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.
President Joe Biden lambasted Republicans’ emerging trade-off plans to raise the nation’s debt limit only in exchange for spending cuts and other policy concessions on Wednesday, declaring that GOP lawmakers are threatening a historic default on U.S. obligations “unless I agree to all these wacko notions they have.”
His remarks in a union hall speech came as House Speaker Kevin McCarthy, who had for months struggled to unite Republicans around a unified budget proposal, released a sweeping spending-restraint plan to offer to the White House along with lifting the debt limit by $1.5 trillion.
An IRS special agent said to be involved in the federal investigation into Hunter Biden’s taxes is seeking whistleblower protections to provide sensitive disclosures about the probe to Congress.
Mark D. Lytle, a lawyer for the unnamed IRS employee, wrote in a letter Wednesday to a bipartisan group of lawmakers that he represents a “career IRS Criminal Supervisory Special Agent who has been overseeing the ongoing and sensitive investigation of a high profile, controversial subject since early 2020” and would like to make protected whistleblower disclosures to Congress.
A House committee formally silenced Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, R-Ga., on Wednesday after she lobbed accusations at the homeland security secretary during his congressional testimony.
Democrats on the GOP-led Homeland Security Committee twice sought to strike remarks made by Greene at the hearing, one in which she accused a Democratic member of having an extramarital affair, but the only bipartisan agreement came when she called Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas “a liar.”
The first remark that sparked backlash came when it was Greene’s turn to question Mayorkas. She followed Rep. Eric Swalwell, D-Calif., who had displayed a poster that depicted a defund-the-FBI campaign with Greene’s face on it.
The Supreme Court on Wednesday delayed making a decision that could prevent patients from obtaining the abortion pill mifepristone in the mail by extending a temporary block on a lower court ruling.
In a brief order issued by Justice Samuel Alito, the court said the hold, first announced last week, would be extended two more days, until just before midnight Friday. The announcement says nothing about how the court will ultimately resolve the case, although the delay could indicate there is division among the nine justices.
The decision means that, at least for now, women can still obtain mifepristone by mail as the legal battle continues.
Sen. John Fetterman (D-Penn.) returned to work this week after his treatment for depression and quickly engaged in one of his favorite diversions: trolling his critics on the right.
Last month, some conservatives on social media claimed Fetterman had been replaced by a body double while undergoing inpatient treatment at Walter Reed hospital.
Fetterman, who was known for his sharp social media responses during last year’s Senate campaign, posted a video rebutting the “fringy fringies” who claim he has a body double… with himself playing the role of his own supposed double.
Key Senate Democrats are considering a hearing about Supreme Court ethics in the wake of revelations that Justice Clarence Thomas received previously undisclosed gifts and luxury travel from billionaire Republican donor Harlan Crow.
Senate Majority Whip Dick Durbin, D-Ill., the chair of the Judiciary Committee, said the “20 years of gift travel on yachts and chartered planes was outrageous.” He added that the failure to disclose Crow’s real estate deals and his reported purchase of Thomas’ mother’s home was “beyond anything I could imagine at the Supreme Court level.”
Senate Republicans blocked a request Tuesday by Democrats to temporarily replace Sen. Dianne Feinstein on the Judiciary Committee while the 89-year-old Californian recovers from illness.
Majority Leader Chuck Schumer asked for unanimous consent to swap out Feinstein for Sen. Ben Cardin, D-Md., saying that Feinstein “made her wish clear” to be removed “until she returns to the Senate.”
That was met with opposition from Sen. Lindsey Graham, the top Republican on the Judiciary Committee, effectively dooming the request. “This is about a handful of judges that you can’t get the votes for,” Graham, R-S.C. said, adding that he doesn’t believe those judges that lack GOP support should be confirmed.
Fox News and Dominion Voting Systems reached a $787.5 million settlement agreement Tuesday afternoon, the parties announced, narrowly heading off a trial shortly after the jury was sworn in.
“Fox has admitted to telling lies,” John Poulos, Dominion’s CEO, said at a news conference after the trial ended.
Justin Nelson, lead attorney for Dominion, told NBC News he hopes the settlement will restore faith in elections.
“This alone can’t do it, right? But this shows that there is accountability, that we showed that if you are caught lying, you will be held responsible,” he said.
If Democrats believed Republicans would help them easily solve their Dianne Feinstein dilemma, they’re in for some disappointment.
A pair of Republicans who serve on the powerful Senate Judiciary Committee made clear they won’t vote to replace the 89-year-old California Democrat on the panel as she has requested due to health issues that have kept her away from Washington for nearly two months.
“I will not go along with Chuck Schumer’s plan to replace Senator Feinstein on the Judiciary Committee and pack the court with activist judges. Joe Biden wants the Senate to rubber stamp his unqualified and controversial judges to radically transform America,” Sen. Marsha Blackburn (R-Tenn.) tweeted on Monday.
Fresh off reports that Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas accepted luxury travel and accommodations from billionaire GOP megadonor Harlan Crow without any disclosure, a new report reveals Thomas also sold Crow his family home without disclosing it — which experts say is a much more clear-cut violation of federal ethics laws.
ProPublica reporter Josh Kaplan, who broke the story, delved into more detail on CNN’s “The Lead” Thursday.
“Explain the significance of what you found here, this 2014 real estate transaction between Justice Thomas and Mr. Crow,” said anchor Jake Tapper.
“Yes, so we found that Harlan Crow bought property from Justice Thomas in a undisclosed real estate deal,” said Kaplan. “Crow paid roughly $133,000 to Thomas and his relatives for three properties, one of which was the house, that old house that Thomas’ mom was living in. And the other two were vacant lots down the street. And Thomas did not disclose this, which experts told us appears to be a clear violation of government ethics law.”
Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA) defended Jake Teixeira, 21, on Thursday, just hours after he was arrested for allegedly leaking highly sensitive military documents online.
Teixeira, a Massachusetts Air National Guardsman serving since 2019, held the highest-level security clearance possible for top-secret information military information and he allegedly shared highly sensitive national defense documents with an online Discord gaming group called “Thug Shaker Central.” The New York Times reported that the group of “about 20 to 30 people, mostly young men and teenagers, came together over a shared love of guns, racist online memes and video games.”
The leaks caused shock waves of anger and frustration around the globe as key U.S. allies panicked over sensitive information regarding the war in Ukraine, NATO preparedness, and other topics leaked online.
The Georgia Republican, however, brushed all that aside after Teixeira’s arrest and vehemently defended him.
“Jake Teixeira is white, male, christian, and antiwar,” Greene wrote on Twitter
WASHINGTON — Jack Teixeira, a 21-year-old member of the Massachusetts Air National Guard was arrested Thursday, a U.S. law enforcement official confirmed to NBC News, in connection to the investigation of classified documents that were leaked on the internet.
U.S. officials had been searching for the source of the leak, which exposed potentially hundreds of pages of intelligence about Russian efforts in Ukraine and spying on U.S. allies.
Pentagon Press Secretary Air Force Brig. Gen Pat Ryder declined to confirm the leaker’s identity at the press briefing on Thursday and referred reporters to the Department of Justice, which is conducting a criminal investigation because it’s a “law enforcement matter” and ongoing investigation, he said.
Memphis-area officials voted Wednesday to reinstate Justin J. Pearson to the Tennessee Legislature after Republicans expelled him last week for protesting gun violence on the chamber floor.
The seven members of the Shelby County Board of Commissioners present for the vote unanimously approved Pearson’s reinstatement during a special meeting in Memphis. Board members suspended the rules to allow for an immediate vote.
Following the vote, Pearson addressed the commission with an enthusiastic speech.
“Nashville thought they could silence democracy,” he said to cheers from supporters who had filled the chamber. “But they didn’t know the Shelby County Commission … and its fearless leaders.”
He added that he had a “message for all those people in Nashville who voted to expel us”: “You can’t expel hope, you can’t expel justice.”
Federal prosecutors probing the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol have in recent weeks sought a wide range of documents related to fundraising after the 2020 election, looking to determine if Trump or his advisers scammed donors by using false claims about voter fraud to raise money, eight people familiar with the new inquiries said.
Federal investigators are asking witnesses whether former President Donald J. Trump showed off to aides and visitors a map he took with him when he left office that contains sensitive intelligence information, four people with knowledge of the matter said.
The map has been just one focus of the broad Justice Department investigation into Mr. Trump’s handling of classified documents after he departed the White House.
The nature of the map and the information it contained is not clear. But investigators have questioned a number of witnesses about it, according to the people with knowledge of the matter, as the special counsel overseeing the Justice Department’s Trump-focused inquiries, Jack Smith, examines the former president’s handling of classified material after leaving office and weighs charges that could include obstruction of justice.
WASHINGTON — Former Trump adviser Stephen Miller arrived Tuesday at the U.S. District Court in Washington, D.C., and was seen entering the area where the grand jury tied to special counsel Jack Smith’s Jan. 6 investigation meets.
Neither Miller nor his attorney responded when asked what the former aide was doing there.
The grand jury is investigating the role former President Donald Trump played in the Jan. 6 riot and efforts to overturn the 2020 election results. Miller served as a senior adviser to the president and director of speechwriting at the time of the riot.
CNN reports that investigators are looking through the footage, which shows the perpetrator shooting his AR-15 style weapon inside the bank. Officials told the network that the attack lasted approximately a minute before the gunman stopped shooting for about a minute and a half, and the police arrived shortly after.
The Manhattan district attorney on Tuesday sued Representative Jim Jordan of Ohio in an extraordinary step intended to keep congressional Republicans from interfering in the office’s criminal case against former President Donald J. Trump.
The 50-page suit, filed in federal court in the Southern District of New York, accuses Mr. Jordan of a “brazen and unconstitutional attack” on the prosecution of Mr. Trump and a “transparent campaign to intimidate and attack” the district attorney, Alvin L. Bragg. Mr. Bragg last week unveiled 34 felony charges against Mr. Trump that stem from the former president’s attempts to cover up a potential sex scandal during and after the 2016 presidential campaign.
I’m getting the feeling that one of these wrap-ups is going to turn into another semi-regular weekly survey around the shebeen. One of our regulars is a place called The Tennessee Holler, a progressive news site in that benighted state. Naturally, the Holler has been following closely the current dust-up in the Tennessee legislature over gun reform laws. Accordingly, this happened.
President Joe Biden on Monday signed into law a Republican-backed resolution that immediately terminates the coronavirus national emergency first declared in March 2020.
The measure ends the national emergency a month earlier than the Biden administration had planned. A separate public health emergency tied to Covid will remain until May 11.
Biden had signaled his opposition to ending the national emergency but said he wouldn’t veto the legislation.
A gunman opened fire at a bank in downtownLouisville on Monday, killing at least five people — including a close friend of Kentucky Gov. Andy Beshear — and injuring nine others, authorities said.
The gunman was identified as Connor Sturgeon, 25, who police said was an employee of Old National Bank on East Main Street, where the gunfire erupted at 8:38 a.m.
Parts of the attack were livestreamed, police said.
U.S. District Judge Matthew Kacsmaryk’s decision to put the Food and Drug Administration’s approval of the abortion drug mifepristone on hold has thrown future access to medication abortion into question nationwide and laid the foundation for a high-stakes Supreme Court battle.
The ruling, issued Friday, is set to go into effect at the end of this week unless a higher court intervenes. The Justice Department asked an appeals court to block it Monday.
In interviews, several legal and medical experts said Kacsmaryk’s decision was unprecedented and clearly ideological. His language and reasoning, they said, closely mirrored arguments and concepts put forward by the anti-abortion movement — at the expense of scientific consensus in some instances.
