It looks President Joe Biden may be able to do something Donald Trump couldn’t: get people to join the former president’s Truth Social platform.
Biden’s presidential campaign announced Monday that it would be joining Truth Social in order to “[meet] voters where they are,” a Biden campaign official told Fox News.
The spokesperson added: “Republicans can’t even agree on a speaker of the House, so clearly, not every Republican thinks the same.”
President Joe Biden will travel to Israel on Wednesday to show support for the U.S. ally as concerns increase that the raging Israel-Hamas war could expand into a larger regional conflict.
U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken announced Biden’s travel to Israel as the humanitarian situation in the Gaza Strip grows more dire and as Israel prepares for a possible ground attack on the 141-square-mile (365-square-kilometer) territory to root out Hamas militants responsible for what U.S. and Israeli officials say was the most lethal assault against Jews since the Holocaust.
The global crisis unfolding in Israel is putting renewed scrutiny on Congress, which has been without a permanent House speaker since Kevin McCarthy was ousted last week.
Hamas on Saturday launched an unprecedented attack on Israel, killing hundreds of people and escalating a decadeslong conflict in the region. President Joe Biden said that U.S. support for Israel is ironclad.
But as an unelected speaker pro tempore, Rep. Patrick McHenry, R-N.C., is effectively powerless on the matter. Under House rules, the interim speaker can act only on matters that relate to the election of a new speaker: gavel in, gavel out, and preside. That post-9/11 rule was designed for continuity of government, not for an unprecedented political situation like the current one. Two scholars with knowledge said the House would need to elect McHenry as speaker pro tem for that to change.
The office of Sen. Tommy Tuberville, R-Ala., said he isn’t backing down on his monthslong blockade on hundreds of military promotions, even amid Hamas’ deadly attack on Israel, a close U.S ally.
“The Pentagon clearly thinks forcing taxpayers to facilitate abortion is more important than confirming their top nominees wit
hout a vote. They could end this situation TODAY by dropping their illegal and immoral policy and get everyone confirmed rapidly, but they refuse,” Tuberville spokesperson Steve Stafford said in a statement to NBC News. “If the Biden administration wants their nominees confirmed then Senate Democrats can do what Coach just did in September and file a cloture petition to force a vote.”
As thousands of people danced at a music festival in an Israeli desert area in the early hours of Saturday, Hamas militants from Gaza descended upon the revelry.
Videos show young Israelis dancing to trance music under a giant Buddha statue and prayer flags around dawn — right around when festivalgoer Eliav Klein said he saw rockets launched from Gaza, startling everyone.
A total of 260 people were killed at the event, according to a spokesperson for ZAKA, an Israeli nongovernmental rescue and recovery organization.
Israel’s military acknowledged on Monday that it was still battling to drive Palestinian militants out of southern towns near the Gaza Strip and that more militants could still be crossing through breaches in the border fence, two days after an invasion that has killed hundreds and provoked furious retaliatory strikes by Israel.
“We are still fighting,” Lt. Col. Richard Hecht of the Israel Defense Forces said at a briefing on Monday morning, offering an unusually blunt assessment of the military’s struggles to turn back the invasion that began on Saturday. “We thought by this morning we’d be in a better place.”
WASHINGTON — Donald Trump is asking a federal judge to dismiss criminal charges against him based on his actions leading up to his Jan. 6, 2021, coup attempt because, as president, that coup attempt should be considered part of his presidential duties.
Trump lawyers Todd Blanche and John Lauro, in Thursday’s 52-page filing to U.S. District Judge Tanya Chutkan, attempted to minimize Trump’s actions leading up to the violent assault on the Capitol that day and that, regardless, the law allowed Trump to act based on his belief that the election had been stolen from him.
President Joe Biden on Thursday said his administration had no choice but to build about 20 miles more southern border wall — after he’s long dismissed Donald Trump‘s wall as a waste of money that doesn’t work to stop illegal immigration.
“Money was appropriated for the border wall,” Biden told reporters, referring to congressional action during the Trump administration. “I tried to get them to reappropriate — to redirect the money. They didn’t, they wouldn’t. And in the meantime, there’s nothing under the law other than they have to use the money for what is appropriated. I can’t stop that.”
The White House proposed funds for border barrier construction be rescinded in 2021, but Congress essentially ignored the request. Officials said a series of procedural regulatory steps were required before the project could move forward.
Shortly after he left office, former President Donald J. Trump shared apparently classified information about American nuclear submarines with an Australian businessman during an evening of conversation at Mar-a-Lago, his private club and residence in Florida, according to two people familiar with the matter.
The businessman, Anthony Pratt, a billionaire member of Mar-a-Lago who runs one of the world’s largest cardboard companies, went on to share the sensitive details about the submarines with several others, the people said. Mr. Trump’s disclosures, they said, potentially endangered the U.S. nuclear fleet.
The two leading candidates to become the next Republican speaker of the House worked the phones and the halls of the Capitol on Thursday, vying for support from within their party’s fractured ranks as the chamber remained in a state of paralysis after the ouster of Representative Kevin McCarthy of California.
Representatives Steve Scalise, the majority leader, and Jim Jordan, the Judiciary Committee chairman, had each landed more than a dozen endorsements by the afternoon as they raced toward a vote of Republicans tentatively scheduled for Tuesday. An election on the House floor could follow the next day, though the process could stretch much longer if no consensus can be reached.
Then early Friday, former President Donald J. Trump, whose far-right acolytes in Congress helped lead the rebellion that has plunged the House into chaos, weighed in.
The two leading candidates to become the next Republican speaker of the House worked the phones and the halls of the Capitol on Thursday, vying for support from within their party’s fractured ranks as the chamber remained in a state of paralysis after the ouster of Representative Kevin McCarthy of California.
Representatives Steve Scalise, the majority leader, and Jim Jordan, the Judiciary Committee chairman, had each landed more than a dozen endorsements by the afternoon as they raced toward a vote of Republicans tentatively scheduled for Tuesday. An election on the House floor could follow the next day, though the process could stretch much longer if no consensus can be reached.
Reps. Jim Jordan (R-Ohio) and Steve Scalise (R-La.) are the first Republicans to declare their candidacies for speaker of the House after the shocking ouster of Rep. Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) on Tuesday.
Both men asked their Republican colleagues for support on Wednesday in letters lambasting federal spending and the supposed persecution of former President Donald Trump.
Scalise and Jordan are well-respected by their colleagues, though Jordan is best known as a combative defender of Trump, which could turn off moderates. In recent weeks, lawmakers have mentioned both as possible replacements for McCarthy.
New York Attorney General Letitia James said Wednesday that Donald Trump’s appearances at his business fraud trial were merely a “political stunt” but declared that justice would be served and that would not be “bullied” by the former president.
Trump has spent the last three days in court as part of a $250 million lawsuit James filed against Trump, two of his sons and his business. The attorney general alleged Trump engaged in years of fraud by inflating the value of his assets to secure favorable loans and insurance deals. The former president has denied all wrongdoing and has regularly taken to social media to blast James, calling her “corrupt” and saying that the trial is rigged against him.
President Joe Biden on Wednesday touted his administration’s efforts to address student debt, including an additional $9 billion in relief that the White House announced.
The additional relief, set to help about 125,000 Americans, brings the Biden administration’s total approved debt cancellation to $127 billion for nearly 3.6 million Americans, Biden said in remarks at the White House.
“This kind of relief is life-changing for individuals and their families, but it’s good for our economy as a whole as well. By freeing millions of Americans from the crushing burden of student debt, it means they can go and get their lives in order,” Biden said.
Sen. Bob Menendez‘s then-girlfriend, now his wife, struck and killed a pedestrian in December 2018, newly revealed police records show.
Four months after the incident, Nadine Arslanian and Menendez, D-N.J., were allegedly given a new Mercedes as a gift as part of what federal prosecutors have described as a bribery conspiracy to cash in on Menendez’s power and influence. Police records indicate the fatal collision badly damaged Arslanian’s Mercedes.
The crash, which was first reported Wednesday by the Recordnewspaper of Bergen and The New York Times, happened on the night of Dec. 12, 2018, in the New Jersey town of Bogota
House Speaker Pro Tempore Patrick McHenry (R-N.C.) had a curious choice for one of his very first orders of business: He booted Rep. Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) from the hideaway office she has in the Capitol.
“Please vacate the space tomorrow, the room will be re-keyed,” a top aide on the Republican-controlled House Administration Committee wrote to Pelosi, according to Politico.
The move came hours after Rep. Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) was forced out of the speaker’s chair in a Republican coup.
The judge presiding over Donald Trump’s $250 million civil fraud trial in New York issued a partial gag order Tuesday after the former president trashed his law clerk on social media.
“Personal attacks on members of my court staff are unacceptable, inappropriate and I won’t tolerate it,” an angry Judge Arthur Engoron said following Trump’s post and comments about his law clerk.
“Consider this a gag order on all parties with respect to posting or publicly speaking about any member of my staff,” Engoron said, warning that violations would be met with swift and meaningful sanctions.
Last Wednesday, three days before a widely feared government shutdown, far-right Rep. Matt Gaetz stood on the steps of the U.S. Capitol and issued a categorical threat.
If House Speaker Kevin McCarthy, R-Calif., relied on Democrats to keep the government open, said Gaetz, R-Fla., there would “very likely” be “a motion to vacate that the speaker would face.”
“It’s so obvious I can’t believe I have to say it out loud,” Gaetz told NBC News at the time.
The House voted Tuesday to oust Kevin McCarthy from the speaker’s chair, with Rep. Matt Gaetz and seven other conservatives joining all Democrats present to remove him.
What happens next?
The Office of the Speaker has been declared vacant. This does not immediately trigger a new speaker election, however, because of a succession list McCarthy, R-Calif., submitted to the House clerk in January. That list isn’t public.
But Rep. Patrick McHenry, R-N.C., revealed shortly after McCarthy was removed that his name tops that list. McHenry will now serve as a temporary replacement under House rules.
John Kelly, who served as former President Donald Trump’s chief of staff, unleashed a blistering attack against his former boss on Monday, confirming on the record that many of Trump’s critical remarks about veterans and injured service members were true.
“What can I add that has not already been said?” Kelly told CNN in an exclusive statement. “A person that thinks those who defend their country in uniform, or are shot down or seriously wounded in combat, or spend years being tortured as POWs are all ‘suckers’ because ‘there is nothing in it for them.’ A person that did not want to be seen in the presence of military amputees because ‘It doesn’t look good for me.’
Donald Trump was in the courtroom Monday for the beginning of the New York attorney general’s $250 million civil fraud trial against him, his company and two of his children — a case that could have widespread implications for the former president’s businesses.
Trump, who was not required to attend the trial, sat with his arms crossed for most of AG attorney Kevin Wallace’s presentation to Judge Arthur Engoron, occasionally tapping his foot. The trial puts Trump’s business acumen into focus as the AG’s office seeks to portray the image-fixated ex-president as a fraud who intentionally overstated his successes.
After opening statements were done, Trump walked out of the courtroom, shooting an angry glare at Attorney General Letitia James.
Rep. Henry Cuellar, D-Texas, was carjacked Monday night about a mile from the Capitol.
His chief of staff confirmed the incident in a statement and said he was not injured.
“As Congressman Cuellar was parking his car this evening, 3 armed assailants approached the Congressman and stole his vehicle. Luckily, he was not harmed and is working with local law enforcement. Thank you to Metro PD and Capitol Police for their swift action and for recovering the Congressman’s vehicle,” the statement said.
Rep. Matt Gaetz, R-Fla., the Donald Trump ally and conservative bomb-thrower who has been a nagging thorn in leadership’s side, filed a resolution Monday to force a vote to overthrow his political nemesis, Kevin McCarthy, as speaker of the House.
The House must now vote on whether to keep McCarthy on as speaker. It has until Wednesday.
Speaking to reporters on the steps of the Capitol, a beaming Gaetz predicted he has the votes to oust McCarthy — as long as Democrats don’t move to save the speaker.
Former President Donald Trump said he will go to court in New York for his civil fraud trial on Monday.
“I’m going to Court tomorrow morning to fight for my name and reputation,” he posted on Truth Social Sunday evening.
Trump had been expected to attend, and law enforcement and court employees had already been making security preparations for his potential appearance at the courthouse in Lower Manhattan on Monday and possibly Tuesday.
Matt Gaetz said Sunday that he plans a vote this week to try and remove Speaker Kevin McCarthy from his role as punishment for McCarthy backing a bipartisan stopgap funding bill to stave off a partial government shutdown.
In an interview with ABC “This Week” co-anchor Jonathan Karl, Gaetz, a longtime McCarthy critic, savaged the speaker’s leadership and handling of the spending fights since conservatives retook the House this year.
“The one thing Democrats, Republicans, the White House, that we all have in common is that Kevin McCarthy, at one point or another, has lied to all of us,” Gaetz said.
It was Democrats in the House who helped avert a partial government shutdown this weekend, in the final hours before funding ran out amid “brinkmanship” and “theater” by hard-line conservatives, President Joe Biden’s budget director argued on Sunday.
“I will tell you, if I’m sick of it, I can only imagine what the American people are feeling,” White House Office of Management and Budget Director Shalanda Young told ABC “This Week” co-anchor Jonathan Karl. “Why go down this road, take us so close?”
California Gov. Gavin Newsom (D) announced he’s appointing EMILY’s List President Laphonza Butler to finish out the late Sen. Dianne Feinstein’s Senate term, making good on his promise to fill the vacancy with a Black woman.
The swift appointment (D) was essential for Democrats’ power in the Senate, where they have a slim 50-49 majority following Feinstein’s death at age 90.
Butler’s appointment will last until January 2025, when Feinstein’s sixth term in the chamber was due to end. It’s then up to voters to select a permanent senator for the next six-year term.
Donald Trump and his sons Don Jr. and Eric will be among the witnesses in next week’s $250 million civil fraud trial against the former president and his companies, new court filings show.
Trump and his two oldest sons — both senior executives at his company, the Trump Organization — were named on witness lists filed Thursday by lawyers for the Trumps and New York Attorney General Letitia James’ office, which alleges the Trumps have been wildly exaggerating their business assets for years.
Also named on the witness lists is Allen Weisselberg, the former chief financial officer of the Trump Organization who pleaded guilty last year to running a 15-year tax fraud scheme at the company. He testified against the company in a criminal trial last year and was sentenced to five months in jail. The company was convicted and fined $1.6 million.
Congress is hurtling toward a government shutdown, with money set to run out in a little more than two days and no sign of a short-term funding deal between the Republican-led House and Democratic-controlled Senate.
With time running short, the two chambers are moving in different directions and remain far from converging on a path to resolve their disputes.
The Senate has been slowly advancing a bipartisan stopgap bill, known as a continuing resolution or CR, with overwhelming support in the chamber; it would fund the government at current levels through Nov. 17 and provide roughly $6 billion in aid for Ukraine and another $6 billion for disaster aid.
Attorneys for Donald Trump have notified a Fulton County court that the former president will not seek to have his Georgia election interference case removed to federal court.
The move comes three weeks after a judge denied a bid by co-defendant Mark Meadows, Trump’s former chief of staff, to have his case moved.
Meadows had sought the move to federal court on the basis that his alleged actions were all performed while he was acting “under color” of his role as chief of staff.
House Republicans on Thursday held the first public hearing of their impeachment inquiry into President Joe Biden.
Republicans say their House Oversight Committee inquiry is focused on whether Biden was involved in or benefitted from his family’s foreign business dealings, among other issues. But so far, they have yet to release evidence that Biden profited from his son Hunter’s business deals or was improperly influenced by them.
The White House has blasted the impeachment inquiry as “extreme politics at its worst.”
A federal government shutdown this weekend looks increasingly likely, as House Republicans indicated Wednesday they would not consider a bipartisan Senate plan to fund the government past the weekend deadline.
In light of the standoff in Congress, the White House Office of Management and Budget told federal agencies Wednesday to be prepared to notify their employees of the status of government funding, two people familiar with the matter told The Washington Post, speaking on the condition of anonymity to describe internal planning. Those updates will occur Thursday morning, as part of the government’s mandatory contingency process.
The federal judge overseeing former President Donald Trump’s election interference case in Washington has denied his request that she recuse herself because of her comments in criminal cases against other Jan. 6 defendants.
U.S. District Judge Tanya Chutkan wrote in her opinion that her comments in other Jan. 6 cases, which Trump’s team took issue with, “reflect the information and arguments presented by the defense in each case.”
Chutkan wrote that she “has never taken the position the defense ascribes to it: that former ‘President Trump should be prosecuted and imprisoned.'” Trump faces charges in four separate indictments. This case is one of two federal cases being prosecuted by special counsel Jack Smith, who was named in November.
