Trump’s New Attorney General Pick Already Let One of His Scams Slide

Donald Trump has tapped one of his impeachment attorneys, former Florida Attorney General Pam Bondi, to lead the Justice Department.

“For too long, the partisan Department of Justice has been weaponized against me and other Republicans—Not anymore,” Trump said Thursday in a statement. “Pam will refocus the DOJ to its intended purpose of fighting Crime, and Making America Safe Again.”

Bondi replaced ex-Florida Representative Matt Gaetz as the top contender for attorney general after he withdrew his nomination Thursday. Insiders believed that Gaetz never had a chance at passing the Senate’s rigorous nomination process, especially as the alleged sexual abuser faced intense scrutiny over the details of two federal investigations related to sex trafficking accusations.

Gaetz hurriedly withdrew his nomination following news that the House Ethics Committee had obtained evidence that there was a second incident in which the ex-congressman slept with a minor.

As one of the few Trump nominees with relevant experience, Bondi could prove equally if not more dangerous than Gaetz in the crucial law enforcement role—as well as a relative shoo-in. Assuming that all Democrats will vote against Trump’s nominees, the president-elect can only afford to lose three Republican votes to squeeze his candidates into the executive branch. Bondi, who served more than 18 years as a prosecutor, stands against a background of Trump nominees that authoritarianism scholars have described as “anti-qualified.”

Bondi and Trump have been longtime allies. In 2013, his charity (illegally) issued $25,000 to her reelection bid for Florida attorney general—while her office was weighing whether to pursue charges against Trump University (she ultimately did not). Bondi was a star player on Trump’s legal team during his first impeachment, and was a vocal opponent of Jack Smith during Trump’s post-2020 legal woes, accusing the special counsel of “weaponising our legal system” for trying to hold the former president’s feet to the fire.

New York Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez had the perfect response to Georgia Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene’s new gig as Congress’s billionaire babysitter.

The House Oversight Committee announced Thursday that it would create a new subcommittee expressly for the purpose of working with the Department of Government Efficiency, the meme-based advisory group led by Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy, that plans to slash trillions of dollars’ worth of essential government services for the purpose of eradicating the administrative state and racking up new government contracts to replace it. 

Greene is reportedly set to head the new subcommittee, and Ocasio-Cortez managed to find the silver lining.

“This is good, actually. She barely shows up and doesn’t do the reading,” Ocasio-Cortez wrote on X Thursday. “To borrow a phrase I saw elsewhere, it’s like giving someone an unplugged controller.”

“Absolutely dying at those two now getting assigned the ‘privilege’ of ‘working’ with MTG,” she wrote in a separate post. “That is actually hilarious. Enjoy, fellas! Very prestigious post you have there.”

Representative Jamie Raskin also weighed in on just how ridiculous Republicans’ plan is to shrink the size of government by creating a new committee. 

“It’s hard to keep track of all the new departments and bureaucracies the Republicans are setting up to study the size and efficiency of government,” Raskin said in a statement. “But isn’t that what Chairman Comer and the Committee on Oversight and Accountability actually said they were doing over the last two years? Where’s their report and recommendations? Perhaps the impeachment flop derailed them a bit.”

“So now a noted student of American government, Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, will chair a subcommittee to work with two unvetted billionaires who stand to receive billions more in government contracts and subsidies from the government under Trump,” Raskin said. “That’s why Democrats will stay focused on waste, fraud, abuse and corruption.  The government belongs to the people, not the billionaire oligarchs.”

Musk and Ramaswamy have already outlined their plans to strip funding from public broadcasting, Planned Parenthood, and “entitlement programs,” which likely include Medicare and Medicaid. It may be a blessing that they now have to work with the congressperson more interested in pushing outlandish, and antisemitic, conspiracy theories than actually governing. 

With fresh arrest warrants being issued by the International Criminal Court on Thursday, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu will have fewer travel options, as a handful of foreign countries have announced that they will comply with the ICC’s mandate.

The ICC issued warrants for Netanyahu, Israel’s former Defense Minister Yoav Gallant, and Hamas military leader Mohammed Deif, alleging that all parties have committed war crimes and crimes against humanity. Deif’s charges have to do with Hamas’s October 7 attack on Israel that left 1,200 dead; Netanyahu and Gallant are being charged over Israel’s brutal war in the year since, which has killed at least 44,000 Palestinians—which is very likely an undercount. Estimates by the medical journal The Lancet from July say the death toll ​​could exceed 186,000.

