The Democratic Power Broker Working to Undermine AOC

Former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi is reportedly working behind the scenes to tank Representative Alexandria Ocasio Cortez’s bid to become ranking member on the House Oversight Committee.

Punchbowl News reported Thursday that Pelosi, arguably the most powerful Democratic playmaker in a generation, is set on quashing the New York progressive’s shot at leading the House of Representatives’ key investigative arm.

Pelosi is making calls on behalf of Representative Gerry Connolly, a 16-year House veteran from Virginia, who is also running for the coveted leadership spot.

Last week, Pelosi told Politico who she wanted for one of the most influential positions in the House. “I have supported Mr. Connolly for that, should it be open,” she said.

Pelosi and AOC have had a somewhat tumultuous professional relationship, predicated on the slate of differences between establishment Democrats and a younger, progressive vanguard. Pelosi reportedly took issue with certain progressive tactics, like AOC’s “Abolish ICE” slogan, according to Ryan Grim’s 2023 book The Squad: AOC and the Hope of Political Revolution.

In 2021, Pelosi publicly criticized AOC and other members of the Squad for being the lone Democrats to withhold support for an immigration bill that she had backed. “All these people have their public whatever and their Twitter world,” she told The New York Times in an interview. “But they don’t have any following. They’re four people, and that’s how many votes they got.”

AOC and her chief of staff publicly pushed back on Pelosi’s dismissive response, and Pelosi told them to back off, according to Politico. In a private meeting between the two women, things got particularly heated, according to Grim. Pelosi has nevertheless dismissed claims that there is bad blood between her and the Squad.

Meanwhile, AOC has garnered support  from an unexpected place: Representative James Comer, the Republican chair of the House Oversight Committee, who has spent years waging investigations into the political enemies of Donald Trump, including Joe Biden, Kamala Harris, and Tim Walz. “I’m a big AOC fan. Obviously, I don’t agree with very much of her policy, but I think she’s a good person,” Comer said on CNN Thursday. 

In her bid for the top Democratic spot on the House Oversight Committee, Democratic Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez has found a perhaps unlikely supporter in the committee’s Republican chairman, James Comer.

Last week, Ocasio-Cortez announced her candidacy for ranking member of the Oversight Committee, writing in a statement that, under Trump, Democrats on the committee “will face an important task” of balancing “our focus on the incoming president’s corrosive actions and corruption with a tangible fight to make life easier for America’s working class.”

Politico reported Wednesday that Ocasio-Cortez, who has served as vice–ranking member on the committee under outgoing ranking member Jamie Raskin, has garnered the support of most Democrats on the committee, though her success will require the approval of the Steering and Policy Committee.

Comer sang the 35-year-old progressive lawmaker’s praises in a Thursday interview with CNN’s Pamela Brown—though he spoke well too of her leading opponent, 74-year-old Representative Gerry Connolly.

Asked if he would “like to co-chair with” her, Comer replied that he’s “a big AOC fan.” “Obviously I don’t agree with very much of her policy,” he continued, “but I think she’s a good person. I think she’s very well spoken.”

Mentioning his history of trading barbs with Raskin, who is running for the top Democratic position on the House Judiciary Committee, Comer said, “The Democrats have nowhere to go but up after having Jamie Raskin for the last four years.”

The Oversight chair added that Representative Connolly, who is reportedly being boosted by former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi in hopes of sinking AOC’s bid, “would be great,” as would two others who were initially considered possible contenders but have since declined: Representatives Raja Krishnamoorthi, who has indicated his disinterest in the role, and Ro Khanna, who endorsed Ocasio-Cortez for the position, according to NBC News.

“But I certainly look forward to the next ranking member,” Comer continued. “If it’s AOC, I think we’ll have a good working relationship. We’ll obviously have a lot of differences on policy, but I think she’s a good, well-spoken person for the Democrats to serve in that position.”

Drone sightings over Northern New Jersey have sparked feelings of confusion and fear from residents and local officials alike—but some attention-seeking, alien-obsessed politicians in D.C. appear to be milking the fear cycle for all it’s worth.

In a video rant posted to her X account Thursday, Georgia Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene insisted that the government’s continued inability to identify the strange lights hovering over the Garden State was “total bullshit” that put every American “in danger.”

