opposed it. She said Jones told her, “maybe if a few of them died, that they would move on, not shooting people, not killing people.” Jones denied making the statement, according to the Virginia Scope.

Coyner told the Virginia Scope that she had nothing to do with the release of the texts and did not know about their release until contacted by National Review. Before Jones apologized, he doubled down and claimed he was being “smeared” by his opponent, Miyares, even though Miyares had said that he, too, had nothing to do with the texts making their way to the media.

Scott’s campaign to oust Coyner is especially curious because Coyner has frequently worked with Democrats in the legislature, including Scott’s close ally and Senate leader Louise Lucas, to make community college classes free for high schoolers. According to the Virginia Public Access Project, Coyner broke ranks to vote with Democrats more than any other Republican. No Democrat was as bipartisan as she was, according to the data.

Yet even as Virginia Democrats have tried to win a purple state with messaging opposing “extremists,” the fact pattern suggests that some have contempt for all Republicans, however moderate. Jones’ infamous rageful texts were spurred by then-Republican Speaker Gilbert saying kind things about a Democrat who had died. “If those guys die before me, I will go to their funerals to piss on their graves,” he said.

In the gubernatorial debate on October 9, Spanberger’s response when asked about the Jones texts was to blame Republicans. She obfuscated when asked by the moderator whether she still endorsed Jones, given the texts. After the moderator noted that Spanberger was dodging the question, she said Republicans “held them for years so the public was unaware who had knowledge of these text messages.”

That apparent victim-blaming comes despite the fact that Coyner appears to have not told the public about the text messages precisely because she was collegial and forgiving. On top of that, the suggestion that Democrat legislators could only know how Jones felt about Republicans by hearing it from Republicans calls for believing that Jones was more open with his opponents than he was with his Democratic colleagues.

Republicans have continued to show compassion even as Democrats refuse to denounce a candidate who called for violence against Republicans. This month, a Democrat statehouse member, Candi Mundon King, had a daughter die. Gilbert, whose kind words for another deceased Democrat triggered Jones’ rage, offered condolences again, saying, “May God wrap his arms around Delegate Mundon King.” But on the same weekend that her daughter died, King reposted on social media a call for “punishing Confederates and erasing them” and “punishing trump & his MAGAt accomplices.”

Senator Mark Warner and Congressman Eugene Vindman, both Virginia Democrats, are set to appear alongside Jones at a fundraiser in Fredericksburg on Friday.

Virginia Congressman Don Beyer (D-VA) said he “very much hopes [Jones] prevails,” claiming that Jones’ express fantasies about murdering the family of a political rival are “no worse than what Donald Trump says almost every day.”

Related: Virginia Dems Say ‘Our Democracy’ Depends On Voting For Candidate Who Fantasized About Assassination