Legal analyst and former U.S. attorney Harry Litman on Monday said he believes “the table is set” for the imminent indictment of Donald Trump in special counsel Jack Smith’s investigation into the former president’s attempts to overturn the 2020 election result and his role in the Jan. 6 insurrection.
“There’s one main signal,” Litman told MSNBC’s Joy Reid.
“That is, everything they’re talking about in terms of witnesses they have to interview, they don’t need the grand jury for, but it is customary,” he explained. “And in this case, it will happen that Trump’s lawyers will be afforded a final chance to come in and make a last-minute plea, which will not succeed, but they have the opportunity.”
The Justice Department on Monday filed a lawsuit against Texas and its Republican governor for placing buoys in the Rio Grande as part of the state’s effort to deter migrants from crossing into the United States.
The civil suit said Gov. Greg Abbott violated federal law by installing the barrier and asked a judge to order the defendants to “promptly remove the unauthorized obstruction” at their own expense.
The lawsuit cites the Rivers and Harbors Appropriation Act of 1899 which bars the “creation of any obstruction not affirmatively authorized by Congress, to the navigable capacity of any of the waters of the United States.”
A Jan. 6 rioter who repeatedly struck a police officer with a flag pole as the officer was being dragged down the steps of the Capitol was sentenced Monday to more than four years in federal prison.
Peter Stager, a 44-year-old truck driver from Arkansas, was sentenced to 52 months in prison by U.S. District Judge Rudolph Contreras. Prosecutors had sought six-and-a-half years in prison, citing Stager’s “chilling motivation” and the brutality of the assault.
“Every single one of those Capitol law enforcement officers, death is the remedy, that is the only remedy they get,” Stager said on video on Jan. 6, according to prosecutors.
The lawyer who represents former New York City Police Commissioner Bernard Kerik has turned over thousands of pages of documents to special counsel Jack Smith’s office as part of the federal investigation into efforts to overturn the 2020 presidential election.
The attorney, Tim Parlatore, said Monday that he submitted the records to Smith’s office on Sunday.
“I have shared all of these documents, approximately 600MB, mostly pdfs, with the Special Counsel and look forward to sitting down with them in about 2 weeks to discuss,” Parlatore said in a statement to CNN that he later confirmed to NBC News.
You have to be impressed by the big, clanging brass ones demonstrated by a state legislature that won’t take an order from the Supreme Court for an answer. From The Hill (via News5 Mobile):
While Alabama’s population is 27 percent Black, just one of the state’s seven districts is majority-Black. In a 5-4 decision in June, the Supreme Court affirmed a three-judge panel’s ruling that Alabama’s current map likely violates the Voting Rights Act by taking away from the voice of Black voters. The group of voters who sued and won before the Supreme Court proposed a second district where Black residents are 50.5 percent of the population, according to The Associated Press.
Facing down a Friday deadline, Republican state lawmakers proposed a congressional map Monday that would increase the percentage of Black voters in the 2nd Congressional District from around 30 percent to nearly 42.5 percent, still below the court’s prescribed level. The proposal was approved by the Permanent Legislative Committee in a party-line 14-6 vote and was introduced to other lawmakers Monday afternoon in a special session.
Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis downplayed the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol on Friday, saying that the deadly day was not an insurrection.
“It was not an insurrection,” DeSantis told comedian Russell Brand in an interview on his streaming show “Stay Free with Russell Brand.”
“These were people that were there to attend a rally, and then they were there to protest. Now, it devolved, and it devolved into a riot, but the idea that this was a plan to somehow overthrow the government of the United States is not true, and it’s something that the media had spun up just to try and basically get as much mileage out of it and use it for partisan and for political aims,” he continued.
Former Vice President Mike Pence, a Republican presidential contender, said Sunday that Donald Trump’s actions leading up to the Capitol riot on Jan. 6, 2021, were “reckless” but that he’s “not yet convinced” they were crimes.
“While his words were reckless, based on what I know, I am not yet convinced that they were criminal,” Pence said in an interview on CNN’s “State of the Union.”
Trump said last week that special counsel Jack Smith notified him in a letter that he is the target of an investigation by a Washington-based grand jury examining the Jan. 6 riot and efforts to overturn the 2020 election, which he said effectively means he will be indicted for a third time.
Seven Republican presidential candidates have, as of Sunday, met the polling requirements to appear on the August debate stage following new polling from Fox Business in Iowa and South Carolina.
Former President Donald Trump, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, tech entrepreneur Vivek Ramaswamy, former Vice President Mike Pence, former South Carolina Gov. Nikki Haley, South Carolina Sen. Tim Scott and former New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie have each reached 1% or higher in at least two qualifying national polls and two qualifying state polls from separate states, which is a requirement set by the Republican National Committee.
“Barbenheimer ” didn’t just work – it spun box office gold. The social media-fueled fusion of Greta Gerwig’s “ Barbie ” and Christopher Nolan’s “ Oppenheimer ” brought moviegoers back to the theaters in record numbers this weekend, vastly outperforming projections and giving a glimmer of hope to the lagging exhibition business, amid the sobering backdrop of strikes.
Warner Bros.’ “Barbie” claimed the top spot with a massive $155 million in ticket sales from North American theaters from 4,243 locations, surpassing “The Super Mario Bros. Movie” (as well as every Marvel movie this year) as the biggest opening of the year and breaking the first weekend record for a film directed by a woman. Universal’s “Oppenheimer” also soared past expectations, taking in $80.5 million from 3,610 theaters in the U.S. and Canada, marking Nolan’s biggest non-Batman debut and one of the best-ever starts for an R-rated biographical drama.
Not to educatorsplain things to Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene, the enthusiastic genital displayer from Georgia’s 14th District, but during her speech last weekend at one of those endless streams of conservative conferences that seem to be as frequent as a new Marvel thing, she went off, oddly, on how Joe Biden’s policies were helping people. “Joe Biden had the largest public investment in social infrastructure and environmental programs, that is actually finishing what FDR started, that LBJ expanded on, and Joe Biden is attempting to complete,” she said. Unsurprisingly, Biden’s campaign for president used Greene’s words approvingly, flipping the context to how, yeah, Biden’s done some good things for the country and thanks, Marj.
But there’s another aspect to Greene’s ignorance that deserves more attention. She very specifically went after Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society programs and Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal. She sneered, “The Great Society were [sic] big government programs for education, medical care, urban problems, rural poverty, transportation, Medicare, Medicaid, food stamps, welfare” and more things. It should benoted that the fact that what she’s listing are considered bad things by the gathered future fascists of America points to an emptiness in what we might quaintly call their “souls.”
We lost the “sweetest girl in Lockport” the other day. She was 100.
Stephanie Wagner Miller died in North Carolina early last Friday. She was married to William E. Miller for 40 years, until his death, in 1983.
She lived on for 40 years more, and now will be interred next to him at Arlington National Cemetery.
Her husband ran for U.S. vice president in 1964 as Barry Goldwater’s running mate. His bona fides at the time included service as a prosecutor of Nazi war crimes at Nuremberg, Niagara County district attorney, seven terms as a Buffalo-area congressman, and chair of the Republican National Committee.
After the landslide loss to Lyndon Johnson and Hubert Humphrey, the Miller family moved back to Lockport, where Bill became famous for being unfamous.
“Do you know me?” he asked in a 1975 American Express commercial. It was among the first in a series that ran from 1975 to 1986. By then he was an attorney in Buffalo who served over the years as chair of the Niagara Frontier Transportation Authority and on the boards of local banks and businesses.
In his obituary, the New York Times noted that “he was known as an acid-tongued extremely conservative Republican, a natty dresser, and an expert at billiards, bridge and golf.”
His wife’s death notice in North Carolina noted that she led “an active, healthy life of tennis, bridge, and traveling. She left upstate NY almost 26 years ago to make her home in NC where two of her four children reside.”
That would be William E. Miller Jr., of Charlotte – who, in the 1990s, twice lost races for a Buffalo-area seat in Congress – and Mary Miller James, of Salisbury. The other children are Libby Miller Fitzgerald, of Lynchburg, Va., and Stephanie Miller Jr., of Los Angeles.
Stephanie Jr. is how she styled herself this week on “The Stephanie Miller Show,” her nationally syndicated radio program simulcast on Free Speech TV. Monday’s emotional show was dedicated to her mother.
“As my Dad always said, she was the sweetest girl in Lockport,” Stephanie Jr. said on air. Miller was an attorney when Stephanie Wagner was a witness in one of his first trials. He later asked her out – and proposed after the third date. Stephanie Jr. told their meet-cute story on the tribute show: “My mother always said, ‘He winked at me on the witness stand!’ ”
Stephanie Jr. is a 1979 graduate of DeSales Catholic High School, where she once did a talent-show sketch to the tune of “Torn Between Two Lovers.” She wore a dress, sewn by her mother, with panels that tore off. “I got my first laugh, and that was it,” she told the Los Angeles Times in a 1998 profile. “It’s like a drug. It’s always been my only drug.”
She got her start in radio doing bits for Sandy Beach on Hot 104 radio, when she lived in a one-bedroom apartment above a pizza joint on Hertel Avenue. Then she got her own show in Lockport, which led to gigs at stations from Rochester to Chicago to New York to L.A.
“Frankly, if you don’t like my career, you can blame people in Buffalo,” she told Alan Pergament in The Buffalo News in 1998, “because they are the ones who encouraged me. They were the ones who laughed and said I was funny.”
Her mother always told her that, too, as she pointed out on the tribute show. “There wasn’t a day in my life that she didn’t tell me how proud she was and how well I was doing. She was wrong – but my point is how nice of her. At a time when this country is so divided in politics, I just thought love is all there is at the end of the day. … That’s why I chose this shirt today.”
It was a T-shirt that said in rainbow colors, “Love Trumps Hate.” This daughter of conservative Republicans makes a living as a liberal firebrand.
“I wished I could talk to my Dad so many times about what has happened to his and Barry Goldwater’s Republican Party,” she said on the tribute show. “I wish I could talk to him about being a Nuremberg prosecutor and having a party that has Nazi flags flying at some of its rallies.”
It was Patrick Buchanan’s combative speech at the 1992 Republican convention that turned her off her parents’ political party. Years later, she and Bay Buchanan, Pat’s sister, were co-hosts of “Equal Time” on CNBC. On the tribute show, Stephanie Jr. played a clip of the time her mother spoke to Bay on the air: “Thanks for trying to keep Stephanie in line. I know it’s a huge job. I think she’s still going through a phase.” To which Bay responded: “I’m hoping for the same thing, Mrs. Miller.”
That L.A. Times profile of Stephanie Jr. ran 25 years ago, when her mother was 75. The reporter quoted her introducing her mother as a guest on the radio show: “Ladies and gentlemen – my mom. We had to get the headphones over the Republican helmet hair.”
Mother recalled attending Barry Goldwater’s funeral, where she ran into Bob Dole, who “referred to the time when he was up in Buffalo to help in the campaign [when] your brother was running for Congress.”
“Did he discuss his Viagra use at all?” Stephanie Jr. asked. (Dole was doing ads for it at the time.) “I don’t mean to be indelicate.”
“Oh, Stephie, you leave me speechless,” her mother said.
Daughter is often indelicate, but never speechless. The tribute show – by Lockport’s funniest export to its sweetest – was both funny and sweet. Stephanie Jr. called Stephanie Sr. a national treasure.
“My hero,” she said. “My namesake.”
The Georgia Republican Party spent more than $500,000 in the first half of this year representing “alternate” electors under investigation by local authorities in connection with Donald Trump’s efforts to overturn the 2020 election, The Atlanta Journal-Constitution reports.
The party has spent more than $520,000 in legal fees in the first six months of this year, which is around 75 percent more than it spent all of 2022 and a five-fold increase over the previous year, according to the report, which cites newly filed campaign disclosures.
The AJC reports that more than $340,000 was spent representing fake electors who may be targets of the Fulton County probe led by District Attorney Fani Willis.
US District Judge Aileen Cannon signaled she is likely to push back the start of a trial in the Mar-a-Lago classified documents case beyond the mid-December date proposed by federal prosecutors – but appeared deeply skeptical of arguments from Donald Trump’s lawyers that he couldn’t get a fair trial while running for president.
During the hearing in Fort Pierce, Florida, Cannon told the prosecutors that their timeline was “compressed” and said that cases like this take more time.
Cannon did not decide on a trial date but said she plans to “promptly” issue an order on the matter.
Special counsel Jack Smith’s team and lawyers for Trump appeared Tuesday for the first time in front of Cannon, who will preside over the criminal case Smith has brought against the former president.
Michigan’s attorney general on Tuesday criminally charged 16 so-called “fake electors” for former President Donald Trump, accusing them of a fraudulent effort to reverse President Joe Biden’s victory in the state’s 2020 election.
The 16 people each face eight charges, including conspiracy, election law forgery, and uttering and publishing, state Attorney General Dana Nessel said in a video announcement.
Nessel called the alleged plan a “desperate effort” to “undermine democracy.” Several of the accused are active in Republican politics.
Nessel has not ruled out potential criminal charges against additional defendants, her office said.
Former President Donald J. Trump has been informed that he could soon face federal indictment for his efforts to hold onto power after his 2020 election loss, potentially adding to the remarkable array of criminal charges and other legal troubles facing him even as he campaigns to return to the White House.
Mr. Trump was informed by his lawyers on Sunday that he had received a so-called target letter from Jack Smith, the special counsel investigating his attempts to reverse his defeat at the polls, Mr. Trump and other people familiar with the matter said on Tuesday. Prosecutors use target letters to tell potential defendants that investigators have evidence tying them to crimes and that they could be subject to indictment.
“Deranged Jack Smith” sent Mr. Trump a letter on Sunday night informing him he was a “TARGET of the January 6th Grand Jury” investigation, Mr. Trump said in a post on his social media platform.
Such a letter “almost always means an Arrest and Indictment,” wrote Mr. Trump, whose campaign is rooted in accusations of political persecution and a promise to purge the Justice Department and Federal Bureau of Investigation of personnel he sees as hostile to him and his agenda.
The Screen Actors Guild — the union representing tens of thousands of Hollywood performers — voted Thursday to strike after negotiations with film and TV studios fell apart.
“The strike will begin at midnight tonight, and all of us — union members, leadership and staff — will be out on the picket lines tomorrow morning,” the union’s chief negotiator, Duncan Crabtree-Ireland, said after the vote.
The guild, known as SAG-AFTRA, had agreed to extend talks with the Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers (AMPTP) two weeks past their contract expiration date of June 30. But the two sides failed to reach an agreement in that time, even after federal mediators joined discussions, and the union’s negotiating committee unanimously recommended a strike to its national board early Thursday. The national board agreed hours later.
The White House is amping up pressure on Republicans over Sen. Tommy Tuberville’s blockade on hundreds of promotions for military officers, apparently seeking to make the GOP pay a price with voters if he persists, according to a new memo first obtained by NBC News.
In the memo addressed to “Interested parties,” the White House dials up the rhetoric against Tuberville, R-Ala., and paints the Republican Party more broadly as enablers of his effort, accusing it of mounting “barely a word of protest.”
“Right now, a Republican Senator is choosing to erode military readiness and abuse military families in the pursuit of an unrelated and extreme anti-freedom agenda — with barely a sound from his GOP colleagues,” White House communications adviser Andrew Bates wrote in the memo, dated Thursday.