Israel claims Deif was killed in August; if true, it no longer matters whether or where he is arrested. Netanyahu and Gallant are another story entirely, as they risk arrest if they travel to any countries that are signatories to the Rome Statute. Israel and the United States are not among those countries, but many others are, including Canada, whose Prime Minister Justin Trudeau said Thursday that the country “will abide by all the regulations & rulings of the international courts.”

A spokesperson for France’s foreign ministry, Christophe Lemoine, said that while the warrants were a “complex legal issue,” the nation supports the court’s actions. “Combating impunity is our priority,” Lemoine said. “Our response will align with these principles.”

Leaders of the Netherlands gave a clearer answer, saying Netanyahu would be arrested if he set foot on Dutch soil. “The line from the government is clear. We are obliged to cooperate with the ICC ... we abide 100 percent by the Rome Statute,” Dutch foreign minister Caspar Veldkamp said in Parliament Thursday. The Netherlands is home to the court, located in The Hague.

In all, 124 countries are party to the Rome Statute, including every country in the European Union; under the terms of the treaty, Netanyahu and Gallant shouldn’t be able to travel to any of them without being arrested. Other signatories to the Rome statute include the United Kingdom, New Zealand, and Australia.

But the United States is not, and has rejected the warrants out of hand, with the National Security Council saying that “the ICC does not have jurisdiction over this matter. In coordination with partners, including Israel, we are discussing next steps.”

Netanyahu and other Israeli leaders have been accused of war crimes going back to 2023, so this decision from the ICC will be seen by foreign rights observers as a long time coming. The U.S. has thus far avoided any measures holding Israel accountable, whether ignoring its own laws and pronouncements or failing to restrict weapons exports to Israel in Congress. The question is whether the U.S. will intervene to prevent the enforcement of these arrest warrants.

With his nomination to run the Department of Justice hanging in precarious balance, a timely news story finally proved to be the deal-killer for Trump loyalist Matt Gaetz. At issue was a second, unreported sexual encounter between Trump’s attorney general nominee, Matt Gaetz, and the underage girl he had sex with at a sex party in 2017—to which the House Ethics Committee was alerted. 

This second encounter, reported on Thursday by CNN, may very well be the biggest reason that Gaetz withdrew his nomination. Gaetz and Vice President–elect JD Vance spent Wednesday lobbying Republican senators to overlook Gaetz’s infamous allegations of sexual misconduct and trafficking. The way the CNN report is written points to an uncanny timing behind Gaetz’s decision to pull out:

The woman, who was 17 years old at the time, testified that the second sexual encounter, which has not previously been reported, included another adult woman. She also testified to both sexual encounters in a civil deposition as part of a related lawsuit, sources said.

After being asked for comment for this story, Gaetz announced he was backing out as President-elect Donald Trump’s attorney general nominee.

Gaetz has since played things very close to the vest. “I had excellent meetings with Senators yesterday.  I appreciate their thoughtful feedback—and the incredible support of so many,” Gaetz wrote on X. “While the momentum was strong, it is clear that my confirmation was unfairly becoming a distraction to the critical work of the Trump/Vance Transition.” President-elect Trump thanked Gaetz on Truth social and told him he had a “wonderful future.”

The Florida lawmaker tried to rid himself of multiple investigations into his alleged pecadillos by resigning from Congress right before the House Ethics Committee was set to release its probe on him. This strategy has backfired tremendously, as he is now out of two jobs. 

The New York Times reported that four Republican senators were poised to oppose Gaetz’s nomination: Lisa Murkowski of Alaska, Susan Collins of Maine, John Curtis of Utah, and Mitch McConnell. Gaetz’s replacement for the nomination remains to be seen; it’s equally unclear where Gaetz goes from here. President-elect Trump, in a statement on Truth Social, appeared to close the door on the possibility of Gaetz serving in a meaningful role in his administration: “Matt has a wonderful future, and I look forward to watching all of the great things he will do!” But that future is looking pretty bleak.

