MANHUNT: New York police are hunting a man who gunned down the  CEO of one of the country’s largest health insurance companies yesterday morning outside a Manhattan hotel in what appears to have been a planned hit. Brian Thompson, 50, from Minnesota, CEO of UnitedHealthcare, was shot in the back and a leg and later declared dead at Mt. Sinai Hospital.

  New York Police Commissioner Jessica Tisch called the killing a “brazen targeted attack.” Police recovered three shell casings, three live rounds, and a cellphone.

  Thompson was arriving at 6:46 am for a conference at the New York Hilton when a man wearing a mask opened fired before running off eastbound on 6^th Avenue. The shooter was seen escaping down the Ziegfeld alleyway before hopping on a Citi Bike rental bicycle and riding off.  He was last seen in Central Park.

  Security video caught images of a light-skinned man in dark clothing with a hoodie and a light colored backpack. Surveillance cameras at a Starbucks captured enough of the shooter’s face for police to be able to use facial recognition software. The Citi Bike also has geo-location.

  The 9-milimeter pistol used appeared to have a silencer. The gun jammed in the midst of the attack and the gunman cooly cleared the action, ejecting the three live rounds found later. 

  Thompson was promoted to chief executive of the Minnesota-based UnitedHealthcare in April 2021. He was in New York for UnitedHealthcare’s 2024 investor conference. 

  Thompson had a wife and two sons. His wife, Paulette Thompson, told NBC News that he had received threats recently. “There had been some threats,” she said. “Basically, I don’t know, a lack of coverage? I don’t know details. I just know that he said there were some people that had been threatening him.”

TRANSITION TROUBLE: Former Fox News host Pete Hegseth is sticking to his guns in his quest to be confirmed as Secretary of Defense, telling reporters he has a mandate from the president-elect. “We’re putting the warfighters first. That’s what Donald Trump asked me to do,” Hegseth said. “Your job is to bring a warfighting ethos back to the Pentagon. Your job is to make sure that it’s lethality, lethality, lethality. … everything else that distracts from that shouldn’t be happening.”

  As for questions about drinking, sexual abuse, and other scandal in his personal life, Hegseth told reporters to listen to an interview he did with right wing host Megyn Kelly in which she joined him in blaming the main stream media for digging into his history.

  But you could also read Hegseth’s recently-published book to develop concerns.

“America today is in a cold civil war,” Hegseth wrote. “Our soul is under attack by a confederacy of radicals” while “we allowed America’s domestic enemies at home to gobble up cultural, political and spiritual territory.” He says  there is a “cultural Marxist revolution ripping through the Pentagon.”

  Hegseth opposes women in combat, saying in his book that they are best suited to “carry the banner of Christian love” into war as nurses and support staffers.

TOO BIG TO JAIL: Lawyers for Donald Trump filed arguments in a New York court claiming that as president-elect he is covered by the Supreme Court ruling granting a president broad immunity from prosecution. They wants his 34 felony convictions to be dismissed.

  “Following President Trump’s overwhelming victory in the 2024 Presidential election, Presidential immunity is an unavoidable legal impediment to further proceedings in this case,” his lawyers wrote.

  They claim in the 70-page filing that the Justice Department policy against prosecuting a sitting president also applies to state cases.

  Judge Juan Merchan has delayed sentencing three times and is weighing whether to dismiss the case.

THE WAR ROOM: The Russian general who planned the invasion of Ukraine called President Biden’s top military adviser last week to talk about managing escalation between the two countries, The NY Times reports.

  In the unusual call, Gen. Valery Gerasimov is reported to have told Gen. Charles Q. Brown Jr., the chairman of the Joint Chiefs, that the launch of a nuclear-capable ballistic into Ukraine had been planned long before the Biden administration agreed to allow Ukraine to use American longer range missiles to strike deeper into Russia.

  The call came after Russian President Vladimir Putin had said that  his country had the right to strike the military facilities of countries “that allow their weapons to be used against our facilities.” 

  A Pentagon spokesman said, Gerasimov and Brown “discussed a number of global and regional security issues, to include the ongoing conflict in Ukraine.”

THE SPIN RACK: A new artificial intelligence tool from DeepMind, a Google company in London,  has broken the limits and developed 15-day weather forecasts previously thought impossible.  The developers claim that they can track killer storms and save lives.— The attorney general of the District of Columbia sued Amazon, accusing the company of violating consumer protection laws by making slower deliveries to Prime members in lower-income neighborhoods.  — Several Montana Republicans joined Democrats to block a measure that would have barred transgender lawmakers from using the state Capitol bathrooms that aligned with their gender identities. The rule would have banned state Rep. Zooey Zephyr, a transgender Democratic woman, from using the women’s bathroom — One of  Colombia’s legendary drug lords, Fabio Ochoa Vásquez from the Medellin cocaine cartel, has been released from a US prison after serving 25 years of a 30-year sentence and is expected to be deported back home. His story was featured in the Netflix series “Narcos.”

BELOW THE FOLD:  Life is expensive in the big city. The NY Times reports that several of the elite private schools in New York that charge $65,000 tuition offer financial aid to families earning as much as $600,000 to $800,000 a year if they have multiple kids in school. 

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