The mystery of who brought cocaine into the White House remains unsolved. The Secret Service investigation has concluded with no usable forensic or video evidence identifying the person responsible, three Secret Service officials familiar with the investigation said.
The small plastic baggie with a powdered substance — which was found in a storage cubby at the White House on a Sunday evening this month — was subjected to advanced testing and examined at two federal labs, but no usable fingerprints or DNA were detected, the officials said.
The Secret Service received results Wednesday from tests conducted by the FBI, “which did not develop latent fingerprints and insufficient DNA was present for investigative comparisons,” the Secret Service said in a statement Thursday. Security camera video was also reviewed, but “[t]here was no surveillance video footage that produced investigative leads,” the agency said.
Special counsel Jack Smith is opposing former President Donald Trump’s request to delay the trial over his alleged mishandling of classified documents until after the 2024 election.
In a court filing Thursday, the special counsel’s legal team rejected the defendants’ argument that a fair trial couldn’t be convened ahead of the presidential election. Prosecutors cited the Speedy Trial Act of 1974, which says judicial officers should set trials “at the earliest practicable time,” with allowances for only limited delays in limited circumstances.
“The Defendants chide the Government for seeking an ‘expedited’ trial but in doing so they have it exactly backward,” assistant special counsel David Harbach wrote. “A speedy trial is a foundational requirement of the Constitution and the United States Code, not a Government preference that must be justified.”
Sen. Joe Manchin III (D-W.Va.) plans to headline an event in New Hampshire next week sponsored by the bipartisan group No Labels, a move that has stoked speculation that he could mount a third-party presidential bid in 2024 that Democrats fear could be damaging to President Biden.
Manchin is scheduled to appear Monday at the group’s “Common Sense” town hall at St. Anselm College alongside former Utah governor Jon Huntsman (R). No Labels is eying a potential “unity” ticket in 2024, though organizers say no decision has been made.
Republicans bombarded Christopher A. Wray, the F.B.I. director, on Wednesday with criticisms about his role in investigating former President Donald J. Trump, efforts to address extremist violence and the bureau’s electronic surveillance practices during a contentious House Judiciary Committee hearing.
Committee Republicans, led by the chairman, Representative Jim Jordan of Ohio, treated Mr. Wray as if he were a hostile witness — repeatedly interrupting his attempts to answer their rapid-fire queries with shouted rebuttals. Most sought to portray the nation’s premier law enforcement agency, and Mr. Wray, who was appointed by President Donald J. Trump, as a political tool of the Democrats.
Hollywood actors could soon have a new role: picketers.
Thousands of screen performers represented by the powerful labor union SAG-AFTRA, which stands for the Screen Actors Guild-American Federation of Television and Radio Artists, are on course for strike action after the guild and a trade association representing the industry’s leading studios could not agree on a new contract.
“SAG-AFTRA’s Television/Theatrical/Streaming contracts have expired without a successor agreement,” the union said in a statement early Thursday. It is seeking higher compensation and safeguards around the use of artificial intelligence in the creative arts.
President Joe Biden promised Ukraine that its Western partners would not back away from its defense in a speech Wednesday after two days of high-stakes meetings with leaders at a NATO summit.
Speaking before a heaving crowd on a bright Wednesday evening, Biden said that “the defense of freedom is not the work of a day or a year. It’s the calling of our lifetime — of all time.”
“We are steeled for the struggle ahead,” he added. Of Ukraine’s partners, he said, “Our unity will not falter, I promise you.”
A Republican senator’s blockade on hundreds of military promotions could inflict widespread damage on troops and their families and prompt some to leave the armed forces, President Joe Biden’s nominee for chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff told lawmakers on Tuesday.
“We will lose talent” because of the problems caused by the block on promotions, Air Force Gen. Charles “CQ” Brown Jr., the president’s pick to serve as the country’s top military officer, told the Senate Armed Services Committee.
Brown said the holds on nominations could affect readiness, with less experienced deputies having to take up leadership positions temporarily, and discourage junior officers from staying in the military while creating financial and logistical burdens for troops’ families.
A Georgia judge on Tuesday seated two grand juries that are likely to be tasked with deciding whether to bring election interference charges against former President Donald Trump and his allies.
Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis has said she plans to announce charging decisions stemming from an investigation into “possible criminal interference in the administration of Georgia’s 2020 general election” during a Superior Court term that began Tuesday.
Superior Court Judge Robert McBurney seated two grand juries that will hear cases over the length of term, which ends Sept. 1. Each panel consists of 23 jurors and three alternates.
Though his campaign slogan is still “Make America Great Again,” Donald Trump’s new legal filing seems to suggest another motto: Keep Me Out of Jail 2024.
Critics have argued for over a year that the coup-attempting former president’s efforts to regain his office are as much about painting his prosecutions as politically motivated as they are about a desire to govern — which Trump’s lawyers all but admitted in a brief filed late Monday in his secret documents case.
“President Trump is running for president of the United States and is currently the likely Republican Party nominee. This undertaking requires a tremendous amount of time and energy, and that effort will continue until the election on November 5, 2024,” said the filing, written by Chris Kise and Todd Blanche.
Returning from a two-week recess, House Freedom Caucus members refused to say Tuesday whether they had kickedRep. Marjorie Taylor Greene out of the group of conservative hard-liners.
“I don’t discuss that,” said Freedom Caucus Chairman Scott Perry, R-Pa.
“I don’t talk about membership at the Freedom Caucus,” added a Greene rival, Rep. Lauren Boebert, R-Colo.
“I’m just not gonna comment on that with all the world problems were having,” chimed in Rep. Ralph Norman, R-S.C.
President Joe Biden on Thursday blasted the Supreme Court ruling setting new limits on affirmative action as a “severe disappointment,” saying, “we cannot let this decision be the last word.”
“The court has effectively ended affirmative action in college admissions and I strongly, strongly disagree with the court’s decision,” Biden said, adding that “the court has once again walked away from decades of precedent.”
Saying “affirmative action is so misunderstood,” Biden said, “I believe our colleges are stronger when they are racially diverse. Our nation is stronger because we use — but because we are tapping into the full range of talent in this nation. I also believe that while talent, creativity and hard work are everywhere across this country, not equal opportunity, it is not everywhere across this country,” he said.
A Florida jury on Thursday cleared a former school security officer who was charged over his failure to confront a gunman who massacred 17 people at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in 2018, in an emotional trial that left bitter feelings on both sides.
Scot Peterson, who was a Broward County sheriff’s deputy and worked as a resource officer at the school in Parkland, was charged in 2019 with seven counts of neglect of a child, three counts of culpable negligence and one count of perjury.
He was found not guilty on all counts. As the first acquittals were announced, an emotional Peterson put his head down on the defense table and openly wept.
The votes split along ideological grounds, with Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. writing for the conservative members in the majority, and the liberals dissenting. While the ruling examined Harvard and UNC, its impact will be felt across the nation.
Elite universities have contended that without considering race as one factor in admissions, their student bodies will contain more Whites and Asian Americans, and fewer Blacks and Hispanics.
A federal judge rejected former President Donald Trump’s effort to dismiss writer E. Jean Carroll’s defamation suit against him on Thursday, saying his claims of absolute presidential immunity were not a “get out of damages liability free card.”
U.S. District Judge Lewis Kaplan in New York issued a lengthy ruling after Trump’s attorneys attempted to get the case thrown out, claiming the former president was protected by free speech rights and presidential immunity. But Trump failed to mention that immunity for three years, a period Kaplan said was too long.
Debris recovered from the submersible that catastrophically imploded while on a voyage to see the Titanic wreckage last week contained “presumed human remains,” the U.S. Coast Guard said.
Salvaged pieces of the Titan vessel were unloaded from the Canadian ship Horizon Arctic at the Canadian Coast Guard pier in St. John’s, Newfoundland, Wednesday morning.
The U.S. Coast Guard said later Wednesday it has received the debris and evidence, including “presumed human remains,” that had been recovered from the ocean floor in the incident, in which five people died.
Madonna, 64, is delaying her upcoming tour as she recovers from a “serious bacterial infection” that had her hospitalized, her manager said Wednesday.
The pop star had a “several day stay” in the intensive care unit after she developed the infection Saturday, her manager Guy Oseary said in an Instagram post.
A source close to Madonna said Wednesday that she was out of the ICU.
President Joe Biden touted his economic agenda Wednesday amid low polling numbers on his job performance and the direction of the country.
In remarks at Chicago’s Old Post Office building, Biden railed against the economic approach of his predecessor, Donald Trump.
“The trickle-down approach failed the middle class. It failed America,” Biden said. “I knew we couldn’t go back to the same failed policies when I ran. So I came into office determined to change the economic direction of this country, to move from trickle-down economics to what everyone at [The] Wall Street Journal and Financial Times began to call ‘Bidenomics.'”
Walt Nauta, an aide charged alongside former President Donald Trump for the alleged mishandling of classified documents from the White House, had an arraignment hearing rescheduled after his flight to Florida was canceled due to storms.
Nauta had been set to be arraigned on Tuesday, but the judge postponed the date after Nauta did not make it to Miami for the court hearing. Nauta’s attorney, Stanley Woodward, told a magistrate judge that Nauta’s flight was canceled. He was at the airport for several hours, trying to catch another flight to Florida, but couldn’t get rebooked, Woodward said.
In addition, Nauta still does not have a local attorney who can practice in the Southern District of Florida, Woodward said.
The Supreme Court on Tuesday delivered a strong rejection of a controversial legal theory that threatened to upend state election laws nationwide and give state legislatures unchecked power over federal election rules in the case Moore v. Harper.
In a 6-3 decision, written by Chief Justice John Roberts, the Supreme Court sided with a group of North Carolina voters who challenged an attempt by state Republican lawmakers to circumvent a state court decision that struck down a new gerrymandered election map.
Roberts was joined by Justices Sonia Sotomayor, Elena Kagan, Ketanji Brown Jackson, Brett Kavanaugh and Amy Coney Barrett.
Rudy Giuliani has been interviewed by federal investigators as part of a special counsel investigation into the efforts to overturn the 2020 presidential election, according to multiple reports.
CNN first reported Tuesday that Giuliani, who acted as a private attorney for Donald Trumpand was instrumental in the former president’s efforts to remain in power despite his loss to Democrat Joe Biden, met with investigators in recent weeks. Justice Department special counsel Jack Smith has reportedly been nearing decisions surrounding any charges in that investigation.
Former President Donald Trump said Tuesday that a recording of him talking about sensitive military documents amounted to just “bravado” and claimed he did not show off anything classified when he said on the tape that he was handling “highly confidential” and “secret information” in front of guests.
Trump made the comments to Semafor and ABC News a day after CNN first aired a shocking two-minute clip of him at a 2021 meeting in Bedminster, New Jersey, with people working on the memoir of his former chief of staff Mark Meadows. In the audio, the former president can be heard describing a document complied by Gen. Mark Milley, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff when Trump was president, on potential attacks on Iran.0……..
Republicans in the House of Representatives could impeach Attorney General Merrick Garland over an allegation that the Justice Department stifled criminal charges against Hunter Biden.
House Speaker Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) said Sunday the allegation would be “a significant part” of an impeachment inquiry if an IRS whistleblower’s claims pan out.
Federal prosecutors in Delaware announced charges last week against President Joe Biden’s son for failing to pay taxes in 2017 and 2018. Hunter Biden agreed to plead guilty.
The Supreme Court has left this term’s blockbuster decisions for last, with rulings expected this week on student loans, affirmative action and more.
The justices will hand down their next round of opinions on Tuesday at 10 a.m. ET. There are 10 total cases remaining from the term that began back in October.
Their rulings will decide the fate of millions of Americans with federal student loans, a 40-year precedent of race-conscious college admissions processes, how federal elections are run in the U.S. and LGBTQ+ rights.
Agents from the United States Secret Service have testified before the grand jury investigating the events of Jan. 6, 2021, a source familiar with the situation confirmed to ABC News.
Agents provided testimony as part of the grand jury’s probe into whether there were any crimes committed during the Jan. 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol, the source said.
It is not known how many agents testified or whether they mentioned former President Donald Trump.
ABC News has obtained an audio recording of former President Donald Trump appearing to acknowledge he held onto a sensitive military document after leaving office — but can no longer declassify it because he is no longer president.
The contents of the recording, made during a July 21, 2021, meeting at Trump’s Bedminster, New Jersey, golf club, have been previously reported and are quoted in the Justice Department’s 37-count indictment related to Trump’s handling of classified documents after leaving office — but the recording itself has never before been heard publicly.
ABC News was able to confirm the authenticity of the recording from another source who has heard it.
Not to put too fine a point on it but, at the moment, the state of Texas is bordering on being unlivable. It’s so bad that the National Weather Service is resorting to pep talks. From the Washington Post:
“Sadly, temps are going to creep back upward next week, too. Sorry, y’all. We’re gonna get back to our typical levels of heat someday, but not real soon. Keep up the fight against the heat!” the National Weather Service in Houston tweetedFriday morning.
Go, Port Lavaca Calhoun Sandcrabs! Beat that heat! By the way, Port Lavaca topped out in the mid-90’s on Friday and will stay there for the foreseeable future.
On Friday in NYC, the annual Drag March for Pride Month got under way in Tompkins Square Park. It was the expected array of fabulous, fantastic, and/or delicious people decked out in outrageous finery, crossing and uncrossing gender lines. The march is the cause of the latest right-wing freak out over a perceived LGBTpocalypse because of a portion of a chant.
One part of the marching group chanted, “We’re here! We’re queer! We’re not going shopping!” as an anti-capitalist stance by some queer organizations going all the way back to at least the 1990s. The freak out is because in the video clip that made the rounds of Nutsyzania (and apologies for linking to a right-wing dipshit for this) you can hear one guy and maybe one other person chant, “We’re here, we’re queer, and we’re coming for your children.” It’s a clever joke playing on the worst fears of the most ignorant motherfuckers out there. It is so insignificant, like a flea fart in a hurricane, but conservative media, including Fox “news” and the New York Post and assorted cockmites of the right have picked up on that little bit of a sound bite and treated it like the entire goal of Pride Month is to force kids to go on puberty blockers or some such shit.
In the past, Donald Trump has wanted the American public to cover him for his legal bills. Now a new report says he’s doing that by taking the money for his legal expenditures from his 2024 presidential campaign.
New York Times reporters Maggie Haberman and Shane Goldmacherpublished a story on Sunday about Trump’s online fundraising, reporting a change they noticed on his website. The change pertains to how much donated funding goes to Trump’s campaign, and how much goes to the political action committee Trump is using to cover his legal costs.
Prosecutors from special counsel Jack Smith’s office have requested that former President Donald Trump’s criminal trial for alleged mishandling of classified documents be delayed until December, according to a court filing on Friday.
Earlier this week, Judge Aileen Cannon set a trial date for Aug. 14 and estimated that the court proceedings would take two weeks. But prosecutors said more time was needed before the trial could begin and requested that the trial be delayed until Dec. 11.
If the date is approved and isn’t delayed further, Trump, who is seeking a return to the White House, could face the jury in December and voters in January. While a final date has not been set for the Iowa caucuses, the first primary contest is expected to take place in mid-January.
In a speech Saturday marking the anniversary of the Supreme Court’s reversal of Roe v. Wade, Vice President Kamala Harris condemned conservative justices for creating a “health care crisis in America.”
“How dare they?” Harris, the first female vice president, asked a crowd in Charlotte, North Carolina.
