Category: Trump
Democratic lawmaker texted Epstein during hearing — appeared to use his tips to grill Trump’s ex-lawyer
A Democratic lawmaker admitted to texting with convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein during a 2019 congressional hearing, seeking his advice on how to question President Donald Trump’s so-called “fixer,” Michael Cohen.
Cohen has claimed that Trump tried to conceal a $130,000 hush-money payment to porn actress Stormy Daniels to hide an alleged extramarital affair. Trump has denied these claims, stating that the funds were sent directly to Cohen, his then-personal attorney, for legal expenses. Cohen testified against the president in the case led by Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg (D), in which Trump was convicted on all 34 counts of falsifying business records. Trump has filed an appeal seeking to reverse the criminal conviction.
‘During the hearing, Congresswoman Plaskett received texts from staff, constituents and the public at large offering advice, support and in some cases partisan vitriol, including from Epstein.’
Documents released Wednesday by the House Oversight Committee revealed that a member of Congress, whose name was redacted, had been exchanging text messages with Epstein during a February 2019 hearing where lawmakers heard testimony from Cohen.
Epstein’s messages to the lawmaker appeared to indicate that he was watching the hearing live. Although the name of the congressperson was redacted from the committee’s documents, the timing of the messages indicated that the convicted sex predator was texting Democratic Delegate Stacey Plaskett of the U.S. Virgin Islands, the Washington Post reported.
Plaskett’s office released a statement on Friday, admitting that she had been texting with Epstein.
Plaskett reportedly sent a message to Epstein before the hearing. When the hearing began and the live feed started, Epstein complimented the delegate’s outfit.
RELATED: Trump felony conviction in doubt? President files appeal to clear his name
Stacey Plaskett. Photo by Anna Moneymaker/Getty Images
“Are you chewing,” read Epstein’s message to the lawmaker moments after the camera cut to Plaskett, who was seen moving her mouth in a chewing motion.
“Not any more,” Plaskett responded, according to the documents. “Chewing interior of my mouth. Bad habit from middle school.”
“Cohen brought up RONA – keeper of the secrets,” Epstein wrote at 11:24 a.m. His message seemed to reference Rhona Graff, Trump’s former executive assistant and former vice president of the Trump Organization, although Plaskett did not immediately grasp the reference.
“RONA??” the lawmaker replied.
“Quick I’m up next is that an acronym,” Plaskett asked, appearing to indicate that it would soon be her turn to question Cohen.
RELATED: Sorry, liberals — the Epstein emails don’t nail Trump
Michael Cohen. Photo by Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images
At 12:25 p.m., Epstein suggested the lawmaker ask Cohen about other individuals close to Trump.
“Hes (sic) opened the door to questions re who are the other henchmen at trump org,” he wrote.
When it was Plaskett’s turn to question Cohen, she inquired about Trump’s associates, as Epstein had recommended.
“During the hearing, Congresswoman Plaskett received texts from staff, constituents and the public at large offering advice, support and in some cases partisan vitriol, including from Epstein,” the statement from Plaskett’s office read. “As a former prosecutor she welcomes information that helps her get at the truth and took on the GOP that was trying to bury the truth. The congresswoman has previously made clear her long record combating sexual assault and human trafficking, her disgust over Epstein’s deviant behavior and her support for his victims.”
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Democrat ex-lawmaker who heckled Trump convicted in COVID fraud scheme
A leftist former lawmaker was sentenced last month after being convicted of fraudulently obtaining a COVID-19 relief loan.
Ibraheem Samirah, a former Democratic Virginia state delegate, made headlines in 2019 for interrupting President Donald Trump’s Jamestown speech, holding up a sign that read, “Deport hate” and “reunite my family.”
‘The defendant was stealing federal tax dollars at the same time he was deciding how to spend Virginia tax dollars.’
Samirah, 34, was sentenced to three years of probation and ordered to pay $88,000 in restitution after he pleaded guilty to one count of wire fraud, according to a Tuesday report from the Washington Post.
Prosecutors argued that the former lawmaker received an $83,000 Paycheck Protection Program loan in May 2020 for his dental practice in Fairfax County. He applied in August 2021 to have the loan forgiven, which would require the PPP funds to have been used for payroll, rent, or mortgage payments.
Samirah claimed that the loan would be used to pay four workers at his practice. However, court documents revealed that his business had no payroll employees. Additionally, it had no active financial account to disburse payroll funds until a few days before applying for the loan.
ANDREW CABALLERO-REYNOLDS/AFP via Getty Images
Samirah allegedly fabricated payroll and tax records to secure the loan. The funds were distributed through bank accounts belonging to the supposed employees and then transferred into Samirah’s own account, according to prosecutors.
“The defendant was stealing federal tax dollars at the same time he was deciding how to spend Virginia tax dollars,” prosecutors wrote.