“They can track down a guy that just killed a CEO, but they can’t identify what nightly drones are and where they’re coming from,” Greene continued, referring to Luigi Mangione, the 26-year-old charged with the murder of UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson.

“Secondly, if they’re telling the truth, then this country is in horrible shape. We’re all in danger,” Greene added. “I mean, seriously, if our great government can’t identify what these drones are—they’re flying every single night, the people are sitting out there videoing with their cell phones—then no American is safe. And I have no respect if our government cannot say what these are.”

Commercial-grade drones were first spotted lingering over sections of Northern Jersey in mid-November, sparking an FBI investigation into the aerial gathering. At a Wednesday briefing between the office of New Jersey Governor Phil Murphy and the Department of Homeland Security, mayors from the region lamented that no one from state or federal agencies had been able to tell them exactly how many drones were flying over the state, with estimates ranging from 400 to thousands, according to NBC News.

“I’m not sure how I can go back to my residents and say that I’m satisfied from this meeting, when now I know that I have 180 drones that have been flying over the state of New Jersey,” Middletown Mayor Tony Perry told NBC after the meeting. “We have no more information as to where these drones are coming from, where they’re launching from, where they’re landing.”

Greene, famously, loves a space-based conspiracy. In a 2018 Facebook post (two years before she took office), Greene linked alleged sightings of “lasers or blue beams of light” to the cause of the California wildfires. She then, apropos of nothing, further tied those sightings to the Rothschilds, a wealthy Jewish banking family often targeted by antisemitic conspiracies, whom she believed were clearing the land for rail stations.

But she’s not the only D.C. politico to thoughtlessly stoke the flames over the unusual drone sightings. New Jersey Representative Jeff Van Drew suggested to Fox News on Wednesday that the drones were coming from an Iranian “mothership”—a claim that the Pentagon quickly shot down.

“There is no Iranian ship off the coast of the United States, and there’s no so-called ‘mothership’ launching drones towards the United States,” Pentagon deputy press secretary Sabrina Singh said the same day.

One of MAGA’s favorite January 6 conspiracy theories seems to have fallen apart.

On Thursday, a report released by a Justice Department watchdog found no evidence that FBI agents helped incite the January 6, 2021, insurrection at the U.S. Capitol.

The idea that there were undercover FBI agents in the crowd acting as mob catalysts on January 6 has gone from internet fringe to being peddled by multiple right-wing leaders and politicians, including Donald Trump himself.

“There was antifa and there was FBI … leading the charge. You saw the same people that I did,” Trump said at an Iowa rally in January. At other times, he has referred to the January 6 riots, which he encouraged his supporters to attend, as “Entrapment Day.”

Thursday’s report, which came from Justice Department Inspector General Michael Horowitz, did find that there were 26 informants in Washington, D.C., at the time, referred to as “confidential human sources.” But it found nothing to suggest that any of them were told to join the riots or encourage others to do so.

More than 1,500 people across nearly all 50 states have been charged in connection with the January 6 insurrection, with charges like trespassing, assault of a federal officer, and seditious conspiracy.

The private foundation of the world’s richest man failed to donate the legally required amount for the third consecutive year.

Per what’s known as “the 5 percent rule,” private foundations are required by law to direct at least 5 percent of their assets toward charitable causes. The Musk Foundation is among the largest of such foundations, boasting $9 billion in assets, including millions of shares of Musk’s electric vehicle company, Tesla.

But The New York Times reported Thursday that the Musk Foundation fell $421 million short of the 5 percent rule in 2023, making it the third year in a row that it missed the mark. The foundation was short by $234 million in 2022 and $41 million in 2021, but later forked up to cover those gaps and avoid a penalty tax.

In contrast to the foundations of other wealthy philanthropists, which tend to focus on broad social causes and the public good, Musk’s private foundation is somewhat unconventional in its focus on serving the interests of its founder. The charity also has no hired staff and is instead run by a three-member volunteer board, including Musk himself.

As the Times reported in March, the Musk Foundation “has been haphazard and largely self-serving—making [Musk] eligible for enormous tax breaks and helping his businesses.” In 2021 and 2022, around half of the foundation’s donations were linked in some way to Musk himself, his businesses, or his employees, according to the Times.