She also criticized abortion bans that have been passed in several Republican-led states since the reversal of Roe. The politicians who created those laws “don’t even understand how a woman’s body actually works,” Harris said as she vowed that the Biden administration will continue to fight for women’s right to make their own choices.
For the first time in his more than 20-year rule, President Vladimir Putin’s power appeared to hang in the balance this weekend.
And even though the rebellious Russian mercenary forces who descended on Moscow have turned back, Putin will struggle to project the image of a man in total control that he once did. That could set the stage for further challenges to his rule at home and could weaken Russia’s hand in the war in Ukraine.
With spectacular ease and a stated aim of ousting Russia’s defense minister, Yevgeny Prigozhin’s Wagner troops swept into Rostov-on-Don, a city of 1.1 million people, and seized the military headquarters there. They then continued hundreds of kilometers (miles) north on a lightning march toward the capital without meeting any serious resistance.
A Titanic-bound submersible tragically imploded nearly 2 miles deep in the ocean of the mid-Atlantic. All five people aboard were killed.
“The pattern of the debris suggests that at some point in the Titan’s journey there was a leak. It was so deep in the sea by then that the amount of water above it would have been equivalent to the weight of the Eiffel Tower, tens of thousands of tons. The people inside are kept safe by the hull. But if there were a rupture to the structure the pressure outside would compress the vessel and disintegrate its carbon fiber body.”
A catastrophic accident happened. 2 miles deep and 900 miles east of Cape Cod.
And I’ll give you a dollar if you can guess who Republicans say is to blame.
On the anniversary of the Supreme Court ruling that overturned the landmark 1973 Roe v. Wade decision, 6 in 10 voters remain opposed to the court’s removing federal protection of the right to abortion, according to results from a new national NBC News poll.
Nearly 80% of female voters ages 18-49, two-thirds of suburban women, 60% of independents and even a third of Republican voters say they disapprove.
And by more than a 2-to-1 ratio, voters say abortion access across the country has become too difficult rather than too easy. A plurality — 43% — say their home states have struck the right balance, though there’s a considerable geographical difference on this question.
A former IRS employee told the House Ways and Means Committee that U.S. Attorney David Weiss sought authority to charge Hunter Biden in two federal districts with charges broader than the tax-related misdemeanors the president’s son agreed this week to plead guilty to, according to a 212-page transcript of his interview.
The whistleblower, Gary Shapley, says Attorney General Merrick Garland was not telling Congress the truth when he asserted in earlier testimony that Weiss, who is based in Delaware, had the authority to charge in other jurisdictions, including California and Washington, D.C. Shapley said bringing charges in those districts is not something the U.S. attorneys there, who were appointed by President Joe Biden, would do.
The Justice Department denied Shapley’s assertions.
A remotely operated underwater vehicle that reached the seafloor Thursday — four days after the vessel went missing during its dive — found five major pieces of the submersible in two areas of debris near the Titanic wreckage, which sits 12,500 feet underwater hundreds of miles off the coast of Newfoundland.
The father and an aunt of Rep. George Santos, R-N.Y., guaranteed his $500,000 bond after he was charged last month with more than a dozen federal counts, a source familiar with the matter confirmed Thursday.
The congressman’s father, Gercino Dos Santos, and Elma Santos Preven, his aunt, were the suretors for the bond. They did not have to provide any money upfront — they are obligated to pay only if Santos violates the terms of his release.
Their names, first reported by ABC News, were confirmed minutes before a federal court in New York released a document just after noon Thursday showing the family members’ signatures.
The search is intensifying for a submersible carrying five people that vanished while heading to tour the Titanic wreckage site off the coast of Newfoundland, Canada.
The 21-foot deep-sea vessel, operated by OceanGate Expeditions, lost contact about an hour and 45 minutes after submerging on Sunday morning with a 96-hour oxygen supply. That oxygen is forecast to run out Thursday morning.
Republicans are waving off ethics questions surrounding another Supreme Court justice, Samuel Alito, after it was revealed that he accepted an undisclosed trip from a GOP megadonor who had business before the court.
Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) said Wednesday that Congress should “stay out” of the court’s business after ProPublica reported that the conservative justice accepted a luxury fishing vacation from wealthy benefactors.
“I think it’s part of an assault on the conservatives because the left doesn’t like their decisions,” added Sen. John Cornyn (R-Texas), who serves on the Senate Judiciary Committee.
In a de-escalation of internal GOP tensions, House Republicans are now aiming to refer a Biden impeachment resolution to two committees instead of holding an immediate voteon impeaching the president.
The House will vote Thursday to send a resolution offered by Rep. Lauren Boebert, R-Colo., to the Homeland Security and Judiciary committees. By forgoing the impeachment vote, Republicans will be able to avoid, for now, a messy fight that was already dividing the conference.
The House Rules Committee advanced the plan in a last-minute meeting Wednesday night after huddling with House Speaker Kevin McCarthy, R-Calif., who urged rank-and-file Republicans at a closed-door meeting earlier in the day to oppose Boebert’s resolution,arguing that such an important issue should go through the committee process, three GOP sources who heard the comments confirmed.
The House took the rare step Wednesday of censuring one of its own members, Democratic Rep. Adam Schiff, over his criticisms of then-President Donald Trump and his role in leading the first impeachment inquiry into the former president.
The 213-209 party-line vote came exactly one week after a similar effort to censure Schiff, D-Calif., was rejected after 20 Republicans joined Democrats to block the resolution over objections to a provision that called for fining him $16 million.
But the author of the resolution, freshman Rep. Anna Paulina Luna, R-Fla., said this week she had secured support from the 20 GOP dissenters after she removed language about a fine.
Conservative Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito on Tuesday published a commentary in The Wall Street Journal defending himself from questions about his ethical conduct raised in a yet-to-be published article by news outlet ProPublica.
The commentary on the WSJ website addressed what Alito referred to as “charges” by journalists from ProPublica that he had failed to recuse from cases in which an entity connected to hedge fund founder Paul Singer was a party and to report certain gifts on mandatory annual financial disclosure forms, such as a private flight to Alaska for a fishing trip.
“Neither charge is valid,” Alito wrote.
A federal judge struck down an Arkansas law Tuesday that would have banned transition-related medical care for transgender minors, declaring it unconstitutional.
U.S. District Judge James Moody Jr. of the Eastern District of Arkansas overturned and permanently blocked the law from taking effect, writing that it violates the First Amendment and the equal protection and due process clauses of the 14th Amendment.
“Rather than protecting children or safeguarding medical ethics, the evidence showed that the prohibited medical care improves the mental health and well-being of patients and that, by prohibiting it, the State undermined the interests it claims to be advancing,” Moody wrote.
A Canadian surveillance aircraft looking for the missing Titan submersible and the five people on board in the North Atlantic has “detected underwater noises in the search area,” the U.S. Coast Guard said early Wednesday.
The Coast Guard said in a brief statement on Twitter that remote-operated vehicles were still searching for the Titan. Officials in the United States and Canada did not immediately respond to requests for further comment late Tuesday.
Hunter Biden agreed with the Justice Department on Tuesday to plead guilty to two misdemeanor tax charges and accept terms that would allow him to avoid prosecution on a separate gun charge, a big step toward ending a long-running and politically explosive investigation into the finances, drug use and international business dealings of President Biden’s troubled son.
Under a deal hashed out with a federal prosecutor who was appointed by President Donald J. Trump, Mr. Biden agreed to plead guilty to misdemeanor counts of failing to pay his 2017 and 2018 taxes on time and be sentenced to probation.
Rest assured, there are already plans in place to turn this country into Argentina under Galtieri, if not Chile under Pinochet. The New York Times has produced a truly scarifying piece of reporting that leaves no doubt what’s at stake in courtrooms right now, and at the polling stations all over the country in 2024. It is no exaggeration to say that what’s on the line is not only the American democratic experiment, but also the basic idea of self-government itself.
A submersible craft carrying five people in the area of the Titanic wreck in the North Atlantic has been missing since Sunday, setting off a search and rescue operation by the U.S. Coast Guard.
The Coast Guard confirmed Monday that it was searching for the vessel after the Canadian research ship MV Polar Prince lost contact with a submersible during a dive about 900 miles east of Cape Cod, Mass., on Sunday morning.
“It is a remote area and it is a challenge to conduct a search in that remote area, but we are deploying all available assets to make sure that we can locate the craft and rescue the people on board,” said Rear Admiral John Mauger of the U.S. Coast Guard.
A federal judge issued a protective order Monday barring former President Donald Trump from disclosing on social media — or keeping — evidence the government is set to turn over to him in the classified documents case.
The order prohibits Trump and Walt Nauta, his co-defendant in the criminal case alleging he mishandled national security information, from sharing evidence federal investigators are scheduled to begin turning over to their lawyers as part of the discovery process.
“The Discovery Materials, along with any information derived therefrom, shall not be disclosed to the public or the news media, or disseminated on any news or social media platform, without prior notice to and consent of the United States or approval of the Court,” Magistrate Judge Bruce Reinhart said in the order.
Former President Donald Trump said Monday he doesn’t want his children to serve in his administration again if he wins a second term in the White House.
“I said, ‘That’s enough for the family,’” Trump told Fox News host Bret Baier. “It’s too painful for the family. My family has been through hell.”
Ivanka Trump and her husband, Jared Kushner, were senior advisers to Trump in the White House, frequently drawing criticism for their roles in government.
Former President Donald Trump said in a new interview he was reluctant to hand over boxes of classified documents because he was “busy” and needed to sort through them to remove personal items, including golf shirts and shoes.
Trump spoke to Fox News’ Bret Baier in an interview that aired Sunday, his first since he was indicted on 37 charges linked to his handling of the sensitive files after he left the White House. Prosecutors have homed in on his alleged efforts to obstruct federal investigators attempting to recover the classified material, and Baier asked the former president why he didn’t return the boxes even after he received a government subpoena.
Former New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie, who’s running for the GOP presidential nomination, on Sunday called the Republican National Committee’s requirement for candidates to pledge support for the eventual nominee a “useless idea.”
In an interview on CNN’s “State of the Union,” Christie said “I think the pledge is just a useless idea” when he was asked whether he’d pledge to support Donald Trump, the party’s front-runner, even if the former president is convicted of a felony.
“And by the way, in all my life, we never had to have Republican primary candidates take a pledge,” he said. “You know, we were Republicans. And the idea is you’d support the Republican whether you won or whether you lost. And you didn’t have to ask somebody to sign something.
Former Arkansas Gov. Asa Hutchinson, who’s running for the 2024 GOP presidential nomination, said Sunday he expects that if former President Donald Trump is re-elected and convicted in the classified documents case, he will try to pardon himself.
“I could certainly see Donald Trump doing that. That’s exactly what he would intend if he got elected president. And if [his case] was not brought to trial before then, he’s likely to issue that, as well,” Hutchinson said in an interview on ABC News’ “This Week.”
“From a legal standpoint, a constitutional standpoint, that is a question that the courts would have to resolve,” he added. “I’m doubtful of it. I don’t think that’s what the Constitution intends in giving the president the pardon power. But most importantly, it would be inappropriate, unseemly.”
Secretary of State Antony Blinken is meeting with Chinese President Xi Jinping in Beijing on Monday, the second and final day of a high-stakes visit aimed at easing spiraling tensions between the world’s two largest economies.
Blinken’s trip to China is the first by a U.S. secretary of state since 2018. He is also the highest-ranking U.S. official to visit China since President Joe Biden took office.
His talks with Xi — seen as key to the trip’s success — were expected but had not been confirmed by either side until shortly before they were scheduled to begin.
President Joe Biden spoke before an audience of union members in Philadelphia Saturday in what was his first rally since he declared his bid for a second term and comes as his campaign engagements ramp up.
Biden begins his 2024 campaign in the same way he kicked off his run in 2020: in front of Pennsylvania laborers.
“I am a union man, period,” Biden said at a union hall in Pittsburgh during his first rally in 2019.
President Joe Biden has been very clear: No, motherfuckers, he will not answer your goddamned questions about the federal indictment of former president Donald Trump on 38 counts of just being a fucking cockknob and possibly, but not provably (yet), a traitor. Not only will Biden not answer your questions, he won’t comment on it. And he doesn’t want anyone in the White House to talk about it, nor does he want his reelection committee or even the Democratic National Committee to say jack shit. And, yep, as of this writing, the DNC has not a peep on its website.
Former President Donald Trump repeatedly rejected his attorneys’ attempts to see him return classified documents and minimize the legal fallout after he absconded to his private club in Florida with the sensitive material when he left the White House in 2021, according to a report by The Washington Post.
The Post, citing seven advisers to the former president, said Trump was extraordinarily stubborn when it came to negotiating with government officials. When one of his attorneys, Christopher Kise, suggested meeting with the Justice Department to negotiate a settlement that could avoid charges, Trump reportedly rejected that plan. Instead, he listened to the advice of Tom Fitton, the president of the conservative group Judicial Watch, who told him he could keep the documents and that he should fight Justice Department efforts to see them returned.
President Joe Biden announced Thursday that ticket sales giants Ticketmaster and Live Nation have pledged to provide consumers with full pricing upfront, ending surprise fees at checkout during online purchases.
Biden convened a roundtable at the White House with companies that have committed to disclose fees to consumers upfront. The event included representatives from Live Nation, SeatGeek, xBk, Airbnb, TickPick, DICE, the Newport Festivals Foundation and the Pablo Center at the Confluence.
Live Nation Entertainment, which formed in a merger with Ticketmaster in 2010, pledged that all tickets for its shows sold through Ticketmaster will display all fees and costs upfront starting in September. Ticketmaster will also add a feature that allows consumers to view upfront pricing for all other tickets sold on the platform.
A federal grand jury on Thursday indicted Defense Department leak suspect Jack Teixeira on six counts of willful retention and transmission of national defense information.
Teixeira, who was arrested in April, is suspected of leaking classified Pentagon documents on Discord, a social media platform primarily used by online gamers, while serving as a Massachusetts Air National Guardsman.
“The unauthorized removal, retention, and transmission of classified information jeopardizes our nation’s security,” Acting U.S. Attorney Joshua S. Levy of the District of Massachusetts said in a statement Thursday. “Individuals granted access to classified materials have a fundamental duty to safeguard the information for the safety of the United States, our active service members, its citizens, and its allies.”
When news broke Thursday that special counsel Jack Smith decided to indict former President Donald Trump over his classified documents scandal, one of the most intriguing questions was: Would Smith indict only Trump or would he charge a conspiracy that includes the people around Trump who assisted, facilitated or were directly complicit in Trump’s alleged crimes? In other words, would Smith try to take down the entire “Mar-a-Lago mafia” next?
As of Friday, the answer to the last question appears to be yes. Not only has the former president been charged with conspiracy to obstruct, but also the Justice Department has indicted his aide Walt Nauta. According to The Washington Post, one of the jobs of Trump’s “personal aide and general gofer … has been to move and carry cardboard boxes in which Trump likes to keep mementos and papers.” Nauta has been a subject of Smith’s interest since reportedly making contradictory statements about whether he moved boxes of classified documents around at Mar-a-Lago. Might Nauta turn out to be one of the capos of the Mar-a-Lago mafia?
Former President Donald Trump’s ex-chief of staff said the twice-impeached Republican is intimidated by the possibility he may finally face accountability for his actions.
“He’s scared shitless,” John Kelly, the chief of staff from 2017 to 2019, told The Washington Post on Tuesday.