Donald Trump claimed he came to Michigan on Wednesday to show solidarity with striking autoworkers. Instead, he fearmongered about the transition to electric vehicles, told autoworkers they would be out of a job in two or three years even if they secured a contract with wage increases, then begged United Auto Workers leadership to endorse him for president.
“There’s no such thing as a fair transition to the end of your way of life. You’re going to lose your beautiful way of life … it’s a transition to hell. It’s a transition to unemployment and to inflation,” Trump said at a nonunion manufacturing facility in swingy Macomb County in the Detroit suburbs. “In other words, your current negotiations don’t mean as much as you think.”
As he sat in the spin room with the Fox News host Sean Hannity after the second Republican debate on Wednesday night, Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida accurately summed up the spectacle he had just participated in.
“If I was at home watching that,” Mr. DeSantis said, “I would have changed the channel.”
The meandering and at times indecipherable debate seemed to validate former President Donald J. Trump’s decision to skip it. With only occasional exceptions, the Republicans onstage seemed content to bicker with one another. Most of them delivered the dominant front-runner only glancing blows and did little to upend the political reality that Mr. Trump is lapping all of his rivals — whose cumulative support in most national polls still doesn’t come close to the former president’s standing.
After 148 days, leaders of the Writers Guild of America have unanimously voted to lift its strike, allowing writers to return to work Wednesday, Sept. 27.
“The WGAW Board and WGAE Council also voted unanimously to lift the restraining order and end the strike as of 12:01 am PT/3:01 am ET on Wednesday, September 27th. This allows writers to return to work during the ratification process, but does not affect the membership’s right to make a final determination on contract approval,” The union announced on Tuesday.
The WGA, which represents nearly 11,500 screenwriters, released the entire seven-page agreement.
Senate leaders released a short-term funding billTuesday — with four days left to avert a government shutdown at the end of this month — to keep money flowing until Nov. 17 to give Congress more time to reach a larger agreement.
The bipartisan bill, negotiated between leaders of the Democratic majority and the Republican minority, includes about $6 billion in aid to Ukraine and $6 billion in emergency disaster relief funding for the Federal Emergency Management Agency. It would also prevent a lapse in Federal Aviation Administration authorities through the end of the year and prevent a pay cut for federal firefighters.
The Senate will begin voting Tuesday evening to debate the measure, with the hope of passing it before Sunday to prevent a shutdown. It’s unclear whether the chamber can pass it before the 12:01 a.m. Sunday deadline, as it would be likely to require unanimous consent to hold a quick vote.
President Joe Biden made history Tuesday when he visited a picket line in Michigan in a show of loyalty to autoworkers who are striking for higher wages and cost-of-living increases.
Biden, who is looking to polish his pro-labor persona, is the first sitting president to appear on a picket line.
Speaking through a bullhorn, he told the striking autoworkers in Wayne County, “You deserve what you earned, and you’ve earned a hell of a lot more than you’re getting paid now.”
A New York judge ruled in the state attorney general’s $250 million lawsuit against Donald Trump and his company Tuesday that the former president committed repeated acts of fraud for years.
According to the ruling, which allows the civil trial to begin next week, Trump lied to banks and insurers by both overvaluing and undervaluing his assets when it was to his benefit while exaggerating his net worth to the tune of billions of dollars.
In his 35-page ruling, Judge Arthur Engoron said Trump continually lied on his financial statements and was able to get favorable loan terms and lower insurance premiums as a result. Trump’s legal arguments defending the statements are based in “a fantasy world, not the real world,” Engoron wrote.
Ordinarily, we don’t jump every time a brushfire breaks out across the desiccated landscape of the former president*’s brain if, for no other reason than the fact that it would be all we did here in the shebeen, and life is too damn short. However, there was a general conflagration breaking out this weekend and it is worthy of note because it seemed to leap into the desiccated landscapes of the brains of his allies, too.
First, Fulton County (Ga.) Inmate No. P01135809 suggested that former Chairman of the Joint Chiefs Mark Milley be executed for the treasonous act of preventing him from starting a war in order to stay in office, as detailed in a long piece in The Atlantic. (In truth, and in the abstract, having the JCS chief contacting China to reassure it regarding the ostensible commander-in-chief made me a little nervous.)
Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis and California Gov. Gavin Newsom will take part in a televised 90-minute debate moderated by Fox News’ Sean Hannity on Nov. 30, the network announced Monday.
The debate will air on Hannity’s namesake show from Georgia, though a specific location in the key battleground state remains “to be determined,” Fox News said in a news release.
“I look forward to the opportunity to debate Gavin Newsom over our very different visions for the future of our country,” DeSantis said on X, the platform formerly known as Twitter.
Former Arkansas Gov. Asa Hutchinson fell short of qualifying for the second GOP presidential primary debate this week, but the seven other candidates who were there for the first debate in August will be back onstage Wednesday in California.
North Dakota Gov. Doug Burgum, former New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, former U.N. Ambassador Nikki Haley, former Vice President Mike Pence, entrepreneur Vivek Ramaswamy and Sen. Tim Scott, R-S.C., have all qualified for the second debate Wednesday at the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library in Simi Valley, California, the Republican National Committee said in a statement.
That means they met all three of the party’s qualifying criteria — a unique donor threshold, a minimum polling requirement and signed pledges that include supporting the party’s eventual nominee. Former President Donald Trump, who also skipped the first GOP debate, easily surpassed the first two requirements, according to NBC News’ analysis. But he has refused to sign the party pledges, without which he can’t qualify.
Two Democratic senators called for Sen. Bob Menendez, D-N.J., to resign Monday, joining a growing chorus of lawmakers urging him to step down amid federal corruption charges.
Sen. Sherrod Brown of Ohio — chairman of the Banking Committee, where Menendez chairs a subcommittee — and Sen. Peter Welch of Vermont called on Menendez to leave Congress. Over the weekend, Sen. John Fetterman of neighboring Pennsylvania became the firstSenate Democrat to say he should resign.
Rep. Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., also said Monday night that Menendez should step aside.
Read the rest of the story at NBC News
House Speaker Kevin McCarthy’s attempts to avoid a government shutdown just became more complicated after former President Donald Trump stepped in to endorse the tactics of far-right House Republicans, who prefer to see a funding lapse than compromise with the Democratic-led Senate and White House.
Trump, the front-runner for the 2024 Republican presidential nomination, who backed McCarthy, R-Calif., for speaker, made the comments in a post on his social media platform.
“The Republicans lost big on Debt Ceiling, got NOTHING, and now are worried that they will be BLAMED for the Budget Shutdown. Wrong!!! Whoever is President will be blamed,” Trump wrote, adding: “UNLESS YOU GET EVERYTHING, SHUT IT DOWN! Close the Border, stop the Weaponization of ‘Justice,’ and End Election Interference.”
Former New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie said Sunday that he has “no interest” in running for the recently indicted Sen. Bob Menendez’s seat if his presidential run is unsuccessful.
“No, I have no interest in being in the United States Senate,” Christie, who’s running for the 2024 GOP nomination, told NBC News’ Kristen Welker on “Meet the Press.”
“I had a chance to appoint myself to the United States Senate” after Sen. Frank Lautenberg died in 2013, Christie said. “If I didn’t appoint myself, the easiest way to get there, I sure as heck am not going to run for it,” he said.
One week ahead of a potential government shutdown, President Biden issued a stark warning that “America could be forced to pay the price” if Republicans in Congress fail to act.
“Let’s be clear: if the government shuts down, that means members of the Congress — members of the U.S. military are going to have to continue to work and not get paid,” Mr. Biden said at a dinner hosted by the Congressional Black Caucus, or CBC, in Washington Saturday night. “A government shutdown can affect everything from food safety to cancer research to Head Start for children.”
Mr. Biden said funding the government is one of the “most basic responsibilities of Congress,” and blamed “extreme Republicans” for failing to adhere to a previous debt ceiling agreement that included limits on federal spending. House Republicans continued to strategize over the weekend and plan to move forward on a package of appropriations bills this week, hoping to build support for a short-term continuing resolution to keep the government open.
Former President Donald Trump spent his Sunday night on Truth Social raging at NBC News and MSNBC and pledging to have them investigating for “country-threatening treason.”
Trump before and after leaving office has often deemed media outlets who do provide him favorable coverage as the “enemy of the people.”
Now as the former president faces four criminal indictments, his rhetoric regarding unfriendly press and turned into threats.
Using his Truth Social media platform, Trump threatened to have Comcast, the parent company of NBC News and MSNBC, investigated for “threatening treason” while claiming they are not “entitled to use the very valuable Airwaves of the USA” for free.
The Writers Guild of America and Hollywood’s top media companies reached a tentative agreement Sunday that could resolve the writers strike and bring a close to one of the longest walkouts in entertainment industry history.
“WGA has reached a tentative agreement with the AMPTP,” the guild said in a statement. “This was made possible by the enduring solidarity of WGA members and extraordinary support of our union siblings who joined us on the picket lines for over 146 days.”
The union said that there would be no further comment at this time and that details will be released after the WGA West Board and the WGA East Council vote on the agreement, tentatively scheduled for Tuesday. Members would then need to ratify it with a vote.
In a forthcoming book by McKay Coppins, excerpted in The Atlantic, retiring Senator Mitt Romney, who, one should never forget, is an entirely shitty human being and a blithering dickhead, pointed out something that should have been patently obvious. He said that prior to January 6, 2021, “elected Republicans feared a political backlash from their base. But after January 6, a new, more existential brand of cowardice had emerged. One Republican congressman confided to Romney that he wanted to vote for Trump’s second impeachment, but chose not to out of fear for his family’s safety.”
And “Later, during the Senate trial, Romney heard the same calculation while talking with a small group of Republican colleagues. When one senator, a member of leadership, said he was leaning toward voting to convict, the others urged him to reconsider. You can’t do that, Romney recalled someone saying. Think of your personal safety, said another. Think of your children. The senator eventually decided they were right.” They’re not talking about crazed leftists going all Bolshevik on their asses. It’s the fucking MAGA cretins who are murdery. They’re the ones, primarily, who call in the death threats and bomb threats and show up at the houses of Democrats, armed to the tits with guns and ammo because open carry.
President Joe Biden roasted congressional Republicans on Thursday, hours after it was announced they were calling it a week despite appearing to make no tangible progress toward legislation to potentially avoid a shutdown.
Speaker Kevin McCarthy (R-CA) was dealt yet another blow on Thursday by members of his conference. In an emblematic sign of dysfunction, a mere procedural vote on military funding failed when six Republicans voted with Democrats to sink the measure.
The speaker is facing pressure from hardliners in his party to bring 12 separate appropriations bills to the floor instead of a single omnibus package that would fund the entire federal government. It seems increasingly unlikely the chamber will pass the appropriations bills in time – let alone have the Democratic Senate and White House sign off on them. McCarthy is reportedly seeking a 30-day stopgap funding bill to avert a shutdown, which will happen if Congress and the White House do not agree on legislation to fund the government.
As the Republican stalemate over government funding continues, two freshman GOP House members opened the door Thursday to end-running their party’s leadership and working with Democrats to fund the government.
Reps. Marc Molinaro and Mike Lawler, two New York Republicans who represent Hudson Valley-area districts that voted for President Joe Biden in 2020, said they’re willing to consider a “discharge petition” to force votes on a short-term funding bill — if their party fails to get its act together.
“It is absolutely an option,” Molinaro said outside the Capitol steps. “Working to ensure the government remains functional and that Congress is making the legitimate choices as it relates to funding … is an important principle.”
Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) said Thursday she’s glad Rupert Murdoch is stepping down from his empire, but blasted the media magnate for the “incalculable damage” he’s done to the country.
Fox Corp and News Corp. announced Murdoch, 92, would pass the reins of the companiesto his son, Lachlan Murdoch ― a seismic shift in a media landscape he has long dominated.
Coup-attempting former President Donald Trump demanded that House Republicans use the looming threat of a government shutdown to “defund” the federal criminal prosecutions against him.
“Republicans in Congress can and must defund all aspects of Crooked Joe Biden’s weaponized Government that refuses to close the Border, and treats half the Country as Enemies of the State,” Trump wrote on his Truth Social media platform late Wednesday. “This is also the last chance to defund these political prosecutions against me and other Patriots.”
While Trump did not use the word “shutdown” in his post, he did call the coming end of the budget year on Sept. 30 “a very important deadline.”
Mere hours after some House Republicans reported progress on a proposal to avoid a government shutdown at the end of the month, Donald Trumpdemanded they use the opportunity to “defund” Special Counsel Jack Smith and his team.
Smith is prosecuting Trump in federal court in Florida and Washington, D.C., where the former president will stand trial over his retention of government documents and his efforts to overturn the 2020 presidential election, respectively.
Speaker Kevin McCarthy (R-CA) has had his hands full trying to get his own conference to agree on a proposal to keep the government funded beyond Sept. 30. Hardline Republicans such as Rep. Matt Gaetz (R-FL) have demanded the House pass 12 individual single-subject spending bills rather than one large omnibus package that funds the entire federal government.
Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis (R) said humans are “safer than ever” from the threat of climate change, and he blasted the Biden administration’s effort to address the phenomenon as he unveiled an oil- and gas-first energy plan on Wednesday.
DeSantis, who is vying for the 2024 Republican presidential nomination, made the comments during a speech in Midland, Texas. He pledged to enact a slew of policies to roll back efforts to address climate change, including proposals to make electric vehicles more expensive, ramp up domestic production of fossil fuels and remove the U.S. from the landmark Paris climate agreement.
“We’ve seen a concerted effort to ramp up the fear when it comes to things like global warming and climate change,” he said Wednesday, claiming Democrats were trying to “circumscribe your ambitions.”
House Speaker Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) said the House will vote again on whether to consider the bill to fund the Pentagon as House Republicans showed signs of breaking an intra-party logjam that threatens a government shutdown in 10 days.
Talking to reporters after a lengthy party conference early Wednesday night, McCarthy said the House would vote Thursday on a rule to govern debate on the $826.2 billion defense bill. A similar vote Tuesday failed as five Republicans voted with all the House Democrats to sink the rule and prevent the bill from coming to the floor.
“I think we’ve got a plan to move forward, going to [the Department of Defense] and then going to a number of other appropriation bills,” McCarthy said. He added that he had won over two of the GOP holdouts in Tuesday’s vote.
Cassidy Hutchinson, a former top aide to ex-White House chief of staff Mark Meadows, said in a new book that she was groped by then-Trump attorney Rudy Giuliani at an event on Jan. 6, 2021.
In excerpts of her book “Enough,” set to be released next week, Hutchinson said Giuliani was “like a wolf closing in on its prey” when she met with him backstage while President Donald Trump delivered remarks to his supporters at the Ellipse near the White House shortly before the Capitol riot.
The excerpts were first reported by The Guardian. NBC News has not obtained a copy of the book, but a person familiar with the book confirmed that the quotes published by The Guardian were accurate.
Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) issued a warning to his Republican counterparts in the House on Tuesday, telling them a looming government shutdown will hurt the party.
Unless Congress and the White House agree to a resolution to fund the federal government beyond Sept. 30, it will shut down on Oct. 1. The Republican-controlled House is currently in abject disarray, with GOP members unable to agree on a workable solution among themselves.
On Tuesday, Speaker Kevin McCarthy (R-CA) canceled a procedural vote on a spending proposal after it became clear that the measure did not have adequate Republican support to pass.
The entire world has a vested interest in helping defeat the Russian invasion of Ukraine, President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine told the U.N. General Assembly on Tuesday, casting his appeal for more allies and aid as a matter of security — even survival — for many other nations.
Delivering one of the most anticipated speeches of the annual gathering of world leaders, Mr. Zelensky painted Russia as a habitual aggressor, citing Moscow’s military interventions in Moldova, Georgia and Syria, its increased control over Belarus and its threats against the Baltic States.
Republican infighting reached new heights this week as House Speaker Kevin McCarthy engaged in a war of words with conservative hard-liners on his right flank.
Republicans in the Senate watched their counterparts in the House with dismay as internal squabbles over s/9pending put McCarthy’s future as speaker in doubt and increased the odds of a government shutdown at the end of the month.
“It’s a shitshow in the House. It’s always a shitshow in the House,” Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) said. “Eventually, what’s going to happen is a government shutdown, [and it] will not go well for us.”
A small group of rebellious House Republicans sank the annual funding bill for the Pentagon in the House Tuesday, underlining how difficult it will be to keep the entire government open and the lights on after Sept. 30.
The defense bill is usually the easiest for Republicans to vote in favor of, as it funds their top priority: national defense. But this year, it has become entangled in a wider, increasingly bitter intra-party fight in the House GOP overspending.
