Latest news with #2020election
Yahoo
4 days ago
- Health
- Yahoo
Tuberville says Trump health issues exacerbated by ‘fighting the radicals'
After President Trump was diagnosed with a chronic vein condition, Sen. Tommy Tuberville (R-Ala.) suggested the president's health condition could be a result of his efforts in 'fighting the radicals.' 'The pressure on somebody like President Trump right now, not just from outside entities … all over the world but also fighting the radicals in this country,' Tuberville said during a Sunday interview with radio host John Catsimatidis on WABC 770 AM's 'The Cats Roundtable. 'Every day it's almost like a fistfight.' The White House announced Thursday that Trump had been diagnosed with chronic venous insufficiency, a condition where leg veins have difficulty sending blood back to the heart. It often results in ankle swelling and is common in people over the age of 70. On the show, Tuberville repeated baseless claims that the 2020 presidential election was stolen from Trump and claimed that illegal immigrants were voting in droves for Democrats. Tuberville also bashed Zohran Mamdani, the Democratic nominee for New York City mayor. 'He's a communist! No police? Are you kidding me?' the Alabama senator exclaimed. Mamdani called for defunding the police in 2020, but vowed not to do so during a June debate. He identifies as a Democratic socialist. Catsimatidis is leading a coalition of wealthy business leaders to back Mayor Eric Adams' bid for re-election as a way to oppose Mamdani, Politico reported in June. Copyright 2025 Nexstar Media, Inc. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed.
Yahoo
15-07-2025
- Politics
- Yahoo
The Revolt Over the Epstein Files Is Snowballing
President Donald Trump departs after a White House Faith Office luncheon in the State Dining Room of the White House, in Washington, DC on July 14, 2025. Credit - Andrew Caballero-Reynolds —AFP via Getty Images This article is part of The D.C. Brief, TIME's politics newsletter. Sign up here to get stories like this sent to your inbox. Here's the thing about conspiracy theories: once they take hold, there's no turning back. And when you layer over them a political ideology and make Donald Trump the lead pitchman, they metastasize at a pace beyond control. Trump has openly flirted with nearly every major conspiracy theory of the last half century, and championed one of the most reckless through his insistence without evidence that the 2020 election was stolen. Add to those doozies this latest from the Trumpist legions: that the MAGAverse is being denied the truth about how registered sex-offender billionaire Jeffrey Epstein lived and died after years of a promised epiphany if only Trump were given back control of state secrets. Like so much else that grew into a headache for Trump, this started with his chase of a quick headline without thinking through how it might end. The Epstein saga has become a snowball racing down Mount MAGA that the President has lost the capacity to stop. In the snowball's immediate path? Some of the highest profile members of his administration, all of whom have gone quiet on what they had previously characterized as a dangerous conspiracy that needed to be brought to light. But there are signs that this MAGA kerfuffle may be different from the ones before it. The cleft in the MAGA Movement is pronounced. Trump's base may not so easily move on to the next culture war battle or shiny conspiracy theory. This could reverberate into next year's midterm election and beyond, potentially shaping the second half of Trump's term. Former Trump strategist Steve Bannon is warned that as many as 10% of Trump supporters may defect over feeling short-changed, perhaps costing House Republicans a dozen seats next November. In a sign that this is eclipsing almost everything else, even those eyeing a 2028 campaign are taking the bait and weighing in. 'Release the Epstein files and let the chips fall where they may. This is why people don't trust government,' former South Carolina Gov. Nikki Haley posted on X. 