Trump, now the first president to be federally charged with a crime, pleaded not guilty on Tuesday in response to a 37-count indictment accusing him of illegally holding on to classified documents at his Mar-a-Lago private club in Florida.
The House on Wednesday rejected a GOP-backed effort to censure Rep. Adam Schiff, D-Calif., with almost two dozen Republican lawmakers bucking their party’s attempt to publicly rebuke him.
The House voted 225-196 to set aside the resolution, introduced by Rep. Anna Paulina Luna, R-Fla., to censure Schiff over his role in the House investigation into Russia and the 2016 Trump campaign.
Twenty Republicans joined Democrats in tabling Luna’s measure, effectively blocking a vote on the censure resolution itself. Two Republicans and five Democrats voted present.
Former President Donald Trump’s 2024 campaign said Wednesday that it has raised $6.6 million since news of his federal indictment broke, including more than $4.5 million online.
In an announcement, the campaign said an additional $2.1 million came in at a pre-planned fundraiser Tuesday night at Trump’sBedminster golf course in New Jersey.
Altogether, that’s a bit more than half of the $12 million Trump’s campaign previously announced raising in the six days following the news in late March that he had been indicted in New York City. That indictment alleged that Trump violated New York state law when paying an adult film actress to stay quiet about an alleged affair.
Attorney General Merrick Garland declined to answer questions about the indictment of former President Donald Trump on Wednesday, saying only that his own limited role in the process was spelled out in Justice Department regulations and that special counsel Jack Smith had assembled a team of veteran career prosecutors and agents to examine the facts of the case.
“As I said when I appointed Mr. Smith, I did so because it underscores the Justice Department’s commitment to independence and accountability,” Garland told reporters assembled in the attorney general’s fifth-floor conference room on Wednesday, where he was meeting with federal prosecutors across the country to discuss violent crime.
“Mr. Smith is a veteran career prosecutor. He assembled a group of experienced and talented prosecutors and agents who share his commitment to integrity and the rule of law,” Garland said.
President Joe Biden on Tuesday cracked a joke about his documents that almost certainly seemed like a reference to Donald Trump, who on Tuesday was indicted on 37 federal charges in his classified documents scandal.
Biden spoke about his long relationship with Chinese President Xi Jinping, which goes back more than a decade to when they were both vice presidents.
“I’ve allegedly met more face-to-face with Xi Jinping than any world leader has,” Biden told a roomful of diplomats at an event honoring the State Department’s Chiefs of Mission.
A federal judge on Tuesday granted a motion by E. Jean Carroll to file an amended defamation suit against former President Donald Trump seeking at least $10 million, based in part on recent comments Trump made on CNN.
Carroll made the motion for an amended complaint after Trump called her a “whack job” at a CNN town hall in May — the day after she won a $5 million judgment against him in a different civil case that alleged sexual abuse and defamation.
At the CNN event, Trump said, “I never met this woman. I never saw this woman,” and he called her claims “fake” and “made up,” her lawyers said in seeking the amended complaint.
Sen. JD Vance announced Tuesday that he will be putting a procedural hold on Department of Justice nominees in response to the prosecution of former President Donald Trump for allegedly mishandling national defense information.
Vance’s office said nominees for positions with the U.S. Marshal Service will be excepted from the Ohio Republican’s move.
The announcement follows “the unprecedented political prosecution of Donald J. Trump by Biden’s Department of Justice,” Vance’s office wrote in a statement. Trump was arraigned Tuesday as Vance made the announcement. Vance has endorsed Trump’s 2024 presidential run.
A stone-faced former President Donald Trump entered a not guilty plea Tuesday to charges he lied and schemed to hold on to sensitive national security material that he was supposed to have surrendered when he left the White House.
Trump, 76, was indicted last week on 37 federal felony counts, including willful retention of national defense information, making false statements and representations, and conspiracy to obstruct justice.
In court, Trump, wearing a blue suit and a red tie, sat silently with his hands crossed and had a not guilty plea entered by his attorney during the brief proceeding before Magistrate Judge Jonathan Goodman.
Speaker Kevin McCarthy, R-Calif., struck a temporary deal with a band of 11 conservative rebels Monday, ending a nearly weeklong blockade of the House floor and paving the way for votes this week on a handful of GOP messaging bills.
The agreement was announced after a meeting between McCarthy and some of the rabble-rousers who last week joined Democrats in voting no on a rule vote — a rare move that blocked a package of GOP bills from advancing on the floor and prompted leadership to send lawmakers home for the week.
A federal judge tonight said members of the media will be prohibited from taking cellphones or other electronic devices into the courthouse where Trump is scheduled to be arraigned tomorrow afternoon.
“All cellular phones and/or electronic equipment are hereby prohibited for news reporters and other members of the media inside the Wilkie D. Ferguson, Jr. United States Courthouse in Miami,” Chief U.S. District Judge Cecilia M. Altonaga wrote in a court order.
Former President Donald Trump arrived in Miami on Monday, a day ahead of his first court appearance on 37 felony charges accusing him of illegally taking highly classified documents from the White House to his Florida club and refusing to return them.
Upon arrival, he headed to Miami’s Trump National Doral, where he’s expected to spend the night before his court appearance. A crowd of about 40 supporters lined the route to his golf club, reporters on the scene said, but Trump did not roll down his window or acknowledge them.
Trump has said that Tuesday’s court session will take place at 3 p.m. and he will plead not guilty on all charges. It’s not yet clear whether the former president will appear before Judge Aileen Cannon, the federal judge assigned to the case, or a magistrate judge, as often happens in this kind of initial hearing.
Jack Smith came out to speak today. (JACK SMITH SPEAKS! Special counsel as Garbo.) And he was as Jack Smithian as Jack Smith could be.
“Our nation’s commitment to the rule of law sets an example for the world. We have one set of laws in this country, and they apply to everyone.”
Simple as that, and then he was gone. Finished. Drive home safely everyone.
Clearly, Smith decided to let the indictment speak for itself and, boy howdy, it does more than that. It bellows. It snarls. It grabs you by your lapels and screams in your face, “LISTEN, IDIOTS. DO NOT EVEN THINK ABOUT ELECTING THIS DANGEROUS CROOK AGAIN. JESUS, WHAT THE HELL IS WRONG WITH YOU PEOPLE?”
Or words to that effect.
Donald Trump faces a formidable task defending against charges that he illegally kept top-secret documents upon leaving the White House in 2021, according to legal experts, who said neither the law nor the facts appear to be on his side.
The former U.S. president, who is a candidate to run again in the 2024 election, was charged in an indictment unsealed in Florida federal court on Friday. The 37 counts against him include violations of the Espionage Act, obstruction of justice conspiracy and false statements.
National security law experts were struck by the breadth of evidence in the indictment which includes documents, photos, text messages, audio and witness statements. They said this made a strong case for prosecutors’ allegation that Trump illegally took the documents and then tried to cover it up.
If there was a theme for Kevin McCarthy’s jampacked first five months as speaker, it would be this: You only live once.
In April, he followed in the footsteps of his political idol, fellow California Republican Ronald Reagan, delivering a major address on Wall Street. Then he hosted Taiwanese President Tsai Ing-wen at Reagan’s presidential library, infuriating Beijing. Last month, McCarthy met King Abdullah II in Jordan, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu in Israel and Pope Francis at the Vatican.
President Joe Biden welcomed hundreds to the White House on Saturday for a delayed Pride Month celebration aimed at showing LGBTQ+ people that his administration has their back at a time when advocates are warning of a spike in discriminatory legislation, particularly aimed at the transgender community, sweeping through statehouses.
The event, which the administration described as the largest Pride event hosted at the White House, was initially scheduled for Thursday, but was postponed because of poor air quality from hazardous air flowing in from Canadian wildfires. But the haze that blanketed a huge swath of the East Coast this past week had lifted over the nation’s capital, allowing the president and first lady Jill Biden to hold their South Lawn party.
Donald Trump and his allies are escalating efforts to undermine the criminal case against him and drum up protests as the former president braces for a history-making federal court appearance this week on dozens of felony charges accusing him of illegally hoarding classified information.
Trump’s Tuesday afternoon appearance in Miami will mark his second time in as many months facing a judge on criminal charges. But unlike a New York case some legal analysts derided as relatively trivial, the Justice Department’s first prosecution of a former president concerns conduct that prosecutors say jeopardized national security and that involves Espionage Act charges carrying the threat of a significant prison sentence in the event of conviction.
Yesterday, in a 5-4 ruling, the Supreme Court affirmed Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act and ruled that Alabama could be sued over its racially gerrymandered congressional maps. Chief Justice John Roberts wrote the majority opinion for the court, joined by Justices Sonia Sotomayor, Elena Kagan, and Ketanji Brown Jackson, as well as alleged attempted rapist Brett Kavanaugh.
I cannot emphasize enough how shocked I was by the decision. This Supreme Court has spent the last decade systematically dismantling the Voting Rights Act, whittling down the most important piece of legislation in American history to a mere husk of what Congress intended. John Roberts has been the VRA’s chief antagonist during this time, ruling against it again and again. He voted to remove one of its core features in 2012’s Shelby County v. Holder; he voted to limit its applicability in 2021’s Brnovich v. Democratic National Committee; and he voted to ignore it all together in certain circumstances in 2019’s Rucho v. Common Cause. Here, he had a chance to deliver the coup de grâce to the act by declaring it functionally unconstitutional. But he blinked.
Pat Robertson, a religious broadcaster who turned a tiny Virginia station into the global Christian Broadcasting Network, tried a run for president and helped make religion central to Republican Party politics in America through his Christian Coalition, has died, the network announced Thursday. He was 93.
Robertson died at his home in Virginia Beach, Virginia, early Thursday morning, according to the network. No cause was given.
Robertson’s enterprises also included Regent University, an evangelical Christian school in Virginia Beach; the American Center for Law and Justice, which defends the First Amendment rights of religious people; and Operation Blessing, an international humanitarian organization.
The Supreme Court’s unexpected affirmation of part of the Voting Rights Act was not just a win for Black voters in Alabama — it could also send new Democrats to Congress in as many as four states, advocates said, as the precedent is applied in similar cases around the country.
The court, divided 5-4, struck down Alabama’s congressional map Thursday, agreeing with a lower court that the state had diluted the power of Black voters by drawing just one majority-Black district when there were enough voters for two seats.
Chief Justice John Roberts and fellow conservative Justice Brett Kavanaugh sided with the court’s three liberals.
A federal grand jury has indicted Donald Trump on seven criminal charges in connection with his mishandling of more than 100 classified documents that were discovered last year at his Mar-a-Lago resort in Florida, making the twice-impeached former commander-in-chief the first former president to face federal criminal charges.
Trump said Thursday night that his attorneys were informed that he has been indicted in the special counsel’s investigation into his handling of classified documents. Two sources familiar with the matter confirmed the indictment, one adding that Trump had received a summons to appear in U.S. District Court on Tuesday.
NBC News’s Jacob Soboroff sat down with California Governor Gavin Newsom (D) for an interview set to air Thursday morning on Today. In the interview, Newsom doubled down on his strongly-worded criticism of Florida Governor Ron DeSantis (R) and his vow to investigate and potentially prosecute anyone involved in the deceitful shipping of migrants to his state.
“These flights of asylum seekers that are being brought to Sacramento. There’s been two of them, now. They’ve been described as state-sanctioned kidnaping by the attorney general of the state of California,” Soboroff began.
A small bloc of conservative bomb-throwers is holding the floor of the House of Representatives hostage, forcing GOP leaders to cancel votes for the rest of the week.
For the second straight day, the conservatives blocked several leadership-backed bills from moving forward Wednesday in protest of Speaker Kevin McCarthy’s handling of the debt deal he struck with President Joe Biden.
The brazen revolt means this hard-right faction, made up mostly of House Freedom Caucus members, has ground legislating on the chamber floor to a halt, undermining the Republican majority and McCarthy’s power.
Steve Bannon, a longtime supporter and ex-adviser to former President Donald Trump, was subpoenaed in Washington, D.C., by a federal grand jury in an investigation of the Jan. 6, 2021, insurrection at the U.S. Capitol, several news outlets reported Wednesday.
The subpoena, which was first reported by NBC News, is the latest update in special counsel Jack Smith’s investigation into the attack on the U.S. Capitol and Trump’s actions following his loss of the 2020 election.
Sources told NBC News that the subpoena was sent out in late May and calls for documents and testimony. CNN later confirmed that reporting.
Federal prosecutors have notified President Donald Trump’s legal team that he is a target of the criminal investigation into his handling of classified documents, according to multiplereports.
The move, first reported by The Guardian, reflects a major uptick in the inquiry and comes amid reports that Justice Department special counsel Jack Smith is nearly finished collecting testimony and evidence in the case. Prosecutors are also using a grand jury in Florida in their investigation as those in the Trump camp fear charges against the former president could be imminent.
The PGA Tour, the dominant force in men’s professional golf for generations, and LIV Golf, which made its debut just last year and is backed by hundreds of millions of dollars in Saudi money, will together form an industry powerhouse that is expected to transform the sport, executives announced Tuesday.
The rival circuits had spent the last year clashing in public, and the tentative agreement that emerged from secret negotiations blindsided virtually all of the world’s top players, agents and broadcasters. The deal would create a new company that would consolidate the PGA Tour’s prestige, television contracts and marketing muscle with Saudi money.
About two dozen Secret Service agents have been subpoenaed or have appeared before a federal grand jury in Washington that’s looking into former President Donald Trump’s handling of classified documents, two sources familiar with the matter confirmed Tuesday.
The sources said prosecutors have interviewed agents assigned to Trump’s security detail at his Mar-a-Lago estate in Florida, about 24 of whom have been asked to testify before the grand jury. All complied, the sources said.
The testimony occurred in the “past few months,” meaning not recently, since the grand jury has been on hiatus, the sources said.
Former President Donald Trump’s last White House chief of staff, Mark Meadows, has testified before a federal grand jury hearing evidence in the special counsel’s investigations into Trump, sources familiar with the matter told ABC News.
Sources said that Meadows answered questions on both Trump’s efforts to overturn the 2020 election and Trump’s alleged mishandling of classified documents while he was out of office.
Meadows’ appearance was first reported by The New York Times. It was not immediately clear exactly when he appeared before the grand jury, which has been meeting regularly in Washington.
Former New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie jumped into the 2024 presidential race Tuesday, filing his official paperwork hours before a planned launch event.
Christie has been blunt in his criticism of former President Donald Trump, who remains the Republican front-runner in the polls, and he’s likely to continue those lines of attack now that he’s in the race.
Christie directly took aim at Trump as he announced his candidacy Tuesday night at a town hall at the New Hampshire Institute of Politics in Manchester.
The legal pursuit of El Caudillo del Mar-a-Lago is starting to look like a televised bass-fishing tournament. There’s Team Smith in Washington, and Team James in New York, and Team Willis down there in Georgia. At the moment, Team Smith seems to be in the lead on total weight but, down in Georgia, Team Willis is aiming to land a big one that might just close the gap considerably.
Gov. Gavin Newsom took his feud with Gov. Ron DeSantis to new heights on Monday, seemingly threatening him with kidnapping charges after California officials say South American migrants were sent to Sacramento by the state of Florida as a political stunt.
Newsom, a Democrat, cited state kidnapping laws in a tweet to the Florida governor and Republican presidential hopeful, whom he called a “small, pathetic man.”