Photo by Tasos Katopodis/Getty Images
Samirah told the Post that he had a “mistaken understanding of the PPP loan process,” which he claimed was “weaponized by Donald Trump’s Justice Department.”
He told the news outlet that he intended to use the cash to hire workers to market his business; however, on the loan application, he claimed that the funds would go to existing employees. He explained that he changed his mind about hiring new workers after realizing the pandemic would be prolonged. Instead, he spent the money on dental equipment and office furnishings, which were not authorized uses of the funds.
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Election Day Update!
Supreme Court to Hear Mississippi Ballot Deadline Case Michigan Atty. Gen. Coordinated with Leftist Nonprofit to Target Trump and Supporters Secure Border, Fewest Illegal Crossings in History Supreme Court to Hear Mississippi Ballot Deadline Case The U.S. Supreme Court has granted review of our landmark election integrity case on behalf of the Libertarian Party […]
The post Election Day Update! appeared first on Judicial Watch.
NFL player apologizes over backlash for doing Trump dance: ‘I did not mean to offend anyone’
A Detroit Lions player says he is sorry if he hurt anyone’s feelings.
The Lions crushed the Washington Commanders 44-22 in Landover, Maryland, on Sunday, in a game that featured a flyover from President Trump in Air Force One.
‘It had nothing to do with who the president was.’
The event included the president in the commentary booth, and Trump swore in members of the military over a chorus of boos from Commanders fans.
Fans were likely equally as perturbed when Lions wide receiver Amon-Ra St. Brown celebrated a touchdown with Trump’s signature dance, which was a massive trend among athletes in 2024.
Evidence of displeasure from fans was apparent on social media following the game. Detractors called Brown “a f**king disgrace” and a “hoe ass n***a,” while claiming he is “supporting an orange racist, sexist, felon currently stopping people from receiving food.”
On Wednesday, St. Brown took to his podcast to address the controversy. His brother, Equanimeous, brought up the “elephant in the room” less than six minutes into the episode.
“You had a touchdown celebration. Talk about it,” Equanimeous prompted his brother.
Amon-Ra then immediately apologized.
“First of all, if I offended anyone, I do apologize. I did not mean to offend anyone. It was just we’re having fun,” he said on the “St. Brown Podcast.”
The 26-year-old added, “If any president was at that game — if they had a dance, I would have done it. It had nothing to do with who the president was.”
While it seemed that St. Brown was deliberately fence-sitting, he commented on the historic nature of Trump’s appearance at the Commanders’ venue.
“Even after the game, I found out — someone told me that was the first game that a president has been to in over 40 years. So first regular-season game, which is crazy,” he said.
The receiver said the controversy was simply a case of him and his teammates “having fun doing the dance”; “nothing more, nothing less.”
Backing his brother, Equanimeous equally described the “quick shimmy” as “nothing serious, nothing political.”
Trump has become intertwined with the Commanders franchise during his second term, as the team hopes to move back to D.C. and a $2.7 billion stadium.
Trump, the NFL, and D.C. Mayor Muriel Bowser (D) praised the plans in May while announcing that the city would also host the 2027 NFL Draft.
The president subsequently threatened to suspend the whole deal if the Commanders refused to change their name back to the Washington Redskins. The team abandoned the moniker in 2020, going as the Washington Football Team until rebranding as the Washington Commanders in 2022.
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Judicial Watch: Documents Detail Michigan Att. Gen. Relationship with Leftist Nonprofit to Target Trump and Republicans Over 2020 Election Disputes
(Washington, DC) Judicial Watch announced today it received 5,789 pages of records from the Michigan Department of Attorney General in a Michigan Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request that show the state’s coordination with the nonprofit States United Democracy Center, which pushed indictments of President Donald Trump’s supporters, lawyers, activists, and Republican Party officials who […]
The post Judicial Watch: Documents Detail Michigan Att. Gen. Relationship with Leftist Nonprofit to Target Trump and Republicans Over 2020 Election Disputes appeared first on Judicial Watch.
Trump and Meloni Outpace Critics on Human Rights
According to the White House, President Donald Trump urged Chinese President Xi Jin Ping at the APEC summit for the…
Trump’s Right: Nuke the Filibuster
President Trump is right in his a call for the Senate to eliminate the filibuster — the procedural rule requiring…
European Trump derangement syndrome on full display in ‘deviant’ crucifixion spectacle
Liberals have made no secret of their desire to see harm come to President Donald Trump.
A survey conducted by the Network Contagion Research Institute and Rutgers University’s Social Perception Lab revealed in April that 55% of respondents who identified as left of center said that assassinating Trump would be at least somewhat justified.