The vote on a rule setting the limits for floor debate on the defense bill failed on a 212-214 tally, with five Republicans voting against it. While the vote was only procedural, the reality is it, and the underlying defense bill, will probably not come back to the House floor until a deal is struck within the Republican conference.
California Gov. Gavin Newsom said Vice President Kamala Harris was “absolutely” the best choice to be President Joe Biden’s running mate in 2024 and rejected concerns over Biden’s age during an interview with CNN on Monday.
“New CBS News poll shows only one-third of American voters think that Joe Biden will stay in office through a second term,” said CNN host Dana Bash during her interview with Newsom. “I know you are downplaying concerns about his age, but do you believe that voters don’t have any reason to be concerned that he would be 86 years old by the end of his second term?”
Newsom replied that while “voters have every right to be concerned,” he “couldn’t imagine three years ago that this president could accomplish so much in such a short period of time” in the White House.
One of former President Donald Trump’s long-time assistants told federal investigators that Trump repeatedly wrote to-do lists for her on documents from the White House that were marked classified, according to sources familiar with her statements.
As described to ABC News, the aide, Molly Michael, told investigators that — more than once — she received requests or taskings from Trump that were written on the back of notecards, and she later recognized those notecards as sensitive White House materials — with visible classification markings — used to brief Trump while he was still in office about phone calls with foreign leaders or other international-related matters.
The notecards with classification markings were at Trump’s Mar-a-Lago estate when FBI agents searched the property on Aug. 8, 2022 — but the materials were not taken by the FBI, according to sources familiar with what Michael told investigators.
The idea that Rep. Matt Gaetz will run for Florida governor in 2026 has been the topic of several conversations in Tallahassee over the past few days, including during a reception Sunday night for the incoming speaker of the Florida House.
Gaetz has long been considered on the shortlist of those who will try to seek the Republican nomination for governor, a field that is expected to be crowded because the incumbent, Ron DeSantis, will be facing term limits. DeSantis is currently running for president but would have two years remaining in the governor’s mansion if that run falls short.
Gaetz, like most other Florida Republican politicians, was in Tallahassee for the designation ceremony of Miami Republican state Rep. Danny Perez, who starting next year will serve as speaker of the Florida House.
Former Trump attorney Rudy Giuliani was sued Monday by his onetime lawyers in a lawsuit that says he owes $1.36 million in unpaid legal fees.
Robert Costello, a partner at the law firm Davidoff Hutcher & Citron, sued Giuliani in New York Supreme Court. He and his law firm are seeking payment of legal services that Giuliani has received since 2019.
According to the lawsuit, Costello’s firm began providing Giuliani legal services around November 2019, which continued through July of this year. The lawsuit said legal services provided by the firm included early representation in what became the election interference cases in Georgia and Washington, D.C.
Senator Professor Warren has some thoughts she’d like to share with one of her favorite BFFs: Elon Musk. She is Just Wondering about his involvement in the war in Ukraine and about whether or not Musk should be playing a role in the country’s foreign policy beyond ruining the platform on which our ambassadors share photos of their grandchildren and their cats. From Bloomberg:
“The Congress needs to investigate what’s happened here and whether we have adequate tools to make sure foreign policy is conducted by the government and not by one billionaire,” the Massachusetts Democrat said Monday at the Capitol. Musk, the chief executive officer of SpaceX, is expected to be among the technology industry chiefs to attend a closed-door summit with senators at the Capitol on Wednesday. Warren, a member of the Armed Services Committee, said she also wants the Defense Department to look into its contractual relationship with the company. Armed Services Chairman Jack Reed, a Rhode Island Democrat, also said he was concerned about the issue, given that governments traditionally have controlled satellites and presidents decided what to do with them.
The latest uproar stems from Walter Isaacson’s new biography of Musk. In it, Isaacson reports that Musk shut down his Starlink network in advance of a Ukrainian drone attack on a Russian fleet at anchor. Musk claims he did so to save the world from nuclear annihilation.
REP. LAUREN BOEBERT addressed the incident where she was kicked out of a Denver performance of the musical Beetlejuice, claiming in an interview with One America Newsthat she was removed from the theater for being “a little too eccentric.”
That’s certainly one way of framing it. Theater surveillance footage from last Sunday shows Boebert recording part of the performance and vaping, prompting a pregnant audience member to tap the congresswoman on the shoulder in an apparent attempt to ask her to stop. Video also shows Boebert exchanging words with the audience member. Several patrons lodged complaints, and Boebert was asked to leave the theater and responded, “Do you know who I am?” according an incident report from the city obtained by 9News Denver. The report said that two individuals were asked to leave the performance because they were “vaping, singing, causing a disturbance.”
Drew Barrymore put out an apologetic statement to announce she is backing off her attempt to restart her talk show until the end of the ongoing Writers’ Guild of America strike.
The actress and talk show host released her statement on Instagram, saying “I have listened to everyone” after her attempted show restart generated major outrage.
“I am making the decision to pause the show’s premiere until the strike is over,” Barrymore wrote. “I have no words to express my deepest apologies to anyone I have hurt and, of course, to our incredible team who works on the show and has made it what it is today. We really tried to find our way forward. And I truly hope for a resolution for the entire industry very soon.”
Former President Donald Trump assumed complete responsibility for his attempts to overturn his loss in the 2020 election.
As NBC’s Kristen Welker grilled Trump on numerous issues surrounding Jan. 6, she drilled down on who the ex-president was listening to as he pushed his unsubstantiated claims that the election was corrupted by mass fraud.
“The most senior lawyers in your own administration and on your campaign told you that after you lost more than 60 legal challenges that it was over,” Welker said. “Why did you ignore them and decide to listen to a new outside group of attorneys?”
“Because I didn’t respect them,” Trump answered.
Welker pointed out, “You hired them.”
Key factions of the House Republican Conference reached a tentative agreement Sunday to keep the government funded temporarily and avert a shutdown scheduled for the end of the month, pairing it with a conservative border security measure, multiple GOP sources with knowledge of the agreement said.
House Republicans released a bill after the far-right Freedom Caucus and the center-right Main Street Caucus reached a tentative agreement, the sources said. The deal, which would keep the government funded through Oct. 31 but includes cuts to domestic spending, is expected to pave the way to pass a defense spending bill this week that has been tied up in the standoff between Republican leadership and the far right.
Former President Donald Trump danced around questions as to whether he’d pardon himself if reelected next year, a clip from an upcoming NBC News interview showed.
In the segment from his sit-down with “Meet the Press” moderator Kristen Welker filmed Thursday, Trump hesitated to give her a straight answer when she asked him about the possibility. The first time she asked, he responded by insisting he could have preemptively pardoned himself before leaving office in 2021 but chose not to ― even though such a power was untested and questioned by legal scholars.
“Don’t ask me about what I would do,” Trump said. “I could have ― the last day, I could have had a pardon done. That would have saved me all of these lawyers and all of this these fake charges.”
Frustration boiled over in a closed-door House GOP meeting Thursday morning when Speaker Kevin McCarthy all but dared his detractors to file the “motion to vacate” the speaker’s chair and try to remove him.
In the meeting, McCarthy told House Republicans, “If you want to file a motion to vacate, then file the f—ing motion,” according to two sources in the room who confirmed the comments to NBC News.
It was a nod to members including Rep. Matt Gaetz, R-Fla., and others who are threatening to force him out of the speakership if he doesn’t comply with their demands, like putting certain bills on the floor and not passing a stopgap bill to prevent a government shutdown at the end of the month.
Federal prosecutors have indicted Hunter Biden, the son of President Joe Biden, on gun charges, court documents show.
Biden was indicted Thursday in federal court in Delaware on three counts tied to possession of a gun while using narcotics.
Two counts accuse Biden of having completed a form indicating he was not using illegal drugs when he bought a Colt Cobra revolver in October 2018. The third count alleges he possessed a firearm while using a narcotic. The indictment says Biden certified on a federally mandated form “that he was not an unlawful user of, and addicted to, any stimulant, narcotic drug, and any other controlled substance, when in fact, as he knew, that statement was false and fictitious.”
A fugitive who escaped from a Pennsylvania prison just days after being sentenced to life without parole in the fatal stabbing of his ex-girlfriend was captured early Wednesday after he tried to crawl away and was taken down by a law enforcement K-9 named Yoda, Pennsylvania State Police said.
Danelo Cavalcante was captured at 8:14 a.m. Wednesday, officials said. He was found hiding in or near a large pile of logs behind a John Deere store in South Coventry Township, about 30 miles from a county-run prison where he escaped 14 days ago.
“Today is a great day in Chester County. Our nightmare is finally over and the good guys won,” Chester County District Attorney Deb Ryan said at a news conference Wednesday morning.
Rep. Matt Gaetz (R-Fla.) slammed House Speaker Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) on Wednesday, saying his colleague was “never” going to impeach President Joe Biden, accusing the Republican leader of gaslighting members of his party.
“He’s throwing impeachment out like an ill-cast lure with no real intention to follow through,” Gaetz said of the speaker in an interview with MSNBC’s Ari Melber. “If you were really serious, you would subpoena Hunter Biden, get answers. They’re not serious. And that’s why you see this failure theater in the absence of real accountability.”
McCarthy said Tuesday he was unilaterally directing House committees to launch an impeachment inquiry into the president, saying Republicans had uncovered “serious and credible allegations” that “paint a picture of a culture of corruption” in the White House. Those claims center on millions of dollars in payments made by foreign nationals to the president’s son, Hunter Biden, including during years when Joe Biden was serving as vice president.
Sen. Mitt Romney of Utah, the 2012 Republican presidential nominee and an outspoken critic of former President Donald Trump, will not run for re-election next year, he said in a video statement Wednesday.
“I have spent my last 25 years in public service of one kind or another. At the end of another term, I’d be in my mid-80s. Frankly, it’s time for a new generation of leaders. They’re the ones that need to make the decisions that will shape the world they will be living in,” Romney said.
He added: “While I’m not running for re-election, I’m not retiring from the fight. I’ll be your United States senator until January 2025.”
The judge presiding over the federal criminal case alleging Donald Trump willfully mishandled national security secrets issued an order Wednesday limiting the former president’s access to the evidence and barring him from publicly discussing sensitive material.
The 16-page order from U.S. District Judge Aileen Cannon is largely in line with a proposal special counsel Jack Smith’s team submitted in July for how Trump and his attorneys should handle national security information at the center of the case.
“The limitations on disclosure of classified information set forth in this Order are binding on Defendant and his counsel and violations may result in criminal and/or civil penalties,” Cannon wrote. The version prosecutors proposed called for the order to be “forever binding.”
North Korea’s Kim Jong Un has arrived at the Vostochny Cosmodrome for his planned meeting with Russian President Vladimir Putin.
Putin greeted him in front of the building. The two shook hands and walked inside.
“I’m very glad to see you,” Putin said upon greeting Kim, according to RIA News, a state-run media outlet.
The high-level summit began at about 2:30 p.m. local time, coming after days of speculation over when and where the meeting would take place. The Kremlin, which announced on Monday that the meeting was planned, had said on Tuesday it would take place in the coming days.
Rep. Lauren Boebert (R-Colo.) wasn’t quite ready for showtime.
The conspiracy theorist lawmaker was given the boot from a touring production of “Beetlejuice” in Denver on Sunday for being disruptive, according to multiple reports.
The Denver Post said three theatergoers complained that Boebert and her companion were vaping, singing, recording the performance and causing a disturbance at the Buell Theatre.
The newspaper said they were warned during intermission, asked to leave during the second act, and initially refused to do so, which led to police being called to the scene.
She and her companion did eventually leave.
Everyone ages 6 months and older should get the updated Covid vaccines this fall, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said Tuesday.
The move follows a vote from the CDC’s advisory committee earlier in the day in favor of the recommendation.
“We have more tools than ever to prevent the worst outcomes from Covid-19,” the CDC’s director, Dr. Mandy Cohen, said in a media statement. “CDC is now recommending updated COVID-19 vaccination for everyone 6 months and older to better protect you and your loved ones.”
The shots are expected to be available within the next 48 hours in some areas, the CDC said.
House Speaker Kevin McCarthy, R-Calif., said Tuesday he is directing three House committees to open an impeachment inquiry into President Joe Biden in an effort to seek bank records and other documents from the president and his son Hunter Biden.
Speaking to reporters at a news conference, McCarthy said an impeachment inquiry is a “logical next step” of the GOP-led investigations that have been going on for months.
“This logical next step will give our committees the full power to gather all the facts and answers for the American public,” which he said “is exactly what we want to know — the answers.”
Former President Donald Trump is asking Judge Tanya Chutkan to recuse herself from the 2020 election subversion case against him brought by special counsel Jack Smith.
Trump, in a new court filing Monday, pointed to comments that Chutkan made in cases involving January 6 US Capitol rioters. He argued that there was “little doubt” that reasonable members of the public might “believe she has prejudged both the facts pertinent to this case and President Trump’s alleged culpability.”
“In a highly charged political season, naturally all Americans, and in fact, the entire world, are observing these proceedings closely,” he said. “Only if this trial is administered by a judge who appears entirely impartial could the public ever accept the outcome as justice.”
Three days after losing his bid to have his Fulton County, Georgia, election interference caseremoved to federal court, former Trump Chief of Staff Mark Meadows on Monday filed a motion for an emergency stay with the Eleventh Court of Appeals, as well as the judge overseeing the case, asking that the order be stayed pending the appeals process.
The motion came on the same day that Rudy Giuliani filed a motion seeking to sever his case, making him the latest defendant seeking to separate himself from the two defendants who are set to stand trial on Oct. 23.
Judge Steve Jones on Friday rejected Meadows’ bid to have his case moved, based on a federal law that calls for the removal of criminal proceedings brought in state court to the federal court system when someone is charged for actions they allegedly took as a federal official acting “under color” of their office.
President Joe Biden delivered remarks for the 22nd anniversary of 9/11 at a military base in Anchorage, Alaska, on the way back to Washington from a trip to India and Vietnam.
Biden spoke at Joint Base Elmendorf-Richardson before an audience of more than 1,000 service members, first responders and their families, a White House spokesperson said.
“On this day 22 years ago from this base, we were scrambling on high alert to escort planes through the airspace,” Biden said. “Alaskan communities opened their doors to stranded passengers.”
Former President Donald Trump’s attorneys filed court papers Monday that marked his first attempt to get charges against him dismissed in the Georgia election interference case.
Lawyers for Trump filed several motions that adopted arguments previously put forth by some of his 18 co-defendants, who have been accused of violating Georgia’s Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act and other crimes amid alleged efforts to overturn Trump’s 2020 election loss in the state.
In one instance, Trump’s attorneys adopted a motion filed by lawyers for Kenneth Chesebro, who allegedly crafted the legal theory behind the so-called fake electors scheme. Chesebro last week asked Fulton County Superior Court Judge Scott McAfee to dismiss the case against him, arguing that the U.S. Constitution’s Supremacy Clause barred states from prosecuting or otherwise regulating conduct “that was entirely within the ambit of federal authority.”
Over the weekend, Heidi Przybyla of Politico blew a very loud whistle on the cozy relationship between Federalist Society puppetmaster Leonard Leo, crackpot political activist Ginni Thomas, and the carefully manufactured conservative majority on the Supreme Court of the United States in the person of Ginni’s husband, Justice Clarence Thomas. The initial revelation lies right there in the very first anecdote in the story. It all comes back to Citizens United v. FEC, the egregious 2010 decision that legalized political influence-peddling and protected the free speech rights of bagmen and their customers. Turns out that Leo and Thomas knew enough about what was coming down from the bench to get a well-financed operation up and running in advance of the eventual decision.
Looking ahead:
Moroccan authorities said Sunday that more than 2,122 people had been killed and more than 2,400 injured in the 6.8-magnitude quake that destroyed homes and shattered lives throughout the High Atlas Mountains. Three days of mourning have been declared nationwide and the death toll is expected to rise as the full scale of the tragedy comes into view.
The Republican chairman of the House Foreign Affairs Committee on Sunday condemned Sen. Tommy Tuberville’s ongoing hold on hundreds of military promotions, calling it a “paralyzing” move that amounts to a “national security problem.”
“The idea that one man in the Senate can hold this up for months — I understand maybe promotions, but nominations? — is paralyzing the Department of Defense,” Rep. Michael McCaul, R-Texas, said in an interview on CNN’s “State of the Union.” “I think that is a national security problem and a national security issue.”
Tuberville, R-Ala., who is a member of the Senate Armed Services Committee, has blocked hundreds of military promotions for months over his objection to a Defense Department policy that provides paid time off and reimburses travel costs for service members and dependents seeking abortions.
President Joe Biden is nearing the end of a whirlwind trip to India and Vietnam for a series of high-profile meetings aimed at countering China’s influence in the developing world.
