Pro-Trump Network Newsmax Secured a Ton of Cash From Qatar—For a Price

A previously undisclosed $50 million investment helped launch Newsmax into a Fox News competitor, a new report shows, and it came from an unexpected place: the Qatari government.

In 2019 and 2020, a former Qatari government official and member of the royal family, Sheikh Sultan bin Jassim Al Thani, invested tens of millions into the fledgling far-right media company, according to documents leaked by a Cayman Islands–based financial services provider and reviewed by The Washington Post.

At the time, Newsmax was massively scaling its operations, transforming itself from a network that paid hosts to drink and advertise scotch on weekday afternoons to one that would end up embroiled in defamation lawsuits after denying the 2020 presidential election results. But it desperately needed an influx of cash before it could compete with Rupert Murdoch’s broadcast empire.

Halfway across the world, Qatar was struggling with an economic blockade created by a coalition of its regional neighbors, including Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates. Qatar had turned to former President Donald Trump for help with the situation, but was cast aside on criticisms that it had funded terrorism.

Before and after Al Thani decided to shell out a lump sum to a network that would grow to hold Trump’s attention, senior newsroom leaders told Newsmax staff to go easy on its coverage of Qatar, an order that resulted in at least one host being verbally reprimanded by Newsmax CEO Christopher Ruddy after making on-air remarks about the nation. “We were not allowed to criticize Qatar,” one unidentified source told the Post. “We were told very clearly from the top down, no touching this.”

A Newsmax representative who spoke with the Post rejected the notion that they had “slanted coverage to be favorable to Qatar.”

The lawyer arguing the case against the abortion pill mifepristone in the Supreme Court made a major mistake Tuesday, when she let slip that the drug has only caused complications “dozens of times.”

Erin Hawley, who is married to Republican Senator Josh Hawley and works for the extremist legal group Alliance Defending Freedom, represents a coalition of anti-abortion groups seeking to block access to mifepristone. The group first sued in November 2022, arguing that the Food and Drug Administration improperly approved mifepristone and that doctors who oppose abortions could be harmed if they had to treat patients experiencing negative health effects from mifepristone.

“According to Guttmacher, nearly 650,000 women take mifepristone every single year,” Hawley said in arguments before the Supreme Court, referring to the pro-abortion access research group Guttmacher Institute. “It’s no surprise that respondents have seen an increase in emergency room visits and indeed treated women suffering from abortion drug harms tens of thousands of times.”

“Excuse me, dozens of times,” she corrected herself quickly. “Women have suffered tens of thousands of times.”

That huge numerical confusion could end up costing her, but at the very least, it reveals how baseless the entire case really is.

Mifepristone, which has been proven safe through more than 100 studies, is one of two drugs used in medication abortion, one of the most common abortion methods in the country. The drug has become a crucial tool for abortion access since Roe v. Wade was overturned in 2022.

A series of reports published last week by the Guttmacher Institute found that more than one million abortions were conducted in the United States in 2023. Of those, about 63 percent were medication abortions. And that number doesn’t even account for self-managed abortions when people took medication at home, such as people living in states with abortion bans who had the medication mailed to them.

Out of all of those medication abortions, very few actually result in the kind of emergency situations that Hawley describes. A study published in February in the journal Nature Medicine looked at more than 6,000 patients who took mifepristone and the companion drug, misoprostol, used to induce abortions. Of those patients, only 0.25 percent of them experienced a “serious abortion-related adverse event.”

At about 1:40 a.m. EST on Tuesday, a 1,000-foot cargo ship careened past large concrete obstacles ahead of Baltimore’s Francis Scott Key Bridge, colliding with one of its structural pillars and toppling it into the Patapsco River. Mere hours later, conservatives were already hurling their racist conspiracy theories against the wall to see what sticks.

In an early morning broadcast, Fox Business attempted to tie the horrific situation—which was deemed a developing mass casualty event by the Baltimore City Fire Department—to the “wide-open border.” Via a clumsily worded, cross-wired question, Fox Business host Maria Bartiromo connected the catastrophic collapse to President Joe Biden’s immigration policy.

“Let me also get your take on what’s going on in terms of world affairs. The White House has issued a statement on this saying that ‘there’s no indication of nefarious intent in the collapse of the Francis Scott Key Bridge,’” started Bartiromo. “The ship involved in the collapse of the bridge is 948 feet long, called The Dali, a Singaporean-flag container, but of course you’ve been talking a lot about the potential for wrongdoing or potential for foul play given the wide-open border. That is why you have been so adamant.”