When asked by pollsters about the September 2024 attempt on the president’s life at his golf course in Florida, 28% of Democrats said it would have been better for Trump to have been slaughtered on the green.
This murderous loathing for the president leached into popular culture long before Democrats rushed to mock Trump’s brush with death last year in Butler, Pennsylvania. For instance, a theater production simulated his assassination in New York City and an aspiring D-list comedian posed with a fake decapitated head made to look like the president.
A masked London-born agitpropist who calls himself Mason Storm recently contributed to this unhinged anti-Trump genre with a hyper-realistic, life-size sculpture of the president dressed in an orange prison jumpsuit and set on a cross-shaped gurney in a cruciform pose. The sculpture, which is titled “The Saint or the Sinner,” depicts Trump as incapacitated with the implication — made explicit elsewhere — that he is dead as the result of a lethal injection.
According to a statement shared online by Storm, “In a world increasingly driven by polarized narratives, this work offers a moment of reflection, urging us to take responsibility — and to realize that every decision tells a story.”
RELATED: Evil unchecked always spreads — and Democrats are proof
Photo by SEBASTIEN BOZON/AFP via Getty Images
While the title of the sculpture and the corresponding statement from Storm suggest there’s an ambiguity about the work’s meaning, Storm made clear online his antipathy toward Trump, writing, for instance, “He’s not the messiah he’s a very naughty boy!”
‘Simply deviant.’
The sculpture, which was shown earlier this year in Vienna, was also going to be shown at the central train station in Basel, Switzerland; however, Gleis 4, the gallery responsible for the planned pop-up, called it off, citing “expected large crowds and feared disturbances.”
On Saturday, Gleis 4 reportedly installed the sculpture in a showcase window on Kunstmeile, an indoor pedestrian walkway in downtown Basel.
According to France24, the sculpture has been purchased by an “internationally renowned figure living in Europe” whose identity will remain confidential.
Bishop Hermann Glettler of the Diocese of Innsbruck has called the sculpture “simply deviant.”
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BBC execs step down after network accused of deceptive edit of Trump’s January 6 speech
An internal memo has rocked the leadership at the British Broadcasting Corporation.
Last week, another outlet in the United Kingdom revealed that the memo had accused the BBC of deceptively editing footage of President Donald Trump’s speech on January 6, 2021.
‘We fight like hell, and if you don’t fight like hell, you’re not gonna have a country any more.’
The Telegraph reported that Michael Prescott, a former independent external adviser to the BBC’s Editorial Guidelines and Standards Committee, wrote a dossier on the BBC’s alleged bias before leaving his position in June.
The report accused the BBC of splicing together Trump’s comments on Jan. 6 to appear as if they were made in the same breath, even though the remarks were about 54 minutes apart.
As Blaze News previously reported, the edit in question appeared on the BBC’s one-hour Panorama special, titled “Trump: A Second Chance?”
The documentary featured a clip purporting to show Trump saying, “We’re going to walk down to the Capitol, and I’ll be there with you. And we fight. We fight like hell.”
In reality, Trump’s actual statement was:
“We’re gonna walk down, and I’ll be there with you. We’re gonna walk down. We’re gonna walk down, any one you want, but I think right here, we’re gonna walk down to the Capitol, and we’re gonna cheer on our brave senators and congressmen and women. And we’re probably not going to be cheering so much for some of them, because you’ll never take back our country with weakness. You have to show strength, and you have to be strong. We have come to demand that Congress do the right thing and only count the electors who have been lawfully slated. Lawfully slated. I know that everyone here will soon be marching over to the Capitol building to peacefully and patriotically make your voices heard.”
The edited clip also featured Trump’s words from about 54 minutes later, when he was discussing election integrity.
“Most people would stand there at 9 o’clock in the evening and say, ‘I wanna thank you very much,’ and they go off to some other life, but I said something’s wrong here, something’s really wrong, can’t have happened, and we fight.”
“We fight like hell, and if you don’t fight like hell, you’re not gonna have a country any more,” Trump added.
Now, BBC Director-General Tim Davie and CEO of BBC News Deborah Turness have both handed in their resignations.
RELATED: BBC allegedly deceptively edited Trump’s Jan. 6 speech into riot lie
Tim DAvie. Photo by Dominic Lipinski/Getty Images
Davie issued a memo to his staff on Saturday and claimed that it was completely his decision to step down.
“I wanted to let you know that I have decided to leave the BBC after 20 years. This is entirely my decision,” Davie wrote, according to the Hollywood Reporter.
The director said he had been reflecting on the “very intense personal and professional demands” that come with his role and claimed that “in these increasingly polarized times, the BBC is of unique value and speaks to the very best of us.”
Without directly mentioning the video editing controversy, Davie called the BBC a “critical ingredient of a healthy society.”
‘As the CEO of BBC News and Current Affairs, the buck stops with me.’