The Nashville Metropolitan Council voted Monday to return Justin Jones to the state Legislature after he was removed last week by Republicans for protesting gun violence on the House floor.
The 36 council members at Monday’s meeting unanimously supported reinstating Jones. The council had suspended its rules to allow an immediate vote instead of holding a monthlong nomination period.
Less than an hour later, Jones was sworn in on the steps of the State Capitol. He raised his fist as he entered the House chamber while supporters chanted, “Welcome home!”
Former Tennessee state Rep. Justin Pearson said Sunday he expects to be quickly reappointed after what he called his “unprecedented” expulsion for participating in a raucous, unrecognized gun violence protest on the Legislature floor.
“I do hope to continue to serve District 86 in the reappointment,” Pearson, a Memphis Democrat, told ABC “This Week” co-anchor Jonathan Karl. “If there is a special election, I would definitely run in that special election because our voters have been disenfranchised.”
Pearson was ousted from the Tennessee House of Representatives on Thursday along with Democratic Rep. Justin Jones of Nashville. It was the first such partisan expulsion in the state’s modern history.
Congressional Democrats quickly condemned the decision Friday by U.S. District Judge Matthew Kacsmaryk, who was appointed by former President Donald Trump, to suspend the Food and Drug Administration’s longtime approval of the key abortion pill mifepristone, while top Republicans in Congress have yet to weigh in.
Kacsmaryk has given the government a week to appeal his decision, and President Joe Biden said his administration will file an appeal. If the ruling does eventually go into effect, it would curtail access to the standard regimen for medication abortion nationwide.
Trump lawyer James Trusty said Sunday that there are no more classified documents at former President Donald Trump’s Mar-a-Lago residence in Florida.
In an interview on “Meet the Press,” Trusty was asked by NBC News’ Chuck Todd whether he can be certain there are no classified documents or copies of documents at Mar-a-Lago following reportsthat Trump’s legal team turned over additional materials, as well as a laptop, to investigators.
“Yeah, sure,” Trusty responded. “And I can tell you the leak about what happened with this additional document or several documents that were found in the thumb drive is absurd.”
William Barr, Donald Trump’s former attorney general, said he believes Trump’s legal troubles are likely to bolster him during the Republican primaries but “greatly weaken” him during the 2024 general election, which Barr said the former president cannot win.
“He’s already, I think, a weak candidate that would lose, but I think this sort of assures it,” Barr, who has previously said he won’t support Trump’s reelection, told ABC News “This Week” on Sunday.
Barr said it’s not because of Trump’s arrest last week in New York on charges related to hush money payments during his 2016 campaign. The former attorney general called that case “unjustified” and “an abuse of prosecutorial power,” echoing complaints by Trump allies and even some critics.
Read the rest of the story at HuffPost
Progressive representatives on Thursday called for the impeachment of Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas shortly after a ProPublica report detailed how he took lavish trips funded by a Republican billionaire donor that he did not disclose.
“This degree of corruption is shocking — almost cartoonish,” Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, D-N.Y., wrote on Twitter. “Thomas must be impeached.”
Progressive ally Rep. Rashida Tlaib, D-Mich., reiterated the call for impeachment, adding that the Supreme Court needs a binding code of ethics. Rep. Ilhan Omar, D-Minn., joined in on Twitter: “I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: Clarence Thomas needs to be impeached.”
Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg on Thursday accused House Republicans of trying to “undermine” his office’s criminal case against former President Donald Trump through an “unprecedented campaign of harassment and intimidation.”
“Repeated efforts to weaken state and local law enforcement actions are an abuse of power and will not deter us from our duty to uphold the law,” Bragg tweeted in response a subpoena House Judiciary Committee Chairman Jim Jordan, R-Ohio, issued to a former prosecutor involved in the investigation.
The White House released a report Thursday about the decisions made regarding the 2021 U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan, including the bombing at the Kabul airport that killed 13 U.S. service members.
The 12-page report by the National Security Council summarizes the administration’s assessment of the withdrawal and largely blames former President Donald Trump’s administration for the chaos that unfolded as U.S. troops were leaving and as Americans and Afghans evacuated from the country. The Taliban took over the governmentand have remained in power.
Republican legislators in Tennessee voted Thursday to expel two Black Democrats from the state House over their protests on the chamber floor against gun violence last week, while a vote to expel a third, white Democratic representative fell short.
It’s the first time in state history that Tennessee House members have been expelled for alleged chamber rules violations.
In the first vote, Republicans expelled Rep. Justin Jones. The second vote, to kick out Rep. Gloria Johnson, failed. Republicans then voted to remove Rep. Justin Pearson.
Jones and Pearson are Black. Johnson is white.
A Delaware judge said he’s inclined to force Fox Corp. executives Rupert Murdoch and Lachlan Murdoch to testify live in the defamation suit against Fox News and Fox Corp.
Delaware Superior Court Judge Eric Davis said Wednesday at a public hearing that lawyers for Dominion Voting Systems would need to issue trial subpoenas to force their testimony.
“I would not quash it, and I would compel them to come,” he said. “It would be my discretion that they come.”
Democrat Robert F. Kennedy Jr., an anti-vaccine activist and scion of one of the country’s most famous political families, is running for president.
Kennedy filed a statement of candidacy Wednesday with the Federal Election Commission.
The 69-year-old’s campaign to challenge incumbent President Joe Biden for the Democratic nomination is a long shot. Self-help author Marianne Williamson is also running in the Democratic race.
Former Vice President Mike Pence will not appeal a federal judge’s order that he testify in the special counsel’s probe of former President Donald Trump’s attempt to overturn the 2020 election, his adviser announced Wednesday.
The decision not to fight the order could provide special counsel Jack Smith with remarkable access to one of the key people with critical insight into Trump’s thinking and efforts to cling to power.
Last week, Judge James Boasberg, the chief judge of U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia, largely dismissed efforts mounted by Pence and Trump to limit his testimony and avoid handing over documents.
Read the rest of the story at NBC News
It finally happened: Former president Donald Trump was charged this afternoon with 34 counts of falsifying business records by Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg. In a spectacle that played out almost entirely behind closed doors, but was still carried on television news like Trump was flying to the moon to be arraigned by Xenomorphs, Trump surrendered voluntarily at a downtown Manhattan courthouse, was arrested and booked, pleaded not guilty, and then went back to Mar-a-Lago on his own recognizance.
The counts cover 34 separate instances of a false business entry or record. Some refer to false entries into business ledgers. Others refer to false invoices or checks. All 34 counts against Trump are felony charges (class E) instead of misdemeanors. To make that case, Bragg must convince a jury that all of the criminal record-keeping was done in order to cover up some larger crime.
Just hours after he left his fingerprints in a Manhattan courthouse and on American history, former President Donald Trump returned to his home turf at the Mar-a-Lago club here and proclaimed that he is being unjustly persecuted by prosecution.
“They can’t beat us at the ballot box, so they try to beat us through the law,” Trump, the first former president ever charged with a crime, said Tuesday night to a room of supporters that included luminaries of his movement, such as defeated Arizona GOP gubernatorial nominee Kari Lake, voter fraud evangelist Mike Lindell and Reps. Marjorie Taylor Greene, R-Ga., Matt Gaetz, R-Fla., and Ronny Jackson, R-Texas.
Brandon Johnson will be the next mayor of Chicago, NBC News projected Tuesday, marking a stunning turn for a staunch progressive and former teacher whose campaign leaned into messages of racial and economic disparities and who overcame blowback over past comments about decreasing police funding.
Johnson defeated the well-financed, tough-on-crime moderate Paul Vallas, a former CEO of the Chicago Public Schools who promised to immediately bulk up the Chicago police ranks to curb a crisis of gun violence.
Vallas told his supporters Tuesday night that he called Johnson and “told him I absolutely expect him to be the next mayor.”
Janet Protasiewicz, a judge on the Milwaukee County Circuit Court, has won a seat on the Wisconsin Supreme Court, NBC News projects, giving liberals their first majority on the state’s highest court in 15 years.
Protasiewicz defeated conservative Dan Kelly, a former state Supreme Court justice, on Tuesday in what became the most expensive state Supreme Court race in U.S. history and one of the most closely watched elections of 2023.
Protasiewicz’s victory will allow the court’s new liberal majority to determine the future of several pivotal issues the bench is likely to decide in the coming years, including abortion rights, the state’s gerrymandered legislative maps and election administration — including, possibly, the outcome of the 2024 presidential race in the battleground state.
Donald Trump pleaded not guilty Tuesday to 34 felony counts of falsifying business records related to his alleged role in hush money payments toward the end of his 2016 presidential campaign — the first time a former president has had to plead to criminal charges.
The indictment was unsealed in a proceeding before Judge Juan Merchan in criminal court in Manhattan. Trump was flanked by his lawyers inside the courtroom as prosecutors outlined their case, alleging he made covert and illegal payments to affect the 2016 election. He faces a maximum of four years in prison if convicted.
Asked for his plea, Trump answered, “Not guilty.”
After a full night and morning digesting The Latest News, I have come to one important conclusion: That any and all political noise out of Washington concerning the events in New York should be treated as completely irrelevant to the criminal charges in New York. And the noise is already at decibels only dogs can hear. From CNN:
House Speaker Kevin McCarthy tweeted that “The American people will not tolerate this injustice,” as he criticized Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg. “The House of Representatives will hold Alvin Bragg and his unprecedented abuse of power to account,” he said. The number two House Republican – Majority Leader Steve Scalise – called it “outrageous.” In a tweet, Scalise called the indictment “one of the clearest examples of extremist Democrats weaponizing government to attack their political opponents.” Rep. Elise Stefanik, the House GOP conference chair, released a statement saying the indictment was “a political witch hunt” and a “dark day for America.”
Wisconsinites are set to elect a new justice to the state’s Supreme Court on Tuesday.
State Supreme Court races are often sleepy affairs, not least in Wisconsin, where they occur in the springtime ― months away from elections with greater turnout.
But this particular race has extraordinarily high stakes, eliciting an accordingly larger share of attention and resources.
The contest, prompted by the impending retirement of conservative Justice Patience Roggensack, will determine whether conservatives continue to hold a 4-3 majority on Wisconsin’s highest court, or if liberals hold the balance of power on the bench.
The shooter in last week’s deadly attack at a private Christian school in Nashville planned it for months, police said Monday.
Audrey Hale outlined plans “to commit mass murder at The Covenant School” in journals police found in the shooter’s car and bedroom after the March 27 attack that killed six people, the Metropolitan Nashville Police Department said.
Police previously said the shooter, a former student at the school, had carefully planned the attack with detailed maps and surveillance.
Judge Juan Merchan will allow five pool still photographers to snap for several minutes before the arraignment formally starts, according to a decision issued Monday night.
No video cameras will be allowed, though Judge Merchan conceded, “That this indictment involves a matter of monumental significance cannot possibly be disputed. Never in the history of the United States has a sitting or past President been indicted on criminal charges.”
Donald Trump is set to appear in criminal court in New York City on Tuesday to be arraigned on dozens of charges related to hush money payments — the first time in American history a former president will face criminal charges.
Trump is expected to appear at the courthouse at 100 Centre St. in lower Manhattan around noon ET for fingerprinting and processing and to go before Judge Juan Merchan to enter a plea of not guilty around 2 p.m.
Security was high in the courthouse and nearby areas as the police department, court officers and the Secret Service braced for protests amid the unprecedented arraignment of a former president. Trump called for “protests” in the event of his arrest last month, and he later ratcheted up his rhetoric, warning of “potential death and destruction” if he was charged criminally.