For failing to meet the legal minimum, the foundation “can distribute more the following year as a make-good”—or pay a hefty penalty to the IRS.

But Musk recently indicated that the IRS could be on the chopping block of the proposed Department of Government Efficiency under the Trump administration. “The IRS just said it wants $20B more money,” Musk posted on his platform X last month, asking users to vote on whether its budget should be “increased,” “same,” “decreased,” or “deleted.” The latter won with 60 percent of users’ votes.

The ex-FBI informant who accused President Joe Biden and his son Hunter of netting millions of dollars in bribes from Ukrainian energy company Burisma has admitted that the whole story was a dud.

In a plea deal, Alexander Smirnov admitted to completely fabricating the conspiracy that became central to a Republican effort to impeach the sitting president. Smirnov agreed to plead guilty to four felony charges, which include one count of obstruction of justice and three tax evasion charges, in exchange for the end of two pending criminal cases against him, according to court documents.

In June 2020, Smirnov falsely reported to the FBI that Burisma executives had paid Biden and his son millions of dollars. The fake claim was part of a larger series of unfounded allegations that accused Biden of improperly leveraging his position as vice president (at the time) to prevent a corruption investigation into Burisma, of which Hunter sat on the board. The fraudulent tale also sparked an October surprise in the 2020 election about Hunter Biden’s laptop, which Trump allies Rudy Giuliani and Steve Bannon insisted contained evidence that Biden and a Burisma adviser had held a “meeting.” (The New York Post, which ran the original story on its front page, later said that the contents of the laptop were mixed with fake material and that most of the data could not be verified.)

Smirnov could face anywhere between two to six years behind bars for fabricating the story, though Donald Trump could potentially commute his sentence or outright pardon the conservative witness once he returns to the White House.

In February, the Justice Department revealed that Smirnov admitted to prosecutors that “officials associated with Russian intelligence were involved” in developing the Hunter Biden narrative.

In the ensuing fallout over the DOJ indictment, Smirnov told investigators he was in contact with “four different [top] Russian officials,” two of whom were the “heads of the entities they represent.”

Republicans had spent months building up the hype around Smirnov as a witness, isolating his allegation that Biden had pocketed millions of dollars from the Ukrainian company as the centerpiece of their probe. But in the end, Smirnov’s faux narrative—and its ability to capture and sway overzealous and power-hungry U.S. politicians—served as just another example of how effectively the Russian government can infiltrate and undermine U.S. elections.

“It targeted the presumptive nominee of one of the two major political parties in the United States. The effects of Smirnov’s false statements and fabricated information continue to be felt to this day,” prosecutors wrote at the beginning of the year.

Pete Hegseth has repeatedly criticized the U.S. military’s decision to repeal its “don’t ask, don’t tell” policy because he thinks it is part of a broader leftist, Marxist agenda.

CNN published an extensive report Thursday detailing statements made by Hegseth, the television host facing allegations of excessive drinking and sexual assault, in which he grieves the repeal of “don’t ask, don’t tell,” a Clinton-era policy that allowed gay and lesbian service members to join the military as long as they never told anyone about their sexual orientation. The rule was repealed under the Obama administration.

When asked Thursday whether he opposed the repeal of “don’t ask, don’t tell,” Hegseth said, “Oppose the repeal? No, I don’t.” He called CNN’s report “more false reporting.”

As it turns out, Hegseth has been talking about this for years. During a 2015 appearance on Fox News, Hegseth lamented the decision to allow women and people openly identifying as LGBTQ+ to serve in the military.

“What you’re seeing is a military right now that is more interested in social engineering led by this president than they are in war fighting. So, as a result, through ‘don’t ask, don’t tell’ and women in the military and these standards, they’re going to inevitably start to erode standards,” Hegseth said.

Hegseth argued that this kind of change was made simply so military higher-ups “can put them on a recruiting poster and feel good about themselves, and has nothing to do with national security.”

Hegseth did not go so far as to explain exactly what standards these soldiers failed to meet, or how they were specifically detrimental to military operations. This vague criticism seems to be a pattern for Hegseth, who made similar comments disparaging female soldiers, specifically saying they were unfit for combat, but didn’t deign to explain why, simply citing “historical” precedent.

