Adam Lynch

Critics blast 'Donald Degenerate' after Epstein tipper alleges death threat

President Donald Trump’s culpability in connection to convicted sex-trafficker Jeffrey Epstein is not dying down this week with the release of roughly 3.5 million new files on Friday, according to Raw Story.

Included in the documents were multiple tips sent to authorities regarding abuses and behavior of Trump at the height of the president’s friendship with Epstein. One such tip involved a witness telling the FBI in 2016 that they had “personally witnessed” Trump threaten to “disappear” a girl and have her entire family killed.

“I personally witnessed Defendant Trump telling Plaintiff that she shouldn’t ever say anything if she didn’t want to disappear like the 12-year-old female [redacted], and that he was capable of having her whole family killed,” claims the FBI tip, which was signed under penalty of perjury on June 18, 2016.

According to Raw Story, the plaintiff claimed to have been employed by Epstein from 1990 to 2000, and she told the FBI that she was also personally threatened by Epstein in a fashion similar to threats Trump lobbed at the unknown plaintiff in the unmarked lawsuit.

“I was personally threatened by Mr. Epstein that I would be killed and my family killed as well if I ever disclosed any of the physical and sexual abuse of minor females that I had personally witnessed by Mr. Epstein or any of his guests,” the tip to the FBI states.

Reaction on social media was fierce on Saturday, with one commenter on X posting, “still think he's a ‘Christian’ president?”

“’Maga Christians’ is an oxymoron,” said another X commenter sounding off under the Raw Story repost.

Still another critic demanded, “When will Epstein’s victims see justice served?”

“Donald Degenerate,” howled another on X.

This one tip may prove one of many painful documents that will haunt Trump over the next few weeks. Other tips eagerly discussed by Trump’s critics include an underage woman claiming to have bitten Trump while being forced to have sex with him. In that particular claim, the girl allegedly got “hit in the face” for her behavior.

Trump fought the release of the files for months before eventually relenting and signing a law to expose them.

Read the Raw Story report at this link.

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Trump just sent the wrong message as he continues to 'spiral': analysis

New York Times Columnist Jamelle Bouie says President Donald Trump likes to project the image bullying strength at all times, whether it’s against Democrats, critics, or the news media. But the president’s effort to steamroll independent media on Thursday may number among the recent examples of overreach that’s currently knocking Trump off his spin.

“One point I’ve tried to make over the last year is that the Trump administration has a starkly unsophisticated vision of power,” said Bouie. “Where a subtler president might cajole and persuade, President Trump demands and threatens. He prefers subordinates to partners and tries to dominate his opponents rather than de-escalate a situation or find a mutually beneficial solution. He rejects persuasion altogether. If he wants something, he takes it.”

The only thing Trump and his allies know how to do, said Bouie, is “use the coercive force of the state.” But, when met with resistance, defiance or indifference, the go-to move is always “to apply more force, in hopes of forcing their opponents to bend the knee.”

“One reason the president is constantly threatening to invoke the Insurrection Act against protesters is because he sees it something like an ‘I win’ button — a move that guarantees instant victory because it represents overwhelming force,” said Bouie.

But look no further than the arrest of independent journalist Don Lemon for an example of blunt force failing to connect, said Bouie. There is little chance Lemon’s arrest will lead to a viable prosecution for example. Multiple judges have already spurned the pleas of Trump’s politicized Justice Department to pursue the case. Rather, Bouie says the arrest was meant to “send a message to other journalists to watch their words and their movements or face punishment.”

“But here, again, the White House does not seem to understand the limits of repression,” said Bouie. “In the same way that the killings of Renee Good and Alex Pretti only galvanized more Americans against the president, the arrests of journalists will likely further convince many ordinary people that the most reasonable response to Trump administration is opposition.”

This, said Bouie, leaves the White House “caught in a spiral of its own making.”

“The more it tries to repress and dominate its opponents, the more it loses ground with the public, and the more it loses ground, the more it leans on force and threats of force to save face,” Bouie said. “Eventually, the president and his allies will find that few people fear either his bark or his bite.”

New York Times writer Michelle Cottle added in a separate Saturday podcast with Bouie that Trump’s ever-faithful Republican Party also appears to be catching splash damage from their boss’ aggressive behavior.

“For the longest time Republicans have been operating on the assumption that their only risk politically to their fortunes is if they don’t back Trump enough. In this case, they are seeing from this public reaction the potential downsides to having hitched their wagon to this authoritarian nightmare,” said Cottle. “And so you do see people in Congress pushing back.”

Read Bouie’s column at this link.

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'A message must be sent': Jim Acosta tells Don Lemon to 'sue the pants off Trump'

“Jim Acosta Show” host Jim Acosta says it’s good that independent reporter Don Lemon has good lawyers in his corner, because he predicts lemon will be using them against President Donal Trump after his Thursday arrest.

Even conservative media slammed the Trump administration’s “dictator”-style arrest of Lemon for covering a protest at a Minnesota church. On Friday, CNN host Jake Tapper posted Lemon’s 12-page indictment to his official X account, with D.C.-based attorney John Aravosis writing on social media that the indictment "basically accuses [Lemon] of journalism."

"He asked the pastor and congregants questions. Yeah, that’s literally journalism," Aravosis wrote. "There’s no proof, or even substantive allegation, of Lemon partaking in any conspiracy.”

"If this is the case against Don Lemon, it's about as weak as it gets," tweeted criminal defense attorney Scott Greenfield.

Speaking with MS NOW anchor Ali Velshi, Acosta said Lemon owes it to the nation and democracy to chew the administration to pieces for trying to push such nonsense.

“Don Lemon should sue the pants off Donald Trump so they can't get away with this,” Acosta said. “A message has to be sent that this this kind of stuff can't be tolerated.”

“My guess is, is that Don has some great lawyers working on his behalf to get something along those lines going right now,” Acosta added. “… They're trying to send a message, and not just to the mainstream press and brand name press, legacy media. They're trying to send it to independent journalists, that ‘if you mess with us, you're going to get in trouble and there’s going to be consequences. And we just can't let that happen.”

Independent media, said Acosta — who is himself and independent journalist — has been “rising up” in response to failings in legacy media as it “bends the knee” to Trump. Acosta referenced an agreement by CBS to cancel the show of late night comedian and Trump gadfly Stephen Colbert and settle a spurious lawsuit with Trump that could have easily been fought in court. Earlier in 2025, Disney settled an unrelated lawsuit with ABC News with a $15 million donation to the Trump Library.

“Folks at home can sniff this out and they don't want mainstream media behaving in that fashion, paying lawsuit settlements to Trump and pulling comedians off the air, and the stuff that's been going on at ‘60 Minutes’ and so on. And the independent media has been thriving [in that vacuum,” said Acosta. “… But if you target the independent press, the world just gets quieter.”

- YouTube youtu.be

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News anchors blast Trump using lackeys to 'scam' taxpayers for $10 billion

MS NOW “The Weekend” hosts Jonathan Capehart and Eugene Daniels raked President Donald Trump for using his own government-appointed zealots to wrangle $10 billion from U.S. taxpayers.

“President trump has filed yet another lawsuit, this time targeting his own government,” said Capehart. “On Thursday, Trump announced he is suing the IRS and the Treasury Department over the alleged leak of his 2019 tax return and is seeking $10 billion in damages.”

The complaint alleges the agencies failed to prevent leaks by former IRS employee Charles Littlejohn, who has pled guilty and is serving a five-year prison sentence. If Trump wins the case, taxpayers will be on the hook to cover the payment, but Capehart lamented Trump’s likelihood of winning because of the allies he’s installed over the department.

“This man will look for any and every opportunity to scam some money, even if it's from the American taxpayers,” said Capehart.

“It's really important that we note that he has greased the wheels here,” said co-host Jacqueline Alemany. “The people who are deciding whether these settlements are going to ultimately be approved are senior department officials who were placed in these jobs because of their allegiance to Donald Trump. They've proven that time and time again. One of them was Trump's personal lawyer.”

“First of all, Donald Trump is worth $6.5 billion. So, it's not like he's hurting for money, No 2: $10 billion is more than he is worth. But also … another president would never do this. Because … that is the money that you pay to this country to make sure we pave the roads," Daniels said, gesturing to the camera, "to make sure that you are protected from foreign interference in elections and foreign interference in your lives. That is what it's for. It's not actually for the president to decide how he wants to grease the wheels and get more rich.”

“Well, that's the way it was until this person got elected,” said Capehart.

Daniels then rolled footage of ABC reporter, Karen Travers confronting Trump in the Oval Office over his demand for a $10 billion payout from taxpayers.

“Who are you with?” demanded an incredulous Trump. “You're a loud person. Very loud. Let somebody else have a chance.”

“Can you answer the question?” Travers pressed.

“ABC? Fake news. I didn't call on you,” Trump answered.

“Well, he doesn't want to answer the question, because if he had a good answer, if there was a good answer to why the president of the United States was suing his own government and suing the taxpayers for $10 billion, he would say it,” said Daniels. “… You could use that $10 billion for anything else. It shows how out of touch Donald Trump is because there are people suffering economically in this country and he's suing to take their money.”

