Representative James Comer has found a new scapegoat for his impeachment inquiry into Joe Biden going up in flames: It’s all the deep state’s fault.
Comer made the wild claim during a Monday appearance on the Fox News radio show Fox Across America With Jimmy Failla. The House Oversight Committee chair insisted that Attorney General Merrick Garland was conspiring with the “deep state” to sabotage the impeachment investigation.
“Garland’s working with the deep state, who’s working with the liberal mainstream media to try to indoctrinate into people’s minds that there’s no evidence,” Comer said.
Comer then insisted that multiple members of the Biden family had received payments from foreign businesses. “This all revolves around Joe because not only have we proven Joe got $250,000, a quarter of $1 million of that money, but Joe met with all the people that were wiring the Bidens money,” Comer said.
The $250,000 that Comer mentioned has already been proven to be from Biden’s brother Jim, who was repaying the president for a loan in 2018. As for Biden meeting with foreign businesspeople, there is no evidence that he ever had more than a passing encounter with any of them.
Despite what Comer says, the “deep state” doesn’t need to convince people that there’s no evidence of Biden’s wrongdoing. There simply is no evidence of Biden’s wrongdoing. Almost all of the Republicans’ supposed star witnesses have said that Biden was not involved in his son Hunter’s business dealings.
During a disastrous Oversight Committee hearing last week, Hunter’s onetime business partner Tony Bobulinski insisted that the president was guilty of corruption but could provide no examples of times he had actually witnessed such crimes. Meanwhile, former Rudy Giuliani associate Lev Parnas said that the impeachment effort was based on Russian disinformation.
Parnas’s accusation is backed up by the arrest of former FBI informant Alexander Smirnov. Smirnov alleged that Biden and his son accepted bribes from a Ukrainian oligarch, sparking the impeachment investigation. When the Justice Department charged Smirnov with providing false information to the FBI, he admitted that his story had been fed to him by a Russian intelligence operative.
Slowly, Republican lawmakers have begun to back away from the impeachment inquiry, grudgingly admitting that there is no proof to their claims. Comer himself changed his tune earlier this week, saying he intends to make nonbinding criminal referrals against Biden to the Justice Department.
Less than 24 hours after Donald Trump got hit with a gag order in his hush-money trial, he launched a fresh attack on the judge and his family.
In posts on Truth Social Wednesday morning, Trump blasted Judge Juan Merchan and his family, singling out his daughter while seemingly spitting on the idea of a gag order altogether.
“Judge Juan Merchan, who is suffering from an acute case of Trump Derangement Syndrome (whose daughter represents Crooked Joe Biden, Kamala Harris, Adam ‘Shifty’ Schiff, and other Radical Liberals, has just posted a picture of me behind bars, her obvious goal, and makes it completely impossible for me to get a fair trial) has now issued another illegal, un-American, unConstitutional ‘order,’ as he continues to try and take away my Rights,” Trump said, accusing the state of depriving him of his First Amendment right to speak out against “Crooked Joe Biden”—even though it definitely did not.
“So, let me get this straight, the Judge’s daughter is allowed to post pictures of her ‘dream’ of putting me in jail, the Manhattan D.A. is able to say whatever lies about me he wants, the Judge can violate our Laws and Constitution at every turn, but I am not allowed to talk about the attacks against me, and the Lunatics trying to destroy my life, and prevent me from winning the 2024 Presidential Election, which I am dominating?” Trump wrote in a second post, continuing to push past the reality of his situation. “Maybe the Judge is such a hater because his daughter makes money by working to ‘Get Trump,’ and when he rules against me over and over again, he is making her company, and her, richer and richer. How can this be allowed?”
Trump’s posts just barely skirt the gag order he was hit with on Tuesday. The partial gag order forbade Trump from speaking publicly about courtroom staff, prosecutors, or any of their family members. Comments about jurors were also prohibited, as well as comments about witnesses—but wiggle room still existed within the order that would allow Trump to attack Merchan or Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg.