Even in his 2024 book, The War on Warriors, Hegseth provided no real evidence for the dire consequences of these supposedly eroding standards.

He wrote that while he was initially ambivalent about the rule change, he eventually decided that it was the beginning of the end for a military that was being driven to care about social issues more than fighting because, for some reason he never bothers to describe, no organization could do both.

He changed his view, “Not because I have a newfound ax to grind with gay Americans, but because I naïvely believed that’s what ending ‘don’t ask, don’t tell’ was all about. Once again, our good faith was used against us,” he added.

Ahead of Trump’s election he continued to tout “don’t ask, don’t tell” as part of the efforts of “leftists and Marxists,” and said it was only the beginning of liberal “tinkering” with the military.

A spokesperson for the Trump transition told CNN that, “like President Trump, Pete wants to see the U.S. military focus on being the world’s strongest fighting force—not on cultural and social issues. Bottom line: If you can meet the standards, you can serve.

“But given the threats we face, our priorities shouldn’t be lowering standards and wasting taxpayer money to meet arbitrary social quotas—our priorities should be readiness and lethality.”

This statement seemingly leaves the door open for Hegseth and others at the Defense Department to make way for changes to policies that promote the involvement of women and people identifying as LGBTQ+.

Donald Trump won’t rule out supporting Israel’s annexation of the West Bank.

The president-elect sat with Time magazine for a lengthy interview after being named their 2024 “Person of the Year” on Thursday. He was asked directly by the Time staff, “Do you want to get a two-state deal done, outlined in your Peace to Prosperity deal that you put forward, or are you willing to let Israel annex the West Bank?”

“So what I want is a deal where there’s going to be peace and where the killing stops,” Trump replied vaguely.

The Time staff doubled down, reminding Trump that he had stopped Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu from annexing the West Bank in 2020. Again, he refused to answer directly:

“I’ll say it again, I want a long lasting peace. I’m not saying that’s a very likely scenario, but I want a long lasting peace, a peace where we don’t have an October 7 in another three years. And there are numerous ways you can do it. You can do it two state, but there are numerous ways it can be done. And I’d like to see, who can be happy? But I’d like to see everybody be happy. Everybody go about their lives, and people stop from dying. That includes on many different fronts. I mean, we have some tremendous world problems that we didn’t have when I was president. You know, when I left, we had, we had an Iran that was not very threatening. They had no money. They weren’t giving money to Hamas. They weren’t giving money to Hezbollah.”

Israeli politicians have considered annexing the West Bank for decades, and in the last year, the right-wing government has looked the other way as settler violence in the territory has ramped up. Annexation of the West Bank would essentially kill any possibility of a two-state solution, as the area is considered key to a potential Palestinian state. Complete annexation would be yet another massive human rights violation on Israel’s part that would result in even more suffering and displacement of the Palestinian people.

Trump’s election victory has already invigorated Israeli settlers eager to take over the West Bank. “There has never been an American president that has been more helpful in securing an understanding of the sovereignty of Israel. I fully expect that to continue,” Mike Huckabee, Trump’s nominee for ambassador to Israel, said in a November interview with Israel Army Radio. The rest of Trump’s potential Cabinet, including defense secretary pick Pete Hegseth, national security adviser pick Mike Waltz, and secretary of state pick Marco Rubio, are all pro-Israel hard-liners.

The West Bank has been under Israeli occupation since 1967. Despite a blatant violation of international law, the West Bank saw 33,000 new Israeli housing units in Trump’s first term, nearly three times as many as in Obama’s second term. His murky foreign policy plans and right-wing Cabinet likely mean that trend will continue.

A highly influential figure in Donald Trump’s upcoming administration has miraculously skirted public attention.

Sergio Gor, a former Fox News booker and onetime Matt Gaetz wedding officiant, will be the next director of the White House Office of Presidential Personnel, a position that will have him “find, vet, and hire” some 4,000 officials, according to The Washington Post.

Gor’s job will be to “diligently” comb through thousands of options, assessing their loyalty to Trump’s cause. Per Trump’s son Donald Jr., that means understanding their political positions dating back to 2015 and assessing their fealty to Trump in the wake of January 6, 2021.