Former President Donald Trump will deliver remarks Tuesday night in Florida after his scheduled arraignment in New York on charges related to hush money payments, his campaign announced Sunday.
Trump will hold the event at his Mar-a-Lago club after returning from Manhattan, where he is expected to voluntarily turn himself in. He is expected to be joined in Florida by supporters as he tries to project an image of strength and defiance and turn the charges into a political asset to boost his 2024 presidential campaign.
Trump is facing multiple charges of falsifying business records, including at least one felony offense, in the indictment handed up by a Manhattan grand jury last week, two people familiar with the matter have told The Associated Press. They spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss information that is not yet public because the indictment remains under seal.
The Justice Department has gathered new evidence in its investigation into former President Donald Trump’s removal of classified documents from the White House that may point to possible obstruction, The Washington Post reported Sunday.
Sources familiar with the matter told the newspaper investigators are homing in on whether Trump attempted to impede the government’s efforts to recover sensitive documents from his Mar-a-Lago compound in Florida, or if he directed anyone to do so on his behalf.
The Post reported federal investigators have gathered evidence that Trump might have sifted through boxes of documents after he received a subpoena to return them, possibly to keep some of the files despite the order.
Even for a city accustomed to celebrity appearances, the two-day visit during which Donald J. Trump is expected be arraigned in Manhattan is likely to be a striking spectacle: There will be protests and celebrations, an all-hands-on-deck police presence and a crush of media attention on the moment in which the first American president is charged with a crime.
Mr. Trump is expected to arrive in New York on Monday from his estate in Florida and head to his erstwhile home in Trump Tower, where he began his pursuit of the presidency in 2015 by descending a golden escalator. The exact timing of the former president’s arrival was unclear, though he was expected to stay the night there before heading to a courthouse in Lower Manhattan on Tuesday.
Sen. John Fetterman is speaking publicly for the first time since he entered the hospital in February with severe depression, saying in an interview on “CBS Sunday Morning” that he looks forward to returning to work later this month.
Fetterman, D-Pa., said he also looks forward to “being the kind of dad and the kind of husband and the kind of senator that Pennsylvania deserves. Truly, that’s what my aspiration is.”
Elected in November in one of 2022’s most significant midterm elections, Fetterman checked himself into Walter Reed Military Medical Center for treatment for depression on Feb. 15, his staff has said.
It’s pretty fucking simple: If you won’t do anything at all about the number one cause of deaths in children and teenagers in this stupid country, you don’t get to say you care about children. It really is that easy. No matter what policies you support, good or shitty, you are a fucking fraud if you won’t step up on the number of and easy access to firearms, especially high-powered weapons with large magazines. If your house is on fire but you’re ignoring that because you want to spackle a hole in the wall, then your minor repair is worthless. That wall’s gonna burn, too.
After another shooting at another school, this time in Nashville, with 3 kids and 3 adults murdered by a shooter who had bought their guns legally, Republicans practically lined up to tell parents everywhere that they don’t fucking care if your children die. Senator John Cornyn from Texas, who was a Republican co-sponsor of the mild gun legislation that was signed into law in 2022, said, “I would say we’ve gone about as far as we can go” on any additional gun control laws. Profiles in chickenshit.
Former President Donald Trump reacted angrily on Thursday to news that he had been indicted by a Manhattan grand jury on unknown charges linked to a hush money payment made to an adult film actor. The 2024 candidate is now the first U.S. president in history to be criminally charged.
“These Thugs and Radical Left Monsters have just INDICATED the 45th President of the United States of America,” Trump wrote on his Truth Social platform, seemingly misspelling “indicted.”
He went on: “THIS IS AN ATTACK ON OUR COUNTRY THE LIKES OF WHICH HAS NEVER BEEN SEEN BEFORE. IT IS LIKEWISE A CONTINUING ATTACK ON OUR ONCE FREE AND FAIR ELECTIONS. THE USA IS NOW A THIRD WORLD NATION, A NATION IN SERIOUS DECLINE. SO SAD!”
A federal judge in Texas has struck down Affordable Care Act provisions that require health insurers to provide some free preventive care services.
The ruling could jeopardize coverage nationwide for people relying on the health care law for preventive services, such as screenings for cancer, as well as HIV drugs.
In the decision, U.S. District Judge Reed O’Connor mentioned his previous ruling on the structure of the U.S. Preventive Services Task Force, which was created under Obamacare and helps determine preventive services coverage, saying it violates the appointments clause of the Constitution and therefore its related preventive care mandates are unlawful.
Donald Trump’s rivals for the Republican presidential nomination jumped to his defense Thursday after he was indicted by a grand jury in Manhattan, a sign of the former president’s continued power within the party.
Many of his declared or potential rivals were quick to assert that the potential prosecution was merely about politics rather than the possibility that Trump may have committed a crime.
Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis called it “un-American” and a “weaponization of the legal system to advance a political agenda.”
A grand jury in New York City voted Thursday to indict Donald Trump — the first time a former U.S. president has faced criminal charges.
The historic indictment comes in a case centered on $130,000 in payments to adult film star Stormy Daniels during the closing days of the 2016 presidential campaign. Daniels claimed she slept with the married Trump in 2006, a claim he has denied. Trump had classified his reimbursement of the payout as a legal expense.
A spokesperson for the Manhattan DA’s office confirmed the indictment in a statement Thursday night.
Former President Donald Trump boasted he “got along” with Vladimir Putinbefore Sean Hannity said the Russian president is “evil.”
Trump declined to join the Fox News host in that assessment.
Wednesday’s Hannity aired the third and final installment of the host’s interview with the former president at Mar-a-Lago. In one segment, Hannity rattled off the names of people so Trump could give quick reactions.
Pope Francis was admitted to a Rome hospital after complaining of breathing difficulties in recent days, the Vatican said Wednesday after canceling his meetings for the next two days.
Vatican spokesman Matteo Bruni said medical checks had been carried out on the pontiff at the Gemelli hospital, where Francis underwent surgery in 2021.
“In recent days Pope Francis has complained of some breathing difficulties,” Bruni said in a statement, adding that the tests had picked up a respiratory infection.
A heated debate erupted on Capitol Hill when Democratic Rep. Jamaal Bowman, a former middle school principal, yelled at his GOP colleagues Wednesday and repeatedly called them “cowards” for not supporting stricter gun measures in the wake of the Nashville school shooting.
The exchange between Bowman, D-N.Y., and Rep. Thomas Massie, R-Ky., occurred just outside the House chamber and was widely circulated on social media after several journalists posted video of it.
Bowman, a former principal at Cornerstone Academy for Social Action in the Bronx, can be heard yelling: “They’re all cowards! They won’t do anything to save the lives of our children at all!”
Audrey Hale struggled to cope with the death of a close friend in the months before the rampage that killed six people at a private Christian school, those who knew the school shooter said Wednesday.
The 28-year-old, who attacked The Covenant School on Monday, was devastated by the death in August of Sydney Shere Sims in a traffic accident, former classmate Samira Hardcastle said.
Hale and Sims attended Isaiah T. Creswell Middle School of the Arts and the Nashville School of the Arts.
Lawyers for Fox News were met with skepticism Tuesday when they argued that Fox Corp. Chairman Rupert Murdoch should be excused from testifying in court as part of Dominion Voting Systems’ $1.6 billion defamation lawsuit against the company.
At a hearing in Delaware Superior Court, Judge Eric Davis said he’d received a letter from Fox saying it would be an “inconvenience” for Murdoch, 92, to provide testimony in the courtroom.
Murdoch, the judge said, is “hardly infirm.” The judge said that after receiving the letter he was told that Murdoch had just gotten engaged and was discussing plans to travel more in the coming years — an apparent reference to an interview the recently divorced media mogul gave to his New York Post last week, where he announced his engagement to Ann Lesley Smith, 66. The article said the couple planned to spend their time between California, the United Kingdom, Montana and New York.
After another mass shooting took the lives of six people, including three 9-year-old children, at a Nashville, Tennessee, school, Senate Chaplain Barry Black used his opening prayer to urge lawmakers to take action.
“Lord, when babies die at a church school, it is time for us to move beyond thoughts and prayers,” Black said as the Senate opened for business on Tuesday. “Remind our lawmakers of the words of the British statesman Edmund Burke: ‘All that is necessary for evil to triumph is for good people to do nothing.’ Lord, deliver our senators from the paralysis of analysis that waits for the miraculous.”
Rep. Tim Burchett (R-Tenn.) managed to shock even the most jaded social media users on Monday with his candid remark on school shootings.
“We’re not going to fix it,” he told reporters just hours after a shooter wielding two “assault-style” rifles and a pistol killed three students and three adults at a private Christian school in Nashville.
Burchett, who voted against a bill expanding background checks on gun sales in 2021, called Monday’s shooting “a horrible, horrible situation,” but insisted nothing could be done to prevent future tragedies because, “criminals are gonna be criminals.”
A federal judge has ordered former Vice President Mike Pence to comply with a subpoena in the investigation into former President Donald Trump’s efforts to overturn the 2020 election results, according to a source familiar with the decision.
The ruling from Judge James Boasberg, the chief judge of U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia, requires Pence to testify before the grand jury tied to the probe led by special counsel Jack Smith.
The ruling, which was issued Monday, remains under seal because it involves grand jury matters. The order was a partial victory for Pence and his argument that he was shielded from having to testify about Jan. 6 because of his constitutional role as part of the legislative branch.
Read the rest of the story at NBC News
President Joe Biden once again called on Congress to pass a bill that would ban assault-style weapons in the wake of a shooting at a Nashville grade school that left three children and three adults dead on Monday.
“We have to do more to stop gun violence. It’s ripping our communities apart,” the president said from the White House. “Ripping at the very soul of the nation. And we have to do more to protect our schools so they aren’t turned into prisons.”
“I call on Congress, again, to pass my assault weapons ban,” he continued.
House Speaker Kevin McCarthy, R-Calif., said Sunday that lawmakers “will be moving forward” with legislation to address national security concerns surrounding TikTok after the social media giant’s CEO faced hours of hostile questioning before a congressional panel last week.
“It’s very concerning that the CEO of TikTok can’t be honest and admit what we already know to be true — China has access to TikTok user data,” McCarthy tweeted.
“The House will be moving forward with legislation to protect Americans from the technological tentacles of the Chinese Communist Party,” he added.
Former President Donald Trump returned to Fox News on Monday night and aired a host of grievances about investigations he’s facing, mail-in voting and Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis in his first interviewwith the network since legal filings showed network leaders privately condemning him.
There was no hint of the acrimony detailed in those communications, made public as part of Dominion Voting Systems’ $1.6 billion defamation lawsuit against the network. Trump, the Republican presidential front-runner, spoke for nearly an hour with prime-time host Sean Hannity, long one of his most outspoken Fox News backers.
A search of the Nashville school shooting suspect’s residence Monday turned up more firepower, police said in an evening statement.
Officers armed with a search warrant scoured the residence on Brightwood Avenue in Belmont-Hillsboro, a neighborhood of seven-figure, early 20th-century homes, blocking off residential streets and using explosive devices to gain entry.
Nashville police said investigators found two more firearms, described as shotguns, at the residence. At least one of those was described by police as a “sawed-off shotgun,” some of which can be illegal, depending on the exact measurements and whether the owner has filed federal paperwork.
