Dems Rally to Save Lina Khan After Mark Cuban Puts Target on Her Back

Progressive Democrats are rallying around Federal Trade Commission Chair Lina Khan amid reports that business executives supporting Kamala Harris want her dismissed.

Billionaire Mark Cuban told Semafor on Tuesday that “if it were me, I wouldn’t” keep Khan next year, criticizing the FTC chair for taking on technology firms over artificial intelligence.

“The bigger picture is, she’s hurting more than she’s helping,” Cuban said, even while acknowledging her admirable antitrust efforts to improve pharmacy benefits.

Cuban’s comments drew a sharp reply from Senator Bernie Sanders, who posted on X Tuesday afternoon that Cuban “is wrong. Lina Khan is the best FTC Chair in modern history.

“By taking on corporate greed & illegal monopolies, Lina is doing an exceptional job preventing large corporations from ripping-off consumers & exploiting workers,” Sanders said, thanking Khan “for what you are doing.”

Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez echoed Sanders’s show of support in her own post Wednesday morning. 

“Let me make this clear, since billionaires have been trying to play footsie with the ticket: Anyone goes near Lina Khan and there will be an out and out brawl. And that is a promise,” Ocasio-Cortez said in her post. “She proves this admin fights for working people. It would be terrible leadership to remove her.”

Ocasio-Cortez’s post alluded to Harris’s recent efforts to court business leaders and corporate executives and draw them away from Donald Trump. Several executives have pledged their financial support to the vice president, even forming a “Business Leaders for Harris” group to raise money. These include Cuban, LinkedIn co-founder Reid Hoffman, Netflix co-founder Reed Hastings, and Ken Chenault, the former CEO of American Express who now heads a private equity firm.

Two finance executives told the Financial Times last week that they expected Harris to make more business-friendly appointments to the FTC and the Securities and Exchange Commission. Both Khan and Gary Gensler, who heads the SEC, have directed their agencies to go after corporate consolidation and malfeasance, with Khan making pro-worker reforms and Gensler taking on the cryptocurrency industry. Hoffman has made no secret of his desire to see Khan dismissed, accusing her of “waging war on American business.”

Will Harris side with business executives and dismiss Khan, or will she listen to progressives like Sanders and Ocasio-Cortez and continue President Biden’s efforts to rein in corporate excess? It all depends on whose support the vice president thinks is more vital to defeating Trump.

Fox News host Sean Hannity platformed more Republican lies about the federal government’s response to this year’s hurricane season, despite the fact that the network seemingly had the truth on hand.

“You have DHS Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas saying FEMA is running out of money and going bankrupt,” Hannity said Tuesday night. “Bankrupt? This has not been a busy hurricane season. This happened to FEMA—FEMA directed more than $1 billion to pay for housing and food for Harris-Biden illegal immigrants.”

“Because this story looks really bad for Democrats in charge, they are trying to just outright lie to you and pretend this is misinformation. This is a deepfake statement by conservatives. Well, it’s also on the FEMA website,” Hannity continued, providing no visual evidence of such claims. “It’s completely truthful, it’s completely real.”

But Hannity’s source doesn’t jibe with information that circulated even inside the conservative media behemoth. A fact sheet produced by conservatives on the House Appropriations Committee, obtained by Fox, revealed that FEMA “has enough funding in the short-term to address immediate needs for both Hurricane Helene and Hurricane Milton,” reported Fox News’s senior congressional correspondent Chad Pergram. Pergram tweeted about the fact sheet less than 30 minutes before Hannity went on air Tuesday night.

Further, the fact sheet clarified that there is “no funding connection between” the immigration program at the U.S.-Mexico border and the Disaster Relief Fund, noting that there is “no intermingling of funding between these two programs,” and that the only correlation between them is that they are both managed by FEMA.

FEMA has fervently rejected the accusation that it is out of funds, with agency leaders telling ABC News on Sunday that the notion was “frankly ridiculous and just plain false.”

“This kind of rhetoric is not helpful to people,” FEMA Administrator Deanne Criswell said. “It’s really a shame that we’re putting politics ahead of helping people.”

