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Former FBI Director James Comey's legal team filed a motion on Monday arguing that key charges against him should be dismissed because of what they call “smoking gun evidence” of improper political influence.

Comey is charged with one count of making a false statement to Congress and another of obstructing a congressional proceeding.

But in the filings, his attorneys accuse President Donald Trump of directing the Department of Justice to prosecute Comey because of longstanding animus — and they point to the ex‑President’s public and social‑media attacks on Comey as evidence.

“The indictment in this case arises from multiple glaring constitutional violations and an egregious abuse of power by the federal government," the filing said.

CNN's Katelyn Polantz reported that a centerpiece of the defense’s argument is a collection of 60 pages of social media posts attributed to Trump, in which he repeatedly criticized Comey and called for him to be prosecuted.

The defense posits that those posts demonstrate that had Trump not ordered the Justice Department to act, Comey would not have been charged.

Comey’s attorneys argue that the appointment of Lindsey Halligan as U.S. Attorney in the Eastern District of Virginia, which led the indictment, was unlawful. They say career prosecutors had declined the case and that Halligan, who previously worked for Trump, was installed in order to secure charges at the statute‑of‑limitations deadline.

The indictment against Comey stems from his 2020 testimony before the Senate Judiciary Committee, during which he said he had never authorized anyone at the FBI to be an anonymous source in a media leak. Prosecutors claim he did.

Legal experts note that motions to dismiss on the basis of selective or vindictive prosecution are very rarely successful — the burden is high. The question for the judge will be whether the evidence of Trump’s statements and the circumstances of the prosecutor’s appointment rise to the level of unconstitutional prosecutorial misconduct.

A trial is scheduled for January 5.

CNN's Brianna Keilar pressed Rep. Randy Fine (R-Fla.) Monday on whether it was appropriate for the U.S. or its proxies to negotiate directly with Hamas, a designated terrorist group.

During a segment on CNN, the anchor asked: “How are you viewing the U.S. negotiating directly with terrorist groups?”

“Well, look, I can only look at the results that we got. I don’t think anyone thought Hamas would ever release every single hostage. It’s a miracle. So, obviously, the results work, and now we’re in a much better position to go after Hamas because they don’t have the leverage of these hostages. So I support President [Donald] Trump," Fine said, calling himself "an intense guy."

Keller pressed again: “I’m talking about the negotiating directly with terrorists. Does that inform your thinking on how other conflicts might be solved?”

Fine said he believed it did.

“I think what it shows is that when President Trump leans in and focuses on dealing with all of the parties, he can generate results. We need that same result in Russia and Ukraine. And I think that sort of intense focus is the right way to go. It got results here," he said.

The tone shifted when the anchor turned to another controversial topic: Fine’s recently-introduced “No Shari’a Act" in Congress, and his comments on “Islamification” of America.

Keller asked: “You said to Laura Loomer, a controversial far‑right activist, about your bill that 'We have to be focused on the problem' — you talked about the problem being the Islamification of America. You said 'We can see what happened in France, we can see what happened in the U.K., we can see what happened in Dearborn. And we have to say, we don’t want that.'What did happen in Dearborn? What do you mean by that?”

“Well, the mayor of Dearborn, in a city that has become 50 percent Muslim, told a Christian minister … that he was no longer welcome there because he did not want a road named after a terrorist. That is what we're dealing with in this country," he said.

"And when you have a radical Jihadi‑like [New York mayoral candidate Zohran] Mamdani possibly being elected in the City of New York, we’ve got to … deal with that."

The anchor then mentioned Trump's outreach to the Muslim community.

“Donald Trump, as you’re well aware, courted Muslim‑American, Arab‑American voters in Dearborn," she said. "He won Dearborn on his way to winning Michigan. He has nominated Muslim American mayors in Michigan, not far from Dearborn, including Dearborn Heights, to be ambassadors … a population that really mattered a lot to him. How do you square what you’re saying with what he has said and how he has viewed these folks?”

"I don’t think they’re inconsistent. Not all Muslims believe in terrorism. The problem is a large percentage do. And what President Trump is doing right is he is engaging with the ones that I consider radical — the ones who want peace with Christian and Jewish communities, who want peace around the world, to set them up to be successful. That’s the way we solve this problem," Fine said.