During one of the 2012 presidential debates, when Barack Obama and Mitt Romney engaged in a spirited debate about tariffs, I remember being struck by the fact that they were debating an issue I had previously only read about in books. What was next, I wondered, hammer-and-tongs over the free coinage of silver?
It struck me then that an entire political industry had been built up to re-litigate issues I had thought long settled. In the judiciary, this entailed chipping away piecemeal at landmark decisions. The legislature then used the judiciary’s work to craft laws to render what remained of those landmark decisions impractical in real life.
Tens of thousands of Israelis poured into the streets of cities across the country Sunday night in a spontaneous outburst of anger after Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu abruptly fired his defense minister for challenging the Israeli leader’s judicial overhaul plan.
Protesters in Tel Aviv blocked a main highway and lit large bonfires, while police scuffled with protesters who gathered outside Netanyahu’s private home in Jerusalem.
The unrest deepened a monthslong crisis over Netanyahu’s plan to overhaul the judiciary, which has sparked mass protests, alarmed business leaders and former security chiefs and drawn concern from the United States and other close allies.
Rep. Ro Khanna, D-Calif., said Sunday that he won’t run for the seat of retiring Sen. Dianne Feinstein and will endorse Rep. Barbara Leeinstead.
Referring to Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., Khanna said in an interview on CNN’s “State of the Union,” “I have concluded that, despite a lot of enthusiasm from Bernie folks, the best place, the most exciting place, action place, fit place, for me to serve as a progressive is in the House of Representatives.”
Khanna said he will be a co-chair of Lee’s campaign, adding, “We need a strong anti-war senator, and she will play that role.”
Facing a potential indictment, Donald Trump took a defiant stance at a rally Saturday in Waco, disparaging the prosecutors investigating him and predicting his vindication as he rallied supporters in a city made famous by deadly resistance against law enforcement.
With a hand over his heart, Trump stood at attention when his rally opened with a song called “Justice for All” performed by a choir of people imprisoned for their roles in the Jan. 6 insurrection at the U.S. Capitol. Some footage from the insurrection was shown on big screens displayed at the rally site as the choir sang the national anthem and a recording played of Trump reciting the Pledge of Allegiance.
Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg has dismissed another letter by three House Republican chairmen seeking more information related to the hush money probe that could lead to an indictment of former President Donald Trump.
In a letter to Bragg on Saturday, House Judiciary Committee Chairman Jim Jordan, Oversight Committee Chairman James Comer and Administration Committee Chairman Bryan Steil argued that Congress should be privy to documents and testimony in the ongoing investigation into a $130,000 payment made during Trump’s 2016 campaign to adult film star Stormy Daniels.
A Manhattan grand jury reportedly won’t decide until at least next week whether to charge former President Donald Trump with crimes related to a hush money payment his associate made to a porn actress ahead of the 2016 election.
Despite Trump suggesting he would be arrested this week, the grand jury assembled by the Manhattan district attorney’s office indicated Thursday that they would not meet about the case for the remainder of the week, multiple outlets reported.
The potential charges are connected to a $130,000 hush money payment Trump’s former personal attorney, Michael Cohen, made in 2016 to Stormy Daniels, who says she had an affair with Trump a decade earlier. Cohen claims he made the payment at the behest of Trump, who reimbursed him. Cohen pleaded guilty in 2018 to charges related to the payment and has met with the grand jury several times.
Sens. Mark Warner, D-Va., and John Thune, R-S.D., who have authored legislation that could be used to ban TikTok, said Chew’s testimony did not address their concerns about the app’s ties to China.
“Under PRC law, all Chinese companies, including TikTok, whose parent company is based in Beijing, are ultimately required to do the bidding of Chinese intelligence services, should they be called upon to do so. Nothing we heard from Mr. Chew today assuaged those concerns,” they said in a joint statement.
“We are encouraged by the quick momentum and strong bipartisan support for our legislation and expect that it will only grow following today’s testimony,” the senators added. The White House has indicated it backs the bill, known as the RESTRICT Act.
The Manhattan District Attorney’s Office on Thursday slammed three House Republican chairmen and argued they overstepped in their request for DA Alvin Bragg’s testimony related to the hush money probe involving former President Donald Trump.
In a letter obtained by NBC News, Leslie Dubeck, general counsel for the Manhattan DA’s office, called their request “an unprecedent inquiry into a pending local prosecution” which “only came after Donald Trump created a false expectation that he would be arrested the next day and his lawyers reportedly urged you to intervene.”
The White House COVID-19 team will wind down as the country moves out of the emergency phase of the pandemic, multiple administration officials confirmed to ABC News.
The public health emergency is set to expire on May 11 after being in place since early 2020. The end will impact public health measures afforded by the pandemic, like expanded Medicaid enrollment, subsidized costs of COVID tests, and data gathering on cases and deaths across the country.
It will also mark a “new phase” of COVID response, an administration official said, which will be mirrored by a restructuring within the White House.
Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis′ administration is moving to forbid classroom instruction on sexual orientation and gender identity in all grades, expanding the controversial law critics call “Don’t Say Gay” as the Republican governor continues a focus on cultural issues ahead of his expected presidential run.
The proposal, which would not require legislative approval, is scheduled for a vote next month before the State Board of Education and has been put forth by state Education Department, both of which are led by appointees of the governor.
Special counsel Jack Smith’s office presented sufficient evidence to establish that former President Donald Trump committed a crime through his attorneys, a U.S. district judge ruled Friday night, a source briefed on the proceedings confirmed to NBC News on Wednesday.
U.S. District Judge Beryl Howell, based in Washington, D.C., wasn’t ruling on whether Trump was guilty of a crime but was making a decision about whether his attorney could be compelled to testify.
As a result of the decision, Howell ruled in favor of applying the “crime fraud” exception, which would let prosecutors sidestep protections afforded to Trump lawyer Evan Corcoran through attorney-client privilege. Howell also ruled in favor of ordering Corcoran to testify before the federal grand jury. The development was first reported by ABC News.
The Manhattan DA plans to convene the grand jury again Thursday, according to two sources familiar with the matter.
Manhattan DA Alvin Bragg was seen leaving his office shortly before 5 p.m. ET Wednesday.
Earlier in the day, his office told members of the grand jury that they should be on standby for tomorrow, two sources familiar with the matter said.
Communications between adult-film star Stormy Daniels and an attorney who is now representing former President Donald Trump have been turned over to the Manhattan district attorney’s office, Daniels’ lawyer told CNN.
The exchanges – said to date back to 2018, when Daniels was seeking representation – raise the possibility that the Trump attorney, Joe Tacopina, could be sidelined from his defense of the former president in a case pertaining to Trump’s alleged role in a scheme to pay hush money to Daniels.
Daniels’ communications with Tacopina and others at his firm include details relating to Daniels’ situation, according to her current attorney Clark Brewster, who believes the communications show a disclosure of confidential information from Daniels.
Several sources close to former President Donald Trump say he is currently huddling at his private club at Mar-a-Lago and meeting with his team, including his lawyers and senior advisers from his campaign operation, as he awaits a possible indictment in New York City.
Trump posted on social media over the weekend that he expected to be arrested this week by the Manhattan district attorney, who has been investigating whether Trump was involved in allegedly falsifying business records to hide campaign finance violations tied to payments made to adult film star Stormy Daniels.
The former president did not post any details about what the charges would be, but Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg has been probing whether Trump violated New York bookkeeping law by allegedly directing Michael Cohen to pay Daniels in exchange for her silence ahead of the 2016 election.
House Speaker Kevin McCarthy on Tuesday again ripped into the Manhattan district attorney when asked about the potential charges against Donald Trump at a news conference at the House GOP retreat in Orlando while seemingly growing frustrated with reporters after multiple questions about the former president who has continued to dominate the news cycle.
McCarthy was asked directly if had concerns specifically about Trump’s alleged conduct regarding a hush money payment to Stormy Daniels and quickly pivoted to talking about Hillary Clinton and did not answer the question — before instead targeting the Manhattan DA.
Prosecutors in the special counsel’s office have presented compelling preliminary evidence that former President Donald Trump knowingly and deliberately misled his own attorneys about his retention of classified materials after leaving office, a former top federal judge wrote Friday in a sealed filing, according to sources who described its contents to ABC News.
U.S. Judge Beryl Howell, who on Friday stepped down as the D.C. district court’s chief judge, wrote last week that prosecutors in special counsel Jack Smith’s office had made a “prima facie showing that the former president had committed criminal violations,” according to the sources, and that attorney-client privileges invoked by two of his lawyers could therefore be pierced.
Trump has repeatedly denied any wrongdoing in his handling of classified documents.
A subcommittee to investigate the committee that investigated the January 6th riots is the most goddamn useless exercise in democratic government since the Buchanan Administration.
The subcommittee will be led by Rep. Barry Loudermilk, R-Ga., a Trump ally who had his own run-in with the Jan. 6 committee. The panel accused Loudermilk of giving tours of the Capitol in the days leading up to the riot. Video footage showed Loudermilk guiding a tour of House office buildings during a time when the complex was closed off to visitors because of pandemic restrictions. Loudermilk has strenuously denied that the group he was leading was using the tour to inspect the facility ahead of the riot.
Oh, good. The tour guide for the Bear Spray Caucus will be leading this particular fishing expedition, which apparently was planned as the follow-up to Tucker Carlson’s game-changing use of security footage. That, of course, turned into the Al Capone’s vault of political television, and now the Republicans are stuck with a subcommittee dedicated to proving that we all didn’t see what we actually saw, led by a dude who compared the first impeachment of the former president* to the trial of Jesus.
In 2007, Stormy Daniels starred with Randy Spear in the porn film Black Widow (sorry, not a porn parody of the Marvel film, although, yeah, those exist. Look up The Assvengers). It was one of the first films she made after she had sex with Donald Trump one time in 2006. And, in context, I gotta tell you: there’s a dissertation that could be written about this confluence of fucked-up history and fuck film.
Lemme set this up for you: Stormy plays Peyton, a poor young women from an abusive mother and a cruel, neglectful father, and she grew up in south Louisiana (like me). The movie takes place after Stormy/Peyton is grown up. She has decided that the way to get anywhere is to find a sugar daddy, marry him, and then murder him. When the movie starts, we know that Peyton is married to Randy Spear or “Charles,” a wealthy corporate lawyer with a heart of gold. She’s 20 and he’s 56. She says, “He was just attractive enough to fuck…He was quiet, gentle, and suffered from chronic depression.” Nothing like hearing about mental illness in the midst of jacking off to porn.
Former President Donald Trump’s effort to keep key evidence out of his civil rape trial next month was rejected by a federal judge Monday.
Judge Lewis A. Kaplan in Manhattan ruled that key witnesses will be allowed to testify and misogynistic remarks Trump made about women in 2005 when he apparently didn’t realize he was being recorded can be played for a jury that will hear quarter-century-old rape allegations made by a former magazine columnist.
A trial in the case filed by E. Jean Carroll is scheduled to start April 25. Carroll and Trump are expected to testify.
The leadership of the New York Young Republican Club, a far-right group, wants to be very clear: It’s actually a good thing that only a handful of Donald Trump supporters showed up to the pro-Trump rally held Monday outside the Manhattan district attorney’s office.
“We purposefully kept it small,” the club’s president, Gavin Wax, told HuffPost.
“I think there’s more cameras here than people,” observed Vish Burra, the club’s executive secretary and a staffer for Rep. George Santos (R-N.Y.).
“I would prefer a lower turnout,” said Troy Olson, sergeant-at-arms.
Frustrated by what it sees as the U.S.’s determination to thwart its rise as a global superpower, China is pushing ahead with efforts to promote a new international order that has Beijing at its center.
