President Donald Trump's public address Thursday night revealed a problem that not even a warehouse of testosterone earmarked for the military can solve, a New York Times columnist quipped Saturday.

Maureen Dowd argued in her scathing takedown of his "batty stew of whiny complaints" that Trump had little or no effect on those whose anger he meant to arouse — and the problem was the one his Defense secretary claims plagues the military.

"Trump seemed very low-T," wrote Dowd. "I’m surprised that Pete Hegseth...didn’t rush over to shoot up the flaccid 80-year-old commander in chief with the elixir of manhood needed, as he put it, to give America 'the leading edge of lethality.'"

As proof of Trump's "manhood" problem, Dowd ticked of the list of usual suspects who should have responded to Trump's rallying cry with outrage.

First came Trump's political party.

"There was barely a peep from Republicans on Capitol Hill about the speech," she wrote. "No organized effort to polish his tirade. You could almost hear the fervent wish of Republican lawmakers watching the president: Please, Donald, move on!"

Then there were the television networks Trump called out during his speech:

"He seemed impotent, raving about nonsense, threatening to punish ABC and NBC for not taking his weird rant live," Dowd wrote. "He struggled to wield his superpower: creating a fake alternate universe for his supporters."

And then, Dowd highlighted the surprising response from the conservative network that oftentimes echos his claims — but not on Thursday night.

"Even Fox News acted more skittish than sycophantish for a change, not wanting to relive its $787.5 million debacle as part of its settlement with Dominion Voting Systems after claiming its machines switched votes from Trump to Joe Biden," wrote Dowd.

"The next morning, Mediaite reported, 'Fox & Friends' did not mention the address once in its three-hour show."

Dowd quipped that if Trump wants to continue his campaign against U.S. elections, he may need a chemical boost to get "high-T." There's just one problem, she concluded: "Can that hormone be prescribed to babies?

The Trump administration has activated a long-dormant court created to remove noncitizens accused of terrorism-related crimes, according to new reports.

The Alien Terrorist Removal Court has received its first case since it was created by Congress thirty years ago, Court Watch first reported on Saturday.

The court has five federal judges appointed by the Chief Justice to "review applications for the removal from the United States of alien terrorists," according to a description by the Federal Judicial Center.

The court's first case "represents a significant escalation in the Trump administration's crackdown on illegal immigration" that comes amid the deadly crackdown by Immigration and Customs Enforcement, a Newsweek report noted.

The Attorney General submitted the court's first application on July 15 and the court posted an order by Judge Joan Ericksen to a newly created website for the Alien Terrorist Removal Court, Court Watch reported.

The application and more details about the removal sought by the Department of Justice are sealed, but the court order mentioned that the Justice department is trying to "remove the respondent in the above-captioned matter from the United States."

In the court order, Ericksen wrote that "the court could benefit from the opportunity for more thoughtful consideration," and on July 16, the removal court had a hearing with the government about the submitted application.

However, "no sworn testimony was taken" at the hearing, and the DOJ lawyers offered to "supplement the record," per the order.

The court has requested more information on the sealed application, and the DOJ has until July 22 to provide it, Court Watch reported.

When Tim Cook steps down as CEO of Apple on September 1, he will be leaving behind a company enjoying record-breaking profits. In just the second quarter alone, Apple reportedly earned over $100 billion. Financially, the company couldn’t be any stronger. Ethically, it couldn’t be in any more peril.

Since Donald Trump returned to office, his masked goon squad—aka ICE—has killed 10 people. Fifty, if you include the roughly 40 who reportedly died while in custody. And that's not counting the tens of thousands who have allegedly been injured, brutalized, or wrongfully detained at the hands of these poorly trained, poorly screened, and increasingly lawless agents.

To date, not a single ICE agent has been held personally accountable for their actions.

While it’s impossible to know how many lives might have been saved had Cook not bowed to pressure from the Trump Justice Department and removed IceBlock, the app that gives communities advance warning of ICE activity, allowing people to avoid potentially dangerous encounters, one can’t help but wonder how many of those tragedies might have been prevented had Cook stood his ground.

IceBlock operates on essentially the same principle as Waze—and even Apple Maps—which alert motorists to police activity and speed traps ahead. Yet, Waze is still available on the App Store.

By eliminating one of the few tools communities could use to warn one another of potentially dangerous encounters, Apple sided with a government that had already demonstrated its willingness to use executive power to achieve what it could not accomplish in a court of law. We'd already seen those strong-arm tactics succeed against major law firms and universities that chose capitulation over litigation. Apple simply became just another institution to fold.

What makes Cook's decision particularly striking is that it represents a complete reversal of the principles he, himself, once defended.

In 2016, Cook refused repeated demands from the FBI to build a backdoor into the iPhone used by one of the San Bernardino shooters, arguing that weakening encryption for one case would endanger the privacy and security of millions. He rightly stood on principle, even in the face of enormous political pressure.

ICEBlock developer Joshua Aaron has said in numerous interviews that one of the primary reasons he never released the app for Android was Google's inability to protect user data to the same degree as Apple. Apple, he believed, was "100% safe.”

Or, so he thought.

All it took for Apple to eviscerate that promise was a five-minute phone call to its CEO. No lawsuits. No subpoenas. No prolonged legal battle. Just a phone call.

By agreeing to remove ICEBlock, without so much as an ounce of pushback, Tim Cook betrayed not only Steve Jobs' vision of technology empowering ordinary people, but his own.

At the time, Apple tried to justify the decision by citing safety concerns—that someone could theoretically use the app to locate ICE agents and commit violence. Yet the company has yet to explain why that rationale applies to ICEBlock but not to Waze or Apple Maps, both of which notify users of police activity in remarkably similar ways.

The precedent this sets for Big Tech—and what it means for the everyday user—should keep all of us awake at night. If the companies entrusted with the most intimate details of our lives are willing to fold at the slightest hint of political pressure, then none of us can be certain our privacy is protected, no matter what their policies promise.

Good luck putting that horse back in the barn.

Anti-authoritarianism activist and former Georgia Rep. Stacey Abrams warned Saturday that a MAGA-aligned senator just made a disturbing on-air confession in regards to his pending gubernatorial campaign.

Abrams appeared on MS NOW to discuss President Donald Trump's baseless allegations of nationwide voter fraud and the loyalists who have lined up to echo his claims — Sen. Tommy Tuberville in particular.

"They don't care about the public," said Abrams. "They don't care about the republic. They don't care about America. They care about being adjacent to power."

Abrams was responding to Tuberville's comments made to Newsmax Thursday claiming he'd "seen the evidence" that a system was in place to "put the screws" into Trump.

"You know, there's no doubt," Tuberville said. "We probably have four or five senators that didn't legally win."

Tuberville was referencing reports circulated that Trump would declare Georgia's two Democratic U.S. senators, Jon Ossoff and Raphael Warnock, illegitimate amid his push to find voter fraud in the state, experts noted at the time.

MS NOW The Weekend co-host Eugene Daniels was quick to provide the context — then pivoted to a question.

"That rumor ended up not being reported," said Daniels. "But what does it say that all of the levers of power that Republicans have seem to be pointed toward the same thing, which is making people believe that they can't trust our elections, and then, more importantly, act on that belief and do things to make shenanigans within the election process?"

That's when Abrams argued Tuberville had made a serious slip in regards to his mounting gubernatorial campaign.

"His illegitimacy argument is a confession," said Abrams. "He doesn't live in Alabama, and he's being challenged for that inadequacy."