'You can never go wrong with being transparent. Redact victims' names but release the rest.' And Charlie Kirk, who leads the populist Turning Point USA powerhouse with younger MAGA activists and has churned plenty of content out of the Epstein saga, has abruptly adopted a nothing-to-see-here approach and said he was done talking about it. Let's rewind the tape. Epstein was at the center of a network of super-rich and -priveledged people rumored to exploit young women and girls as part of a sex-trafficking scheme that was said to include a whole host of bold-faced names. Trump, who counted Epstein as a friend for over a decade, fed suspicion about the former Mar-a-Lago regular at campaign rallies and in online posts. In 2008, Epstein pleaded guilty in Florida on two state felony charges, paid restitution to three dozen victims, and registered as a sex offender. A decade later, Epstein pleaded not guilty in New York to multiple charges, including sex trafficking. Epstein died in 2019 in a Manhattan jail cell; officials ruled it a suicide, yet many Trump fans were convinced he was murdered to protect the hyper-connected insiders who might have been implicated should Epstein turn on his former pals. After all, there is a missing minute of video on the footage of his door the night he is said to have killed himself. (Epstein's former girlfriend and associate Ghislaine Maxwell was convicted in 2021 on federal charges of sex trafficking and conspiracy. She was accused of helping Epstein recruit and abuse minors. She was sentenced to 20 years in prison.) For years, Trump hinted there was an Epstein client list. Weeks into Trump's second term, Attorney General Pam Bondi announced it was on her desk, and MAGA influencers were handed binders of documents that they waved for cameras. (Those binders carried no real bombshells, just documents that were already mostly out there.) But last week, Bondi and her fellow Trumpers Kash Patel and Dan Bongino—the director and deputy director at the FBI—released a statement saying no further disclosures about Epstein was in the offing: 'It is the determination of the Department of Justice and the Federal Bureau of Investigation that no further disclosure would be appropriate or warranted,' the organizations said in a joint statement. The memo went off like a bomb within the President's political base. Trump's biggest boosters were unswayed by his contention that the findings were penned by former President Barack Obama, who left office in early 2017, and 'Crooked Hillary' Clinton, who has held no government job since 2013. Trump bristled during a Cabinet meeting last week when Bondi was asked about the so-called Epstein files, saying no one was really interested in that old chestnut. He then unfurled an unhinged social media rant, essentially telling his supporters to back the heck off. Trump understands the power of the rumble—and the unpredictable nature of sparked kindling. Over a decade ago, he fed the wrong and racist trope that Obama was not born in the United States and thus an illegitimate President. He promised to release the files linked to John F. Kennedy's assassination, along with those of his brother Robert F. Kennedy and civil rights leader Martin Luther King Jr. He promised to release the files on 9/11, which he famously claimed without factual basis included Muslims dancing in the streets and on roofs in metro New York that day. He similarly suggested someone needs to audit Fort Knox for missing gold. Trump now faces this ugly reality: he promised the goods, and either the goods don't exist or they are potentially embarrassing to him or his buddies. Either way, it has triggered his conspiracy-addled allies in a way we did not see in his first term. Fellow agitator Laura Loomer—a conspiracy theorist who accompanied Trump to Ground Zero on the 9/11 anniversary last year—has been calling for Bondi to get the boot if she can't pony-up proof of l'affair Epstein. In the interim, Loomer proposed taking it off her desk and passing it to a special counsel. Another influencer, Benny Johnson, suggested that Trump's law-and-order team haul former President Bill Clinton in for questioning. And Bongino, who spent years peddling Epstein innuendo and out-nuendo alike, was so palpably angry that he and Bondi clashed in the West Wing and he skipped work on Friday while contemplating leaving a job he has openly hated. For their part, Democrats are cautiously capitalizing on the opposition party's disarray. On Monday night, they forced a vote on the House Rules Committee on requiring the release of the Epstein files, leading the Committee's Republicans to be the ones to block it to avoid overriding Trump. House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries told reporters on Monday he may get behind efforts to force the White House or Justice Department to provide a fuller accounting of what it knows about Epstein, saying either they lied about having the goods before or are lying about it now. For now, Democrats seem happy to help this snowball of a crisis keep rolling and allow it to distract Trump from a moment when he should be taking a victory lap on major domestic legislation. Make sense of what matters in Washington. Sign up for the D.C. Brief newsletter. Write to Philip Elliott at