When pressed further whether he might be “lumping people together,” Fine said: “No. … I’m very clear about this. I believe we have gotten this wrong. The radical Muslims are the ones who want peace. They’re the ones in the UAE, the ones in Dubai, many in Saudi Arabia, who want peace. But it is the mainstream, the imams, that we can see over and over and over again, who call for the destruction of the West. And we cannot be afraid to call it out. We have to recognize that there is evil in this world, and we have to fight it every day.”

Fine’s “No Shari’a Act” legislation has drawn criticism from civil rights groups for its potential to disproportionately target Muslim Americans.

The Florida Republican has a documented history of inflammatory remarks about Muslims and Muslim‑Americans.

Civil rights groups note that he has referred to Muslims as terrorists, celebrated the killing of a Muslim‑American activist and was designated by Council on American‑Islamic Relations (CAIR) as an “anti‑Muslim extremist” for what they described as “a pattern of violent, dehumanizing rhetoric toward Muslims and Palestinians.”

President Donald Trump continues to claim that he won the 2024 election by a "landslide" when, in fact, he won the popular vote by roughly 1.5 percent. And Trump is claiming that the No Kings Day protests held in cities all over the United States on Saturday, October 18 were small, marginal and poorly attended; in fact, there were millions of participants in protests that, organizers said, totaled around 2500.

According to MSNBC reporter Antonia Hylton, the No Kings protest in New York City turned out to be even larger than predicted. The turnout, Hylton reported, "far exceeded" the original estimate of 200,000 people.

During an interview with Democratic strategist Simon Rosenberg for The New Republic's podcast, "The Daily Blast," host Greg Sargent emphasized that the more Trump feels threatened, the more he angrily lashes out. And right now, according to Sargent, Trump is feeling very threatened thanks to recent polls — including a CNBC poll showing that only 34 percent of Americans approve of his handling of inflation.

In the interview, posted on October 20, Rosenberg told Sargent, "I think that there are two things that are happening simultaneously that we have to keep in our minds. One is that Trump is doing incredible harm to the country and breaking things that are going to be difficult, if not impossible, to repair. And we must act with incredible vigor to mitigate the damage and to win back power."

Rosenberg continued, "But the second thing that's happening, and that's equally important, is that he's in physical, cognitive, and political decline, and that he's growing, I think, ever more distant from the American people. He's struggling to rally even his own voters behind major parts of his agenda. And as a political project, he's failing."

The Democratic strategist warned that "the more there’s a perception that his government and his political project have failed," the more one is seeing a "greater escalation toward authoritarianism" from the Trump Administration.

Rosenberg told Sargent, "And that's because they're growing to believe that winning the elections, staying in power through winning the elections next year, is starting to become difficult, if not impossible. And so, therefore, they're going to Door 2 — which is greater illiberalism, crushing their opposition…. I call it the vicious cycle of a failing strongman — that the more he fails, the more he grows distant from the public, which encourages him to become more of an illiberal strongman and to crack down on his opposition. And I think that he's in that dynamic right now. And unfortunately, what it's doing is accelerating his experimentation with becoming a total autocrat."

Trump, according to Rosenberg, is acting like a "full-on authoritarian."

"They're losing," Rosenberg told Sargent. "They don't feel like this stuff is working. They know the economy isn't going well. So what it's causing them to do, Greg, is a version of what you were saying — which is for him to have to restore his strength and his manhood and his manliness through these other extraordinary means, right? Through the use of the military, through killing fishermen in the Caribbean, through the saber-rattling that he does against the Democrats every day, to putting (former FBI Director) James Comey into jail."

Rosenberg added, "These are ways of him restoring strength that he actually doesn't have. It's like drinking the blood of virgins in order to restore the decline that he's going through…. He's also doing things such that I don't know that you can argue that America lives in a democracy, that we live in a democracy, any longer.

Listen to the full podcast at this link or read the transcript here.

Disgraced former Rep. George Santos (R-New York) is out of prison after receiving a commutation from President Donald Trump on Friday, October 17. Santos, in 2024, pleaded guilty to criminal charges that included wire fraud and aggravated identity theft.

One person who is furious about the commutation is Richard Osthoff, a disabled, New Jersey-based military veteran who accused Santos of stealing $3,000 that was raised for his dying dog via GoFundMe. The money was raised for surgery that the dog needed to survive, but the dog died.