Still it’s a clear intimidation tactic aimed at the judge overseeing his first criminal trial.
Trump should be no stranger to the legality of gag orders—so far, he’s been hit with them in two of his other legal trials. In October, Judge Arthur Engoron silenced the former president after he ushered a scourge of far-right vitriol onto Engoron’s chief law clerk. Trump was later fined $15,000 for violating the order. Judge Tanya Chutkan also imposed a gag order on the former president in his election interference trial.
Under a mountain of legal bills, Mike Lindell’s biggest property, MyPillow, just lost a place to lay its head.
The 62-year-old’s biggest success—a line of poly-foam pillows—is currently facing a court-ordered eviction after the big boss failed to pay $217,000 in rent at one of its two warehouses in Shakopee, Minnesota.
“MyPillow has more or less vacated, but we’d like to do this by the book,” attorney Sara Filo, representing MyPillow’s landlord, First Industrial, said during a hearing on Tuesday. “At this point there’s a representation that no further payment is going to be made under this lease, so we’d like to go ahead with finding a new tenant.”
Admittedly, the business hasn’t been looking too good. According to Lindell, the infomercial-heavy product lost $100 million in revenue after it was dropped by shopping networks and retailers, had its credit limit downsized by American Express, and had to auction off thousands of pieces of equipment, reported The Star Tribune. Lindell, however, would need a mirror to see exactly why MyPillow has transformed over the last several years into a risky investment.
The former millionaire spent months using every platform at his disposal to seed conspiracy theories following the 2020 presidential election, including against Dominion Voting Systems and Smartmatic, claiming the electronic voting companies were complicit in a scheme to keep Donald Trump from retaking the White House. That, however, cost Lindell $5 million and put him on the line in a $1.3 billion defamation suit brought by Dominion, in which he’s being sued not just for spreading the lies but also for attempting to profit off them. Lindell’s ingenious plan for all this is to try to use the ultraconservative Supreme Court to absolve himself—with the help of a crowdsourced legal fund.
The beleaguered conspiracy theorist has, all in all, been struggling with cash flow for some time. Earlier this month, Lindell joined Steve Bannon’s podcast to advertise a new Arizona lawsuit he underwrote for Kari Lake—and to ask if listeners would be willing to spare some change to help him out.
Donald Trump didn’t hold back against his former ally Ronna McDaniel after she was fired from NBC, following just days on the job.
NBC News confirmed the news of McDaniel’s firing Tuesday night, following an immediate on-air revolt by some of the network’s biggest stars. “No organization, particularly a newsroom, can succeed unless it is cohesive and aligned,” NBCUniversal News Group Chair Cesar Conde said in a memo. “Over the last few days, it has become clear that this appointment undermines that goal.”
The dismissal comes just weeks after McDaniel was unceremoniously ousted as Republican National Committee chair, at Trump’s behest. And the Republican presidential nominee wasted no time in piling onto McDaniel’s woes.
“Wow! Ronna McDaniel got fired by Fake News NBC. She only lasted two days, and this after McDaniel went out of her way to say what they wanted to hear,” Trump wrote on Truth Social Tuesday night. “It leaves her in a very strange place, it’s called NEVER NEVERLAND, and it’s not a place you want to be. These Radical Left Lunatics are CRAZY, and the top people at NBC ARE WEAK.”
It’s another embarrassing blow for McDaniel. While she was at the RNC, she repeatedly pushed Trump’s conspiracies, including that the 2020 election had been rigged and that mail-in voting allowed for fraudulent ballots to be cast. She helped organize Trump’s fake-elector scheme and tried to pressure Michigan officials not to certify the state’s 2020 election results. And she even tried to cast doubt on the 2020 election during a Meet the Press interview on Sunday—her first and only appearance on NBC since the network first announced her cushy gig.
NBC had planned to pay McDaniel about $300,000 per year to appear as a conservative political analyst on the network. But her hiring prompted an immediate revolt from some of NBC’s biggest stars.