- YouTube youtu.be

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Americans on the hook for an extra $6 billion — thanks to Trump: report

President Donald Trump appears blind to consumers’ rocketing electricity costs, reports the Washington Post. If anything, the president appears willing to make consumers pay even more for their monthly power bills to protect his favored industry.

“On energy policy, the administration’s most obvious sin has been picking losers,” reports the Post. “It has attempted to halt construction for offshore wind developments, even some that were nearly complete, and suffocated massive solar projects with red tape. As the nation clamors for more electricity, this oppositional attitude makes no policy sense.”

But it is Trump’s militant embrace of the wildly outdated and expensive coal industry that has energy strategists perplexed, and consumers furious.

“The Energy Department quietly issued emergency orders in late December requiring four coal plants to keep operating that had been scheduled to retire. That was in addition to another plant in Michigan that the administration has forced to remain open since last May. Energy Secretary Chris Wright has indicated he intends to do the same for additional plants,” the Post reports.

But Trump appears to be protecting coal plants not from coal-hating liberalsbut from economics. The power industry itself has opened no new coal plants in recent history for a reason. Other forms of energy, including natural gas, are cheaper, while solar has fewer moving parts, less pollution and no capacity to poison neighbors with mercury and toxins. Coal plants are also woefully inefficient — wasting roughly two-thirds of their energy through heat, according to the Post, and they take hours for their dated technology (which is barely a step up from that of a campfire) to ramp up.

Plus, the aging facilities that were scheduled for retirement are in “disrepair and require expensive investments to keep operating safely,” according to the Posy. One facility in Michigan — which Trump is determined to drive like a zombie — has already been offline for long stretches for maintenance.

“The plant’s operator, Consumers Energy, told regulators in November that running past its scheduled retirement had cost $80 million since May, more than $615,000 per day. And who picks up that tab? Residents, in the form of higher electricity bills,” the Post reports. “Ratepayers nationally will take on as much as $6 billion in higher costs by 2028 if this pattern continues, according to analysis last year by the consulting firm Grid Strategies.”

Another plant Trump forced to stay open in the state of Washington had long been slated for closure, even going so far as to pay employees a $50,000 “parting bonus” to help with their re-education into new jobs.

“This is what it looks like when ideology drives energy policy,” said the Post. “Keeping money-losing plants online skews the market, making it harder for companies to invest in the infrastructure of the future.”

Meanwhile, energy bills across the US have increased by 13 percent since Trump returned to the White House last January.

Read the Washington Post report at this link.

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'Total clowns': Critics roast White House's bungled Epstein files release

While critics deny Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche’s claim that the 3.5 million files the Trump administration released on Friday were all the department had, others are too busy lambasting the malicious clumsiness of the release.

Bulwark podcaster Tim Miller and Bulwark editor Sam Stein say the administration’s stuttered, idiotic drip of information was curated specifically to hurt certain people and protect others.

“They f—— up the redactions. Shocker. They did. Like, they left many victims' names on files and they scrambled to fix that. So, you know, this is not — these guys are just total clowns. They leaked stuff to try to hurt foes like Bill Gates immediately,” said Miller.

Above most things, Miller and Stein agreed the files prove that millionaires maintained correspondence with sex trafficker Jeffrey Epstein even after he was convicted of fraternizing with minors. There are also at least seven tips in the files involving accusations against Donald Trump, including a tip that an underage girl bit Trump while being "forced" to perform oral sex on him and got “hit in the face.”

“It's disgusting. A lot of this s—— is gross. The big takeaway is that indeed there were a lot of rich, well-connected people who were hobnobbing with this dude who you know played footsie with him. Some clearly wanted to go to his island. Some did go to the island. And then they all f—— lied about it,” said Miller. “I mean, the people who were most adamant that this was a grotesque cabal of people hanging out with Jeffrey Epstein, they probably were hanging out with Jeffrey Epstein.”

“Some of these characters … spent the last couple of years being like, “Ugh! Ugh! This guy is the worst, and I knew it! He's grotesque, and anyone who cavorted with him should be in jail!’ And then it turns out they were emailing the guy and doing fundraisers with the guy and hanging out with the guy,” agreed Stein, who then rolled footage of former U.S. Secretary Howard Lutnick telling the New York Post that “I will never be in the room with that disgusting person ever again.”

“I was never in the room with [Epstein] socially, for business, or even philanthropy,” said Lutnich, who was appointed by President Donald Trump in his first term. “If that guy was there, I wasn't going because he's gross.”

“Now, let's put up his email … ,” said Stein, referring to Lutnick’s correspondence with Epstein after his 2008 conviction for abusing underage women.

“We're landing in St. Thomas early Saturday afternoon and planning to head over to St. Bart on Monday at some point,” Lutnick announced in a post-conviction email to Epstein. “Where are you located? What's the exact locator for my captain? Does Sunday evening for dinner sound good?”

Lutnick went on tell Epstein that “I have another couple with me on my boat, and each of us have four children: Two 16s, two 14s, a 13, 12, 11, and a 7-year-old.”

The Trump administration’s Friday release of files reveal Epstein responding to Lutnick, saying: “Come Saturday or Sunday lunch. Little St. James on the map behind Christmas Cove.”

“So, no. Apparently no problems talking with Howard and organizing lunches with Jeffrey Epstein,” Stein quipped.

“Why would you want to bring a child to Epstein Island?” Miller added, aghast.

The two then lauded emails from other wealthy elites, including Elon Musk and Bill Gates, apparently seeking party time with Epstein, despite his conviction.

“He's already been to jail for sex trafficking of minors, right? It's like, what do you think you're signing up for when you ask for the wildest party on p—— island? It's pretty gross,” said Miller.

See the Bulwark podcast at this link.

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'Huge credibility deficit': Loyalty sinks another Trump foot soldier

The New York Times reports National Economic Council Director Kevin A. Hassett was seen as the front-runner in the race to replace fed chairman Jerome Powell, but the economist’s unflinching loyalty to President Donald Trump over economic truth became a liability with a market that relies on honest interpretation.

“[His] proximity [to Trump] ultimately morphed into his biggest liability, leaving Mr. Hassett on Friday to lose out on one of the most powerful roles overseeing the U.S. economy,” the Times reports. “In the end, Mr. Trump’s decision evinced both the risk and reward for an economist whose previous views had morphed in service of the White House and its economic agenda. The president did not want to lose one of his most forceful champions, whose full-throated advocacy had won deep praise from Mr. Trump but had fueled fears that Mr. Hassett could not guide monetary policy while resisting political influence.”

Sure enough, on Friday the Times reported Hassett set about reprising “his role of loyal foot soldier.”

“He predicted that the president’s recent tax cuts and other policies would lead to a surge in growth this year. He briefly teased what might yet be ‘possible tax legislation’ to come, though he did not elaborate. And he heralded a coming investment boom in the United States, echoing his past defense of the president’s trade policies,” the Times said.

Congress granted the Fed the autonomy to ensure its officials “set interest rates in pursuit of low, stable inflation and a healthy labor market, rather than in a bid to benefit the president or cater to the whims of electoral politics,” said the Times, but Trump has harassed, threatened and cajoled the fed to lower interest rates at least three points, “far lower than what many economists believe is appropriate.”

Hassett, formerly seen as a reliable wonk for the numbers, instead shared his boss’ criticism of the Fed and its policies under Powell, nailing down once and for all financial critics’ anxiety about his independence.

“It’s one thing when it comes out of Donald Trump’s mouth, but when it comes out of a trained economist who knows better, it’s very, very disconcerting,” said Alan S. Blinder, who served as vice chair at the Fed in the 1990s. “There’s a huge credibility deficit.”

In January, the Times reported Hassett appeared to be the front-runner to lead the Fed, but Trump’s latest slew of attacks on the fed, including an investigation Trump launched against Powell with the help of his politicized justice department, shook markets. This prompted a quick pivot by the White House to a preference for a slightly more independent-minded Fed nominee. Of course, even Trump’s newest preference, Kevin M. Warsh, is the son of a Trump donor, so ‘independence’ is still not a given.

Read the New York Times report at this link.

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GOP-appointed judge smacks down Trump admin for hiding government spending: report

Law & Crime reports a federal judge called out President Donald Trump's administration for violating a court order demanding access to hidden spending plans.

In win for transparency groups, U.S. District Judge Emmet G. Sullivan, first appointed by President Ronald Reagan and later by Presidents George H.W. Bush and Clinton, had to school the Trump administration over what it could and could not hide from the public.

Last year, Sullivan ordered the administration to "stop violating the law" and restore public access to the "Public Apportionment Database," which Office of Management and Budget (OMB) Director Russ Vought ordered removed last March.

At the judge’s order, the database was back online by last August, but plaintiffs noticed documents in the database contained references to an "undisclosed spend plan," according to an eight-page motion to enforce filed last September. Access to the information in the footnotes, they argued, is just as legally binding as the original document the judge ordered released.

Law & Crime reports Sullivan had to give the Trump administration a crash course in “remedial legal education” by citing from Black's Law Dictionary to explain why the protesting administration had to cough up the info. The source of a “legally binding footnote,” the judge concluded, must be disclosed.

But it turns out that the Trump administration — much like President Donald Trump himself — can’t seem to keep the name of former president Joe Biden out of its mouth. While Trump is more than happy to keep blaming Biden for the Trump economy, Middle East instability and the Russian invasion of Ukraine, he has also leaned on Biden for excuses. In the case of the OMB redactions, his administration essentially argued that Biden was guilty of doing the same thing.