In recent weeks, China has spoken more robustly about the prospect of conflict unless the U.S. changes course and reveled in a major diplomatic victory in the Middle East. Now its leader, Xi Jinping, is in Moscow to meet with Russian President Vladimir Putin, signaling Beijing’s growing embrace of its rising power on the global stage and the potential for it to further deepen conflict with the U.S. and its allies.
House Speaker Kevin McCarthy urged calm Sunday and said Americans should not protest if former President Donald Trump is indicted and arrested in a hush-money investigation in New York, contradicting Trump, who called on his supporters Saturday to “Protest, take our nation back!”
“I don’t think people should protest this, no. And I think President Trump, if you talk to him, he doesn’t believe that, either,” McCarthy, R-Calif., said in response to a question from NBC News during House Republicans’ retreat in Orlando.
He said later: “Nobody should harm one another … We want calmness out there.”
Days after the International Criminal Court issued a warrant for his arrest, Russian President Vladimir Putin made a defiant visit to the city of Mariupol in his first trip to Ukrainian territory that Moscow illegally annexed in September.
Putin flew into the port city by helicopter and “traveled around several districts of the city,” the Kremlin said in a statement Sunday, adding that he met several residents and went into one family’s home after they invited him in.
Russia’s Deputy Prime Minister Marat Khusnullin said in a separate post on his Telegram channel that Putin “personally inspected one of the residential areas, the building of the Philharmonic Society and assessed the roads, driving a car around the city.”
UBS agreed to buy its embattled rival Credit Suisse for $3.2 billion Sunday, with Swiss regulators playing a key part in the deal as governments looked to stem a contagion threatening the global banking system.
“With the takeover of Credit Suisse by UBS, a solution has been found to secure financial stability and protect the Swiss economy in this exceptional situation,” read a statement from the Swiss National Bank, which noted the central bank worked with the Swiss government and the Swiss Financial Market Supervisory Authority to bring about the combination of the country’s two largest banks.
Former President Donald Trump claimed in a post on his social media platform that he will be arrested on Tuesday related to the Manhattan district attorney’s investigation into hush money payments made to adult film star Stormy Daniels ahead of the 2016 presidential election.
As part of the post, Trump also called on his supporters to protest.
In a statement, a Trump spokesperson appeared to walk back the comments.
The Senate on Thursday, in a procedural move, cleared the way for a final vote on repealing decades-old war powers measures that authorized two wars with Iraq — first under former President George H. W. Bush in the Gulf War, and then by his son, former President George W. Bush — with supporters fearing that the outdated authorizations could be misused by a future president.
In a strong bipartisan showing, the Senate voted 67-27 in a test vote to repeal the authorizations.
It’s now all but certain to pass the Senate in a final vote next week, but it’s less clear is how a Republican-controlled House will handle the legislation.
A group of financial institutions has agreed to deposit $30 billion in First Republic Bank in what’s meant to be a sign of confidence in the banking system, the banks announced Thursday afternoon.
Bank of America, Wells Fargo, Citigroup and JPMorgan Chase will contribute about $5 billion apiece, while Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley will deposit around $2.5 billion, the banks said in a news release. Truist, PNC, U.S. Bancorp, State Street and Bank of New York Mellon will deposit about $1 billion each.
“This action by America’s largest banks reflects their confidence in First Republic and in banks of all sizes, and it demonstrates their overall commitment to helping banks serve their customers and communities,” the group said in a statement.
Former President Donald Trump’s campaign attacked the Manhattan district attorney’s office on Thursday ahead of possible charges linked to his effort to pay hush money to adult film star Stormy Daniels.
The former president’s campaign released the fiery statement just days after Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg’s office invited Trump to testify in front of a grand jury, seen as a signal that charges could be near. Any indictment would be historic: No former American president has been indicted, and any charges are sure to upend the 2024 race for the Republican presidential nomination.
Three U.S. officials familiar with the intelligence said the highest levels of the Kremlin approved the aggressive actions of Russian military fighter jets against a U.S. military drone over the Black Seaon Tuesday.
The Russian jets dropped jet fuel on the MQ-9 Reaper, an unprecedented action, and two of the officials said the intelligence suggests the intent seemed to be to throw the drone off course or disable its surveillance capabilities.
It was “Russian leadership’s intention to be aggressive in the intercept,” said one of the officials.
A judge appointed by former President Donald Trump heard arguments Wednesday in a lawsuit that aims to ban an abortion medication that women in the U.S. have used widely for over two decades.
During the four-hour hearing, U.S. District Judge Matthew Kacsmaryk appeared sympathetic to arguments from the lawyers for a coalition of anti-abortion groups called the Alliance for Hippocratic Medicine. Their goal in filing the suit was to overturn the Food and Drug Administration’s approval of the pills used to terminate pregnancies, which account for more than half of abortions in the U.S.
Porn actor Stormy Daniels met Wednesday with prosecutors who are investigating hush money paid to her on former President Donald Trump’s behalf, her lawyer said Wednesday.
The news emerged as Michael Cohen, a former Trump attorney who orchestrated the payment, was giving a second day of testimony before a New York grand jury looking into the matter.
The $130,000 payment was made in 2016, as Trump’s first presidential campaign was in its final weeks and Daniels was negotiating to go on television to air her claims of a sexual encounter with him a decade earlier. Cohen made the payment and arranged another payout — at Trump’s direction, he says.
A special grand jury that investigated whether Donald Trump and his allies illegally meddled in the 2020 election in Georgia heard a recording of the former president pushing a top state lawmaker to call a special session to overturn his loss in the state, according to a newspaper report.
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution reported Wednesday that it spoke to five members of the special grand jury who said they heard a recording of a phone call between Trump and Georgia House Speaker David Ralston that had not previously been reported and has not been made public.
A Russian fighter jet forced down a US Air Force drone over the Black Sea on Tuesday after damaging the propeller of the American MQ-9 Reaper drone, according to the US military.
The Reaper drone and two Russian Su-27 aircraft were flying over international waters over the Black Sea on Tuesday when one of the Russian jets intentionally flew in front of and dumped fuel on the unmanned drone several times, a statement from US European Command said.
The aircraft then hit the propeller of the drone, prompting US forces to bring the MQ-9 drone down in international waters. Pentagon spokesman Brig. Gen. Patrick Ryder added Tuesday that the Russian aircraft flew “in the vicinity” of the drone for 30 to 40 minutes before colliding just after 7 a.m. Central European Time.
President Joe Biden signed an executive order Tuesday designed to increase background checks in a visit to a Los Angeles suburb that was the site of a mass shooting this year.
Biden issued the order shortly before a trip to Monterey Park, where 11 people were killed in January at a gathering for Lunar New Year celebrations.
“We all saw a day and festivity and light turned into a day of fear and darkness,” Biden said Tuesday afternoon, when he read the names of the mass shooting victims.
A group of Democrats led by Sen. Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts and Rep. Katie Porter of California will unveil legislation Tuesday to restore bank regulations that were undone under then-President Donald Trump in 2018, seeking to fix what they say was the cause of Silicon Valley Bank’s collapse.
The legislation, first reported by NBC News, would repeal the centerpiece of a law passed on a bipartisan basis by the Republican-led Congress in 2018, which eased Dodd-Frank financial regulations on midsize banks by raising the “too big to fail” threshold from $50 billion in assets to $250 billion.
Republican senators broke with Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis on Tuesday over his remarks that defending Ukraine against Russian aggression wasn’t a “vital” U.S. interest.
“I completely disagree with his comments,” said Sen. Roger Wicker, R-Miss., the ranking member of the Armed Services Committee.
About a half-dozen of Wicker’s GOP colleagues voiced varying degrees of opposition to DeSantis’ remarks Monday night on Fox News.
Donald Trump will not testify before a grand jury investigating hush money payments made to an adult film star during the 2016 election by his then-attorney.
Trump attorney Joe Tacopina told NBC News Monday that the former president has “no plans” to sit for the grand jury convened by the Manhattan District Attorney’s Office.
Prosecutors may be poised to bring criminal charges in the case, which concerns a $130,000 payment Trump’s former personal lawyer Michael Cohen made to porn starStormy Daniels, who claims she had an affair with Trump in 2006.
Former President Donald Trump on Monday blamed “wokeness” for the collapse of Silicon Valley Bank rather than the law he signed in 2018 that gutted the Dodd-Frank federal regulations on smaller banks.
Trump bragged within days of taking office that he would go after the Dodd-Frank Act, which was signed by President Barack Obama in 2010 after the 2008 financial crisis and which forced banks to be more conservative in investing their depositors’ money.
“Dodd-Frank is a disaster. We’re going to be doing a big number on Dodd-Frank,” Trump said on Jan. 30, 2017, as he signed an executive order requiring that agencies eliminate two regulations for each new one they wanted to implement.
Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., was “discharged from the hospital today,” his communications director, David Popp, said in a statement Monday.
“At the advice of his physician, the next step will be a period of physical therapy at an inpatient rehabilitation facility before he returns home,” Popp said. “Over the course of treatment this weekend, the Leader’s medical team discovered that he also suffered a minor rib fracture on Wednesday, for which he is also being treated.”
McConnell, 81, was hospitalized Wednesday after he fell at a private dinner and was treated for a concussion, his office said. By Friday, a political adviser who visited him in the hospital said, he was “doing well” and “eager” to leave.
Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, a potential Republican presidential candidate, broke with many in his party Monday and told Fox News host Tucker Carlson that protecting Ukraine is not a “vital” national interest for the U.S.
“While the U.S. has many vital national interests — securing our borders, addressing the crisis of readiness within our military, achieving energy security and independence, and checking the economic, cultural, and military power of the Chinese Communist Party — becoming further entangled in a territorial dispute between Ukraine and Russia is not one of them,” DeSantis wrote in a questionnaire response Carlson posted on his Twitter feed.
The hills are alive with the sound of illusions falling like dead fish onto a pier. The proud, entitled princes of the tech world have proven to be babes in the financial woods. The collapse of the Silicon Valley Bank had them jettisoning libertarian disruption in favor of abject pleading for bailouts, lifeboats, and all manner of conventional corporate socialism. Compared to these honkers, Dick Fuld at Lehman Brothers went out with dignity and grace.
And the capper was delivered by the insufferable Larry Summers, who emerged from the luxurious shadows of his own ego.
Rep. George Santos on Friday rejected allegations of fraud from a convicted Brazilian man who said the New York Republican was the brains behind a credit card skimming scheme in 2017.
“I’m innocent. I never did anything of criminal activity and I’m no mastermind of anything,” Santos told reporters when asked about a sworn affidavit from Gustavo Ribeiro Trelha that was obtained by Politico and published Thursday. “The story’s false.”
Trelha pleaded guilty in 2017 to a charge of “access device fraud” in federal court in Seattle for a scam involving a card skimmer that lifted card numbers and passwords from ATMs. He served about six months in jail before he was deported back to Brazil, court records show.
Former Vice President Mike Pence on Saturday harshly criticized former President Donald Trump for his role in the Jan. 6 riot at the U.S. Capitol, widening the rift between the two men as they prepare to battle over the Republican nomination in next year’s election.
“President Trump was wrong,” Pence said during remarks at the annual white-tie Gridiron Dinner attended by politicians and journalists. “I had no right to overturn the election. And his reckless words endangered my family and everyone at the Capitol that day, and I know history will hold Donald Trump accountable.”
Federal regulators stepped in Sunday to back all Silicon Valley Bank deposits, resolving a key uncertainty surrounding the second-largest bank failure in U.S. history hours before global stock markets resumed trading.