Longtime anchor Chuck Todd said the top brass owed Meet the Press host Kristen Welker an apology and slammed McDaniel for “credibility issues.” He noted that under McDaniel’s time leading the RNC, many journalists who tried to report on the organization and the Republican Party “have been met with gaslighting, have been met with character assassination.”
On Monday, Morning Joe hosts Joe Scarborough and Mika Brzezinski slammed NBC’s decision to hire McDaniel and played a compilation of the former RNC chair’s many lies. By Tuesday morning, several other MSNBC anchors also expressed outrage, including Nicole Wallace, Joy Reid, Jen Psaki, Lawrence O’Donnell, and Rachel Maddow.
Other NBC employees, speaking anonymously, wondered what exactly McDaniel could offer the network. McDaniel is not close to Republican leaders in Congress, and she is unpopular with anti-Trump voters, who think she tipped the primaries toward the former president. McDaniel has also fallen out of favor with Donald Trump himself, leading to her resigning from the RNC at the start of the month.
McDaniel’s talent agency, CAA, which represented her in the deal with NBC, also dropped her on Tuesday. She is reportedly looking for a lawyer to represent her against the network.
A new report from the Department of Defense reveals the number of times military members were reimbursed for costs of traveling out of state for reproductive health care—and in doing so, exposes just how ridiculous Senator Tommy Tuberville’s protest of that policy was.
Tuberville single-handedly held up more than 400 military promotions last year to protest the Defense Department policy of reimbursing service members who had to travel for an abortion or other form of reproductive care. Despite repeated warnings from department leadership that he was hurting military readiness, the Alabama Republican claimed he wanted to “stand up for the taxpayers of this country” against what he considered a “bad policy.”
But deputy Pentagon press secretary Sabrina Singh revealed Tuesday that the policy wasn’t such a burden on taxpayers after all.
Between June and December 2023, “the policy was used 12 times to access noncovered reproductive health care services,” Singh told a press briefing. Those services include abortion, as well as assisted reproductive procedures such as egg retrieval and in vitro fertilization.
“The number 12 accounts for each instance of an individual using the policy for a round-trip event,” Singh explained.
The total cost for travel and transportation in those 12 instances was $44,791.20, Singh said.
In comparison, the Defense Department’s total budget for 2023 was $816.7 billion. And the amount has gone up for this year.
Tuberville held up hundreds of military promotions for most of 2023, throwing the entire U.S. military into disarray. He finally relented in December, after succeeding only in making everyone angry with him. Military leaders called him out by name, accusing him of “aiding and abetting Communist and other autocratic regimes,” while fellow Republicans criticized him, with one calling him “dumb” on the Senate floor.
Through it all, the Defense Department refused to budge on its policy. Dropping that policy “would be an egregious violation of the covenant that we make, the military makes, with the people that sign up and volunteer,” Pentagon spokesman John Kirby said in October.
“When they volunteer for that duty, they have every right to expect that they’re going to get the health care they need.”
A special election in Alabama on Tuesday proved one thing for Democrats: Abortion is a winning issue.
Democratic candidate Marilyn Lands defeated her Republican opponent, Madison City Council member Teddy Powell, for a state House seat in a deep-red district after she made abortion and in vitro fertilization access a cornerstone of her campaign.
“Today, Alabama women and families sent a clear message that will be heard in Montgomery and across the nation. Our legislature must repeal Alabama’s no-exceptions abortion ban, fully restore access to IVF, and protect the right to contraception,” Lands said in a statement after her victory.
Lands secured a whopping 63 percent of the vote—a 26-point lead—by aggressively going against the grain, telling voters she supports a repeal of Alabama’s abortion bans while sharing her own experience with abortion two decades ago, when she received a devastating diagnosis: a genetic defect called trisomy.
“Twenty years ago I was able to get the care I needed. My three doctors told me this is the procedure I needed, that my life was at risk. I was able to go to my own hospital with my own doctor there, I didn’t have to leave my community,” Lands told The New Republic’s Greg Sargent. “And to think we’ve gone 20 years backwards. I can’t believe that. I’ve seen, in my lifetime, women make great strides in many areas. And, I’m just, I’m outraged that 20 years later women do not have the same freedoms and protections that I had.”
