President Donald Trump is in for two years of impeachment battles and should fill the vacant position of press secretary with a lawyer, conservative talk radio host Hugh Hewitt said in a column on Thursday for Fox News.

“Impeachment proceedings for President Trump and Secretary of War Pete Hegseth are coming in the next two years,” Hewitt wrote.

Hewitt, a contributor to Fox News who is a constitutional law professor at Chapman University, said the best pick for the job would be someone who is a quick and effective communicator with “extraordinary legal chops,” in other words, a young person who has clerked for the Supreme Court.

The next press secretary would need to be familiar with Article II of the Constitution and Supreme Court case law, as many of the battles ahead will involve the scope of the president’s power, Hewitt predicted.

“A press secretary who knows those cases and precedents will be far ahead of the average journalist in the press room,” he wrote. “President Trump cannot afford a spokesperson who is behind from the jump.”

The position has been unfilled since mid-October, when Katie Zacharia was out after just five days on the job, following her first press briefing, which was widely criticized, and revelations that she had billed herself as a lawyer even though she did not pass the bar exam, NBC News reported.

Previous press secretary Karoline Leavitt resigned at the end of August after serving about 20 months on the job, and on her last day, told her replacement to remember that Trump is his “own best spokesperson.”

Similarly, Hewitt wrote that Trump is his best defender, but could use a talented lawyer as his spokesperson to help the president get his message out to a press corps reminiscent of those that reported during the final years of Richard Nixon’s presidency.

The House voted 211-204 on Tuesday night to send a resolution to impeach Hegseth to committee, effectively killing it in the current Congress.

Hegseth held his first news conference in more than 180 days earlier in the day. He said Monday that he was “not worried” about the impeachment effort.

Hewitt said the Democrats are going to push for impeachment votes over and over again once the new Congress begins. Some of the articles of impeachment will be passed, and there will be Senate trials, he predicted, which will go nowhere.

“With their enormous majority, Democrats will call impeachment votes again and again, and they can count on near-unanimous support from their caucus,” he wrote. “That means many hearings on many articles of impeachment, some of which will pass, and then hours, days, weeks and months of the Senate’s time will be spent on impeachment trials."

Still, he predicted that Republicans would make sure Trump isn’t removed.

“They won’t succeed, of course,” he wrote. “Even if they secured the necessary number of senators to vote for extended trials on every different impeachment article, enough GOP senators won’t vote for removal. It’s all a gigantic waste of time.”

Hewitt said Trump should begin interviewing clerks from the last six years on the Supreme Court who have a strong view of presidential power and who are “able to verbally battle with and best a White House press corps that will rival that of Nixon’s last two years in its collective combativeness.”

The White House has not named a new press secretary since Zacharia’s departure.

Nobel Prize-winning economist Paul Krugman said a scandal surrounding Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang offers a glimpse into the darker side of President Donald Trump’s inner circle.

In a Thursday Substack post, Climates of Treason, Krugman said Huang was a fool and should never be allowed near national security again. But the real issue, he said, is that the Trump administration tried to bury any inquiry into the threat that Huang’s affair represents. That, he said, is “part of a bigger story of betrayal at the highest levels.”

Huang admitted to an affair with Alice Huang, no relation, a former executive at Singapore-based Megaspeed whom U.S. intelligence reportedly suspects of spying for Beijing.

The New York Times reported that Commerce Department agents investigating whether Megaspeed had smuggled Nvidia chips into China stopped their probe after Nvidia’s top lawyer reached out to them, and the Justice Department took over the case. The Commerce Department said it handled the case by the book, and Nvidia’s board, which is now investigating, said it has seen no indication national security was compromised. Trump defended Huang on Sunday.

Krugman said that after two years of Trump, America is neither loved nor feared. It can’t be trusted to keep its promises or defend its allies, and it seems unable to punish its enemies. It has essentially lost a war with Iran and a trade war with China, and it might be losing the technology race, too, he wrote.

“How did we fall so far, so fast? It’s all about Trump,” he wrote.

Part of that is just plain incompetence, Krugman said. For example, he wrote, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth thinks that a military in the age of drones and artificial intelligence needs testosterone shots. That’s no accident, he said.

“MAGA hates people with expertise, because such people might engage in critical thinking and might care about their reputations,” he wrote. “Only the truly hapless can be counted on to be truly loyal.”

Key figures in or near the administration, he said, are knowingly making the U.S. less secure.

“I don’t know how much of this betrayal meets the legal standard of treason, but morally that’s what it amounts to.”

Taking his title from a 1979 book about the Cambridge spies who served Stalin out of conviction, Krugman thinks it’s a mix of motives. In regard to Russia, he thinks it’s largely ideological: Trump, Elon Musk and other hard-right types look up to Putinism, with its authoritarianism, male supremacy and crony capitalism. It’s probably only secondarily about money, he said.

In regard to China, it’s money: Nvidia gave $25 million to Trump’s ballroom, Krugman wrote, and the A.I. industry appears to have funneled hundreds of millions of dollars in Trump’s direction. He wrote that people around Trump protected Huang, partly out of fear that exposing the scandal would be bad for a major source of money.

And he’s betting that the vast payments made to Jared Kushner by Middle Eastern rulers are eventually going to turn out to be in return for favors.

“This is a huge scandal even if there weren’t any quid pro quos. And I’ll bet that we’ll eventually learn that there were, in fact, favors exchanged for that money.”

Those in charge of the country, Krugman said, are all about waving the flag but in fact are completely unpatriotic, unwilling to sacrifice for the country and hostile to democracy and the rule of law.

“They are completely unwilling to make personal sacrifices, no matter how small, or to pass up personal opportunities, for the sake of the nation.”

“In other words,” he wrote, “USA! USA! USA!”

After losing his fight at the Supreme Court over his emergency tariffs, Donald Trump faces a legal battle that could require his administration to refund all importers who paid those tariffs, not just those who sued.

On Tuesday, lawyers representing more than 330,000 importers of record asked the U.S. Court of International Trade to issue a relief order to refund all the money the government has collected under the International Emergency Economic Powers Act (IEEPA), Fortune reported. The total would add up to some $166 billion in refunds. The case, Freestyle World, Inc. v. United States, was certified as a class action on Oct. 8.

The class’s lawyers told Fortune that issuing such an order would provide U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) with the authority that the agency says it needs to pay full refunds, including interest, to all importers, including “small businesses who lack the resources to bring their own cases.”

The Supreme Court ruled in February that Trump’s tariffs under IEEPA went beyond the powers he had. As of August, CBP had refunded more than $115 billion, but thousands of importers are still waiting for their money back. These importers include small businesses as well as individuals who bought tariffed goods online. Some importers ran into technical issues, others didn’t have a lawyer or the appropriate paperwork to request a refund, while some bought their goods from a third-party importer.

Fortune reported that such refunds would help alleviate pressure on companies that increased their prices in the wake of the tariffs and war with Iran, making it more likely that consumers would be able to get refunds as well.

Trump’s administration has said it only wants to refund importers who brought lawsuits. Judge Richard Eaton, who handles all the tariff refund cases, ruled in March that all importers who paid the tariffs were entitled to refunds and issued a universal refund order in April. The Trump administration appealed that order in June, claiming Eaton had overstepped his authority.

“CBP has no authority to reliquidate or refund money without a court order,” the Department of Justice said in a filing.

The Trump administration successfully argued before the Supreme Court in order to narrow the scope of a nationwide block of Trump’s executive order to limit birthright citizenship. But Eaton has argued that the Supreme Court’s limits don’t apply to his court, which has exclusive jurisdiction over trade-related cases.

Trump’s tariffs also became a flashpoint in the affordability crisis that ended up costing the Republicans in this month’s midterms, Fortune reported.

Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) accused Trump’s administration of having “slow-walked the refund process” in a letter to CBP in June. Sen. Ron Wyden (D-Ore.), who is likely to become the next chairman of the Senate Finance Committee, is leading a Democratic push to repeal specific tariffs, starting with Canada.

Every day that Trump insists on keeping his tariffs, Wyden told CNBC, “he digs a deeper hole for Republicans enabling his tariff spree.”

The Department of Justice has until Friday to respond to the class action complaint and until Dec. 9 to respond to the motion for relief.

A North Carolina Republican who cheered President Donald Trump’s war on Iran when it began is now calling it “terrible policy” and blaming it for the GOP’s midterm drubbing.

Rep. Pat Harrigan of North Carolina unloaded on the conflict Wednesday morning during an appearance on Real America’s Voice’s American Sunrise, a week after he barely held on to his own seat.

Harrigan argued the war wiped out the benefit of this year’s record tax refunds for middle-class families.

“Unfortunately, when April 15th came around and tax returns were the largest in the history of our country, we forced that money, to the American middle class, straight into their gas tanks,” he said, per Mediaite.

