New Abortion Pill Suit Wants to Force More Teenagers to Get Pregnant

A cohort of states with some of the most draconian abortion restrictions in the nation are suing the federal government to limit access to mifepristone, one of the pills used to induce an abortion—but an underlying reason behind the suit is perhaps one of the most insidious anti-abortion initiatives yet.

Mifepristone, combined with misoprostol, composes the two-step prescription referred to as “the abortion pill.” The procedure accounts for more than half of all abortions in the United States, according to a 2022 report by the Guttmacher Institute, and has become a crucial tool as abortion restrictions limit access to in-person medical visits.

The suit was filed by the attorneys general of Kansas, Missouri, and Idaho, who argued that the medication should be illegal for minors entirely (misoprostol is fully legal as it is used for other treatments). The suit also accuses the Food and Drug Administration of having “unlawfully removed its prohibition against mailing abortion drugs,” allowing what the attorneys general describe as “a 50-state abortion drug mailing economy” to undermine their states’ abortion laws.

But their moral ground for pushing the ban was seemingly less focused on protecting children’s health than it was on actually creating more children, with the suit detailing the (apparently) unfortunate ramifications that abortion access has on an (apparently) desirable conundrum: teenage pregnancy.

“This study thus suggests that remote dispensing of abortion drugs by mail, common carrier, and interactive computer service is depressing expected birth rates for teenaged mothers in Plaintiff States, even if other overall birth rates may have been lower than otherwise was projected,” the suit reads on page 190.

And that could lead to cataclysmic losses for the Republican states, whose legal counselors quietly noted that a diminished population could cost them as much as a seat in Congress.

“A loss of potential population causes further injuries as well: the States subsequent ‘diminishment of political representation’ and ‘loss of federal funds,’ such as potentially ‘losing a seat in Congress or qualifying for less federal funding if their populations are’ reduced or their increase diminished,” the suit continued.

The Supreme Court unexpectedly saved mifepristone access in June, when it unanimously ruled that a group of different plaintiffs, represented by the right-wing Christian legal group Alliance Defending Freedom, did not have legal standing to sue the FDA and that the legal organization had failed to demonstrate how its clients were personally harmed by the drug’s existence on the market.

By and large, most Americans support abortion access. In a 2023 Gallup poll, just 13 percent of surveyed Americans said that abortion should be illegal in all circumstances. Meanwhile, 34 percent said it should be legal under any circumstances, and an additional 13 percent said it should be legal in most circumstances.

Donald Trump expressed surprise at Harvey Weinstein’s legal trouble in an interview on The Dan Bongino Show Friday morning.

“I was so amazed that Harvey Weinstein got schlonged. He got hit as hard as you can get hit. Because he was sort of the king of the woke, right? And yet he got it. And I figured that maybe he wouldn’t get hit so hard,” Trump told Bongino. 

Trump seemed to be insinuating some sort of left-wing or liberal conspiracy behind who faces criminal charges in referring to Weinstein, a convicted serial sex offender and longtime Democratic donor. 

“So when they do get hit, they get hit. But that’s the only one I can think of. Normally they protect everybody. What they did with [Eric Adams] is very suspect,” Trump added, referring to the recently indicted New York City mayor, a Democrat.    

There’s a lot to unpack from Trump’s comments, as his claim that liberals tend to protect their own from prosecution also isn’t true, considering the cases of Democrats Senator Bob Menendez and Representative Henry Cuellar this year as well as others in recent decades. 

Trump also brought up Weinstein unprompted, and said “I don’t know him well.” This raises the question of whether the former president is lying and did know Weinstein, which then raises further questions about whether Trump knew about Weinstein’s reputation as a serial abuser. It wouldn’t be too much of a surprise, considering Trump’s own record with sexual abuse.

It’s a reminder of Trump’s relationship with another infamous sex offender, Jeffrey Epstein. The former president has praised Epstein as a “good salesman” and was named in the documents released following a lawsuit against the billionaire from one of his victims.  

With less than three weeks til Election Day, Donald Trump’s lukewarm media appearances—which have featured the Republican presidential nominee struggling to piece words together—showcase just how frail he has become.

During an appearance on Fox & Friends Friday morning, Trump voluntarily created sound bites that were so absurd they could be mistaken for deepfakes.

Responding to a call-in question from a child inquiring about his favorite farm animal, Trump couldn’t help himself from dropping an unfounded rally talking point of his: that Vice President Kamala Harris wants to ban bovines in the United States.

“I’ll tell you what I love, I love cows,” Trump slurred. “But if we go with Kamala you won’t have any cows.