“The government, for its part, claimed that the Biden administration similarly did not provide access to such spending plans,” Law & Crime reports, but Sullivan agreed with plaintiffs that the Biden administration's database documents "rarely" even contained such references.

“The court rejected the argument about the Biden precedent out of hand. In turn, the court also rejected a related defense claim that the plaintiffs waived their argument because the Biden administration established the practice of referencing undisclosed spend plans,” Law & Crime reported.

“[B]ecause Defendants illegally removed the database, Plaintiffs could not have known that OMB is now with significantly greater frequency incorporating spend plans by reference into apportionment documents," Sullivan said. "Plaintiffs have not waived this argument because until the illegally removed database was restored, Plaintiffs could not have known that documents 'required to be disclosed by the 2022 and 2023 Acts' were missing."

The decision counts as a win for the open records advocate Protect Democracy Project, who sued the OMB over the hidden spending plan.

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Trump loses in court again after judge blocks attempt to restrict voting

The Atlanta Journal Constitution reports a federal judge on Friday blocked federal agencies from requesting citizenship status when distributing voter registration forms. The decision amounts to the latest derailment of President Donald Trump’s far-reaching executive order seeking to change the face of voting in national elections.

U.S. District Judge Colleen Kollar-Kotelly (an appointee of former President Bill Clinton) ruled that the Constitution's separation of powers give states authority over setting election rules, with some input from Congress — not the White House.

“… [O]ur Constitution does not allow the President to impose unilateral changes to federal election procedures,” wrote the judge, who permanently blocked two provisions of Trump’s executive order seeking to demand new voting requirements above those already set by states.

Her decision means agencies are not allowed to "assess citizenship” before providing a federal voter registration form to people enrolling in public assistance programs. She also mandated that the Secretary of Defense cannot require documentary proof of citizenship when military personnel register to vote or request ballots.

The White House sought to impose new rules in the name of “election security,” but voting rights advocates argue the rules were one more onerous requirement standing in the way of U.S. citizens exercising their Constitutional right to vote without harassment.

“Our democracy works best when all Americans can participate, including members of our military and their families living overseas,” said Danielle Lang, a voting rights expert with the Campaign Legal Center, which is representing plaintiffs in the case. “Today’s ruling removes a very real threat to the freedom to vote for overseas military families and upholds the separation of powers.”

White House spokeswoman Abigail Jackson claimed the judge's decision makes it easier for noncitizens to vote, despite research, “even among Republican state officials, has shown voting by noncitizens is a rare problem,” reports the Associated Press.

Jackson vowed the Friday decision is “not the final say on the matter” and that the administration “looks forward to ultimate victory on the issue.” However, the same executive order faces challenges on multiple fronts.

“Separate lawsuits by Democratic state attorneys general and by Oregon and Washington, which rely heavily on mailed ballots, have blocked various portions of Trump's order.

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Deep red state on the hook for more than $163 million — thanks to Trump

Mississippi may soon face a ‘huge gap’ in disaster recovery funding when the Trump administration follows through with its plan to raise the threshold for public assistance.

Mississippi Today reports the administration of President Donald Trump’s is proposing raising the threshold a state’s damages have to reach to qualify for public assistance funds for road, bridge and government building repairs after a disaster.

State emergency officials saw the numbers rolling down from the federal level and alerted Mississippi lawmakers, warning them that had Trump’s cuts already been in effect, the state would have missed out on federal support for 18 of the last 28 declared disasters, causing an estimated loss of $163 million.

In its hurry to eviscerate federal programs, Trump officials proposed quadrupling Mississippi’s public assistance threshold from $5.5 million to $22 million. Of course, upping the threshold that severely makes it much harder for the impoverished Republican-majority state to qualify for federal help — which already only kicks in when a state cannot afford the costs of recovering from a disaster by itself.

“If that does get increased, which we are expecting to happen, there will be a huge gap between what MEMA (Mississippi Emergency Management Agency) can do to assist the citizens of this state,” MEMA’s Chief of Staff Crystal Thompson told lawmakers.

With Trump pulling financial support, the agency is already proposing legislation to fill the void. Two proposals would create state managed versions of FEMA’s Public Assistance and Individual Assistance programs. The bills, one authored by Rep. Clay Deweese (R-Oxford) and Sen. Josh Harkins (R-Flowood) do not set aside a specific budget for filling the budget hole Trump left, however.

“What we’re doing with that legislation is simply a preparation mechanism. It puts something in place so that, if the Legislature has to come back into session to fund it, we have a plan in place to where we can assist the locals,” Thompson told Mississippi Today.

Thanks to steep cuts in government jobs and rampant privatization by anti-government lawmakers, Mississippi is already having to consider investing $1 billion to shore up its hollowed out, publicly-funded retirement plan. But now, even as legislators ponder where to find an extra $160 million for emergency repairs, Mississippi Today reports lawmakers are having to deal with Trump freezing a 2025 Emergency Management Performance Grant. That freeze is forcing administrators to request an additional $2.7 million from the state Legislature.

“(The counties) need this money,” Thompson told the room of senators.

Read the Mississippi Today report at this link.

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Melania Trump exchanged affectionate emails with chief Epstein accomplice

The New York Daily News is reporting on new “gushing” emails from the latest trove of documents from the Epstein files, showing First Lady Melania Trump with an apparently strong relationship with convicted sex trafficker Ghislaine Maxwell (who was convicted for procuring victims for Jeffrey Epstein) two years before Melania married now-President Donald Trump.

“Dear G! How are you?” Melania asked in one email to Maxwell, dated October 2002. “Nice story about JE in NY mag. You look great in the picture.”

“In her email, Melania expressed excitement about visiting Maxwell in Palm Beach and tried to make arrangements to meet up with her as soon as she was back in New York City,” the Daily News reports. “Trump and Epstein owned property in both cities.”

“I’ve known Jeff for 15 years. Terrific guy,” Trump boasted in a New York Magazine story about Epstein that ran in 2002, according to the Daily News. “He’s a lot of fun to be with. It is even said that he likes beautiful women as much as I do, and many of them are on the younger side.”

The Daily News reports Maxwell responded to her correspondence by calling Melania “Sweet pea,” and sharing that a change in plans would have her back in New York for only a short time.

“I leave again on Fri so I still do not think I have time to see you sadly,” Maxwell replied. “I will try and call though.”

The Daily News reports the emails “appear to be the first written communications between Maxwell and the future first lady, who was then still known as Melania Knauss. However, the pair were known to spend together alongside Trump and Epstein, and were photographed with the men around that same time.”

The Daily News went on to report that Trump biographer Michael Wolff alleged in 2024 that Trump and Melania first had sex on Epstein’s private plane. Wolff claims Melania threatened a lawsuit, but Wolff filed his own suit and hopes to formally question the first lady.

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Trump admin fired Atlanta FBI chief for 'refusal to carry out' election raid: report

MS NOW Justice and Intelligence correspondent Ken Dilanian is now reporting that President Donald Trump administration’s seizure of Fulton County, Georgia election records may be either more flimsy or more political than proclaimed.

“Two people familiar with [the] matter tell MS NOW News that the special agent in charge of the FBI’s Atlanta Field office, Paul Brown, was forced out of that job earlier this month over his qualms about, and refusal to carry out, the searches and seizures of the Fulton County ballots,” Dilanian announced on X.

On Wednesday, members of the FBI raided the Fulton County Election Hub and Operation Center, carrying away records from an election that happened five years ago, which President Donald Trump lost to former President Joe Biden. That loss was one of the few national elections in modern history where a Democrat beat a Republican in the formerly deep-red state of Georgia.

Several opinions on the matter argue that the actual case for Donald Trump’s loss five years ago is a flimsy argument for the administration to make. Speculation suggests the raid could be the work of Trump’s politicized FBI laboring to make the president feel better about losing the election. Other opinions argue that the administration is chasing ulterior motives for taking the information and trying to build a case, no matter how weak.

Georgia attorney Michael J. Moore characterized the Wednesday raid as “an effort by the federal government to control elections,” saying “that's been a goal of this administration for some time.”

The statute of limitations for federal crimes is typically about five years, he added, saying the time to investigate the suspicion of election fraud theft had expired.

Atlanta Journal Constitution Senior Political columnist Patricia Murphy, meanwhile, agreed that the raid “is about the next elections — who will control them in Fulton County in 2026 and who will run them in Georgia two years after that when the 2028 presidential election takes place.”

Elections in Georgia’s extremely blue Fulton County are currently handled by the Fulton County Election Board, but Republican state lawmakers passed a new voting law that gives the Republican-dominated Georgia State Election Board the power to replace any so-called “underperforming” county election board. Replacement is possible in the event of an audit or investigation.

As a side note, the State Election Board “now includes three Republican members whom Trump infamously singled out in 2024 as ‘pit bulls fighting for honesty, transparency and victory.’” Murphy said. And two of the so-called “pit bulls” were onsite with the FBI in Union City during the Wednesday raid, Murphy added.

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Trump 'learning the hard way' that his smears no longer work: conservative

Conservative columnist Michael Warren says President Donald Trump has one response to most things that bother him, but it’s not saving him this time.