“And so the economy and the economic issues surrounding this election were absolutely a complication of the Iran conflict,” Harrigan added. “That was terrible policy, even if it was well-intentioned, and the consequences were incredibly significant.”

It’s a sharp turn for the former Green Beret, who sits on the House Armed Services Committee and backed the war when the U.S. launched Operation Epic Fury in late February.

“Anyone who has been to war, hates war. But I like what we’re doing, and why,” Harrigan said in a statement at the time. By July, he was warning on Newsmax that the conflict could become a “forever war.”

His own race shows the cost. Harrigan beat Democrat Ashley Bell by about a point, 49.72 percent to 48.69 percent, in a district covering Iredell, Lincoln and Catawba counties that he won with 57.5 percent of the vote two years ago.

He isn’t alone. Since last week’s blue wave, more Republicans and MAGA voices have started criticizing the war. Even conservative commentator Victor Davis Hanson listed the Iran war alongside affordability and gas prices among voters’ concerns in a Daily Signal video on Tuesday.

For Trump, the war has dragged on for months, disrupting shipping through the Strait of Hormuz and sending gas prices climbing. Only 35 percent of registered voters approved of his handling of it in a recent Harvard CAPS-Harris poll.

Trump paused military action in the run-up to Election Day, but told TIME that resuming the bombing after the midterms was “possible,” and administration officials reportedly told Gulf leaders to prepare for “a short, intense campaign” once the votes were counted.

Now the administration appears to be backing off. Secretary of State Marco Rubio, traveling to a G7 meeting in France, conceded over the weekend that the war is not “necessarily popular.” On Tuesday, he told reporters, “there’s really no need for major combat operations any longer” in Iran, pointing to the success of economic sanctions.

MAGA ally and conservative commentator Victor Davis Hanson is urging President Donald Trump to “clean up” the corruption in government, including in his own administration.

In a video for The Daily Signal on Tuesday, Hanson said corruption weighed heavily on voters in last week’s midterms, and warned that even the perception of it is causing Republicans to “lose the moral high ground.”

Hanson, author of The Case for Trump, started with familiar Democratic targets Hunter Biden, Nancy Pelosi and Rep. Ilhan Omar, before turning on his own side.

“But we as conservatives can’t just say it’s Hunter or Pelosi or Ilhan Omar,” he said.

Corruption on the right is especially damaging, he argued, because MAGA and other right-wing movements are premised on attacking “the aristocratic classes and the corruption at the highest levels of government.”

Hanson pointed to corruption the administration has been targeting in various states, but argued that the same mindset must be applied to some White House officials and to Trump’s own family.

He said: “Some of us have been very worried about the Trump administration, that there are members associated with some of the Trump family that are very active in the Middle East, investing and helping people who are investors in the Middle East find receptive avenues in the United States that they might not otherwise find. … I don’t know if that’s illegal, but it seems highly unethical.”

Both Donald Trump Jr. and Eric Trump are involved in Middle East-related business ventures.

Hanson also named the president’s former attorney, Alina Habba Mildon, saying that although he had “a lot of regard for” her, she “is alleged to have obtained pardons” for people convicted of serious crimes, in some cases with “an alleged quid pro quo for over $50 million.” Habba Mildon reportedly took on a $50 million contract from the family of a Venezuelan man who later received a Trump pardon.

He brought up Steve Bannon, whom he said he personally likes, and Bannon’s admission that border wall donations were diverted to other uses.

And he pointed to Susie Wiles, whom Trump moved out as chief of staff last week, raising what he called “allegations, not proven,” that her daughter, a lobbyist, may have charged people to steer them to the right officials.

“That’s unethical. I don’t know if it’s illegal or not, but it’s unethical,” Hanson said.

He says Trump should be proactive and support a bill banning members of Congress from trading on the stock market, then establish similar rules within his own administration.

Conservatives, he said, must be “beyond suspicion of corruption.”

“It’s time to clean up the language, clean up behavior, stop the hate speech, and stop the graft and obvious corruption.”

The Trump administration is still trying in vain to kill congestion pricing in NYC. In June, the U.S. DOT appealed Judge Lewis Liman’s March decision in favor of the MTA, which had sued the federal government over President Trump’s attempt to kill the Manhattan toll.

According to Dave Colon at Streetsblog NYC, the feds’ brief contained two main arguments. The first is the one we’ve seen before in this increasingly absurd legal farce: that Liman never had the jurisdiction to hear the MTA’s case, as it was a dispute over a financial contract.

The second and new argument is similar to the one the Trump administration made in lower court. Rather than argue that the president is a de facto sovereign with unlimited powers, the Department of Justice lawyers argued that the FHWA can simply change its mind at any time.

“The government must be empowered to adjust to changing circumstances or to changed priorities,” they wrote.

In January, at a hearing before Judge Liman, DOJ lawyer Eric Hamilton made a rather unconvincing argument that the president and his agents have an absolute power to cancel contracts or agreements that the federal government signs with other parties. Liman described that argument as “breathtaking” and “wrong.”

The problem with the new argument, as one legal expert pointed out, is that the agreement that authorized congestion pricing under the Value Pricing Pilot Program has no kill switch, and the underlying law that authorizes the program has no “revoke whenever you want” clause.

“It’s a stretch to say they have any inherent authority just to change their mind,” said NYU law professor Roderick Hills, Jr. “I don’t know of any case that said an agency can just always change its mind, regardless of the statute under which the initial decision was made, regardless of the correctness of the original decision.”

Hills did point out that there is precedent for an agency to reverse itself if it can show it made a mistake in the first instance. “How can you correct an error that doesn’t exist?” he said.

The argument is also out of place as the federal government didn’t raise it in the lower court. The judges hearing the case could therefore easily decide to simply ignore the argument.

“The simplest thing to do would be not to rule on the merits at all, but say on second argument, you didn’t raise it below. It’s waived,” said Hills.

“Sean Duffy is the one who’s trying to change the status quo,” said Hills. “For almost two years, the MTA has been chugging along, and Sean Duffy’s been on the sideline saying, ‘Judge, stop that guy.’”

“In this case, the legal arguments are weak, and the policy here seems fine,” he said.

Donald Trump’s favorite economic weapon may be on borrowed time now that Democrats are set to take over Congress in January.

In a Wednesday op-ed for The Washington Post, Zachary Karabell writes that the incoming Democratic majority should devote the next two years to “stripping the presidency of the imperial trappings it has acquired in fits and starts since World War II,” beginning with tariffs.

“There is no natural constituency for unbridled presidential power in perpetuity,” the columnist argues.

Virtually everything Trump has done unilaterally has been done through the power given the presidency by Congress, according to the columnist, ranging from the domestic tools granted by the post-9/11 Patriot Act to the ability to levy tariffs, which was added to arcane trade laws over the course of the 20th century.

While the Constitution’s Article I grants Congress the power to impose “Duties, Imposts and Excises,” in the years since, lawmakers have ceded to presidents the right to impose tariffs without congressional approval. In February, the Supreme Court voted 6-3 to strike down Trump’s tariffs imposed under a declaration of emergency, and other courts ruled that the president had exceeded the authority Congress intended to give him. However, “the underlying problem is the laws that made the flexing possible in the first place,” the Karabell argues.

Tariffs are “both the most obviously flawed of Trump’s policies economically and the most objectionable to huge swaths of people,” according to the columnist. They have infuriated everybody from farmers in the Midwestern states to businesspeople across the country, and voter anger at tariffs is credited with helping Democrats win last week in Maine, Ohio and Texas, the column argues.

The columnist writes that barely a third of Americans support the administration’s tariffs, and blue-collar workers, many of whom once bought the idea that tariffs would bring factory jobs home, have turned on them, going from 49 percent in favor a year ago to 58 percent opposed.

That means that the Democrats have a two-for-one deal, the columnist writes: cutting back on the president’s tariff powers would both restore a balance under the Constitution and attack “one of the root causes of inflation and affordability.”

But standing in the way is Trump himself, the self-proclaimed “Tariff Man,” who would almost certainly veto such legislation. That would mean convincing at least 30 Republicans in the House and 11 GOP senators to vote with Democrats and override the veto, based on current projections.

But, the columnist argues, the tariffs are unpopular enough in many Republican districts that a bipartisan coalition might be amassed to chip away at them one by one — repealing, for example, the tariffs against Canada — or to dramatically curb the president’s tariff powers.

There is precedent for this: after Richard Nixon resigned over Watergate in 1974, Congress passed reforms to the civil service and installed inspectors general in major departments. Since then, the reforms have been weakened, and both Trump and a Supreme Court that adheres to the unitary executive theory have assaulted them.

“The risk is that the catnip of investigations and anger stands in the way of building a coalition that includes Republicans,” Karabell warns.

