Editor’s note: This is the sixth in a series of profiles of potential running mates for presidential candidate Donald Trump on the 2024 Republican Party ticket.

The race to determine who will be Donald Trump’s running mate this November is continuing to heat up, with the former president telling Fox News last week he has ‘sort of a pretty good idea’ who he’ll select.

The identity of that person remains a mystery, but a number of prospective contenders were recently asked to provide documents to Trump’s team as part of the vetting process, including firebrand Ohio Sen. J.D. Vance, who some insiders say could be the key to flipping working-class Democrat voters in a number of consequential battleground states.

‘J.D. Vance has become a fixture on the road for Donald Trump and is extremely popular with the Trump base,’ one top GOP strategist told Fox News Digital, referencing Vance’s frequent appearances with Trump on the campaign trail and beyond.

‘He would be a lot of help across the entire Rust Belt and could help pick up working-class Democrat votes in places even outside his own state of Ohio. He would be an asset everywhere, really, but especially in states like Pennsylvania, Michigan and Wisconsin.’

The three states mentioned were all won by Trump in 2016 when they constituted part of the so-called ‘blue wall’ for Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton but flipped to President Biden in 2020.

All three are once again taking center stage in the presidential race and could be the deciding factor for who wins the presidency this year. Vance’s blue-collar upbringing, which he detailed in his bestselling 2016 memoir, ‘Hillbilly Elegy,’ particularly appeals to many voters across those states in the same fashion Trump did during his first presidential run, another insider argued.

‘[Vance] capably handles hostile media interviews with the poise and precision of a Yale Law School graduate while also sharing an authentic connection with blue-collar voters in the key states of Michigan, Wisconsin, and Pennsylvania. So, it’s easy to see why he’s on Trump’s list of potential picks,’ said GOP strategist Matt Wolking, who served as deputy communications director for Trump’s 2020 presidential campaign.

‘A combat veteran and a good friend of Donald Trump Jr., Vance is a fresh face from the populist, noninterventionist, union-friendly wing of the new Republican Party,’ Wolking added, referencing Vance’s service in the Marine Corps and deployment to Iraq.

Wolking noted some potential downsides to Vance’s selection include that he would be the youngest vice president in 70 years, and, considering he was elected to the Senate in 2022, has only held elected office for 18 months as of June.

‘He has only one general election under his belt in a state Trump won by eight points,’ he added.

Another GOP strategist with experience in presidential campaigns told Fox that because Trump is working hard to court the business community, Vance’s ‘anti-big business inclinations would give some of those potential donors major heartburn.’

Others who have been floated as possibilities to join Trump on the Republican ticket include House GOP Conference Chair Elise Stefanik, Arkansas Gov. Sarah Sanders, Virginia Gov. Glenn Youngkin, North Dakota Gov. Doug Burgum, South Dakota Gov. Kristi Noem, Florida Sen. Marco Rubio and South Carolina Sen. Tim Scott.

Trump has suggested he will likely wait until July’s Republican National Convention in Milwaukee to name his pick.

The House Oversight Committee announced this week that it has launched an investigation into a news-rating system that purportedly ranks which news outlets are trustworthy, with the focus of the probe surrounding whether the ratings group’s contracts with federal agencies have an influence on what news it attempts to suppress.

Oversight Chair James Comer, R-Ky., said Thursday his committee was investigating NewsGuard’s impact ‘on protected First Amendment speech and its potential to serve as a non-transparent agent of censorship campaigns.’

In a letter to Steven Brill and Gordon Crovitz, NewsGuard’s chief executive officers, Comer requested documents on the group’s ‘business relationships with government entities, its adherence to its own policies intended to guard against appearances of bias, how it tries to avoid and manage potential conflicts of interest arising from its investors and other influences, and actions that may have the impact of delegitimizing factually accurate information.’

‘A primary concern for the Committee is the Department of Defense contract NewsGuard was awarded in 2021, which raises questions about the involvement of federal agencies in potential censorship campaigns,’ Comer wrote in the letter. ‘One concerned journalist expressed fear that NewsGuard’s activities are an extension of federal efforts — since struck down by courts — to coerce social media companies and to ‘destroy the financial survival of disfavored outlets. . . . ‘

Comer told the duo that his committee is looking to ‘make an independent determination about whether NewsGuard’s intervention on protected speech has been in any way sponsored by a federal, state, local, or foreign government.’