“This isn’t Martha’s Vineyard. Kidnapping charges?” Newsom said in the tweet, referencing DeSantis’ action last year to send a group of Venezuelan migrants to the wealthy liberal vacation spot in Massachusetts.
Former Vice President Mike Pence is filing paperwork on Monday declaring his campaign for president in 2024, setting up a challenge to his former boss, Donald Trump, just two years after their time in the White House ended with an insurrection at the U.S. Capitol and Pence fleeing for his life.
Pence, the nation’s 48th vice president, will formally launch his bid for the Republican nomination with a video and kickoff event in Des Moines, Iowa, on Wednesday, which is his 64th birthday, according to people familiar with his plans. He was set to file papers making his candidacy official with the Federal Election Commission.
The FBI privately briefed lawmakers Monday about an unverified tip the bureau received in 2020 that Joe Biden had been involved in a bribery scheme when he was vice president.
Republicans have said the source of the allegation is highly credible while admitting they don’t know whether it’s true or not.
House Oversight Committee Chair James Comer (R-Ky.) declared after the briefing on Monday that the FBI had not determined the allegation to be untrue, though he didn’t say it had found the tip credible, either.
Former President Donald Trump suggested Monday that he’s close to being charged in the Department of Justice’s investigation into his handling of classified documents.
In an online post conveying panic, Trump expressed disbelief that he could be indicted and said he’s innocent of all wrongdoing.
“How can DOJ possibly charge me, who did nothing wrong, when no other president’s [sic] were charged,” he posted in all caps on his Truth Social account.
Texas has become the most populous state to ban gender-affirming care for minors after Gov. Greg Abbott signed legislation on Friday.
Texas joined at least 18 other states that have enacted similar bans.
Every major medical organization, including the American Medical Association, has opposed the bans and supported the medical care for youth when administered appropriately. Lawsuits have been filed in several states where bans have been enacted this year.
The federal grand jury that has been hearing evidence in the Justice Department’s investigation of former President Donald Trump’s handling of classified documents is expected to meet again this coming week in Washington, according to multiple people familiar with the investigation.
Prosecutors working for special counsel Jack Smith have been presenting the grand jury with evidence and witness testimony for months, but activity appeared to have slowed in recent weeks based on observations at the courthouse and sources.
It’s unclear whether prosecutors are prepared to seek an indictment at this point. The Justice Department would not comment on the status of the investigation.
President Joe Biden on Saturday signed into law a bill extending the debt ceiling for two years, averting an economically disastrous debt default ahead of Monday’s deadline.
The Fiscal Responsibility Act of 2023 suspends the public debt limit through January 1, 2025, after the 2024 presidential elections.
“If we had failed to reach an agreement on the budget, there were extreme voices threatening to take America, for the first time in our 247 year history, into default on our national debt,” Biden said of the deal Friday night in his first televised address from the Oval Office.
NBC News is passing the baton on its long-running Sunday public affairs program “Meet the Press.”
Chuck Todd told viewers Sunday he is leaving the moderator’s chair on the 75-year-old program in September. He will hand it off to Kristen Welker, the network’s chief White House correspondent.
Welker will be the second female moderator in the long history of “Meet the Press.” Martha Rountree was the first to have the job when the program launched in 1947 and held the position until 1953.
There is one question that I don’t see being asked of right-wing politicians when they start talking about all the things they want to ban from the “public” (and I put “public” in quotes because the real public doesn’t actually give a shit about any of this, but a fantasy public that the GOP pretends exists sure cares a lot about making sure their kids don’t learn that it’s possible for same sex couples to love each other). It’s a simple one: “What’s your end goal here?” Or, to put it more simply, “What are you trying to accomplish?”
As often as Florida governor, GOP presidential candidate, and man who looks like making children cry arouses him Ron DeSantis talks about crushing the “woke mind virus,” which I think means, “Shit I can make sound scary,” as often as he promises to “leave woke ideology in the dustbin of history,” as he does in his truly, laughably shitty campaign website, I haven’t seen a single challenge to him where he’s asked, “The fuck do you want?”
Former President Donald Trump said Thursday he doesn’t “know anything” about a reported tape of him discussing a sensitive military document he allegedly took from the White House.
CNN and The New York Times reported Wednesday federal prosecutors had obtained the tape as part of the ongoing investigation into Trump’s handling of classified documents. The recording, taken during a July 2021 meeting in New Jersey, reportedly includes audio of Trump referencing a document he said was related to the U.S. attack on Iran. During the conversation, Trump went on to indicate he knew the document was secret.
The Senate voted largely along party lines Thursday on legislation to block President Joe Biden’s student debt relief program after the measure cleared a key procedural hurdle in the chamber.
The 52-46 vote to pass the legislation comes a day after senators took a similarly close vote to proceed to the measure, which would repeal Biden’s debt relief program and end the administration’s pause on federal student loan payments. A few moderate senators — Democrats Joe Manchin of West Virginia and Jon Tester of Montana and independent Kyrsten Sinema of Arizona — voted with Republicans on the final passage vote as well as the motion to take up the measure.
President Joe Biden fell onstage Thursday at the Air Force Academy’s graduation ceremony and is “fine,” a White House aide said.
After Biden shook the hands of more than 900 graduates, he turned to head back to his seat and started to motion as if he were going to jog. He then appeared to trip and fell down on the stage.
Biden, 80, was helped up by two Secret Service agents and an Air Force official, and he then turned and pointed to something onstage that he might have tripped over.
The Senate voted Thursday night to pass a bill that would extend the debt ceiling for two years and establish a two-year budget agreement on a broad bipartisan vote.
The vote was 63-36.
Having already cleared the House on Wednesday, it now goes to President Joe Biden, who is expected to sign it and avert an economically catastrophic debt default with mere days to spare before Monday’s deadline.
Legal experts foresaw serious consequences for Donald Trump following the reported newly-surfaced recording from July 2021 in which the former president allegedly claimed to have classified documents ― about a possible attack on Iran ― after leaving the White House.
CNN’s report Wednesday that federal prosecutors obtained the audio amid special counsel Jack Smith’s investigation into the classified documents scandal would, if accurate, spell another indictment for Trump, they said.
Federal prosecutors have obtained an audio recording of a summer 2021 meeting in which former President Donald Trump acknowledges he held onto a classified Pentagon document about a potential attack on Iran, multiple sources told CNN, undercutting his argument that he declassified everything.
The recording indicates Trump understood he retained classified material after leaving the White House, according to multiple sources familiar with the investigation. On the recording, Trump’s comments suggest he would like to share the information but he’s aware of limitations on his ability post-presidency to declassify records, two of the sources said.
CNN has not listened to the recording, but multiple sources described it. One source said the relevant portion on the Iran document is about two minutes long, and another source said the discussion is a small part of a much longer meeting.
Mike Pence plans to enter the GOP presidential nomination fray June 7 with a campaign video and a kickoff speech in Des Moines, Iowa, according to a person familiar with his launch schedule.
The former vice president, a longtime advocate of the priorities of traditional conservatives on social and economic issues, will join the race at a time when his onetime boss, former President Donald Trump, claims a majority in most national polls and Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis is in a clear second place.
Redefining himself to Republican voters, most of whom know him primarily as Trump’s vice president, will be a challenge.
With overwhelming bipartisan support, the House voted Wednesday to pass the debt ceiling legislation negotiated by Speaker Kevin McCarthy and President Joe Biden, sending it to the Senate with days to spare before a potentially disastrous default.
The vote was 314 to 117, with 149 Republicans joining 165 Democrats.
The bill would extend the debt limit for two years alongside a two-year budget agreement if it is signed into law. It is the culmination of months of political warfare and weeks of frenzied negotiations between the two parties that finally broke a lengthy stalemate.
Former President Donald Trump promised to nullify a key clause of the Fourteenth Amendment if he is elected president again, though he does not have the authority to do so.
Trump has long taken issue with the citizenship clause of the amendment, which states, “All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside.”
This means that under the Constitution, anyone born in the United States is a citizen of the country, regardless of the immigration status of the parents – with very few exceptions (such as cases where a parent has diplomatic immunity). To change this or any other provision of the document, two-thirds of Congress and three-fourths of the states would have to agree to ratify the change. (As an alternative to Congress’s role, two-thirds of the states could request an amendment be considered by the rest of the states.)
Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis said he plans to “counterpunch” against former President Donald Trump’s attacks after kicking off his 2024 campaign in Iowa on Tuesday.
The Florida governor implicitly poked fun at his top rival at his first official campaign event. But speaking to reporters after the event, he had plenty to say about Trump, unloading a series of blows designed to depict him as selfish, unprincipled and petty.
“I think our voters are looking at this and they say, yeah we appreciate what he did, but we also recognize there are a lot of voters that just aren’t gonna ever vote for him,” DeSantis told reporters. “I know people in Florida who voted against me in ’18 and for me in ‘22. They said in ‘18, ‘I thought you were too much like him and in ‘22 we realized you were your own guy, we’re gonna do it.’”
As criticism builds in Republican ranks over the debt ceiling deal struck by House Speaker Kevin McCarthy, R-Calif., and President Joe Biden, some hard-line conservatives have begun floating the idea of toppling the speaker.
On a House Freedom Caucus call Monday night, Rep. Ken Buck, R-Colo., floated using the motion to vacate, a rule that would allow any House member to force a vote to remove the speaker, two sources familiar with the call said. Buck, speaking toward the end of the call, referred to it as the “elephant in the room,” a source said.
A major debt ceiling bill negotiated by President Joe Biden and House Speaker Kevin McCarthy passed its first test Tuesday, gaining approval from the Republican-led House Rules Committee and setting up a vote Wednesday in the full chamber.
The vote was 7 to 6, with two Republicans — Reps. Ralph Norman of South Carolina and Chip Roy of Texas — and all four Democrats voting no. It sends the bill to the House floor.
The 99-page Fiscal Responsibility Act, which faces heavy criticism from some GOP hard-liners, will need a majority of the House to pass. It is sure to rely on some Democratic votes in the narrowly divided chamber.
The shebeen is going dark until Tuesday, barring any major events, like, say, indictments of former presidents*, out of respect for the spirit of Memorial Day. So a new feature is born: Out On The Weekend In The Laboratories Of Democracy.
We begin the latter semi-regular weekly survey in Texas where, as far as Attorney General Ken Paxton is concerned, there are too many chickens for a limited number of roosts. It’s never been a good idea for a state to have an AG who’s been under indictment for nearly a decade but, hey, Texas, boy, I dunno. Anyway, the whole thing has blown up since a legislative investigation found that Paxton allegedly carried over the same attitude into his official duties as he had exercised in the private sector.
A critical deal to raise the nation’s debt ceiling was announced over the weekend, and lawmakers in Washington now face one week to pass the bill in both chambers of Congress before the predicted deadline when default would begin.
Unless the $31.4 trillion borrowing limit is increased, the U.S. will run out of cash to pay all of its bills in full and on time — the so-called “X-date” — as early as June 5, according to Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen.
Despite the breakthrough on an agreement between President Joe Biden and House Speaker Kevin McCarthy, legislative hurdles remain to get the 99-page debt and spending bill to Biden’s desk by next Monday.
A historic impeachment trial in Texas to determine whether Republican Attorney General Ken Paxton should be permanently removed from office will begin no later than August in the state Senate, where the jury that would determine his future could include his wife, Sen. Angela Paxton.
Setting a schedule was one of the last orders of business lawmakers took Monday during an acrimonious end to this year’s legislative session in Texas, where the impeachment laid bare fractures in America’s biggest red state beyond whether Republicans will oust one of the GOP’s conservative legal stars.
Shootings across the U.S. left at least 16 people dead and dozens more injured over Memorial Day weekend.
The gun violence occurred at beaches, high schools and motorcycle rallies, among other locations, across at least eight states. The victims were teenagers to people in their 60s.
The weekend concluded as it began — with gunfire. Nine people were injured in a shooting in the Hollywood Beach area of Hollywood, Florida, on Monday evening as people enjoying the holiday amassed along the Atlantic coast north of Miami, police said.
Russia’s Interior Ministry on Monday issued an arrest warrant for U.S. Sen. Lindsey Graham following his comments related to the fighting in Ukraine.
In an edited video of his meeting on Friday with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy that was released by Zelenskyy’s office, Graham, a Republican from South Carolina, noted that “the Russians are dying” and described the U.S. military assistance to the country as “the best money we’ve ever spent.”
While Graham appeared to have made the remarks in different parts of the conversation, the short video by Ukraine’s presidential office put them next to each other, causing outrage in Russia.
Donald Trump predictably made Memorial Day all about himself on Monday.
The former president began a post on his Truth Social platform innocuously enough when he wished a “happy Memorial Day to all.”
But it then devolved into a ranting screed as he continued:
“But especially to those who gave the ultimate sacrifice for the country they love, and to those in line of a very different, but equally dangerous fire, stopping the threats of the terrorists, misfits and lunatic thugs who are working feverishly from within to overturn and destroy our once great country, which has never been in greater peril than it is right now. We must stop the communists, Marxists and fascist ‘pigs’ at every turn and, Make America Great Again!”
Read the rest of the story at HuffPost
President Joe Biden on Sunday night celebrated a bipartisan “compromise” to raise the nation’s debt ceiling and avert a historic default that could upend the economy.
In a brief speech from the White House’s Roosevelt Room, Biden urged Congress to move swiftly to pass the deal, brokered with House Republicans led by Speaker Kevin McCarthy, which also imposes some spending limits on the federal government and some regulatory and policy changes.
Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen has said the U.S. will run out of money to pay all of its bills as soon as June 5, known as the “X-date,” unless the $31.4 trillion borrowing limit is raised.
Seeking to strike a reassuring tone despite days of negotiations, President Joe Biden said Thursday afternoon that he’s had several “productive conversations” with House Speaker Kevin McCarthy and their teams are “making progress” on debt ceiling talks as the country inches closer to default.
“I’ve made it clear time and again: Defaulting on our national debt is not an option,” Biden said as he delivered remarks in the Rose Garden before nominating a new chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.
But an agreement still remains elusive with just seven days until potential default. Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen maintains that the U.S. government could run out of cash to pay all its bills in early June, possibly as soon as June 1.
Two employees at former President Donald Trump’s Mar-a-Lago resort moved boxes of papers around the property a day before FBI agents and a federal prosecutor visited in their effort to recover classified documents, multiple media outlets reported Thursday.
The Washington Post first reported that a maintenance employee at the Florida club told federal prosecutors he saw Trump’s valet, Walt Nauta, moving the boxes on June 2, 2022, into a storage area before he offered to help without knowing what the boxes contained. That same day, a lawyer for Trump contacted the Justice Department and said DOJ officials could come to Mar-a-Lago to pick up classified files, people familiar with the investigation told the newspaper.
The Supreme Court on Thursday significantly weakened a landmark water pollution law by ruling that an Idaho couple’s property does not include wetlands subject to federal oversight under the law.
The ruling, in which all the justices agreed in the outcome but differed on the legal reasoning, concluded that Mike and Chantell Sackett’s land does not fall under jurisdiction of the 1972 Clean Water Act, so they do not require a federal permit to build on the property.
The decision ends a yearslong battle between the Sacketts and the federal government and is a victory for conservative groups and business interests opposed to the broad application of the water pollution law.
The founder of the far-right Oath Keepers has been sentenced to 18 years in federal prison in connection with the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol following his conviction on seditious conspiracy.