LBCI
12-07-2025
- Politics
- LBCI
US Justice fires nine more employees from Jack Smith's team, sources say
U.S. Attorney General Pam Bondi on Friday fired at least nine more Justice Department employees who worked for Special Counsel Jack Smith to investigate President Donald Trump's retention of classified records and efforts to overturn the 2020 election, according to five people familiar with the matter. At least two of the people fired were prosecutors who most recently worked in other U.S. Attorney's offices in Florida and North Carolina, three of the sources told Reuters. The other seven people served as support staff to Smith's team, according to two other sources. Reuters
Yahoo
04-07-2025
- Politics
- Yahoo
Trump's FBI Deputy Director Is A Podcaster Who Thinks The Election Was Stolen
President Donald Trump tapped a conservative media personality and conspiracy theorist for a big job in his administration. Dan Bongino, a former U.S. Secret Service agent who later hosted a Fox News show and pilots a popular right-wing podcast, is deputy director of the FBI despite having no leadership experience at the department. His appointment did not require a Senate confirmation. Bongino, who unsuccessfully ran for Senate in 2012, is a major promoter of some of Trump's favorite conspiracy theories about the 2020 election and COVID-19. He's also a 'significant shareholder' in the right-wing video platform Rumble, the company said. Here are some of the biggest whoppers he's spread. Researchers haveidentified Bongino as one of the most effective spreaders of misinformation around the 2020 election, noting he spent hours of his podcast and posted widely shared videos on social media promoting debunked claims about ballot harvesting and suspicious votes. 'The FBI and the CIA, members of it, unquestionably tried to rig both the 2016 and 2020 election,' he once told his listeners. Bongino, who has nearly 6 million followers on Facebook, had over 7.7 million interactions on Facebook the week of the 2020 election, The New York Times found at the time. In May 2024, he warned his listeners that they should still be leery of Democrats 'stealing an election' from Trump. 'Do not let them fleece this thing again,' he said on an episode of his podcast. Bongino, who claimed the FBI was 'irredeemably corrupt' after its agents raided Mar-a-Lago, raised diversity, equity and inclusion policies as a possible culprit behind the Secret Service's failure to prevent an assassination attempt on Trump last summer. 'They put out a thousand tweets about all this DEI stuff,' he said of the Secret Service. 'Do I know that's related here? I don't, I'm just saying, like ― you have one job and only one job.' After another person was apprehended for plotting an assassination attempt on Trump in September, Bongino asked whether there could be a 'mole' among the agents assigned to protect Trump or that one of them could be mishandling information about his whereabouts. 'Is there a honeypot trap going on in the Secret Service?' he asked on an episode of his podcast. 'Is there a guy or a woman in the Secret Service having a relationship with someone who is not who they say they are?' In an August episode of his podcast, Bongino questioned the integrity of the FBI's investigation into the assassination attempts. 'Folks, the FBI is at it again. I don't trust these people at all,' he wrote on social media alongside a clip from his podcast. Bongino has also claimed that footage the FBI released of the Jan. 6, 2021, pipe bomb suspect may have been 'manipulated' and that something sinister is afoot. 'Something is going on here. Where is the video of him dropping the bomb? Why don't we have it? Why does it appear manipulated?' he said in a January 2024 episode. 