Tulsi Gabbard’s nomination to be the next director of national intelligence may not be making you happy, but it’s certainly making someone happy: Russian President Vladimir Putin.

In Russia, the response to the former Hawaii representative’s nomination has been “gleeful,” The New York Times reported Tuesday.

Komsomolskaya Pravda, a Russian newspaper, fawned over Gabbard in an article last week, noting that “the CIA and FBI are trembling.” The article also noted that Ukrainians considered Gabbard to be “an agent of the Russian state.”

Trump’s decision to nominate Gabbard, of all people, signals his distinct willingness to cozy up to Putin.

“Nominating Gabbard for director of national intelligence is the way to Putin’s heart, and it tells the world that America under Trump will be the Kremlin’s ally rather than an adversary,” authoritarian scholar Ruth Ben-Ghiat told the Times.

Gabbard has defended Russia’s incursion into Ukraine, claiming that the U.S. had provoked Russian aggression and that Ukraine housed U.S.-funded biolabs that were developing secret bioweapons—a piece of foreign state propaganda that earned her the reputation as a Russian asset.

Virginia Representative Abigail Spanberger sounded the alarm about Gabbard on MSNBC, noting that, if confirmed, Gabbard would be responsible for putting together the president’s daily briefings, and would likely include Russian propaganda.

Former CIA Director John Brennan also voiced his concerns about Gabbard on MSNBC Tuesday. “[Gabbard] has done things and said things over the years that really [have] caused great concern about where her sympathies and sentiments lie, but also she has no experience and background in the intelligence profession,” he said.

Connecticut Senator Chris Murphy told MSNBC that Gabbard had been known to “toe the line of brutal despotic regimes.”

Russia isn’t the only authoritarian state Gabbard’s defended: She’s also backed Syrian President Bashar Al Assad, Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi, and Egypt’s Abdel Fattah Al Sisi.

Donald Trump’s secretary of defense nominee, Pete Hegseth, is having a hard time defending himself.

The Fox News star has been the subject of increased scrutiny after a police report from 2017 surfaced, documenting an instance in which Hegseth allegedly assaulted an attendee at a Republican women’s conference in Monterey, California.

Speaking to a crowd of reporters on Capitol Hill Thursday ahead of a meeting with senators regarding his confirmation, Hegseth minced words about the attack, failing to say that he hadn’t actually sexually assaulted anyone at the event.

“As far as the media is concerned, it’s very simple,” Hegseth said. “The matter was fully investigated, and I was completely cleared, and that’s where I’m gonna leave it.”

But specifying that he was “completely cleared” isn’t wholly accurate. The 22-page police report, published by Mediaite on Wednesday, does not mention that Hegseth was cleared. Instead, it recommends that the case be forwarded to local prosecutors. Ultimately, no charges were filed in the case.

In a statement to The Washington Post on Saturday, Hegseth’s attorney Tim Parlatore said that Hegseth had paid his accuser in exchange for her signing a nondisclosure agreement in order to stop her from filing a lawsuit and to protect his future at Fox News.

A friend of the victim reportedly shared details of the attack with Trump’s transition team in a memo last week, but the news apparently did not shake the MAGA leader’s confidence in his nominee.

“This police report confirms what I have said all along that the incident was fully investigated and police found the allegations to be false, which is why no charges were filed,” Parlatore told Mediaite in a statement.

Meanwhile, Hegseth’s nomination may have already sunk. Reports from inside Trump’s transition team indicate that the forty-seventh president-elect is quietly assembling a list of alternatives to the white nationalist–connected conservative.

Matt Gaetz may be out of the running for attorney general, but Donald Trump still has plenty of horrific nominees he’s trying to push through Senate confirmation—and he’s threatening to unseat any Republican that gets in his way.

Trump, JD Vance, and their transition team have been “playing hard ball” as they try to garner support for the president-elect’s nightmare slate of Cabinet nominees, according to ABC News’s Selina Wang.

One Trump adviser told ABC News’s Jonathan Karl that the message to Republican senators had been, “If you are on the wrong side of the vote, you’re buying yourself a primary. That is all. And there’s a guy named Elon Musk who is going to finance it.”

“The president gets to decide his Cabinet, no one else” the adviser added.