The new Congress is set to be sworn in on Jan. 3.

President Donald Trump and the Republicans’ effort to shift the courts to the right could be at an end, with the Democrats set to take control of the Senate next year.

During his first term, he put over 230 judges on the federal bench, including three on the Supreme Court. So far in his second term, the Senate has confirmed 57 of the president’s judicial appointments. In total, Trump nominees now make up about one-third of the active federal bench.

But the Democrats are now in a position to take at least 54 of the Senate seats and as many as 56, depending on the results in Mississippi and Alaska, so it’s very unlikely that Trump will be filling many more of the vacancies on the U.S. district and appeals courts.

“No one, or nearly no one, is going to get confirmed, so what he does in terms of nominating people, we’ll see,” Ed Whelan, a distinguished senior fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center and former law clerk to the late Justice Antonin Scalia, told CBS News.

There are 28 vacancies on the federal courts and another 15 that will be opening up over the coming weeks and months. The president has formally sent 16 of his nominees to the Senate.

The GOP-controlled Senate Judiciary Committee is moving with alacrity to get those appointments before the chamber changes hands.

Republicans are violating “numerous longstanding standards in a desperate attempt to confirm more than 30 qualified loyalists to lifetime appointments before Democrats take the majority,” said Sen. Dick Durbin (D-Ill.), the senior Democrat on the Judiciary Committee, on Tuesday.

But Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa), chair of the Judiciary Committee, was not impressed by Durbin’s assertion that he was departing from committee practice.

“Historically, this committee has shortened timelines when circumstances warrant it,” he said.

“The priority is going to be getting the judges across the finish line,” Senate Majority Leader John Thune told reporters on Monday.

But the federal bench seats that remain open at the end of the current Congress are likely to stay unfilled for at least the next two years.

“What we’ve seen is the federal courts being stacked with extremists and loyalists, and now Democrats have the power to stop the reshaping of our courts in a very dangerous direction,” said Rachel Rossi, president of the Alliance for Justice, a progressive judicial advocacy group.

Democrats’ complete trouncing of the Republicans in last week’s midterms also makes it highly unlikely that a Supreme Court justice appointed by a GOP president would be retiring in the final two years of Trump’s term, as a successor would almost certainly not be able to get through the Senate.

“Trump has managed to put in jeopardy his biggest achievement,” Whelan said.

For a long time, the Deep South was one of the safest bets in the Republican column. But after the midterms last week, perhaps that’s no longer the case.

In a column on Wednesday, the New York Times’ Jamelle Bouie argues that this is a problem of the Republicans’ own making. He says that the GOP’s eagerness to take advantage of a Supreme Court ruling on voting rights has sparked a backlash that’s changed the national political landscape.

“The South has not been this competitive in national politics since the 1970s and ’80s,” Bouie writes.

South Carolina elected Democrat Annie Andrews to fill the seat of Lindsey Graham, making her the first Democrat elected to the Senate in the state since Fritz Hollings in 1998. As Bouie notes, Andrews now holds a seat previously held by Strom Thurmond and John C. Calhoun.

But that’s not all. In Georgia, Democrats control all three top statewide offices for the first time since the first term of George W. Bush. And in Mississippi, a state that hasn’t elected a Democrat to statewide office since 2015, voters are on the verge of electing Democrat Scott Colom to the Senate.

Bouie argues that this all started with the Supreme Court’s decision in Louisiana v. Callais in April. In the majority opinion, Justice Samuel Alito gutted the remaining parts of the Voting Rights Act. He ruled that mandating majority-minority districts is itself an act of racial discrimination, and that states could engage in gerrymandering for partisan gain even if Black voters were harmed.

Alito went further, arguing that, if you control for race, voting in the South is not racially polarized at all. As Bouie put it, it’s “a C-minus rhetorical move that should embarrass an undergraduate.”

Tennessee wasted no time in reacting by splitting up the majority-Black city of Memphis into bits and pieces and spreading them out into mostly rural districts. Louisiana, Mississippi and Alabama did the same, and some Republicans went so far as to cancel elections already underway.

“Republicans reacted to the Callais decision like it was a gold rush,” Bouie writes.

It didn’t work out quite the way they’d expected. Black voters and their allies mobilized, tying the issue of voting rights to other bread-and-butter issues such as health care and wages.

“Black Americans voted at a whopping 96 percent of the presidential turnout,” Bouie writes, citing an analysis of Deep South turnout from Strength in Numbers.

Without this turnout, Bouie argues, South Carolina and Mississippi might have slipped away from the Democrats, and the party might not have swept Georgia and North Carolina.

“It is possible that these victories are a one-off,” Bouie writes. But he argues that Democrats are still obligated to deliver a new Voting Rights Act and end partisan gerrymandering for the voters, even though Trump almost certainly wouldn’t sign such a bill.

“The party can either honor the work of the voters who made their success possible or see whatever advantage they now have dissipate in disappointment and anger,” Bouie writes.

A number of leading voices in the MAGA movement who host podcasts have been oddly quiet since the midterm drubbing last week. The hosts of The Bulwark are making no secret of the fact that they love it.

On Nov. 10’s episode of The Bulwark’s “Next Level” podcast, GOP strategist Sarah Longwell admitted as much.

“I’m not going to lie. I’m doing some schadenfreude,” she said. “Some of it is like watching Trump, you know, just bring out his ‘How could this have happened? It must be rigged. It’s the voting machines.’ And then watching all of the Republican influencers go like, shut up. Like, nobody wants this right now.”

Longwell said the right-wing influencers are still trying to “come to grips” with the results, and mentioned that MAGA streamer Tim Pool lamented that Republicans have lost young men for a generation.

“It’s just fun watching their spaces right now,” she said.

“So many of them are shutting down their podcast,” Longwell said. “Laura Loomer shut down her podcast. Katie Miller shut down her podcast.”

“Yeah, we’re losing some real content creators,” one of her co-hosts quipped.

Katie Miller is married to Stephen Miller, Trump’s new chief of staff in the White House. This inspired the hosts to go on a bit of a tangent about the fact that Katie Miller has a tattoo on her lip that, according to one host, reads “YOLO.” One of the hosts said they learned this from a Bulwark colleague named Andrew Egger.

“That’s kind of a great tattoo,” said one of the hosts.

“The problem is if YOLO means to you, you only live once, so you might as well spend it with the most despicable white nationalist in the country,” the host said.

For his part, Texas Rep. Dan Crenshaw celebrated Stephen Miller’s promotion and, in a post read by the hosts, appeared to dismiss the podcasters as entertainers not worth pursuing.

Longwell mocked the lecturing from a man who frequently appears on Joe Rogan, but said he had a point.

“It is true they are entertainers. They are not serious about policy,” she said. “As much as we don’t want it to be true that people are getting their political news from these types of people, it is just true that that is happening.”

But that’s the bigger problem for the Republican Party. Not only is Trump crying voter fraud, but Stephen Miller is now running the White House West Wing. And it seems like some of the people who were getting Trump’s message to young men have stopped talking.

“Guys, this is what it’s going to be like,” one of the hosts told listeners as the episode wrapped up. “It’s going to be wheels off for the next two years and perhaps beyond.”

Mary Trump is calling for an investigation into a family member. She singled out Jared Kushner as one of the first people Democrats should focus on, calling him “deeply corrupt” while renewing her attacks on House Democratic leader Hakeem Jeffries for meeting with him.

In a post on her Substack, The Good in Us, the president’s niece argued that Democrats’ return to power in Congress should bring economic relief alongside the investigations. In what appears to be a response to Democrats who are not interested in impeachment, she accused leaders of misunderstanding voters’ demands for accountability.

She once again blasted Jeffries for meeting with Kushner in August. The pair reportedly discussed housing, immigration, and affordability. Jeffries, who was heavily criticized, later said that Kushner requested the meeting and maintained that the conversation would not prevent congressional investigations.

“Why are you meeting with somebody who does not even have an official role in this government and who is so deeply corrupt that he is among the first people who needs to be investigated?” Mary Trump asked.

“What message does that send? The message it sends to me is that Jeffries does not get it.”

Last week, Mary made similar comments and even called for Kushner to be jailed.

She called on Democratic leaders to reject any suggestion that investigating the administration would amount to political retribution.

She quoted Jeffries’ statement on the Democrats' priorities from his Morning Joe interview earlier this month after the midterms, when he emphasized affordability.

“The American people don’t want us to get even. They want us to get things done on their behalf because life is way too expensive,” Jeffries said.

Mary Trump rejected the suggestion that voters want to get revenge, arguing that corruption directly affects Americans’ ability to afford everyday necessities.

“Clearly, the other thing Jeffries does not understand is that we are not talking about getting even,” she said. “This is not some mob revenge. This is about justice, and if you do not understand that, move aside.”