“I don’t want to ruin this kid’s day. I love cows, I think they’re so cute and so beautiful and so.… But according to Kamala, who’s a radical left lunatic, you will not have any cows anymore,” he added.

Elsewhere in the interview, Trump suddenly flipped and got snippy with the Fox hosts, scolding them for playing “attack ads” against him this election cycle.

“But you know the difference? In the old days, you never played negative ads. When I leave here, I’ll then be hit by five or six ads,” Trump said. “When I leave, I’ll have 12 people from Kamala on—and, you know, pretty much unopposed—for 19 days. I don’t think we should do that anymore.

“You shouldn’t play negative ads,” Trump continued. “I love complaining, I like to have everything perfect.”

Trump’s own allies appear aware of the fatal flaw, with some of the MAGA leader’s closest advisers admitting that Trump isn’t consistently at his best.

“When he’s good, he’s great, and when he’s off message, he’s not so great. I don’t think anyone is really changing their mind at this point, but when he distracts from his biggest, broadest messaging, it’s counterproductive because the Harris campaign uses it to turn out their voters,” Trump adviser David Urban told The New York Times.

Right-wingers in the United States and across the pond are spinning out about a small group of Labour Party organizers coming to canvas in battleground states.

According to a LinkedIn post by the head of operations of the Labour Party, nearly 100 of the U.K.’s left-wing party’s staff are coming to knock doors in North Carolina, Nevada, Pennsylvania, and Virginia. MAGA leaders are claiming this is foreign election interference, even though it is expressly legal, according to the Federal Election Commission.

“Foreign nationals are not allowed to be involved in anyway in U.S. election,” wrote Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene on Thursday, claiming that the U.K. volunteers are violating Federal Election Commission regulations. “Please go back to the UK and fix your own mass immigration problems that are ruining your country.”

“Yet another reason to vote for President Trump,” said Senator Tom Cotton.

“Isn’t this foreign election interference? Imagine if members of the Russian Duma did this,” wrote far-right poster Ian Miles Cheong, who pinned the tweet to his profile. Elon Musk agreed, writing simply, “This is illegal.”

It’s not. Although foreign nationals may not donate or take on management roles in a campaign, they “may participate in campaign activities as an uncompensated volunteer,” according to FEC guidelines.

Given that volunteers are reportedly paying for their own travel and are unpaid volunteers, they shouldn’t be breaking the law. This also isn’t a new phenomenon; in 2016 at least 70 British Labour activists came to swing states to campaign for Hillary Clinton. However, one constitutional and electoral law expert who spoke to the Telegraph suggested that if an individual spends more than $1,000 on the trip, they could be breaking an FEC rule, as travel expenses about that amount could be considered a donation to the party.

Even U.K. politicians, including Brexiteer Nigel Farage tried to paint the canvassing as nefarious. “This is direct election interference by the governing Labour Party, and particularly stupid if Trump wins. Who is paying for all of this?”

However, it appears that Farage didn’t have any problems directly campaigning for Donald Trump in 2020.

And one of the featured speakers at the RNC? Former Conservative Prime Minister Liz “Lettuce” Truss.

The judge in Donald Trump’s criminal 2020 election inference case released hundreds of pages of evidence Friday.

Judge Tanya Chutkan ordered that the clerk of courts file all four volumes of special counsel Jack Smith’s redacted appendix Friday morning, one day after rejecting a request from Trump’s legal team to delay the unsealing until after the presidential election next month.

Volume I of the filing contained several mostly unredacted interviews conducted by the House January 6 committee. One, with Trump’s valet, was previously redacted in a release from House Republicans. The valet recalled telling Trump that his televised speech had been cut short to show the unrest at the Capitol.

Volume II contained a collection of tweets, the majority of which were from Trump’s personal account, not his official POTUS account. This included his call for followers to attend a “big protest” in Washington, D.C., noting that it “will be wild!”

Volume III contained highlighted excerpts of Mike Pence’s book So Help Me God, detailing how Pence had tried to “encourage” Trump to accept the actual election results as his fraud cases fell apart. Pence reminded Trump that he’d taken “a dying political party and given it a new lease on life.”

Volume IV of the filing contained several pieces of evidence that were already publicly available, such as Trump’s speech on the Ellipse that preceded the January 6 riot at the Capitol, in which he undermined the results of the election.

It included Trump’s comments on January 6, broadcast on C-SPAN, urging MAGA rioters to “go home” while reaffirming that the election had been “stolen.” The volume also contained the special counsel’s report, which found that Trump’s former attorney Peter Navarro had violated the Hatch Act.

Additionally, the filing includes several fundraising emails from the Trump campaign and budget and travel planning documents, which might financially connect Trump to the January 6 riot.

