A look at what the DOJ is looking for in Ghislaine Maxwell interview
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Yahoo
7 minutes ago
- Yahoo
Trump gushes over Karoline Leavitt: ‘It's that face, it's that brain, it's those lips, the way they move!'
Donald Trump offered high, if not slightly uncomfortable, praise for his White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt, gushing over 'that face' and 'those lips.' The president gave the unorthodox compliments during a Friday interview with Newsmax in response to Leavitt's claim that he should be awarded the Nobel Peace Prize for his alleged success since returning to office. 'She's become a star. It's that face. It's that brain. It's those lips, the way they move. They move like she's a machine gun,' Trump said. 'She's a great person, actually. But she's – I don't think anybody has ever had a better press secretary than Karoline. She's been amazing.' The 27-year-old is Trump's fifth press secretary overall, though remains the only one from his second term so far. At a White House Press briefing Thursday, Leavitt praised Trump in a similarly effusive fashion. 'President Trump has brokered, on average, about one peace deal or ceasefire per month during his six months in office,' she claimed. 'It's well past time that President Trump was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize.' Social media was quick to react to the president's comments during his Newsmax sit-down, with some accusing him of being 'creepy.' 'This definitely sounds like something Jeffrey Epstein's best friend would say,' one user wrote, referring to the ongoing furor surrounding the president and his connection to the deceased pedophile financier. Trump has denied any wrongdoing and said that he and Epstein had cut ties many years before allegations of sex-trafficking were made against the financier. 'Will ANYONE in the MSM ask him or the White House about this incredibly bizarre, creepy, cringey comment? Of course not,' wrote one user. 'It's amazing how his 'super Christian-y' base just love that he's such a creepy old pervert,' added another. A third wrote: 'If any man said this on the job about a fellow employee, they'd be fired instantly, and the company sued.'
New York Post
8 minutes ago
- New York Post
Trump demurs on pardoning disgraced former Rep. George Santos: ‘He lied like hell'
President Trump demurred on whether he'll pardon disgraced former Long Island Rep. George Santos, who kicked off a seven-year prison sentence for fraud last week. Despite Santos' claims he had been privately lobbying for a pardon, Trump indicated the push to give the fabulist some sort of clemency was news to him. 'He lied like hell, I have to tell you. And I didn't know him, but he was 100% for Trump. I might have met him, maybe, maybe not, I don't know,' Trump told Newsmax host Rob Finnerty on Friday. 'Nobody has talked to me about it,' Trump said of a Santos pardon, before taking note of the former Congressman's prison sentence. 'It's a long time.' Advertisement Santos, 37, pleaded guilty in August 2024 to aggravated identity theft charges and wire fraud for swindling donors to bankroll his campaign for Congress. 3 George Santos is serving out a seven-year sentence for wire fraud and identity theft. Bloomberg via Getty Images 3 President Trump was amused by George Santos' lies but didn't rule out a pardon. Advertisement Prosecutors accused Santos of falsely claiming he had $250,000 in donations to qualify for the National Republican Congressional Committee's 'Young Guns' program. Santos also preyed upon elderly donors and charged credit cards without authorization for frivolous expenses, authorities said. Some of the charges billed to donors include Botox treatments, OnlyFans purchases, jaunts to Atlantic City casinos, French fashion attire, and more, prosecutors said. Santos denied some of the accusations made by prosecutors and blamed others on his former treasurer Nancy Marks, who cooperated with authorities. 'But he was a congressman and his vote was solid; it sounds like a lot. You know, you could blame the other side for not checking him out,' Trump added. Advertisement 'You could say the media misses. Everybody missed it. They found out about it after the election was won.' Trump was referencing the series of scandals against Santos after he was caught lying about vast swaths of his personal backstory, including falsely claiming he was a star volleyball player at New York University even though he never attended the school; that he worked for Citigroup and Goldman Sachs and that his Jewish grandparents fled prosecution in Europe. In reality, his grandparents were born in Brazil, and he has since described himself as 'Jew-ish.' Santos, who was ousted in a late 2023 bipartisan vote, was the sixth House lawmaker to be expelled from the lower chamber. Advertisement 3 George Santos had to report to prison after turning 37. Dennis A. Clark Since then, he's launched a podcast, titled 'Pants on Fire,' and revealed he had been pressing behind the scenes for some form of clemency from Trump, though in May, Santos said he dropped that pursuit. 'Even though I initially considered the prospect of petitioning the president with a pardon application I have seized that approach as I will not spend the last 61 days I have of life scrambling on how to get past a bunch of guard dogs,' he said. In his remaining weeks before reporting to prison, Santos made several media appearances including on the 'Tucker Carlson Show,' in which he admitted to being terrified of winding up behind bars. 'I'm not suicidal. I'm not depressed. I have no intentions of harming myself, and I will not willingly engage in any sexual activity while I'm in there,' Santos wrote on X earlier this month. Trump also acknowledged that Sean 'Diddy' Combs' allies have pushed for a pardon, but was noncommittal about pardoning him or Jeffrey Epstein accomplice Ghislaine Maxwell.