During a Monday afternoon, October 20 appearance on MSNBC, Osthoff had scathing comments about the commutation and Trump's treatment of veterans in general.

When Jansing noted that Santos, under the commutation, "doesn't have to pay restitution," a frustrated Osthoff commented, "His whole thing is about keeping money away from people that he owes money to. And I'm not surprised that he doesn't want to pay them back. He's laughing all the way to the bank right now."

Jansing pointed out that Santos, after his release, told CNN's Dana Bash he wants to "make amends" for past actions — a claim that Osthoff doesn't believe.

Osthoff told Jansing, "He's been so rude to me. He's lied about me. He's defamed me on TV dozens of times. He has no remorse."

The disabled veteran went on to lambast Trump for the commutation.

"I still haven't eaten since I heard that," Osthoff angrily told Jansing. "That was three days ago. I was really just sick to my stomach for the president of the United States to stick me in the gut with a knife — and every other veteran and every other military member to get a knife in the gut. He also knifed Holocaust victims, Holocausts survivors and 9/11 survivors and victims in the gut by letting this guy out this early. He should have done at least half of his seven years. This is disgraceful."

Osthoff continued, "President Trump — this is another thing in the long line of his disrespect for our military and our veterans. He wouldn't go to a Marine Corps cemetery in France because the weather didn't agree with him. He calls us suckers and losers — what's in it for us?.... It's disgusting. He hates us."

Osthoff argued that Santos "walking out of prison" is a "complete travesty."

"The same with the January 6 people," Osthoff added. "This is a president, a rogue president now, just using his pardon power like a cudgel against everything that's decent, good and holy. It's shameful and a disgrace. And I'm almost ashamed that I served my country now. This is not the country I raised my hand three times to reenlist for. That man disrespects the military and veterans and just about everybody that walks that doesn't wear a red hat every single day."

In the days leading up to the No Kings protests of Saturday, October 18, House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-Louisiana) attacked the gatherings as "Hate America rallies" that would be dominated by a combination of Antifa agitators, Hamas supporters, and far-left communists. But the protests, which attracted millions of participants nationwide, were considerably different from what Johnson predicted.

Expressing their opposition to President Donald Trump's policies, the demonstrators ranged from centrist Democrats to democratic socialists to liberals to right-wing Never Trump conservatives and libertarians. Conservative attorney George Conway, a Never Trumper and veteran of the right-wing legal movement, marched in the No Kings protest in Washington, D.C.

The New Republic's Michael Tomasky, in an article published on October 20, argues that Johnson's comments about the protesters show a fundamental lack of understanding about the U.S. population.

Tomasky explains, "It was one thing to distort the intent and nature of these rallies in the run-up to them by saying they were for violent terrorists who despise the United States of America…. But by late afternoon Saturday, the events had happened; the smaller ones like mine finished in the early afternoon…. There was no violence at all. Seven million people attended. There were American flags everywhere. The rallies were the very definition of patriotism: People who love their country and want to do what they can to save it from tyranny."

Johnson, Tomasky notes, "spent the days leading up to the rallies saying they were essentially going to be (George) Soros-backed terrorist gatherings."

"Last Friday," Tomasky writes, "Johnson said, 'You're going to bring together the Marxists, the socialists, the Antifa advocates, the anarchists, and the pro-Hamas wing of the far-left Democratic Party'…. He should be ashamed of himself. He should also have gone to one of the rallies in his congressional district — there appear to have been three of them, and two more right nearby — and seen for himself the flags and the 'I love my country' signs and talked to some of the good and decent people from all walks of life who attended."

Johnson and "others of his Trumpist ilk," Tomasky laments, showed that they "truly understand nothing about the United States of America."

"They think this is a Christian nation," Tomasky observes. "They want a country based on 'biblical principles.' I'm not sure which biblical principles he means. The biblical principles I was taught as a young Episcopalian were to love thy neighbor as thyself, be compassionate toward the poor and needy, treat the stranger among you with love, and don't ever lie. The principles Johnson follows as a legislator are hate thy neighbor, to hell with the poor and needy, throw strangers in detention camps, and worship a man who lies every time he opens his mouth…. And no, the United States is not a Christian nation and was never intended to be."

Michael Tomasky's full article for The New Republic is available at this link.