“What were they doing and saying at that time?” Don Jr. told the Post.

But inside Trumpworld, Gor is his own kind of riot. The book publisher and conservative party DJ has been described by some of the people closest to the president-elect as a “fun presence,” overwhelmingly popular, and “ruthlessly efficient.”

“He gets along with everybody in Trump’s orbit,” Charlie Kirk told the Post. “Which is very unusual. Jared, Ivanka, Don, Eric, the president. He’s an incredibly agreeable figure in Trumpworld, which will make the personnel job a great fit.”

Kirk made note of Gor’s MAGA allegiance, commenting that Gor was one of the few individuals who stuck by Trump’s side during the former president’s “exile period after 2020.”

But it’s not all about affability for Gor, who has seemingly taken the meaning of social climbing to new heights. He visited Trump’s trade adviser, Peter Navarro, in prison. He performs Phantom of the Opera songs with the MAGA leader and has been dubbed the “Mayor of Mar-a-Lago” for his near-constant presence at Trump’s Florida estate.

“I imagine he’s had dinner more in the last year with my father than I have,” Don Jr. told the publication.

Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner described Gor as a “very easy personality” that people in their orbit trust.

But Gor has also cultivated a reputation for ruthlessness, cruelty, and extreme callousness. Former colleagues in Congress, where he worked as a spokesman for Senator Rand Paul, have painted the status seeker as a “sweet-talking backstabber, bent on accruing power,” who, at one point, tormented a former Paul staffer about her deceased husband, the acclaimed journalist Michael Hastings, after he discovered she had a higher salary than him, reported the Post.

It’s through this patchwork of skills, both opportunistic and cruel, that Gor has made himself an invaluable asset to Trump’s MAGA empire. His well-rounded Rolodex has ushered in a new age for the administration, which Kushner noted to the Post could “barely give away ambassadorships” in 2016, but which now has “basically 20 people competing for every job.”

“The benefit of him having a strong relationship with Donald Trump,” Kushner told the Post, “is that he knows him well enough to know what he’ll care about and what he won’t care about, so he doesn’t have to go to him with every little decision.”

Donald Trump Jr. took to Instagram Wednesday evening to celebrate his father’s selection as Time magazine’s 2024 “Person of the Year” and mock Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy.

The president-elect’s eldest son posted a video depicting his father literally kicking Zelenskiy off the Time 2022 “Person of the Year” magazine cover. The 2022 cover featured the Ukrainian president and “the spirit of Ukraine,” with editor Edward Felsenthal writing of Ukraine’s resistance to the Russian invasion: “In a world that had come to be defined by its divisiveness, there was a coming together around this cause.”

Time announced Thursday that Donald Trump is the magazine’s 2024 “Person of the Year.” The editor in chief said the president-elect was chosen, for the second time, because he, “for better or for worse, had the most influence on the news in 2024.” As Walter Isaacson wrote in the 1998 issue, the magazine gives the title to “the person or persons who most affected the news and our lives, for good or ill, and embodied what was important about the year, for better or for worse.”

In Trump Jr.’s post, the president-elect’s foot appears to boot Zelenskiy off the 2022 cover (Taylor Swift appeared on last year’s) before Trump takes his place, doing his signature dance move to the song “Hold On I’m Coming” by soul duo Sam and Dave.

President-elect Trump recently told the New York Post that he is “formulating a concept of how to end” the war in Ukraine. On the 2024 campaign trail, he threatened to cut funding to Ukraine, calling Zelenskiy “the greatest salesman of all time” for his efforts to secure U.S. support.

Trump also vowed to end the conflict within 24 hours, even prior to his inauguration. According to his Time interview, he “acknowledged this is trickier than he let on” and, when asked if he would abandon Ukraine, said “he would use U.S. support for Ukraine as leverage against Russia in negotiating an end to the war.”

“I want to reach an agreement,” he told Time finally, after being pressed three times on the matter, “and the only way you’re going to reach an agreement is not to abandon.”

This is not the first time that Trump Jr. has antagonized Zelenskiy on social media. Last month, he posted a meme to his Instagram story saying the Ukrainian leader would soon be “losing [his] allowance” once his father assumed the presidency.