“Butcher of Gaza”: Pro-Palestine Protesters Interrupt Blinken Hearing

At the Senate Tuesday, Secretary of State Antony Blinken had to contend with protesters upset over the Biden administration’s support for Israel during its brutal war on Gaza. Screams of “war criminal” and “butcher of Gaza” broke out on the Senate floor before protesters were forcibly removed.

Blinken was called to testify before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee in a review of the State Department’s budget for the 2025 fiscal year, and later the Senate appropriations subcommittee. While Blinken was speaking during the first hearing, protesters who had red paint on their hands stood up and called him “bloody Blinken,” shouting that “the blood of 40,000 Palestinians” is on his hands.

“Blinken, you will be remembered as the butcher of Gaza!” one protester yelled as Capitol Police officers removed him from the hearing. “You will be remembered for murdering innocent Palestinians.”

The antiwar organization Code Pink posted video of the interruption to X (formerly Twitter) and also posted video of one protester being picked up and carried outside of the room by police.

In a brief moment of levity, Senator Lindsey Graham warned in the hearing that if the ICC followed through on pursuing warrants for Israeli officials, “we’re next.” His statement drew applause from protesters, who welcomed the news.

“You can clap all you want to,” Graham said. “They tried to come after our soldiers in Afghanistan but reason prevailed.… What I hope to happen is that we level sanctions against the ICC for this outrage.”

Blinken, Graham, and many other Biden officials and politicians from both parties have been confronted by protesters calling for a cease-fire in the war in Gaza. On Tuesday, though, Blinken seemed relatively unfazed, saying the administration is willing to work with “a profoundly wrong-headed decision” regarding possible warrants for Israeli leaders issued by the International Criminal Court.

Meanwhile, Israel’s war has killed over 35,000 people, including at least 15,000 children. Israel has clamped down on press coverage of the war, including briefly shutting down an Associated Press camera on Tuesday. The United Nations agency for Palestinian refugees has had to shut down food distribution in the city of Rafah, where many Gazans have been displaced, due to the security situation and a lack of supplies. The Biden administration, after briefly pausing one weapons shipment to Israel, continues to send weapons to Israel, instead of listening to protesters and taking steps to end the war by stopping the flow of arms altogether.

Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell apparently has no issue with Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito’s decision to fly a symbol of the insurrection shortly after the January 6 attack on the Capitol.

Images published on Friday revealed that the conservative justice had flown the upside-down flag—a symbol of Donald Trump’s “Stop the Steal” effort to overturn the 2020 presidential election results—at his home in Alexandria, Virginia, in the immediate aftermath of the January 6 insurrection at the U.S. Capitol. The photographic evidence has since sparked questions about Alito’s impartiality on the nation’s highest court—but none of that seemed to bother McConnell, who appeared to suggest Tuesday that examining the court’s ethics was an unnecessary “attack” on the judiciary.

“It seems to me there are nonstop attacks on the Supreme Court, week after week after week, so I’m not going to dignify that with a response,” McConnell said, responding to a direct question on the issue from CNN’s Manu Raju.

“We need to leave the Supreme Court alone, protect them from people who went into their neighborhoods and tried to do them harm, look out for the Supreme Court—that’s part of the job of the administration,” McConnell added.

But that’s not the position McConnell took in the months following January 6. McConnell has privately and publicly criticized Trump for his role in the riots, including denying that the 2020 presidential election was stolen and saying that the mob was “provoked by the president and other powerful people.”

Meanwhile, other conservative leaders in the upper chamber have had no problem shutting down Alito’s symbolic declaration, including Senator Lindsey Graham, who described the flag choice as “not good judgment.”

“He said his wife was insulted and got mad—assume that to be true—but he’s still a supreme court justice,” Graham told HuffPost’s Igor Bobic on Monday. “And, you know, people have to realize that moments like that, to think it through.”

Rudy Giuliani’s new coffee business must be grinding hard to hock its beans as the dirt-broke former mayor fills his cup with another debt: a $10,000 bond issued Tuesday by an Arizona state court after Giuliani unsuccessfully evaded a subpoena at his own birthday bash.

During arraignment, Giuliani pleaded not guilty to nine counts of conspiracy, forgery, and fraud. Prosecutors sought to ensure his return to court by issuing the bond, which will be returned to him if he makes his court date, due to his prior efforts to avoid being served. On Friday night, hours before he was served, Giuliani posted a photo of himself at his birthday party mocking the Arizona attorney general. After he was served, he deleted the post.