Time Magazine
9 minutes ago
- Time Magazine
Trump's Decision to Fire BLS Chief Echoes Putin's Strategies
President Donald Trump's firing of the Commissioner of the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) on Friday afternoon just after she delivered a negative jobs report echoes the impulse of many leaders to shoot the messenger. Trump declared, 'I've had issues with the numbers for a long time. We're doing so well. I believe the numbers were phony like they were before the election and there were other times. So I fired her, and I did the right thing.' While Trump may or may not be friends with Vladimir Putin, he is clearly following the Russian President's HR staffing guidelines to eliminate lieutenants who bring bad news. As we've documented before, the Federal State Statistics Service (Rosstat) has a long history of manipulating official economic statistics to please Putin, 'bending over backward to correct bad numbers and burying unflattering statistics' under the pressure the Kremlin has exerted to corrupt statistical integrity, especially since Putin's invasion of Ukraine in 2022. The reliability of official statistics from China has also been brought into question, leading analysts to rely on a wide range of unofficial or proxy indicators to gauge the true state of the Chinese economy. Even China's former Premier, the late Li Keqiang, reportedly confided that he didn't trust official GDP numbers. Read More: What to Know About the Jobs Report That Led Trump to Fire the Labor Statistics Chief Like other strongmen, Trump has repeatedly shown a pattern of manipulating data to suit his preferred narrative. Trump's surprise firing of BLS Commissioner Erika McEntarfer has quickly caught the attention of technical market analysts and economists on both sides of the political spectrum. One side cheers the push to disrupt a slow, bureaucratic federal agency. The other side shouts in dismay over concerns about yet another example of Trump politicizing an apolitical institution. Both responses are warranted. The accuracy of BLS data has long been questioned as major revisions only come in months later. To their credit, the BLS, in addition to other statistical agencies, has publicly recognized a need to modernize its methodology. Unfortunately, though, the severity of job revisions has worsened since the COVID-19 era, with no successful program to address the issue. The downward revision on Friday of more than 250,000 jobs marked the most significant adjustment since the depths of the pandemic. However, Trump's accusations against the BLS of rigging the job numbers to make him and the Republican base look bad, and his subsequent firing of McEntarfer based on a belief that BLS revisions were politically motivated, are yet another step closer to authoritarianism. Introducing his latest conspiracy theory, the President went even further by suggesting McEntarfer, whose career spans two decades across Republican and Democratic Administrations, rigged the numbers 'around the 2024 presidential election' in then-Vice President Kamala Harris' favor. Trump conveniently fails to mention that his definition of 'around' was back in August 2024. Recall, the 2024 presidential election was a full three months later in November. Revisions are not unusual behavior by the BLS. They are a critical part of the natural process for developing an accurate picture of the largest, most dynamic economy in the world. The average size of job revisions since 2003 is not insignificant at 51,000 jobs. And, despite what Trump may want Americans to believe, his tariff policies have created an unprecedented level of uncertainty in the U.S. economy, comparable only to that of 2020, with many economists expecting a recession to follow as a result. Bloomberg reporting has pointed to a possible connection between the severity of negative job revisions and recessionary economic environments. The BLS has also been subjected to DOGE-led hiring constraints and other resource rescissions. In addition, the Trump Administration's disbanding of the Federal Statistics Advisory Committee in March both eliminated one of the main engines for enhancing agency performance and, perhaps, in what should have been a concerning harbinger, abolished the canary in the data integrity coal mine. Complaints about BLS methods are legitimate, like the reliance on enumerators over scanner data, and deserve attention, but this is not how to fix it. Read More: What Trump's Win Means for the Economy This is far from the first time Trump has subordinated statistical integrity to political theater. From crowd sizes to weather forecasts, vote counts to tariff formulas, Trump has discarded facts for fictions that play to his political favor. Trump doesn't just bend the truth—he twists the numbers until they resemble propaganda and then silences those who disagree. As CBS News titan Edward R. Murrow warned 65 years ago: 'To be persuasive, we must be believable. To be believable, we must be credible. To be credible, we must be truthful.'