According to the Alabama Reflector, two plaintiffs have claimed the U.S. Senator does not meet the Alabama Constitution’s seven-year residency requirement to serve as governor and have filed an appeal to challenge a lower court's dismissal of their case.

Abrams argued Tuberville's echoing MAGA talking points stood as proof to that legal challenge by showcasing his desperation to stay close to Trump.

She then called on voters to act.

"What we do about it is make certain that someone like Tommy Tuberville doesn't move from the Senate to becoming the governor of Alabama," she said. "We cannot let them steal from us our confidence in our democracy."

A MAGA lawmaker is asking for "prayers" after being snubbed by President Donald Trump.

Rep. Russell Fry (R-SC) took to X on Saturday just hours after Trump announced he would endorse late Sen. Lindsey Graham's sister Darline Graham Nordone to replace him — and not Fry.

"My family and I have a big decision to make soon," Fry wrote. "We'd appreciate your prayers."

Trump's endorsement of Nordone caught the GOP flat-footed, as she had only been intended to be a caretaker appointment while voters decided a replacement, according to previous reporting.

Filing to enter the race opens in three days, according to the Associated Press, which leaves Fry and other would-be contenders little time to decide whether to challenge a Trump-backed candidate in the primary.

Nordone's entrance into the race complicates the path ahead for multiple U.S. representatives who have expressed interest in running, including Rep. Fry and Rep. William Timmons (R-SC).

"Russell Fry says he hasn't made a decision as to whether he will run in the primary for Senate in S.C.," noted Jake Sherman, the founder of Punchbowl News, in a response to Fry's big decision post. "In Congress, Reps. Ralph Norman and Nancy Mace have signaled they may run."

The Democratic nominee in the race is Annie Andrews, a pediatrician.

On Saturday, Fry suggested he will weigh his options carefully.

"South Carolina deserves strong conservative leadership," he wrote. "We need a fighter and one who delivers results for South Carolina and the US."

Rapper Boosie Badazz' demand for a $600,000 refund from MAGA operatives he thought could secure him a Trump administration pardon spurred roars of laughter at Talking Points Memo Saturday morning.

Writers Allegra Kirkland and Emine Yücel reveled in the news that two "wannabe lobbyist goofballs" — Jacob Wohl and Jack Burkman — are now in arbitration over the rap artist's gun charge and the pardon President Donald Trump did not provide.

"You can’t blame Boosie for trying." the pair wrote. "Under the second Trump administration, the 'pardon economy' is booming."

Their analysis notes that pardons have been dolled out to 1,600 individuals involved with the Jan. 6 riots and a slew of other questionable and notable power brokers convicted of crimes.

"Trump has been handing pardons out like candy to people convicted of federal crimes who he claims were victims of retaliation by the Biden administration," they wrote.

"Trump installed his all-purpose lout Ed Martin as U.S. pardon attorney and largely abandoned the traditional pardon process, which requires the filing of official petitions, demonstration of good conduct and remorse, and other key guardrails."

Talking Points Memo's Derick Dirmaier told the pair that the Trump administration had effectively created "a new genre and economy type," and argued, "that’s something.”

This was all the prompting Kirkland and Yücel needed to lambast what they described as "the most absurd pardons of Trump II.

Among those to receive pardons were Rudy Giuliani, former mayor of New York City, Chanpeng Zhao, co-founder and former CEO of Binance, Rod Blagojevich, former governor of Illinois, and Rep. Henry Cuellar (D-TX), which Trump admitted to regretting.

Why? According to Trump, Cuellar showed “Such a lack of LOYALTY."

Quipped Kirkland and Yücel, "Guess you can’t bat 1,000 when you’re trying to curry favor via sweeping pardons."

Read their full take-down here.

We have all become so hypnotized, desensitized, bored, angered, and abused by President Donald Trump that at this point, it's far more productive to point to what Trump won't do, won't say, than all he will.

On Thursday evening, Trump meant to bring the country to a standstill with a presidential address, something normally reserved for Space Shuttle explosions, 9-11, or the hunt for Osama Bin Laden. In a country at war with Iran, at war with inflation, warring against wages and underemployment, and mostly at war with itself, Trump talked about the only issue that moves him: how the world perceives him day to day.

But even in that litany of grievances as to why the "most powerful man on Earth" remains ever the victim of even the pettiest of plots, it was what we didn't hear that roared.

Trump told us that “great damage has been done to our country,” and “Our elections were left vulnerable to being rigged and stolen, and the trust of the American people was lost. This cannot be allowed to continue.”

The allegation is just so damned tired that far too many in the media, and nearly all of Trump's supporters, have failed to ask some simple follow-ups: "If the most egregious of these offenses happened in the 2020 election, then you were the president at the time, charged with protecting this nation, and so how did you allow such great damage to be done to our country, and why should you be trusted to ensure it never happens again?"

Again, one gleans the real news here from what's not being said. The reason there's no scandal about Trump allowing the horrific manipulation of our 2020 election is that there was no horrific manipulation of the 2020 election. It is almost like the country, worn out by his incessant neediness and bullspit, has come to an arrangement suiting both; "We won't blame you for allowing our elections to be so easily rigged so long as it's fairly clear you're simply doing this for your ego, and won't act on it — not yet anyway."

Quite frankly, the deal has actually worked in the best interests of both parties for a while. Donald Trump gets to nurse the ultimate narcissistic injury back to health by convincing himself it was all wrong and he beat Joe Biden, and we rest assured that nothing is really going to happen because we've reached a sick detente — like the nominees for Senate approval who are asked: "Who won the 2020 election?"

They refuse to answer, the silence is deafening, the answer on display for all who hear through the silence, and again — the real news lies in all that wasn't said.

But the ultimate tell, the one that really proves that this is nothing more than an ego bath and the predicate for future claims that elections are rigged runs through China — no, not the nation of China but the China "issue." As reported by the Times:

Mr. Trump described a series of allegations about voter interference in the 2020 vote. He said that China had bought, stolen or hacked tens of millions of voter data files across 18 states. And he attacked a “deep state” conspiracy that he said was aimed at suppressing the information.

Wake up, please! Yes, it is extremely hard to care about anything this man says on any given day, but this one demands your attention. The President of the United States just effectively accused our current greatest adversary of manipulating the election and stealing it from him, the president at the time. Take that accusation dead seriously for just one moment in order to absorb the importance of what did not follow.

Having just accused a superpower of effectively illegally choosing the next American president over the rightful man chosen by Americans, having just accused that superpower of doing so with supposed proof that China did it in all those documents, did the American president do what any president would leap to do in the face of such an outrage?

Did Donald Trump immediately demand that China explain itself? Did he lay out a set of sanctions he will impose and forward to Congress even more punitive sanctions against the nation behind such a plan? (President Obama and a bipartisan Congress wasted less than two months in sanctioning Russia for real election interference in 2016, and yet still affirmed Trump as the winner of the election and the rightful incoming president. Of course, Obama and that Congress had real proof of such interference.) Did Donald Trump call out Chinese President Xi Jinping and demand an answer, a summit, or even threaten war with China for having done so, or threaten war if they ever do so again?

No. And that silence is the real reveal, one circling the globe, proof once again that the U.S. is in decline due to a petty man, with petty false grudges, consumed with monetizing each moment, and will sell his own country out to anyone buying.

Because Trump skipped right over the fact that the world's only other superpower, according to Trump's own theory, displaced him as president, and instead went to war on... Americans, his real enemy — American citizens who just happen to be politically opposed to him.

“Yet those responsible for sounding the alarm instead kept the information secret and hidden,” Mr. Trump said. “They did not disclose to me as president or to anyone else, and to the best of our knowledge, they did not inform Congress.”