Turness, however, was openly self-deprecating in her decision to resign.
“The ongoing controversy around the Panorama on President Trump has reached a stage where it is causing damage to the BBC — an institution that I love,” she wrote in a memo. “As the CEO of BBC News and Current Affairs, the buck stops with me — and I took the decision to offer my resignation to the Director-General last night.”
She added that “in public life, leaders” must be “fully accountable, and that is why I am stepping down.”
Still, Turness said despite the mistakes, any “allegations that BBC News is institutionally biased are wrong.”
RELATED: The UK wants to enforce its censorship laws in the US. The First Amendment begs to differ.
CEO of BBC News Deborah Turness, October 13, 2022 in London, England. Photo by Leon Neal/Getty Images
As the BBC is a government-run institution, the ruling Labour Party chimed in on the controversy.
“I want to thank Tim Davie for his service to public service broadcasting over many years. He has led the BBC through a period of significant change and helped the organization to grip the challenges it has faced in recent years,” said U.K. Culture Secretary Lisa Nandy.
Nandy said the BBC charter, which defines “Object, Mission and Public Purposes” for the organization, will be reviewed to help the BBC “adapt to this new era” and secure its role at the “heart of national life” for the future.
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The nukes are fine — the advice is not
Despite his well-known aversion to using the “other N-word” and discussing the issues connected to nuclear deterrence and nuclear saber-rattling by America’s adversaries, the president, during his recent trip to Asia, dropped a bombshell of his own.
On October 29, President Trump posted a brief statement on Truth Social about nuclear weapons testing, which contained the following key points:
- The United States has more nuclear weapons “than any other country.”
- During Trump’s first term in office, the U.S. accomplished a “complete update and renovation” of existing U.S. nuclear weapons.
- Because of other countries’ testing programs, the president has “instructed the Department of War to start testing our Nuclear Weapons on an equal basis.”
- The process of testing our nuclear weapons “will begin immediately.”
Sadly, whoever provided the president with the background information for each of his statements is manifestly unaware of the easily ascertainable facts. The president is being extremely poorly served by his own staff.
The president appears to have been informed that the Department of War is responsible for nuclear weapons testing. It is not.
First, the Russian Federation has more nuclear weapons than any other nation. Its stockpile of nuclear weapons available to the Russian military is about 5,200, while its overall stockpile is about 5,600. The numbers for the U.S. are about 3,700 and 4,400, respectively. This information is readily available in public sources such as the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute Yearbook or the annual assessments published by the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists.
Second, during the president’s first term, progress was made on the Strategic Modernization Program initiated in 2010. Still, no new platforms (submarine-launched ballistic missiles, bombers, or land-based missiles) were deployed between 2017 and 2021. Instead, we rely today on aging systems that are decades old.
Importantly, a small number of modified, low-yield submarine-launched warheads were produced and placed in service, and development of new Air Force nuclear warheads began, but none were deployed.
Related: America must lead the Mars race before China claims the final frontier
Photo by NASA/Getty Images
Third, the president’s staff has a profound misunderstanding about the difference between the test of a nuclear system’s delivery vehicle (i.e., a ballistic or cruise missile) and the test of a nuclear warhead. In the days before the president’s post, Russia conducted a test of a new cruise missile and a new trans-oceanic torpedo (both of which, incidentally, are not constrained by the new START treaty). Tests of missile systems are commonly conducted by all the nuclear powers, including the United States.
Today, with the sole exception of North Korea in 2017, neither Russia nor China nor any other nuclear power has conducted a nuclear warhead test in this century. To be clear, the U.S. intelligence community has raised concerns that both Russia and China may be covertly carrying out extremely low-yield tests of experimental nuclear designs, but those do not appear to be the “tests” to which the president’s Truth Social post was referring.
Finally, the president appears to have been informed that the Department of War is responsible for nuclear weapons testing. It is not. That responsibility belongs to the Department of Energy. Based on over 30 years of neglect, that department would be unable today to conduct a nuclear weapon test in the near future. Based on estimates provided by the Department of Energy to Congress, it would take 24-36 months to do so, at a cost of several billion dollars — dollars that have not been authorized or appropriated by Congress.
When asked, on his return flight from Asia, why he had delivered this signal of U.S. strategic nuclear weapons muscle-flexing, the president said he believed that if others were testing, then we should too. Depending on the state of our own nuclear weapons (currently assessed by the military as being reliable), and if he had been properly informed on the facts that others had resumed testing of nuclear weapons, there would be something to this argument. But as things stand, the president owes it to himself and to America’s national security to improve the quality of advice he is being provided on the vital issue of nuclear deterrence and our ability to sustain it — and soon.
Editor’s note: This article was originally published by RealClearDefense and made available via RealClearWire.