'Ladies and gentlemen, somebody's hiding something, and it's not small. They are hiding something freaking huge,' he continued. He's also pushed the theory that President Barack Obama's administration had at least one FBI agent tasked with spying on the 2016 Trump campaign. While discussing the idea on Tucker Carlson's Fox News show at the time, Bongino simply cited 'reporting.' In 2022, YouTube temporarily suspended Bongino's account, which had around 900,000 subscribers, for spreading misinformation about the COVID-19 pandemic. Notably, he claimed masks were 'useless' at preventing the virus' spread despite research to the contrary ― something YouTube said violated its misinformation policy. When Bongino tried to circumnavigate the ban by posting from another account, the video platform banned him permanently. Shortly after, Google pulled all ads from Bongino's website. He said one of the pieces of content Google cited was about Anthony Fauci, then the chief medical adviser to President Joe Biden, and said that his 'use of masks despite being vaccinated had nothing to do with science.' In 2022, Bongino suggested Biden's administration may have been responsible for the explosions that ruptured a set of natural gas pipelines — Nord Stream 1 and 2 — running between Russia and Germany. The act of sabotage, the Wall Street Journal reports, was carried out by Ukraine, though Russia blamed the U.S. Bongino backed up the Kremlin's claims in an episode of his podcast. 'Is the Biden administration crazy enough to do this to light a spark that might cause World War III?' he asked. 'The answer is, 'I wouldn't be surprised, and I bet neither would you.'' 'The motivations of the Biden administration and the green agenda, I think, are far greater than the motivations of Russia,' he continued. Ex-Secret Service Agent And Conservative Media Personality Dan Bongino Picked As FBI Deputy Director A Conspiracy Theorist Is Officially In Charge Of The FBI Under Trump New FBI Deputy Director Is 'Significant Shareholder' In Right-Wing Video Platform
Yahoo
19-06-2025
- Politics
- Yahoo
With disbarment decision, John Eastman's downfall continues
Friday, June 13, was a truly unlucky day for John Eastman, a key architect of President Trump 's plot to disrupt the results of the 2020 presidential election. A California appellate court, charged with reviewing recommendations to discipline lawyers in that state, affirmed the findings of a trial judge and recommended that Eastman 'be disbarred from the practice of law in California and that Eastman's name be stricken from the roll of attorneys.' The judges found that his work on the 2020 election case was shoddy and deceptive. 'Disbarment,' they said, 'is necessary to protect the public, the courts, and the legal profession.' For any lawyer, this is a professional death sentence. But the court's decision is not only a devastating blow to Eastman but also to the Trumpist myth that the 2020 presidential election was stolen. That lie drove MAGA's 2024 election efforts and still animates Trump's speeches, including the one he recently gave to troops at Fort Bragg, N.C. It is also embraced by the heads of the Justice Department and the FBI, as well as by Speaker of the House Mike Johnson. And, as the court noted, Eastman himself continues, to this day, to claim that there were 'nefarious forces behind former President Biden's 2020 electoral win.' But like the House Jan. 6 Committee and 60 other courts, the judges serving on the Review Department of the California State Bar Court would have none of it. They made clear that 'in a democracy nothing can be more fundamental than the orderly transfer of power that occurs after a fair and unimpeded electoral process,' and that Trump and Eastman violated the law by conspiring and lying to disrupt the 2020 election. So why is Friday's Eastman ruling significant? The case is unique and momentous because this is the only proceeding where Eastman, along with supporting denialist enthusiasts, testified under oath, cross-examined their critics and presented their full denialism defense. Eastman — assisted by his denialist apostles, who took 19 days to testify, present 7 witnesses and introduce over 180 document exhibits — had more than his day in court. He also presented his stolen election narrative to the public-at-large, with thousands watching by Zoom. After considering this evidence, the Review Department court held that Eastman's 'false narrative' of 'nefarious forces behind' President Biden's 2020 win 'resulted in the undermining of our country's electoral process, reduced faith in election professionals, and lessened respect for the courts of this land.' And even if neither of the meticulous decisions of these two California courts changes the minds of the MAGA faithful nor shames Republican leadership into rejecting the Big Lie, the decisions and the evidence that support them will withstand the tests of time and help foil historical revisionism. They set the record straight and ensure that Trump and his accomplices will have difficulty escaping history's judgment. As former Chief Justice Charles Evans Hughes observed, court judgments like the one handed down last week are addressed