“He has shown no intent to comply with the legal process in Arizona,” prosecutor Nicholas Klingerman said of Giuliani when petitioning the court for bond. Giuliani has 30 days to appear in Arizona to be booked.

The Arizona fake elector indictment is just the latest in a long series of predictable events for Giuliani, who’s been largely left out in the cold by the man he sweat his hair off trying to support.

Appearing remotely, Giuliani stated he didn’t have a lawyer. When asked by the court if he wanted a public defender, he said, “No, no, I think I am capable of handling it myself.” At the time of his arraignment, an ad featuring the future convict touting his “Rudy Coffee” brand began getting double-roasted online.

“I’m obsessed with how he says ‘chocoley,’” wrote one Twitter user. “If rock bottom was a person,” cracked another.

“This ad is giving Drag Race branding challenge where the queen ends up in the bottom, takes off her wig during the lip sync (only to reveal her wig cap), then goes home,” wrote New York City Councilman Chi Ossé.

Giuliani is charged alongside 17 others for a harebrained fake elector scheme they’re alleged to have crafted in an effort to overturn the 2020 election results. The 18 defendants are all charged with nine counts of felony conspiracy, forgery, and fraud by the state of Arizona, where prosecutors allege the dozen and a half wise guys and gals submitted a document to Congress falsely declaring Trump won Arizona in the 2020 presidential election.

According to AP, 11 people were arraigned alongside Giuliani on Tuesday, including Tyler Bowyer, an executive for white nationalist–fueled group Turning Point USA, Arizona state Senator Anthony Kern, and miscellaneous leaders and chairs of Arizona state and local Republican organizations. Of the 18 indicted, seven are former Trump aides, including former chief of staff Mark Meadows, Trump attorney John Eastman, who’s alleged to have cooked up the plan, and Jenna Ellis, another Trump attorney who tried persuading Arizona lawmakers to change the 2020 election results.

The Republican National Committee’s senior counsel for election integrity, Christina Bobb, was arraigned Tuesday at a Maricopa County, Arizona, courthouse, pleading not guilty to charges that she was part of a plan to overturn the 2020 presidential election and keep Donald Trump in the White House.

Bobb was one of 11 people—two Trump aides and nine Arizona Republicans—who were arraigned, including Trump’s former lawyer Rudolph Giuliani, who was finally served Friday after weeks evading and mocking the Arizona attorney general.

Bobb was a lawyer for Trump’s 2020 campaign, and has long been an election denier. While working for One America News, Bobb reported on an “audit” of the Arizona election results while she was also fundraising for that so-called “audit.”

From there, she joined the fake elector plot and was part of the “command center” at the Willard Hotel in Washington, D.C., during the Capitol insurrection on January 6, 2021. She’s defended Trump’s role in the insurrection, even has seemingly acknowledged he’s guilty. When the former president’s daughter-in-law Lara Trump took over the RNC earlier this year, one of the committee’s earliest hires was Bobb. 

Regarding Arizona, Giuliani has deferred to Bobb, saying that she knows more about the election efforts in that state than he does. 

“I used Christina Bobb to a large extent, and I’m not putting anything off on Christina. If Christina said it happened, it’s probably more accurate than if I said it happened,” Giuliani said in late April on Newsmax.

Bobb was seen smirking in the courthouse during her arraignment. Her mugshot is below:

During an interview with KDKA News in Pittsburgh on Tuesday, Donald Trump praised himself for overturning Roe v. Wade and suggested abortion isn’t the only thing on the chopping block.

Asked whether he’d outlaw birth control or Plan B, Trump responded, “We’re looking at that” and said his campaign plans to release his full policy proposal in a week. “I think it’s something you’ll find interesting.… You will find it, I think, smart. I think it’s a smart decision.”

Pressed further, Trump indicated his general policy will be to allow states to do whatever they want to restrict bodily autonomy around abortion.

“Things really do have a lot to do with the states, and some states are going to have different policy than others,” Trump told KDKA.

KDKA didn’t ask Trump his position on mifepristone and misoprostol—medications used to terminate early pregnancy and miscarriages—but Trump touted the overturning of Roe as an accomplishment brought forth by his administration.