At the G20 in New Delhi and again in Hanoi, Biden used his swing through Asia to make the case that the US is a more reliable and trustworthy partner than Beijing, though he emphasized that he did not want a new Cold War with the Chinese.
“I don’t want to contain China, I just want to make sure we have a relationship with China that is on the up-and-up squared away, and everyone knows what it’s all about,” Biden said. “We have an opportunity to strengthen alliances around the world to maintain stability. That’s what this trip is all about, having India cooperate much more with United States, be closer to the United States, Vietnam being closer with the United States. It’s not about containing China. It’s about having a stable base – a stable base in Indo-Pacific.”
I know we like to insist that Democrats are generally milquetoast and rational to a fault when they respond to the wrongs that are done to them. When Sen. Dick Durbin can praise the absolutely bullshit blue slip rule, which is not a requirement on what underwear Ted Cruz has to wear but is instead a way that a single senator can shitcan a judicial nominee and has been ludicrously abused by Republicans, we’re into a realm where Democrats often fight with one hand tied behind their back and one foot nailed to the ground.
But this week, we’ve had a couple of examples of Democrats fucking done with GOP bullshit. They take off the gloves and just beat the shit out of very specific Republicans while, at the same time, implicating the entirety of the party. They are out of fucks, and it’s glorious to see.
Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis engaged in a heated argument Thursday with an audience member at a news conference who blamed him for the recent racist mass shooting that killed three Black people in Jacksonville.
The news conference, which was in Jacksonville, had been scheduled to highlight Florida’s protections against Covid-related mandates. But it took a pugilistic turn when DeSantis called on an attendee to ask a question.
Speaking calmly from the back of the room, the man told DeSantis that while he was a veteran and appreciated DeSantis’ military service, he felt DeSantis’ policies allowed “immature people” to access weapons that ultimately “caused the deaths of the people who were murdered a couple weeks ago.”
Hurricane Lee strengthened to a major Category 5 storm Thursday night, with forecasters predicting “dangerous beach conditions” around the western Atlantic.
The National Hurricane Center warned that the storm system was going to “rapidly intensify” Thursday — meaning maximum winds would surge 35 mph in 24 hours or less.
In a matter of hours Thursday, the storm went from a Category 4 hurricane to a Category 5 with maximum sustained winds of 160 mph, according to an 11 p.m. Thursday update from the hurricane center. It’s expected to continue to strengthen.
Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis essentially told House Judiciary Chair Jim Jordan(R-Ohio) to stay in his lane in a blunt response to his demand for documents related to her case against Donald Trump.
“Your attempt to invoke congressional authority to intrude upon and interfere with an active criminal case in Georgia is flagrantly at odds with the Constitution,” she wrote in a nine-page letter to Jordan, a longtime Trump apologist.
NBC News posted the full letter online.
Trump White House official Peter Navarro was convicted Thursday of contempt of Congress charges filed after he was accused of refusing to cooperate with a congressional investigation into the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol.
The verdict came after a short trial for Navarro, who served as a White House trade adviser under President Donald Trump and later promoted the Republican’s baseless claims of mass voter fraud in the 2020 election he lost.
Navarro was the second Trump aide to face contempt of Congress charges after former White House adviser Steve Bannon. Bannon was convicted of two counts and was sentenced to four months behind bars, though he has been free pending appeal.
Special counsel David Weiss intends to bring an indictment against President Joe Biden’s son Hunter Biden by the end of this month, according to court documents filed Wednesday.
The development comes a month after Attorney General Merrick Garland appointed Weiss as special counsel in his investigation of the younger Biden, after a plea deal struck between Hunter Biden and federal prosecutors fell apart and the case appeared headed for trial.
As part of the plea deal, Hunter Biden had originally agreed to acknowledge his failure to pay taxes on income he received in 2017 and 2018. In exchange, prosecutors would have recommended probation, meaning he would likely have avoided prison time.
A federal judge ordered Texas to remove floating barriers in the Rio Grandeand barred the state from building new or placing additional buoys in the river, according to a Wednesday court filing, marking a victory for the Biden administration.
Judge David Alan Ezra ordered Texas to take down the barriers by September 15 at its own expense.
The border buoys have been a hot button immigration issue since they were deployed in the Rio Grande as part of Gov. Greg Abbott’s border security initiative known as Operation Lone Star. The Justice Department had sued the state of Texas in July claiming that the buoys were installed unlawfully and asking the judge to force the state to remove them.
A Washington-based advocacy group filed a lawsuit on Wednesday to block former President Donald Trump from the 2024 Republican primary ballot in Colorado, citing the 14th Amendment’s ban on insurrectionists holding public office.
In recent weeks, a growing number of liberal and conservative legal scholars have embraced the longshot legal strategy. The lawsuit, from Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, is the first high-profile legal case attempting to use the 14th Amendment to derail Trump’s presidential campaign.
Trump has denied wrongdoing regarding the January 6, 2021, attack on the US Capitol and said in a recent social media post that there is “no legal basis” to use the 14th Amendment to remove him from the ballot.0…
Two of Donald J. Trump’s co-defendants in the Georgia election-interference case will go to trial together on Oct. 23, a judge ruled on Wednesday. The defendants, Sidney Powell and Kenneth Chesebro, had asked to be tried separately from one another.
The ruling from Judge Scott McAfee of Fulton County Superior Court, however, is contingent on the case remaining in state court — a situation that could change if other defendants succeed at moving the case into a federal courtroom.
Fani T. Willis, the district attorney of Fulton County, is still holding out hope that all 19 defendants in the racketeering case can be tried together. One of her prosecutors said during a hearing on Wednesday that the state would take approximately four months to present its case, calling roughly 150 witnesses. That estimate does not include the time it would take to pick the jury.
A panel of federal judges on Tuesday struck down a new congressional map created by Alabama Republicans that includes only one majority-Black district, defying a Supreme Court order.
“We are disturbed by the evidence that the State delayed remedial proceedings but ultimately did not even nurture the ambition to provide the required remedy,” the three judges of the U.S. District Court for Northern Alabama wrote in a 217-page order Tuesday. “And we are struck by the extraordinary circumstance we face.”
“We are not aware of any other case in which a state legislature — faced with a federal court order declaring that its electoral plan unlawfully dilutes minority votes and requiring a plan that provides an additional opportunity district — responded with a plan that the state concedes does not provide that district,” they added.
Former White House chief of staff Mark Meadows, former Justice Department official Jeffrey Clark and Trump attorney John Eastman have all pleaded not guilty to racketeering charges in the Georgia election interference case, court filings show.
Meadows and Eastman filed their not guilty pleas Tuesday, while Clark’s plea was entered late Friday, the filings show. The three also waived their arraignments, which had been scheduled for Wednesday.
Three more of the 19 defendants in the sprawling case brought by Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis have also pleaded not guilty — former Coffee County GOP chair Cathy Latham on Tuesday and alleged fake electors Shawn Still and David Shafer on Monday.
New York Attorney General Letitia James is asking the state Supreme Court to sanction former President Donald Trump, his sons Eric and Don Jr., others related to the family business and Trump’s attorneys for a total of $20,000.
Court records filed Tuesday showed that James’ office wants to sanction them because they’ve continued to raise “previously-rejected arguments” in their motions. The attorney general called them “frivolous and sanctionable” because “sophisticated defense counsel should have known better.”
The attorney general’s office said in the filing that there are five instances where previously rejected arguments by the court have been reused by Trump attorneys or where Trump attorneys made arguments based on a lack of legal or factual basis.
Enrique Tarrio, the former chairman of the far-right Proud Boys, was sentenced to 22 years in federal prison Tuesday afternoon following his conviction on a seditious conspiracy charge in connection with the Jan. 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol.
His sentence is the longest in a Jan. 6 case so far, surpassing the 18 years for Oath Keepers founder Stewart Rhodes, who was also convicted of seditious conspiracy.
Tarrio was one of four Proud Boys found guilty of seditious conspiracy in May. Federal prosecutors sought a sentence of 33 years in federal prison; U.S. District Judge Timothy Kelly sentenced Tarrio’s co-defendants to much lower terms than those sought by prosecutors.
Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell apparently had another “episode,” this one at a political event in Kentucky on Wednesday afternoon. From NBC News:
The Kentucky Republican froze in July at a news conference on Capitol Hill, going silent for 19 seconds before being escorted away from the cameras. McConnell, 81, returned shortly afterward and continued his news conference, telling reporters, “I’m fine.” When it became apparent that McConnell had frozen again on Wednesday, an aide came up to him and asked, “Did you hear the question, senator?” McConnell continued to be unresponsive. Once McConnell re-engaged, he responded briefly to another question about Kentucky Attorney General Daniel Cameron, a Republican; his aide needed to repeat the question to him.
President Joe Biden laced a Labor Day speech Monday with several pointed attacks at former President Donald Trump, casting him as the worst jobs president since the Great Depression and mocking his reputation as a real estate mogul.
“The guy who held this job before me was just one of two presidents in history … who left office with fewer jobs in America than when he got elected to office,” Biden said while addressing union workers before a parade in Philadelphia. “By the way, you know who the other one was? Herbert Hoover. Isn’t that kind of coincidental?”
Minutes later, the Democratic incumbent bragged about his bipartisan infrastructure deal, taking a victory lap for an achievement that eluded the Republican Trump during his term in office.
Some people get excited for pre-season football, some get amped when there’s a showdown coming in the United States House of Representatives. If a serious threat to Speaker of the House Kevin McCarthy’s (R-CA) grip on his position by members of his own party is your idea of a thriller, this is the Mediaite story for you!
Ever since McCarthy won the speakership on his 15th vote in January, he has been called the “weakest” Speaker of the House since struggling to win over the most hard-right members of the Republican conference. The reason for that is the compromise that allows one member to “move to vacate” McCarthy from the speakership and put the vote to the rest of the House. While the MAGA Republicans in Congress have been making this threat in the months since, CNN’s Manu Raju and Melanie Zanona reported over the weekend that the threat is very much on the table as the House prepares to figure out how to keep the country funded while making the majority of representatives happy.
Billionaire Twitter owner Elon Musk threatened to sue the Anti-Defamation League (ADL) for defamation on Monday after he accused the organization of “destroying half the value” of his social network.
“To clear our platform’s name on the matter of anti-Semitism, it looks like we have no choice but to file a defamation lawsuit against the Anti-Defamation League … oh the irony!” wrote Musk in a post to his platform Twitter, which was recently rebranded as X.
First Lady Jill Biden tested positive for Covid Monday night, the White House said in a statement.
President Joe Biden tested negative and will continue to test at regular intervals.
“She is currently experiencing only mild symptoms,” the White House said of the first lady. “She will remain at their home in Rehoboth Beach, Delaware.”
The last time the first lady tested positive for Covid, the virus that caused a global pandemic that put much of the nation on lockdown in 2020, was one year ago.
Former President Donald Trump pleaded not guilty Thursday in the Georgia criminal case accusing him of racketeering and conspiracy in connection with the effort to overturn the 2020 election, according to court documents.
Trump’s lawyers submitted the plea in writing and notified the court that he will not appear in person for the scheduled arraignment next week, which is allowed under Georgia law.
The former president said in the court filing Thursday that he had discussed the charges in the indictment with his attorney, “and I fully understand the nature of the offenses charged and my right to appear at arraignment.” He added that he “freely and voluntarily” waived his right to be present at his arraignment and to have it read to him in open court.
Never Back Down, the super PAC backing Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis’ presidential campaign, has ceased its door-knocking operations in Nevada, home to a key early nominating contest, and California, a delegate-rich Super Tuesday state, officials confirmed Wednesday.
They added that in recent weeks, the group also ended its field operations in North Carolina and Texas, two additional states that vote on Super Tuesday in March.
Never Back Down had pitched a wide-ranging canvassing effort throughout the early nominating states as the centerpiece of its effort to help boost DeSantis in the primary — even letting reporters inside its door-knocking boot camp in Iowa where it trained hundreds of canvassers earlier this year. The super PAC had planned to spend $100 million on the effort.
Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell released a doctor’s note Thursday saying he is “clear” to return to work after he appeared to freeze up for the second time in two months.
But that isn’t satisfying Republicans who are raising concerns that McConnell, R-Ky., the longest-serving leader in Senate history, isn’t being fully transparent about his health issues.
“If he wants to stay as leader, he needs to be transparent and open about his current condition,” said a House Republican, who requested anonymity to discuss McConnell’s health.
Amid a renewed focus on Supreme Court ethics, conservative Justice Clarence Thomas disclosed trips that were paid for by his billionaire friend Harlan Crow, in his annual financial disclosure report Thursday.
Among his activities in 2022 that he reported on, Thomas noted that Crow paid for his travel to a conservative conference in Dallas in May last year. Thomas spoke at the event, which was held at a facility owned by Crow’s real estate company. Crow also provided a return flight from Dallas in February following an ice storm, Thomas reported.
Thomas also said Crow paid for a trip to the Adirondacks in New York state in July 2022.
Delaino’s house is half a block from the water, but it’s on a ridge that rises 20 feet above sea level, a vantage point that gave him confidence, even as the storm sped through. The cedar tree in his front yard lost a few branches, but other than some debris, there wasn’t much to clean up.
A federal judge ruled Wednesday that Rudy Giuliani defamed former Georgia election workers Ruby Freeman and her daughter, Wandrea “Shaye” Moss, and is liable for damages after he failed to comply with discovery obligations in their lawsuit over his baseless claims that they committed fraud during the 2020 election.
A civil trial will be held to determine the amount of damages.
“The bottom line is that Giuliani has refused to comply with his discovery obligations and thwarted plaintiffs Ruby Freeman and Wandrea ArShaye Moss’s procedural rights to obtain any meaningful discovery in this case,” U.S. District Judge Beryl Howell wrote in a lengthy opinion.
Former President Donald Trump routinely overstated his personal net worth to financial institutions, by as much as $2.2 billion one year, New York Attorney General Letitia James’ office alleged in a filing Wednesday.
The figures, tucked into a 100-page motion for partial summary judgment, are the latest details in the sweeping $250 million civil lawsuit James brought against Trump, some of his eldest children and the Trump Organization last year. The lawsuit alleges efforts spanning 10 years to inflate Trump’s personal net worth to attract favorable loan agreements.
In court papers filed Wednesday in state Supreme Court, prosecutors asked the court to rule in favor of the attorney general’s office on only the first cause of action they brought against Trump last year, which argued that the former president and some Trump Organization employees used financial statements as a “vehicle” to fraudulently inflate his net worth by billions of dollars annually from 2011 to 2021.
Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell appeared to freeze again Wednesday, this time during a gaggle with reporters in Covington, Kentucky, stopping for more than 30 seconds after he was asked whether he would run for re-election.
McConnell, R-Ky., froze in July at a news conference on Capitol Hill, going silent for 19 seconds, before he was escorted away from the cameras. McConnell, 81, returned shortly afterward and continued his news conference, telling reporters, “I’m fine.”
When it became apparent that McConnell had frozen again Wenesday, an aide went up to him and asked, “Did you hear the question, senator?” McConnell continued to be unresponsive.
With more than a year to go before the 2024 election, a constellation of conservative organizations is preparing for a possible second White House term for Donald Trump, recruiting thousands of Americans to come to Washington on a mission to dismantle the federal government and replace it with a vision closer to his own.
Led by the long-established Heritage Foundation think tank and fueled by former Trumpadministration officials, the far-reaching effort is essentially a government-in-waiting for the former president’s second term — or any candidate who aligns with their ideals and can defeat President Joe Biden in 2024.
With a nearly 1,000-page “Project 2025” handbook and an “army” of Americans, the idea is to have the civic infrastructure in place on Day One to commandeer, reshape and do away with what Republicans deride as the “deep state” bureaucracy, in part by firing as many as 50,000 federal workers.
Cedar Key, Florida, is poised to take the brunt of Idalia when it makes landfall on Wednesday as a Category 3 or 4 Hurricane, prompting meteorologists to warn that the island city has the potential to be “wiped off the map.”
“We’re really narrowing it in here,” said NBC meteorologist Bill Karins while pointing to a computerized map of the area. “And we’ve been talking a lot about Cedar Key; about 700 residents call it home, it’s a big vacation area. It sticks out almost like a pier does into the water. If there’s one spot that is potentially going to be wiped off the map, it would be Cedar Key. That’s where they could have the 15-foot surge. We hope not. We hope it didn’t materialize like that, but at least that’s the potential.”
Fulton Co. District Attorney Fani Willis made a stunning request by asking the court in the Georgia fake elector case to allow her to try all 19 co-defendants, including former President Donald Trump, together beginning Oct. 23.