The sentence for Stewart Rhodes is the longest imposed on a Jan. 6 defendant to date. In a politically-charged speech in the courtroom just before his sentencing, he called himself a “political prisoner” and said that when he talked about “regime change” in a phone call with supporters earlier this week, he meant he hopes that former President Donald Trump will win in 2024.
The judge disagreed that Rhodes had been locked up for politics, saying it was his actions that led to his criminal convictions.
Tina Turner, the exuberant, heel-stomping, wild-haired rock goddess who sold out stadiums, earned a dozen Grammy Awards and won the adoration of fans around the world in an electrifying music career spanning five decades, died Wednesday at her home near Zurich after a long illness, according to her publicist.
She was 83.
“With her, the world loses a music legend and a role model,” Turner’s publicist, Bernard Doherty, said in a statement. Doherty added that there will be a private funeral ceremony for close friends and family members. He did not specify a cause of death.
Fitch Ratings, a top credit rating agency, put the United States’ AAA long term foreign currency issuer default rating on negative watch on Wednesday evening.
“The Rating Watch Negative reflects increased political partisanship that is hindering reaching a resolution to raise or suspend the debt limit despite the fast-approaching x date (when the U.S. Treasury exhausts its cash position and capacity for extraordinary measures without incurring new debt),” the agency said in a statement.
The Arkansas man who was photographed on Jan. 6, 2021, with his feet on a desk in then-Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s office was sentenced Wednesday to four and a half years in prison.
Federal prosecutors had asked the judge to sentence Richard “Bigo” Barnett to more than seven years for his actions before, during and after the riot at the U.S. Capitol.
They noted in a court filing that a picture of a smiling Barnett lounging in Pelosi’s office became “one of the best-known images of that day, symbolizing the rioters having wrested control of both the hallowed space and the political process from the nation’s elected leaders.”
The start of a much-anticipated Twitter event in which Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis planned to announce his 2024 Republican presidential bid was repeatedly disrupted Wednesday when Twitter’s servers apparently could not handle the surge in traffic.
The app crashed repeatedly as Twitter users tried to listen to the event where Twitter owner Elon Musk joined DeSantis for the announcement.
DeSantis eventually was able to speak, about 20 minutes after the scheduled start, after Musk closed the initial Twitter Spaces event and started a second one on the app. That space attracted about 161,000 users, according to Twitter’s public-facing data, as DeSantis read a short speech.
Former President Donald Trump made a virtual appearance in New York criminal court Tuesday for the first time since pleading not guilty last month to 34 felony counts of falsifying business records.
A stern-looking Trump appeared before Judge Juan Merchan on video to hear the terms of a protective order barring him from publicly disclosing evidence, which the Manhattan district attorney’s office will be turning over to his lawyers in the hush money payments case. Trump — whose in-person arraignment in the same courthouse last month came with massive security precautions and paralyzed operations there for the day — appeared virtually from Florida, with lawyer Todd Blanche at his side.
The 19-year-old Missouri man accused of deliberately driving a rented box truck into a White House barrier allegedly told authorities that he admires Nazis and wanted to “seize power” and “kill the president,” court documents released Tuesday show.
Sai Varshith Kandula, of Chesterfield, Missouri, rented the U-Haul truck Monday night immediately after flying from St. Louis to Dulles International Airport on a one-way ticket, a Secret Service agent said in a statement of facts filed in federal district court in Washington D.C.
The statement was included with a criminal complaint charging Kandula with depredation of property of the United States in excess of $1,000.
As Washington struggles to reach a debt ceiling deal with little more than a week until potential default, a key hangup in the negotiations is turning out to be — “work requirements.”
A long-sought effort by Republicans to impose stricter conditions on recipients of Medicaid and other federal assistance programs is now front-and-center in the debt ceiling standoff.
House Speaker Kevin McCarthy has described tougher work requirements as a “red line” in his ongoing negotiations with President Joe Biden to reduce federal spending in exchange for addressing the debt ceiling.
Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis will launch his 2024 presidential campaign during a social media event with Elon Musk on Wednesday night, multiple sources familiar with the matter told ABC News.
DeSantis will declare he is seeking the Republican nomination during a live, audio-only Twitter Spaces event at 6 p.m. ET Wednesday, the sources said. The Twitter conversation will be moderated by Musk ally David Sacks.
Later Wednesday, DeSantis will appear on Fox News to talk about his campaign. He is also expected to file with the Federal Election Commission this week, which would formally enter him into the 2024 race.
Rep. James Comer (R-Ky.) on Monday inadvertently implied that House Republicans’ high-profile investigation into President Joe Biden’s family members and their finances is actually about helping Donald Trump win the presidency in 2024.
Comer, who is leading the GOP’s probe as chair of the House oversight and accountability committee, appeared to say the quiet part out loud during a “Fox & Friends First” interview.
“We have talked to you about this on the show, about how the media can just not ignore this any longer. In an op-ed in The Washington Post, it says, ‘Millions Flowed to Biden Family Members. Don’t Pretend It Doesn’t Matter,’” said the show’s host, Ashley Strohmier, referring to a piece last week by conservative columnist Jim Geraghty. “So do you think that because of your investigation, that is what’s moved this needle with the media?”
Writer E. Jean Carroll on Monday asked a judge to update her still pending original defamation lawsuit against former President Donald Trump to add a new claim after he trashed her as a “whack job” during his CNN town hall earlier this month.
In a court filing late Monday, Carroll attorney Roberta Kaplan said her client will be seeking a “very substantial punitive damages award” for Trump’s remarks.
Trump made the comments a day after a federal court jury in New York found Trump liable for sexually abusing Carroll in a Manhattan department store in the 1990s and then defaming her for calling her claims fraud. The jury awarded Carroll $5 million in damages.
A driver was detained after a truck crashed into security barriers near the White House on Monday night, officials said.
The white U-Haul box truck crashed into the barriers on the north side of Lafayette Square, at 16th Street, just before 10 p.m. ET.
The Secret Service said the incident, which took place just a few hundred feet from the White House, may have been intentional.
“There were no injuries to any Secret Service or White House personnel and the cause and manner of the crash remain under investigation,” Anthony Guglielmi, the Secret Service chief of communications, said in a statement Monday night.
A meeting between President Joe Biden and House Speaker Kevin McCarthy on Monday afternoon to discuss a path forward to avert a debt limit breach failed to yield a deal, but both sides agreed that talks were “productive.”
“We don’t have an agreement yet, but I did feel the discussion was productive in areas that we have differences of opinion,” McCarthy, R-Calif., told reporters after leaving the Oval Office. He added that the “tone tonight was better than any other night we’ve had discussions.”
A White House official said disagreements remain, but echoed the speaker’s assessment that the meeting was overall “productive,” a word that continued to surface as negotiators fanned out.
Rarely has a government report taken so long — in years and pages — to tell the public so little as Special Counsel John Durham’s report to the Department of Justice this week.
When then-Atty. Gen. Bill Barr appointed Durham to investigate the department’s probe of connections between Russia and Donald Trump’s 2016 campaign, Trump and his true believers looked forward to revealing a criminal conspiracy within the FBI. Trump tweeted at the time that Durham would uncover the “crime of the century.”
Instead, four years after Barr first ordered Durham to investigate the investigators, he produced a ponderous, 316-page tome that interminably chews over information that has long been in the public record.
Read the rest of Harry Litman’s piece at The Los Angeles Times
Debt ceiling talks were set to resume Sunday evening as Washington races to strike a budget compromise along with a deal to raise the nation’s borrowing limit and avert an economy-wrecking federal default.
President Joe Biden and House Speaker Kevin McCarthy spoke by phone Sunday while the president was returning home on Air Force One after the Group of Seven summit in Japan. Upbeat, McCarthy, R-Calif., told reporters at the Capitol that the call was “productive” and that the on-again, off-again negotiations between his staff and White House representatives are focused on spending cuts.
He’s to meet Biden on Monday at the White House.
As an American, it’s easy to be cynical about knife crime in the United Kingdom. I’m here right now, and already I’ve seen multiple TV news segments about all the stabbings and threats of stabbings with knives and machetes. When I saw a BBC report with the chyron “Knives: can we end the violence?” my gut Yank instinct was to think, “Oh, England. You’re adorable that you’re only worried about one-on-one knife attacks. Try living every fucking day of your life damned to be in a country where mass shootings happen with a frequency approaching hourly.”
Last night, I saw the play Dismissed at the Soho Theatre, which I disliked a great deal for being didactic and over-directed and more. But it sure seemed to be relevant to the nodding audience. It’s about a teacher reporting a student who brought a knife to school, and her agony and guilt over the boy’s coming expulsion. Now, in the US, schools do freak out over any weapon brought to school property, even in a student’s car. Hell, they freak out over Advil. But, again, I thought, “Damn, must be nice to live in a place where that knife is the worst of your worries on school grounds.”
Disney has abandoned plans to open up a new employee campus in Lake Nona, Florida, amid rising tensions with the state’s governor.
Citing “changing business conditions” and the return of CEO Bob Iger, Josh D’Amaro, chairman of Disney’s parks, experiences and products division, penned a memo to employees Thursday, announcing that the company will not move forward with construction of the campus and will no longer be asking more than 2,000 California-based employees to relocate to Florida.
“This was not an easy decision to make, but I believe it is the right one,” D’Amaro told employees.
Sen. Dianne Feinstein, D-Calif., experienced more complications than were publicly disclosed from a recent case of shingles that left her absent from Washington for nearly three months.
Feinstein, 89, had also suffered from Ramsay Hunt syndrome, which occurred when shingles spread to her head and neck, and a case of encephalitis, which is swelling of the brain, a person familiar with her situation said Thursday.
The New York Times first reported the previously undisclosed complications.
Two of the three self-proclaimed FBI whistleblowers who testified before a House subcommittee Thursday lost their security clearances because their conduct in Jan. 6 cases brought into question their allegiance to the U.S., a bureau official wrote in a letter to members of Congress this week.
A third FBI employee, a special agent who did not testify before the committee, lost his security clearance because he was on the restricted grounds of the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, but lied about his conduct, FBI Acting Assistant Director Christopher Dunham wrote in a letter to Rep. Jim Jordan, R-Ohio, which was obtained by NBC News.
Reps. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.) and Jamaal Bowman (D-N.Y.) got into a shouting match outside the Capitol on Wednesday. The two yelled until Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.) stepped in to defuse the situation by taking a shot at Greene.
“She ain’t worth it, bro,” Ocasio-Cortez said, tapping Bowman on the shoulder. “She ain’t worth it, bro.”
President Joe Biden on Wednesday said he is “confident” the U.S. will avert default, expressing optimism a crisis could be avoided as he left for a foreign trip even as debt ceiling negotiations were coming down to the wire.
“I’m confident that we’ll get the agreement on the budget that America will not default,” Biden said from the White House Roosevelt Room. He added, “We’re going to come together because there’s no alternative.”
Biden’s remarks come as he embarks on a now five-day trip to Japan to meet with G-7 leaders. The president was due to visit Papua New Guinea and Australia following his appearance in Hiroshima but canceled the back half of the trip to work on a debt ceiling deal.
The House voted Wednesday evening to refer a Democratic-sponsored resolution to expel Rep. George Santos, R-N.Y., to the Ethics Committee.
By referring the matter to the House Committee on Ethics, which has been investigating Santos since early March, Republicans for now avoided a vote on the resolution itself, which was introduced Tuesday by Rep. Robert Garcia, D-Calif.
The referral, approved Wednesday in a 221-204 vote, required only a simple majority to pass. No Republicans voted against the motion, and seven Democrats voted present, including all five Democratic members of the Ethics panel.
Rep. Robert Garcia, D-Calif., introduced a resolution on the House floor Tuesday afternoon to expel GOP Rep. George Santos.
“I rise to give notice of my intent to raise a question of the privileges of the House. … Rep. George Santos be, and hereby is, expelled from the House of Representatives,” he said.
House Republicans can schedule this vote within two legislative days, needing a two-thirds majority to pass; however, House Speaker Kevin McCarthy said he would refer the resolution to the House Ethics Committee instead.
An unknown man managed to slip undetected inside the home of White House national security adviser Jake Sullivan, according to two people familiar with the incident. The U.S. Secret Service is investigating.
The door was apparently unlocked, and the intruder was able to get inside Sullivan’s home around 3 a.m. last month, the people said. Secret Service is investigating whether the person intentionally went into the home or whether it was some kind of accident; the person appeared to be intoxicated, the people said. The people were not authorized to talk about an ongoing investigation and spoke to The Associated Press on condition of anonymity.
A White House effort to counter China’s increasing influence in the western Pacific on Tuesday became the first casualty of Republican attempts to make honoring the U.S. debt contingent on cutting medical and food benefits for welfare recipients.
President Joe Biden’s aides for weeks had been touting his planned visit to Papua New Guinea as part of the administration’s outreach to Southeast Asian and Pacific island nations that are also being wooed by China. Now the first-ever presidential visit there and a meeting with Prime Minister James Marape and other leaders of Pacific Islands Forum countries have been canceled to let Biden return to Washington immediately after the conclusion of the G-7 summit of the world’s largest democratic economies in Japan on Sunday.
North Carolina Republicans successfully killed Democratic Gov. Roy Cooper’s veto of a 12-week abortion ban on Tuesday, paving the way for the restriction to soon become law.
When the legislature held an override vote on Tuesday, every Republican voted for the 12-week abortion ban in the Senate, 30-20, and the House, 72-48 ― confirming that the state’s Republican supermajority had the power to override Cooper’s veto. All four Republicans whom Cooper had eyed as possible swing votes — state Reps. Tricia Cotham, John Bradford and Ted Davis Jr., as well as state Sen. Michael V. Lee — voted in favor of the abortion ban.
A person looking for Virginia Rep. Gerry Connolly allegedly attacked two of his staffers with a metal baseball bat at his district office Monday, the congressman said in a statement.
Connolly, a Democrat, said the individual was taken into police custody and the two staffers who were injured were taken to the hospital with non-life-threatening injuries.
One of the staffers, a senior aide, was hit in the head, according to Connolly’s office in Fairfax. The other, an intern who had just started working in the office, was hit in the side.
A woman who says she worked as an off-the-books employee for Rudy Giuliani during his stint as Donald Trump’s personal lawyer alleges in court papers that the former New York City mayor coerced her into sex and owes her nearly $2 million in unpaid wages.
Noelle Dunphy said in the lawsuit that she was Giuliani’s business development director and public relations consultant from 2019 to 2021. She initially made her allegations public in January, but she detailed her claims further in a 70-page legal complaint filed Monday in New York.
Giuliani “vehemently” denied the allegations through a spokesperson. His lawyer had also previously denied that Dunphy ever worked for Giuliani.
A woman who said she worked for Rudy Giuliani during the last two years of the Trump administration alleged in a wide-ranging lawsuit that Giuliani, the former president’s personal attorney, discussed selling presidential pardons and detailed plans to overturn the 2020 election results.
In a 70-page complaint filed in state court in New York on Monday, Noelle Dunphy said that after Giuliani hired her in January 2019 he sexually assaulted and harassed her, refused to pay her wages and often made “sexist, racist, and antisemitic remarks,” adding that she had recordings of numerous interactions with him.