“We did something that everybody wanted,” he said. “We got rid of Roe v. Wade.” Polling data from Pew Research Center in July 2022 found a majority of Americans supported Roe and were angered by the Supreme Court’s overturning of the landmark decision.

Trump skirted questions about whether he would sign a national 15-week abortion ban, much like he has in past interviews. The measure is incredibly popular with his ultraconservative supporters, but Trump has generally argued in favor of a “winning” position. “We must win,” he said. “We have to win.”

Trump’s stance on abortion has shifted wildly over the years, swinging from “very pro-choice” in 1999 to “pro-life” in 2011 when Trump first mused on running for president. In 2016, Trump said people should “be punished” for having abortions. He later dropped this talking point as people reasonably interpreted his statement to endorse prison time for abortion-seekers, a policy that has since been enacted in multiple states.

As Donald Trump’s New York City criminal trial comes to a close, the former president has been increasingly surrounded by loyalists and defenders who decry what they see as a grave miscarriage of justice: a witch hunt aimed at undercutting a wildly popular leader; a show trial out of Stalinist Russia.

On Tuesday, as his defense rested without Trump taking the stand, his political posse once more gathered outside the Manhattan courthouse. This time, however, their argument was slightly different: Trump isn’t just a victim—he’s a regular guy being beaten down and persecuted by a vast cabal of venomous elites.

“What happens to any of you if the courts in New York come after any of you because of something you said? Because you said something that the ruling class didn’t like?” Texas Lieutenant Governor Dan Patrick said Tuesday. “That’s what these other countries are all about. They shut down the ruling class. They want to be sure that anyone that speaks up against the ruling class disappears.”

“They want Donald Trump to disappear, they want to send him to jail, they want to take him off the main stage, because they know he’s their biggest danger to taking the ruling class—,” Patrick continued before being cut off by a reporter, who asked if he didn’t consider Trump to be a member of that ruling class.

“No!” the Texas politician squeaked, turning toward the reporter. “Donald Trump is not a member of the ruling class.”

As Patrick folded back into the sycophantic crowd, former deputy assistant to the president Sebastian Gorka attempted to further shut down the idea that Trump—who served as president from 2016 to 2020, claims a net worth in the billions, and is currently running to reclaim the highest position in the American government—is a member of the ruling class.

“Would a member of the ruling class be facing 730 years in prison? What a pathetic question,” Gorka mocked while clad in Trump’s signature courtroom combo of blue suit, white shirt, and extra-long red tie. “And he’s a member of the elite? That’s pathetic. You’re not a journalist.”

Last year, Trump and his namesake company were found guilty of vastly inflating the worth of their assets by at least $812 million. Trump’s actual net worth is unclear—and it has recently taken a sizable hit as a result of numerous multimillion-dollar damages—but he is undoubtedly a millionaire several times over and owns a number of lavish properties. He has recently seen a windfall thanks to his ownership of Truth Social, a media and technology company that lost more than $300 million in the first quarter of 2024 but is nevertheless worth billions thanks to an overinflated stock market valuation.

Trump is accused of using his former fixer Michael Cohen to sweep an affair with porn star Stormy Daniels under the rug ahead of the 2016 presidential election. He faces 34 felony charges in this case for allegedly falsifying business records with the intent to further an underlying crime. Trump has pleaded not guilty on all counts.

Carlson’s many conspiracy theories—from Lyme disease being a bioweapon against the poor to the rise of “wokeness” in the United States—have already aired in the country. And it’s not really a surprise why.

Carlson has long espoused pro-Russian views, downplaying the country’s conflict with Ukraine and minimizing Russia’s invasion as a mere “border dispute.” He even touted a conspiracy theory of a U.S.-led effort to supply Ukraine with chemical weapons.

Carlson has also made no secret of his love for Russian dictator Vladimir Putin, traveling all the way to Moscow earlier this year for a widely panned softball interview. Despite Putin’s mockery of Carlson during and after the interview, Carlson still defended Putin’s killing of dissidents, words that eventually came back to hurt the conservative pundit when Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny died in Russian custody days later.

Putin and the Russian government evidently see value in Carlson to keep him on a national TV channel in a country where independent media outlets are highly restricted and subject to bans and being declared “foreign agents” or “undesirable organizations.”

Meanwhile, here in the U.S., even top Republicans like Senator Mitch McConnell have blasted Carlson, pointing to him as the reason why many Republicans were against aid to Ukraine in its war against Russia. Can Carlson make up for his diminished U.S. audience with a Russian one? Even if he does, it’ll be difficult to profit from it, considering the massive Western sanctions against Russia.