A construction crew had been performing maintenance on the bridge at the time of its collapse. So far, two have been rescued, while a search continues for another six people in the water.

The area around Baltimore, which is just a one-hour drive from D.C., constitutes one of the most heavily trafficked sections of the country. The Key Bridge offered an alternative route along Interstate 95, the East Coast corridor, and was used by approximately 35,000 people a day, according to Maryland Transportation Secretary Paul Wiedefeld.

The bridge’s loss—and its subsequent blockade in the river—also shuts off the Port of Baltimore from its shipping route.

But even though the FBI had already determined that the crash was not the result of terrorist activity, other conservatives still joined the digital pile-on, including self-avowed misogynist Andrew Tate and far-right conspiracy theorist Alex Jones, who baselessly pegged the accident as a “cyber attack.”

The Supreme Court is hearing arguments Tuesday on whether the abortion pill mifepristone was improperly approved, in a case that could decimate access to abortion nationwide.

The case arrived at the Supreme Court after a lengthy legal roller-coaster. Mifepristone’s status currently remains unchanged until the high court issues a ruling. Mifepristone is one of two drugs used in medication abortion, one of the most common abortion methods in the country. The drug has become a crucial tool for abortion access since Roe v. Wade was overturned in 2022, with nearly 28,000 additional doses of abortion pills provided in the six months after Roe fell alone.

A coalition of anti-abortion groups, represented by the extremist legal group Alliance Defending Freedom, sued to block access to mifepristone in November 2022. They argued that the Food and Drug Administration improperly approved mifepristone, despite the fact that more than 100 studies have proven the drug to be safe. They also claim that doctors who oppose abortions could be harmed if they had to treat patients experiencing negative health effects from mifepristone.

Oral arguments on this case have already begun. You can tune in and listen to the case here.

While the Supreme Court cannot technically ban mifepristone outright, it could reimpose restrictions on it to the point that it would be incredibly difficult to acquire. In 2016, the FDA determined that mifepristone was safe for use through 10 weeks of pregnancy, up from seven weeks, and could be provided after just two in-person appointments, down from three.

In 2021, due to the Covid-19 pandemic, the Biden administration said providers could prescribe mifepristone during telemedicine appointments. The administration made that change permanent later the same year. If the Supreme Court rules in favor of the anti-abortion group, it could undo all of those FDA-approved changes.

As arguments began Tuesday, Solicitor General Elizabeth Prelogar, who represents the FDA, argued that the plaintiffs did not have standing to bring the case in the first place. Their arguments of potential harm, she said, “rely on a long chain of remote contingencies.” The circumstances that would cause anti-abortion doctors harm are unlikely to arise often enough to merit the lawsuit.

In fact, the initial lawsuit and ruling against mifepristone cited multiple bogus studies that either cherry-picked results from a small sample pool or were based on such faulty data that they were retracted altogether.

A bigger issue at play is the challenge to the FDA’s authority. The original lawsuit “undermined” the FDA’s authority—and by extension, the authority of other federal agencies, Rachel Rebouché, the dean of Temple University’s law school, told The New Republic when the case first began.

“To take seriously that [the FDA] ignored risks, risks unsupported by any credible evidence, suggests questions as to what federal courts might decide about other federal agencies’ decisions,” she said.

A former employee of Donald Trump has a small message for his old boss now that his hush-money trial has a concrete date: “Be worried.”

Michael Cohen, Trump’s former attorney turned fixer, took to MSNBC on Monday to send the warning to the GOP presidential nominee.

“He shouldn’t be worried about me,” Cohen told Jen Psaki. “He should be worried about the Manhattan district attorney, the district attorney of New York prosecutors, he should be worried about the documentary evidence, he should be worried about all of the witnesses that are going to be coming into that trial simply because, as others have also appropriately put it, this is a simple case.”

On Monday, Manhattan Supreme Court Justice Juan Merchan ruled that jury selection will begin April 15. It’s the first criminal trial officially on the docket for the former president, while the proceedings for his three other criminal trials are on hold thanks to appeals and delay tactics from Trump’s legal team.

Trump is accused of using Cohen to sweep an affair with porn actress Stormy Daniels under the rug ahead of the 2016 presidential election. He’s facing 34 felony charges in this case for allegedly falsifying business records with the intent to further an underlying crime. Trump has pleaded not guilty on all counts.

Despite Trump’s efforts to keep them both far away from the courthouse, Cohen and Daniels are both expected to be star witnesses in the trial.

Representative James Comer has finally given up on trying to impeach Joe Biden—but he’s trying to make it seem like that was his plan all along.