To date, only attorneys Kenneth Chesebro and Sidney Powell have asked for speedy trials. However, Willis wrote in a document filed Tuesday that separating the defendants would be “improper.”
MSNBC’s Ali Velshi asked legal analyst Glenn Kirschner, “What is the basis of arguing that severance in a case like this is improper?”
Look, I’m just spitballing here but, over the weekend, we had a viciously, nakedly racist mass shooting in Jacksonville, Florida. A guy who decorated his firearms with swastikas, and who spent hours typing out his hatred with one hand in the half-light of his mom’s basement and in the darkness of what was left of his mind, showed up at Edward Waters University all geared up. And only an alert student who flagged down campus security prevented a massacre there, instead of at the nearby Dollar General. From CNN:
The gunman, identified as 21-year-old Ryan Christopher Palmeter, left behind racist writings and used racial slurs, Jacksonville Sheriff T.K. Waters said. He was armed with an AR-15-style rifle and a handgun, both legally purchased, and targeted Black people as he opened fire inside the store, according to the sheriff.
The shooter, who lived with his parents in Orange Park in Clay County, left his home around 11:39 a.m. and headed to Jacksonville in neighboring Duval County, Waters told CNN Saturday. The man immediately got in his vehicle and started to drive away after being confronted by a security officer, who followed him until he left campus, Faison saiD. “We don’t know obviously what his full intentions were, but we do know that he came here right before going to the Dollar General,” Faison said. “Members of our university security team reacted almost immediately. I think the reports are in less than 30 seconds after he made contact and drove onto our campus.”
It seems like Donald Trump was in the mood to gossip on Monday.
The former president used his platform Truth Social to share some “rumors” about Republican rival Gov. Ron DeSantis (R-Fla.), not long before learning his Washington, D.C., trial is set to start the day before Super Tuesday primary voting.
“Rumors are strong in political circles that Ron DeSanctimonious, whose Presidential run is a shambles, and whose poll numbers have absolutely crashed, putting him 3rd and 4th in some states, will be dropping out of the Presidential race in order to run, in Florida, against Rick Scott for Senate. Now that’s an interesting one, isn’t it?” he posted.
DeSantis press secretary Bryan Griffin painted Trump’s rumor-mongering as a weak intimidation tactic, telling The Messenger, “They know this is a two-man race, and we will carry this on to a win in this presidential primary.”
The judge overseeing former President Donald Trump’s election interference case in federal court set a trial date for March 4, a schedule that could have a crucial impact on the 2024 race for the White House.
U.S. District Judge Tanya Chutkan‘s decision sets the trial in the middle of the Republican presidential primaries and the day before Super Tuesday.
At a hearing Monday, Chutkan heard arguments from Trump’s lawyers and federal prosecutors about when the case could be set for trial. Special counsel Jack Smith proposed that the trial start in January, with jury selection beginning this December, while Trump’s team said the trial should be pushed back until April 2026, after the presidential election.
A University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill faculty member was killed Monday in a shooting that prompted a campuswide lockdown while officials searched for an “armed and dangerous person,” university officials said.
A suspect was captured about an hour and a half after the shooting at Caudill Laboratories, and an all-clear was issued for the campus about two hours after that.
No other injuries were reported, school officials said at a briefing Monday afternoon.
Former White House chief of staff Mark Meadows, one of the defendants charged with racketeering in the Georgia 2020 election probe, took the witness stand for five hours Monday in an attempt to bolster his bid to move the Fulton County case to federal court.
Former President Donald Trump and 18 co-defendants, including Meadows, were booked at the Fulton County Jail last week in connection with efforts to overturn the 2020 presidential election results in Georgia, a battleground state.
Testifying before U.S. District Judge Steve C. Jones, Meadows portrayed the conduct he’s charged with as part and parcel of his work as Trump’s chief of staff, which he described as a “24/7 kind of job.” Asked by his attorney George Terwilliger whether his duties ever intersected with political matters, Meadows said almost everything the president does has a political reaction.
Fulton County, Ga., District Attorney Fani Willis (D) on Monday will have her first major courtroom faceoff after indicting former President Trump and 18 others in the Georgia election case.
At a Monday morning hearing in Atlanta, prosecutors are set to battle with attorneys for former Trump White House chief of staff Mark Meadows, who wants to move his charges to federal court so he can assert immunity.
Although Monday’s hearing technically regards only Meadows, the proceeding could have implications for the other co-defendants.
If Meadows succeeds, Trump and the others could automatically go to federal court along with Meadows. Even if not, the same judge will soon consider similar removal requests from other defendants, and the judge on Monday could provide insights into his thinking on the issue.
Three people were killed in a shooting Saturday afternoon at a Dollar General store in Jacksonville, Florida, that authorities said was racially motivated. The suspect died by suicide, officials said.
In a news conference Saturday evening, Jacksonville Sheriff T.K. Waters said that the suspect, described as a White man in his early 20s, entered a Dollar Store just after 1 p.m. and opened fire, killing three people. All the victims were Black, Waters said.
“He targeted a certain group of people, and that’s Black people,” Waters said.
The suspect then died from a self-inflicted gunshot wound, Waters disclosed. His name was not immediately released.
Bob Barker, the longtime host of television’s “The Price Is Right” who used his combination of comfort-food charm and deadpan humor to become an American television staple, has died, according to his longtime publicist. He was 99.
“It is with profound sadness that we announce that the World’s Greatest MC who ever lived, Bob Barker has left us,” publicist Roger Neal said in a statement Saturday.
Neal served as Barker’s publicist from 1987 to 1994 and again from 2020.
House Speaker Kevin McCarthy said Sunday that an impeachment inquiry into Joe Biden is a “natural step forward” following Republican probes into the business dealings of the president and his family.
In an interview on Fox News’ “Sunday Morning Futures,” McCarthy, R-Calif., was asked whether he plans to launch an impeachment inquiry when Congress returns next month.
“So, if you look at all the information we have been able to gather so far, it is a natural step forward that you would have to go to an impeachment inquiry,” McCarthy said.
1. Honestly, the conservadouche Fox “news” moderators, Bret Baier and Martha MacCullum, could have phrased things differently at the first debate of the future losers of the Republican nomination for president on Wednesday night in Milwaukee. Baier asked for a show of hands in answer to the question, “If former President Trump is convicted in a court of law, would you still support him as your party’s choice?” He might as well have asked, “If President Trump wanted you to come to his prison cell and suck his dick, would you?” The response would have been the same, with fast-talking, bright-toothed, empty-headed rich fucknut Vivek Ramaswamy eagerly raising his hand to volunteer that he’d vigorously gobble some orange knob and others joining in to demonstrate how much they want Trump’s balls slapping their chins with pathetic, shouty worm Ron DeSantis and America’s mopiest stepdad Mike Pence grudgingly admitting that, yeah, they’d mouth the mushroom. Only sad, hairless scrotum Asa Hutchinson and beach ball with high blood pressure Chris Christie had the nerve to say, “No, get that thing out of my face.”
Former President Donald Trump returned to Twitter — recently rebranded as “X” — on Thursday and made his first post since January 2021, just hours after he was arrested in Fulton County, Georgia.
In Trump’s first post since his Twitter ban following the January 6, 2021 Capitol riots, Trump shared the mugshot from his Thursday arrest, along with the caption, “ELECTION INTERFERENCE. NEVER SURRENDER! DONALDJTRUMP.COM.”
Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis has requested a trial start date in October for the election subversion case she brought against former President Donald Trump and 18 co-defendants in Georgia, court records show.
In her request to the court Thursday, Willis noted that Trump lawyer Kenneth Chesebro, one of the defendants charged with attempting to overturn the state’s 2020 election results, submitted a “demand for speedy trial” under a Georgia statute Wednesday.
Willis had previously proposed that the trial start on March 4 — the same week that voters in 16 states go to the polls in the presidential primaries. Legal experts told multiple media outlets that even this timeline would be infeasible.
Donald Trump surrendered to authorities at the Fulton County Jail on Thursday evening, but it was his self-reported physical attributes that took center stage for CNN panelists.
“Jake, as we were discussing earlier, they did provide, in the record, his height and weight, 6’3″, 215 pounds. It’s out there,” said CNN’s Abby Phillip, as other panelists remarked incredulously, “215 pounds?”
“One-five,” Phillip assured them.
“But did they say they took it, because we were told that he filled out some papers ahead of time,” said Jamie Gangel.
Former President Donald Trump turned himself in Thursday night at the Fulton County Jail to be booked on felony charges in connection with efforts to overturn the 2020 presidential election results in Georgia.
Trump arrived at the jail shortly after 7:30 p.m. ET in a presidential-style motorcade and was booked, fingerprinted and photographed for a mug shot within minutes, according to jail records. Trump was quickly released, according to the records. He was in and out of the jail in about 20 minutes.
“What has taken place here is a travesty of justice,” Trump told reporters on the tarmac moments before he boarded his plane to leave Atlanta. “We did nothing wrong at all, and we have every single right to challenge an election we think is dishonest.”
Russian officials and the Wagner Group are yet to officially confirm the fate of Yevgeniy Prigozhin, after an Embraer business jet listing the mercenary group chief among its passengers crashed northwest of Moscow, killing all 10 on board, according to Russia’s civil aviation agency. Once a key ally of Russian President Vladimir Putin, Prigozhin led a dramatic failed mutiny in June, falling out of favor and laying low since. On Thursday morning, pieces of the jet — including what appeared to be its tail — lay more than a mile from the primary crash site.
Trump compared the current volatile mix of passion and hatred to the crowd on Jan. 6, 2021, and pivoted to defending his supporters who attacked the U.S. Capitol that day — falsely describing the violent assault as a day of “love and unity.”
Former President Donald Trump plans to turn himself in and be processed at the Fulton County jail on Thursday, following his agreement earlier Monday to a $200,000 bond and other release conditions.
“I’ll be going to Atlanta, Georgia, on Thursday to be ARRESTED,” Trump wrote on Truth Social, confirming CNN’s earlier reporting from two sources familiar with the plan.
Several co-defendants in the sweeping Georgia racketeering case have also agreed to the terms of their bond agreements with the district attorney’s office.
Trump’s lawyers Jennifer Little, Drew Findling and Marissa Goldberg met with the district attorney’s office on Monday before the details of the bond agreement were released. Little, Findling and Goldberg are based in the state. Other Trump lawyers have been working behind the scenes on the approach to the bond and Trump’s forthcoming arrest, including Todd Blanche, who has taken the helm as Trump’s primary defense attorney across his multiple criminal indictments.
One thing was clear when former President Donald J. Trump decided to skip the first debate of the 2024 Republican primary race: There would be a vacuum to fill.
But it was not Mr. Trump’s chief rival in the polls, Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida, who emerged at the epicenter of the first Trump-free showdown on Wednesday, but instead the political newcomer Vivek Ramaswamy, whose unlikely rise has revealed the remarkable degree to which the former president has remade the party.
Mr. DeSantis had stumbled heading into the debate and was widely seen as in need of a stabilizing performance. He sought it by largely avoiding the scrum and sticking closely to the core case he makes on the stump, hoping to gain incremental ground in front of a national audience.
A key witness against former President Donald Trump and his two co-defendants in the Mar-a-Lago documents case recanted previous false testimony and provided new information implicating the defendants after he switched lawyers, special counsel Jack Smith’s office said in a new court filing.
Yuscil Taveras, the director of information technology at Mar-a-Lago, Trump’s club in Palm Beach, Florida, changed his testimony last month about efforts to delete security camera video at the club after he changed from a lawyer paid for by Trump’s Save America PAC to a public defender, Tuesday’s filing says.
The revised testimony led to last month’s superseding indictment against Trump and his two co-defendants.
Former New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani is expected to surrender at the Fulton County Jail on Wednesday, multiple sources told ABC News. Lawyers for Giuliani will be meeting with the Fulton County District Attorney’s Office early Wednesday to finalize a bond package before a surrender in the Georgia election interference racketeering case.
Giuliani, according to sources, has secured local counsel but is expected to be joined by his longtime friend and former NYC Police Commissioner Bernie Kerik, who is assisting him through the process.
Attorney John Eastman was booked and released on bail Tuesday at the Fulton County Jail, as some of the 18 defendants charged alongside former President Donald Trump in the case began turning themselves in.
Eight out of the more than a dozen 2024 GOP presidential candidates are confirmed by the Republican National Committee to be on the first primary debate stage on Wednesday night in Milwaukee. The four candidates who didn’t make the debate stage are attacking the RNC’s requirements and making plans for the next steps in their campaign.
Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, tech entrepreneur Vivek Ramaswamy, South Carolina Sen. Tim Scott, former U.N. ambassador and South Carolina Gov. Nikki Haley, former Vice President Mike Pence, North Dakota Gov. Doug Burgum, former New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie and former Arkansas Gov. Asa Hutchinson are confirmed by the party to have cleared the polling, donor and pledging requirements.
Former President Donald Trump was not among the listed participants and confirmed on Sunday that he would skip the debate.
House Speaker Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) said Tuesday that Republicans would open an impeachment inquiry against President Joe Biden next month if he doesn’t hand over personal records.
McCarthy said Republicans need “the bank statements, the credit card statements” that would show whether Biden had taken a bribe.
“Show us where the money went. Show us: Were you taking money from outside sources? That would clear most of this up,” McCarthy said on Fox Business. “The whole determination here is how the Bidens handle this. If they provide us the documents, there wouldn’t be a need for an impeachment inquiry.”
Eight presidential hopefuls officially qualified for Wednesday’s GOP presidential debate in Milwaukee, the Republican National Committee confirmed Monday night.
While former President Donald Trump appeared to have met the party’s polling and fundraising thresholds, he won’t be on the stage, as he has refused to sign the RNC’s pledge to support the eventual nominee and announced he would skip the debate.
President Joe Biden and first lady Jill Biden traveled to Maui, Hawaii,on Monday to meet with residents affected by the wildfires this month, the deadliest in modern U.S. history.
The president toured Lahaina, surveying the charred town where 850 people are believed to still be missing. He promised that the federal government would do all it can to help with the recovery.
“The country grieves with you, stands with you and will do everything possible to help you recover, rebuild and respect culture and traditions,” Biden said in detailing search-and-rescue efforts that he said involved 450 search-and-rescue experts “working around the clock.”
Former President Donald Trump said Monday night that he would turn himself in Thursday in Fulton County, Georgia, after he was indicted on sprawling charges stemming from his efforts to hold on to office in the wake of the 2020 election.
“Can you believe it? I’ll be going to Atlanta, Georgia, on Thursday to be ARRESTED by a Radical Left District Attorney, Fani Willis,” Trump wrote on his social media platform, Truth Social.
Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis, who launched the investigation into Trump and his allies, has given the defendants until noon Friday to surrender voluntarily.
The indictment that Fulton County Dist. Atty. Fani Willis unveiled Monday night offers a panoramic recapitulation of the misdeeds that former President Trump and his confederates allegedly perpetrated to unlawfully retain power in the months after the 2020 election. Its core charge against Trump and 18 other defendants is a violation of Georgia’s version of the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act, or RICO, traditionally used to prosecute organized crime.
About half the indictment consists of a recitation of 161 overt acts in furtherance of the RICO violation, 40 of which are crimes in themselves. It covers much of what we learned from the House Jan. 6 committee and Trump’s federal indictment on charges of attempting to overturn the 2020 election, adding details such as those concerning a plot to infiltrate voting systems in rural Coffee County.
Read the rest of Harry Litman’s piece at The Los Angeles Times
The Angry Children’s Caucus has delivered the ransom note to its primary houseboy-slash-hostage, Speaker Kevin McCarthy, and the demands are as angry and childish as one could have expected. From the Washington Post:
In a statement, the ultraconservative Republicans said they will oppose a short-term extension of government funding — known as a continuing resolution — if it doesn’t include a House-passed bill that funds restrictive border policies. The continuing resolution, they said, must also include provisions that “address the unprecedented weaponization of the Justice Department and FBI” and it must “end the Left’s cancerous woke policies in the Pentagon.” The House’s most right-wing members have alleged that the Justice Department has been “weaponized” against former president Donald Trump, who has been indicted four times, and that Democrats have turned the Pentagon “woke” by supporting inclusive policies within the military.
And, on both of those idiotic concerns, a large portion of the Republican Party is completely out of its mind. Hey, somebody had to say it.
Appearing to contradict former President Donald Trump’s primary public defense in the classified documents case, former White House chief of staff Mark Meadows has told special counsel Jack Smith’s investigators that he could not recall Trump ever ordering, or even discussing, declassifying broad sets of classified materials before leaving the White House, nor was he aware of any “standing order” from Trump authorizing the automatic declassification of materials taken out of the Oval Office, sources familiar with the matter tell ABC News.