Who is "they"? He never says, not really. Doesn't need to, so long as "they" exist in some liminal space in which Trump lives his alternative life, where he is always the "winner."

Set aside the fact that he was president at the time and thus "they" should never have been in a position to keep such information from him (as if something that explosive would not have leaked). Having just accused China of what is essentially an act of war against the United States, Trump moved to this personal war against his only real enemy, the domestic one, the one he is prepared to wage war against, troops, tanks, all of it.

And even though he has no more real evidence against Americans stealing an election from him than he does with China, it doesn't matter because all he really needs is the accusation. The accusation itself justifies all the news to be found in all that was left unsaid. The accusation says, "Don't call me a loser to Joe Biden because I didn't lose!" Like warm milk to soothe the angry baby, but much more dangerously, the accusation says, "And we cannot trust any upcoming election in which any Democrat wins.

He is saying this despite the fact that it's his job to protect the nation from international threats. But instead of threatening to send three carrier groups to control the port of Hong Kong should China make such an attempt again, Trump did all he could to stifle the votes of Americans, votes that might go against him — actually aiding any nation that believes it benefits by keeping the U.S. under Republican control, nations like China and every nation run by a despotic dictator who can manipulate Trump through flattery and currency to obtain a deal favorable to them.

Unlike the message we're hearing from most American media, Trump's Thursday night speech roared with critical information American voters desperately need. The problem is that the roar came from all that was left unsaid, unacted upon, and unimportant because it's all unsubstantiated.

Snap out of the Trump daze just for a few seconds! The American president just accused China of kicking him out of the Oval Office in 2020! If Donald Trump actually believed such a thing, and if Donald Trump believed in his job as protector of the nation, not himself, we would, today, be on very nearly a war footing with one of the only countries on earth that could give us a real fight.

Instead? Nothing new, everything already said, documents dumber than ham, disinteresting as Jesse Watters, and as untruthful as having settled eight wars.

Don't buy the media line about Thursday night. Donald Trump made one of the most important speeches of either term. It wasn't just what wasn't said, but also the unspoken promise that it won't ever be said when he says Democrats grabbed both branches of Congress through RIGGED elections. Not a single Republican victory will be questioned, another silent tell, only that one is just cute enough to get a giggle.

If you just a) Pay close attention even when you know he lies and repeats, and b) Listen closely to what's not said, you will c) Not only understand exactly what is happening, but have the answer to confront a Trump supporter, or a Democratic candidate fighting a "RIGGED" question before the election, or an accusation after a win.

Presidential addresses still matter. But with Trump, the power lays in what he doesn't say.

Jason Miciak is a Rawstory columnist, former editor of Occupy Democrats, an author, political consultant, attorney, and single parent girldad. Please follow on Bluesky and he can be reached at jasonmiciak@gmail.com and reads and appreciates the community within the comments.

A fight erupted on CNN Saturday morning as conservative political commentator tried and failed to defend Federal Bureau of Investigation Director Kash Patel as reports mount of ICE agents involved in fatal shootings.

Jason Rantz spurred an uproar as he tried to the Trump administration after Lorenzo Salgado Araujo, a father of three killed by ICE in Texas last week, was found not to have drugs, as the FBI suggested, but salt in his car.

"Any time there's any kind of action, the response has always been that ICE is 100 percent to blame," Rantz said. "They used their vehicle to flee. We should be having a conversation, at least in part, to say, 'Do not do that."

This defense came in direct response to Xochitl Hinojosa, former Democratic National Committee advisor, and her argument that the FBI was more concerned with controlling the narrative than investigating the truth.

"The FBI has typically taken its time until it has more information about any sort of shooting or any incident," she said. "Under Kash Patel, what has happened is that they have tried to rush to frame the narrative a certain way, and it's not the way that you do law enforcement."

Hinojosa referenced the response to two fatal ICE shootings in Houston and Maine — where an ICE agent with a reported history of violent behavior fatally shot a Columbian father named Joan Sebastián Durán Guerrero — as proof of serious problems within the FBI.

"These were massive law enforcement failures," she said. "We have seen Kash Patel and our law enforcement agencies fail at every turn to try to get ahead of the narrative."

Tensions mounted among the commentators when podcaster Cari Champion brought up the topic of quotas.

"They are actually randomly killing people," she said. "Accusing people because they have in fact, because they do have a quota in place of 2000 arrests per day, they are actually probably not trained to do their job effectively in the way in which they should."

"How is it random?" a flustered Rantz shot back.

"It's random because you're targeting people and you're suggesting, after the fact... after you murder someone," she replied. "And then you say that they had methamphetamine and then you're like, 'Wait a minute, wait a minute, it wasn't that it was actually something so they can stay hydrated because they're construction workers and they work out.'"

"The FBI hasn't—," Rantz tried to interject, but Champion cut in with a question: "If you sit up here and tell me straight face on a Saturday morning that you don't think that they've made mistakes?"

"I don't think they have," he said.

Champion then threw down a challenge: "Explain to me what they've done right."

As the pair shouted each other down, Hinojosa cut it to raise the topic of an FBI investigation, which Rantz tried to argue was under way.

"The FBI usually opens a civil rights investigation anytime there's a police involved shooting," she said. "Except for in this administration."

Gov. Ron DeSantis' refusal to back a clear frontrunner has turned Florida's gubernatorial race into a "Republican family feud" marked by race-baiting and in-fighting — and not even President Donald Trump can stop him, according to a new report.

DeSantis continues to withhold support for Rep. Bryan Donalds and in doing so has allowed an angry swarm of conservatives to hover over the race to control the pivotal swing state, CNN reported Saturday.

“Everybody has tried to talk sense into him, including the president,” a source told CNN. “Ron is leaving without a lot of friends. There’s going to be a big effort to take the shine off of him and he won’t have a platform to defend himself.”

And as DeSantis gambles with his political clout, Donalds combats challengers who use racist rhetoric and face legal challenges over Washington D.C. tax returns and an alleged loan one New York hedge fund company wants back, according to the report.

Candidate James Fishback, 31, has garnered support from antisemite, far-right influencer Nick Fuentes with critiques of Donalds, who is black, that include calling him a "slave to his donors" who would "turn Florida into a Section 8 ghetto," CNN reported.

But Fishback faces two legal challenges as another candidate sues to remove him from the ballot — arguing his Washington D.C. home disqualifies him from claiming seven years' residency in Florida — and a dispute with his former employer, according to the report.

New York hedge fund Greenlight Capital has sued Fishback on allegations that he failed to repay a loan and now wants the $1 million a New York judge ordered he pay in 2025, CNN reported.

Fishback denied D.C. residency to CNN and reportedly plans to appeal.

DeSantis has also refused to support Lt. Gov. Jay Collins or former state House Speaker Paul Renner, both of whom claim they are chipping away at Donalds' support, according to CNN.

"The resulting vacuum has transformed what could have been a straightforward Republican succession into one of the nastiest GOP primary fights of the midterm season," reported CNN.

"DeSantis’ role in the divisive fight has frustrated his remaining allies in the party and left him increasingly isolated as he drifts toward an uncertain political future."

I watched the horror show that was Donald Trump’s address to his base Thursday night, the one not covered by ABC and NBC on their traditional over-the-air networks (the ones fewer and fewer people watch, anyway).

It was a predictably appalling display because it showed the depths to which the president will sink to rig the midterms and save his base of absolute power. Six years after the 2020 General Election, he still pretends he got screwed out of his rightful victory despite every court in the land finding his claim lacked even the thinnest degree of merit.