The U.S. Treasury, the Federal Reserve and the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. said the government would back Silicon Valley Bank deposits beyond the federally insured ceiling of $250,000. The decision addressed concerns around the fate of uninsured funds held at the Santa Clara, California-based bank — the country’s 16th largest — which had $209 billion in assets and more than $175 billion in deposits.
It didn’t win quite everything everywhere all at once. But it came pretty darn close.
“Everything Everywhere All at Once,” a gleefully bonkers sci-fi-action-comedy mash-up about a Chinese American immigrant who traverses the multiverse to keep her family together, claimed best picture at the 95th Academy Awards on Sunday night, beating out a diverse field that included massive blockbusters as well as intimate art-house fare.
Leading the field with 11 nominations, “Everything Everywhere” won seven, including lead actress for Michelle Yeoh, supporting actor for Ke Huy Quan and supporting actress for Jamie Lee Curtis, along with original screenplay and directing wins for co-directors Daniel Kwan and Daniel Scheinert.
And DeSantis will visit the early nominating states of Iowa on Friday and Nevada on Saturday as he tours the country promoting his memoir.
President Joe Biden on Thursday rolled out his proposed budget for fiscal year 2024, casting it as a reflection of his values ahead of an anticipated reelection run and aiming to put Republicans on the defensive.
The White House said the budget would reduce the deficit in the long-term by $3 trillion, largely due to tax increases on wealthy Americans and corporations. It would also provide a record amount for defense spending, and include funds for Biden’s pledges on paid family leave, universal preschool and more.
“I value everyone having an even shot, not just labor but small business owners, farmers and so many other people who hold the country together who’ve been basically invisible for a long time,” Biden said in a speech before a union audience at the Finishing Trades Institute in Pennsylvania.
Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) is being treated for a concussion after falling at the Waldorf Astoria hotel in Washington, D.C., Wednesday night.
“He is expected to remain in the hospital for a few days of observation and treatment,” McConnell’s spokesperson said Thursday, in the first official update on the senator’s condition. McConnell, 81, fell at the hotel during an event for the Senate Leadership Fund.
Sen. John Barrasso (R-Wyo.) told reporters that McConnell is awake and talking, and that he’s expected to make a full recovery, though Barrasso said he had not spoken to McConnell himself. For the most part, GOP senators attending their weekly closed-door luncheon didn’t know much more than what had been released by McConnell’s office. The Senate minority leader is expected to be in the hospital through the weekend.
The Manhattan District Attorney’s Office has indicated to Donald Trump’s legal team that he could face criminal charges over hush money paid to an adult film star during the 2016 election, four people familiar with the matter told The New York Times on Thursday.
According to the sources, prosecutors have offered Trump the opportunity to testify before a grand jury case next week, which would be an unusual step if they weren’t planning to proceed with charges. It’s also a sign that a decision on an indictment is close, the Times noted. Sources later confirmed the offer to testify with The Washington Post.
Trump, who’s announced his plans to run for president again in 2024, is unlikely to testify.
The now year-long violent slog of war in Ukraine has taken an enormous toll on the country. And there is no end in sight to the fighting. No one questions the fact that stopping the Russian aggression and ending the killing is Ukraine’s – and the world’s- top priority.
That said, we are also deeply concerned that the impact of the war on Ukraine’s children is already posing a serious threat to the country’s future. A devastating combination of widespread psychological trauma and educational disruption among Ukraine’s youngest citizens bodes poorly for them and for the future of Ukraine more broadly.
It’s difficult to overstate how traumatic this past year has been for Ukraine’s kids.
It was not a mystery what Tucker Carlson would do with exclusive access to hours of surveillance footage from Jan. 6, 2021.
The Fox News host claimed long ago that videos from that day showed the horde of Donald Trump supporters acting peaceably.
“You see people walking around and taking pictures,” Carlson told his millions of viewers in September 2021. “They don’t look like terrorists, they look like tourists, and all of them by the way are Americans.”
Many Fox News employees are reeling in the wake of stunning court filings released as part of the defamation lawsuit against the network by Dominion Voting Systems, according to The Daily Beast.
Court documents released in recent weeks have included bombshell revelations about the inner workings of the right-wing network, including text transcripts appearing to show that star hosts and network executives sought to mollify former President Donald Trump and his supporters by giving airtime to lies about the 2020 presidential election despite knowing the stories were bogus. Meanwhile, journalists in the network’s news side appeared to have caught flak for pushing back against those narratives.
Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., was hospitalized after tripping at a hotel, a spokesperson said Wednesday.
“This evening, Leader McConnell tripped at a local hotel during a private dinner. He has been admitted to the hospital where he is receiving treatment,” McConnell spokesman David Popp said in a statement.
McConnell, 81, is serving a seventh term in the Senate, after being first elected in 1984. He was Senate majority leader until early 2021.
By early January 2021, Fox News hosts and executives were ready to move on from then-President Donald Trump and his insistence that the election was stolen.
“it’s been 8 weeks and none of them has produced anything tangible or verifiable. and now he wants thousands of his supporters to go to DC without shelter or food to demonstrate,” host Lou Dobbs texted a producer on his show on Jan. 3. “I believe the election was stolen — but without evidence we can do nothing significant.”
“We are very, very close to being able to ignore Trump most nights,” Tucker Carlson wrote in a Jan. 4 text to an unidentified person. “I truly can’t wait.”
Fox Corp. Chairman Rupert Murdoch said under oath that he believes the 2020 presidential election was free, fair and not stolen, according to court filings released Tuesday in a voting machine company’s defamation lawsuit over Fox News’ coverage of former President Donald Trump’s false election fraud claims.
In sworn questioning in January by lawyers for Dominion Voting Systems, Murdoch was asked, “Do you believe that the 2020 presidential election was free and fair?”
“Yes,” he replied, according to a transcript.
“The election was not stolen,” he said later.
Minority Leader Mitch McConnell and other Senate Republicans lashed out at conservative Fox News host Tucker Carlson on Tuesday after he characterized the deadly Jan. 6 attackon the Capitol as “mostly peaceful chaos.”
At a GOP leadership news conference, McConnell, R-Ky., said he wanted to align himself with the letter sent to the U.S. Capitol Police force by Capitol Police Chief Thomas Manger, who denounced Carlson for spreading “offensive and misleading conclusions” about the insurrection on Jan. 6, 2021, including a “disturbing accusation” that Officer Brian Sicknick’s death had nothing to do with the riot.
A bipartisan group of senators introduced a sweeping bill Tuesday that would allow the federal government to regulate and even ban foreign-produced technology, including TikTok.
The bill, the Restricting the Emergence of Security Threats that Risk Information and Communications Technology Act, or RESTRICT Act, would give the secretary of commerce broad power to regulate tech produced by six countries that have adversarial relationships with the U.S.: China, Cuba, Iran, North Korea, Russia and Venezuela.
The White House endorsed the RESTRICT Act on Tuesday, calling it “a systematic framework for addressing technology-based threats to the security and safety of Americans.”
On Jan. 4, 2021, Fox News host Tucker Carlson was done with Donald Trump.
“We are very, very close to being able to ignore Trump most nights. I truly can’t wait,” he texted an unidentified person.
“I hate him passionately. … I can’t handle much more of this,” he added.
By this time, Fox News was in crisis mode. It had angered its audience when it correctly said Joe Biden had won Arizona in the presidential election. Executives and hosts were worried about losing viewers to upstart rivals, most notably Newsmax.
A flashback: February 9, 2023, the first public hearing of the House Select Subcommittee on the Weaponization of the Federal Government, Rep. Jim Jordan (R-Ohio), presiding.
THE CHAIRMAN: This is only a sampling. In my time in Congress, I have never seen anything like this. Dozens and dozens of whistleblowers, FBI agents, coming to us talking about what is going on in the political nature of the Justice Department. This is not Jim Jordan saying this, not Republicans. It’s not conservatives. It’s good and brave FBI agents, willing to come forward and give us the truth. And this is just the FBI.
What if the GOP needn’t worry quite so much?
That’s what a new study suggests. But there are some significant caveats to that.
Hope Hicks, a trusted aide to Donald J. Trump during his 2016 presidential campaign, met with the Manhattan district attorney’s office on Monday — the latest in a string of witnesses to be questioned by prosecutors as they investigate the former president’s involvement in paying hush money to a porn star.
The appearance of Ms. Hicks, who was seen walking into the Manhattan district attorney’s office in the early afternoon, represents the latest sign that the prosecutors are in the final stages of their investigation.
She is at least the seventh witness to meet with prosecutors since the district attorney, Alvin L. Bragg, convened a grand jury in January to hear evidence in the case. Last week, another prominent member of the 2016 campaign, Kellyanne Conway, testified before the grand jury, according to two people with knowledge of the matter.
Read the rest of the story at The New York Times
Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-SC) said on Monday he is prepared to introduce legislation to pave the way for the president to potentially use military force in Mexico to combat drug cartels.
On Friday, four Americans were kidnapped just over the border in northeastern Mexico in what U.S. officials are saying is a case of mistaken identity. Authorities say it is likely that members of a drug cartel abducted them thinking they were smugglers.
The incident highlights the ongoing problem of drug cartels in Mexico as well as the high demand in the U.S. that helps empower them.
Fox News host Tucker Carlson on Monday released security video from the Jan. 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol, using footage provided exclusively to him by Speaker Kevin McCarthy to portray the riot as a peaceful gathering.
Carlson acquired the tapes as part of a deal for McCarthy, R-Calif., to win the speaker’s gavel. When McCarthy was struggling to gather the votes to lead the House, Carlson used his program to list two “concessions” he could make to win over far-right Republicans.
“First, release the January 6 files. Not some of the January 6 files and video — all of it,” Carlson, the most-watched host on cable news, said after McCarthy faced three failed votes. “So that the rest of us can finally know what actually happened on January 6, 2021.”
Back in December, I warned that the next round of fuckery the right was going to pull had to do with ESG investing. While it’s a way more complex thing than I have the ability to explain, lemme give it a shot: investing in well-governed companies that give a shit about the environment and social issues. There you go. E=Environment, S=Social, G=Governance. So, like, it’s investing in a corporation that isn’t run by shitbags, and instead by those who think climate change is gonna fuck us if we don’t do anything and who don’t treat their workers like garbage. It’s not new, but it’s taken off in the last couple of years, and now “ESG accounted for $1 of every $8 in all U.S. assets under professional management.”
Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis visited Southern California on Sunday, taking swipes at Gov. Gavin Newsom in his own backyard amid a widening Republican Primary battle ahead of 2024.
“I know you guys got a lot of problems out here, but your governor is very concerned about what we’re doing in Florida, so I figured I had to come by,” DeSantis said, speaking before a crowd of over a thousand people at the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library’s Air Force One Pavilion and drawing considerable applause.
But it was not a warm welcome from everyone. The Simi Valley Police Department said Sunday that library employees discovered black spray paint on an entrance sign reading “Ron DeFascist” in the early morning hours.
Donald Trump seemed to have Gov. Ron DeSantis on his mind here Saturday evening during his speech at the Conservative Political Action Conference.
Addressing an audience of devoted fans at the annual CPAC gathering, the former president called out Republicans who, in the past, have favored cuts to entitlement programs.
“We’re not going back to people that want to destroy our great Social Security system,” Trump said in his speech. “Even some in our own party.”
Trump then added coyly: “I wonder who that might be.”