The Trump team’s newest threat makes it clear: No dissent among Republicans will be tolerated under the Trump administration. Technocrat billionaire Musk’s super PAC helped to fund Trump’s successful presidential run, and he could continue to fund challenges against any of the vulnerable Senate Republicans not willing to get in line behind the president-elect.

Gaetz withdrew his nomination Thursday less than an hour after he was notified that CNN was planning to report that the House Ethics Committee had heard testimony about a second alleged sexual encounter between the Florida Republican and a 17-year-old girl.

Still, Trump and his team are working to push through his other nominees who are allegedly sexual predators, such as Fox & Friends host Pete Hegseth, who is embroiled in a rape allegation from 2017 that he seemingly kept from the Trump team, and Robert F. Kennedy Jr., who allegedly sexually assaulted his children’s former babysitter two decades ago.

Donald Trump is taking fresh aim at the press before he is sworn in for his second term, asking Republicans to block a federal shield bill that would protect journalists from federal investigators. 

The New York Times reports that the president-elect attacked the bill Wednesday afternoon in a Truth Social post in which he cited a news article, writing “REPUBLICANS MUST KILL THIS BILL!” The measure in question is the Protect Reporters from Exploitative State Spying Act, or PRESS Act. 

The PRESS Act previously received unanimous, bipartisan approval by the House in January, but has since stalled in the Senate Judiciary Committee as Democrats in the upper chamber rush to approve President Biden’s judicial nominees before he leaves office and the GOP takes over the chamber next year. 

The bill would provide reporters with stronger protections regarding confidential sources, protecting them against prosecution. In his first term, Trump’s routine anger over leaks from his administration led to him secretly subpoenaing reporters’ private communications. Bipartisan support for the measure was probably fueled by the fact that attacks on journalists have, in recent years, been a bipartisan problem. 

Trump’s predecessor, Barack Obama, left his own checkered legacy on press freedom behind—the former president routinely deployed the Espionage Act to put “a number of people in jail for daring to help national security journalists report on classified government programs.”

President Joe Biden took a different tack. His attorney general, Merrick Garland, issued a Justice Department rule banning federal prosecutors from using such practices, including search warrants, to seize journalists’ information or force them to testify about their sources. But since the Biden administration’s actions could easily be overturned by a future administration, the PRESS Act was written to erect sturdier safeguards. 

But Trump has always been extremely hostile towards journalists, and his 2024 presidential campaign was no exception. He threatened news networks such as ABC and CBS with removing their broadcast licenses for what he considered unfavorable treatment and coverage. He joked to a rally audience in Pennsylvania only days before the election about a potential assassin having “to shoot through the fake news,  and I don’t mind that so much because I don’t mind. I don’t mind that.” 

Since at least 2017, Trump has called the press “the enemy of the people,” and when he is sworn in next year, he’ll have a pliant Congress behind him to treat the press as the enemy of the state. If passed, the PRESS Act might have protected at least some journalists from legal action under Trump’s second administration, but now it might be too late. 

On top of everything that’s gone wrong for Democrats in November, Anthony Weiner is mulling making a political comeback.

The New York Times is reporting that the registered sex offender and repeatedly-shamed former New York congressman has floated a return to his once thriving political career, despite the known existence of an incalculable number of New Yorkers who might currently be better suited to hold literally any elected office. Weiner used a recent barbershop interview with failed Republican state comptroller candidate Jonathan Trichter to test these waters. 

“I got removed from society. That happened. I was removed from society for 18 months and five days, and for years I have lived as a civilian in this neighborhood,” Weiner said, strategically deploying the passive voice as he discussed the matter during his haircut. “Maybe this campaign will be an opportunity for me to engage those people, even if they do not like what I did.”

A reminder: That whole “what Weiner did” thing was getting caught for sexting lewd images to women and an underage girl over and over again. In 2011 he accidentally posted his bulge showing through his underwear publicly on his Twitter timeline, and then denied doing that for days before finally resigning from Congress. More sexual messages to a 22-year-old woman were exposed during his New York City mayoral campaign in 2013. He was caught sexting another woman and a 15-year-old girl in 2016. Weiner surrendered to the FBI in 2017 and was found guilty of “transferring obscene materials to a minor.” He spent almost two years in prison.  