The math is pretty clear.

Trump lost to Joe Biden by seven million votes. Even if every one of the 280,000 noncitizens Trump says exist voted against him, that still leaves him roughly 6.72 million short. The picture he painted on Thursday of a grand conspiracy by China and The Deep State to steal the 2020 Election was pretty much the same mumbo-jumbo, just with a perplexingly bizarre foreign twist.

None of the supposed evidence of his getting screwed that was released after his speech changes a thing. Everyone knows it, Trump included. It’s just a game he’s playing to build a leverage case going forward. That, at the end of the day, is what all of this gratuitous grievance is about.

There were two especially frightful undercurrents to the speech that need be pointed out, one right there on the surface and the other strategically hidden.

The first was the utter conviction with which Trump spoke in his barrage of bogus babble. This is perhaps the secret of his support from the MAGA base. His shamelessness comes across to the sane as the speechifying equivalent of a Cyclospora infection. But to his people, he is the pied piper.

There is never any actual evidence. Trump relies on bold assertions and unwavering confidence to mask the absence of facts. Leave it to a raging sociopath who is expert at sounding like he believes his own bull to connect with the stupid, the brainwashed, the vulnerable. He spews it loudly and repeatedly, and somehow that’s taken by them as indisputable.

But beyond that is the second and more disturbing aspect to the speech: Trump’s motivation for doing it in the first place. It had nothing to do with actual safety and security concerns in our voting; it’s about what he will do to stay in power. The answer is anything and everything, including eroding confidence in the legitimacy of our elections and destroying the system itself.

In short, Thursday’s speech was a declaration of war on the midterms. Trump knows the polls are showing a Republican bloodbath in the House at the very least and possibly even a loss in the Senate. So, his address was solely about establishing a pretext to dispute and potentially overturn otherwise free and fair elections.

He knows at this point that he probably isn’t going to get his voter-suppressing SAVE America Act passed. If his party tanks the midterms, there’s a chance he gets impeached a third time. And there’s a fresh look at his involvement in the Epstein Files. And all of his stock and crypto deals are suddenly closely examined under a microscope.

Plus, we see how the man reacts to losing. He can’t handle it. He will deny., deny, deny, then deny some more – shifting blame to those who would wish him ill. He has no understanding of, nor appetite for, accepting a loss with grace and humility and moving on.

So we have determined that there is nothing Trump is above to keep his presidential gravy train running. The speculation is all pretty much out there but bears repeating, since democracy itself is about to face its sternest test in many a generation.

His trying to cancel the midterms outright is one option, of course. But I doubt Trump could get away with it even from those in his own party. I don’t see how he could manufacture a national emergency serious enough to easily justify it. Plus, what would canceling them mean? Would America be OK with never having the elections at all? It seems like an implausibility.

Of greater concern is sending in the ICE brigade to generate enough chaos to throw the elections into the courts. Also, claiming nonexistent Chinese interference, Trump could order the Department of Homeland Security to seize ballot boxes to account for the supposed massive fraud that his Thursday speech already outlined.

Along those same lines, Trump might also challenge the voting procedures enough to litigate the thing into oblivion, so it holds up the certification of the midterm races for months and freshly minted senators and representatives are unable to be seated in Congress. Meanwhile, the Republican majority in both houses continues forth.

There is also the looming possibility of the Proud Boys and Oath Keepers being dispatched to blue states to protest and wreak havoc, January 6 style. This time, it could be a hundred times worse.

Don’t expect the courts to save us. If we have learned nothing else over the past year and a half, it’s that the president will stop at nothing to get what he wants and no entity has the will and authority to obstruct him. And if the whole thing winds up in the Supreme Court, all bets are off, as we know. There is very little evidence of that corrupt body doing the right thing.

The overwhelming expectation is that something is going to happen. But I’m choosing not to be a hopeless pessimist. My thought is that while it’s hardly a sure thing, the system will hold and Trump won’t succeed. For one thing, we’re more than onto him. There will be no surprises this time.

I have to believe we can ultimately triumph over an 80-year-old mentally ill criminal. But it won’t be easy.

(Ray Richmond is a longtime journalist/author and an adjunct professor at Chapman University in Orange, CA.)

A law professor flagged a legal theory from a Trump amicus brief that he says would let foreigners bring enslaved people into the U.S.

During an interview on the Legal AF podcast, legal expert Paul Gowder talked about American legal scholar Richard Epstein and an argument he made in an amicus brief filed in Trump's birthright citizenship case. Earlier this month, the Supreme Court ruled against Trump's bid to end birthright citizenship, and Epstein filed the brief on Trump's side.

Gowder explained that Epstein argued that the phrases "subject to the jurisdiction" and "within the jurisdiction" have different meanings in the Constitution. Epstein observed that the phrase "subject to the jurisdiction" is used in the 14th Amendment, which guarantees birthright citizenship, and the 13th Amendment, which abolished slavery.

Epstein interprets that to mean that those two amendments can only apply to people who are members of society in the United States, or "subject" to the jurisdiction, not simply within it, according to Gowder.

"Richard Epstein wants to read 'subject to the jurisdiction' to mean like in more control of the U.S., basically a member of the U.S. community, not somebody who's just passing through," Gowder explained.

That would allow Epstein to argue, "We can read the 14th Amendment to exclude tourists and to exclude undocumented people," Gowder said. But with slavery and the 13th Amendment, "he just, like, embraces the notion that therefore the 13th Amendment must mean that if somebody from a country that has legal slavery comes to the U.S. as a tourist, they can bring their slaves with them," Gowder explained.

"Like, what?" Gowder said in dismay as he described Epstein's idea as "slave tourism."

Gowder stressed that Epstein isn't a fringe legal scholar and described him as a "very, very famous NYU law professor, worshipped by the [Federalist Society], like basically, for a certain kind of right-wing thinker, people on the right often think he's like the greatest legal mind of his generation."

However, for Gowder, Epstein is "completely nuts."

A journalist pointed out that Trump's speech revealed what angered him much more than election meddling.

During an episode of The Daily Beast Podcast, executive editor Hugh Dougherty looked back at Trump's Thursday night speech on election security. Trump had touted it as a "primetime" speech earlier in the week, and what left him fuming more than election meddling was how it was snubbed by major television networks like ABC and NBC.

"That's the thing that really angered him," Dougherty said. "He wanted this speech to be on prime time. There's nothing he loves more than being on prime time. There's nothing he loves more than ratings, and he was boycotted. Effectively, he was switched off."

Trump showed that he was enraged by the snub more than anything because "the rest of the speech was, if I'm honest, a bit low T," Dougherty said.

"He was raspy," Dougherty said. "He was not quite slumped, but he was not standing energetically, and he went through a whole lot of grievances."

Dougherty noted that Trump did seem "very sore" about losing a presidential election. "He's very sore about what happened six years ago," Dougherty said. "And he became president again, but he can't get over that. He lost."

By contrast, "the most alive bit of this speech on Thursday night was when he demanded that they face revenge for not showing their speech," Dougherty said, referring to how Trump complained that networks such as ABC and NBC were "part of a plot."

Trump suggested that ABC and NBC should lose their broadcast licenses for not airing his remarks, reporting by The Daily Beast noted, adding that the White House Rapid Response Team even went after members of the press for their coverage afterwards.

Online critics scoffed at threats from the head of the Department of Homeland Security that he would mandate election changes.

At a press conference where DHS Secretary Markwayne Mullin threatened to jail state officials, he also said that he plans to make "mandatory" changes to elections, including having states "scrub" their voter rolls. Mullin's remarks came the day after Trump delivered a speech about supposed election security vulnerabilities.