“The Trump administration may be learning the hard way that its de facto policy of shooting your mouth off first and asking investigatory questions later is providing diminishing returns,” Warren said in the Dispatch. “Tricia McLaughlin, the ubiquitous spokeswoman for the Department of Homeland Security, is a case in point.”

Even Fox Business anchors are asking McLaughlin if the Trump administration is sticking with its off-the-cuff description of Homeland Security shooting victim Alex Pretti as a “domestic terrorist.” White House advisor Stephen Miller similarly slimed Pretti as an “assassin” in two posts, one of which was reposted by Vice President JD Vance. The commander-at-large of the Border Patrol even claimed Pretti was an individual seeking to “do maximum damage and massacre law enforcement.” An official DHS statement from Saturday repeated the same phrase.

But then came a slew of public footage presenting what appears to be an execution-style shooting of a U.S. citizen in the back. Now, suddenly, Trump is having to walk back his administration’s claims “… hey, look, bottom line: Everybody in this room, we view that as a very unfortunate incident.”

After being confronted on Fox, Warren points out that McLaughlin refused to embrace the administration’s initial “terrorist” label for Pretti, and instead blamed her administration’s vicious, false labels on “reports from CBP on the ground” and the “chaotic scene.” Just to make sure, the FOX entertainer again gave McLaughlin a chance to embrace the label, and she refused.

The Trump administration is late the party on this realization, said Warren, but there’s a reason “it’s standard protocol for all law enforcement agencies to decline to speak about ongoing investigations, even if it is often a convenient excuse for public officials to avoid commenting on controversial incidents.”

But the Pretti situation is hardly the only recent law enforcement-related controversy in which officials have needed reminders about this basic concept, said Warren. When Minneapolis police initially described the death of George Floyd as a “medical incident,” on-the-scene footage soon painted police as liars. The same can be said for favorable claims Texas administrators made about the May 2022 Uvalde, Texas school shooting — before footage revealed officers to be cowering outside a classroom while the shooter picked off one child after another. It did not help that Texas Gov. Greg Abbott (R) initially praised law enforcement’s bravery.

“These sorts of misstatements and incomplete accounts are embarrassing, frustrating, and detrimental to public trust. But what makes the Trump administration’s own premature responses to last week’s shooting in Minneapolis so particularly galling is the brazen dishonesty,” said Warren. “Officials like Noem and Miller made their false assessments about Alex Pretti not with bad information or poor judgment of initial facts but as part of an irresponsible public-relations effort to shape the narrative.”

Warren said the administration is now quietly walking back its aggressive lies with the removal of officers in charge at the time of the Pretti killing, but argued this does not mean Trump is capable of learning and adapting.

“[This] is a tacit acknowledgment that this was a screw-up. But will anyone in the Trump administration learn the lesson?” Warren asked.

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Deep red state discovers new $200 million annual bill — courtesy of Trump

Alabama Media Group reports state legislators are discovering a nasty new bill courtesy of President Donald Trump’s “Big Beautiful Bill” this week as the Alabama legislative session is underway.

“It’s a matter of what can we do or should we do - or is there anything that can be (done) to prevent running into that $200 million wall?” said state Sen. Greg Albritton, R-Atmore, chairman of the Senate’s general fund committee. “And right now I think that train’s got the light on headed straight for us.”

Trump and Republicans designed the Big Beautiful bill to pass federal social safety net costs down to states — even those with a Republican majority. Now those costs are coming home to roost as lawmakers are discovering the GOP law cuts federal funding for the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, which serves about 750,000 Alabamians.

“That means the state is going to have to pay more of the cost — as much as about $200 million a year starting in 2028,” reports AL.com.

Republicans in the U.S. House and Senate fashioned Trump’s bill with a difficult bar to leap in the name of fairness, but low-income red states like Alabama and Mississippi with middling state government investment will have a difficult time meeting that bar. The state could avoid much of the increased burden if it can some lower its error rate in the SNAP program below a 6 percent target.

The state’s current error rate is about 9 percent, according to Alabama Department of Human Resources Commissioner Nancy Buckner.

Republican state lawmakers likely did not welcome the news from Buckner on Thursday when she informed them that many of those errors are difficult for DHR to control. These include incidents when there is a change in the household of a person receiving SNAP that affects their eligibility. or the amount of their monthly benefit, or when there is a delay in adjusting the benefit.

Errors made by clients count toward the rate, as well as errors made by the agency, AL.com reports.

Until the Big Beautiful Bill, the federal government paid the full cost of SNAP benefits and 50 percent of administrative costs. But, in order to fund the permanent extension of the Trump tax cuts, states will pay 75 percent of administrative costs starting in 2027. The biggest change comes in 2028, officials say states will also have to pay a portion of SNAP benefits for the first time.

AL.com added that Alabama’s error rate was 8.32 percent in fiscal year 2024 is actually the lowest of eight southeastern states for the third straight year—meaning states like Mississippi and other deep red Southern states are about to catch it.

Read the AL.com report at this link.

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US dollar won’t stop sinking under Trump assault: report

CBS News reports that unlike the luckier U.S. stock market, the U.S. dollar is “sinking fast.”

“The value of the greenback just hit a four-year low … against a basket of six other major currencies,” reports CBS, citing info from the ICE U.S. Dollar Index. “While much of the decline has occurred over the past year, the dollar has slid more than 3 percent since mid-January, according to the index.”

The devaluing U.S. dollar does more than make people's overseas vacations more expensive, said CBS. It also upsets financial markets and “makes it more expensive for American companies to import furniture, clothing and many other goods manufactured outside the U.S..” This adds to businesses’ already expanding costs amid the President Donald Trump’s far-reaching tariffs.

And of course, the slide has everything to do with Trump, say analysts. The decline coincides with a host of destabilizing forces, including Trump’s latest tariff threats against any nation that dares to sell oil to Cuba. Plus, a Trump-inspired longer-term trend is also in the works as investors shift out of the dollar and into assets such as gold, according to JPMorgan Chase. It does not help that Trump, who is not an economist, actually wants the dollar devalued, allegedly to better compete with international economies with pit-deep currencies.

At a Jan. 27 Iowa appearance, Trump was asked if the dollar had plummeted too far, and responded: "No, I think it's great. The value of the dollar — look at the business we're doing."

That statement was in direct contradiction to his own Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent, who claimed in a Jan. 28 CNBC interview that the U.S. government continues to want a "strong dollar."

The dollar took its cue from Trump rather than Bessent, continuing to sink after he declared war on its and dropping nearly 1 percent as the president fueled speculation among investors, who diverted investment into currencies whose respective countries actually desire a strong national currency.

Meanwhile, CBS reports Trump’s tariff continue to deliver their own destruction.

The dollar's most recent leg down is due to "Trump's promotion of tariff policy and pressure on the Fed to lower the key rate," Alex Kuptsikevich, FxPro chief market analyst, told CBS News. "Over the past couple of weeks, these factors have resurfaced due to a new round of tariff threats and Trump's comments that he feels comfortable with the dollar at its current level."

With Trump’s eager announcement of a new fed chair, CBS News reports investors now fear a new chair aligned with his views might give the dollar “even more room to fall.”

“Without adequate support from Treasury officials and the Fed, the U.S. currency could fall 7 percent to 8 percent in the coming months, returning to the lows of 2018 and 2021," Kuptsikevich said.

Read the CBS report at this link.

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Unrepentant MAGA influencer suddenly 'not political' after slew of club bans

The Miami New Times reports Miami venue moguls gave MAGA influencer Clavicular [Braden Peters] a dressing down after he and far-right “manosphere” influencers Andrew Tate, Nick Fuentes, Myron Gaines, and Sneako celebrated and sang Kanye West’s “Heil Hitler” at a Miami Beach club.

“They're not really going for subtlety here,” said Bulwark podcaster Tim Miller while reviewing the widely spread video of the event. “You can see, I think that's Gaines … just doing the full Nazi salute over and over again while they're videoing themselves [in a van]. Nick Fuentes is in the back looking a little uncomfortable and chuckling.”

Later the group took a table at a club, Vendôme, where they prodded the DJ to play more Kanye so they could do more Nazi salutes, sing and party.

After the video went live, Vendôme released a statement calling the video content and imagery “deeply offensive and unacceptable” and claiming “Vendôme and our hospitality group do not condone anti-Semitism, hate speech, or prejudice of any kind.”

“In the days following the incident, the 20-year-old ‘looksmaxxing’ influencer Clavicular, who frequently uses the N-word and wears a hat with the N-word written on it, said that he would not apologize for what he did,” reports the Times. “He maintained that ‘it’s just a song.’ A week ago, he streamed himself in his Sprinter van dancing to ‘Heil Hitler.’”

“You can ban me from clubs, you can s-—— talk me on Instagram, but I’m not sorry about any of it,” the Times reports Clavicular saying on a livestream. “Not at all. Not even a little bit. F——the clubs. I would rather have free speech and the ability to make jokes and do content a thousand times over rather than being a little b—— who you know has to censor himself and do all that sh—— because if that’s what’s required to go into these dogs hit Miami clubs, keep me the f—— out.”

“However, it appears the ongoing bans hit a breaking point for the 20-year-old influencer,” the Times reported. “As he continued having difficulty partying in Miami, Clavicular sat down with Grutman and Papi Steak owner David Einhorn earlier this week.”

