Jack Smith Rolls the Dice With Surprise Request for the Supreme Court

Special Counsel Jack Smith made a bold move on Monday when he petitioned the Supreme Court and asked the justices to decide, once and for all, whether Donald Trump has presidential immunity from prosecution for his attempt to overturn the results of the 2020 election.

Smith’s 14-page petition explains that this issue is “of imperative public importance and must be resolved so that the trial can move forward “as promptly as possible.”

“This case presents a fundamental question at the heart of our democracy: whether a former President is absolutely immune from federal prosecution for crimes committed while in office,” Smith wrote in the court filing.

Smith made the move in hopes of bypassing a lengthy appeals process, as Trump tried his best to throw out the trial.

Earlier this month, Trump’s team appealed a lower court ruling by U.S. District Court Judge Tanya Chutkan, in which she denied Trump’s motion to dismiss his indictment on grounds of presidential immunity.

The appeal functionally suspends Trump’s trial, which Smith hopes to begin on March 4, 2024—one day before Super Tuesday. A definitive answer from the Supreme Court could allow Smith’s team to circumvent the appeal and for the trial to begin as scheduled without delay.

“The United States recognizes that this is an extraordinary request. This is an extraordinary case,” Smith wrote, and while it is extraordinary, there is some precedent for it. In his petition, Smith cited the 1974 case U.S. v. Nixon, in which the Supreme Court ordered President Richard Nixon to surrender tape recordings sought during the Watergate investigation.

We’ll see if Smith’s move pays off.

Disgraced politician George Santos issued his first round of promised hellfire against Representative Nicole Malliotakis on Sunday, chiding the fellow New York Republican for using info from classified briefings to turn some cash on the stock market.

“She receives classified briefings as a member of the Ways and Means Committee,” Santos said on CBS News’s The Point With Marcia Kramer. “Can somebody explain to me that she miraculously becomes a member of the committee and then she’s doing trades on NYCB with the Signature Bank collapse just a day before having an 80 percent stock hike? That’s not a lucky trade, Marsha, that’s a very well-informed trade.”

If Santos is to be believed, then more dirty laundry is on its way via ethics complaints against other tristate politicians in both parties who voted him out of the House, including Representatives Mike Lawler, Nick LaLota, and Rob Menendez. Santos pledged those complaints were forthcoming last week before he got busy promising interviews to Ziwe and selling clips of himself on Cameo.

Speaking of, the fabulist congressman also claimed on CBS that the idea to start working on Cameo came from inside the House after a former member of Kevin McCarthy’s team suggested he get on the bespoke video service.

“He reached out and says, ‘George, you have such a large personality, people love you,’” Santos recalled McCarthy’s former staff member saying. “’You should just open a Cameo.’ I’m like, what’s a Cameo? So I looked into it.”

The reputed liar—who was caught lying about his entire résumé, his relation to Holocaust survivors, being “Jew-ish,” his connection to the 2016 Orlando nightclub shooting, and the kidnapping of his niece, among other things—is currently facing 23 counts related to illegally receiving unemployment benefits, aggravated identity theft, and credit card fraud. He is also completely unashamed of his political career.

“I feel like everything I stood for—I’m so proud of the legacy I leave behind, even with the short 11-month term that I served,” he said. “I feel like every vote I took I can stand by and I can defend, and I’m proud of that. But regrets, plenty. Like, there’s always regrets, right.”

Tucker Carlson is launching a new streaming service after failing to find a new network to anchor—and it’s got a fitting new logo.

The so-called Tucker Carlson Network went live on Monday, charging a fee of $9 per month for all your Tucker Carlson needs, including multiple shows, a podcast, and select interviews from the ousted Fox host.

All of that comes dressed in a neat little package that looks so much like a red pill that even fellow conservatives can’t help but point it out.

The red pill’s significance in pop culture originated from The Matrix—a trans allegory written by two trans women before they were out of the closet—where the choice between the red or blue pill meant the difference between staying complacent and living within the status quo versus embracing a life-changing, reality-altering truth.

Since the film, the symbol has taken a chauvinistic dive, being co-opted by incels and self-proclaimed misogynists in the mid-2010s to express vitriol toward women during a period of radically shifting gender politics, aggressing emerging conversations on rape culture and toxic masculinity. It was just a quick walk for the symbol to then become an image of far-right resistance, standing counter to seemingly progressive social movements like feminism in favor of “men’s rights.”