Comer also pointed out in his letter that NewsGuard ‘touts’ how its editorial employees sign a pledge to ‘refrain from any political activities, such as participation in or donations to political campaigns, opinionated social media posting, involvement in protests, or other activities that could call into question my fairness or create the appearance of political bias.’

‘The social media accounts of several individuals listed as ‘editorial’ on NewsGuard’s online list of employees casts doubt on NewsGuard’s commitment to enforcing this pledge and anti-bias efforts,’ Comer said.

NewsGuard has reportedly received nearly a million dollars from the federal government, most of which came from the Department of Defense. NewsGuard was also awarded a prize after participating in a State Department co-sponsored ‘COVID-19 misinformation and disinformation’ tech challenge.

Several advertisers use the service as a way to find niche audiences for a product or service. Other advertisers, however, reportedly use the service to prevent doing business with networks or outlets that peddle ‘misinformation.’

‘The Committee does not take issue with a business entity providing other businesses and customers with data-based analysis to protect their brands. Rather, we are concerned with the potential involvement of government entities in interfering with free expression. Truthfulness and transparency about the purpose and origin of inquiries and managing conflicts of interest that may impact the public good are also relevant,’ Comer added.

‘This appears to be a very biased, very unfair service that’s getting federal funds. It could be another backdoor attempt at censoring conservative media outlets,’ Comer said during a recent appearance on One America News. ‘What’s their criteria that just happen to give networks like MSNBC and CNN tremendous grades, and then networks like OAN, Newsmax and Fox very poor grades?’

NewsGuard is a web extension that ’employs a team of journalists and experienced editors to produce reliability ratings and scores for news and information websites based on nine journalistic criteria,’ according to the group’s website. News sources that are ranked by NewsGuard receive scores from certain journalists and ‘experienced editors’ who are tasked with rating publishers on a scale of 0 to 100, based on ‘a set of apolitical criteria of journalistic practice.’

Comer requested a number of documents from NewsGuard — including complete versions of ‘current and past contracts with government entities’ and ‘records of all disciplinary or corrective actions taken by NewsGuard over the past five years related to violations’ of its editorial employee pledge — that are due on or before June 27, 2024.

CNN has finalized the rules for the first presidential debate of the 2024 election cycle, which is less than two weeks away.

The campaigns of President Biden and former President Donald Trump have agreed to the rules, CNN said on Saturday, noting that it is not ‘impossible’ for independent candidate Robert F. Kennedy Jr. to join the pair on stage.

To qualify for the CNN showdown, a candidate must have received 15% support in four separate national polls, and be on the ballot in enough states to reach 270 electoral college votes. Currently, Kennedy is on the ballot in six states, totaling 89 potential Electoral College votes.

The 90-minute debate, scheduled to take place on June 27 in Atlanta, will be hosted by CNN’s Jake Tapper and Dana Bash. It will be the first in-person face off between Biden and Trump since they stood alongside one another on debate stages during the 2020 cycle.

Ahead of the election, both candidates accepted the network’s invitation to debate last month and agreed to certain rules and formats that were outlined in CNN letters to their respective campaigns.

CNN said there will be two commercial breaks during the debate, and candidates will not be allowed to consult with other members of their campaign during that time.

The network also noted that candidates’ podiums and positions will be determined by a coin flip, their mics will be muted outside of speaking time, and they will only be provided with a pen, a notepad and a bottle of water.

Candidates will not be allowed to bring props or prepared notes.

For the first time in recent history, the debate between presidential contenders won’t have a studio audience.

The network said debate moderators ‘will use all tools at their disposal to enforce timing and ensure a civilized discussion.’

In order to qualify for the debate, candidates must also meet the requirements outlined in Article II, Section 1 of the US Constitution to serve as president. Biden and Trump both meet those requirements. Other candidates on non-major-party tickets – Kennedy, Cornel West and Jill Stein – also meet those requirements.