She also criticized Senate Democratic leader Chuck Schumer and urged voters to apply pressure to lawmakers over the party’s leadership choices before the new Congress convenes in January, warning that neither Schumer nor Jeffries should assume they will return to leadership roles. She encouraged supporters to demand different candidates and pick leaders that have a stronger commitment to accountability.

Despite her criticism, the president’s niece believes the Democratic Party leaders will eventually commit to investigating corruption.

“I think we are going to start hearing Jeffries and Schumer commit to real accountability,” she said.

CNN's Kaitlan Collins has shared intel on the White House scramble to back the embattled Pete Hegseth. The secretary of defense was the target of an impeachment push by lame-duck Republican Thomas Massie, who officially reintroduced his effort in the House on Monday.

But on Tuesday evening, the House voted 211-204 to send the articles of impeachment against Hegseth to committee, blocking an immediate impeachment vote. Hegseth likely dodged a bullet, as 11 Democrats didn't vote and the only Republican to vote with them was Massie.

In Tuesday's episode of The Source, Collins provided insider details about the White House chaos behind the scenes ahead of the impeachment vote.

"It certainly wasn't the outcome the White House was expecting tonight," she said, noting that Republicans in the House had "banded together and defeated that effort by one of their own."

"Sources say that both Republican leadership and White House officials were working furiously behind the scenes today to ensure that Congressman Thomas Massie's attempt to rebuke and potentially oust Secretary Pete Hegseth from the President's Cabinet wasn't successful," Collins added.

Her intel lines up with a report in The New York Times which said that Republican leadership was concerned that "attendance issues" among Republicans would "doom their chances to save Hegseth." However, the Pentagon chief was ultimately saved by absent Democrats.

President Donald Trump voiced his support for Hegseth on Truth Social and mocked the unsuccessful impeachment attempt, writing: "The Democrats' attempt to impeach Secretary of War Pete Hegseth has miserably FAILED! Every single Republican, except Thomas Massie, a major LOSER, voted in favor of Pete. Again, Victories in Venezuela and Iran, the Best Recruitment Numbers in the History of the Military (Long waiting lists to get in!), and Spirit like rarely seen before, led to the EXONERATION of a Great American Patriot. The Democrats continue to weaponize and abuse the United States of America. They must be stopped! MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN."

Collins noted the president’s failure to mention the unexpected help the Democrats had provided him.

"It was actually the absence of these 11 Democrats, including Congresswoman Nancy Pelosi, who might have helped save Secretary Hegseth from facing that vote on impeachment. Even if they did so unintentionally by just not showing up," Collins noted.

She also claimed sources in the White House said that the new chief of staff, Stephen Miller, now in his second day on the job, reassured Hegseth "that they have his back" in the face of an impeachment attempt on Tuesday. Collins said Miller, the architect of the White House immigration agenda, is "personally close" to Hegseth.

Noting that President Trump has been in support of Hegseth this week, both on social media and in comments to the media, Collins said: "he does have a history of saying that only until he doesn't." This was the case with Susie Wiles, who was abruptly fired after the president publicly backed her.

Democrats could revive the impeachment effort when they take control in January, with more members to ensure it reaches the Senate floor.

Democrat Hakeem Jeffries said after the decision on Tuesday, "This is not the end of it. It's just the beginning."

Collins also reflected on Hegseth’s first major press conference at the Pentagon on Tuesday since May.

"It was almost solely focused on this effort to potentially impeach him, and his reasoning of why it shouldn't happen," Collins said. "I should note he only took questions from a prepared list of what appeared to be only conservative media outlets."

President Donald Trump went nuclear at The New York Times on Truth Social in a 2 am rampage, this time over a C-SPAN phone call and a sexual harassment scandal at his Bedminster golf club involving his former lawyer.

In a 1:25 a.m. post Wednesday, Trump disputed the Times’ account of his call to C-SPAN’s new primetime show.

“The New York Times incorrectly reported that ‘Mr. Trump called into the premier of a C-Span show, APPARENTLY WITHOUT NOTICE.’ This is WRONG,” Trump wrote. “It was a fully scheduled call, as a favor to C-Span, set up through White House Communications. It was done at C-Span’s request, not mine. The Times knew this, but lied, in order to demean - But this is the least of their lies!”

CNBC also described Monday’s eight-minute call to the debut of “Washington Journal Primetime” as unannounced, noting host Mimi Geerges told viewers, “It looks like we’ve got a call from the White House.” Therefore, Trump’s claims have not been independently confirmed.

Twenty-two minutes later, he turned his rage to the Bedminster scandal.

“The failing New York Times wrote about the ‘settling of a sexual harassment suit brought years ago by a waitress at President Trump’s golf club in Bedminster, N.J.’ What they fail to say is that it did not involve President Trump, a rather important omission. FAKE NEWS!!!” he posted.

On Tuesday, New Jersey’s Office of Attorney Ethics filed a 23-page disciplinary complaint against Alina Habba, who is Trump’s former personal lawyer and was also the interim and acting U.S. Attorney for the District of New Jersey from March 2025 until December 8, 2025.

In 2021, Alice Bianco, who was then 21 years of age at the club, accused her supervisor of sexual harassment. Habba helped secure a $15,000 settlement that came with an NDA; she was also a dues-paying club member. The watchdog accused her of “divided loyalties” and says the deal included terms that violated New Jersey law.

State regulators have quietly been investigating Habba since early 2024. Trump was not named as a defendant in the Bianco suit, and NYT did not accuse him of wrongdoing in the report.

Present Trump’s rant is another in a series of late-night outbursts that have led many to question his mental stability. It comes after he garnered controversy for questioning the integrity of the election results after previously accepting the GOP defeat.

An appeals court panel has ruled that Kari Lake, the former agency head tapped by President Donald Trump, acted illegally in firing Michael Abramowitz from his post as Voice of America director, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit said Tuesday.

In its ruling, the three-judge panel gave Abramowitz a legal win by upholding the August 2025 decision of U.S. District Judge Royce Lamberth. The unanimous vote came from Judges Sri Srinivasan and Cornelia Pillard, both put in place by President Barack Obama, and Florence Y. Pan, an appointee of President Joe Biden.

Abramowitz was let go by Lake in August 2025 when he would not agree to her ultimatum to either take a demotion to a lower-level position in North Carolina or be fired. He called the termination “illegal.” As The Washington Post reports, Abramowitz had already filed suit against the government over Lake’s attempts to tear down the international broadcaster, which was founded in 1942 to push back against Nazi propaganda, and sought to have his firing set right.

Lamberth, a Reagan appointee who had a running feud with Lake and once threatened to hold her in contempt, concurred with Abramowitz that the dismissal was unlawful. In an opinion issued in August 2025, the judge granted a motion for partial summary judgment and put a permanent injunction on Abramowitz’s removal. Lamberth determined that only the International Broadcasting Advisory Board, a Senate-confirmed entity that Trump did away with at the start of his second term, was empowered to fire the VOA director.

Writing in a published opinion, Pillard described the protections at hand as “a durable barrier against any breach of the firewall protecting the journalistic integrity of Voice of America and the affiliate networks,” rather than standard employment law.

In a statement, Abramowitz said he is “gratified” and wants to return to work. “My lawyers and I are carefully studying the decision to determine next steps,” he said. “But there is no longer any reason for the government to prevent me from doing the job for which I was legally installed on a bipartisan basis more than two years ago.”

The case is the most recent in a string of failures for the Trump administration in its effort to dismantle Voice of America. The organization has been bled dry under Trump and Lake, with its broadcasting capacity much reduced and hundreds of staff put on paid administrative leave for a year and a half. Back in March, Lamberth nullified many of Lake’s actions after finding she was running the U.S. Agency for Global Media, VOA’s parent agency, in an illegal fashion. Trump then put forward State Department official Sarah B. Rogers as a formal nominee to also serve as CEO of the agency, but the Senate has yet to confirm her.

In a move to protect First Amendment freedoms, a federal appeals court has blocked the Trump administration’s attempt to obtain a wide array of journalists’ LinkedIn records in its national security leak probe. The court held that such an “overbroad” search would “deal a damaging blow to First Amendment freedoms” and expose confidential sources who have no bearing on the investigation.

Judge J. Harvie Wilkinson, a Reagan appointee, wrote for the three-judge panel in a unanimous decision: “Confidentiality of sources is the lifeblood of a free press.”

“Without confidentiality, the ability of journalists to report on events of large importance and governmental behavior of dubious legality and integrity could not help but be hampered,” he wrote, per Politico.

The decision forces a district court to put much tighter limits on the records the Trump administration can see, balancing legitimate national security concerns with the First Amendment. It also undercuts a Justice Department inquiry into a leak to an unidentified news organization that ran an article on “a top-secret United States military operation in a foreign country,” including classified intelligence on “special operations” not found in other public reports.

