SHERO on Sunday

A lightning-fast recap of the week's most significant political and legal events for February 8th - 15th, 2026, before we are on to the next!

Epstein survivors in the room during a Congressional hearing on Wednesday were asked to stand and raise their hands if they had reached out to the Justice Department to offer testimony and evidence, and again if they felt they had been "denied or ignored.” (Photo via Getty Images)

Welcome to the Sunday Recap, where you can quickly check in to review the week with a minimal time commitment and ensure you do not miss a thing. Each snippet includes several links to credible and free sources, providing more details for those who want to delve deeper into any issue.

This kind of newsletter model, which provides free, reliable, independent journalism that connects the political and legal dots for everyone, works only if subscribers support our work with paid subscriptions. Consider upgrading your weekend by investing in SHERO today. There is a lot to cover for this week, so let’s get started!

Gun Violence This Week

At SHERO, we document all mass shooting incidents for the week every Sunday, so please take a moment to review them and remember to keep up the fight for sensible gun reform. There were five separate mass shooting events in the United States this past week, where seven people were killed, and16 were injured.

1. Sunday, February 8, 2026: Jacksonville, Florida

2. Sunday, February 8, 2026: San Jose, California

3. Monday, February 9, 2026: Auburn, Washington

4. Tuesday, February 10, 2026: Sarasota, Florida

5. Thursday, February 12, 2026: Hammond, Louisiana

• The FBI has increased its reward to up to $100,000 for information leading to the location of Nancy Guthrie or the arrest and conviction of anyone involved in her disappearance, according to a new update from the Phoenix Field Office. A video was released by the FBI showing a suspect in a mask outside of Nancy Guthrie’s house the night she disappeared.

• At least two dozen ICE employees and contractors have been charged with crimes since 2020, including repeated sexual abuse of a woman in custody and another charged with taking bribes to remove detention orders on people targeted for deportation.

• The highly classified whistleblower complaint against Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard is related to a conversation intercepted last spring in which two foreign nationals discussed Jared Kushner, While it has yet to be determined which country the foreign nationals are from or what they discussed about Kushner, the connection alone sheds further light on the top-secret whistleblower complaint that has stalled within Gabbard’s agency for eight months and was kept locked in a safe until it reached Congress in heavily redacted form last week.

• The Internal Revenue Service improperly shared confidential tax information of thousands of individuals with immigration enforcement officials, breaching a legal firewall intended to protect taxpayer data.