On his Kick livestream on Tuesday, the Times reports Clavicular says he’s no longer doing politics.

“I just said, ‘Look, I’m not trying to do politics anymore, and I would never want to be associated with politics,” said Clavicular, recounting his conversation with Grutman. “… I was like, ‘ Yeah, bro, of course. I’m here to mog. I’m here to lookmaxx. I’m not political whatsoever.'”

He later posted a photo of himself sitting at a table with the club owners on Instagram with the caption: “No more politics, just mogging #kingsofmiami @davidgrutman @davideinhorn.”

There’s no telling whether the tension is gone, however, report the Times.

“He has yet to publicly apologize, only claiming that he is not political. Meanwhile, he continues to say the N-word,” the Times said.

Read the Miami New Times report at this link.

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Trump's base could threaten this organization's control over the GOP: analysis

MS NOW Columnist Philip Bump says the powerful Trump cult may accomplish something where countless others failed: reign in gun culture and the NRA.

It all began, he says, with a lie.

“As a presidential candidate, Donald Trump offered one particular promise repeatedly: He, not his Democratic opponents, would be a champion of gun rights,” said Bump. “So it was a bit jarring, then, when Trump suggested earlier this week that the death of Alex Pretti — shot to death in Minneapolis by Border Patrol agents — was somehow due to Pretti’s being armed.

“You can’t have guns. You can’t walk in with guns,” Trump said of Pretti’s legally-concealed weapon as he observed federal agents.“

If a Democrat had said it, woe unto them. But social media on Thursday was filled with Republican commenters saying Pretti essentially “had it coming,” and with mixed pushback from fellow MAGA conservatives.

Bump points out that firearm advocacy groups like long-term Trump allies the National Rifle Association, proffered a tepid response to his anti-gun statement, saying it believed “all law-abiding citizens have a right to keep and bear arms anywhere they have a legal right to be.”

“Is it possible we have moved past a historic peak in American gun culture? Maybe — but the conditions that exist now may not last forever,” said Bump, reporting “the once-feared” NRA was “very successful in leveraging the Obama presidency to suggest that gun ownership was under threat.”

But since NRA former leader Wayne LaPierre was accused of siphoning off NRA money for his own benefit, the organization lost about a fifth of its membership between 2019 and 2022, said Bump.

A site that covers gun violence in America now noted a downturn in gun sales at the beginning of last year, but Bump said trends suggest one of the drivers of gun ownership in the months after the pandemic was urban residents, including Democrats who live in cities.

“The interpretation of the Second Amendment that has driven conservative politics for decades is that it is necessary in order to hold government oppression at bay. But now a putatively conservative president suggests that gun rights don’t extend to his political opponents,” said Bump.

Read the MS NOW report at this link.

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'Conservative Hollywood' dream 'in ruins' as eight-figure show staggers out the door

In early 2020, Daily Wire CEO Jeremy Boreing found himself inspired by the eagerness with which the MAGA community devoured Daily Wire documentaries, and he decided to build a conservative Hollywood in Nashville, according to Bulwark Editor Will Sommer.

“Boreing’s pet project was a Game of Thrones–style take on the King Arthur legend, called The Pendragon Cycle: The Rise of Merlin. And, for a while, the right’s long-running dream of having more influence in entertainment seemed like it just might happen,” said Sommer.

But then the series caught the common Hollywood bugs of cost overruns and chaos and Boreing abruptly stepped down and vanished last March, according to Sommer. Then came the layoffs of Boreing’s entertainment division. “The dream of cool Hollywood conservatism,” said Sommer, “lay in ruins.”

But, lo and behold, the first two episodes of Boreing’s $14 million Pendragon project have finally broken ground. Or, maybe it cost $67 million, as podcaster Candace Owens claimed. Either way, the money just couldn’t buy a path out of mediocrity.

“Production-wise, Pendragon has the look of a quickly forgotten second-tier streaming show—which is . . . not bad, certainly when you consider where it’s coming from,” said Sommer. “Unfortunately for Boreing, he was and is no Ted Sarandos, the Netflix honcho hoovering up the competition. Instead, his dreams of bringing Pendragon to life appear to have deeply complicated his own career and the status of the Daily Wire itself. Investors in the conservative news site long ago began to wonder why they were paying so much to make a fantasy TV show when that money could have gone to, say, another dozen podcasts.”

In a “Deadline” interview, Boreing claimed the show cost “eight figures,” with “seven figures” spent on each of the seven episodes, said Sommer — which does not compare with the cheap, self-soothing schmear of Daily Wire’s 2024 documentary Am I Racist? costing just $3 million and then going on to “become the highest-grossing documentary of 2024.”

The problem for Pendragon is that Daily Wire’s audience prefers to buttress its beliefs with echo chamber documentaries, not wizards with arcane ties to Atlantis. It’s yet to be seen what kind of return all that money is going to bring, but Sommer notes that Boreing touched on his “apparently soured relationship” with Daily Wire founder Ben Shapiro in the “Deadline” interview.

“Either way, Boreing seems more focused on the world of movies now,” said Sommer. “He told Deadline he wants to launch ‘a conservative alternative to A24.’ He said Hollywood treats conservative viewers ‘as though they’re anathema. It takes them for granted.’”

“… [T]he sky’s the limit for Boreing’s conservative-film ambitions,” said Sommer, “as long as he is willing to cut the check this time.”

Read the Bulwark report at this link.

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Raid could hand Georgia's elections to Trump allies in 2026 — and 2028: analysis

Atlanta Journal Constitution Senior Political columnist Patricia Murphy said the Wednesday FBI raid at the Fulton County Election Hub and Operation Center was not about prosecuting President Donald Trump’s disproven claims of a stolen election in 2020 for the millionth time.

“Although the records they took were from the election five years ago, it’s important to understand that the raid in Fulton County is not really about the 2020 elections at all, which have long since come and gone,” said Murphy. “Instead, the raid is about the next elections — who will control them in Fulton County in 2026 and who will run them in Georgia two years after that when the 2028 presidential election takes place.”

Trump may croon that “people will soon be prosecuted” but Georgia Election Commissioner Robb Pitts said the ballots that agents seized were the same ones “counted, recounted, hand-counted, debated, litigated and fought over” after Trump’s 2020 election loss in Georgia.

“Despite every attempt by the president and his legal team to prove the election had been stolen from him at the time, every road led back to the same result — Trump lost and Joe Biden won,” said Murphy. “The … question at hand is who will oversee Fulton County elections in 2026.”

Currently, elections are run by the Fulton County Election Board. But Republicans in the General Assembly passed a massive new voting law that contained language giving the Georgia State Election Board the power to replace any so-called “underperforming” county election board, including Fulton County’s, with an interim leader of their choosing.

“Replacement could only happen after an audit or investigation, and the state board left Fulton’s elections in the hands of county officials in 2023 after it said the county had made “substantial improvements” to its processes during a performance review,” said Murphy.

However, Fulton County is a large, cosmopolitan and overwhelmingly blue region of an otherwise red state, so Republicans consider it a bad actor interfering with their plan for political dominance. It was just a few years ago that the county’s population singlehandedly handed Trump his nasty defeat, turning the Southern state of Georgia blue for President Joe Biden.

Trump was furious, and so were his Republican allies — who seized upon the county’s past record of long lines, late returns and slow bookkeeping, mostly due to its inordinately high population.

“On 2020, the president went further, claiming that Fulton County was a hotbed of so much nefarious activity and rampant fraud that it cost him the election, all accusations that his White House staff dismissed and multiple courts in Georgia threw out,” Murphy wrote.

She added that thanks to the work of the state’s majority Republican government the current majority on the State Election Board “now includes three Republican members whom Trump infamously singled out in 2024 as ‘pit bulls fighting for honesty, transparency and victory.’”

Two of the so-called “pit bulls” were actually with the FBI in Union City during the Wednesday raid, Murphy said.

“If this week’s raid produces enough of a pretext for the board to act in the future, the 2026 elections in Fulton County could be overseen by someone picked by the pro-Trump State Board, not by elected Fulton commissioners themselves,” Murphy warned.

Read the AJC report at this link.

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Why conservative Mormon women derailed Republicans in Utah

The Guardian reports it was largely the work of a hyper-conservative group of Mormon women who derailed Republican efforts to gerrymander a new Republican district in Utah this year.

The Pew Research Center reveals that Mormons, also known as members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, were among Trump’s strongest supporters in 2016, with about 61 percent of church members backing him, making the group his second-largest religious support base.

But in 2018, the Mormon Women for Ethical Government (MWEG) helped gather enough signatures to pass Utah’s Proposition 4, with 50.34 percent of the vote. This created an independent state commission to draw state and congressional maps using nonpartisan criteria, rather than let legislators cherry-pick their own voters.

But in 2020, state Republican lawmakers told MWEG to take a hike and repealed Proposition 4. Then they redrew maps that split Salt Lake County – Utah’s youngest, most diverse and bluest region – into four districts. This packed urban Democratic votes into red outlying regions and entrenched GOP dominance for the next election. The MWEG group sued their state government along, arguing that the Republican-led legislature violated the state constitution when it altered a legitimate voter-approved proposition.