Republicans, encouraged by lies spewed by Donald Trump, have launched a host of disinformation throughout the 2024 hurricane season. On top of the charge that the Biden administration has diverted funds from FEMA to assist undocumented immigrants enter the country, conservative leaders in heavily affected regions, including Florida and Georgia, have also claimed that working with the White House to expedite disaster relief “seemed political,” and have conspiratorially suggested that the hurricanes are a government manipulation.

By Tuesday, it became clear to federal officials that the lie that FEMA was out of money had stopped people from actually requesting their aid in the wake of Hurricane Helene, which devastated large swaths of North Carolina and Georgia.

The magnitude of the disaster caused by the bold-faced lies will only come to light after the full hurricane season has passed. On the immediate horizon swirls another massive superstorm, Category 5 Hurricane Milton, which is scheduled to slam the west side of Florida by Wednesday evening. Central Floridian leaders have repeatedly warned that Milton’s arrival at the Sunshine State’s shores will be a catastrophic event that will claim lives and demolish the region, with forecasted 10-to-15-foot storm surges that Tampa Mayor Jane Castor has described as “not survivable.”

After refusing to even do an interview with 60 Minutes, Donald Trump’s campaign is demanding that the CBS show release a full transcript of its interview with Vice President Kamala Harris.

The Trump campaign has taken issue with a truncated package that aired on Face the Nation Sunday ahead of the full interview, which showed Harris answering a question one way. But according to Fox News, when the full interview aired the next day, her answer was entirely different.

When host Bill Whitaker asked Harris about the U.S.’s relationship with international war criminal and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, the Face the Nation clip showed that Harris responded, “Well Bill, the work that we have done has resulted in a number of movements in that region by Israel that were very much prompted by, or a result of, many things, including our advocacy for what needs to happen in the region.”

The 60 Minutes interview showed Harris responding quite differently. “We are not going to stop pursuing what is necessary for the United States to be clear about where we stand on the need for this war to end,” Harris said simply.

The Trump campaign’s national press secretary, Karoline Leavitt, released a statement Tuesday accusing 60 Minutes of “deceptively” editing Harris’s full interview. 

“Why did 60 Minutes choose not to air Kamala’s full word salad, and what else did they choose not to air? The American people deserve the full, unedited transcript from Kamala’s sit-down interview. We call upon 60 Minutes and CBS to release it. What do they, and Kamala, have to hide?” Leavitt said.

It’s worth noting that Trump didn’t even attempt to do the interview, and gave some exceedingly flimsy reasons as to why. 60 Minutes brutally roasted Trump over his baseless excuses for breaking more than 50 years of tradition by not appearing for an interview. It seems that the former president couldn’t handle being fact-checked, nor did he want to face any “tough questions” like the ones that caused him to storm off set in 2020.  

Still, his campaign seems more than willing to nitpick Harris’s performance: Trump went ballistic Wednesday in a post on Truth Social, claiming 60 Minutes had “sliced and diced” Harris’s interview and baselessly insisting she had been hyper-edited into coherency. 

“Lyin’ Kamala’s answers to questions, which were virtually incoherent, over and over again, some by as many as four times in a single sentence or thought, all in an effort, possibly illegal as part of the ‘News Division,’ which must be licensed, to make her look ‘more Presidential,’ or a least, better,” Trump wrote. 

Trump also claimed that the interview violated campaign finance laws and that he had never heard of an interview being edited. However, Trump appeared in an interview that appeared heavily edited on Fox & Friends just three months ago. 

“This is a stain on the reputation of 60 Minutes that is not recoverable—It will always remain with this once storied brand. I have never heard of such a thing being done in ‘News,’” he wrote.

Donald Trump’s “God Bless the USA” Bibles weren’t actually made in the USA, it seems—they were printed in China.

The Associated Press reports that a Chinese printing company based in Hangzhou shipped 120,000 of the Bibles to the United States in February and March. Three separate shipments cost $342,000, averaging out to less than $3 per Bible. Trump is selling hand-signed copies of his branded Bible for $1,000, and the minimum price for an unsigned copy is $59.99, putting potential sales revenue at close to $7 million.

Trump announced that he was selling the Bibles in partnership with country singer Lee Greenwood in a Truth Social video on March 26, and two days later, 70,000 Bibles arrived at the port of Los Angeles.