All five have also filed a formal statement of candidacy to the Federal Election Commission, another requirement to participate in the debate.

National polls of registered or likely voters that meet CNN’s standards for reporting include those that are sponsored by CNN, ABC News, CBS News, Fox News, Marquette University Law School, Monmouth University, NBC News, The New York Times/Siena College, NPR/PBS NewsHour/Marist College, Quinnipiac University, The Wall Street Journal and The Washington Post.

One of the most notorious far-left groups in the nation just handed 60 employees their pink slips.

It’s not the first time the Southern Poverty Law Center has seen a mass exodus from its workforce, but this round of layoffs may signal an important shift in the political winds just as the national election cycle begins to heat up.

As an erstwhile staffer claimed on X, formerly known as Twitter, the SPLC’s recent downsizing comes even while the non-profit is ‘hoarding’ over $1 billion of donor funds in reserves. While that assertion dwarfs much more reliable reporting tabbing the number just north of $160 million, what would appear to be a gross exaggeration actually provides a perfect window to understand the shell game the SPLC has been playing on the American people for the last four decades.

After all, exaggeration and outright lies have been the common currency at the SPLC for decades.

After gaining a reputation for successfully bringing to an end what was left of the Ku Klux Klan through lawsuits in the early 1980s, the SPLC shifted into full-time fundraising mode under its co-founder, Morris Dees.

A member of the Direct Marketing Association’s Hall of Fame, Dees was unceremoniously booted from the SPLC in 2019 while longtime president Richard Cohen resigned in disgrace amid swirling allegations of racism and sexism at company headquarters—a lavish facility employees have dubbed ‘The Poverty Palace.’

And don’t kid yourself into thinking that anything has changed. In 2021, one ex-SPLC staff member wrote at The Daily Beast that even the follow-up efforts to address this toxic culture were designed to ‘protect the reputation of SPLC and not to enact or recommend changes that would benefit staff—changes that were desperately needed.’

Apparently sniffing out the fact that the con was on decades earlier, the entire legal department resigned in protest. This was a group that could read the writing on the wall. As one former employee, Bob Moser, put it in a 2019 article for The New Yorker, ‘It was hard, for many of us, not to feel like we’d become pawns in what was, in many respects, a highly profitable scam.’

Of course, pawns only have value if they can remove an opponent’s pieces from the board. The key to that goal has been the SPLC’s absurd ‘Hate Map,’ which for years has lumped together KKK holdouts with mainstream conservatives and conservative organizations—including my employer, Alliance Defending Freedom—in a blatant attempt to push us to the margins of American life.

That hasn’t slowed us down. Since 2011, ADF has been blessed to argue and win 15 cases at the U.S. Supreme Court and hundreds more in lower courts. As the high court was deciding one of those cases, protecting donor privacy, the SPLC launched its ‘Hate Free Philanthropy’ campaign, which gives a not-too-subtle go at bypassing the ruling by urging private companies to dox our donors anyway.

Tellingly, the SPLC’s round of layoffs comes just days after releasing its annual update to the laughable ‘hate group’ document, which one federal judge—an Obama appointee—deemed ‘entirely subjective.’ Included on the list were grassroots parental rights groups like Moms for Liberty and physician groups who oppose experimenting with transgender medical interventions like cross-sex puberty hormones on children.

That’s wildly out of step with most of the country. Polling reported by The Washington Post shows that most Americans agree with the position of doctors on the SPLC’s hate list that the law should protect minors from harmful puberty-blocking regimens.

Meanwhile, the SPLC’s animus toward peaceful, religious Americans prompted the Federal Bureau of Investigation to issue a field memo targeting Roman Catholics who celebrate the Latin Mass. The blowback caused the FBI to retract the memo and spurred a congressional investigation.

The SPLC has overplayed its hand with the American people. Disagreement is not discrimination or hate. We’re tired of seeing our neighbors slandered as bigots and bullied from polite society simply because they have the nerve to say what everyone else is thinking.

The only question remains: Will the political left more broadly learn this lesson, or will it be left to ex-SPLC staffers to think things over in the unemployment line?