Dunphy, who is seeking $10 million in compensatory and punitive damages, said Giuliani had hired her for $1 million a year in addition to expenses and pro bono legal representation for a domestic abuse case against a former partner. But after she was hired, Dunphy alleged, Giuliani kept her employment “secret” and paid her only about $12,000 and reimbursed some of her business expenses, owing her $1,988,000 in unpaid wages. She said she was fired in January 2021.
The special counsel who spent four years investigating the Trump-Russia probe accused the FBI of acting negligently by opening the investigation based on vague and insufficient information in a sweeping 300-page report made public Monday.
Special counsel John Durham, named by then-Attorney General William Barr to examine the origins and conduct of the investigation into whether Donald Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign colluded with Russia, criticized the FBI at length in the report.
“The [Justice] Department and the FBI failed to uphold their important mission of strict fidelity to law,” the conclusion section of Durham’s report says. “Senior FBI personnel displayed a serious lack of analytical rigor toward the information they received, especially information received from politically affiliated persons or entities.”
Did you leave him in the car? Did you look in the pockets of yesterday’s jeans? Have you checked between the cushions of the sofa?
These people are unbelievable.
“You have spoken with whistleblowers,” [Maria Bartiromo] said. “You also spoke with an informant who gave you all of this information. Where is that informant today? Where are these whistleblowers?”
“Well, unfortunately, we can’t track down the informant,” Comer answered. “We’re hopeful that the informant is still there. The whistleblower knows the informant. The whistleblower is very credible.”
“Hold on a second, Congressman,” Bartiromo said. “Did you just say that the whistleblower or the informant is now missing?”
“Well, we’re hopeful that we can find the informant,” Comer said, explaining the informant was in the “spy business” and “they don’t make a habit of being seen a lot.
(You will note that, while listening to Comer, Bartiromo begins to resemble someone confronting a talking duck.)
It was supposed to be a clash of 2024 GOP presidential primary titans in Iowa on Saturday, but Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis had the state to himself — meeting with voters at several stops — as the threat of tornadoes forced former President Donald Trump to cancel an outdoor rally.
DeSantis, seizing on Trump’s absence, hurriedly scheduled an unannounced stop late Saturday at Jethro’s, a Des Moines barbecue joint a stone’s throw from the park where Trump had planned to hold his rally. Roughly 100 DeSantis supporters packed the restaurant’s patio and the sidewalk outside to take pictures, shake hands and hear him give a short version of his stump speech.
The number of crossings along the U.S. southern border has dropped by 50% since pandemic-related asylum restrictions expired on Thursday, contradicting earlier fears that there would be a surge, Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas said Sunday.
U.S. Border Patrol counted roughly 6,300 crossings on Friday and 4,300 on Saturday, down from more than 10,000 before Title 42 expired on Thursday night, Mayorkas told CNN’s Dana Bash.
It’s still “too early” to say whether the number of crossings has peaked, he said, while crediting harsher penalties for unlawful entry for the immediate drop.
Rep. James Comer (R-KY) revealed on Sunday that Republicans had lost track of a top witness in the investigation of President Joe Biden and his family.
During an interview on Fox News, host Maria Bartiromo asked Comer about evidence he had of Biden’s alleged corruption.
“You have spoken with whistleblowers,” she noted. “You also spoke with an informant who gave you all of this information. Where is that informant today? Where are these whistleblowers?”
“Well, unfortunately, we can’t track down the informant,” Comer replied. “We’re hopeful that the informant is still there. The whistleblower knows the informant. The whistleblower is very credible.”
There was a time in the not-so-distant past when it was just fine to sexually harass and assault women. Slapping a woman on the ass was supposed to be taken as a compliment. Discussion about women’s looks and their fuckability was a constant in workplaces. And by “fuckability,” I mean “rapeability” because it didn’t matter if the woman wanted to be judged that way. Consent was something that was given the moment a woman agreed to be alone with a man. It was a bullshit, stupid time, and a good many men didn’t buy into it. But a whole fuckin’ lot of them did and not enough of those good men did enough to stop it. So there was a kind of impunity, especially since a woman who didn’t “happily” accept the ass slaps and tit comments and sex propositions was seen as uptight and man-hating while a woman who didn’t give in to fucking when alone with a man who wanted to fuck was seen as a cocktease and prude. And if you were a woman who was raped by a man, your entire sexual history would be questioned, as well as what you wore and what you did to make that man rape you.
Cheers and applause broke out as migrants prepared to cross the border into El Paso, Texas, hours after the lifting of pandemic-era restrictions on Friday.
Once across, men and women, some in hoodies and sweaters to guard against the chilly desert night air, walked in single file to a U.S. Border Patrol van. A man and woman held hands, the woman covering her nose and mouth with her sleeve as dust filled the air.
Dozens of migrants had already boarded three white school buses in small groups, Border Patrol vans partially obscuring the media’s ability to see them. The bus was flanked by members of the National Guard and Border Patrol in green and camouflage uniforms.
One day after making a long-anticipated return to Congress, Sen. Dianne Feinstein, D-Calif., attended her first Judiciary Committee meeting on Thursday after a monthslong absence following a shingles diagnosis in February.
With Feinstein’s “aye” votes, Democrats were able to send three additional judicial nominees to the Senate floor for consideration on party-line votes: Charnelle Bjelkengren to be a district court judge in Washington state; Kato Crews to be a district court judge in Colorado; and Marian Gaston to be a district court judge in California.
Former President Donald Trump’s “whack job” remarks – and others – about E. Jean Carrollmay lead to another defamation lawsuit as her lawyer revealed that “everything’s on the table” in the wake of a CNN town hall event that’s been panned by media figures both inside and outside of the network.
Carroll spoke to The New York Times on Thursday after a Manhattan jury found Trump liable of sexual abuse and defamation, and called on him to pay $5 million in damages.
Trump, in his town hall appearance, claimed he had no idea “who the hell she is” as he rambled on and claimed she has a “fake,” “made-up story” – remarks that led to her telling The Times that she’s been “insulted by better people.”
Sen. Dianne Feinstein, D-Calif., cast her first two votes on the Senate floor Wednesday afternoon after a nearly three-month absence due to health issues.
Upon her arrival on Capitol Hill, she was assisted into a wheelchair and greeted by Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y.
Feinstein told reporters that she feels “much better.” She did not answer questions about why she decided to return or respond to calls from critics to resign.
Sen. Tommy Tuberville, R-Ala., appeared to defend white nationalists in a recent interview by suggesting they should not be barred from serving in the military, prompting his office to clarify the remarks.
In an interview published this week by Birmingham-based radio station WBHM, Tuberville criticized the state of the military and said Democrats were to blame.
“We are losing in the military — so fast — our readiness in terms of recruitment,” said Tuberville, a member of the Armed Services Committee. “And why? I can tell you why. Because the Democrats are attacking our military, saying we need to get out the white extremists, the white nationalists, people that don’t believe in [President Joe Biden’s] agenda.”
For months, Representative George Santos seemed to possess a Teflon-like resistance to repercussions, even as questions mounted over his income, campaign finances and rags-to-riches life story.
Mr. Santos, a first-term Republican representing Long Island and Queens, gave numerous speeches on the House floor and appeared to relish his growing notoriety. Just in the last month, he announced his bid for re-election and tried to leverage his vote with House Republican leadership on a contentious bill to raise the debt ceiling.
But on Wednesday, Mr. Santos was confronted with consequences that may prove difficult to skirt. Federal prosecutors charged him with 13 counts of wire fraud, money laundering, stealing public funds and lying on federal disclosure forms, and took him into custody.
Donald Trump is still Donald Trump.
His 70 minutes onstage in New Hampshire served as a vivid reminder that the former president has only one speed, and that his second act mirrors his first. He is, as ever, a celebrity performance artist and, even out of office, remains the center of gravity in American politics.
CNN’s decision to give him an unfiltered prime-time platform was a callback to the 2016 campaign, even as the moderator, Kaitlan Collins, persistently interjected to try to cut him off or correct him.
Mr. Trump was so focused on discussing and defending himself that he barely touched on President Biden’s record — which people close to Mr. Trump want him to focus on. But he was disciplined when it came to his chief expected primary rival.
President Joe Biden and congressional leaders failed to resolve the impending default crisis at a contentious meeting in the Oval Office on Tuesday afternoon, but they plan to meet again Friday.
Each side accused the other of being unreasonable, and Biden — for the first time — said after the meeting that there have been White House discussions about taking the unilateral step of invoking the 14th Amendment to circumvent Congress and ignore the debt ceiling, although he later seemed to dismiss the idea, citing litigation concerns.
A source described the mood in the room as “tense and serious,” and Biden suggested afterward that House Speaker Kevin McCarthy, R-Calif., was at times out of line.
The Department of Justice has filed criminal charges against Rep. George Santos (R-N.Y.), CNN is reporting.
The charges haven’t been announced, but the controversial member of Congress is expected to appear as soon as Wednesday at federal court in New York’s Eastern District.
A request for comment to Santos’ office was not immediately returned.
ABC News reported that the nature of the charges are unclear since the charges are under seal. CNN is speculating that the charges could be connected to allegations of false statements in Santos’ campaign finance filings and other claims that have been the subject of investigations by the FBI and the Justice Department’s public integrity prosecutors in New York and Washington.
Conservative commentator and former Fox News host Tucker Carlson is launching a new version of his show on Twitter, he said Tuesday.
Speaking in a nearly three-minute video posted on the platform, Carlson gave few details about the show and offered a familiar criticism of the news media.
Carlson called the platform the “last big one remaining in the world” for free speech.
“Twitter isn’t a partisan site,” he said. “Everyone is allowed here.”
A New York jury found former President Donald Trump liable Tuesday for sexually abusing writer E. Jean Carroll in a Manhattan department store in the 1990s but not liable for her alleged rape.
The jury awarded her $5 million in damages for her battery and defamation claims.
Asked on its verdict sheet whether Carroll, 79, had proven “by a preponderance of the evidence” that “Mr. Trump raped Ms. Carroll,” the nine-person jury checked the box that said “no.” Asked whether Carroll had proven “by a preponderance of the evidence” that “Mr. Trump sexually abused Ms. Carroll,” the jury checked the box that said “yes.” Both allegations were elements of Carroll’s battery claim.
E. Jean Carroll was “exactly” Donald Trump’s type, and the former president didn’t show up at her civil trial accusing him of rape because “he knows what he did” to her, her attorney alleged in closing arguments Monday in Manhattan federal court.
Speaking to the six-man, three-woman jury, Roberta Kaplan played a video of the former president’s October deposition in the case, where he looked at a picture of Carroll from the late 1980s and identified it as a photo of Marla Maples, his second wife.
Trump had said in his deposition and in public statements after Carroll accused him of sexually assaulting her in a Manhattan department store that he wouldn’t have done so because she was “not my type.”
The New York state judge presiding over the criminal hush money case against Donald Trump issued an order Monday restricting the former president from posting about some evidence in the case on social media.
Judge Juan Merchan largely sided with Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg by limiting what Trump can publicly disclose about new evidence from the prosecution before the case goes to trial.
The order says that “any materials and information provided by the People to the Defense in accordance with their discovery obligations … shall be used solely for the purposes of preparing a defense in this matter.”
President Joe Biden and congressional leaders — including the two top Republicans — will meet Tuesday in the Oval Office to open negotiations to head off an impending default crisis, although neither side expects the summit to make much progress.
With the Treasury Department saying the government will run out of money as soon as June 1 unless Congress raises its borrowing limit, Biden and House Speaker Kevin McCarthy, R-Calif., have precious little time and virtually no pre-existing relationship.
But even sitting down together is seen as a major step forward, because the White House has so far refused to negotiate over the debt ceiling itself and both sides agree a resolution is essential to avoid the unprecedented economic calamity of a default.
A social media page appearing to belong to a gunman who killed eight people at a Dallas-area outlet mall had shared extremist beliefs with rants against Jews, women and racial minorities posted since September, as well as posts about struggling with mental health.
Mauricio Garcia, 33, maintained a profile on the Russian social networking platform OK.ru, including posts referring to extremist online forums, such as 4chan, and content from white nationalists, including Nick Fuentes, an antisemitic white nationalist provocateur.
In the weeks before the attack, Garcia posted more than two dozen photos of Allen Premium Outlets, where an officer killed him after the shooting Saturday, and surrounding areas, including several screenshots of Google location information, seemingly monitoring the mall at its busiest times.
Texas Gov. Greg Abbott (R) said the state would focus on addressing “mental health problems” behind gun violence, but didn’t address calls for gun reform after another devastating mass shooting at a shopping center this weekend.
Eight people were killed and at least seven others injured at an outlet mall in Allen, Texas, on Saturday after a gunman opened fire on the crowded facility. Authorities identified the shooter as 33-year-old Mauricio Garcia, who was killed by a police officer on the scene.
It was the second mass shooting in Texas in recent weeks after another gunman killed five of his neighbors in Cleveland, Texas, after they asked him to stop firing his weapon at home.
Federal officials were looking into whether the gunman who killed eight people at a Dallas-area mall expressed an interest in white supremacist ideology Sunday as they work to try to discern a motive for the attack, a law enforcement official told The Associated Press. The official cautioned the investigation is in its early stages.
Federal agents have been reviewing social media accounts they believe Mauricio Garcia, 33, used and posts that expressed interest in white supremacist and neo-Nazi views, said the official, who could not discuss details of the investigation publicly and spoke to the AP on condition of anonymity.
Garcia also had a patch on his chest when he was killed by police that read “RWDS,” an acronym for the phrase “Right Wing Death Squad,” which is popular among right-wing extremists and white supremacy groups, the official said.
Former President Donald Trump rejected his last chance Sunday to testify at a civil trial where a longtime advice columnist has accused him of raping her in a luxury department store dressing room in 1996.
Trump, a Republican candidate for president in 2024, was given until 5 p.m. Sunday by U.S. District Judge Lewis A. Kaplan to file a request to testify. Nothing was filed.
It was not a surprise. Trump has not shown up once during the two-week Manhattan trial where writer E. Jean Carroll testified for several days, repeating claims she first made publicly in a 2019 memoir. She is seeking compensatory and punitive damages totaling millions of dollars.
Eight people waiting at a bus stop in a Texas border city were killed and a dozen more were injured early Sunday when a vehicle rammed into them, officials said.
The victims, who are believed to be migrants, were at a stop near a Catholic Charities facility in Brownsville known as the Ozanam Center, a senior law enforcement official said.
Shortly after the crash, around 8:30 a.m., seven deaths were reported. Brownsville Mayor Trey Mendez later said an additional person had died.
“Several more remain critical,” Mendez said in a statement on Facebook.
The Justice Department is seeking 25 years in prison for Stewart Rhodes, the Oath Keepers founder convicted of seditious conspiracy for what prosecutors described as a violent plot to keep President Joe Biden out of the White House, according to court papers filed Friday.
A Washington, D.C., jury convicted Rhodes in November in one of the most consequential cases brought in the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol, when a mob of then-President Donald Trump’s supporters assaulted police officers, smashed windows and temporarily halted Congress’ certification of Biden’s victory.
The sentencing recommendations come a day after jurors in a different case convicted four leaders of another extremist group, the Proud Boys — including former national chairman Enrique Tarrio — of seditious conspiracy. The Proud Boys were accused of a separate plot to forcibly keep Trump in power after he lost the 2020 election.
Eight of the so-called “fake electors” in Georgia who were allegedly involved in efforts to overturn the results of the 2020 election in the state have accepted immunity in the Fulton County probe into the matter, according to their lawyer.