While reactions were swift to his threat to jail state officials who don't cooperate, with blue states daring him to follow through, online critics pointed out that Mullin doesn't have any power to implement the sweeping election changes he planned to mandate.

"Yeah, no lil buddy," former GOP operative Rick Wilson responded on X. "That's not how this works."

"Someone should read the Constitution," wrote Melanie D'Arrigo, a former Democratic congressional candidate and the executive director of the Campaign for New York Health. "The executive Branch cannot mandate states to make changes to how they administer elections."

"Senate Republicans, this is the crap you pretend will not happen when Trump nominees sit in front of you and lie," complained Michael Steele, a political commentator and former chairman of the Republican National Committee. "And you know they are lying. The DHS secretary has NO role to play in our elections. You know that too. 'Mandatory' my a--!"

"Ha! No he's not," immigration attorney and policy analyst Aaron Reichlin-Melnick posted in response to Mullin's claims. "DHS has literally zero power to do this. The Trump admin has lost every single lawsuit on their efforts to get state voter data or change voter requirements. The power to administer elections is given to the states."

"This would be actual proof of rigging an election," commented disability rights advocate James Tate.

A former GOP operative flagged how Trump's latest speech showed that his health has clearly diminished.

During an episode of The Lincoln Project Podcast, Rick Wilson pointed out the signs of Trump's physical decline that showed during his Thursday night speech.

"I've been an anthropologist of Trump for over a decade," Wilson said. "He did not read that speech, and I don't even think he, in a lot of ways, can internalize large complex speeches anymore."

Wilson explained that Trump appeared to be reading from a teleprompter the whole way. Looking at Trump's eyes during the speech, Wilson noted how "you could see the reading back and forth" because "he had not read that speech, had not internalized it."

That wasn't all that caught Wilson's attention. Trump "was clinging to that podium for dear life," Wilson continued. "His mouth was dry. He was huffing when he was going through the speech."

Trump is "running on empty," he said.

"If you were a person who actually cared about Donald Trump, you'd say, 'Hey, let's get you a couple days off,'" Wilson said. "'Let's get you to the doctor.'"

However, "no one does" actually care about Trump, Wilson said. Even if anyone did care, "that physicality of Trump, the decline is so marked that people almost lose track of it," Wilson said.

"The guy from 2015 and 16 had this sort of swagger, big burly physical presence on the stages and loomed behind Hillary [Clinton] and Jeb [Bush]," Wilson remembered. "That guy's gone. He's a very physically diminished man. He's a very, very physically diminished man."

President Donald Turmp wanted a "bombshell moment" with his primetime speech about election interference, MS NOW's Jen Psaki said on Friday — but if an explosion happened, it was one more of the Looney Tunes variety.

"Remember that cartoon character, Wile E. Coyote?" said Psaki. "Okay, he spent every single episode putting together elaborate plans to chase the Road Runner, tying himself to rockets, to finally catch the Road Runner, and always blowing himself up in the process. It's kind of what happened to Trump."

The president, said Psaki, wanted his speech to "stand out" from six years of hollering about election fraud and not offering any proof. And he did it by declassifying a bunch of documents about Chinese interference in the election. But "not only did those documents not prove Trump's allegations, the documents actually seem to disprove a lot of Trump's points," she said.

For example, Psaki continued, "the intelligence community showcased how vote tabulation systems would be difficult to manipulate on a wide enough scale to compromise election results ... and despite Trump's claims that China carried out, quote, 'the largest compromise of election data in history, resulting in china's illicit acquisition of 220 million U.S. voter files,' it turns out China only access data from seven states and did so through legal public records channels.

"And of course, there were also other documents reiterating the intel community's consensus that Beijing has not deployed influence efforts intended to change the outcome of the U.S. presidential election," said Psaki. Trump "hurt himself" by releasing that, she said, "sort of like Wile E. Coyote painting a tunnel on a rock wall only to run into it himself."

In fact, she added, "not only did the documents Trump release debunk his claim that foreign powers were trying to stop him from being elected," they revealed "the intelligence community believed that at least one foreign power was actively trying to help Trump get elected. Surprise everyone! And this won't be a surprise. Just like in 2016, Russia was trying to help Trump win."

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President Donald Trump's controversial Thursday night election speech has disrupted Republican congressional strategy.

According to Politico, Trump's address created particular difficulties for House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA).

Republican leaders have been attempting to walk back portions of Trump's SAVE America Act, which would impose new voting restrictions on American voters. Instead, they are pushing for a "clean" spending measure, according to the report.

Among his new proposals, Johnson suggested funding the government well ahead of the normal Sept. 30 deadline and has been privately lobbying Trump for endorsement, according to Politico's anonymous sources. Johnson allegedly hopes this triggers a shutdown fight before the midterms, which would benefit Republicans politically.

"House GOP leaders are trying to put that budget resolution on the floor next week, too — setting up some serious whip operations for leaders trying to get buy-in from all corners of their conference on both measures," Politico wrote.

Senate Majority Leader John Thune (R-SD) further complicated matters Thursday, responding skeptically to Johnson's claims about Senate adoption of the House budget framework before the August recess, the publication added.

Watch the video below.

A top Democrat sounded the alarm on the actions of a MAGA senator and feared he'll "tee up a coup d'etat."

During an interview on Bulwark Takes, Rep. Jim Himes (D-CT) shared his thoughts on remarks made earlier this week by Sen. Tommy Tuberville (R-AL), in which he questioned the legitimacy of several Democratic senators.

"If you want to rot your brain really quickly, you'll read Tommy Tuberville quotes," Himes said, telling host Sam Stein that he hadn't heard the comments. Stein explained that Tuberville's comments came as reports circulated that Trump would declare Georgia's two Democratic U.S. senators, Jon Ossoff and Raphael Warnock, illegitimate amid his push to find voter fraud in the state.

"Is this the next level?" Stein asked Himes, the ranking member of the House Intelligence Committee. "Where people who are already seated are going to have their validity in Congress challenged?"

"What worries me most about that is not that Jon Ossoff and Raphael Warnock are being kicked out of the Senate. That's not going to happen," Himes responded. "I'm not even sure there's a legal mechanism for that to happen."

Tuberville's allegations were made with "zero evidence," Himes noted, and explained they still pose a threat.

"What is devastating is that a United States senator, and maybe more than one United States senator, would effectively tee up a coup d'etat," Himes said.

Himes explained that when one or multiple senators question the legitimacy, as Tuberville did, they're challenging a "process that nobody questioned" and that courts upheld.

"What you have is somebody who is demented," Himes said. "They are either wittingly or unwittingly participating in a coup d'etat."

Tuberville is not just doing the work of Trump with his comments, but he's also accomplishing "Russia's objective," Himes warned.

"Russia's objective here is, yes, to elect Donald Trump because Donald Trump loves him some Vladimir Putin, but Russia's core objective here is to create chaos," Himes warned.

The November midterm elections are coming closer, and President Donald Trump has signaled his intent to interfere with them as much as possible as he fears a wipeout for the GOP. But MS NOW's Chris Hayes has one big fear about a scenario that could happen.

Hayes elaborated on his fear in discussion with UCLA Law professor Rick Hasen on Friday's edition of "All In."

"I was really underwhelmed by not just the delivery, which was kind of a low-energy delivery, but the substance," said Hasen. For one thing, he said, Trump was just rehashing a lot of information that was already known about foreign election interference, and "didn't even make his usual claims that the elections were stolen or rigged." Meanwhile, his demands to pass the SAVE America Act don't really change anything, as the votes still don't exist in the Senate.