The White House is taking aim at congressional Republicans over their support for ‘MAGAnomics’ and former President Donald Trump’s ‘across-the-board tariffs’ plan, which it claims would raise prices for families and worsen inflation.

In a Friday memo to ‘allies and interested parties,’ White House deputy press secretary Andrew Bates slammed Republicans for ‘targeting Medicare and Social Security for cuts, pushing tax welfare for the super-rich, and supporting across-the-board tariffs that would raise costs and taxes for hardworking families.’

‘Yesterday congressional Republicans met to plot a 2025 agenda that involves historic tax increases on the middle class in the form of high tariffs, then gives tax handouts to big corporations that are overcharging Americans despite inflation decreasing,’ Bates wrote.

Trump met with both Senate and House Republicans on Thursday during his trip to Capitol Hill. Rep. Thomas Massie, R-Ky., said afterward that the former president ‘briefly floated the concept of eliminating the income tax and replacing it with tariffs.’

‘What’s more, the lead House Republican for budget issues, Jodey Arrington, recently wrote, ‘Unchecked mandatory spending on programs like Medicare, Medicaid, Social Security and welfare represent a growing threat to our economic security and potentially our way of life,’’ Bates said in the memo.

Pointing to other recent reporting, Bates claimed that ‘in addition to extending the Trump tax giveaway for billionaires and multinational companies, congressional Republicans want even further corporate tax windfalls that will add another $1 trillion to the deficit.’

President Biden ‘rejects this dangerous MAGAnomics agenda,’ Bates noted.

‘His plan would protect and strengthen Medicare and Social Security, further cut the deficit by making rich special interests pay their fair share, and to crack down on the corporate greed that is ripping off American families as inflation falls,’ he wrote in the memo. ‘Republican officials have stood against every aspect of that plan, even defending junk fees and price gouging.’

Bates insisted the ‘MAGAnomics summit puts into relief the stark choice between President Biden’s plan for an economy in which economic growth flows to the middle class, and an economy in which hardworking families are sold out to billionaires and the biggest corporations, forced to pay whatever big corporations want to charge while stripped of the Medicare and Social Security benefits they pay to earn.’

In a statement to Fox News Digital, Karoline Leavitt, the Trump campaign’s national press secretary said, ‘The Biden campaign is lying because they are losing. President Trump’s first-term pro-growth economic policies created record-low mortgage, interest, and unemployment rates and made inflation virtually non-existent. Americans can expect President Trump’s second-term economic agenda will have the same impact and end Joe Biden’s inflation crisis that continues to rob working families of thousands of dollars every month.’

She added, ‘President Trump delivered on his promise to protect Social Security and Medicare in his first term, and President Trump will continue to strongly protect Social Security and Medicare in his second term.’

Leavitt insisted the ‘only candidate who poses a threat to Social Security and Medicare is Joe Biden – whose mass invasion of countless millions of illegal aliens will, if they are allowed to stay, cause Social Security and Medicare to buckle and collapse.’

Trump’s trip to the nation’s capital this week made numerous headlines, as he met for the first time in several years with Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell. 

Trump told Republican senators that there was tremendous unity in the party, and promised to ‘bring back common sense to the government’ if he’s elected in November.

With a staggering 99.6% success rate in court, some federal investigations under the Biden administration’s Department of Justice (DOJ) are drawing scrutiny for alleged partisan bias and the little-known problem of overcharging — fueling calls for urgent reform among experts.

‘We have just lost our damn minds when it comes to criminal prosecution,’ healthcare defense attorney Ron Chapman told Fox News Digital in an interview. ‘Ninety-five percent of cases do not go to trial, because prosecutors can find fuzzy statutes to get such high maximums or even mandatory minimums at play, which force innocent people to plead guilty. And that’s what we’re dealing with — we’re dealing with tons of innocent people who may not be innocent of all the crimes, but they’re innocent of the ones that were overcharged against them.’

Prosecutors commonly charge additional felonies to pressure guilty pleas, Chapman said, which is denounced by the American Bar Association for violating defendants’ fair trial rights. Federal prosecutors have a 99.6% conviction rate, according to a 2019 Pew Research Center study. As such, federal investigations result in more pleas and avoid trials altogether. 