President Biden told a crowd gathered to commemorate the 58th anniversary of a brutal police attack on Black protesters that the right to vote was “under assault” as Republicans introduce laws to restrict ballot access and redraw voting districts.
Observing the anniversary of Bloody Sunday, an event that electrified the civil rights movement, Mr. Biden said the marchers who crossed the Edmund Pettus Bridge on March 7, 1965, had bucked the “forces of hate” and encouraged activism that led to the signing of the Voting Rights Act five months later.
“They forced the country to confront hard truths,” Mr. Biden said, “and to act to keep the promise of America alive.”
Kellyanne Conway, who was a top adviser to former President Donald Trump, and George Conway, a lawyer and frequent Trump critic, announced Saturday that they are divorcing after more than two decades of marriage.
The Conways, who married in 2001, said in a statement shared to Twitter by George Conway that they were in the “final stages of an amicable divorce.”
“We married more than two decades ago, cherish the many happy years (and four corgis) we’ve shared, and above all else, our four incredible children, who remain the heartbeat of our family and our top priority,” they wrote.
A Republican state senator in Florida has introduced a bill that, if passed, would require bloggers who write about Gov. Ron DeSantis, his Cabinet or state legislators to register with the state.
Sen. Jason Brodeur’s bill, titled “Information Dissemination,” would also require bloggers to disclose who’s paying them for their posts about certain elected officials and how much.
“If a blogger posts to a blog about an elected state officer and receives, or will receive, compensation for that post, the blogger must register” with the appropriate office within five days of the post, the legislation says.
Sen. Dianne Feinstein, D-Calif., said Thursday she was hospitalized in San Francisco with shingles after she missed Senate votes this week.
In a statement, Feinstein, 89, said she got the shingles diagnosis while the Senate was in recess late last month.
“I have been hospitalized and am receiving treatment in San Francisco and expect to make a full recovery,” Feinstein said. “I hope to return to the Senate later this month.”
Alex Murdaugh, the disgraced South Carolina lawyer accused of murdering his wife and son to gain pity and distract from financial crimes threatening to topple his reputation, was found guilty Thursday in their slayings.
After deliberating for three hours, the jury of seven men and five women convicted Murdaugh, 54, of two counts of murder in the fatal shootings of Margaret, 52, and their youngest son, Paul, 22, in June 2021. He faces 30 years to life in prison without parole.
The jury also convicted him of two counts of possession of a weapon during a violent crime, which carry five more years in prison.
Former President Donald Trump can be sued by injured Capitol Police officers and Democratic lawmakers over the Jan. 6, 2021, insurrection at the U.S. Capitol, the Justice Department said Thursday in a federal court case testing Trump’s legal vulnerability for his speech before the riot.
The Justice Department told a Washington federal appeals court in a legal filing that it should allow the lawsuits to move forward, rejecting Trump’s argument that he is immune from the claims.
The department said it takes no position on the lawsuits’ claims that the former president’s words incited the attack on the Capitol. Nevertheless, Justice lawyers told the court that a president would not be protected by “absolute immunity” if his words were found to have been an “incitement of imminent private violence.”
Former Vice President Mike Pence still won’t say whether he’s running for president next year, and he won’t speak ill of his ex-boss, former President Donald Trump. But in an interview with CBS News in Michigan on Wednesday, he also twice declined to commit to supporting Trump if he is the Republican presidential nominee.
Instead, Pence said he believes voters in 2024 will choose “wisely again,” as they did in 2016. But said he thinks “different times call for different leadership.”
“I’m very confident we’ll have better choices come 2024,” he told CBS News political correspondent Caitlin Huey-Burns. “And I’m confident our standard-bearer will win the day in November of that year.”
On Wednesday, former Trump White House adviser Kellyanne Conway met with prosecutors from the Manhattan District Attorney’s office as part of their criminal investigation into Trump and the alleged hush payment to Stormy Daniels, sources familiar with the matter told ABC News.
Conway is the latest witness to meet with prosecutors. Others include Michael Cohen, Trump’s one time fixer and lawyer who funded the payment, and David Pecker, the former publisher of The National Enquirer who helped arrange it.
Last month, Cohen gave his 15th interview with the district attorney’s office, which was the first since a recently convened grand jury began hearing evidence about Daniels’ long-denied affair with Trump. Pecker appeared before the grand jury on Jan. 30.
President Joe Biden hasn’t announced whether he’s running for a second term yet, but his address to a gathering of House Democrats here Wednesday sounded a lot like a 2024 stump speech.
Biden dared House Speaker Kevin McCarthy of California to reveal Republicans’ budget full of spending cuts, mocked GOP Sen. Rick Scott’s reversal on targeting Social Security and Medicare and knocked “MAGA Republicans” like Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene of Georgia. an acolyte of former President Donald Trump who recently called for a “national divorce” between red states and blue states.
“A little bit more of Marjorie Taylor Greene and a few more and you’re going to have a lot of Republicans running our way,” Biden said of GOP voters in 2024. “Isn’t she amazing?”
Republicans subjected Attorney General Merrick B. Garland to a four-hour grilling before the Senate Judiciary Committee on Wednesday, a harbinger of the fights that loom ahead as the party targets the Justice Department in the months leading up to the 2024 election.
One by one, Republican senators accused Mr. Garland — testifying before Congress for the first time since appointing special counsels to investigate former President Donald J. Trump and President Biden — of politicizing the department by aggressively investigating Republicans and conservative activists while shielding Democrats.
They also rebuked Mr. Garland over a range of policy and law enforcement issues, including his response to the fentanyl and immigration crises as well as the court’s decision in June to end the constitutional right to an abortion.
Donald Trump Jr. — in a video shared online — whined about not being invited to appear on Fox News anymore.
The eldest son of former President Donald Trump blamed Republican former House Speaker Paul Ryan, who is now on the board of directors at Fox Corp., for his absence from the conservative network.
The Trump scion first claimed “no one gives a crap” about Ryan’s vow not to attend the 2024 Republican National Convention if Donald Trump becomes the GOP nominee. Ryan has said he’ll support “anybody but Trump” in the election.
The Supreme Court’s conservative justices looked ready to void President Joe Biden’s targeted student loan relief plan during arguments on Tuesday, although the debt relief could live on if two conservatives side with the liberal justices and deny the plaintiffs standing to sue.
At least five of the six conservative justices appeared skeptical of arguments made by Solicitor General Elizabeth Prelogar that the student loan relief program was legal. They questioned Secretary of Education Miguel Cardona’s authority under the HEROES Act to cancel student loan debt and implied that such an action violated the court’s so-called major questions doctrine, which forbids executive regulatory actions of “vast economic or political significance” that were not expressly authorized by Congress.
Chicago Mayor Lori Lightfoot lost her bid for re-election Tuesday, ending her historic run as the city’s first Black woman and first openly gay person to serve in the position.
Lightfoot, a Democrat, failed to get enough votes in the nine-person race to move on to an April 4 runoff election, according to projections by The Associated Press.
Paul Vallas, a former CEO of Chicago schools, will face Brandon Johnson, a Cook County commissioner endorsed by the Chicago Teachers Union.
House Speaker Kevin McCarthy, R-Calif., on Tuesday defended his decision to hand over tens of thousands of hours of security video from the Jan. 6 insurrection to Fox News host Tucker Carlson.
McCarthy told reporters that he was following the precedent of the House Jan. 6 committee in giving a news network early, exclusive access to video that he said he would later release more widely. “So he’ll have an exclusive, then I’ll give it out to the entire country,” McCarthy said.
President Joe Biden took a hard shot at Fox News over the bombshell Dominion revelations when ABC News anchor David Muir asked about flagging polls despite positive economic indicators.
Damning comments made by Fox News hosts and executives in private in the aftermath of the election were revealed in a recent filing by Dominion Voting Systems, which is suing Fox News for defamation and seeking $1.6 billion in damages.
The suit has prompted copious doomsaying by a spectrum of pundits including Mediaite Editor-in-Chief Aidan McLaughlin and famed First Amendment lawyer Floyd Abrams. On Monday afternoon, a new bombshell filing dropped that’s chock full of fresh revelations.
CIA Director William Burns said Russian President Vladimir Putin is “too confident” that he can defeat Ukraine as China considers providing lethal military aid to Moscow.
The Russian leader does not appear to be backing away, Burns told CBS’ “Face the Nation”when asked if he sees any signs that Putin will come to the realization that he can’t win the conflict.
“I think Putin is, right now, entirely too confident of his ability, as I said before, to wear down Ukraine, to grind away and that’s what he’s giving every evidence that he’s determined to do right now,” Burns told CBS’ Margaret Brennan in the interview, which aired Sunday.
By the time Tennessee Gov. Bill Lee confirmed Monday that he would sign a recently passed bill criminalizing drag performances in public and in front of children, a photo that appears to show him dressed in drag as a high school student had already started to circulate on Reddit and Twitter.
Just before midnight Saturday, a Reddit user shared an image that appears to show Lee as a high school student wearing a short-skirted cheerleader’s uniform, a pearl necklace and a wig, posing on a school sports field next to two girls in men’s suits. The caption says, “Governor Bill Lee in drag (1977 high school yearbook).”
News Corp. Executive Chairman Rupert Murdoch declined to rein in Fox News hosts who spread false claims of widespread voter fraud in the days after the 2020 election despite privately expressing that he had seen little evidence for then-President Donald Trump’s claims and that he found half of them “bulls— and damaging,” according to court documents unsealed Monday.
Fox News was “trying to straddle the line between spewing conspiracy theories on one hand, yet calling out the fact that they are actually false on the other,” Murdoch said in testimony released in the court documents.
Do not mistake Speaker Kevin McCarthy’s surrender of the January 6 videotapes to Tucker Carlson for a one-off, quid pro quo arrangement aimed at securing the speakership. As Hal Holbrook says in All The President’s Men, if you do, you’ll be missing the over-all. We are in the middle of the beginning of a two-year conservative campaign to convince the public that we didn’t see what we clearly saw on January 6, 2021, and that we don’t know what we learned last year from the House select committee’s work on the insurrection. We are going to be asked, regularly, to believe them instead of our own lying eyes.
How do I know this? Because the offensive isn’t limited to McCarthy’s insipid capitulation to the Angry Children’s Caucus.
Two things can be true at once. We can believe that the people in East Palestine, Ohio, are a bunch of fucking idiots who vote against their own interests repeatedly, electing horrible motherfuckers who don’t give a happy monkey fuck about their health or safety, but, man, they sure hate Black people and migrants, so they got your vote. And we can also believe that they should get all the help they desperately need to recover from the toxic chemicals that were spilled and burned when a Norfolk Southern train derailed in their town.
A group of news organizations on Friday asked House Speaker Kevin McCarthy to share thousands of hours of security footage from Jan. 6 after Fox News host Tucker Carlson said this week that he has been given access to about 44,000 hours of video from the attack on the Capitol.
“We understand that, in your capacity as Speaker of the House of Representatives, you recently provided the Tucker Carlson Tonight television program with access to certain Congressional records — specifically, previously unavailable video footage from the U.S. Capitol on January 6, 2021,” wrote Laura Handman, a lawyer representing the media outlets. “We write to request that the News Organizations be granted access to these materials.”
The creator of the Dilbert comic strip faced cancellations Saturday as he defended remarks describing people who are Black as members of “a hate group” from which white people should “get away.”
Various media publishers across the U.S. denounced the comments by Dilbert creator Scott Adams as racist, hateful and discriminatory while saying they would no longer provide a platform for his work.
Andrews McMeel Universal, which distributes Dilbert, cited Adams’ remarks in announcing that it would sever all ties with the cartoonist.