After more than a year of insisting that the president and his family are guilty of corruption, Republicans have yet to produce any evidence of Biden’s wrongdoing. Many GOP lawmakers are starting to back away from the impeachment effort, admitting that they likely don’t have the votes to pass articles of impeachment.

Comer, who spearheaded the probe, had held fast to the goal of impeaching Biden, even as he lost key witnesses along the way. But on Monday night, he finally changed his tune.

“It’s clear that Democrats will choose their party over their country and the truth at every turn. They should be ashamed of themselves,” the Kentucky Republican wrote in a fundraising email. “That’s why I am preparing criminal referrals as the culmination of my investigation.”

Comer first raised the possibility of making criminal referrals to the Department of Justice two weeks ago. He told Fox News that “accountability … looks like criminal referrals.”

This is a far cry from his originally stated goal, which was to impeach and ultimately remove Biden from office. But with his probe going up in flames around him, Comer is getting desperate for an “exit strategy,” a congressional Republican anonymously told ABC earlier this month.

But Comer stated in his fundraising email that he is playing a longer game. “When President Trump returns to the White House, it’s critical the new leadership at the DOJ have everything they need to prosecute the Biden Crime Family and deliver swift justice,” he wrote.

Comer is banking on Donald Trump getting reelected in November. Trump, who backs the impeachment effort, could then instruct the Justice Department to take up the charges.

The shift in Comer’s tune comes a week after a disastrous House Oversight Committee hearing, where lawmakers heard testimony from Tony Bobulinski, Jason Galanis, and Lev Parnas. Bobulinski is a former work partner of Hunter Biden with a history of shady business dealings, and Galanis called in from federal prison, where he is serving a 14-year sentence for financial fraud. Hunter says he and Galanis only met once.

Parnas, meanwhile, is a former associate of Rudy Giuliani. He has been adamant that the claims of the Biden family’s corruption are just Russian disinformation.

Things quickly devolved when Democratic Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez asked Bobulinski if he had ever actually seen the president commit a crime. When Bobulinski could not name a specific instance, Ocasio-Cortez tore into Republicans for their entire impeachment push.

“At this point, the story is not the fact that the basis of this impeachment inquiry is wrong. The story is why it’s proceeding anyway. Why is this committee proceeding based on false charges?” she demanded.

A Minnesota Republican state senator had an a-moo-sing but completely unhinged reason to oppose a proposal for safe storage requirements for guns: People might need to shoot cows.

Senator Warren Limmer made the bizarre argument on Friday during a committee meeting on a bill that would require firearms to be stored either unloaded and disabled with a locking device or in a locked storage unit. Current state law merely requires that guns be stored somewhere a child cannot reach them.

Limmer, who worked as a corrections officer prior to serving in the state legislature, argued that people who live in rural areas need to be able to access their guns quickly to protect against both predators and domesticated farm animals.

“Farm animals at times can be very dangerous. Take, for example, a cow who just recently had a calf,” Limmer said. “You even walk too close to a cow and it’ll take you down and trample you into dust.”

“Many farmers have a readily available gun just for those emergencies. Fumbling around with a lock while a cow or bull or any other animal is going after your daughter or your son—you can’t fumble around with a key, or try and find the lockbox, or put your thumb on a biometric key of some sort in your home while the danger is outside.”

Contrary to what Limmer said, death by cow attack is not actually that common in the United States. A study published in January in the journal Forensic Science, Medicine and Pathology found that only about 20 to 22 deaths are caused by cattle per year—and that includes cows reacting to “deliberate provocation or goading intended to incite aggressive behavior for public entertainment purposes.”

It’s hard to envision the scenario Limmer outlines, in which a gun owner is inside the home, fumbling with a lock, while their child is being run down outside by a psychopathic cow. The more likely motivation for Limmer’s wild argument is the same one behind the strange “30-50 feral hogs” meme from 2019: People will say anything, no matter how ridiculous, to oppose gun restrictions.

Team Joe Biden just handed Donald Trump the harshest put-down since Biden told him “shut up” on a 2020 debate stage.

On Monday, the Biden campaign issued a venomous response to Trump’s post-court presser, jabbing the GOP presidential pick on his money struggles and slamming Trump for a Truth Social post in which he likened himself to Jesus.

“Donald Trump is weak and desperate—both as a man and a candidate for President,” wrote Biden-Harris 2024 spokesperson James Singer in a statement. “He spent the weekend golfing, the morning comparing himself to Jesus, and the afternoon lying about having money he definitely doesn’t have.

