🍻 In This Week's Hill Spill Newsletter: Pour One Out for Pam, Crenshaw Breaks His Silence and Bernie's First Class Fiasco

Welcome to this week's Hill Spill, your soon-to-be favorite Thursday Happy Hour political newsletter! We over here at Sources Say hope you're having a better week than both Kristi Noem's husband and Pam Bondi, but even if you're not, we've got plenty of tea to spill! Congress may be on break, but the drama never is. So buckle up, friends!

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SCOOP: TMZ (we are LOVING their newfound DC coverage) received a photo of Bernie Sanders comfortably settled into first class on his way to a "No Kings" rally in Minneapolis, and we have the additional deets and photos on what went down on that flight!

The self-described Democratic Socialist was spotted by a source in first class who managed to grab a pic, but that isn't the end of the story. A man initially seated next to the senior senator from Vermont was moved to a different seat. It was not a better one.

"I have never seen someone be booted from their seat," our source told us. What appeared to be someone from the senator's team was later spotted where the man was sitting. 

The source on the Delta flight who tipped us off on the incident noticed a younger guy who was part of Sanders' travel party pacing back and forth between first class and the middle of the cabin. They said the passenger who had been sitting next to Bernie was quietly walked down the aisle by flight attendants and told he could pick any seat he wanted. He was relocated to seat 16B. It is unclear if or how many miles the individual was offered. 

"The guy that was sitting next to him was booted to not even a comfort section, just a normal seat on the plane," our source told us. Our source sent us two photos of the displaced passenger.  The first sitting next to Bernie in first class, then the back of his head in coach.

Worth noting… Delta put out a statement earlier this year saying they would be ending special treatment for members of Congress during the DHS shutdown. It did not appear to be in effect on this particular flight.

Congressional travel is typically reimbursed by taxpayers.

Sanders' office did not respond to a request for comment.

It may be the weirdest sex scandal we've seen all year, and that bar is high.

The Daily Mail's shocking report on Bryon Noem, husband of former DHS Secretary Kristi Noem, has sent shockwaves through the capitol. The publication alleges he used a fake identity to pay fetish models upwards of $25,000 via Cash App and PayPal, sharing photos of himself in feminine clothing. He was reportedly exposed after a model accidentally reached his "Noem Insurance" voicemail, a rookie mistake that blew the whole operation wide open.

Separately, two male sources told Sources Say News that Bryon made unwanted and uncomfortable advances toward them at politically related events in recent years, claims he denies.

“100% deny,” he told us in an email. 

National security experts say the scandal is more than tabloid fodder. If Kristi Noem's husband was leading a secret double life while she ran the Department of Homeland Security, foreign adversaries may have known long before the Daily Mail did. "If a media organization can find this out, you can assume a hostile intelligence service knows as well," former CIA officer Marc Polymeropoulos told the publication.

Bryon did not deny the fetish model allegations when contacted by the Daily Mail. A spokesperson for Kristi Noem said she was "devastated" and the family was "blindsided," requesting privacy and prayers.

But not everyone is buying the grieving spouse routine. Multiple sources speculated that Noem herself, or her alleged former lover and Trump confidant Corey Lewandowski, may have had a hand in surfacing the story. The thinking is that leaking the scandal could reframe her unceremonious ouster from DHS, recasting her as a sympathetic figure rather than a political liability and putting some distance between Kristi and a marriage that suddenly raises a lot of questions.

We received a file on GOP Rep. Rob Bresnahan (Pa.) and there were two key takeaways. There was a questionable mid-2000s facial hair situation and evidence that he used to hunt ghosts. The scariest thing here might actually be the former but honestly, who among us didn't make some questionable aesthetic choices during that era. We're not here to throw stones.

Long before Congress, a 22-year-old Bresnahan was out at midnight in Northeastern Pennsylvania hunting ghosts with a crew of corrections officers. As one does.

Bresnahan is a pilot, a congressman and a self-described lifelong believer in the unexplained who ran with a nonprofit ghost hunting group that approached the supernatural the way cops approach a crime scene: methodically, seriously and with a lot of flashlights. He grew up in an old house with a long, weird history, so the interest came naturally. The group would head out overnight to locations around the area, investigating whatever needed investigating.

Eventually, he stopped. "A door shut that should never have shut in a closed room," he says, "and that was enough to be done." He didn't want to, as he puts it, "fly too close to the sun." Investigation over.

These days, two things keep him out of the game. No more midnight availability and a very firm personal policy. "I don't like to open up the portals," he says. "I like to keep a very clear separation of church and state." The man has boundaries. Respect it.

And ghosts are just part of it. "I don't believe that we are alone on the Earth," he says, "and I don't believe that we are alone inside of the solar system." He's seen something in the sky he can't explain. He was on the ground, sober and as a licensed pilot he knows exactly what aircraft look like. It wasn't on flight radar. It wasn't broadcasting a signal, it was not explainable, according to the congressman. 

His framework for all of it: if you wrapped a measuring tape around the equator of the Earth, everything humans can see with the naked eye covers just one inch of it. One inch. The rest? Wide open.

We're not going to leave it there. Rep. Bresnahan promised us he’ll come on the pod to dig into all of it, the ghost hunting, the UFO and more! 

We love to talk shit and start shit on this pod! Rep. Dan Crenshaw (R-Texas) has been relatively quiet since his primary defeat, but this week he joined us on the pod and whoo boy does he have some takes on Ted Cruz. We also chat about how influencer culture is impacting politics, dysfunction in Congress and what he really thinks about leadership. Tune in!

FIRST ON SOURCES SAY: Herschel Walker lost Georgia's 2022 Senate race after his ex-girlfriend alleged he paid for her abortion while he was campaigning hard against them. He faced questions about whether he'd embellished law enforcement credentials. He was revealed to have children he'd never publicly acknowledged. And now, somehow, he's U.S. Ambassador to the Bahamas.

His 13-year-old son, meanwhile, couldn't even get a passport.

His mother, Lindsay Dutcher, alleges Walker flat-out refused to sign the application. No reason, no conversation, just no. This from a man whose name wasn't even on the birth certificate for years, while she was doing all the actual parenting, paying the bills, and showing up to every school pickup.

"There is a certain irony in watching someone who can freely travel the world deny that same freedom to his own child," Dutcher told us. "The U.S. government has entrusted him to foster international diplomacy, while his son can't even leave the country."

The boy couldn't even get on a plane to visit his father in the Bahamas if he wanted to. "It is curious that a father would want this," Dutcher said, "especially when it means his son wouldn't be able to visit him — not that he'd invite him anyway."

Walker's attorney denied he was blocking anything. Dutcher took matters into her own hands. She went to court, won full custody and can now get her son a passport without Walker ever signing a thing.

Pam Bondi is out at DOJ, and lawmakers on both sides of the aisle don’t seem particularly mad about it. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

But we are going to have a bev in honor of the fallen attorney general, and this one piqued our interest.