While it is not immediately clear which outlet and piece of reporting set off the probe, the ruling arrives as the Trump administration has been making an aggressive push for reporters’ files in more than one leak case.

For this matter, prosecutors asked LinkedIn to produce an 18-month log of journalists’ private messages, enough to show who they were talking to, but not what was said. U.S. District Judge Elizabeth Hanes of Newport News, Virginia, then put an order in place to keep LinkedIn from telling the journalists of the government’s request.

LinkedIn took issue with the scope of Hanes’ order in proceedings that started last year, arguing it would do harm to its customers and curtail its freedom of communication. The Richmond-based appeals court was mostly in accord.

“While that order may catch sources relevant to the government’s investigation, it will also inevitably sweep in every other confidential source with whom the targeted journalists spoke,” the judges wrote.

They pointed out that the journalists covered almost 1,000 stories during the relevant period and investigated others that never saw print. Many appeared far removed from the article at issue.

Spokespeople for the Justice Department and the U.S. Attorney’s Office in the Eastern District of Virginia did not immediately respond to requests for comment.

In his ruling, Wilkinson offered a broader defense of the press, calling it a threat to “autocrats worldwide.” Reporting can expose things the government would rather keep hidden, whether to avoid embarrassment or scrutiny, he wrote.

“This does not confer upon government the right to silence," he added.

After the GOP’s hard midterm defeat, Bill O’Reilly had no patience for Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin and called on President Donald Trump to put him out to pasture.

On his Monday No Spin News show, O’Reilly spoke about Trump’s 60 Minutes interview, which aired the night before. He gave interviewer Ross Douthat an “A” and said Trump had “admitted that ICE went too far on some occasions, which is true.” In O’Reilly’s estimation, that cost Republicans the Hispanic vote in the midterms, though “there was more to it than that.” Either way, Mullin has run his course.

“So while Tom Homan did his best and I respect him, this Markwayne Mullin guy couldn’t have been worse. He’s worse than [Kristi] Noem,” O’Reilly said. “Never explained, arrogant as hell. What are you doing? You know, when people are getting beat up in the streets by federal agents, you need to say why. Okay, that’s not hard.”

O’Reilly faulted Douthat for letting that point slide.

“Douthat didn’t get into that. I would have,” he said. “I mean, if [it] were me, Mullin would be in the Bahamas right now taking the sun.”

Mullin, a former Oklahoma senator, took over Homeland Security in March after Trump fired Noem. And Trump’s own words to Douthat were a bit softer than O’Reilly’s interpretation. Asked whether his deportation policy went too far, the president said it “might be too tough.”

The question of who in the Trump administration will be done in after last week’s drubbing has been much debated. Three senior DOJ officials have already submitted their resignations, including civil rights chief Harmeet Dhillon and the prosecutor leading the probe into Trump’s political foes. White House Chief of Staff Susie Wiles has stepped aside, and Deputy Chief of Staff Stephen Miller took over her post on Monday.

O’Reilly cast the swap as a matter of temperament. Wiles, he said, is “not a wartime consigliere,” while Miller “will go after the people that go after President Trump and he doesn’t hold back.” Where Wiles rarely showed up on camera, O’Reilly said viewers will “see a lot of Miller” answering the attacks headed for the White House. His guest, Just the News CEO John Solomon, agreed the administration now needs “a pugilist.”

But the promotion has put Miller under a microscope. He is widely seen as the architect of the same immigration crackdown Trump now concedes was too tough, and a former ICE official told NewsNation that Miller’s appointment “sends a pretty loud message” that enforcement won’t slow down.

President Donald Trump’s ability to set his judicial agenda is under threat after the Republicans lost their majority in the U.S. Senate at the midterms, and it’s all down to two Supreme Court justices.

The president’s plans to remake the federal courts are in jeopardy, raising questions about whether the Supreme Court can maintain its 6-3 conservative edge. As Democrats are due to assume control of the Senate in January, the window for Republicans to put through Trump’s nominees is closing. Should a seat on the high court open up down the line, the president may have to count on Democratic backing to confirm a replacement.

Alex Swoyer, who wrote Lawless Lawfare, told Fox News that the outcome of the election could force the court’s oldest conservatives into a hard call on their retirement. “It's likely the justices — mainly Justices Thomas and Alito — are stuck on the high court for at least six more years with Democrats taking control,” Swoyer said. “Both in their late 70s, I could see why they may want to retire now, midterm.”

With Republicans set to cede the Senate, the decision by the two oldest conservatives, 78-year-old Clarence Thomas and 76-year-old Samuel Alito, carries extra weight. The New York Times reported that after the midterms, Justice Alito has made it clear to those close to him that he has no intention of resigning anytime soon.

“While Senate Republicans were able to confirm Justice Barrett in a one-month timeframe in 2020, I don't think this GOP Senate has that same work ethic or ability to push a nominee through ahead of January,” Swoyer said.

“I think conservatives would like to see them try; however, a judicial nominations expert told me the Senate work calendar ahead of the holidays would not afford them enough time,” she added. “While a five-week window seems workable, it doesn't appear like Senate Majority Leader John Thune would have the support to usher such a move at this time.”

By Nov. 8, 28 openings in the federal judiciary and 16 nominees awaiting confirmation for present and future vacancies gave Republicans little time to move on Trump’s selections. Zack Smith of the Heritage Foundation noted that even if a justice announced their retirement today, “it could prove difficult to get a replacement confirmed before the end of the current Senate, although Senate Republican leadership has indicated a willingness to try.”

“However, neither Justice Alito nor Justice Thomas has indicated any plan to retire.”

The situation with Thomas and Alito recalls the case of the late Ruth Bader Ginsburg. The liberal justice defied pressure to leave her post ahead of the 2014 midterms, despite fears Republicans would take the Senate and make it harder to confirm an Obama pick. She was on the bench until she died in September 2020, a matter of weeks before the presidential vote. Trump put forward Amy Coney Barrett, and the Senate had her confirmed in short order before Election Day.

Kenneth Roth, former executive director of Human Rights Watch, outlines how prosecutors can bring a legal reckoning for those who might receive a presidential pardon from Donald Trump. A founding board member of The Rule of Law Project, Roth says the new civic organization is intent on putting an end to the impunity of Trump and his administration.

Writing for The Guardian, he notes they are on the lookout for former federal prosecutors and FBI agents to probe allegations of corruption and abuse on the part of government officials and their accomplices that the present Justice Department has been overlooking.

As for Trump's pardoning power, Roth asks: “What if Trump pardons the culpable before he steps down?”

That would not necessarily protect his accomplices, he writes, because “the president’s pardon power does not extend to state crimes.” Conduct that could bring federal charges may also violate state law.

Roth contends that Trump has made his Justice Department a weapon to go after what he sees as political enemies and at the same time let his allies get away with alleged crimes. Those on Trump’s side have little reason to be afraid of his politicized prosecutors. He points to what he describes as the violence of ICE, large-scale official corruption and a habit of flouting the law.

The Rule of Law Project operates on the idea that a case is more likely to be taken up by a prosecutor if they are given a file that is mostly ready to go, Roth says, explaining the group’s function. The organization plans to do the legwork of talking to witnesses, amassing documents and analyzing them so cases can be put together while the evidence is still fresh.

The group cannot bring criminal charges itself, but its investigators will prepare cases for state and local prosecutors, or a future Justice Department willing to pursue them.

According to its launch announcement, the effort is led by Mark Blumberg, who spent nearly 30 years in the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division investigating and prosecuting official misconduct.

Its work will include a detailed prosecution memo that sets out the elements of potential crimes and the evidence gathered to support them. Where state and local authorities have jurisdiction, the group says it will take those cases to them.

The investigators will also look into the use of excessive force, election interference, and the conditions in detention centers.

Those probes could be a route toward criminal accountability without waiting for Trump’s presidency to end. He accuses Trump of weaponizing the DOJ to pursue his perceived political enemies “while neglecting crimes by his allies, who have often enjoyed effective impunity.”

Republican Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick is not taking his defeat lightly. Speaking to a conservative radio host on Monday, the Texas official said Republican lawmakers ought to strip the Democrat who beat him of her power as state Senate president before she is even in office.

Patrick was defeated by Democratic Lt. Gov.-elect Vikki Goodwin in last week’s midterms and is now bent on reducing the office he has occupied since 2015 to a shadow of what it was. The lieutenant governor of Texas has more authority than their counterparts in other states, per The Washington Post. The lieutenant governor in Texas oversees the budget, makes committee and chair appointments, and works with the governor to set the legislative agenda. In his 11 years in the job, Patrick has done all of that.