“Last summer, the women’s groups won,” reports the Guardian. “Now state lawmakers must draw new maps that could pave the way for a Democratic congressional seat in the 2026 midterm elections.”

“I live in a district that’s likely going to become Democratic,” said MWEG Founder Emma Petty Addams. “I’ll lose a Republican representative I respect, and I’m 100 percent OK with that if it means my neighbors get representative government.”

Defying lawmakers was not easy, said Addams, a mother of three and a piano teacher. But the legal battle was necessary to deal with “an overreach of power” that Utah voters opted to protect with “guardrails”.

“People want to see Mormon women as either the secret wives or as a trad wife,” Addams said. “We’re neither of those.”

The organization’s is already saddling up for its next fight, however, as the Utah Republican Party pushes to repeal Proposition 4. In an effort to gerrymander Utah to protect Trump’s narrow House GOP majority, the party is seeking 141,000 signatures by February to place the repeal on the November ballot.

Trump posted on Truth Social, urging Utah residents to repeal the proposition and let politicians pick their own voters. This follow his nationwide effort to restructure districts to enshrine his majority for the foreseeable future — some with more success than others.

“Organizers had gathered around 56,000 signatures as of 26 January,” reports the Guardian. “The Utah Republican party did not respond to a request for comment about its repeal efforts.”

Read the Guardian report at this link

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Trump policy just killed 800 Home Depot jobs in red state: report

Home Depot in Georgia announced it is eliminating about 800 corporate jobs in Cobb County, which could prove a problem for President Donald Trump’s plans for the state in upcoming midterm and the subsequent national elections.

The company announced its cuts primarily due to “a slow housing market and increased consumer uncertainty,” according to the Atlanta Journal-Constitution.

“Many of the affected employees are in technology positions and were working in remote or hybrid roles, Home Depot spokesperson Sara Gorman told AJC. “Some affected employees work in other roles across the Store Support Center, what Home Depot calls its headquarters.

The Atlanta Journal-Constitution reports the company’s cuts come as Amazon announced its own plans to kill 14,000 corporate jobs and as a Sandy Springs, GA.-based UPS announced it was cutting 30,000 positions this year.

Home Depot reported in August that customers were shying away from large home improvement projects because of high interest rates. At that time, it also noted “modest price movement” on certain goods caused by tariffs instituted by President Donald Trump.

“We continue to see softer engagement in larger discretionary projects, where customers typically use financing to fund renovation projects, during the third quarter,” Billy Bastek, Home Depot’s executive vice president of merchandising, said on a call last November.

“Housing has been soft for some time,” said Home Depot chair, president and CEO Ted Decker late last year. “We all know higher interest rates and affordability concerns, but what we’re seeing now is even less turnover. The housing activity is truly at 40-year lows.”

At the time, Decker said the company was predicting a $50 billion drop in repair and remodel activity, and that consumers were feeling “concerned about living costs and job stability.”

Home Depot said its net income dipped to $3.6 billion during the third quarter of last year under Trump, down 1.3 percent from the same period last year, under former president Joe Biden.

The layoffs are terrible timing for President Donald Trump, who is currently visiting red states across the nation to sell his alleged vigorous economy. A slew of polls reveals, however, that U.S. voters are not feeling the economy that Trump describes.

Republicans, in fact, are panicking at voter discontent in the months leading up to the 2026 midterms. The state of Georgia, which was once reliably red, is already becoming more blue as the population grows more cosmopolitan, and voted for former president Joe Biden over Trump after his first term.

Read the Atlanta Journal-Constitution report at this link.

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Former Trump aide angry extremist officials are speaking for federal workers

Former Trump Department of Homeland Security Chief of Staff Miles Taylor said he is furious that ‘wannabe school shooters’ in high positions in the administration of President Donald Trump are hijacking government social media and demeaning “decent” employees who work for the federal government.

The New York Times reported on Tuesday that high-ranking Trump officials have posted on social media references to “neo-Nazi literature, ethnic cleansing and QAnon conspiracies.” They’ve also “mused about deporting nearly a third of the U.S. population, and promoted lyrics from an anthem bellowed by the far-right militants of the Proud Boys,” according to the Times.

“I'm sitting here kind of on the edge of my seat because just hearing you go through that really pisses me off, because there's a lot of good people that work in [government] and want to do the right thing, and they have been by these people who sound a lot more like wannabe school shooters than they do public servants.”

“You look at the rhetoric out of people who [President] Donald Trump has appointed in his second term,” Taylor told MS NOW anchor Nicole Wallace. “You see folks who've offered praise for Adolf Hitler. You've seen folks who've said they're ‘a little bit of a nazi’ and who've been kept inside this administration, people who have been kept in jobs carrying out the work of the American people. I don't think as taxpayers, we want to fund wannabe nazis to run these agencies.”

Davis said this was no longer a matter of one or two embarrassing individuals fouling the water for the rest of employees.

“This isn't some coincidence,” said Davis. “You cannot possibly be a Republican and say, ‘this is just a couple of bad apples.’ This is a whole tree. The whole tree is rotten from the core, all the way out to every single one of those branches. And that tone is being set by the top. It starts with Donald Trump saying Somalis are garbage and then sending 3,000 troops into that state.”

- YouTube youtu.be

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Supreme Court to hear arguments to overturn E. Jean Carroll's verdict against Trump

The Hill reports The Supreme Court has scheduled President Donald Trump’s petition seeking review of the jury verdict finding him liable for sexually abusing writer E. Jean Carroll.

The court’s conservative majority blew off Carroll’s recent request opposing Trump’s motion to overturn a verdict that ordered Trump to pay Carroll $88.3 million in damages. That amount, in turn, stems from a $5 million judgment handed down in 2023 for sexual abuse, plus an additional $83.3 million for defamation.

At the closed-door conference, the justices will now consider taking up Trump’s bid to throw out the verdict alongside dozens of other petitions that have recently reached the high court.

“A federal jury in New York found Trump liable in 2023 for sexually abusing Carroll in a Manhattan department store dressing room in the mid-1990s and defaming her by denying her story when she came forward during Trump’s first presidency,” reports The Hill. “… Trump has maintained he didn’t assault Carroll. His appeal revolves around the evidence the jury saw — and didn’t see — during the civil trial.”

In a Ja. Filing, Carroll’s attorneys argued that Trump seeks to litigate evidentiary issues yet again, but fails to challenge a lower court’s conclusion that Trump failed to show that any error affected his rights. Carroll points out that The Second Circuit court has “already correctly held” that the original court properly considered all evidence before a jury found Trump’s claims questionable.

But Trump’s lawyers want arguments from other women claiming similar sexual-style assault from Trump as well as recorded evidence of sexual assault behavior depicted in the controversial “Access Hollywood Tape” excluded from case argument.

But Trump wants this evidence, including the Access Hollywood Tapes containing Trump’s stated love of grabbing women by their privates, as bounds for canceling the New York jury’s conclusion about Trump.

Trump, however, argues that the jury’s decision is “deeply damaging to the fabric of our Republic.”

“This mistreatment of a President cannot be allowed to stand,” Trump wrote in their final brief, submitted Wednesday.

The Hill reports the Supreme Court could make an announcement “as soon as that day or in an order list set to be released the following Monday morning.” The justices “could also punt an announcement to their next conference.”

Read the Hill report at this link.

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Indictments coming for federal agents in Minneapolis killings: expert

Philadelphia District Attorney Larry Krasner tells the Washington Monthly that there’s plenty of evidence to put before a grand jury regarding the Minneapolis killings.

“Despite the limited information available, the video is very damning. And the apparent cover-up by the feds cannot erase that video,” said Krasner, who was impeached by the Republican-controlled Pennsylvania House of Representatives in 2021 over his progressive criminal justice policies and as a backlash to racial unrest following the murder of George Floyd. Krasner was soon re-elected with more than 70 percent of the vote.

“Any great prosecutor, which [Hennepin County Attorney] Mary Moriarty is, wants all the facts. I have no doubt she is trying hard to get all the facts. … But the outrage over what was done to Alex Pretti says a lot about what a jury would do,” Krasner said.

Krasner added that he would not hesitate to bring charges were he in Moriarty’s position, with access to the same evidence Moriarty has. Moreover, he said Moriarty has nothing to fear in bringing charges against federal officials for their role in the shooting death of two Minneapolis residents.

“[Moriarty] has been maligned, abused, and mistreated by the right, and she’s not running again,” said Krasner. “Not running again is often good news when you want a prosecutor who’s going to do something difficult, because politics enter into it less. … There is enough information in the publicly available video to establish probable cause, bring the case, and present it to a jury.”

Unique in this prosecutorial situation, however, is the fact that the federal government is a hostile party to the indictment, despite federal actions overwhelmingly playing a part in the death of its own citizens. Prosecutors rarely have to ask how hard it will be to get a writ of mandamus from a court order compelling DHS to turn over evidence.

“One of the challenges here is that this is relatively uncharted territory,” said Krasner. “Usually, the federal government reins in unruly local law enforcement. Here, the script is flipped. There isn’t a lot of precedent, and it will matter a great deal which judge is assigned.”

But Krasner said it likely won’t be hard to find a fair judge in Minnesota who’s not trying to cover the federal government’s backside. Helping matters is the Tenth Amendment, which projects a strong state interest in prosecuting crimes that occur within a state’s jurisdiction.