not just to our present moment but 'to the intelligence of a future day.' The Eastman case demonstrates again that misinformation and lies collapse in a courtroom where facts and evidence rule. Among the courts' key findings are: Eastman admitted that he knew of no significant ballot fraud that would justify challenging the election results. Eastman failed to 'support the Constitution or laws of the United States' as all lawyers must do. Eastman was grossly negligent in failing to investigate the bizarre results of statistical studies on which he relied to disrupt the presidential election — for example, that there was a one quadrillion to the fourth power chance of Biden winning four states after Clinton lost them in 2016. Eastman knew that his Jan. 6, 2020, Ellipse speech was built on lies and willful blindness. 'We know there was…traditional fraud that occurred,' he said. 'We know that dead people voted.' At the time, he understood neither claim was true. And the Review Department rejected Eastman's 'merely 'rhetorical hyperbole'' defense. The courts also did not find his explanation a credible defense for his fraudulent actions and mischaracterizations. Both courts rejected Eastman's claims that such statements and rhetorical hyperbole are constitutionally protected. While recognizing that all lawyers have a First Amendment right to make public statements, the Review Department court said that 'this right does not extend to making knowing or reckless false statements of fact or law.' Nor does the First Amendment protect speech 'that is employed as a tool in the commission of a crime.' Eastman falsely told the Jan. 6 "Stop the Steal" crowd and the nation that state election law irregularities and fraudulent voting had changed the result of the presidential election. Part of the proof? As the trial judge noted, on Nov. 29, 2020, Eastman wrote to fellow MAGA lawyer Cleta Mitchell that he knew of no actual evidence of outcome-determinative fraud in any states: 'It would be nice to have actually hard documented evidence of the fraud.' Eastman's biggest lie was that Vice President Pence had the authority to interfere in the electoral vote. Both Eastman and Trump knew Pence had no such authority, but, on the president's behalf, Eastman continued to press Pence and his lawyer to disrupt the Electoral College count. Even Eastman's own testifying constitutional expert and family friend, conservative Professor John Yoo, flipped on Eastman. Yoo breathtakingly admitted that the Trump-Eastman alternative elector notion was 'a made-up dispute rather than a real one' and that Pence's rejection of the pair's arguments was 'unassailable.' The Review Department also emphasized that Eastman's testimony during the bar disciplinary proceedings demonstrated that his beliefs were not sincere, honest or credible. From start to finish, the court found, he 'used his skills to push a false narrative in the courtroom, the White House, and the media.' Despite such plentiful and well-documented findings, which California law insists must meet the heavy burden of "clear and convincing evidence" before an attorney can be disbarred, Trump's top election lawyer has remained defiant, disingenuous and not credible. Eastman characterized the bar proceeding as 'political persecution.' He insisted that those who brought charges against him 'should themselves be disbarred,' and that the Office of Chief Trial Counsel of the State Bar and the trial judge were 'partisan' actors who had made campaign contributions to Democrats. This rhetoric, of course, sounds eerily familiar. Eastman will likely appeal to the California Supreme Court and, if he loses there, eventually to the U.S. Supreme Court on First Amendment grounds. It is also possible that when the next Supreme Court vacancy occurs, Trump may nominate Eastman. After all, if we can have a convicted felon in the White House, why not a disbarred, but loyal, lawyer on the nation's highest court? Whatever unfolds for Eastman, and despite the profound damage that Trump's election denialism has done to American democracy, the Eastman case compellingly illustrates Alexander Hamilton's confidence that this nation is well served by an independent judiciary. As if anticipating the election denialism of Trump and Eastman, Hamilton argued that courts would 'guard the Constitution and the rights of individuals from the effects of…the acts of designing men or the influence of particular [circumstances which] sometimes disseminate among the people themselves…' Nearly 250 years later, Hamilton sounds positively clairvoyant.