This story has been updated.

A string of emails sent by attorney Robert Costello appears to have undercut the witness’s credibility just moments before Donald Trump’s first criminal trial concluded for the day.

Costello had previously represented Trump’s personal attorney Rudy Giuliani, and had allegedly offered a back-channel mode of communication between the former president and his former fixer (and current star defense witness) Michael Cohen in 2018.

But on Tuesday, the former federal prosecutor got caught up in a web of his own making and was forced to admit to moblike tactics that undercut the defense’s core argument.

In one message from 2018, Costello complained to his law partner Jeff Citron that Cohen was not cooperating, and that he believed instead that Cohen was “slow playing us and the president.”

“What should I say to this asshole?” Costello wrote. “He’s playing with the most powerful man on the planet.”

“This email speaks for itself?” asked prosecutor Susan Hoffinger.

“Yes, it does,” Costello told the court.

“You lost control of Michael Cohen?” Hoffinger continued.

“Absolutely not,” Costello replied.

In another 2018 message between Costello and Citron, the Giuliani attorney wrote that “our issue is to get Cohen on the right page without giving the appearance that we are following instructions from Giuliani or the President.”

“We must reverse the Avenatti effect and restore this to a far more simple investigation of things that while they might not look good politically and nevertheless legal,” the message continued, referring to Michael Avenatti, a since-disgraced attorney who represented Stormy Daniels, the former adult film actress that Trump is being accused of paying hush money to in 2016.

The emails clearly show the extraordinary lengths that Trump and his aides used to try to silence Cohen—and suggest that they were engaged in a cover-up.

Trump is accused of using Cohen to sweep an affair with Daniels under the rug ahead of the 2016 presidential election. The Republican presidential nominee faces 34 felony charges in this case for allegedly falsifying business records with the intent to further an underlying crime. Trump has pleaded not guilty on all counts.

Donald Trump’s defense rested and concluded witness testimony in his hush-money trial Tuesday—and the former president pathetically chickened out of taking the stand.

“Yeah, I would testify, absolutely,” Trump told reporters in April before the trial began. “I’m testifying. I tell the truth, I mean, all I can do is tell the truth, and the truth is that there is no case.”

His lawyer Alina Habba again confirmed on Monday that he wants to take the stand—that he is “willing” and “able.”

But in the end, the beleaguered blowhard weaseled out of it.

Trump has wailed at length about a gag order issued by Judge Juan Merchan restricting his public statements, arguing incoherently that the gag order prohibits him from testifying—a statement that is flatly untrue, as the gag order applies to public statements from Trump targeting jurors and prosecution and does not apply to sworn testimony.

Perhaps Trump chickened out because his allies are familiar with his proclivity to ramble uncontrollably and knew he would likely put his foot in his mouth, as he’s already been doing.

In lieu of public statements, Trump has benefited from a rotating gaggle of copycat surrogates speaking on his behalf and admitting to helping him violate his gag order over and over again.

Merchan concluded Tuesday morning that closing arguments would resume the following Tuesday—leaving Trump a full week off from court to violate his gag order again.

Senator Ted Cruz posted a message on X (formerly Twitter) Monday afternoon touting all his help after a storm hit the Houston area on Thursday. Unfortunately for him, the internet never forgets, and in his case, he doesn’t have the best record on natural disasters.

In 2021, Cruz dashed off to vacation in Cancun while much of Texas was without electricity after a winter disaster, earning him scorn and mockery from his political colleagues as well as on social media. His post on Monday quickly brought in commentators eager to remind him of his actions.

Some brought up how he’s spent his time touting his podcast (which could get him in campaign finance trouble) and hawking his new book.

The Lose Cruz PAC, which is raising money to oust the Texas senator, also got in on the act.

Cruz is facing a tough reelection campaign against Representative Colin Allred, a former football player, and is looking to shore up any support he can. Cruz has a number of obstacles this time, such as Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s presidential candidacy pulling away votes and dangerously low fundraising numbers.

He should probably be doing things in Congress that would help his popularity, but in true Cruz fashion, he’s trying to make sure airlines don’t have to easily offer refunds and wants to give politicians extra security in airports so they that don’t get bothered if they leave their state in the middle of a disaster.