“His campaign can’t raise money, he is uninterested in campaigning outside his country club, and every time he opens his mouth, he pushes moderate and suburban voters away with his dangerous agenda,” Singer continued. “America deserves better than a feeble, confused and tired Donald Trump.”

Many American voters are dreading November’s rematch between Joe Biden and Donald Trump. Well, now those people can vote for Literally Anybody Else.

A man in Texas, fed up with the two major-party candidates, has legally changed his name to Literally Anybody Else and launched a campaign for president. Formerly known as Dustin Ebey, the 35-year-old is a U.S. Army veteran and works as a seventh-grade math teacher in Birdville, Texas, near Fort Worth.

“Three hundred million people can do better” than Biden and Trump, Else told The Guardian. “There really should be some outlet for people like me who are just so fed up with this constant power grab between the two parties that just has no benefit to the common person.”

A Reuters/Ipsos poll conducted in January found that about two-thirds of Americans were “tired of seeing the same candidates in presidential elections and want someone new.” Nearly a third of people surveyed still didn’t know whether they would back Biden or Trump in November.

“People are voting for the lesser of two evils, not someone they actually believe in or support,” Else told the local news outlet WFAA88. “People should have the option to vote for someone who resembles and represents them.”

On his website, Else argues that “America should not be stuck choosing between the ‘King of Debt’ (his self-declaration) and an 81-year old. Literally Anybody Else isn’t a person, it’s a rally cry.”

Else faces an uphill battle. In order to appear on the ballot in Texas as an independent candidate, he must submit a petition with more than 113,000 signatures by May 13. The signatures must be from registered voters who did not vote in either major party’s presidential primary in the state.

Since he is unlikely to get that many signatures in such a short time frame, Else is campaigning to get people to write his name on the ballot.

“I’m not delusional. This will be very hard to do, but it’s not impossible,” Else said. “My hope is to have Donald Trump, Joe Biden, and then Literally Anybody Else right underneath.”

Donald Trump has pulled an about-face in recent days about banning TikTok. And we may now know the reason why: A certain Republican billionaire megadonor is an investor in both TikTok’s parent company and the shell company that just merged with the former president’s media company.

Trump briefly met Jeff Yass, a Wall Street financier, in February as Trump sought to court wealthy donors for his presidential campaign (and his rising legal debts). Yass’s trading firm Susquehanna International Group is a major shareholder in TikTok’s parent company, ByteDance. Within just a few weeks, despite having spent a good chunk of his presidency railing about the national security risks TikTok poses, Trump suddenly changed his tune on the popular video-sharing app.

“I could have banned TikTok. I had it banned just about, I could have got that done,” Trump told CNBC in early March. “I sort of said [to Congress], ‘You guys decide, you make that decision.’ Because it’s a tough decision to make.”

“We have to very much go into privacy and make sure that we are protecting the American people’s privacy and data rights,” he said. “But, you know, we also have that problem with other, you have that problem with Facebook and lots of other companies too.”

At the time, Trump said he had not discussed TikTok with Yass and was more concerned with preventing Facebook from getting too powerful.

Still, Trump was very likely trying to curry Yass’s favor. A person close to Trump’s campaign anonymously told The New York Times they expected Yass to make a large donation to a group backing Trump’s current presidential bid. Yass, for his part, said he had never donated to Trump and did not intend to do so.

Yass may have already saved Trump another way, though. Susquehanna owns about 2 percent of the group Digital World Acquisition Corporation, according to a December regulatory filing, the Times reported Monday. DWAC merged Friday with Trump Media & Technology Group, pulling it back from the brink of running out of cash.

It’s unclear if Susquehanna still owns those shares because Susquehanna, like other major investors, only discloses its holdings periodically. But if it still holds a stake in DWAC, then Yass’s company is one of Trump Media’s bigger shareholders. Susquehanna would hold about 605,000 shares, worth about $22 million.

The merger comes as Trump stares down millions of dollars in legal fines and fees. Under the merger deal, Trump is prohibited from selling any of his shares or using them as collateral for a loan for six months, but he can ask the new merged board to waive that rule for him. Even if the board agrees, though, it’s unclear whether selling shares will be profitable enough for Trump’s many legal bills.

Congress, meanwhile, is poised to pass a bill banning TikTok. President Joe Biden—who is currently campaigning on TikTok—has promised to sign the measure if it reaches his desk.

Former Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin has revealed that he is building an investor group to buy TikTok, which could put a major resource for young people in the hands of one of Trump’s allies.