The bottom line, he said, is that "I'm hopeful, so long as we don't have a really close election, that we're going to be able to squeak by through this 2026 midterm without Trump being able to significantly interfere."

But that, Hayes explained, is precisely his fear.

"You raise one thing which is important, which is the margins will matter a lot for the outcome. I mean, I really do — although again, my nightmare scenario is that James Talarico beats Ken Paxton by 5,000 votes in Texas, and I really think you will see them pull out every possible stop," said Hayes. He noted that longtime Trump ally Steve Bannon is aggressively pushing to nationalize elections, as are many advisers in Trump's orbit like conspiracy theorist Cleta Mitchell. "How does that scan to you?"

The key thing to remember, Hasen replied, is that "the president has no power over elections. Our system is decentralized. It's states and localities."

There will be a deluge of lawsuits and court actions if Trump tries anything, Hasen said, but the risk still exists he could try a number of things. For instance, "we have to think about situations like: what if Trump sends the DOJ to collect ballots before they've been tabulated? What if they attempt to try to interfere with how election administrators are doing their jobs? But so far it's been all talk and no action, and I'm hoping that trend continues."

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The Israeli government this week stripped Nile crocodiles of their protected status in order to advance a proposal that National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir said was inspired by the Trump administration’s now-shuttered Alligator Alcatraz to build a prison for Palestinians surrounded by a moat full of the ravenous reptiles.

“You read that right,” the liberal US Jewish group J Street said in response to the news. “When cruelty becomes a governing principle instead of an aberration within the Israeli government, something has gone deeply wrong.”

Israeli Environmental Minister Idit Silman signed a directive Wednesday reclassifying Nile crocodiles as “specially managed wild animals,” a novel legal category enabling the government to keep them for security purposes.

Ben-Gvir, who heads the Israel Prison Service (IPS), said he was inspired by the Trump administration’s recently closed Alligator Alcatraz immigrant detention center in Florida. He is seeking to first introduce crocodiles into a moat around Ketziot Prison in southern Israel.

While it is not certain that the plan will come to fruition, Ben-Gvir celebrated Silman’s decree in a social media post showing him petting a crocodile, with the caption: “Cursed terrorist, thinking of trying to escape? Think again.”

Palestinians have occasionally escaped from Israeli lockups, such as in September 2021, when six men used improvised tools, including spoons, to tunnel out of the high-security Gilboa Prison. All six escapees were caught within weeks.

The move by Silman—who gained international notoriety by calling for the ethnic cleansing of all Palestinians from the Gaza Strip—came despite objections from her own ministry’s legal adviser and the Nature and Parks Authority.

IPS, which sent a fact-finding mission to the Hamat Gader crocodile farm in January, argued that its employees could handle the animals, citing the agency’s experience working with the attack dogs that Palestinian prisoners and human rights groups have claimed were used to maul and even sexually abuse detainees.

Silman’s approval is contingent upon IPS meeting animal welfare requirements and appropriate holding conditions.

Meanwhile, Ben-Gvir has openly boasted about the dramatic deterioration in conditions endured by Palestinian prisoners since the Hamas-led attack of October 7, 2023 and Israel’s retaliatory obliteration of Gaza, which United Nations and other experts describe as a genocide.

“We go into the prisons, and they wet themselves,” Ben-Gvir said of Palestinian prisoners during a speech on Friday. “I’m not joking. They’re afraid. Fear rules them, and that’s how it should be.”

Ben-Gvir and other Israeli officials have worn noose lapel pins to celebrate a recently passed bill legalizing the execution by hanging of so-called “terrorists.”

Former Palestinian detainees and Israeli personnel have described beatings, rape and sexual torture by male and female soldiers, routine amputations due to constant shackling, burnings, electrocutions, attacks by dogs, ice-water dousings, denial of food and water, sleep deprivation, constant loud music, and other abuse.

The Israeli military is investigating the deaths of dozens of detainees at the Sde Teiman prison in the Negev Desert, including one who died after allegedly being sodomized with an electric baton.

Ben-Gvir has defended Israeli reservists accused of torturing Palestinian prisoners, and called the reservists who allegedly gang-raped a man at Sde Teiman prison “heroes.”

The minister is banned from entering a number of Western countries for his incitement to violence against Palestinians.

Several Israeli environmental groups issued a joint statement opposing the use of crocodiles in prisons.

“Crocodiles are sentient beings, with complex needs for space, water, temperature, and natural behavior,” the groups said. “It is also highly doubtful that the crocodiles intended for this purpose have aggressive temperaments, and in any event, during the winter they slow their metabolism dramatically, become very sluggish, and stop eating.”

“Security should be achieved through real security measures, not through animals,” they added. “We are considering filing a petition with the High Court of Justice over the matter.”

Last year, the Israeli military massacred 262 crocodiles that were being kept on a farm in the occupied West Bank near the illegal Israeli settler colony of Petzael, claiming the reptiles posed a risk to the public.

“They just slaughtered them,” farm owner Danny Bitan told reporters at the time, describing the scene as “some kind of killing valley.”

Ben-Gvir’s plan comes amid ongoing slaughter in Gaza—where Israeli forces have killed more than 73,000 Palestinians, over 21,500 of them children, since October 2023—and accelerating colonization and ethnic cleansing in the West Bank.

News of Silman’s approval sparked disbelief around the world and on social media, where Reddit users called the plan “cartoonish idiocy” and “Bond villain-level lunacy.”

“The fact that Israel is trying to surround a prison with [crocodiles] tells you all you need to know about these camps, which are designed to torture, rape, and murder Palestinians, often held as hostages without charges,” Israeli researcher and political commentator Shaiel Ben-Ephraim said Thursday on X.

President Donald Trump used a primetime address Thursday night to sound the alarm about foreign threats to American elections, and one of his own party's top election officials responded that, in effect, his state hasn't heard about any.

West Virginia Secretary of State Kris Warner, a Republican, former state GOP chairman, and a Trump appointee to a U.S. Department of Agriculture post during his first term, issued a statement Friday after the president's speech, asserting no one in the federal government has flagged a genuine danger to his state's upcoming vote.

"West Virginia has yet to receive a call from the White House, the intelligence community, or any other federal agency, alerting us to a real, existing threat to our 2026 general election," Warner said.

He framed that federal silence as consistent with his own office's findings.

"That's great news for us, because it's exactly what we're seeing on our end, as well," he added.

Warner said the state stays open to "any actionable intelligence," but until it arrives, "we'll stay the course."

The statement landed hours after Trump falsely alleged that China pulled off the largest compromise of election data in history and that intelligence officials buried it. Analysts who reviewed the declassified documents he released found nothing to back the claim, and a March 2021 intelligence assessment had already concluded that China did not deploy efforts to change the 2020 outcome.

Warner, West Virginia's chief elections officer, has broken with the stolen-election narrative before. During his 2024 campaign, he said he did not believe the 2020 election was stolen in West Virginia.

President Donald Trump expressed fury at Canada on Friday over wildfires and smoke affecting air quality in the Midwest and Northeast.

On Truth Social, Trump wrote, "We are holding Canada responsible for the fact that they are not properly maintaining their Forests, and Brush therein, and the United States is being unnecessarily invaded by filthy, polluted, and unhealthy air, the quality of which is dangerous, and totally unacceptable!"

He threatened to add pollution costs to Canada's existing tariffs, claiming "The cost is incalculable!" and said he planned to call Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney about the issue.