The special election also sees Lands take the seat back from a Republican she lost to in 2022—former state Representative David Cole, who resigned from the elected position after pleading guilty to voting fraud charges.
It could be the beginning of a turning tide for a state that witnessed an immense backlash after Alabama’s highest judiciary voted 7–2 to ascribe rights to embryos, effectively restricting IVF access across the state. Still, Democrats have a long way to go before they have a stronghold in the state legislature. Republicans currently hold a 75–27 advantage over the liberal party in the state House.
Now that Lara Trump, who once said that people should “get ahead by merit and merit alone,” is in charge, the Republican National Committee has a new question to determine the merit of all job candidates: Was the 2020 election stolen?
Trump and former North Carolina Republican Party head Michael Whatley took over the RNC at the beginning of the month. Both had been picked by her father-in-law, Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump, to replace Ronna McDaniel. Lara Trump and Whatley promptly purged all RNC staffers but allowed them to reapply for jobs with the organization.
The application process now includes an interview with Donald Trump advisers, The Washington Post reported Tuesday night, citing anonymous sources. One prospective employee, who is based in a key swing state, said they were asked, “Was the 2020 election stolen?”
Applicants told the Post they were startled by the question, which seemed more about measuring their loyalty to Donald Trump than their political acumen. While the questions about the 2020 election were reportedly open-ended, one former RNC employee pointed out that “if you say the elections wasn’t stolen, do you really think you’re going to get hired?”
Republican strategist Doug Heye, who worked as the RNC’s communications director, told the Post that the party has always expected staffers to mimic presidential candidates’ positions. “You’re there for that specific reason, to back the candidate up and go along with the worldview,” he said.
“The problem with Trumpism is that despite bringing in very smart and very capable people, if you want to play Trump’s game, you have to back him up on everything he says. Claims about the election being stolen is kind of the last frontier of that.”
The RNC has doubled down on promoting election fraud falsehoods. One of the organization’s first hires post-purge was Christina Bobb, a lawyer and outspoken election denier. Bobb will head the RNC’s new election integrity unit.
The new loyalty test in the application process shouldn’t be surprising now that Lara Trump is at the helm of the RNC. The former personal trainer, model, and cake decorator is running the RNC, all because she has sworn absolute loyalty to her father-in-law.
Donald Trump endured a couple of losses in his hush-money trial on Tuesday, though maybe none more irritating for the boisterous GOP presidential pick than his first gag order in the case.
The ruling came after Trump openly attacked Judge Juan Merchan and his family in a post on Truth Social, targeting the judge’s daughter in particular.
In his order, which came at the request of Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg, Merchan forbade Trump from speaking publicly about courtroom staff, prosecutors, or any of their family members. Comments about jurors are similarly prohibited, and he cannot make—or order others to make—comments about witnesses. The order does still allow Trump to attack Bragg himself.
In a post on Truth Social earlier in the day, Trump attacked Merchan and his daughter.
“Judge Juan Merchan, a very distinguished looking man, is nevertheless a true and certified Trump Hater who suffers from a very serious case of Trump Derangement Syndrome. In other words, he hates me!” he wrote in a Tuesday morning post. “His daughter is a senior executive at a Super Liberal Democrat firm that works for Adam ‘Shifty’ Schiff, the Democrat National Committee, (Dem)Senate Majority PAC, and even Crooked Joe Biden. He was recently the judge on an unrelated trial of a long term employee, elderly and not in good health.”
“This judge treated him viciously, telling him either you cooperate or I’m putting you in jail for 15 years,” Trump continued. “He pled, and went to jail for very minor offenses, highly unusual, served 4 months in Rikers, and now they are after him again, this time for allegedly lying (doesn’t look like a lie to me!), and they threatened him again with 15 years if he doesn’t say something bad about “TRUMP.” He is devastated and scared! These COUNTRY DESTROYING SCOUNDRELS & THUGS HAVE NO CASE AGAINST ME. WITCH HUNT!”