Ever since the FBI’s seizure of more than 100 classified documents from his Mar-a-Lago estate last August, Trump has insisted that he declassified all the materials before he left office. The former president now faces 40 separate criminal charges related to his possession of those documents, ranging from unlawful retention of national defense information to various obstruction-related offenses.
A magnitude 5.1 earthquake followed by a series of aftershocks shook Southern California Sunday afternoon just as Tropical Storm Hilary began drenching the region with heavy rain.
The quake struck at 2:45 p.m. and was centered roughly four miles southeast of Ojai in Ventura County at a depth of one kilometer, according to the U.S. Geological Survey.
The quake could be felt sharply across a wide swath of Southern California including the San Fernando Valley, downtown L.A., Long Beach and Orange County.
A business owner was fatally shot Friday after someone allegedly took issue with a Pride flag she had displayed at her clothing store in Lake Arrowhead, California.
Deputies responded at 5 p.m. to the shooting at the Mag Pi clothing store, where owner Laura Ann Carleton was pronounced dead, the San Bernardino Sheriff’s Department said in a news release. The suspect, who was not identified, ran away.
“Through further investigation, detectives learned the suspect made several disparaging remarks about a rainbow flag that stood outside the store before shooting Carleton,” the news release said.
Donald Trump confirmed Sunday that he will skip the first Republican presidential primary debate Wednesday — and indicated he may not attend future ones, either.
The former president wrote on his Truth Social media platform that polling shows him leading in the Republican primary field by such a wide margin that he doesn’t need to stand alongside his rivals on the debate stage.
“The public knows who I am & what a successful Presidency I had,” Trump wrote. “I WILL THEREFORE NOT BE DOING THE DEBATES!”
A source familiar with Trump’s thinking said the decision applies to only the first two debates, which are affiliated with Fox News and Fox Business. The source declined to rule out the possibility that Trump may change his mind.
One thing that comes across in the indictment of Donald Trump and the cabal of scoundrels, dregs, assholes, and Rudy Giuliani for racketeering and other crimes in Georgia is that Fulton County D.A. Fani Willis treated Trump like a criminal who happens to have been president. It’s a contrast with the indictments from Special Counsel Jack Smith, who treats Trump like a former president who happens to be a criminal. In the federal indictments, for stealing classified documents and refusing to give them back, as well as for inciting the January 6 insurrection, Smith writes with a sense of mourning overlaying some measure anger, as if it’s just a shame that it all had to come to this, but, alas, it did and now we must do something about it. That’s not to take away from the effectiveness of the indictments. I’m just talking tone here.
Hurricane Hilary is heading toward Southern California where it is forecast to bring heavy rain, flash flooding, mudslides and gusty winds.
The greater Southwest area, including Las Vegas, could also see flash flooding from this very rare event.
Hilary, now a Category 3 hurricane, is gaining strength in the Pacific Ocean and is expected to become a major Category 4 hurricane by Friday as it tracks along Baja California.
A tropical storm watch is in effect for Cabo San Lucas. Hilary’s outer bands could graze the popular Mexican resort town on Saturday but it is not forecast to directly hit Cabo.
As Hilary approaches California, it’s expected to weaken to a tropical storm, but is still forecast to bring a significant punch to Southern California and the Southwest.
Some areas in California’s inland desert could see their annual rainfall in just 48 hours.
Allies of Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis outlined a strategy for next week’s GOP presidential primary debate in a memo encouraging him to defend former President Donald Trump from attacks by rival Chris Christie and call upstart contender Vivek Ramaswamy “fake.”
The two-page memo, written by leaders of the pro-DeSantis super PAC Never Back Down, was published to the website of Axiom Strategies and dated Aug. 15. Axiom founder Jeff Roe also leads the pro-DeSantis’ super PAC.
“Defend Trump when Chris Christie attacks him,” the memo reads, adding a potential line for DeSantis to use on stage in Milwaukee against the former governor of New Jersey: “Trump isn’t here so let’s just leave him alone. He’s too weak to defend himself here. We’re all running against him. I don’t think we want to join forces with someone on this stage who’s auditioning for a show on MSNBC.”
Federal prosecutors are seeking sentences of 27 to 33 years in federal prison in the cases of four Proud Boys found guilty of seditious conspiracy for their actions during the Jan. 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol, as well as 20 years for a fifth Proud Boy found guilty on other charges.
Enrique Tarrio, Joseph Biggs, Ethan Nordean and Zachary Rehl were all convicted of seditious conspiracy in May after a monthslong trial that began in January. A fifth defendant, Dominic Pezzola, was acquitted of the seditious conspiracy charge but found guilty of assaulting, resisting or impeding certain officers. Pezzola smashed a Capitol window with a stolen police shield, leading the first breach of the building.
Prosecutors are seeking 33 years in federal prison for Tarrio and Biggs, 30 years for Rehl, 27 years for Nordean and 20 years for Pezzola.
Former President Donald Trump, the front-runner in polls for the 2024 Republican nomination, is seeking to delay his federal trial on charges related to his efforts to stop the peaceful transfer of power and retain the White House following his 2020 election loss.
In a court filing Thursday, Trump’s attorneys recommended starting the trial in April 2026, more than two years after prosecutors are seeking to get the trial underway.
“This is an unprecedented case in American history. The incumbent administration has targeted its primary political opponent—and leading candidate in the upcoming presidential election—with criminal prosecution,” Trump’s attorneys wrote. “The administration has devoted tens of millions of dollars to this effort, creating a special counsel’s office with dozens of employees, many of whom are apparently assigned full-time to this case and this case alone.”
Former President Donald Trump now stands criminally indicted in four separate cases. Presently, he is on pretrial release in three of those cases, but it’s more than likely that the judge in the fourth case also decides to release him pending trial in Fulton County, Georgia. However, given a recent post in which Trump declared that a witness “shouldn’t” testify before Fani Willis’ grand jury there, the former president may be at higher risk of a judge getting sick of his bad behavior.
I attended Trump’s arraignment hearing in early August in federal court in Washington, D.C. And I heard Magistrate Judge Moxila A. Upadhyaya say something that caught my attention.
In the federal system, there are a number of laws that guide judges in deciding when they can and/or should detain a defendant pending trial. The Federal Bail Reform Act of 1966 established a presumption in favor of pretrial release. Congress further fine-tuned the law by amending the act in 1984, requiring a judge to release a defendant pending trial unless the judge concludes that detention is necessary to reasonably assure the defendant will not flee and/or endanger others. When a judge decides to release a defendant pending trial, they will set conditions of release that, if violated, can result in sanctions, up to and including pretrial detention.
A federal appeals court Wednesday upheld parts of a decision limiting access to a widely used abortion pill, but the ruling will have no immediate impact on the availability of the drug, mifepristone.
In its ruling, a three-judge panel on the conservative-leaning 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals held that the Food and Drug Administration failed to adequately take into account safety concerns when it loosened access to mifepristone in 2016.
While the ruling is a victory for abortion opponents, the Justice Department said it would appeal the decision. The Supreme Court this year issued a stay while the case goes through the appeals process, which has allowed the drug to remain widely available.
The Georgia prosecutor leading the election interference case against former President Donald Trump and 18 co-defendants is looking to start the high-profile trial in early March, according to a court filing Wednesday.
Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis proposed a March 4 trial date preceded by arraignments the week of Sept. 5. Trump and some of his closest aides and allies were indicted on felony charges Monday in connection with efforts to overturn the 2020 presidential election results in Georgia.
MSNBC aired newly obtained footage on Wednesday evening showing Donald Trump ally and longtime GOP operative Roger Stone dictating what sounds a lot like the core of the plot to overturn the 2020 presidential election.
In the video, Stone dictates a message saying that “any legislative body” can send their own electors to the Electoral College “on the basis of overwhelming evidence of fraud.”
No such evidence has ever been presented, and Trump and his allies lost in the courts at every turn, including in cases before judges Trump himself had nominated.
A woman in Texas was arrested Wednesday after she allegedly threatened to kill the federal judge overseeing an election interference case against former President Donald Trump. The news came just hours after media outlets reported that the purported names and addresses of grand jurors in the Georgia vote tampering indictment had been shared on far-right message boards.
The episodes reflect the charged political divide over the legal whirlwind surrounding Trump and growing concerns about the safety of those involved in prosecuting him. Trump has regularly lambasted special counsel Jack Smith as “deranged” and attacked the judges assigned to his cases. In a message posted on his Truth Social platform earlier this month, he warned: “IF YOU GO AFTER ME, I’M COMING AFTER YOU!”
With the coup-attempting former president and 2024 Republican front-runner now at 91 felony counts across four separate indictments, his pack of rivals, with few exceptions, on Tuesday remained unwilling to use that vulnerability against him.
Sen. Tim Scott (R-S.C.), campaigning at the Iowa State Fair in Des Moines, told reportersthat the latest indictment from Georgia accusing Trump of creating a “criminal enterprise” to illegally remain in office despite having lost the 2020 election reflected badly not on Trump but on the Fulton County district attorney.
“We see the legal system being weaponized against political opponents. That is un-American and unacceptable. At the end of the day, we need a better system than that,” Scott said.
Former Trump White House chief of staff Mark Meadows is seeking to move the Fulton County, Georgia, prosecution against him to federal court so that he can try to get the case dismissed under federal law.
Meadows argued in a new court filing submitted in the US District Court of the Northern District of Georgia that he is entitled to bring a federal immunity defense because the Georgia state charges against him stem from his conduct as then-President Donald Trump’s chief of staff.
Meadows is one of 19 defendants, including Trump, who were charged on Monday in the Georgia 2020 election subversion case. Meadows’ request would not move the entirety of District Attorney Fani Willis’ case to federal court. Rather, it would be a defendant-by-defendant endeavor.
Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis is asking Disney to drop its lawsuit against him after he took away the company’s ability to self-govern an area of its Walt Disney World amusement parks in Orlando.
“We’ve basically moved on,” DeSantis said in an interview with CNBC on Monday. “They’re suing the state of Florida. They’re going to lose that lawsuit.”
The legal battle began last year after Disney publicly opposed a Florida state law that bans classroom lessons on sexual orientation and gender identity in what critics have called a “Don’t Say Gay” policy.
Special counsel Jack Smith’s office obtained a search warrant this year to gain access to Twitter communications, including direct messages, linked to former President Donald Trump’s account, new details about the warrant revealed Tuesday.
According to a newly unsealed copy of the warrant, prosecutors sought “all content, records, and other information relating to communications sent from or received” from October 2020 to January 2021 on Trump’s account on Twitter, the social media website that has since been renamed X.
The warrant specifically requested contents of “all tweets created, drafted, favorited/liked, or retweeted” by Trump’s account, including deleted tweets, as well as all associated multimedia, metadata and logs.
This week’s installment of What’s My Indictment? will be taped before a live studio audience in Atlanta, Georgia. An educated guess would be that Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis may have begun to soften up the ground over the weekend prior to what may be a sweeping case for the prosecution. This kind of story rarely escapes by accident. From CNN:
Investigators in the Georgia criminal probe have long suspected the breach was not an organic effort sprung from sympathetic Trump supporters in rural and heavily Republican Coffee County – a county Trump won by nearly 70% of the vote. They have gathered evidence indicating it was a top-down push by Trump’s team to access sensitive voting software, according to people familiar with the situation. Trump allies attempted to access voting systems after the 2020 election as part of the broader push to produce evidence that could back up the former president’s baseless claims of widespread fraud.
Former President Donald Trump’s 2024 campaign attacked Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis’ “Black Panther” family on Monday after Trump was charged with 13 felonies over his attempts to overturn the results of the 2020 election.
Soon after the charges were made public, the Trump campaign sent out a lengthy email titled “The Truth About Fani Willis,” which alleged the prosecutor was “a Democrat activist” and that she came from a family “steeped in hate.”
Under the subheadings, “A Family Steeped In Hate” and “Fani Willis Is The Daughter Of A Former Black Panther,” the Trump campaign quoted a 2021 TIMEmagazine article that revealed Willis’ father was a Black Panther.
Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis is giving former President Donald Trump and his 18 alleged co-conspirators until noon Aug. 25 to voluntarily surrender and avoid arrest, she said at a news conference late Tuesday night.
Willis’ news conference came soon after a grand jury voted to indict Trump and his co-defendants, including former New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani and former White House chief of staff Mark Meadows, on a combined 41 criminal charges related to Trump’s scheme to overturn the results of the 2020 presidential election.
“Every individual charged in the indictment is charged with one count of violating Georgia’s [RICO] law through participation in a criminal enterprise in Fulton County, Georgia, and elsewhere to accomplish the illegal goal of allowing Donald J. Trump to seize the presidential term of office,” Willis said, ticking off the names of all 19 defendants.
Hillary Clinton said she took no pleasure from Donald Trump’s legal troubles as a grand jury investigating the former president’s efforts to overturn the 2020 election results returned an indictment Monday night in what could be his fourth set of criminal charges this year.
“I don’t know that anybody should be satisfied,” Clinton, who lost to Trump in the 2016 presidential election, told MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow on Monday after initially smiling and shaking her head at the news. “I just feel great profound sadness that we have a former president who has been indicted for so many charges.”
“He set out to defraud the United States of America and the citizens of our nation,” Clinton, a former secretary of state, added of Trump. “He used tactics of harassment and intimidation. He made threats. He and his allies went after state officials… . We’ll wait to see what [Georgia prosecutors] say … but I don’t know that anybody should be satisfied. This is a terrible moment for our country to have a former president accused of these terribly important crimes.”
Former President Donald Trump and top allies, including his lawyer Rudy Giuliani and his former White House chief of staff Mark Meadows, and a top former Justice Department official, Jeffrey Clark, were indicted Monday on felony charges in connection with efforts to overturn the 2020 presidential election results in Georgia.
The sweeping 41-count indictment also names lawyers John Eastman, Sidney Powell, Kenneth Chesebro, Jenna Ellis and Ray Smith, along with several others. All were charged with violating Georgia’s RICO (Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organization) act.
In an indictment handed up to the judge around 9 p.m. and made public just before 11 p.m., Trump was charged with felony racketeering and numerous conspiracy charges, court filings show.
Former President Donald Trump seized the spotlight at the Iowa State Fair this weekend, swooping overhead in his private plane just as his chief Republican rival, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, was flipping pork chops and greeting potential GOP caucus-goers.
The 2024 Republican presidential race played out in close quarters as Trump and DeSantis joined the crowd of thousands.
For DeSantis, the day was filled with the traditions that have made the Iowa State Fair in Des Moines a quintessential stop on the presidential campaign trail since the Democratic Party moved the state to the first position in its nominating calendar in 1972 and Republicans made the same shift four years later. (Democrats this year are shaking up the order of states for their nominating contest.)
As the death toll from a wildfire that razed a historic Maui townclimbed to 93, authorities warned that the effort to find and identify the dead was still in its early stages. The blaze is already the deadliest U.S. wildfire in more than a century.
Crews with cadaver dogs have covered just 3% of the search area, Maui Police Chief John Pelletier said Saturday.
“We’ve got an area that we have to contain that is at least 5 square miles, and it is full of our loved ones,” he said, noting that the number of dead is likely to grow and “none of us really know the size of it yet.”
Long before the FBI began investigating Donald Trump ’s hoarding of classified documents or Attorney General Merrick Garland appointed a special prosecutor to probe the former president, Fani Willis was at work.
Just one month after Trump’s infamous January 2021 phone call to suggest Georgia’s secretary of state could overturn his election loss, the Fulton County district attorney announced she was looking into possible illegal “attempts to influence” the results in what has become one of America’s premier political battlegrounds. As she built her case, Willis called a parade of high-profile witnesses before a special grand jury, presiding over an investigation that was so public it seemed she would become the first prosecutor in U.S. history to indict a former president.
She instead looks poised to become the third person to levy criminal charges against Trump, leapfrogged by Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg and Justice Department special counsel Jack Smith. But the indictment that Willis may bring as soon as this week could be the most sprawling case against Trump in response to his desperate efforts to remain in power after he lost to Democrat Joe Biden. And some legal experts say it could be one of the more potent cases against Trump.
Prosecutors investigating the attempt to overthrow the 2020 election results in Georgia have texts and emails that connect members of former President Donald Trump’s legal team to the January 2021 voting system breach in Coffee County, according to a CNN exclusive.
Texts and other evidence collected by investigators in the Georgia criminal probe indicate Trump’s lawyers tried to gain access to Coffee County’s voting systems so Trump’s allies could produce evidence for the unfounded theory that the election was stolen, according to CNN’s sources.
Fani Willis, the district attorney in Fulton County, Georgia, is expected to present her case before a grand jury this week and to seek charges against roughly a dozen individuals, including those involved in the Coffee County voting systems breach.