This isn’t Carlson’s first solo step into the media pool since he was ousted from Fox. In the spring, Carlson launched a show on X, formerly known as Twitter, where all of his videos were available without a subscription—that included the one-on-one August interview with Donald Trump, who skipped the first GOP debate in favor of talking with Carlson.

Carlson and his team allegedly explored launching this new network through the social media platform, though people familiar with the matter said the platform wasn’t able to move quickly on building out the technology needed to support the subscription service, reported The Wall Street Journal.

Alex Jones says he was just playing “devil’s advocate” when he spent all those years claiming the Sandy Hook shooting was a false flag operation.

Elon Musk spoke with the far-right conspiracy theorist during a livestream on X, formerly Twitter, on Sunday. When Musk asked Jones about “the whole Sandy Hook thing,” Jones tried to shirk responsibility.

The livestream, co-hosted by Musk and influencer Mario Nawfal, occurred shortly after Musk restored the X account of the disgraced InfoWars host. On Saturday, Musk had posted an X poll asking users whether he should “reinstate” Jones on the platform. About 70 percent of users voted “Yes.” Jones and his InfoWars account were initially banned from Twitter in 2018 for “abusive behavior.”

As part of replatforming the conspiracy theorist, Musk gave Jones the space to explain away his misinformation campaign, in which he tried to convince the public that the 2012 school shooting in Newtown, Connecticut, which killed 20 children and six teachers and staff, was staged. Sandy Hook families secured a $1.5 billion judgment against the InfoWars host after winning a lawsuit over his conspiracy theories.

“Obviously, it would be heartless and cruel to deny a school shooting of children or attack the parents or anyone who was involved,” Musk said, before giving Jones the opportunity to lie about having done that very thing.

“Thank you for allowing me back into the public square so that I can actually tell the world what really happened,” Jones said.

Jones proceeded to make several excuses for his actions, explaining that he’d never gone to college and was not professionally trained. “I had a very small operation and did not even understand how powerful I was,” Jones said.

When the shooting at Sandy Hook elementary happened, “the internet exploded,” Jones said. “It was the top story off and on for years, with all these professors and former school safety people and all of them saying they believed it was a drill, and I simply covered them covering that.”

Jones added that he has already apologized many times and is sorry if he hurt anyone’s feelings.

“I apologize on every show. And I’ll say it again, I apologize that I just gave my commentary because I’m really just a guy … talk radio host. So I do that on the internet. I just take calls, and interview guests, and that I play devil’s advocate,” Jones explained. “And if that hurt people’s feelings, I apologize. But I did not send people to your houses. I did not pee on graves. I don’t know any of the stuff that went on.”

Jones’s return to X is just another of the many ways that Musk has allowed the platform to embrace and empower alt-right voices, making it increasingly less usable for any sane person.

Even Donald Trump’s own legal team can’t predict his next moves.

On Sunday, the former president announced that he actually will not be testifying in his civil fraud trial as planned on Monday.

Trump’s decision was quite a departure from what his attorney Alina Habba said just two days earlier.

“He is so firmly against what is happening in this court and so firmly for the old America that we know, not this America, that he will take that stand on Monday,” Habba assured the press. “He will open himself up to whatever they want because he’s not afraid. People that are afraid cower. President Trump doesn’t cower.”

On Truth Social, however, Trump wrote that he already testified and has nothing more to say.

“THIS IS A COMPLETE & TOTAL ELECTION INTERFERENCE (BIDEN CAMPAIGN!) WITCH HUNT, THAT WILL DO NOTHING BUT KEEP BUSINESSES OUT OF NEW YORK,” the 2024 Republican candidate wrote Sunday. “I WILL NOT BE TESTIFYING ON MONDAY.”

The civil fraud trial comes from New York Attorney General Letitia James who filed a lawsuit accusing top Trump Organization executives of misleading insurers and banks with inflated financial statements.

In previous testimony in the trial, Trump essentially admitted to fraud—claiming it was the responsibility of lenders to fact-check his organization’s financial documents. During his last testimony on November 6, Trump was scolded by Justice Arthur Engoron.

“No speeches,” Engoron said. “This is not a political rally.”

This week’s GOP-led impeachment effort against the President is so extreme that even a Fox & Friends host had a hard time getting on board.