The Bibles contain copies of the Constitution, the Declaration of Independence, the Bill of Rights, and the Pledge of Allegiance, and one version even memorializes the July 13 assassination attempt against the former president: Trump’s name is on the cover above the phrase, “The Day God Intervened,” likely stamped on after the Bible was printed. Trump has also been hawking assassination-themed sneakers for the last two months, and just like the Bibles, fans can shell out extra cash for hand-signed shoes.

The former president and convicted felon is clearly trying to rake in as much cash as possible by having the Bibles printed in China, saving him the costs of paying American workers. An August financial report shows that he made $300,000 in royalties from the texts. Trump’s fans across the country are helping him out with his blatant grift, with the Oklahoma state superintendent requiring specific criteria for Bibles in the state’s public schools (already constitutionally questionable) that only Trump’s God Bless the USA Bible can fit.

It’s telling that the Bibles are printed in China, which has long been attacked by Trump for hurting American businesses and taking American jobs. On the campaign trail, the former president has been touting his economic plan to institute tariffs against China and other countries. Would that include his Bibles? After all, Trump is all about “America First.”

Supreme Court Chief Justice John Roberts has spent the months following Donald Trump’s immunity decision in relative distress, despite the fact that he cooked up its majority opinion himself.

The chief justice reportedly never wanted the nation’s highest court to be a cog in the political machine, but the country’s reaction to the monumental decision has skewed his vision, according to a CNN analysis published Tuesday.

Since the court issued its consequential immunity ruling in Trump v. United States at the beginning of July, Roberts has skirted making public speeches, while colleagues and friends described the conservative justice as “especially weary,” the outlet reported.

Public opinion of the institution since the decision has soured. Fewer than half of Americans—approximately 47 percent—expressed favorable views of the Supreme Court in the ruling’s wake, with the majority of positive opinions coming from Republicans, according to a Pew Research Center survey.

Still, Roberts’s defenders argue that the backlash to the immunity decision was overblown.

“The Trump immunity case is less about Trump and more about not opening the door” to future administrations “coming after previous presidents,” said attorney Erin Murphy, one of Roberts’s former law clerks, at a Georgetown University Law Center session.

And some of Roberts’s longtime friends, such as Harvard Law School professor Richard Lazarus, have insisted that the reconstructed executive power still leaves room for a successful case against Trump.

“The bottom line is clear,” Lazarus wrote in an August essay for The Washington Post. “Whether you are outraged by or sympathetic to the surprising sweep of the Supreme Court’s presidential immunity ruling, it nevertheless leaves the former president very much open to a successful felony prosecution.”

The case sprang out of Trump’s federal election interference trial as a preemptive defense, with Trump’s lawyers arguing that he could not be tried on conspiracy and obstruction charges due to presidential immunity privileges that he held during office. In a 6–3 ruling along ideological lines, the court ruled that some of the actions Trump was indicted for could be categorized as official acts during his presidency.

Writing the majority opinion, Roberts outlined that the president was not immune from criminal prosecution—except on some occasions.

“The President is not above the law,” Roberts wrote. “But under our system of separated powers, the President may not be prosecuted for exercising his core constitutional powers, and he is entitled to at least presumptive immunity from prosecution for his official acts.”

Sonia Sotomayor led the liberal justices with a scathing dissent, warning that “the President is now a king above the law.”

“With fear for our democracy, I dissent,” she wrote.

Donald Trump has taken yet another page out of the fascist handbook and decided that immigrants in the United States with legal status aren’t actually legal.

During an interview Tuesday night on Newsmax, Trump said he didn’t care about what legal processes the Haitian immigrants of Springfield, Ohio, had gone through. They’re still “illegal” to him. 

“I mean, look at Springfield where 30,000 illegal immigrants are dropped, and it was—they may have done it through a certain little trick, but they are illegal immigrants as far as I’m concerned. They’re destroying the towns, they’re destroying the whole—they’ll end up destroying the state!” he ranted.

The Haitian immigrants in Springfield are in the country under temporary protected status, which Trump has already pledged to revoke if he is put into office. The Republican presidential nominee’s reckless disregard for legal processes isn’t surprising, but it is alarming, as it widens the field of whom he hopes to displace in his plan to carry out the largest mass deportations in U.S. history. Whether you’re in the country legally or not legally depends entirely on whether you’re a convenient scapegoat for the former president.