When they return to session in January, Texas GOP state senators will have a simple majority to hand over Goodwin’s power to a Republican majority leader. “I support the Republicans standing up for their voters,” Patrick told Mark Davis on the radio. “I think the Senate should do that” in regard to moving the powers of the office to the majority leader. He added that had he won, as he thought he would, “I was going to begin to change those rules.” He says such steps are needed to “protect the conservative majority.”

Goodwin beat Patrick by six points in a Democratic sweep of the Texas ballot. The blue wave was historic, and every statewide seat in Texas went to the Democrats. Democrats took the state House, and Gina Hinojosa unseated Greg Abbott for the governorship, though the GOP still has its Senate majority. On MS NOW last week, Goodwin warned that Republicans would be stripping her of authority “at their peril because we will have elections again in 2028.”

In an effort at cooperation, Goodwin has been in touch with Republican state senators. A statement from her transition team said she “believes that Texas is best served by a deliberative, collaborative body.”

Since he took office in 2015, Patrick has gathered enough power to be one of the most consequential lieutenant governors in the land. A Trump loyalist, the president praised him in a Truth Social post during a redistricting row last year as an “incredible friend.” Patrick also oversaw the acquittal of Attorney General Ken Paxton following the latter’s 2023 impeachment by the Texas House and has been a defender of GOP causes like the school voucher program.

The Trump administration is pushing the Supreme Court to strip federal prisoners of a key way to sue prison staff over medical neglect, and at Monday’s oral arguments, the court appeared ready to go along. The shift could make federal officers even harder to hold accountable when they mistreat the people in their custody.

The Supreme Court was looking to rein in suits from federal inmates over claims of substandard medical care at the hands of prison officials, a move that would chip away at the legal precedent long used to make federal law enforcement answerable for constitutional transgressions, the Washington Post reported.

The justices on Monday seemed set to throw out the suit of Kekai Watanabe, an ex-inmate who said a nurse at the Honolulu federal detention center did not properly treat him for a broken tailbone sustained in a gang-related assault during a riot. Yet they did not appear prepared to issue a broader ruling that would undo the 1971 precedent entitling those wronged by federal officers in violation of their constitutional rights to sue for monetary damages.

In Watanabe’s case, the prison nurse’s lawyers have been making that argument and trying to overturn the 1971 Bivens v. Six Unknown Named Agents of the Federal Bureau of Narcotics decision. That has given pause to inmate and immigration advocates who fear the demise of the Bivens precedent would leave less room to hold to account not only prison guards but also ICE agents when they break the law. Watanabe’s matter is being heard while allegations against immigration officers are on the rise with the Trump administration’s mass deportation efforts.

In recent years, the high court has been steadily curbing the Bivens precedent. The Trump administration is asking it to put an end to a subsequent precedent that built on Bivens to let prisoners sue under the Eighth Amendment for deliberate indifference to their medical needs.

The administration is not calling for Bivens to be overturned in its entirety. Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr., who is frequently in the majority, and some of his colleagues appeared to side with the administration. “It could be viewed as a cautious, incremental approach to such a fundamental question,” Roberts observed in oral arguments on Monday. A few conservative justices noted other avenues for inmates to seek redress for bad medical care, such as the Federal Tort Claims Act, which permits suits against the federal government but not its employees. For his part, Lucas M. Walker, attorney for the nurse Francis Nielsen, contended the Bivens precedent was a violation of the separation of powers.

President Donald Trump is selling early access to his Truth Social post, and despite the legally questionable move, his company is still bleeding millions. Trump Media & Technology Group, the owner of Truth Social, told investors on Monday that its third-quarter revenue tripled from a year earlier, The Washington Post reports, thanks largely to subscriptions, including a service that sells fast access to the president’s top posts.

The company brought in just $3 million for the quarter, with $1.8 million of it coming from subscriptions to its Truth+ streaming platform and the Truth API. That service, launched in August, gives paying customers instant access to Trump’s Truth Social posts, and it has already come under legal scrutiny.

On paper, the quarter's revenue looks healthy, with Trump Media reporting $409.7 million in net income, after a $54.8 million loss the previous year. However, nearly all of the earnings came from its crypto and stock holdings, which gained $496.1 million, which the company itself described as “noncash.” Set those gains and some other costs aside, and the core business lost $12.3 million, by its own accounting, per the WaPo report.

The company’s stock, widely treated as a stand-in for Trump himself, sank to a record low last week after Democrats took control of both chambers of Congress. Democrats in Congress have also vowed to investigate Trump’s businesses over allegations of corruption. Interim chief executive Kevin McGurn told investors they have nothing to be concerned about. “While the market was trading on headlines, the underlying business didn’t flinch,” he said, adding that the slide had no effect on the balance sheet. The company pointed to $2.5 billion in total assets.

Advertising also got a mention, including a $175,000 campaign for Freedom 250, an entity within the National Park Foundation. Key Trump fundraiser Meredith O’Rourke happens to sit on the boards of both Trump Media and the foundation.

The earnings call comes ahead of the company’s plans for a $6 billion merger with a nuclear fusion power firm, TAE Technologies. Shareholders are set to vote on the $6 billion merger on Dec. 14, and Trump’s trust, which owns 41 percent of the company, has already agreed to back it.

Fusion power is not yet commercially available, though Silicon Valley has invested billions into it. McGurn told Axios last month that the one thing that could knock the platform out of the game was energy. “So we went out, and we found an energy company,” he said.

The Macrons are not about to let their case against the far-right media figure Candace Owens go and have now taken their lawsuit to her home turf.

In her home state of Tennessee, French President Emmanuel Macron and his wife Brigitte have filed a defamation suit against the far-right conspiracy theorist.

The couple filed the complaint in the U.S. District Court for the Middle District of Tennessee. Their lawyers argue the state is the right venue because Owens lives in Nashville and allegedly put out the material from there.

It is the newest turn in a long legal battle the couple has mounted after Owens made false claims that Brigitte is a transgender man. Last year, Owens released an 11-part series, Becoming Brigitte, which garnered millions of views, accusing the First Lady of France of secretly transitioning from a man to a woman.

The Macrons had initially brought a defamation suit in Delaware in July 2025 against Owens and her two media companies where they are registered. However, a court in that state last month limited the scope of the complaint to just the corporations under its jurisdiction.

Delaware Superior Court Judge Sheldon K. Rennie dismissed Owens herself from that case on Oct. 27, finding the court had no jurisdiction over her since she lives in Tennessee. Claims against Candace Owens LLC and GeorgeTom Inc. are still pending there.

Owens said at the time she was “in the absolute best mood” about the ruling. The Macrons’ lawyers at Clare Locke said they would look into other ways to hold her personally accountable.

On Monday, once the new filing from Nov. 4 showed up in the legal databases, a representative for the Macrons’ lawyers confirmed it is real, per Politico. In this 409-page document, the team has gone into what it calls the “outlandish, defamatory, and far-fetched fictions” of Owens and put forward financial and ideological reasons for her work. “She has continued to use her podcast to expand her lies about the Macrons, sell merchandise making fun of the Macrons, and collect donations based on her ‘reporting’ on the Macrons,” the complaint reads.

The Macrons are seeking actual, presumed, and punitive damages, along with an order barring Owens from republishing any statements a court finds defamatory.

Owens is also facing two other defamation suits, filed in Tennessee and Utah, over her commentary on the killing of Charlie Kirk.

While Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth seems like the No. 1 target for impeachment, a former federal prosecutor wants House Democrats to go after Attorney General Todd Blanche first when they take over the chamber in January.

He believes a single count will end Blanche’s reign as head of the Department of Justice.

Harry Litman, a former U.S. attorney for the Western District of Pennsylvania and deputy assistant attorney general, made the case in a column for The New Republic on Monday.

“It is high time to impeach Todd Blanche,” he wrote.

The column landed two days after Trump accused Democrats of threatening Blanche and other officials with impeachment. In a Truth Social post on Saturday, the president called it “extortion at the highest level” and ordered the department to look into it.

On Sunday, Blanche told CNN’s Dana Bash that whether Democratic lawmakers could face prison “depends on what the crime is and what they’ve done.”

Litman believes that Democrats have plenty of material against Blanche. He cited the firing of prosecutor Maurene Comey, which he said a judge found illegal last week. But he argued that a single count on retaliatory prosecutions would keep the focus on what he sees as the clearest mark of authoritarian rule.

“Yet if I were drafting the articles, I’d opt to set aside, for the time being, all those horrendous abuses in the sycophantic service of Donald Trump and advance a single count: that Blanche has wielded the power of federal prosecution to punish the president’s enemies,” he wrote.

He pointed to the cases against former FBI Director James Comey, New York Attorney General Letitia James, former White House aide Cassidy Hutchinson and six Democratic lawmakers who recorded a video telling troops they could refuse illegal orders.

In his view, such prosecutions violate due process and, when they punish speech, the First Amendment. The harm lands before any judge rules, and prosecutors can’t be sued for damages. “Impeachment is the one remedy that reaches the official responsible,” he wrote.