Fox anchor Steve Doocy appeared taken aback and apprehensive to participate in a Monday morning segment on the show in which his co-hosts misrepresented outdated polling data to allege that Hunter Biden’s dealings were shady “enough” to warrant unseating his father from the presidency.

“The Republicans at this point don’t have—they’ve got a lot of ledgers and spreadsheets—but they have not connected the dots,” Doocy said while his co-hosts squirmed.

“They’ve connected the dots, the Department of Justice did, on Hunter, but they have not shown where Joe Biden, you know, did anything illegally,” he added.

The segment reached back to a September poll by CNN that found the majority of Americans—61 percent—felt that the president was involved in his son’s business dealings, while 38 percent felt that Biden didn’t have any involvement in his son’s business during his vice presidency.

But a lot has happened since September, including a shallow House impeachment inquiry—the first in U.S. history to move forward without a vote—that failed to present solid evidence of corruption or bribery and included witnesses and members publicly admitting that they did not have any evidence that rose to the level of impeaching Biden, reported Mediaite.

Doocy then redirected attention toward Hunter Biden’s closed-door deposition scheduled for Wednesday, announcing that Republicans are threatening contempt of Congress if the president’s son is a no-show.

“Ultimately, on this show, we’ve been calling for Hunter to go and sit in a chair on Capitol Hill in front of the TV cameras for the last year,” Doocy said. “Now Hunter’s lawyer, Abbe Lowell, says he will do that, but Comer and Jim Jordan say, no, it’s not negotiable, he’s got to be in private. According to Hunter Biden’s team, they don’t want to do it because of leaks and stuff like that.”

The organizers behind the December charity pub crawl lovingly dubbed SantaCon appear to be a little heavier on the con than the spirit of giving.

Over the last decade, the group’s organizers claim to have raised more than $1 million for charitable causes, according to their website, but not much of that money seems to have gone to charity. Instead, they blew more than a third of the funds on bad crypto investments and groups tied to Burning Man, ultimately giving less than a fifth of that money to actual nonprofits, according to a Gothamist analysis of the group’s financial documents.

The group’s biggest act of giving—more than $66,000—went to a for-profit film production crew called Spectaculum Productions, which made the medical fraud documentary At Your Cervix.

The lion’s share of the money raised by SantaCon—$832,000, or 59 percent—goes to maintenance, according to the group’s founder and director, Stefan Pildes, who told Gothamist that the bills add up for the single-day event, citing expenditures like temporary staff, street permits, and D.J.s.

“It’s not a small undertaking,” Pildes said.

SantaCon falls under the helm of a tax-exempt nonprofit, Participatory Safety. And while anybody can join the citywide bar hop for free, they also offer participants a $15 “Santa Badge” that comes with additional benefits. That has helped the outfit grow tremendously, though the money is specifically described as set aside for “Santa’s charity drive,” according to SantaCon’s website.

“Regardless of what they want to label it, throwing the party is not a charitable activity,” Lloyd Mayer, a Notre Dame University Law School professor, told the outlet. “It’s great to go to this party, right? But don’t pat yourself on the back that you’re helping out the Girl Scouts.” SantaCon organizers and participants regularly tout their group’s charitable side as a shield against allegations that it is a drunken free-for-all that leaves parts of New York City filthy. Even without any waste—and there seems to be quite a bit of it—it’s a lackluster charitable organization, raising barely more than $100,000 a year.

Russia resumed its cruise missile attack on Kyiv after an 80-day hiatus early Friday morning, an action that critics say is the direct result of Republicans blocking a foreign aid package to help Ukraine.

The two-hour barrage was impeded by air defenses that thwarted all missiles headed for the Ukrainian capital, according to the Kyiv city military administration. Other missiles resulted in casualties, including one that struck the city of Pavlohrad, which killed one and injured four others, and another that landed in the eastern Kharkiv region and killed one person and injured another seven, according to CNN.

The missile barrage comes just two days after Senate Republicans voted to block a $110.5 billion emergency spending bill for Ukraine and Israel. Putin allies celebrated America’s right-wing party for what they interpreted as the first step in the total withdrawal of U.S. support from Ukraine.

“Well done, Republicans! They’re standing firm! That’s good for us,” said propagandist Olga Skabeeva on Russian state TV, grinning.

“This will be a great revelation to other countries. It is even more dangerous to be a friend of the United States than its enemy. In the end, they will abandon you, leaving nothing but the scorched earth on your territory,” said Golovanov Time host Roman Golovanov, according to The Daily Beast.