Vice presidential nominee JD Vance has also stated that he doesn’t care about the legal status of immigrants. “Well, if Kamala Harris waves the wand illegally, and says these people are now here legally, I’m still going to call them an illegal alien,” Vance said during a campaign event in North Carolina last month. “An illegal action from Kamala Harris does not make an alien legal. That is not how this works.”

Trump has been not-so-subtly increasing the number of Haitian immigrants in Springfield every time he mentions it. In reality, there are between 10,000 and 12,000 Haitian immigrants in Springfield, according to CNN. Using fake numbers, and even faker stories, Trump has repeatedly exaggerated the supposed negative effect of immigrant communities on American cities.  

Donald Trump denies sending Vladimir Putin Covid-19 tests during the height of the pandemic. But Putin himself says it’s all true.

On Wednesday, Kremlin spokesperson Dmitry Peskov confirmed journalist Bob Woodward’s account from his upcoming book, War, that Trump sent the tests, but denied Woodward’s claim that the two had spoken multiple times since Trump left office in 2021.

“We also sent equipment at the beginning of the pandemic,” Peskov said in a written response to questions from Bloomberg about the book. “But about the phone calls—it’s not true.”

Trump reportedly sent the tests to Putin amid a shortage of tests in the United States, and Putin told him to keep it a secret for fear of a backlash against Trump from the American public.

“I don’t want you to tell anybody because people will get mad at you, not me,” Putin reportedly said to Trump at the time.

Trump’s campaign vehemently denied the report Tuesday, calling Woodward a “total sleazebag,” “an angry, little man,” “a truly demented and deranged man,” and “a boring person with no personality.”

“President Trump gave him absolutely no access for this trash book that either belongs in the bargain bin of the fiction section of a discount bookstore or used as toilet tissue,” said Steven Cheung, the Trump campaign’s communications director, in a statement.

Kamala Harris and her campaign seized on the report.

“That is just the most recent, stark example of who Donald Trump is,” Harris said Tuesday to talk show host Howard Stern.

People were “scrambling to get these kits,” Harris said. “And this guy who is president of the United States is sending them to Russia, to a murderous dictator, for his personal use?”

Biden also attacked Trump for the same thing at a fundraiser in Pennsylvania Tuesday.

“Those tests to tell you whether you had Covid were in short supply, so he called his good friend, Putin, not a joke, to make sure he had the tests,” Biden said. “What’s wrong with this guy?”

Trump said at a press conference last month that Ukraine should surrender to Russia and make things “much better,” almost admitting that if he is elected president again, he plans to give Putin whatever he wants. He’s also said that he wants to “use sanctions as little as possible” against countries like Russia, Iran, and China.

Even Republicans are getting fed up with MAGA’s hurricane conspiracy theories. Representative Chuck Edwards of North Carolina is one of them.

In a press release put out on Tuesday, Edwards condemned the misinformation about Hurricane Milton and Hurricane Helene that has been circulated online by the likes of Donald Trump and Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene.

“While it’s true that FEMA’s response to Hurricane Helene has not been perfect, there are outrageous rumors that have been circulated online and need to be addressed,” wrote Edwards on X, linking his incredibly thorough fact-check.

Since Helene damaged property and claimed lives across several states, including North Carolina, right-wing misinformation around the Federal Emergency Management Agency has been flying. Some Republicans and conspiracy theorists are accusing the agency of diverting much-needed resources to migrants or concocting the whole natural disaster in order to seize land.

Edwards’s debunking document starts off with him dispelling two outrageous rumors. “Hurricane Helene was NOT geoengineered by the government to seize and access lithium deposits in Chimney Rock,” and “Nobody can control the weather.”

Beyond the truly crazy, the Republican congressman also set the record straight about FEMA’s overall response to the disaster. MAGA has tried to engineer anger over FEMA’s $750 disaster relief checks. “Think of it: We give foreign countries hundreds of billions of dollars and we’re handing North Carolina $750,” said Trump on Saturday. But as Edwards clarifies, the amount “is just the first step of a longer process to provide financial assistance to disaster survivors in need of federal support.”