Trump continued, "This is Willful Negligence, and becoming a yearly occurrence, costing the United States Billions of Dollars, which cost of this pollution must of necessity be added to the TARIFFS Canada is currently paying."

Similarly to the president, Rep. Lisa McClain (R-MI) complained about air quality on social media Thursday.

Critics highlighted the hypocrisy of the complaints, noting Canada had offered substantial assistance during California's devastating January 2025 wildfires, demonstrating neighborly cooperation that Republicans overlooked.

Watch the video below.

The conservative Wall Street Journal editorial board tore into President Donald Trump on Friday over his stubborn fixation on passing the SAVE America Act, a controversial piece of legislation that would put new restrictions on the right to vote and has hit dead ends every time it is considered in the Senate.

This comes after the president delivered a rambling primetime speech the day before, alleging foreign election interference rigged the 2020 presidential election, despite none of the documents he declassified providing evidence for this.

"Since Mr. Trump declassified the memo, we can quote the part he didn’t," wrote the board. Specifically, the memo says, “Vote tabulation systems would be difficult to manipulate on a wide enough scale to compromise election results. The systems in each voting location are not connected to the Internet or to each other, and many methods for exploiting them rely on physical proximity.” And even if some results were compromised, “audits and paper trails very likely would uncover such an effort.”

Furthermore, the board pointed out, the legislation Trump is pushing goes well beyond what the public is comfortable with in restricting access to the ballot box.

"The public likes voter ID, with a poll last year finding 83% of adults, and 71% of Democrats, favor it," the board wrote. However, Trump's SAVE America Act requires such rigorous documentation that "most driver’s licenses [would be] insufficient to register to vote, and that’s to say nothing of Mr. Trump’s push to override laws in many GOP states — Florida, Georgia, most of the Midwest — that offer mail ballots for convenience."

The whole approach of undermining public trust in elections, wrote the board, "is a political backfire for the GOP," as Trump's "fraud outbursts" already cost them two Senate seats in Georgia in 2020.

The bottom line, wrote the board, is that the GOP should stop relitigating a six-year-old election and instead "be campaigning on what they want to do with two more years in power. There are ways to improve voting integrity, but Mr. Tillis is right that it’s reckless to sow generalized suspicion that American elections aren’t honest."

A judge dealt a setback to Trump's power by ruling his administration broke the law by firing a civil servant, per Politico.

According to reporting by Politico, a federal judge in Virginia ruled that the Trump administration violated federal law when it fired Mary Comans, the chief financial officer of the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA), without going through congressionally mandated steps.

"This is huge," said Mark Zaid, one of Comans' lawyers, according to Politico. "It's an incredibly significant victory."

U.S. District Judge Michael Nachmanoff, a Biden appointee, dismissed arguments that Trump's power over the executive branch gave officials the right to fire Comans last year without giving her a hearing or the right to transfer to another job, Politico reported.

According to Politico, Nachmanoff said that the Trump administration was trying to overturn a Supreme Court precedent, including an 1886 ruling that upheld congressional authority to set rules for the removal of executive branch officials.

"For the last 140 years...the Supreme Court has affirmed the president does not have plenary power to remove inferior officers," Nachmanoff said from the bench, per Politico.

Comans and several of her colleagues were fired in February 2025 amid a cost-cutting drive by the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), according to Politico. She was accused of going around higher-ups to authorize almost $60 million in payments to New York City for hotel rooms for undocumented immigrants, per Politico.

Attorneys for Comans said that Nachmanoff's ruling is the first to hold that firings under the second Trump administration went too far, according to Politico.

"Today is a victory for every civil servant," Comans told Politico.

A federal judge struck down President Donald Trump's ongoing effort to "rewrite the history" of the Jan. 6 riot, using a court ruling to cement the facts of the Capitol attack.

U.S. District Judge Christopher Cooper — the Obama-appointed judge who originally sentenced Jennifer "Jenna" Ryan for her role in the riot — issued the ruling Thursday in the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia, denying Ryan's bid to erase her conviction from the record.

Ryan, a Dallas-area real estate agent, was sentenced in 2021 to 60 days in prison after pleading guilty to a misdemeanor for parading inside the Capitol, according to CBS News. Trump pardoned her on Jan. 20, 2025, as part of a blanket clemency covering roughly 1,500 January 6 defendants, local outlets reported.

After the pardon, Ryan returned to court asking Cooper to go further. She sought to wipe her conviction from the record entirely, using a rarely granted legal remedy that allows a court to vacate a conviction due to a fundamental error in the proceedings.

Cooper denied that request and used the ruling to tear down Trump's reimagined version of Jan. 6.

"Given the historical significance of the events of January 6 and ongoing efforts to rewrite them, the Court will take the opportunity to set the record straight…" Cooper wrote, making clear the ruling was about more than Ryan's petition.

"Numerous members of the mob forced their way inside the Capitol building by breaking windows and assaulting police officers," Cooper wrote, walking through the facts of that day in the permanent federal court record.

Cooper found that Ryan had been in her hotel room watching the riot on television — and that she chose to leave and join the crowd.

"The Court observed that Ryan decided to join the action after seeing, on the news, that the rallies at the Capitol had turned violent.... But Ryan also celebrated the riot," Coomer noted. "She announced on social media that she was going to 'storm the Capitol.' Once inside, Ryan was captured on video chanting 'Fight for Trump!' while fire alarms blared."

"Afterward, Ryan posted a photo beside a broken Capitol window, threatening that she and her companions would 'come after' news studios if they did not 'stop lying,'" according to the ruling. "Ryan applauded the violence and egged on destruction of property at the Capitol on January 6."

"There is no doubt that Ryan paraded in the Capitol without permission on January 6," Cooper observed, adding that the consequences of participating in the riot "will not be scrubbed from public memory, even if her conviction is vacated."

"Her involvement in the events of January 6 is clear," Cooper said in the ruling's conclusion, before turning to the pardon itself.

"The validity of her prosecution and sentencing is unassailable. Fortunately for her, there are some who wish to rewrite the history of that day, and that desire resulted in her pardon," the judge said, making her case without directly naming the president.

President Donald Trump wants to lean even harder than ever on Federal Communications Commission chair Brendan Carr to strip broadcast licenses from networks that don't do his bidding — but he is playing with fire, a legal expert warned.

According to Politico, the drama kicked off after NBC and ABC both declined to carry Trump's Thursday night prime-time address on election security live, prompting the president to demand the Federal Communications Commission strip both networks of their broadcast licenses entirely. Trump didn't hold back on Truth Social, framing the snub as evidence of corruption.

"Fraud like this should mean a revocation of their licenses," Trump said.

It's a threat that has popped up periodically as Trump vents against the media; in one of the most glaring examples, CBS backed out of allowing Stephen Colbert to broadcast an interview with Democratic Texas Senate candidate James Talarico as the FCC re-evaluated longstanding rules about political interviews. "The View" has also come under scrutiny.

If Carr actually follows through on threats to revoke broadcast licenses, though, said First Amendment litigator Robert Corn-Revere of the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression, it would come back to haunt Trump.

“We’ve never in this country had a law that permits a royal decree for news coverage,” he told Politico. “If you expressly link a licensing proceeding to whether or not the networks are airing coverage that the president wants covered, then whatever legitimacy that those proceedings might have had is automatically diminished if you link them.”

The Trump Justice Department left a MAGA ex-cop to face his prison sentence after he leaked intel to a Proud Boys leader, per a court filing.

According to a court brief published by Politico's Kyle Cheney, the DOJ agreed with the conviction of Shane Lamond, a former D.C. cop who leaked internal information about an investigation into Proud Boys leader Enrique Tarrio. Lamond told Tarrio about the Metropolitan Police Department's probe as it was unfolding, the brief detailed.