And Putin loyalists made it clear they had another reason to celebrate, predicting that the failed aid package would lend itself to the downfall of President Joe Biden and the subsequent return of Donald Trump.

“The downfall of Ukraine means the downfall of Biden! Two birds with one stone,” said America analyst Dmitry Drobnitsky, the Beast reported.

The foreign aid package is tied up in a pseudo hostage situation as Republicans hound Democrats for an extreme border security package that includes Trump-tried policies—something that the White House has said it’s open to.

Republicans have been unable to prove that President Joe Biden is guilty of wrongdoing, and on Friday, even Fox News was forced to admit it.

The House is expected to vote next week on whether to formally open an impeachment inquiry into Biden. Republicans have for months accused Biden of corruption and of benefiting from his son Hunter’s overseas business, but they have yet to produce any actual proof.

“The House Oversight Committee has been at this for years, and they have so far not been able to provide any concrete evidence that Joe Biden personally profited from his son Hunter’s overseas business,” Fox reporter Peter Doocy said Friday, clearly physically struggling to say the word “not.”

“But they are going to try again with this impeachment inquiry that’s set to start next week.”

This isn’t the first time that Fox has acknowledged Republicans have no proof of Biden’s alleged criminal behavior. In May, Fox & Friends host Steve Doocy, who is Peter Doocy’s father, pressed Representative James Comer about the investigation. Comer, who has spearheaded the investigation, has been one of the most vocal lawmakers in pushing the accusations against the Bidens.

“You don’t actually have any facts to that point. You’ve got some circumstantial evidence,” Doocy said. “And the other thing is, of all those names, the one person who didn’t profit is—there’s no evidence that Joe Biden did anything illegally.”

Republicans continue to insist that Biden and his family are guilty of corruption, despite every piece of evidence they produce failing to show that the president was involved. Even the GOP’s own star witnesses have repeatedly refuted the lawmakers’ claims. As a result, Republicans have resorted to the most bonkers logic to back up their own accusations.

Donald Trump is on to his next big, white, election-engineering whale.

The former president and his far-right associates have moved on from targeting Dominion Voting Systems and Smartmatic and are now attempting to harpoon a system meant to detect and prevent voter fraud, the Electronic Registration Information Center, better known as ERIC.

So far this year, Trump has baselessly claimed that the voting accuracy system is a “terrible Voter Registration System that ‘pumps the rolls’ for Democrats and does nothing to clean them up,” and has openly speculated how he might make the system “illegal” across the country should he regain the White House, reports Rolling Stone.

Making a political hooplah out of a system designed by a nonpartisan group in 2012 holds a bounty of possibilities for Trump in 2024, including seeding more chaos in the aftermath of Election Day than he did in 2020.

Trump and his allies’ efforts to discredit the system include attempting to get a swath of GOP-led states to depart from the platform. Louisiana led the bunch, removing itself from ERIC in 2022. Since then, Alabama, Florida, Iowa, Missouri, Ohio, Virginia, and West Virginia have done so too—dropping its membership to 25 states plus Washington, D.C.—though more resignations are anticipated, according to the National Conference of State Legislatures.

ERIC, in truth, is nothing short of a software engineering marvel that allows states to compare their voter rolls against other states’. Operated by a staff of three with no philanthropic funding, ERIC provides election officials with reports on potential inaccuracies in voter lists and identifies people who are registered to vote in more than one state, or inaccurately registered multiple times in a single state, from data collected from state records like change of address records, DMV data, and Social Security Administration death records.

If we lived in a world where Trump was motivated by more than an unimpeded ascent to power, you might be fooled into thinking that this is exactly the kind of system he cried out for after losing the last election. Without it, experts say that voting systems in those states are “likely to be significantly less accurate” and have the potential to “fuel false claims of potential voter fraud.”

“Faulty voter files create long lines on Election Day, delays in getting mail-in ballots, an increase in provisional ballots, and delays in determining a winner,” ERIC co-founder David Becker, who resigned from his role as executive director of the program following a right-wing pressure campaign, told Rolling Stone.

“The bigger potential damage here is that election losers—people who have lost an election or perceive themselves to be about to lose an election—will have more time and more space to create false narratives about an election being stolen,” Becker added. “The more problems at the polls, the more lines, the more provisional ballots, the longer it takes to count overall ballots and get an unofficial winner, those all feed into the potential for chaos and even incitement to violence by election losers.”