Weiner’s inability to keep his rampaging libido in check may have world-historical ramifications, as many argue that his sexting scandal was a critical domino to fall in Hillary Clinton’s 2016 email-server fallout. Emails regarding Hillary Clinton’s controversy were found on Weiner’s laptop that he used for sexting. Weiner’s wife, Huma Abedin, was vice chair of Clinton’s campaign, leading former FBI Director James Comey to reopen investigations into Clinton just days before the 2016 election. Many within the party blame Comey’s decision, initiated by Weiner’s own vile desires, for Clinton’s loss to Donald Trump. 

Today, Weiner is eyeing a seat back at where it all started—the New York City Council. But other candidates in his district, which covers Greenwich Village and the Lower East Side, aren’t exactly enthusiastic about Weiner’s triumphant return to politics. “Everyone deserves a second chance, but this guy has had third, fourth and fifth chances,” council candidate Sarah Batchu said. 

Another candidate, Andrea Gordillo, offered scathing remarks of her own. “Families in Lower Manhattan deserve better than failed New York and Washington politicians using our moment of need for their own political comeback.” 

The Stop Terror-Financing and Tax Penalties on American Hostages Act would allow the secretary of the treasury, a Cabinet position appointed by the president, to revoke a nonprofit organization’s tax-exempt status by labeling it as “terrorist-supporting.” It passed by a vote of 219–184, mostly along party lines.

With the incoming Trump administration broadly vowing to take vengeance against “enemies within,” the successful passage of this bill would place a wide array of organizations vital to Democratic organizing and policymaking in the president-elect’s direct line of fire. It is supremely puzzling, then, that this bill received bipartisan support.

Last week, the same bill failed to advance out of the House because it failed to garner the two-thirds majority needed to pass during a suspension of the lower chamber’s rules. It was subsequently sent back to committee and retooled for a simple majority vote. While 52 Democrats voted for the bill previously, enormous pressure was applied to get those who backed the bill last week to come out against it on Thursday. This time, 15 of them voted along with every single Republican for the bill, which would have a chilling effect on free speech.

The bill’s original intention was to aid in the clamping down on pro-Palestinian protesters, particularly those on college campuses—a dubious undertaking given both the First Amendment rights enjoyed by all under the Constitution as well as a slew of other statutes that already make it illegal to provide material support to terrorist organizations.

However, the reelection of Trump casts this measure in a new light. His promise to turn the civil service into an engine of personal vengeance should be sufficient evidence that he’d likely abuse the powers granted under H.R. 9495, potentially allowing the president to target fairly well-known liberal organizations, such as the Center for American Progress, with punishing sanctions that would prevent such outfits from raising or banking money—penalties which, under the proposed law, such sanctioned organizations would be barred from pursuing legal recourse to plead their case. Moreover, in addition to activist groups, many universities and news outlets are nonprofit organizations.

While significantly lower than the 52 members who joined in last week’s vote to advance the bill, 15 Democrats is still a surprising number of representatives who seem to care more about wanting to neutralize irksome protesters than a fascist, authoritarian president targeting any nonprofit he doesn’t like.

Here’s a full list of Democrats who voted for the bill:

• Colin Allred—Texas
• Yadira D. Caraveo—Colorado
• Ed Case—Hawaii
• Henry Cuellar—Texas
• Don Davis—North Carolina
• Jared Golden—Maine
• Vicente Gonzalez—Texas
• Suzanne Marie Lee—Nevada
• Jared Moskowitz—Florida
• Jimmy Panetta—California
• Marie Gluesenkamp Perez—Washington
• Brad Schneider—Illinois
• Tom Suozzi—New York
• Norma Torres—California
• Debbie Wasserman Schultz—Florida

It is obviously unlikely that President Joe Biden will sign this bill into law. The same cannot be said for the president-elect, who will have majorities in both chambers sufficient to bring this bill to his desk, barring a willingness among Senate Democrats to filibuster the measure. Whether these 15 Democrats will join a later effort to give Trump the power to eliminate nonprofits critical to the electoral success of their own party remains to be seen.

* This article originally identified Representative Ritchie Torres as one of the Democrats to vote “yes” on Thursday’s vote. He was one of the 52 to vote “yes” on the November 12 vote under suspension.