This week, a Texas doctor was charged by the DOJ with four felonies after exposing the hospital he worked in for allegedly secretly conducting transgender surgical procedures on children. Chapman, a former federal prosecutor for the U.S. Marines Corps, said, ‘This is a Merrick Garland allegation, guaranteed.’

‘This would have had to come from the top,’ Chapman said. ‘They’re almost asking for a lawsuit for this to go up to the Supreme Court.’

Last month, two pro-life activists were sentenced to several years in prison for staging a protest inside a D.C.-based abortion clinic in 2020. Federal prosecutors argued the pro-life activists violated the 1994 FACE Act, a federal law that prohibits physical force, threats of force or intentionally damaging property to prevent someone from obtaining or providing abortion services.

But the targeted investigations didn’t start under the Biden administration, Chapman said. Each administration ‘has their own agenda,’ and will fulfill it accordingly.

There are stark differences in the types of investigations the DOJ will pursue. Justin Paperny, a federal prison consultant for white collar criminals, told Fox News Digital he’s seen an uptick in this administration going after more white collar crimes, compared to the former Trump administration, which was ‘more pro-business.’ Professionals in the healthcare sector are also being investigated more thoroughly for fraud schemes. 

‘We’ve had fewer drug cases than we had in the prior administration, and probably because it’s becoming more normal in this country,’ Paperny said. ‘People try to draw this equivalence between Hunter Biden and Trump, but you have to actually question one prosecution versus the other. Everyone has an agenda, and these are things that people are paying more attention to because of this climate.’

Paperny, who previously went to prison in 2007 for financial crimes, said the government will also ‘pile on more charges’ if a defendant pleads not guilty against the government. 

‘Overcharging, threats of 20 to 30 years in federal prison, could compel someone who truly believes they’re innocent, to plead guilty,’ he said. ‘So, many of these cases should be handled civilly at worst, not criminal. Yet, we continue to see prosecutions and people going to prison for very long periods of time, especially those who have exercised their right to go to trial.’

‘These people who are going to trial and fighting it against the odds, it’s very inspiring,’ he said. 

Dr. Eithan Haim — who accused the Texas Children’s Hospital of secretly performing transgender surgical procedures on minors despite previously claiming they planned to shut down the program after state Attorney General Ken Paxton released an opinion saying the procedures could be considered child abuse under state law — is one of those people who will fight against the DOJ’s charges.

‘I refuse to back down or to be silenced,’ Haim said in a post on X.

In December, the GOP-led House Judiciary Committee published a report detailing ‘the Extent of the FBI’s Weaponization of Law Enforcement Against Traditional Catholics,’ which former FBI agent, Kyle Seraphin, blew the whistle on. 

The report said the committee studied the FBI’s categorization of traditional Catholic Americans ‘as potential domestic terrorists’ after the FBI’s Richmond memorandum painted ‘radical-traditionalist Catholics’ as violent extremists and proposed opportunities for the FBI to infiltrate Catholic churches as a form of ‘threat mitigation.’

‘I think it’s a bigger problem than people think,’ Seraphin told Fox News Digital in an interview. ‘And so my solution is broader than most people are comfortable with, but we spend roughly $11 billion a year on the investigative agency of the FBI, and people need to ask if the $11 billion spent is solving the problems the FBI was created to solve, and it’s my argument that that problem doesn’t even exist anymore.’  

‘Most Americans don’t realize that there could be an active national security investigation on anyone,’ he said. ‘That’s the thing that should scare the bejesus out of Americans.’

On Friday, the DOJ announced that it won’t prosecute Obama-appointed Attorney General Merrick Garland in contempt of Congress over his refusal to turn over audio recordings of Special Counsel Robert Hur’s interview with President Biden.

The House voted on Wednesday to hold Garland in contempt, after months of digging by House Republicans to try to bring into public view as much material from the special counsel interview as possible. 

The DOJ did not respond to a request to comment by press deadline.

Fox News’ Louis Casiano contributed to this report.