But expect the federal government to lie, and lie a lot, warned Krasner.

“We’ve already seen one lie after another from federal authorities. Even Trump stated that this federal officer was ‘rammed’ by a vehicle. That appears to be false,” said Krasner. “There’s a real possibility that if you dig into the paperwork, you’ll find ICE agents or officials lying. Those are crimes under state law in almost every jurisdiction. You can’t lie to the police, even if you are the police. You can’t lie to law enforcement.”

That brings up the inevitable possibility of an additional set of charges and criminal liability for hiding information. And despite the administration’s claims, qualified immunity is not a thing.

Another tidbit of information: Any convictions arising of this particular prosecution qualify as state crimes.

“The president cannot pardon state crimes,” Krasner said.

Read the Washington Monthly report at this link.

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Trump 'desperately grasping for control' as lackeys dish on his health: report

Earlier this week, New York Magazine published Ben Terris’s investigation into the issue of President Donald Trump’s health. Intelligencer writer Benjamin Hart points out that Trump has not tried to sue the paper over the story, so he must be happy with the report.

But Hart finds what’s also important about the president’s clearly deteriorating health is the political and media infrastructure that has grown up around his failing health to hide and normalize it.

“It’s a bunch of his lackeys sucking up to him in print talking about how he’s so powerful and so superhuman that they can’t even keep up with him,” Terris told Benjamin in an interview. “… I think he infected the administration. There’s this kind of brain worm that everybody seems to have, where they can’t help [but] debase themselves when talking about how powerful and awesome their boss is and how they are just mere mortals by his side who can’t keep up with him. So as much as it’s a story about his health, it’s also about how he runs a government, how he’s desperately grasping for control.”

“We can all see with our own eyes that he seems to fall asleep in meetings, that his ankles have swollen, that he’s got this bruise on the back of his hand,” Terris added. “He’s not exactly the pinnacle of health. You don’t have to prove that, because it’s proven out there. And then to have these people say ‘Don’t believe what you see with your own eyes’ is itself a story.”

Terris said Trump’s co-workers also know that the best way to “appease Dear Leader” is to exaggerate his vigor.

“There’s no penalty in Trump’s administration for praising him too much,” said Terris. “There is probably a penalty for making him seem human when he wants to be seen as superhuman. And so my guess is the people that I talk to believe that Trump is healthy and has great energy and is hard to keep up with, and then they use language that is Trumpian because that’s the best way to survive in Trump’s administration.”

But what shakes Terris to his foundation and makes him worry about U.S. democracy is the extreme to which even medical professionals are taking the act.

“The problem with this administration is they’ve created a world in which people that you’re supposed to be able to trust, you just can’t fully take it at face value,” Terris told Benjamin. “It used to be that if a doctor from Walter Reed told you something, you’d be like, ‘Yep, that sounds right.’ And it used to be that if the Secretary of State told you something about the health of the president, you’d be like, ‘Yeah, that’s probably right. He’s a serious man.’ But we are now in a world where you don’t know what you can believe anymore. They’ve created this … fictionalized version of [Trump] that’s so absurd that you know you can’t believe all of it, but you don’t know how much of it you can believe.”

The fact of the matter is that Trump, at 79, is looking old, said Benjamin. The large bruise on his hand looks old. His constant napping during Cabinet meetings look old. His increasingly slurred and meandering speech before millions of viewers is the epitome of fading Grampa.

Yet, “it’s very North Korean or Russian, the way his advisers praise him,” said Benjamin.

Read the Intelligencer report at this link.

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Leaked DHS document debunks Trump admin's key defense of Alex Pretti shooting

Department of Homeland Security (DHS) Secretary Kristi Noem’s own agency conducted a review that jettisoned her quick interpretation of slain Minneapolis resident and U.S. citizen Alex Pretti as a man who was “brandishing” a gun.

The New York Times reported Tuesday that it obtained an internal review conducted by the U.S. Customs and Border Protection Office of Professional Responsibility, that made no mention of the DHS' earlier claims that Pretti “wanted to do maximum damage and massacre law enforcement.”

“These notifications reflect standard Customs and Border Protection protocol and are issued in accordance with existing procedures,” a C.B.P. spokesperson told the Times in a statement. “They provide an initial outline of an event that took place and do not convey any definitive conclusion or investigative findings. They are factual reports — not analytical judgments — and are provided to inform Congress and to promote transparency.”

According to review conclusions, at approximately 9 AM on Saturday, a federal officer was confronted by two women blowing whistles. The women did not move, despite the officer ordering them to move out of the road, say investigators.

“The officer then ‘pushed them both away,’ and one of the women ran to Mr. Pretti," the Times reports. “After the officer attempted to move them out of the road and they did not move, the officer deployed pepper spray at them, according to the review.”

The investigation reports Pretti resisted attempts by C.B.P. officers to take him into custody, prompting a struggle, according to the review. A Border Patrol agent multiple times yelled, “He’s got a gun!”

“About five seconds later, a Border Patrol agent fired his Glock 19, and a C.B.P. officer also fired his Glock 47 at Mr. Pretti, according to the review,” says the Times, adding that its own analysis of video footage from the scene found officers had fired 10 shots, including six after Pretti was “laying motionless on the ground” from his first shot.

But Pretti had been disarmed before he was shot.

President Donald Trump faulted Pretti on Tuesday bringing a gun to a protest, but he has since removed the commander in charge of the Minneapolis operation, after gun rights enthusiasts in his own party went on the attack.

Read the New York Times report at this link.

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Republicans 'begging the president to shut up' about key issue: conservative

One prominent conservative commentator is saying that President Donald Trump's latest comments about 37 year-old Alex Pretti — the U.S. citizen and lawful gun owner who was shot dead by federal agents in Minneapolis, Minnesota – are striking a nerve with members of his own party.

In a Tuesday segment on CNN's "OutFront," radio host Erick Erickson (the founder of conservative website RedState) told host Erin Burnett that the administration's handling of the latest shooting in Minneapolis has "blown up in their faces" in more ways than one.

[Border Patrol Commander Greg] Bovino is going to be the Icarus who flew too close to the sun. He's the one who's going to take the fall for this,” Erickson said. "… Miller elevated Bovino, even above his boss at Customs and Border Protection, to be able to do this because they liked his hardline approach. They liked the images of the arrests. They thought it would placate the president in the base, and now it's blown up in their faces with the death of Alex Pretti because [of conservatives’] reaction both on Pretti’s gun ownership and the way [Miller] defined a dead man. It's not working for the president. He had to make the pivot back and re-empower Tom Homan, who Kristi Noem had tried to sideline.”

Miller, said Erickson, was not “going to be a sacrificial lamb,” because Trump “values his counsel.”

“I think they're not going to fire [Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem] and give a scalp to their opposition, but they'll make her disappear. You're not going to see her regularly, much like they've done to Tulsi Gabbard," he said. "She won't be someone they rely on for advice. Tom Homan, the border czar, will be really empowered.”

Burnett pointed out that “five times today” Trump managed to say something contrary to the Second Amendment, and asked Erickson how this was playing out with his base.

“Look, here's the problem: Environmentalists, abortion advocates and guns have constituencies that are single issue voters. And the Republicans have the Second Amendment group in lockstep with them,” said Erickson. “They need them to turn out in November. They tend to turn out for Republicans in midterm elections. They may not when they have this administration—including the president — badmouthing the Second Amendment.”

“I'm in group chats with conservative groups today just begging the president to shut up on this issue and move on,” Erickson added.

- YouTube youtu.be

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Trump 'in full retreat' and GOP 'running for political cover' over Minneapolis: analysis

MS NOW columnist Michael A. Cohen said one year into his second term President Donald Trump has finally managed to make some of his fellow Republicans scream and run from him.

“If you’ve noticed a strange rumble emanating from Washington, D.C., let me help you out: It’s the sound of Republicans running for political cover after immigration officers shot and killed another American citizen, Alex Pretti,” said Cohen (who is not Trump's former fixer). It began as a low rumble on Sunday night, when a smattering of Republicans and usually reliable conservative pundits tepidly expressed concern about the shooting and how the Trump administration was characterizing the incident.”

But by Monday, Cohen said the rumbling “crescendoed into a deafening roar.”

“The situation was so bad that even Trump was looking for political cover. Late Sunday night, in an interview with The Wall Street Journal, Trump declined to defend the Border Patrol officers who took Pretti’s life and signaled that he was looking for an exit ramp from the violence that immigration agents have unleashed in Minnesota over the last month.”

And by Monday afternoon, Cohen said the White House “was in full retreat” with Trump’s Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt refusing to say Trump agreed with claims from Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem and White House deputy chief of staff Stephen Miller that Pretti was a “domestic terrorist.”

“One could practically hear the bus being driven over Noem and Miller,” Cohen said.

Over the weekend, Border Patrol commander-at-large Gregory Bovino also tried to blame Pretti for his own death, accusing him of planning to kill law enforcement officers, He even claimed Border Patrol officers were the real victims of the incident. But by late Monday, Bovino was already being reassigned.

“Other reports suggested that Bovino, who had previously been excoriated by a federal judge in Chicago for lying about his and his agents’ use of force in that city, had been demoted,” said Cohen, adding that this was an extreme pivot from two weeks ago when the White House and its Republican allies in Congress defended agents shooting and killing Minneapolis resident and mother Renee Good.