While the promise of such a massive release brought many to believe they would find new information about Trump’s alleged illegal activities, much of the filings were redacted, with large sections appearing blank, not available for public viewing.

But that didn’t stop Trump’s legal team from scrambling until the last minute to try and prevent the documents’ release.

This story has been updated.

Hundreds of pages of evidence in Donald Trump’s 2020 election interference case are set to be unsealed Friday, and it has the former president shaking in his boots.

Judge Tanya Chutkan denied Trump’s request Thursday to delay the unsealing until after the presidential election, and said that the court documents containing evidence submitted by the government would be docketed publicly the next day.

Trump’s legal team had argued that “the asymmetric release of charged allegations and related documents during early voting creates a concerning appearance of election interference,” and pushed for the unsealing to be postponed.

But Chutkan didn’t seem particularly swayed by that argument.

“If the court withheld information that the public otherwise had a right to access solely because of the potential political consequences of releasing it, that withholding could itself constitute—or appear to be—election interference,” Chutkan wrote in her filing Thursday.

NBC’s legal analyst Lisa Rubin remarked on Morning Joe that Trump’s team seemed particularly desperate in their scrambled efforts to prevent the release of the evidence.

“They got their ruling last Thursday, they asked for more time to evaluate their litigation options. Then they waited until the eleventh hour instead of getting a ruling from the appeals court, which they didn’t have the ability to do,” Rubin said.

“Why are they fighting so hard if what we’re about to see isn’t really all that surprising? There’s probably something in there that they don’t want the voting public to know about or see in a more fulsome way,” she added.

By Friday morning, Chutkan ordered that the clerk of courts file special counsel Jack Smith’s Redacted Appendix (of exhibits to his immunity determination motion) of Volume I, Volume II, Volume III, and Volume IV.

SpaceX billionaire Elon Musk has taken to campaigning solo for Donald Trump, but his campaign stops might be doing more harm than good for the Republican presidential nominee.

While speaking to a crowd in the suburbs of Philadelphia, the Tesla CEO stumbled and fumbled his way through interactions with everyday Pennsylvanians, failing to convince attendees that they should vote early. Some people were especially unimpressed by the effort, shouting out: “Why?”

In one particularly cringe-worthy interaction, Musk sided with a hardcore 2020 election denier, blaming the media and the Department of Justice for the man’s alleged legal troubles. But the tech mogul would only get so close to the narrative: when offered a book on election denialism and voting machine conspiracies, Musk couldn’t keep up the shtick.

“We have hundreds of people, right now, ready. They’re out taking videos, they’re training poll workers. And we are not getting support from many people in the first front rows here. And their pictures, if we want to know who they are, are in this book,” the man said.

Musk’s response? Use his companies.

“What I recommend is post content on the X platform, and then people can—they can—they can argue and say it’s right or wrong, but if you have videos or evidence then post them publicly on social media and people can, you know, judge themselves, exactly,” Musk said.

“Let’s not get contentious. Team work makes the dream work here,” he continued, to gentle cheers. “I don’t want to dissuade anyone from voting. It’s very important to vote. So any actions with respect to voting machines, we certainly want to put them under intense scrutiny, but nonetheless, everyone needs to vote.”

Getting more Americans to turn out en masse for the former president has been high on the top of Musk’s agenda since he endorsed him in July, moments after Trump survived an assassination attempt near Butler, Pennsylvania. Earlier on Thursday, Musk offered hard cash to his more than 200 million followers on X if they signed a petition in support of the First and Second Amendments.

“If you’re a registered Pennsylvania voter, you & whoever referred you will now get $100 for signing our petition in support of free speech & right to bear arms. Earn money for supporting something you already believe in! Offer valid until midnight on Monday,” Musk wrote.

At his first solo event for the Donald Trump campaign, Elon Musk happily espoused election fraud conspiracy theories, at a town hall in Pennsylvania.

On Thursday, on stage outside of Philadelphia, Musk raised the issue of Dominion Voting Systems and election integrity, casting doubt on the election machines and suggesting they might be involved in fraud—a lie that has been widely debunked. Last year, Fox News agreed to pay Dominion a nearly $800 million settlement for making similar statements to Musk.

“The last thing I would do is trust a computer program,” said Musk, without a hint of irony.

“Statistically there are some very strange things that happen that are statistically incredibly unlikely. There’s always this question of, say, the Dominion voting machines. It is weird that, I think, they were used in Philadelphia and in Maricopa County [in Arizona] but not in a lot of other places,” said Musk. “Doesn’t that seem like a heck of a coincidence?”