"Lamond told Tarrio about the investigation's status, MPD's internal deliberations, the FBI's involvement, that an arrest warrant was likely forthcoming, and that the warrant had been signed," the brief reads. "Lamond used Telegram to communicate with Tarrio, knowing that Telegram's encryption would make it harder for the communications to be intercepted."

The police investigation was looking into Tarrio's burning of a Black Lives Matter banner in December 2020. Lamond ran the department's intelligence branch and tipped Tarrio off that an arrest warrant was coming. The information allowed Tarrio to arrive in Washington, D.C. "early so that, if arrested, he would be released in time to participate in inauguration-related protests."

The DOJ's brief argued that the court "did not err" in convicting Lamond for obstruction of the investigation, and "Lamond's conviction should be affirmed." The brief was filed in response to Lamond's appeal of his 2024 conviction.

"The evidence showed that Lamond acted corruptly," the DOJ wrote. "He repeatedly leaked information that advantaged Tarrio and risked impeding the investigation and prosecution."

The brief also challenges claims in Lamond's appeal, saying, "Lamond strains credulity by claiming that he was simply cultivating a relationship with Tarrio."

Lamond was sentenced to 18 months of incarceration to be followed by 18 months of supervised release, according to the brief.

President Donald Trump's declassified document dump backing his claims that US election systems are insecure included a photo of the 1990s computer game "Doom," according to Talking Points Memo.

During a Thursday primetime speech, Trump shared the trove of files allegedly substantiating his election meddling claims.

The documents included a January 2020 National Intelligence Council memo declassified by former Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard, featuring a "Pollbook Hacking Example" involving "Doom," according to Talking Points Memo.

The photo showed an electronic pollbook "modified" at the 2019 Defcon Voting Machine Hacking Village to run "Doom," based on press reporting from the event.

Though "treated as a serious example of threats to election infrastructure," the image appears to have come from a tweet by user l33tLumberjack featured in a Washington Post article.

The National Association of Secretaries of State previously described a similar demonstration as "unrealistic."

Watch the video below.

A Fox News co-host said Friday that Sen. Susan Collins (R-ME) could face a tough road in the upcoming elections to maintain her Senate seat in the fallout over the fatal ICE shooting in her state.

Democratic strategist Jessica Tarlov pointed out that since Democratic Senate candidate Graham Platner stepped down from the race amid allegations of sexual assault, it's opened up more questions and scrutiny over Collins' vote on ICE funding as potential Democratic hopefuls push their campaigns forward.

"There is a lot of energy right now in Maine, and it is blue energy in the Democratic sense," Tarlov said. "There is a reason that they are talking about the policies of Graham Platner because they were overwhelmingly popular with the primary electorate."

Now, it's been six years, and Collins has voted with Trump "95 percent of the time," Tarlov added.

"Right now Maine is in full crisis mode over this ICE murder from last week of Johan Guerrero," she said. "Everyone's talking about Susan Collins, one of the deciding votes for that extra $70 billion for ICE funding."

Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin's threats on Friday that federal immigration officials would ramp up street-level enforcement could also be problematic for Collins, Tarlov argued.

"We're going to be turning up the heat in the streets," she said. "Susan Collins doesn't want any heat up in the streets. Susan Collins is going to have a very difficult time hanging on if things like this are going on in her state, and if you can tie her directly to the funding."

"She's got to run even stronger than she did in 2020; this is a different environment, and it is a very anti-Trump environment, and she is tied with him with 95% of her votes," Tarlov added.

President Donald Trump has insisted for years that the 2020 election was stolen from him. But according to a reporter covering his White House, the people Trump himself tasked with proving it came up disastrously empty.

In a primetime address Thursday night, Trump alleged that China interfered in the 2020 race and that intelligence officials had buried the evidence, releasing declassified documents he falsely said showed the largest compromise of election data in history.

On a Zeteo livestream reacting to the speech, senior political correspondent Asawin Suebsaeng said the outlet's reporting showed Trump's White House had been repeatedly briefed that its own hand-picked investigators — described by Suebsaeng as hardcore, pro-Trump election deniers placed in sensitive posts — failed to find proof that China flipped votes to Joe Biden.

"Even these guys, the most internet brain-cooked people on the planet who Donald Trump put in highly sensitive position powers could not find that actual smoking gun, even though they were supposedly given everything that they so desired," Suebsaeng said.

"So that is why when he went out there tonight, you and other eagle-eared or eagle-eyed listeners may have noticed that the speech was written in this kind of way that was just jack-full of innuendo. They talk about attempts, they talk about intelligence, but they would never talk about that we found a smoking gun that showed the election was stolen by China in Joe Biden's favor in 2020."

Suebsaeng said that lack of evidence led Trump to launch into a barrage of different asides.

"He'd say like, 'Oh, we know a lot of bad stuff happened.' 'Oh, we can never have another stolen election again.' He never actually connected the two thoughts in his speechwriter-written speech tonight. That is because even these conspiratorial crackpots who he's employing right now could not find the smoking gun," Suebsaeng said.

Suebsaeng's reporting tracked with an acknowledgment from Trump's own team.

In a briefing hours before the speech, a White House official said none of the released material alleged that any votes were switched or machines hacked, according to CBS News. Analysts who reviewed the same files found nothing to back the claim.

A March 2021 intelligence assessment concluded that China did not deploy efforts to change the election's outcome, and found no tampering with vote-counting.

Trump lost to Biden by more than 7 million votes, and 306 to 232 in the Electoral College. The result was affirmed across dozens of court rulings.

Hawaii's highest Court launched a rare attack on the U.S. Supreme Court, accusing the John Roberts-led bench of enabling "naked racism" and bending the Constitution to "whatever the Court needs it to be."

The broadside came buried inside a ruling handed down this week that threw out the controversial 1990 rape conviction of a Maui man. The court found that discredited FBI hair-and-fiber testimony was false and denied Daniel Granillo a fair trial, and ordered a new trial.

Using the ruling as a vehicle, Justice Todd Eddins explained why Hawaii no longer takes its cues on constitutional rights from Washington, and he opened with race.

"The Roberts Court sees only white," Eddins charged, opening with an attack on the chief justice.

"That is not blindness," the opinion said, arguing that the court's racial preferences were at the heart of its decisions. "That is white sight, by design."

Eddins pointed to the Court's April decision in Louisiana v. Callais, which gutted a core protection of the Voting Rights Act. That ruling, he wrote, buried "the crown jewel of the civil rights movement," and he accused the justices of "looking at naked racism and seeing none of it."

That record, Eddins argued, exposed the court's colorblind pose as a fiction. "A Constitution interpreted this way is not colorblind," he wrote. "It is whatever the Court needs it to be."

"The Fourteenth Amendment is not colorblind. It never was," Eddins insisted of the Constitution's guarantee of equal protection under the law.

The opinion then turned from race to money. On rulings that lifted limits on political spending, Eddins wrote that the wealthy had bought the system.

"Billionaires spend to be repaid," the opinion charged. "Everyone else just votes."

He was harsh, too, on the decision granting President Donald Trump broad immunity from prosecution, writing that the court had "placed a president above the law."

The whole record, Eddins argued, freed Hawaii to disregard the Court. State constitutionalism, he wrote, makes it easy to treat "Roberts Court jurisprudence" as "white noise."

He closed by refusing to take any further instructions from Supreme Court justices.

"That's not all life tenure and zero accountability have produced lately," the opinion concluded. "But it's enough."