The whole ordeal is a sign that Trump still hasn’t learned his lesson, even after suffering gag orders in previous trials. In October, Judge Arthur Engoron silenced the former president after he ushered a scourge of far-right vitriol onto Engoron’s chief law clerk. Trump was later fined $15,000 for violating the order. Judge Tanya Chutkan also imposed a gag order on the former president in his D.C. trial, which focuses on his efforts to subvert the 2020 election.
Still, the gag came as welcome news to some of Trump’s other victims, including his former fixer (and one of the expected star witnesses in the trial), Michael Cohen, who said he’s “been under relentless assault from Donald’s MAGA supporters.”
“Nevertheless, knowing Donald as well as I do, he will seek to defy the gag order by employing others within his circle to do his bidding, regardless of consequence,” Cohen told New York Daily News’s Molly Crane-Newman.
Donald Trump just lost another bid in his hush-money trial, thanks to his idiot legal team.
On Tuesday, Manhattan Supreme Court Justice Juan Merchan batted away several of Trump’s efforts to waylay the case, and doubled down on his warning that Trump’s legal team must ask for permission in future filings in the case. In a harsh reminder, Merchan warned Trump’s lawyers that he “has the power to punish a party for disobedience of a lawful mandate of the court.”
“This Court advises counsel that it expects and welcomes zealous advocacy and creative lawyering,” wrote Merchan in a court order. “However, the Court also expects those advocates to demonstrate the proper respect and decorum that is owed to the courts and its judicial officers and to never forget that they are officers of the court. As such, counsel is expected to follow this Court’s orders.”
“A court of record has power to punish for a criminal contempt,” noted Merchan in his order.
The root of the effort is all too clear from the judge’s perch.
“[Trump], either directly or through counsel, has repeatedly stated publicly that the defense goal is to delay these proceedings, if possible, past the 2024 presidential election,” Merchan wrote in a footnote to the court order.
On Monday, Merchan ruled that jury selection will begin April 15. It’s the first criminal trial officially on the docket for the former president, while the proceedings for his three other criminal trials are on hold thanks to appeals and delay tactics from Trump’s legal team.
Trump is accused of using his former fixer Michael Cohen to sweep an affair with porn actress Stormy Daniels under the rug ahead of the 2016 presidential election. He’s facing 34 felony charges in this case for allegedly falsifying business records with the intent to further an underlying crime. Trump has pleaded not guilty on all counts.
A previously undisclosed $50 million investment helped launch Newsmax into a Fox News competitor, a new report shows, and it came from an unexpected place: the Qatari government.
In 2019 and 2020, a former Qatari government official and member of the royal family, Sheikh Sultan bin Jassim Al Thani, invested tens of millions into the fledgling far-right media company, according to documents leaked by a Cayman Islands–based financial services provider and reviewed by The Washington Post.
At the time, Newsmax was massively scaling its operations, transforming itself from a network that paid hosts to drink and advertise scotch on weekday afternoons to one that would end up embroiled in defamation lawsuits after denying the 2020 presidential election results. But it desperately needed an influx of cash before it could compete with Rupert Murdoch’s broadcast empire.
Halfway across the world, Qatar was struggling with an economic blockade created by a coalition of its regional neighbors, including Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates. Qatar had turned to former President Donald Trump for help with the situation, but was cast aside on criticisms that it had funded terrorism.
Before and after Al Thani decided to shell out a lump sum to a network that would grow to hold Trump’s attention, senior newsroom leaders told Newsmax staff to go easy on its coverage of Qatar, an order that resulted in at least one host being verbally reprimanded by Newsmax CEO Christopher Ruddy after making on-air remarks about the nation. “We were not allowed to criticize Qatar,” one unidentified source told the Post. “We were told very clearly from the top down, no touching this.”
A Newsmax representative who spoke with the Post rejected the notion that they had “slanted coverage to be favorable to Qatar.”
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