Litman compared Blanche to Hegseth, who faces an impeachment vote that GOP Rep. Thomas Massie is gathering votes to bring to the table. Massie’s articles cover the Iran war and deadly strikes on boats. Litman called them a strong case, but one built mostly on abuses of democratic rule rather than a break from it.

The lone exception, he wrote, is a charge that Hegseth threatened Sen. Mark Kelly with prosecution over the illegal-orders video. Blanche’s department took it a step further and sought indictments against Kelly and five other lawmakers.

In a defiant video, Hegseth responded to the pending impeachment. “This is not about me, but of course the other side, they’re obsessed. A disgruntled, defeated congressman, along with all his Democratic allies, has also dropped sham articles of impeachment against yours truly. Just like they tried against President Trump twice," Hegseth.

Rep. Hank Johnson said last week that Blanche should be impeached and removed from office, and Rep. Jamie Raskin is set to chair the House Judiciary Committee, where any articles against Blanche would begin.

Brett Shumate, head of the Justice Department’s Civil Division, resigned on Monday. He is the most recent of several Senate-confirmed DOJ leaders to depart in the wake of last week’s midterm elections, which saw the GOP suffer huge losses.

In a statement on X, Attorney General Todd Blanche said he accepted the departure: “Today I accepted the resignation of Assistant Attorney General Brett Shumate of the Civil Division. Under his leadership, the Division pursued important affirmative litigation to challenge sanctuary policies and delivered key wins in lawsuits against local policies that endangered federal law enforcement. The Division also secured historic settlements to end illegal corporate DEI practices and shuttered dozens of clinics which were providing so-called ‘gender affirming care’ to minors. We are grateful for Brett’s service at DOJ and wish him continued success.”

Shumate, a former member of the Justice Department under Trump’s first term, ran a division that went after local governments uncooperative with the administration’s immigration hard line, as well as healthcare clinics for transgender minors and corporate diversity programs, according to Reuters. In court, he has also put up a defense for Trump’s move to strip citizenship from naturalized immigrants.

Last month, the department went after 40 naturalized Americans in what Blanche called the “largest denaturalization effort in modern history.”

“Every single one of these individuals lied their way into U.S. citizenship,” Shumate said, according to The New Republic.

Shumate also defended the administration’s push to give the U.S. Postal Service a role in overseeing mail-in ballots, NBC News reported. He likewise had a hand in the decision to let planes carrying alleged Tren de Aragua members land in El Salvador last year despite a judge’s order to the contrary.

The Civil Division, like others in the DOJ, has seen its ranks thin out since Trump’s reelection two years back, even in the unit tasked with defending the president’s policies in court. Lately, the division under Shumate has been offering signing bonuses as high as $25,000.

What prompted Shumate to resign remains unclear. He joins other senior officials who have moved on of late: Harmeet Dhillon of the Civil Rights Division, John Eisenberg of National Security, and U.S. attorney Jason Reding Quiñones, who oversaw probes into past criminal investigations of Trump.

The exits come as Democrats prepare to take over Congress in January with plans to investigate Trump and his administration.

The row between Trump’s ex-MAHA adviser and the fired chief of staff has taken a nastier turn, with him accusing her of disloyalty to the president.

Calley Means, a confidant of Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and, until recently, a top White House health policy adviser, wrote on X accusing Susie Wiles of leaking to the press to shift the blame onto the president. In his lengthy post, he wrote, “I want everyone in the White House to know that Susie is executing a systematic strategy to throw President Trump under the bus.”

Means singled out a reporter he called Wiles’s “stenographer” and alleged the person was relaying her leaks as Trump, not Wiles, and she had been “captured” by Ballard Partners, the lobbying outfit she used to work with.

He also had words for the firm’s founder, Brian Ballard. According to Means, Ballard put in writing that he did not lobby Wiles or White House staff on glyphosate, but the firm’s own disclosure tells a different story, showing him personally lobbying the White House in the quarter a pertinent executive order was issued.

“He is either lying or throwing President Trump under the bus,” Means wrote of Ballard. Means also claimed Ballard is running a PR campaign to defend Wiles and argue “that President Trump is the sole reason the administration has caved to the tobacco and pesticide industries.”

Then there is James Blair, the former deputy chief of staff. Means says Blair has been angrily texting, in no uncertain terms, that “my problem is obviously with President Trump,” and sending quotes to the media, holding the president to account for corporate capture in the first two years.

To Wiles, he wrote, “I’m not intimidated and you will not scare me,” before asking her to stop sending “emotional texts.”

“This is not personal — this is civilizational.” He added, “If America doesn’t move on from the revolting version of politics you represent, our country will cease to exist.”

The former top White House adviser called on present and past administration officials to speak to the press, writing, “It is time to speak to the press about what you saw,” before adding that Stephen Miller and President Trump will “solve” it.

He said of the new controversial chief of staff: “Whatever side of the aisle we are on, we should pray for Miller’s to exorcise Susie’s culture of corruption from the admin and get us on a posture advocating for voters, not Ballard.”

Ballard Partners has dismissed his claims as false and characterized its interactions with Wiles as “limited.” For his part, Blair called the talk of corruption “scurrilous, false, and defamatory” in a statement to The Wall Street Journal and is considering legal action. Wiles told CBS News that Trump has done more for the MAHA movement than any other president.

All this came to a head after Means went on Joe Rogan’s podcast and said Wiles had put the interests of corporate donors before the administration’s healthy-eating platform, recalling her remark that she required “sugar money” to win the midterms.

Rep. Robert Garcia of California, the Democrat expected to run the House Oversight Committee in January, responded to Means’s claims that White House aides put corporations ahead of Americans' health and promised an investigation.

Utah GOP Sen. John Curtis doubled down on his call for President Donald Trump’s son to be looked at, as Democrats prepare a “Trump Crime Family” probe.

“My position hasn’t changed,” Curtis said in a statement to The Salt Lake Tribune. “Congress has a responsibility to examine whether presidential family members are using their access for personal financial gain, regardless of party.”

The incoming Democratic chair of the powerful House Oversight Committee has set four investigative priorities: corporate corruption, DHS and ICE abuse allegations, the Epstein files cover-up, and Trump’s family dealings.

Curtis put in a call in late September for an inquiry into the president’s son. He urged his fellow members of Congress to examine whether Donald Trump Jr. had made any financial profit from being close to the presidency, but his appeal was unheeded.

With Democrats promising to get to the bottom of the Trump family’s business, Curtis’s efforts may have some legs to them now.

In a statement, Curtis said he is also in favor of pressing on with the probes of Hunter Biden, former President Joe Biden’s son. Congress has examined the younger Biden to see whether he has leveraged his father’s office for his own ends. Lawmakers “nearly wore out the subpoena machine investigating Hunter Biden’s foreign relationships,” Curtis remarked in September, and “they shouldn’t unplug it now.”

Trump Jr. has not been subjected to that kind of scrutiny, Curtis said, and he partly put the Republicans’ heavy midterm losses down to that fact.

“Any investigation should follow the facts and focus on restoring public trust,” he said Friday. “That’s one of the many reasons Americans voted the way they did on Tuesday.”

His September call followed a ProPublica piece showing that Umar Kremlev, a Kremlin-linked Russian oligarch, quietly put up hundreds of thousands of dollars for Trump Jr.’s wedding celebrations, even renting a private island in the Bahamas for multiple nights. About 50 people were on the guest list, including Jared Kushner and other Trump family members. Kremlev, who met Trump Jr. a couple of years ago, according to his press office, was there with a good number of other Russians for the affair.

This is not the first time Trump Jr.’s Russian connections have been put under a microscope. In the wake of the 2016 election, he was at the heart of the Robert Mueller probe after word came out he had been at a Trump Tower meeting with a Russian lawyer billed as offering damaging information on Hillary Clinton.

As for the Oversight Committee, Claire Leavitt, a professor at Smith College who deals in government oversight, told The Salt Lake Tribune in an interview Friday that they have wide latitude. “They can really investigate anything they want,” she said. Most committees are confined by their jurisdiction despite having the power to subpoena, but “what makes House Oversight and Reform different is that they have a jurisdiction that’s completely wide open.” So Democratic lawmakers can make an issue of just about anything, whether in the public or private sphere.

President Donald Trump could still have his way with the White House ballroom, but the cost may be in Patriot missiles.

In a column for The Washington Post, Max Boot writes about the means by which Congress can put some discipline on Trump’s foreign policy in the wake of last week’s midterm drubbing. The historian put forward a straightforward proposition for congressional leaders: give the president the funds to complete the ballroom and, in exchange, get more Patriots to Ukraine.