This guy, Kai Cenat, has 6.5 million followers on Twitch, including 80,000 paid subscribers, and millions more following him on YouTube. He streams himself gaming, does pranks, and basically fucks around and makes a shit-ton of money doing it. No judgment. Anyone who makes a living doing what they love, as long as it’s legit and/or doesn’t hurt anyone, good on them.
So Cenat and another online content creator, Fanum, said last Friday afternoon that they were giving away Playstation 5s and gift cards in Union Square in the middle of Lower-ish Manhattan. It’s a busy area even when it’s not peak tourist season, which it totally, fucking annoyingly is. The announcement caused thousands of mostly young people to swarm Union Square. After being delayed, Cenat arrived and live-streamed for a little while from the event until it got too intense to keep going. It doesn’t look like Playstations were given away, but the crowd started to lose its shit and jumped on cars and tore up a subway entrance construction site and other parts of Union Square, getting into fights with the cops who arrived, all while Cenat drove away as people held onto his SUV like it was the last helicopter leaving the Fyre Festival or something.
On Tuesday, I published an article titled, “Trump wants another MAGA terrorist attack—and alarmingly he may get it.” On Wednesday, we saw an alarming example of MAGA violence in Utah when a MAGA extremist died in a shootout with FBI agents who were attempting to arrest him for threats he made to kill President Biden—as well as Manhattan DA Alvin Bragg and others.
At the outset I want to note that I wrote my article Tuesday not to scare people—or to be provocative– but because I’m deeply concerned that we are seeing an uptick in MAGA threats and will soon see more violence. Beyond the reports of increased threats versus judges, prosecutors and others who are involved in the prosecution of Trump, an anecdotal example I gave was the uptick in angry MAGA emails I’ve received in the past few weeks. (I included screen grabs in my article.)
Read the rest of Dean Obeidallah’s piece at The Dean’s Report
The federal judge overseeing the 2020 election conspiracy caseagainst Donald Trump will hear arguments Friday over a request by prosecutors for a protective order seeking to bar the former president from publicly disclosing evidence shared by the government.
The protective order sought by special counsel Jack Smith’s team has become an early flashpoint in the case accusing the Republican of illegally scheming to subvert the will of voters and cling to power after he lost to Democrat Joe Biden.
Protective orders aren’t unusual in criminal cases, and they’re different from “gag orders” that bar parties from talking publicly about an ongoing case outside the courtroom. But lawyers for Trump — who has railed against prosecutors and U.S. District Judge Tanya Chutkan on social media and during campaign events — say the proposed protective order goes too far and would restrict Trump’s free speech rights.
Democratic lawmakers are calling out Supreme Court Associate Justice Clarence Thomasafter new revelations from ProPublica that he’s taken at least 38 luxury trips paid for by wealthy benefactors.
Some say the case illustrates the need for ethics reform on the Supreme Court.
“This is a shameless lifestyle underwritten for years by a gaggle of fawning billionaires,” Sen. Dick Durbin (D-Ill.) wrote on Twitter. “Justices Thomas and [Samuel] Alito have made it clear that they’re oblivious to the embarrassment they’ve visited on the highest court in the land.”
Officials announced Thursday that the death toll from wildfires on Maui now stands at 55, making it one of the deadliest blazes in the last century.
The new fatality count is a significant jump from the 36 confirmed dead on Wednesday, a day after the fire ignited, sending the historic Hawaiian tourist destination town of Lahaina up in flames. The death toll has increased as rescuers have been able to reach parts of the island previously inaccessible due to fires and other obstructions.
“What we’ve seen today has been catastrophic,” Hawaii Gov. Josh Green (D) said during a news conference Thursday after walking through Lahaina, calling the event likely the largest natural disaster in the state’s history. “We’ve also seen many hundreds of homes destroyed, and that’s going to take a great deal of time to recover from.”
House Oversight Committee Chairman James Comer, who is leading the investigation into Hunter Biden’s foreign business dealings, said Thursday his panel plans to subpoena members of the Biden family, including possibly President Joe Biden.
“This is always going to end with the Bidens coming in front of the committee. We are going to subpoena the family,” Comer, R-Ky., said in an appearance on Fox Business.
“Obviously, with all the opposition and obstruction we’re getting from the Biden attorneys now, we know that this is going to end up in court when we subpoena the Bidens,” he continued. “So we’re putting together a case, and I think we’ve done that very well.”
At least 36 people have died in the Lahaina fire in Hawaii, Maui County wrote in a statement posted to the county website Wednesday evening.
Wildfires, whipped by strong winds from Hurricane Dora passing far to the south, took the island of Maui by surprise, leaving behind burned-out cars on once busy streets and smoking piles of rubble where historic buildings had stood. Flames roared throughout the night, forcing adults and children to dive into the ocean for safety.
Officials said earlier that 271 structures were damaged or destroyed and dozens of people injured.
On Wednesday, crews were continuing to battle blazes in several places on the island. Authorities urged visitors to stay away.
Former President Donald Trump on Wednesday said that he would not sign a loyalty pledge required by the Republican National Committee for participation in the first GOP debate this month.
During a Newsmax interview, Trump said that he took issue with a particularly clause of the pledge that says the candidate will support the eventual GOP nominee.
“I wouldn’t sign the pledge,” Trump told host Eric Bolling. “They want you to sign a pledge, but I can name three or four people that I wouldn’t support for president. So right there there’s a problem.”
Donald Trump’s lawyers on Wednesday asked a federal judge in Florida to order the government to “re-establish” a secure facility at his Mar-a-Lago resort where they could safely discuss the national security documents prosecutors say he illegally kept there.
In a court filing to U.S. District Court Judge Aileen Cannon, Trump attorneys Todd Blanche and Chris Kise asked for the accommodation after arguing special counsel Jack Smith’s proposed protective order on how they can discuss the sensitive materials recovered from the former president’s home was too onerous.
“This request is based on the immense practical and logistical hurdles and costs that make it virtually impossible for President Trump to make regular trips to a public facility to discuss classified discovery material with counsel as necessary to conduct a defense consistent with the rights afforded by the Constitution,” their filing said.
A Utah man was fatally shot after FBI agents raided his home in connection to death threats he allegedly made against President Joe Biden and other political figures.
Craig Robertson was killed Wednesday morning during a home raid in Provo, multipleoutlets reported. In a statement, the FBI said agents attempted to serve an arrest and search warrants when the shooting took place.
“The FBI takes all shooting incidents involving our agents or task force members seriously,” the FBI said in a statement to ABC News. “In accordance with FBI policy, the shooting incident is under review by the FBI’s Inspection Division. As this is an ongoing matter, we have no further details to provide.”
Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis is shaking up his campaign leadership, bringing in James Uthmeier, his longtime chief of staff, as his new presidential campaign manager, the latest move in a reset that is now almost a month in the making.
Out is Generra Peck, who was DeSantis’ campaign manager through his 2022 re-election and during the tumultuous first three months of his presidential campaign. DeSantis trails Donald Trump in most public polling, and he has already laid off 40% of his initial campaign staff in an attempt to cut costs.
“Gov. DeSantis has to change the dynamics. That much is clear,” DeSantis donor Dan Eberhart said. “This is a realignment rather than a reset because both folks were already senior advisers.”
Three Alabama men are facing misdemeanor assault charges after a group of white men attacked a Black dockworker on Saturday during a brawl involving multiple people along the Montgomery Riverfront.
Montgomery Police Chief Darryl J. Albert announced assault charges against Richard Roberts, 48; Allen Todd, 23; and Zachery Shipman, 25. At a news conference Tuesday, Albert said one of the men is in custody and the other two other were expected to turn themselves in to police Tuesday afternoon.
Police are expected to bring more charges. The other two people had not turned themselves in as of Tuesday night and were not in custody, a police spokesperson said.
The judge presiding over Donald Trump’s election case has ordered attorneys from both sides to meet in court Friday to discuss proposed restrictions on what the former president can publicly disclose about evidence gathered in the investigation.
U.S. District Judge Tanya Chutkan had ordered special counsel Jack Smith’s office and Trump’s lawyers to pick a date on or before Friday for a hearing in a dispute over competing protective order proposals that would enable the government to start handing over evidence to Trump’s team.
Ohio voters overwhelmingly rejected a Republican-backed ballot measure Tuesday that would make it harder to enshrine abortion rights in the state constitution, delivering a major win for reproductive rights supporters.
Issue 1 asked voters to decide whether to raise the threshold of support required for future state constitutional amendments to 60%. Currently, just a majority is needed. The measure also proposed toughening rules for groups trying to place future measures on the ballot by requiring them to obtain signatures from voters in all of Ohio’s 88 counties, instead of the 44 now required.
Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis on Sunday rejected Donald Trump’s claim that he was the true winner of the 2020 presidential election in his most forceful comments to date on the matter.
“Whoever puts their hand on the Bible on Jan. 20 every four years is the winner,” DeSantis told NBC News correspondent Dasha Burns in his first broadcast network interview since he launched his presidential campaign.
DeSantis continued to discuss all the ways he believed the previous presidential election was not perfect. But pressed further, he clearly stated that Trump lost.
A federal judge in New York on Monday dismissed Donald Trump’s countersuit against E. Jean Carroll, the writer who won a $5 million verdict against the former president for battery and defamation this year.
Trump filed his counterclaims against Carroll in June, alleging she defamed him by continuing to say publicly that he’d raped her even after a jury found him not liable for doing so.
But, U.S. District Judge Lewis Kaplan noted Monday, the jury did find Trump liable for sexually abusing Carroll during an encounter in the dressing room of a New York City department store in the mid-1990s, and the details of that finding show that her having maintained that Trump raped her is “substantially true.”
Former President Donald Trump’s attorneys asked a federal judge to reject a proposed protective order in the government’s election conspiracy case, claiming the effort to limit any public release of evidence would restrict his First Amendment rights.
Special counsel Jack Smith’s team first asked U.S. District Judge Tanya Chutkan on Friday to issue a protective order related to any evidence shared with Trump’s team as lawyers prepare for trial. Though requesting such orders is not unusual, prosecutors suggested Trump’s bombastic use of social media could be a concern as the case moves forward.
Smith’s team included a screenshot of a Truth Social message Trump posted last week, declaring in all caps: “IF YOU GO AFTER ME, I”M COMING AFTER YOU!”
Former New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie said Donald Trump should be very worried about a close member of his inner circle from his final year in office.
“I’ve said all along I think Mark Meadows is already a cooperating witness,” Christie told CNN’s Anderson Cooper on Monday. “He has all the looks of a cooperating witness, running into coffee shops away from the press.”
Meadows was White House chief of staff during much of the final year of Trump’s presidency including the period after the election, which is the focus of the indictment on federal charges of election obstruction and conspiracy.
If former President Donald Trump committed a “technical violation of the Constitution,” it doesn’t mean he necessarily broke any criminal laws, John Lauro, Trump’s criminal defense attorney, argued Sunday on NBC’s “Meet the Press.”
Lauro appeared to signal how he’d defend the former president in a trial that will stem from the four-count criminal indictment returned last week by a federal grand jury that had been examining Trump’s possible role in the Jan. 6, 2021, Capitol riot and his alleged attempts to overturn the 2020 election.
Pressed by NBC’s Chuck Todd about Trump’s alleged pressure campaign to get former Vice President Mike Pence to reverse the election, Lauro claimed that Trump and Pence had merely disagreed over whether a vice president could constitutionally take actions that could lead to a presidential election’s being overturned.
Donald Trump seems to have hell on his mind.
The former president invoked the perpetual flames of the underworld in two separate rants on Sunday against Rep. Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) and the U.S. women’s national soccer team.
Early in the day, he launched his attack on the former House speaker, who on Friday said Trump looked like a “scared puppy” during his arraignment last week on federal charges of election obstruction and conspiracy.
“I wasn’t ‘scared,’” Trump insisted in a post on his Truth Social website. “Nevertheless, how mean a thing to say! She is a Wicked Witch whose husbands journey from hell starts and finishes with her. She is a sick & demented psycho who will someday live in HELL!”
Former Vice President Mike Pence, whose friction with Donald Trump has recently taken the spotlight, declined to say on Sunday whether he would support the thrice-indicted ex-president should he become the Republican nominee in the 2024 election.
Pence, who is also running for president in the 2024 election, has continued growing more vocal about his role in certifying the previous election on Jan. 6, 2021, despite an angry Trump demanding he use his position to keep the then-president in power. Last week, a federal grand jury indicted Trump for his efforts to overturn the 2020 election.
“President Trump was wrong then and he’s wrong now. I had no power to overturn the election,” the Indiana Republican told Dana Bash on CNN’s “State of the Union.”
The Justice Department has asked a federal judge overseeing the criminal case against former President Donald Trump in Washington to step in after he released a post online that appeared to promise revenge on anyone who goes after him.
Prosecutors on Friday requested that U.S. District Court Judge Tanya Chutkan issue a protective order concerning evidence in the case, a day after Trump pleaded not guilty to charges of trying to overturn his 2020 election loss and block the peaceful transition of power. The order, different from a “gag order,” would limit what information Trump and his legal team could share publicly about the case brought by special counsel Jack Smith.
Chutkan on Saturday gave Trump’s legal team until 5 p.m. Monday to respond to the government’s request. Trump’s legal team, which has indicated he would look to slow the case down despite prosecutors’ pledge of a speedy trial, then filed a request to extend the response deadline to Thursday and to hold a hearing on the matter, saying it needed more time for discussion.
One thing that has always bugged the shit out of me with the reaction of Donald Trump, who really was president of the United States for a weird, fucked-up period of time, to the results of the 2020 election. It’s something that has bugged lots of people and it’s something that others have said but deserves to be stated again in this new, post-third indictment context. So I’m not treading new ground when I say this: the easiest way to see that Trump knew that he lost the 2020 election is that he only ever says that his election was “stolen.”
See, if you gave a single fuck about “election integrity” or some such shit, you’d have to insist that the whole goddamned election was screwed up and everyone who got elected did so unfairly, including any Republicans. But even in that case, you’d think that Trump would have made the play because Democrats kept the House and Senate. If the election was all kinds of fucked with cheating and machine hacks and shady workers, if Republican area ballots were stolen or Democratic area ballots were illegally cast multiple times, then that’s the case you make. You’d say all of it was fucked, including local races, including ballot initiatives, the whole damn thing. Toss it out and do it again.
Former President Donald Trump was reportedly “irked” that the judge during his arraignment on Thursday did not address him as a former president.
“I’m learning tonight that Trump left here in a sour and dejected mood,” said CNN host Kaitlan Collins on Thursday after Trump pleaded not guilty to four charges to Judge Moxila Upadhyaya in a Washington, D.C. courthouse. “He was, quote, ‘pissed off,’ according to someone who spoke to him.”
Collins then added, “I am told that the former president, one thing that irked him particularly, was during that hearing today that lasted about 27 minutes, was when the magistrate judge referred to him as simply ‘Mr. Trump.’”
The two Democratic state representatives in Tennessee who wereexpelled by Republicans in April for protesting in support of gun safety on the chamber floor won elections Thursday night for their old seats, The Associated Press projected.
Justin Jones won his election for his state House seat in Nashville, and Justin J. Pearson won his race in Memphis, according to AP projections.
Jones defeated Republican Laura Nelson, while Pearson won his race against independent candidate Jeff Johnston.
At the heart of the latest federal indictment of former President Donald Trump is a scheme to use “fake electors” to overturn the 2020 presidential election. The strategy attempted to find a way to undermine the Electoral College after state officials refused to change the election results.
Here’s a look at what happened:
After someone votes for president, that vote gets counted in a statewide tally. But legally speaking, the Electoral College decides who is elected president.
Former President Donald Trump pleaded not guiltyThursday to charges that he engaged in criminal conspiracies aimed at subverting the 2020 presidential election results and keeping himself in power — a significant moment in one of the most consequential tests of the U.S. Constitution and its criminal justice system.
Trump was arraigned on an indictment charging him with conspiracy to defraud the United States; conspiracy to obstruct an official proceeding; obstruction; and conspiracy against the right to vote and to have one’s vote counted.
Special counsel Jack Smith, who brought the case against Trump, was seated in the front row for the proceeding, about 10 feet away from the former president who’s labeled him a “deranged prosecutor.” Smith was in Trump’s sightline, and Trump appeared to avoid looking at him.
Read the rest of the story at NBC News
Former Attorney General William Barr on Wednesday rejected arguments that Donald Trump’s attempts to overturn the 2020 presidential election amounted to free speech, saying the government had a “legitimate” case following Tuesday’s indictment of the former president.