What changed? Cohen suspects some of it was situational, with Pretti dodging to protect a woman agents pushed to the ice when he was beaten and shot multiple times. Another is what the shooting death represents to Second Amendment rights, which is a central tenet of the Republican platform.

Pretti was carrying a firearm at the time, and was licensed to carry it. But video shows agents stripped him of his weapon before killing him.

“Does this mean that Republicans are preparing to break with the president who has done so much political damage to the GOP brand in just over a year in office? Don’t count on it,” said Cohen. “Congressional Republicans didn’t jettison Trump even after he almost got many of them killed on Jan. 6, 2021. A single death in Minnesota isn’t going to get them to completely change their tune — and for many who represent red states and safe House seats, they are likely better off aligned with Trump.”

Still, at least for a moment, Trump and the GOP realize that they’ve overreached.

“There are limits to how much lawlessness, violence and chaos Americans will tolerate,” Cohen wrote.

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'There's video of this!' Jake Tapper embarrasses former Trump official in fiery exchange

Chad Mizelle – who served as Department of Justice chief of staff under Attorney General Pam Bondi – got into a contentious back-and-forth with CNN host Jake Tapper after seemingly asserting that Minneapolis shooting victim and U.S. citizen Alex Pretti brought what critics are calling “an execution-style death” upon himself at the hands of federal agents.

“Alex Pretti was not following the law, Jake,” Mizelle insisted.

“What law did he break?” Tapper asked.

“He interfered with an ongoing law enforcement investigation. That is a felony."

“By doing what?” Tapper demanded. “By filming it?”

“While [ICE agents] were waiting for backup and trying to clear out the street … there were individuals who were interfering with that, resisting the lawful command of a law enforcement officer is a crime,” said Mizelle. “And then whenever you resist arrest, that's an additional crime. And if you have a gun with you while you're committing an act of violence, in this case, potentially against a law enforcement officer, Jake, that's a crime. So, there's a series of that.”

To this, Tapper pointed out that there was footage on the scene indicating none of these claims.

“Chad, you know, there's video of this, right? I mean, you're accusing Alex Pretti of committing violence. You know we can see what happened, right? I mean, you're aware that there's video of this? And we saw that the officers … I saw 5 or 6 officers wrestling him to the ground while he was holding up his [phone].”

“Why does it take 5 or 6 people to wrestle a single individual? Only if that individual is resisting arrest, Jake. You just proved my point,” Mizelle insisted.

“No, I don't think I did,” Tapper snapped. “Five or 6 officers jumping on somebody who obviously was immediately on the ground and one hand was on the ground and one hand was holding his camera, is not evidence that six people needed to be doing that. That's like saying ‘he deserved to be shot.' Otherwise, why would the officers have shot him? You really don't think that there's any question about whether or not this man deserved to be shot? You really think that this is this was fine. This was a fine act because I don't even think there are people in the Trump administration who are arguing that.”

“I don’t think this was a fine act … I think it was unfortunate,” Mizelle said, before attempting to blame events leading up to the shooting on Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz’s announcement that he wanted ICE agents out of his state before more bloodshed.

To this, Tapper drew a comparison to the President Donald Trump inciting violence on January 6th, and he reminded Mizelle that he refuses to hold Trump accountable for that violence.

“Explain that to me, because it just doesn't make any sense. Why is Tim Walz inciting these activities, but President Trump was not?” He said.

“Jake, I don't even understand the distinction or the analogy you're trying to draw,” Mizelle answered.

“Well, the analogy is that it seems to be that people in the Trump administration, and I guess that includes you,” Tapper said. “… think that there's one set of rules for Trump supporters and another set of rules for people who are not Trump supporters. … [P]eople who assault law enforcement on January 6th, that's fine. They should be given pardons. But people who assault law enforcement — and I don't think Alex Pretti qualifies — that's not allowed. People who are MAGA supporters and carry guns with them to protests: That's fine. But Alex Pretti should not have had a gun on him even though he was a concealed weapon holder. And it's just like it doesn't make any sense to most Americans, because it's really just supposed to be one set of laws and one set of rules.”

- YouTube youtu.be

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'Completely out of her depth': Republicans say Kristi Noem 'needs to go'

MS NOW reporter Jake Sherman said Republicans in Washington, DC. appear to be sharpening their knives for U.S. Secretary of Homeland Security Kristi Noem.

“It depends how hard the administration fights for her. I've talked to Republicans over the last couple days who think she's completely out of her depth, and she needs to go, and she's emblematic of the problem,” Punchbowl News founder Jake Sherman said in a Tuesday segment. “An impeachment resolution has privilege in the House of Representatives, meaning [minority party] Democrats can bring it up. This is not something that needs to go through [Speaker] Mike Johnson. Democrats can bring up an impeachment resolution without the Republican leadership so they could force this vote effectively without Republican cooperation.”

Sherman added that the resulting vote would “put a lot of Republicans in a tough spot.”

“She's got big problems up here, … and I think the administration understands that,” said Sherman. “But at the same time, getting rid of Kristi Noem … is not going to be the answer to the administration's problems.”

Sherman acknowledged that the fallout of two shooting deaths in Minneapolis at the hands of U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents has forced the administration of President Donald Trump to make operational changes, like getting rid of U.S. Border Patrol commander at-large Greg Bovino and putting immigration adviser Tom Homan in charge of the administration's operations in Minneapolis, Minnesota. But replacing Bovino with Homan – who is under investigation for taking $50,000 from agents in a sting operation before Trump shut down the case — is not enough for Democrats.

“What Democrats are seeking now … is not cosmetic changes or executive orders. They want statutory limitations on what ICE can do in the interior of the United States,” said Sherman. “And without that, I … I do believe there's going to be a government shutdown.”

Further complicating the matter is if Trump does manage to get a budget agreement from the Senate, House Democrats my stall it without further ICE restraints.

“It's going to be nearly impossible to get through the house of representatives, so they're in a real, real crisis that I don't think a lot of people have fully internalized yet,” Sherman said.

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'What in the world is he doing?' Trump frustrating Republicans with red state tour

Amid his self-made national rancor, President Donald Trump is retreating to safe ground in Iowa. But this reliable red state today is providing little comfort.

“… [T]his time, the trip comes less as a victory lap than an attempt to reinvigorate voters in territory where Republicans are surprisingly playing defense,” reports Politico's Megan Messerly and Lisa Kashinsky.

Dan Naylor, chair of the Republican party in Lackawanna County, Pennsylvania, said the president needs to connect the dots for voters, for example, on why the U.S. captured a Venezuelan dictator and why he wants Greenland so badly.

“The average person is like, ‘What in the world is he doing all these crazy things for?’ and I think when he gets out on the trail, he’ll be able to define those issues a little bit better,” said Naylor.

The president is avoiding even potentially purple or bluish Iowa city centers and instead swinging through the Des Moines suburbs, however, visiting local businesses, meeting allied lawmakers and attempting to give speeches on the economy. Politico describes this as the “latest example of the White House deploying Trump to energize the GOP in districts he carried.”

“It reflects a bet that his physical presence, more than any specific policy message, will boost turnout among voters who showed up for him in 2024 but are less likely to vote in a midterm election where he’s not on the ballot,” Messerly and Kashinsky wrote.

“Trump’s visit comes amid a moment of growing political strain for the White House as Trump faces flagging poll numbers, persistent voter frustrations about the economy and mounting backlash over his immigration agenda, which has only grown after the shooting death of a protester in Minneapolis over the weekend,” they continued.

Even this could be a challenge, with Politico pointing to Trump’s recent history with mocking voters’ economic pain and calling it a Democratic “hoax.” But the stakes of losing what should be safe House districts “are high,” per the report.

The GOP majority in the House is “particularly narrow,” according to Messerly and Kashinsky. Losing that majority would upend Trump’s final two years in office, with Democrats likely to again pursue impeachment inquiries against him along with investigations over enriching himself and his family. Trump's refusal to follow U.S. law and release the entirety of the Epstein files last year could also complicate Trump's midterm hopes, and Democrats are eyeing two U.S. House districts in Iowa that Trump carried.

“Republican Rep. Mariannette Miller-Meeks held onto her seat in 2024 by just 798 votes, despite Trump winning the district by roughly 8 points, a mismatch that has made Iowa a quiet focus of early Democratic recruitment and Republican defensive planning,” Politico reported, adding that Democrats are already preparing to weaponize Trump’s presence Miller-Meeks and other Republicans like Rep. Ashley Hinson, who is running to replace outgoing Sen. Joni Ernst (R-Iowa).

Additionally, Democrats have repeatedly targeted the seat of Republican Rep. Zach Nunn (R-Iowa), who won his seat by only 3.9 points in 2024.

While Trump hopes to drum up midterm indifference among MAGA and Republican voters, Democrats are hoping to use the president’s unpopularity as an overweight albatross to weigh down his team.

“The reality is that we are here in Iowa, where we’re seeing the effects of Trump’s policies, and it’s not been positive,” Iowa Democratic Party chair Rita Hart, told Politico, while citing high health care premiums and groceries as a result of Republican policies and law. “What are these Republicans going to do about all these ways that people are struggling here in Iowa?”

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