In a court filing in the case on Friday, an attorney who represents 10 of the fake electors said the Fulton County district attorney’s office reached out in April to provide an immunity offer for eight of her clients.
“After reviewing the actual, written offers of immunity, each of those eight electors accepted their immunity offer,” the filing by the attorney, Kimberly Debrow, said.
King Charles III was crowned monarch of the United Kingdom of Britain and Northern Ireland on Saturday, in a ceremony steeped in a millennium of tradition and pageantry.
Shouts of “God Save the King!” were heard, trumpets blared and gun salutes rang out after the Archbishop of Canterbury placed the crown on Charles’s head at Westminster Abbey. The coronation comes almost eight months after Charles ascended the throne following the death of his mother, Queen Elizabeth II, on Sept. 8.
Charles, 74, and his wife, Queen Camilla, 75, then returned to Buckingham Palace in a sumptuous procession cheered on by crowds lining the roads despite the heavy rain. Soon after, the couple and other members of the family, including Prince William and Kate, Princess of Wales, and their three children appeared on the palace’s balcony and greeted a flag-waving crowd below them.
Nine people, including the suspect, are dead after a shooting Saturday at a Dallas-area outlet mall, authorities said.
Seven people died on scene at Allen Premium Outlets and two more were pronounced dead at a hospital, Allen Fire Department Chief Jonathan Boyd said.
Three people remained in critical condition on Saturday night and four were stabilized, Boyd said.
President Joe Biden has been briefed on the shooting, the White House said in a statement. The White House was “closely monitoring the situation and is in touch with law enforcement and local officials to offer support,” the statement added.
Four members of the far-right Proud Boys organization were found guilty Thursday of seditious conspiracy in connection with the Jan. 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol.
Enrique Tarrio, Joseph Biggs, Ethan Nordean and Zachary Rehl were found guilty of the rare charge of seditious conspiracy under a Civil War-era statute. Dominic Pezzola, another member of the group, was found not guilty of seditious conspiracy. Tarrio, Biggs, Nordean and Rehl were also found guilty of conspiracy to obstruct an official proceeding, while U.S. District Judge Timothy J. Kelly declared a mistrial on that count for Pezzola after the jury said it could not come to an agreement.
First Republic Bank has been taken over by federal regulators and will be sold to JPMorgan — making it the third major bank to go under in less than two months.
The Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC) ) announced simultaneously Monday morning that it had seized the bank and that JPMorgan Chase, the largest bank in America, would be purchasing substantially all of the bank’s assets and deposits.
With $229.1 billion in total assets at the time of closure, First Republic Bank has eclipsed Silicon Valley Bank ($209.0 billion at the time of closure) to become the second largest bank failure in American history.
A man suspected of using an AR-15 rifle to kill five neighbors execution-style continued to elude an army of law enforcement hunting for him outside Houston over the weekend.
Authorities said Sunday afternoon that Francisco Oropesa, 38, appeared to have slipped past a 2-mile dragnet of more than 150 law enforcement officers in Cleveland, Texas, about 45 miles north of Houston, on Saturday.
On Sunday, they said, more than 250 officers were continuing the search.
President Joe Biden joked about a range of topics at the White House Correspondents’ dinner on Saturday but struck a serious tone as he called for the release of wrongfully detained Americans abroad.
The annual dinner, hosted inside the Washington Hilton, drew thousands of guests in support of freedom of the press, something Biden called “the pillar of a free society, not the enemy.”
Donald Trump had one of his weirdest campaign moments yet as he updated an anti-trans rant that included a series of grunts as he imitated a woman lifting weights.
“I will tell you another thing that people can’t even believe: I will keep men out of women’s sports, OK?” the former president told a cheering audience in Manchester, New Hampshire, on Thursday.
Then, as he prepared to break out an impression of a woman struggling to lift weights at a competition, he surveyed the crowd.
“Should I do it?” he asked.
The audience cheered.
Writer E. Jean Carroll, who alleges in a lawsuit that Donald Trumpraped her in the 1990s in a New York department store, was questioned Thursday by a lawyer for the former president who repeatedly suggested her claim was made up.
“You were supposedly raped?” Trump lawyer Joe Tacopina asked Carroll early in his cross-examination.
“I was raped,” Carroll responded.
Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis on Thursday brushed off a lawsuit by the Walt Disney Co. over the revocation of its Orlando-area theme park’s self-governing privileges as politically motivated.
“I don’t think the suit has merit. I think it’s political,” DeSantis said during a news conference in Jerusalem as part of a trip his office described as an “international trade mission.”
“I think they filed in Tallahassee for a reason, because they’re trying to generate some district court decision,” the governor said. “But we’re very confident on the law.”
Former Vice President Mike Pence appeared Thursday before the federal grand jury convened as part of the special counsel investigation into former President Donald Trump’s efforts to overturn his 2020 election loss and remain in power, according to a source familiar with the matter.
The testimony is a significant development in the special counsel’s probe, as Pence could provide critical insights into Trump’s thinking in the days leading up to the attack on the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021. He published a memoir and a Wall Street Journal opinion article detailing several of his interactions with Trump, but some details were left vague. Special counsel Jack Smith’s team is particularly interested in Trump’s efforts to try to block the certification of the election, NBC News has reported.
Read the rest of the story at NBC News
Tucker Carlson released a video on Wednesday addressing his firing from Fox News several days prior.
“In five years we won’t even remember that we had them,” he said, adding, “Trust me as someone who has participated.”
House Republicans on Wednesday narrowly passed a bill to increase the nation’s debt ceiling while cutting federal government spending — and while the legislation has no prospect of becoming law, GOP leaders hope it will help force negotiations with Democrats.
The proposal, known as the Limit, Save, Grow Act, passed 217-215, with four Republicans joining all Democrats in voting no.
Those Republicans were Reps. Andy Biggs, Ken Buck, Tim Burchett and Matt Gaetz.
Disney filed a lawsuit Wednesday in U.S. District Court against Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis and various Florida officials over a campaign the company alleges was “patently retaliatory, patently anti-business, and patently unconstitutional.”
The lawsuit follows the state oversight board’s decision to void “publicly noticed and duly agreed development contracts which had laid the foundation for billions of Disney’s investment dollars and thousands of jobs,” according to the legal filing.
The company’s lawsuit called the move “a targeted campaign of government retaliation — orchestrated at every step by Gov. DeSantis as punishment for Disney’s protected speech — now threatens Disney’s business operations, jeopardizes its economic future in the region, and violates its constitutional rights.”
Writer E. Jean Carroll took the witness stand for her lawsuit against former President Donald Trump on Wednesday, telling jurors: “I’m here because Trump raped me.”
When she stepped forward with her allegations in 2019, Trump “lied and shattered my reputation, and I’m trying to get my life back,” Carroll said in her testimony at the civil trial in federal court in lower Manhattan.
Carroll, 79, said she first met Trump — who has said he doesn’t know who she is and had never met her — in 1987 at a party by “Saturday Night Live,” where she was a writer at the time. She said she believes that’s where a picture was taken of her with Trump, his then-wife, Ivana, and Carroll’s husband at the time, who was a popular local news anchor.
In a recorded conversation with Fox Business host Maria Bartiromo ahead of the Jan. 6, 2021, insurrection, Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas) laid out a plan to create a “commission” to help him overturn the 2020 election to keep Donald Trump in the White House.
“I think that the country deserves to have a credible assessment of these claims and what the evidence shows, and the mechanism to try to force that is denying certification on the 6th,” Cruz says in the Jan. 2, 2021, recording, obtained and aired Tuesday by MSNBC’s Ari Melber.
Cruz played a starring role on Jan. 6, 2021, when he led a group of Republican senators in objecting to certain states’ Electoral College counts in the 2020 presidential election. He then continued to support Trump’s lies about widespread electoral fraud even after a violent mob of Trump supporters stormed the U.S. Capitol to try to disrupt the certification of the electoral votes, which confirmed Joe Biden had won the presidency.
E. Jean Carroll, the writer who says Donald Trump raped her in a New York City department store in the 1990s, sued the former president because “she wants to get her life back,” her attorney said in opening statements Tuesday.
“Donald Trump assaulted her in 1996 and defamed her when she said she made it up,” lawyer Shawn Crowley told jurors.
Carroll, a magazine writer and columnist, alleges the attack took place in a Bergdorf Goodman department store on Fifth Avenue in New York City, when the “playful banter” she’d been engaged with Trump, then a businessman, took a “dark turn.” She alleges in her lawsuit that Trump “seized” her, “forced her up against a dressing room wall, pinned her in place with his shoulder, and raped her.”
Chief Justice John Roberts on Tuesday declined an invitation from a high-ranking Democratic senator to testify at a congressional hearing on ethics rules for members of the Supreme Court.
In a letter to Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Dick Durbin, D-Ill., Roberts suggested that his participation could pose a threat to judicial independence.
“Testimony before the Senate Judiciary Committee by the Chief Justice of the United States is exceedingly rare, as one might expect in light of separation of powers concerns and the importance of preserving judicial independence,” Roberts wrote.
Hours after announcing his 2024 bid, President Joe Biden promised in a union hall speech on Tuesday to deliver for American workers if re-elected, pitching his economic vision for the country and swiping at Republicans.
Biden’s remarks to the North America’s Building Trades Unions at the Washington Hilton were punctuated by chants of “Four more years.”
“We’re on the cusp of major change,” Biden said, addressing the labor federation. “We’re creating jobs again. Manufacturing has come alive again. People can afford decent health care. Towns that have been forgotten and left behind are coming to life again because of you all — what we’re doing.”
There was a great disturbance in the Force on Wednesday. Don Lemon gets the gate at CNN, which genuinely seems to be floundering under current leadership. (Gayle King and Charles Barkley? This is a chemistry experiment guaranteed to make the cat disappear.) And, over at Fox, Tucker Carlson gets shuffled out the door without even a chance to say goodbye to his vast audience of angry shut-ins. Far be it from me to advise Florida Governor Ronald DeSantis on anything, but I might call out the National Guard to surround The Villages in case of rioting. To paraphrase Neil Young, I see bloody fountains, and 10 million golf carts, coming down the driveway.
As Republican leaders in the Montana legislature doubled down on forbidding Rep. Zooey Zephyr from participating in debate into a second week, her supporters on Monday interrupted proceedings in the House by chanting “Let her speak!”
Zephyr, a first-term Democrat from Missoula, wanted to speak about a proposal that would restrict when children could change the names and pronouns they use in school, with their required parents’ consent.
When lawmakers voted to continue subjecting Zephyr to a gag order, denying her the chance to speak, the gallery, made up mostly of her supporters, erupted, forcing legislative leaders to pause proceedings and clear the room.
Jury selection is scheduled to begin Tuesday in a civil trial stemming from a lawsuit filed by advice columnist and author E. Jean Carroll against former President Donald Trump.
Carroll says Trump raped her in a New York City department store in the mid-1990s and defamed her when she went public with the story in 2019, when New York Magazine published an excerpt from a book Carroll was soon to publish.
Trump has denied Carroll’s allegations, claiming she fabricated them, and accusing her of doing so for publicity.
Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis said Monday that she’ll announce charging decisions stemming from her probeinto possible interference in the 2020 election by former President Donald Trump and his allies as early as mid-July.
Willis said the charging decisions will be revealed during the state Superior Court’s fourth term, which begins July 11 and ends Sept. 1.
The timeline is the clearest that Willis has given about potential indictments since she said in January that an announcement was “imminent.”
Fox News host Tucker Carlson and CNN host Don Lemon both abruptly exited their cable outlets on Monday following a series of controversies, marking a seismic shift in the media landscape.
Just hours before Fox News announced Carlson’s departure in a statement, the network was still promoting his primetime show, indicating just how sudden the separation was.
“FOX News Media and Tucker Carlson have agreed to part ways,” Fox News said in a statement. “We thank him for his service to the network as a host and prior to that as a contributor.”
More than a half-dozen Republicans who are or may be running for president took their pitches to religious conservatives at an Iowa cattle call on Saturday that’s long been one of the premier stops on the GOP primary calendar.
Before a 1,000-person crowd at the Iowa Faith and Freedom Coalition’s spring kickoff, a bevy of midtier candidates seeking to break out of the pack mingled with attendees, many of whom were influential activists across the state. They called for new restrictions on abortion rights and gender-affirming care, and for expanding school choice programs and shutting down the Department of Education.
The Supreme Court on Friday allowed the most commonly used abortion pill in the U.S. to remain widely available.
The court blocked in full a decision by Texas-based U.S. District Judge Matthew Kacsmaryk on April 7 that had invalidated the Food and Drug Administration’s longtime approval of mifepristone and handed a sweeping victory to abortion opponents.
Two of the nine justices — conservatives Clarence Thomas and Samuel Alito — said they would have let part of Kacsmaryk’s ruling go into effect.
In mid-January 2021, two men hired by former President Donald Trump’s legal team discussed over text message what to do with data obtained from a breached voting machine in a rural county in Georgia, including whether to use it as part of an attempt to decertify the state’s pending Senate runoff results.
The texts, sent two weeks after operatives breached a voting machine in Coffee County, Georgia, reveal for the first time that Trump allies considered using voting data not only to overturn the results of the 2020 presidential election, but also in an effort to keep a Republican hold on the US Senate.
There was never a chance in heaven or hell that Florida Governor Ron DeSantis, who looks like a 1980s shop teacher who gets off on breaking the birdhouses the kids make to prove “you can’t build shit, you little pussy,” was going to win the Republican nomination for president. I mean, put aside that Donald Trump owns the GOP no matter how much a few feckless fucks fail to pry it away from his tiny hands. DeSantis has all the personality of an angry Starbucks manager and all the charm of the least charming dung beetle. If you bottled DeSantis’s vibe as a scent, it would be “old scrotum and expired Axe body spray.” I mean, in Vegas terms, DeSantis is pissed off that the drunks at the buffet at the Tropicana aren’t enjoying his terrible magic show while Trump is Siegfried and Roy rolled into one sparkly orange suit.
Ari Melber aired a recording of Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX) telling Fox host Maria Bartiromo that evidence would be required to prove claims about voter fraud in a court of law.
Bartiromo was one of the several Fox hosts and guests who falsely claimed or suggested the 2020 presidential election was rigged against then-President Donald Trump, who insists to this day it was stolen from him. On Tuesday, Fox Corp. settled a $787.5 million lawsuit with Dominion Votings Systems after the latter sued for defamation when Fox personalities cited Dominion while making their bogus election allegations.
Mike Lindell has to pay $5 million for losing his “Prove Mike Wrong” 2020 election challenge, an arbitration panel has ruled.
In a decision dated Wednesday, the panel found software developer Robert Zeidman had won Lindell’s 2021 contest challenging experts to prove that data he had was not from the 2020 election, and directed the MyPillow founder to pay him the reward money he’d promised in the next 30 days.
Lindell told NBC News on Thursday that the ruling was “a horrible, wrong decision.”
President Joe Biden is preparing to make his intention to seek a second term official next week, with advisers planning to launch his re-election campaign as soon as Tuesday, three sources familiar with the plans said.
Even as advisers have said for months that no formal timetable had been settled on to launch Biden’s 2024 campaign, they have long eyed April 25, the anniversary of Biden’s 2020 campaign announcement, as an informal target. And as he did four years ago, Biden would launch his candidacy with a campaign video message, the sources said.
The Washington Post first reported that Biden is preparing to announce his re-election bid next week.