As Hurricane Milton is set to make landfall Wednesday, all we know for certain is that misinformation will be as prevalent as physical damage.

The lies Donald Trump’s campaign is spewing have become so extreme that even Fox News has started calling them out.

Trump’s attorney Alina Habba appeared on Fox News Tuesday to address the White House’s comments on Trump spreading misinformation about the federal government’s hurricane relief efforts.

“Let’s talk about facts,” Habba offered, but instead, she started to criticize Kamala Harris for appearing on the Call Her Daddy podcast. Habba then spread a gruesome piece of misinformation.

“There are still people missing, there are babies floating in the water, and we’re on podcasts? That’s what the Harris team is doing,” Habba claimed.

“Where did you see that report of a baby floating in the water?” interjected host Martha McCallum.

“We have absolutely heard there are children floating,” replied Habba, clearly unprepared to provide any evidence to support her talking point.

“There’s missing bodies, dead bodies, we know that. There are dead people, up to uh, 200 …” Habba sputtered as she tried to back up her baseless claim. “This is the problem. It’s not misinformation, it’s fact.”

Earlier Tuesday, FEMA director Deanne Criswell hit back at Trump’s repeated claims that there has been no on-the-ground presence in areas hit by Hurricane Helene and inadequate recovery aid, calling the accusation “completely false.”

But that hasn’t stopped Trump, who took to Truth Social Tuesday to brand the Biden administration’s response “THE WORST RESPONSE TO A STORM OR HURRICANE DISASTER IN U.S. HISTORY.”

On Monday, Trump made such extreme claims on Fox News that host Laura Ingraham repeatedly corrected him as he discussed federal hurricane relief.

Trump tried to criticize Harris’s response to Helene but kept coming up short when it came to actual reasons to complain. When Trump tried to whine that Harris was only offering $750 to victims, Ingraham had to interject that the funds were “for immediate needs.” When Trump said that Harris should go to the areas affected, such as North Carolina, Ingraham cut in to say that “she was there today, for three hours, I believe.”

Trump’s rampant lies have gotten so bad that even Republican lawmakers have had to start fact-checking the presidential nominee for their own party. Representative Chuck Edwards published a list Tuesday titled “Debunking Helene Response Myths.”

“FEMA is NOT only providing $750 to disaster survivors to support their recovery,” the release from Edwards’s office said, debunking Trump’s complaint. The list also clarified that FEMA had not diverted funding to the border or foreign aid and that the agency was not going to run out of money.

It turns out that some of the people wearing “Auto Workers for Trump” shirts at J.D. Vance’s rally in Detroit Tuesday weren’t autoworkers at all.

The Detroit News’s Craig Mauger covered the rally and spoke to some of the more than dozen people wearing the shirts. Six of the people wearing the shirts told the newspaper that they didn’t work in the automobile industry.

It’s not a surprise, as the Trump campaign has a long history of faking support from certain groups in desperate attempts to attract more voters. This isn’t even the first instance of Trump faking support from auto industry workers, either. One year ago, the former president made a big show of reaching out to union autoworkers at a campaign event in Michigan, but it was held at a nonunion factory, and it wasn’t clear how many of the people attending were even employed in the industry.

And just like on Tuesday, one person at last year’s event holding a “Union Members for Trump” told Mauger, who also covered that event, that she wasn’t in the union. Another person holding an “Auto Workers for Trump” sign told Mauger that he wasn’t an autoworker. The United Auto Workers at the time were on strike, and Trump’s actions seemed to show that he didn’t support them.

Vance’s rally on Tuesday was held in a heavily Democratic area in the battleground state, and he attacked President Biden and Kamala Harris’s efforts to help General Motors build more electric vehicles as “table scraps.” But the presence of fake autoworkers there raises the question of whether the people who attended the rally were local.

Trump’s campaign has been mocked and criticized for using fake A.I. images to claim support from Black voters as well as Taylor Swift fans. In the latter case, it backfired and led to Swift herself endorsing Harris, right after Trump’s first (and possibly only) debate with Harris. Will Tuesday’s attempt to inflate Trump and Vance’s support among autoworkers help them win the state of Michigan next month? Some of the latest polls have them trailing Harris in the state.