Trump was indicted by a federal grand jury in connection with his attempts to remain in power after he lost the election to Joe Biden. He faces four felony charges claiming multiple conspiracies to defraud the United States, obstruct an official proceeding and deprive Americans of their right to vote and have that vote counted.
The former president’s attorneys responded with fury, accusing the Justice Department of attacking free speech and undermining Trump’s First Amendment rights. But Barr, who served under Trump until Dec. 23, 2020, told CNN those assertions were wrong.
Former Vice President Mike Pence responded angrily on Wednesday to former President Donald Trump’s claim that all he wanted on Jan. 6, 2021, was for Pence to request a delay in the 2020 election certification.
Pence said it was “completely false” that Trump only asked him to “pause the vote counting,” as Trump’s attorney claimed Tuesday evening. Pence said it was perfectly clear what Trump wanted him to do.
“Let’s let’s be clear on this point: It wasn’t just to ask for a pause,” Pence said on Fox News. “The president specifically asked me ― and his gaggle of crackpot lawyers asked me ― to literally reject votes, which would have resulted in the issue being turned over to the House of Representatives and literally chaos would have ensued.”
It was just another Tuesday for former President Donald Trump.
He golfed at his club in Bedminster, New Jersey, chatted with staff and club members there and was relatively nonchalant as he awaited something that is becoming a part of his new reality: being indicted.
Special counsel Jack Smith on Tuesday unsealed an indictmentagainst Trump alleging he tried to undermine democracy by overturning the 2020 election and disenfranchising lawful votes. It is the third indictment Trump is facing and comes after months of investigation that included grand jury testimony from a range of witnesses, including former Vice President Mike Pence.
Former President Donald Trump is scheduled to appear in a Washington, D.C. courtroom Thursday afternoon to answer charges that he used “unlawful means” in an attempt to subvert the results of the 2020 presidential election and hold on to power.
Trump will be arraigned on an indictment charging him with conspiracy to defraud the United States; conspiracy to obstruct an official proceeding; obstruction; and conspiracy against the right to vote and to have one’s vote counted.
He is scheduled to appear before Magistrate Judge Moxila A. Upadhyaya at the E. Barrett Prettyman Courthouse at around 4 p.m. ET.
Former President Donald Trump’s campaign responded to his latest indictment on Tuesday by saying these “fake charges” amount to “election interference” and comparing the investigation to Nazi Germany.
The campaign’s remarks came after a federal grand jury charged Trump based on the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol and his attempt to remain in power despite losing the 2020 election.
“This is nothing more than the latest corrupt chapter in the continued pathetic attempt by the Biden Crime Family and their weaponized Department of Justice to interfere with the 2024 Presidential Election, in which President Trump is the undisputed frontrunner, and leading by substantial margins,” the campaign said.
Former Vice President Mike Pence took direct aim at his onetime boss, former President Donald Trump, for actions Trump took to try to stay in office that led to the four-count federal indictment unveiled Tuesday.
“Today’s indictment serves as an important reminder: anyone who puts himself over the Constitution should never be President of the United States,” Pence said in a statement.
“Our country is more important than one man,” the former vice president said. “Our constitution is more important than any one man’s career.”
The remarkable third indictment of former President Donald Trump returned by a federal grand jury on Tuesday includes six, un-named, un-indicted co-conspirators. But it also contains clues to their identities.
Five of the six alleged co-conspirators, based on details provided in transcripts of testimony to the Jan. 6 Committee and other records, appear to be: Former New York City Mayor and longtime Trump attorney Rudy Giuliani; lawyer John Eastman, who spoke at the Jan. 6 rally and helped architect the “fake electors scheme“; attorney Sidney Powell, who helped lead Trump’s post-campaign legal efforts and promoted conspiracy theories; former Justice Department official Jeffrey Clark, whom Trump considered making his attorney general; and Kenneth Chesebro, another attorney pushing the “fake electors scheme.”
It is not clear who co-conspirator 6 is.
Former President Donald Trump was indictedTuesday on charges he conspired to defraud the country he used to lead and attempted to prevent the peaceful transfer of presidential power to Joe Biden.
“The purpose of the conspiracy was to overturn the legitimate results of the 2020 presidential election by using knowingly false claims of election fraud to obstruct the government function by which those results are collected, counted and certified,” the indictment from special counsel Jack Smith’s office says.
The indictment marks a historic moment for a nation less than 250 years old — the first time a former president has faced criminal charges for trying to overturn the bedrock of democracy, a free and fair election. While Trump’s failure to reverse his defeat was a credit to the guardrails of that democracy, the ability to prosecute him may renew the stress test on the constitutional design.
Two hours of testimony from a former associate of Hunter Biden’s failed to turn up dirt on President Joe Biden, according to Rep. Dan Goldman (D-N.Y.).
Republicans had hoped an interview with Devon Archer, who partnered in business with the president’s son, would help them connect Hunter Biden’s wheelings and dealings to acts of corruption by the president.
But hours of questioning in a Capitol office building yielded no smoking guns, Goldman told reporters.
Former President Donald Trump’s legal woes may not be eating into his lead among GOP primary voters, but they’re costing his political operation millions of dollars.
Trump’s Save America PAC has spent more than $20 million on legal fees alone — doling out payments to more than 40 different law firms — in the first six months of 2023, according to new campaign finance reports filed Monday with the Federal Election Commission.
Legal expenditures accounted for two-thirds of the PAC’s total spending from January through June.
There are those of us who have been wary of the FBI ever since the 1960’s, and for good goddamn reasons, too, but who also are deaf to the fulminations of the former president* and his acolytes in the Congress, because he’s as crooked as a dog’s hind leg, and they’re all thooleramawns of the first degree. That said, federal district Judge Colleen McMahon—a Clinton appointee, as those things are reckoned these days—deserves our thanks for what she did on Thursday and, more important, how she did it.
McMahon freed three men named Onta Williams, David Williams and Laguerre Payen, 75 percent of a hapless crew nicknamed The Newburgh Four, who had been hauled in as a result of an FBI post-9/11 “sting” operation and had 25-year mandatory minimum sentences dropped on them for allegedly plotting terrorist attacks on synagogues in and around New York City. This was one of those operations by career-hungry G-men who got slow-witted (and often indigent) souls and, through entrapment and the use of skeevy informants, got them involved in massive imaginary plots that piled up arrests and convictions that made the FBI and its agents look very good, and also further embedded the fear of terrorism in the general population, which the Bush Administration found very helpful. All that most of these comic operas accomplished was the ruination of lives about which society didn’t give much of a damn anyway.
Donald Trump cried “prosecutorial misconduct” again this weekend while denying new allegations from federal prosecutors, who say the multiply indicted former president and his team tried to destroy surveillance footage from his Mar-a-Lago estate in Florida.
“MAR-A-LAGO SECURITY TAPES WERE NOT DELETED,” Trump declared in an all-caps rantposted to Truth Social on Sunday. “THEY WERE VOLUNTARILY HANDED OVER TO THE THUGS, HEADED UP BY DERANGED [special counsel] JACK SMITH.”
“WE DID NOT EVEN GO TO COURT TO STOP THEM FROM GETTING THESE TAPES,” he continued. “I NEVER TOLD ANYBODY TO DELETE THEM. PROSECUTORIAL FICTION & MISCONDUCT! ELECTION INTERFERENCE!”
In his next post, Trump accused prosecutors of targeting him with “fake crimes,” writing: “Same as the Russia, Russia, Russia HOAX.”
Former President Donald Trump’s team is launching a legal defense fund aimed at helping to handle the onslaught of legal bills the former president and his allies face as the investigations into him mount, sources familiar with the matter tell ABC News.
On Sunday, ABC News reported that a super PAC supporting Trump spent more than $40 million on legal costs in the first half of 2023 to defend Trump, his advisers and others, sources familiar with a filing detailing the costs told ABC.
The filing from the Save America PAC is expected to be released on Monday.
The Mar-a-Lago property manager charged in a new indictment alongside Donald Trump in the alleged mishandling of classified government documents after the former president left office has not secured a Florida-based lawyer ahead of his first court appearance Monday.
Carlos De Oliveira, 56, is set to appear before a magistrate judge Monday in Miami to enter his plea after he was named last week as a third co-defendant in a superseding, or amended, indictment. Prosecutors charge that De Oliveira attempted to delete surveillance footage at the former president’s Palm Beach club after the Justice Department sought to obtain it.
“We’re working on ascertaining local counsel,” John Irving, an attorney for De Oliveira, told NBC News.
A federal judge has dismissed a lawsuit Donald Trump filed against CNN in which the former U.S. president claimed that references in news articles or by the network’s hosts to his efforts to overturn the 2020 election as “the Big Lie” was tantamount to comparing him to Adolf Hitler.
Trump had been seeking punitive damages of $475 million in the federal lawsuit filed last October in South Florida, claiming the references hurt his reputation and political career.
Trump is a candidate for the 2024 GOP presidential nomination in what is his third run for the presidency.
It should have been so fucking easy for Florida Governor Ron DeSantis, who is always angry that a non-white person might be happy and wondering how he can ruin that. When he was asked about the social studies standards released by the Florida Department of Education last week, in particular the one that read that “Instruction includes how slaves developed skills which, in some instances, could be applied for their personal benefit,” he could have just simply said, “I haven’t had a chance to look that over.” Or “I’m not an expert on that. You’ll have to ask the DOE.” Boom. Done. Controversy avoided.
But if you’re a motherfucker, and Ron DeSantis has never met a mother that he didn’t vigorously fuck, you do what he did. You double the fuck down. As DeSantis whitesplained, “They’re probably going to show that some of the folks that eventually parlayed, you know, being a blacksmith into doing things later in life.” Imagine someone who was whipped regularly, whose wife was raped, whose children were sold off. Now imagine them being grateful that they were taught to make horseshoes. It’s ludicrous, and DeSantis got all the bullshit piled on him that he deserved, including a spanking from Vice President Kamala Harris and the NAACP.
Prosecutors have charged a third person, maintenance worker Carlos De Oliveira, in the case concerning classified documents that former President Donald Trump took from the White House to his Mar-a-Lago estate, according to court filings Thursday.
Trump and his aide Walt Nauta were charged in the case last month, and both pleaded not guilty. De Oliveira was the Mar-a-Lago property manager who allegedly helped Nauta move boxes of classified documents around Trump’s resort and residence in Florida.
He faces one count of conspiracy to obstruct justice; two counts related to altering, destroying, mutilating or concealing an object; and one count of making false statements and representations.
Sen. Tim Scott of South Carolina, the only Black Republican in the Senate, rebuked Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis on Thursday for new public school standards that teach that some Black people benefited from slavery because it taught them useful skills.
“As a country founded upon freedom, the greatest deprivation of freedom was slavery. There is no silver lining … in slavery,” Scott — like DeSantis, a GOP presidential candidate — said here in response to a reporter’s question after a forum with Iowa Gov. Kim Reynolds.
“What slavery was really about was separating families, about mutilating humans and even raping their wives. It was just devastating,” Scott said. “So I would hope that every person in our country — and certainly running for president — would appreciate that. People have bad days. Sometimes they regret what they say. And we should ask them again to clarify their positions.”
Some Republican senators harbor concerns about Mitch McConnell’s health, saying they have personally witnessed changes in the minority leader, 81, after he fell and sustained a concussion in March.
Publicly, Senate Republicans are rallying around McConnell, R-Ky., sending him their support and well-wishes. None are calling on him to step down, and the senators who are next in line for the top job say they’re making no succession plans.
“I don’t know how much longer he will want to serve, but I support him as long as he wants the job,” said Sen. John Cornyn, R-Texas, a former GOP whip and a McConnell loyalist who has been floated as a potential successor.
Former President Donald Trump faces new chargesin connection with his post-presidency handling of classified documents after the special counsel filed a new indictment Thursday.
The federal indictment, filed in the Southern District of Florida, alleges that Trump was part of a scheme to delete security video and that a newly charged defendant — who was identified as a property manager at Trump’s Mar-a-Lago residence — told another employee that “the boss” wanted the server deleted.
That employee, Carlos De Oliveira, who was a maintenance supervisor at Mar-a-Lago, was charged Thursday. His lawyer, John Irving, declined to comment.
Donald Trump’s legal and political teams are preparing for the possibility that the federal grand jury will vote on charges against the former president as early as Thursday, according to three sources familiar with the thinking of his inner circle.
Trump said July 18 on his social media platform that he was notified that he is a target in an investigation into the Jan. 6 riot and efforts to overturn the 2020 election.
Special counsel Jack Smith has been investigating the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol by a mob of pro-Trump supporters, as well as other matters, in Washington, D.C.
Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell suddenly stopped speaking during a weekly Republican leadership news conference Wednesday afternoon, appearing to freeze, and then went silent and was walked away.
McConnell, R-Ky., had been making his opening remarks about an annual defense policy bill when he stopped talking. He was silent for 19 seconds. His Republican colleagues asked whether he was OK, and a top McConnell deputy, Sen. John Barrasso of Wyoming, a physician, escorted McConnell, 81, away from the cameras and reporters.
Irish singer Sinéad O’Connor has died at age 56.
“It is with great sadness that we announce the passing of our beloved Sinéad. Her family and friends are devastated and have requested privacy at this very difficult time,” O’Connor’s family said in a statement to The Irish Times and the BBC. A cause of death was not given.
O’Connor, who courted controversy throughout her long career, rose to fame with her 1990 rendition of the Prince song “Nothing Compares 2 U,” which hit No. 1 on the Billboard Hot 100 that year.
Her 17-year-old son, Shane O’Connor, died of an apparent suicide last year. She announced his passing in January 2022.
Hunter Biden pleaded not guilty to federal tax charges Wednesday after a plea deal he struck with the government unraveled when the judge raised questions about the terms of the agreement.
The surprise development came at a hearing in federal court here at which Biden had been expected to plead guilty to two charges of failure to pay taxes under a deal he struck with the government last month. Far from signing off on a done deal, he pleaded “not guilty” to those charges instead until the two sides can meet and address the questions posed by U.S. District Judge Maryellen Noreika.
At times, Noreika appeared almost upset that she believed she was being asked to act as a “rubber stamp” for the deal. The parties will reconvene later to hammer out the terms and provide Noreika more information, which could be within the next six weeks.
On the eve of Hunter Biden’s court appearance to enter into a plea deal for misdemeanor tax crimes that would allow him to avoid prison time, House Republicans and conservative groups sought to intervene in the case, urging a judge to throw out the agreement he reached with prosecutors.
The highly unusual legal maneuvering — which experts said was unlikely to succeed — illustrated the lengths that House Republicans and their allied groups have been willing to go to as they have tried to use Mr. Biden’s legal and personal troubles to inflict political damage on his father, President Biden.
Representative Jason Smith of Missouri, the chairman of the House Ways and Means Committee, filed a brief in Federal District Court in Wilmington, Del., where Hunter Biden’s plea deal is to be considered by a judge on Wednesday.
Even as the special counsel, Jack Smith, appears to be edging closer toward bringing charges against former President Donald J. Trump in connection with his efforts to overturn the 2020 election, prosecutors have been continuing to investigate multiple strands of the case.
In recent weeks, Mr. Smith’s team has pushed forward in collecting new evidence and in arranging new interviews with witnesses who could shed light on Mr. Trump’s mind-set in the chaotic postelection period or on other subjects important to the inquiry. At the same time, word has emerged of previously undisclosed investigative efforts, hinting at the breadth and scope of the issues prosecutors are examining.
In the past few days, a lawyer for Bernard B. Kerik, the former New York City police commissioner who worked closely after the election with Mr. Trump’s lawyer, Rudolph W. Giuliani, gave hundreds of pages of documents to prosecutors working with Mr. Smith.
A federal judge struck down on Tuesday a stringent new asylum policy that the Biden administration has called crucial to its efforts to curb illegal crossings along the U.S.-Mexico border.
The ruling was a blow to the White House, which has seen unlawful entries plunge since the new policy was put in place in May. But the policy has been far from the only factor in the dramatic decline in crossings, and how the ruling on Tuesday will affect migration, if it stands, is uncertain.
The judge, Jon S. Tigar of the U.S. District Court in Northern California, immediately stayed his decision for 14 days, leaving the asylum policy in place while the federal government appealed the decision. The appellate court could extend the stay while it considers the challenge.
President Joe Biden signed a proclamation Tuesday to establish the Emmett Till and Mamie Till-Mobley National Monument. Till, the Black 14-year-old who was lynched in 1955 after he was accused of whistling at a white woman in Mississippi, became a symbol of the Civil Rights Movement.
His murder highlighted the racism and brutality faced by Black people throughout the U.S.
“It’s hard to believe I was 12 years old and I just, you know, I know no matter how much time has passed, how many birthdays, how many events, how many anniversaries — It’s hard to relive this,” Biden said.