A spokesman from Dominion immediately debunked Musk’s claims in an email response. “Fact: Dominion does not serve Philadelphia County. Fact: Dominion’s voting systems are already based on voter verified paper ballots. Fact: Hand counts and audits of such paper ballots have repeatedly proven that Dominion machines produce accurate results. These are not matters of opinion. They are verifiable facts.”

Throughout his talk, Musk continued to call into question the legitimacy of the 2020 election without any proof. “When you have mail-in ballots and no proof of citizenship, it’s almost impossible to prove cheating,” opined Musk, who has stoked fears about noncitizen voting in the past.

Both in person and online, Musk is happy to point fingers at anything that moves. On Thursday, Musk also criticized canvassing efforts in swing states by U.K. organizers, saying simply “this is illegal.” It is not illegal.

Musk is set to appear at least three more times in Pennsylvania and suggested he “will probably do half a dozen throughout the state,” giving him plenty of opportunities to spread more lies by Election Day.

Donald Trump won’t stop backing out of interviews, and his forces have been left scrambling.

Trump dropped out of yet another interview on Friday, when a Trump adviser told producers of The Shade Room that Trump wouldn’t be following through on talks to appear on the podcast because he was “exhausted and refusing [some] interviews but that could change,” two people familiar with the conversation told Politico.

Kamala Harris recently appeared on The Shade Room, a culture podcast with a predominantly young, Black audience. Ahead of Trump’s cancellation, Shade Room staff felt that the campaign was dragging its feet when it came to nailing down the details, according to Politico.

But Trump spokesperson Karoline Leavitt pushed back at the reporting, saying the suggestion that Trump was “exhausted” was “unequivocally false.”

This seems to be becoming a trend for the former president, who has canceled three different events in the last 36 hours. Trump canceled his speech to an NRA convention next Tuesday in Savannah, Georgia; backed out of an appearance on CNBC’s Squawk Box that had been scheduled for Friday; and reportedly “postponed” an interview with NBC’s Christine Romans.

Trump’s not canceling all of his scheduled appearances, though: He still found the time to sit on the couch with Fox & Friends Friday morning.

While canceling plans can be incredibly relieving, Trump’s team isn’t feeling too good. MSNBC’s Jonathan Lemire spoke on Morning Joe about how anxious the Trump campaign is as a result of his shrinking media schedule.

“A few weeks ago, Democrats, you heard it, I heard it, we reported it, were nervous about Harris—she’s not doing enough, she’s not out there, she’s not campaigning. It’s all changed: the media blitz, now she’s barnstorming across the country. Now, Trump is the one who has really pulled back, canceling interviews left and right. And there seems to be a new sense of unease coming from the inner circle,” Lemire said.

Former President Donald Trump broke decorum Thursday, morphing a historically lighthearted, bipartisan charity event in New York City into a bitter, profanity-laden rant against his political opponents.

The Alfred E. Smith Memorial Foundation Dinner, a Catholic fundraising event, is traditionally a well-regarded opportunity for both presidential candidates to poke fun at one another before the high tensions of the season culminate in Election Day. But Trump didn’t bring the jokes—instead, he spent his time on the dais hurling a string of insults at Vice President Kamala Harris, who opted to skip the event to campaign in the battleground state of Wisconsin. (Wisconsin was projected this week to have flipped slightly in favor of Trump.)

“The two candidates for president are supposed to exchange good-natured barbs. And you know, we get along very well. I didn’t like Biden very much, and now I like him quite a bit,” Trump said, practically repeating lines from his rallies. “And now I say that she’s much worse than him. He was a much better candidate than her, actually.

“And when we hopefully win, dispose of her, I’ll like her a lot. But right now I can’t stand her. I’ve never liked people I was competing against, and when you do, a lot of bad things happen,” Trump said to a suddenly mum crowd.

Trump also appeared resentful that Harris had chosen to sit out the event, despite the fact that he himself was the first candidate in the race to break election tradition by refusing to sit for a 60 Minutes interview last month, when he reportedly backed out, last-minute, over fears that the rigorous show would fact-check him. (Trump has since backed out of several major interviews, spawning concerns that the MAGA leader is starting a media blackout with just days until voters have to decide who will lead the country.)

“If you really wanted Vice President Harris to accept your invitation, I guess you should have told her the funds were going to bail out the looters and rioters in Minneapolis and she would have been here, guaranteed,” said Trump.

“Catholics, you gotta vote for me. Just remember. You better remember that I’m here and she’s not,” he said. “I could have done that too.”

“I don’t give a shit if this is comedy or not,” Trump told the crowd of priests.