It is not as far-fetched as it might seem, as Boot makes the case that there is now bipartisan backing in Congress, perhaps even a veto-proof majority, for standing up to Vladimir Putin and supporting Ukraine. Only 3 percent of the American public sides with Russia, he points out.

Boot lists a number of options lawmakers have that don’t need Trump’s approval, including new aid for Ukraine and keeping Starlink’s satellite service running. He also mentions they can turn over Russian assets frozen in the United States to Kyiv ($5 billion to $50 billion) and impose harsher sanctions on Moscow with no presidential waiver.

The whole thing rests on the GOP acting on how they feel behind closed doors. For the better part of Trump’s time in office, many Republicans in Congress would complain in private about his moves abroad but say nothing, too intimidated by his hold on their base. A poll before the election had 79 percent of Republicans approving of him. He notes that Trump’s tariffs went under the radar in terms of the reasons for the GOP wipeout, noting that 66 percent told an NBC News exit poll that his tariffs were bad for the economy.

Boot says the midterms made plain to Republicans the price of going over the cliff with Trump. Some of what remains of the party may be willing to work with Democrats on a foreign policy that puts the country before the president.

Boots admits that the president has wide latitude in foreign affairs, but Congress has the ability to end funding for the Iran war, the boat strikes, and other actions taken by Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth. With this in mind, he notes that Hegseth’s “days are probably numbered.”

Judge Tanya Chutkan has put a 14-day stop to any construction work on the ballroom. With Democrats set to assume control of both houses on Jan. 3 and a full five-week lame-duck session ahead, the project is in limbo. In Boot’s view, Trump could get his dream ballroom in a deal that gives Ukraine the much-needed Patriot missiles.

A former federal prosecutor says Donald Trump can delete his posts, but he can’t delete the record. One of his most damaging Truth Social posts is already locked away in court files, where it could come back to haunt him.

Joyce Vance, a former U.S. attorney, flagged in her Civil Discourse newsletter that Trump has scrubbed a year-old post in which he told then-Attorney General Pam Bondi to speed up prosecutions of people he saw as political enemies. She quoted commentator Adam Mockler, who made note of the deletion on X.

In the now-deleted post, Trump appeared to pressure Bondi to prosecute James Comey, Adam Schiff and Leticia James.

Vance said that despite the deletion, the post has been entered into legal pleadings, including the motions arguing that the prosecution of former FBI Director James Comey was vindictive and selective. Those filings, she noted, preserve the post permanently along with any others.

A vindictive prosecution claim hinges on whether the government went after a defendant out of animus. She said Trump’s direction to Bondi in the post is evidence for defense attorneys who are out to prove his prosecutions, like the Comey case, are vindictive.

Vance believes Trump’s timing on hitting the delete button is no coincidence and comes after the Democrats push the GOP out of Congress in the midterms by gaining the House and the Senate. Trump has said he is willing to work with the new majority. Vance wrote that “Trump is likely motivated more by fear than sincerity” because he knows accountability is coming.

In her view, Trump’s sudden outreach looks less like sincerity and more like fear from a president who knows what is coming for him.

“Justice is coming, even if it has taken far too long,” Vance wrote.

She also pointed to remarks Justice Sonia Sotomayor made on Saturday, when the justice said:

“I think we’re in a rough patch right now. There’s so many challenges to it [the rule of law] on so many different levels. This is a really critical point in our history. Is it going to end tomorrow? No. It’s going to take some hard work. I don’t know how long it’s going to take to put us back on an even keel. I’m hoping it’s … in my lifetime. But even if it’s not in my lifetime, I genuinely believe it will happen.”

Trump may soon find that his deleted posts get a second life outside court, too. When the new Congress is seated on Jan. 3, Rep. Robert Garcia of California is expected to take over the House Oversight Committee, which has the power to investigate the administration. Vance called out Attorney General Todd Blanche, accusing him of not understanding his job and calling for his impeachment “as soon as possible.”

She referenced Blanche’s comments on Fox, in which he said he is Stephen Miller’s lawyer in response to threats from Congressman Robert Garcia, the senior Democrat on the House Oversight Committee, who said congressional investigations are coming for them. She reminded Blanche, “You’re the people’s lawyer. You’re no longer Donald Trump’s criminal defense lawyer.”

While there is no doubt indictments are coming, it is yet to be seen how Trump and his allies respond.

Republican Rep. Thomas Massie is on the verge of unleashing another Epstein Files showdown on Trump’s Department of Justice.

Massie, who lost a GOP primary in May, is just two signatures short of the 218 needed for his latest Epstein discharge petition. He has 216 signatures, according to ABC News, and he’s backed by Reps. Nancy Mace, Ralph Norman and Brian Fitzpatrick, who are also on their way out.

Massie only needs two Democrats to sign on for the Epstein Transparency Act II bill to reach the floor. The bill “empowers state attorneys general, victims and members of Congress to sue the U.S. Attorney General in federal court for unlawfully withholding or redacting Jeffrey Epstein and Ghislaine Maxwell investigative records,” per the report.

Attorney General Todd Blanche has conceded “mistakes” were made in not adequately redacting the names of some victims when millions of files from the Justice Department’s old investigations into the late convicted sex offender Epstein were put out, an action Blanche and other department officials are accused of having done on purpose. In testimony, Blanche said the department immediately set about fixing the situation.

“Whenever we learned that any victim’s name had been improperly non-redacted, we immediately took the document down and fixed it as soon as we could,” said Blanche before the Senate Judiciary Committee on July 15. “That doesn’t excuse the mistakes of which I take full responsibility, but it does mean that we tried to fix them. We — we complied with the act.”

As for Massie, he is making the most of his remaining weeks in Congress by also mounting another impeachment bid against Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth. The resolution Massie has put forward contains eight articles of impeachment. Hegseth has reason to be concerned with his own party following Tuesday’s Democratic wipeout.

On Thursday, President Donald Trump made it known he wants to keep Hegseth in post even though some Republicans, Vice President JD Vance among them, have said that the Iran war was responsible for the party’s midterm beating.

It should be noted that Trump also denied in October that he planned to fire his former Chief of Staff, Susie Wiles, before he let her go.

Hegseth came out swinging with a defiant message in response to what seems like an inevitable impeachment attempt. “This is not about me, but of course the other side, they’re obsessed,” he said.

“A disgruntled, defeated congressman, along with all his Democratic allies, has also dropped sham articles of impeachment against yours truly. Just like they tried against President Trump twice.” He is standing firm on the Iran war and his cultural agenda at the Pentagon in a similar manner.

Massie may make a move as soon as Monday for a midweek confrontation over Hegseth’s impeachment.

Texts have come to light of two MAGA hardliners in the midst of a spat, trading threats as they very publicly fall out over who is at fault for the GOP’s midterm drubbing.

Before the weekend’s social media row, James Blair, Trump’s former deputy chief of staff, put Calley Means, an ex-top health adviser, on notice with a warning. “If you are gonna try to knife me, I’m happy to return the favor,” Blair said in a text The Wall Street Journal has seen.

The former advisers have been at each other online since Means made public charges that Blair and his allies were putting corporate interests first at the White House. In a media campaign, Means has also taken aim at Susie Wiles, the president’s former chief of staff, and other aides for bowing to corporations and holding up Make America Healthy Again (MAHA) policies.

The hostile exchange between the two ex-senior advisers is indicative of the rough going for the GOP as Trump’s people trade blame for the party’s shocking midterm results. Some of the infighting has been over claims of making money off ties to the Trump administration, with corruption being one of the top concerns for the electorate.

Means sat down with Joe Rogan for an interview where he said Wiles, who was chief of staff until Friday, and others like Blair had sided with industry and put the brakes on the MAHA agenda. At one point, Means recounted Wiles saying: “I need the money from the sugar people to win the midterms” and “Calley, we can’t do this. I need sugar money.”

According to the Journal, Means says the exchange with Wiles took place in early June and concerned a letter Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. wanted to issue on ultra-processed food in response to a petition by former FDA head David Kessler to declare some refined carbs unsafe.

Trump has now put forward Stephen Miller, the immigration hardliner, to take over as chief of staff.

As for the allegations, Ballard Partners, Wiles’s former lobbying firm, put out a long statement online, claiming Means was wrong about its firm and that it had “limited” dealings with Wiles. Bayer, which Means named over the pesticide glyphosate, would not comment, and Trump pollster Tony Fabrizio did not immediately respond to the Journal.

Blair told the Journal the insinuations of corruption leveled at him and the rest by Means are “scurrilous, false, and defamatory.” He called Means “a failed political operative and wedding dress salesman.” Blair is considering whether to file a lawsuit.

“You just dragged me in a very public forum with scurrilous, half-baked accusations and you know what you were doing,” Blair wrote to Means in a message the Journal reviewed.

“If I said something factually inaccurate about you, please let me know,” was Means’s answer.