Read the rest of the story at NBC News
A cold front turbocharged by tropical precipitation brought rare snow and heavy rain to some urban Southern California rooftops over the weekend, with more in the forecast.
Late-winter extreme weather Sunday also affected the Midwest and Plains states.
The leading edge of California’s weekend storm was headed east and wreaking havoc as it continued to draw warm energy and clash with cold air, federal forecasters said.
The Energy Department concluded with “low confidence” that the Covid-19 pandemic “likely” originated from a laboratory leak in Wuhan, China, according to a classified report delivered to key lawmakers on the House and Senate Intelligence committees, two sources with direct knowledge told NBC News.
Key lawmakers on the intelligence committees were briefed last month by the Office of the Director of National Intelligence about the classified report, the sources said.
The news was first reported Sunday by The Wall Street Journal.
A federal judge ruled Thursday that former President Donald Trump can be deposed in a pair of lawsuits brought by two former FBI officials whom he has long publicly disparaged.
U.S. District Judge Amy Berman Jackson of Washington, D.C., ruled that former FBI officials Peter Strzok and Lisa Page would also be permitted to question FBI Director Christopher Wray.
The depositions must be limited to two hours and to a “narrow set of topics” that were discussed at a sealed hearing Thursday, the ruling said.
Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg vowed that his department will work with the administration and Congress to prevent future disasters similar to the Feb. 3 train derailment that led to a spill of toxic chemicals during a visit to East Palestine, Ohio, on Thursday.
“The best way to deal with an ecological disaster is to stop it from happening in the first place and that’s a big part of where my department comes in,” Buttigieg said at a news conference, adding that the Transportation Department has laid out steps the federal government wants Congress and the rail industry to take.
Only future generations looking through the lens of history will know the true effects and human cost of the Russia-Ukraine war, Europe’s biggest land conflict since World War II.
For now, as we reach the first anniversary of President Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Ukraine on Friday, we can report on the stories of those trapped, killed or transformed by the war and highlight the numbers that illustrate its intensity and scale.
So far 100,000 Russian and 13,000 Ukrainian service personnel have been killed, according to Western leaders and Ukraine’s armed forces. And more than 7,000 Ukrainian civilians have died in the last year as a result of war, including at least 400 children.
The foreperson of a special grand jury convened in Fulton County, Georgia, to examine possible election interference by former President Donald Trump and his allies embarked Tuesday on a media tour of sorts, where she publicly telegraphed some of her panel’s closely held findings.
In a series of print and television interviews, jury foreperson Emily Kohrs revealed that jurors recommended charges for several individuals, without naming any of them — and intimated that the former president is among them.
“You’re not going to be shocked,” Kohrs told The New York Times about whether her panel recommended charges against Trump. “It’s not rocket science.”
President Joe Biden on Wednesday strongly condemned Russian President Vladimir Putin’s move to suspend his country’s involvement in the last remaining arms control treaty with the U.S.
Biden was asked about his reaction to Putin’s pulling out of the New START nuclear treaty upon arriving at the Polish Presidential Palace in Warsaw ahead of a meeting with leaders of the so-called Bucharest Nine group of eastern European countries and NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg.
“I don’t have time,” Biden said. Pressed again for his reaction, Biden said, “Big mistake.”
Read the rest of the story at NBC News
Former President Donald Trump made a campaign stop here Wednesday, using the aftermath of a train derailment and toxic chemical spill to take shots at President Joe Biden’s handling of the crisis.
“They were intending to do absolutely nothing for you,” Trump, who is seeking another term in the White House, said of the Democratic administration as he spoke in a firehouse.
Flanked by Sen. JD Vance of Ohio and other local Republicans, Trump bragged about having a strong working relationship with the Federal Emergency Management Agency, noting that it initially had not planned to assist relief efforts. Trump claimed, without evidence, that the Biden administration only directed more resources because he announced that he would visit East Palestine.
A second round of snow began to fall in Minnesota on Wednesday as forecasters warned of a major winter storm that could make travel dangerous for wide stretches of the country.
The Twin Cities of Minneapolis and St. Paul were forecast to get up to 12 more inches of snow from 6 p.m. Wednesday to 6 p.m. Thursday, the National Weather Service said, on top of the 5 inches that had already fallen.
“Minnesotans are no strangers to extreme weather, but this storm could break records,” Gov. Tim Walz said in a statement Wednesday.
Russian President Vladimir Putin accused Western countries Tuesday of igniting and sustaining the war in Ukraine, dismissing any blame for Moscow almost a year after the Kremlin’s unprovoked invasion of its neighbor that has killed tens of thousands of people.
In his long-delayed state-of-the-nation address, Putin cast Russia — and Ukraine — as victims of Western double-dealing and said Russia, not Ukraine, was the one fighting for its very existence.
“We aren’t fighting the Ukrainian people,” Putin said in a speech days before the war’s first anniversary on Friday. Ukraine “has become hostage of the Kyiv regime and its Western masters, which have effectively occupied the country.”
President Joe Biden, returning on Tuesday to the Polish castle where he spoke shortly after the Russian invasion of Ukraine last year, said the war had hardened Western resolve to defend democracy around the globe.
He warned that there were “hard and bitter days ahead,” but pledged that the United States and its allies would “have Ukraine’s back” as the war enters its second year.
“Democracies of the world will stand guard over freedom today, tomorrow and forever,” he said at the Royal Castle, a historical landmark in Warsaw, before a cheering crowd of Polish citizens and Ukrainian refugees.
The Biden administration announced Tuesday a new policy, set to take effect when Covid measures at the southern border expire, that would place limits on migrants’ eligibility to claim asylum when crossing into the U.S. from Mexico.
The policy has received wide criticism from congressional Democrats and immigrant advocacy organizations who liken it to a “transit ban” proposed by President Donald Trump’s hard-line immigration adviser, Stephen Miller. Advocacy organizations have threatened to sue.
Under the new rule, migrants who pass through countries on their way to the U.S. and do not first claim asylum there or take advantage of other lawful pathways will be deemed ineligible to claim asylum at the southern border.
The Georgia grand jury that investigated possible interference in the 2020 election by Donald Trump and his allies recommended indicting over a dozen people, the jury foreperson said Tuesday — a list she said “might” include the former president.
“There are certainly names that you will recognize, yes. There are names also you might not recognize,” Emily Kohrs said in an interview that aired on NBC News’ “Nightly News.”
She said the list of recommended indictments is “not a short list.”
Russian President Vladimir Putin railed against the West in his long-delayed state-of-the-nation address on Tuesday, a speech expected to set the tone for the year ahead and shed light on how the Kremlin sees its bogged-down war in Ukraine.
Putin has frequently justified his invasion of Ukraine by accusing Western countries of threatening Russia. They say nothing could be further from the truth, saying that Moscow’s forces attacked Ukraine unprovoked.
Fabulist Rep. George Santos (R-NY) joined Piers Morgan on his Fox Nation show, Piers Morgan Uncensored, where the host pushed the Republican congressman to own up to his many tall tales.
Ahead of the interview, Morgan tweeted a laundry list of some of the lies Santos has told:
Did he lie about his entire education?
Was he ever a Wall St star?
Was his mother in the Twin Towers on 9/11?
Did his grandparents survive the Holocaust?
Is he even Jewish?
Tonight, I go one-on-one with serial liar Geroge Santos
President Biden is in Poland ahead of the anniversary of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, seeking to applaud the global coalition that has helped thwart Russia’s military ambitions and also shoring up an alliance threatened by shifting political winds and fatigue with the war effort.
Biden is scheduled to deliver remarks here Tuesday ahead of the Feb. 24 anniversary of Russia’s invasion, stressing that the United States will stand with Ukraine for “as long as it takes,” a White House spokesman said.
Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene called for the U.S. to be separated by red and blue states and for shrinking the federal government in a tweet on President’s Day, the latest in a string of controversial statements.
“We need a national divorce. We need to separate by red states and blue states and shrink the federal government,” Greene, R-Ga., said in the tweet. “Everyone I talk to says this. From the sick and disgusting woke culture issues shoved down our throats to the Democrat’s traitorous America Last policies, we are done.”
Now this is a nice little aperitif.
Ever since January 21, 2021, Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis has been conducting a remarkably leak-proof investigation into the why’s and wherefore’s of how the previous president* and his minions tried to monkey-wrench the vote in Georgia the previous November and December. On Thursday, on instructions from a state superior court judge, the grand jury released a partial report of its findings. (Willis had fought the release of any material prior to possible indictments, but Judge Robert McBurney denied her motion to that effect.) As expected, the five-page release consisted only of a number of provocative breadcrumbs that may or may not lead to some intriguing destinations.
President Joe Biden made a surprise and historic visit to war-torn Ukraine on Monday, a show of support and solidarity with a democratic nation battling for its survival after Russian President Vladimir Putin invaded nearly a year ago.
The visit, including a meeting with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy, was kept under tight secrecy until Biden’s arrival. White House officials had been adamant that Warsaw, Poland, would be Biden’s only stop. On Friday, a White House spokesman answered with a single word when asked if Biden intended to cross the border into neighboring Ukraine: “No.”
Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg sent a letter Sunday to the CEO of Norfolk Southern, warning that the freight rail company must “demonstrate unequivocal support for the people” of East Palestine, Ohio, and surrounding areas after a fiery train derailment led to the release of chemicals and residents expressing concerns about their health.
“Norfolk Southern must live up to its commitment to make residents whole — and must also live up to its obligation to do whatever it takes to stop putting communities such as East Palestine at risk,” Buttigieg wrote. “This is the right time for Norfolk Southern to take a leadership position within the rail industry, shifting to a posture that focuses on supporting, not thwarting, efforts to raise the standard of U.S. rail safety regulation.”
Former President Donald Trump made a curious decision to amplify a tweet that doesn’t look very good for him with the investigation into his actions in Georgia during the 2020 election.
On Saturday, Trump — via his Truth Social platform — shared a tweet from Politico’s Kyle Cheney, which came from a thread on the release of limited excerpts from the Fulton County special grand jury report. The grand jury is investigating whether Trump and his allies illegally attempted to overturn his electoral loss in Georgia during the 2020 election.
Even though Trump has ceaselessly pushed the unsubstantiated claim that the election was “stolen” from him through massive electoral corruption, he chose to flag Cheney’s tweet which noted “there was no widespread fraud in Georgia.”
Former President Jimmy Carter will begin to receive hospice care at home following a series of hospital stays, his foundation said in a statement on Saturday.
“After a series of short hospital stays, former U.S. President Jimmy Carter today decided to spend his remaining time at home with his family and receive hospice care instead of additional medical intervention,” the statement said. “He has the full support of his family and his medical team. The Carter family asks for privacy during this time and is grateful for the concern shown by his many admirers.”
This one ends with a twist, one I’ll admit I didn’t see coming until I did like 15 seconds of research.
The Republican response to President Biden’s quite sane and unexpectedly lively State of the Union speech was honestly just fucking odd, and not just because it was delivered by Arkansas Governor Sarah Huckabee Sanders in a tone best described as “a Little Rock barista’s worst nightmare.” What was legit fucking strange is how utterly devoid of ideas it was. I mean, sure, yeah, all these speeches, the State of the Union and the response, are at best fantasies where the speakers list a bunch of shit that will almost surely never happen. But, at the bare minimum, we can say that they are aspirational. There were almost no aspirations to do a goddamned thing in Sanders’ 14-minute whine about shit that, truly, has nothing to do with making people’s lives better.
