J.D. Vance Caught on Video Telling Far-Right Group Alex Jones Is Right

Republican vice presidential nominee J.D. Vance once gave a strange defense of disgraced conspiracy theorist Alex Jones during an event held by a shadowy dark money–backed conservative network, according to video obtained by ProPublica.

In 2021, when Vance had just entered the race to replace Ohio Senator Rob Portman, he spoke at a closed-door event hosted by the secretive Teneo Network, an organization backed by conservative billionaire Leonard Leo.

Leo, who is the co-chairman of the Federalist Society, and single-handedly responsible for installing the conservative majority in the U.S. Supreme Court, tracelessly infuses hundreds of millions of dollars into the conservative legal movement every year. With the Teneo Network, Leo said he hoped to create “networks of conservatives that can roll back” liberal influence in all spheres of life, including business, media, and entertainment, according to an informational video about the group obtained by ProPublica.

Vance joined the network in 2018, years before he would run for office. At the time, he was a bestselling author running a nonprofit and investment fund.

During his speech at Teneo’s 2021 Retreat, Vance tried to explain his defense of Jones, the right-wing podcaster and supplement pusher who infamously insisted that the Sandy Hook massacre of children was a hoax. Vance had recently sparked a tidal wave of backlash after he tweeted that Jones was more reliable than MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow.

In front of the audience, Vance tried to defend himself, saying he was “just trolling,” before walking back his denial to insist “that doesn’t mean what I said is in any way untrue.”

Vance explained that it was important to “have a little fun” when you might end up as a political prisoner in your own country. “It’s OK to troll when you make and speak fundamental truths. But, look, I do think what I said was correct,” he said.

“If you listen to Rachel Maddow every night, the basic worldview that you have is that MAGA grandmas who have family dinners on Sunday and bake apple pies for their family are about to start a violent insurrection against this country,” said Vance. “But if you listen to Alex Jones every day, you would believe that a transnational financial elite controls things in our country, that they hate our society, and oh, by the way, a lot of them are probably sex perverts too.”

“Sorry, ladies and gentlemen, that’s actually a hell of a lot more true than Rachel Maddow’s view of society,” said Vance.

Vance urged conservatives to listen to conspiracists and ignore the baseless, dangerous claims they make. He used himself as an example. “I believe the devil is real and that he works terrible things in our society,” he said. “That’s a crazy conspiracy theory to a lot of very well-educated people in this country right now.”

“A lot of the things that are ultimately gonna get revealed as truths are gonna be advocated originally by crazy people. It doesn’t mean you have to be best friends with them,” Vance said, adding that conservatives should stand up for “nonconventional people.”

Vance has a pretty solid track record of ignoring the more heinous things his buddies say. In 2022, the soon-to-be senator gave a friendly 90-minute interview with right-wing activist Jack Murphy, who had once claimed that “feminists need rape,” according to Mother Jones. And of course, there’s his newfound support for Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump, whom Vance once called “America’s Hitler.”

House Democrats are raising objections to the Democratic National Committee’s plan to nominate Biden via a “virtual roll call” vote weeks before the party’s August convention.

The DNC initially turned to the pre-convention virtual roll call to work around an Ohio requirement that parties’ candidates be certified 90 days before the general election. The issue was averted as Ohio passed legislation extending the deadline, but the DNC is poised to move forward with the virtual roll call nonetheless.

A drafted letter by dozens of House Democrats calls this a “terrible idea.”

According to Politico, the letter, authored by House Democrats who span the “spectrum of views” regarding Biden remaining in the race, says, “There is no legal justification for this extraordinary and unprecedented action which would effectively accelerate the nomination process by nearly a month.”

The authors say the move would “stifl[e] debate” by “prematurely shutting down any possible change in the Democratic ticket,” and implore the party to instead “nominate its presidential ticket at the Democratic National Convention, in regular order, as we always have.”

Representative Jared Huffman, who reportedly circulated the letter, told Politico that the DNC sees the virtual roll call vote as “a clever way to lock down debate and I guess by dint of sheer force, achieve unity, but it doesn’t work that way.” Axios reports that many Democratic lawmakers and aides intend to sign on to it, with one House Democrat saying that “the ‘replace Biden’ movement is back.”

The letter represents the chorus of Democratic critics of Biden crescendoing again, after the assassination attempt against Trump briefly superseded conversations about Biden’s electability or lack thereof. Dissatisfaction with Biden remains widespread among Democrats; a recent NBC News poll reports that more than 60 percent of blue voters would prefer an alternative to Biden, whose nomination is now all but inevitable.

We will soon see whether the DNC will heed House Democrats’ exhortations to delay Biden’s nomination until the convention, as Politico reports that the rules committee is “expected to vote on setting up the rules and dates for a virtual roll call vote” at a meeting set for Friday.

Alex Jones is back to hocking conspiracies, and this time his attention is toward the attempted assassination of Donald Trump—which, according to the notoriously factless conspiracy theorist, was a ploy by the Democratic establishment to nix the presumptive GOP presidential candidate from the race.

“Biden’s puppet masters ran the attack on Trump and they will do it again,” Jones wrote Tuesday on X, formerly Twitter. “The secret service now admits the assassin was on the roof for 26 minutes. The secret service has a long history of deliberate stand downs. Think Dallas Texas 1963 and go from there …”

There is little to no evidence that the shooter, Thomas Matthew Crooks, was on the rooftop for 26 minutes—or that the Secret Service had historically “deliberately” stood down in order to allow a political operative to get shot, though Jones’s callback to Dallas in 1963 suggests that he believes the Secret Service allowed President John F. Kennedy to be assassinated.

So far, little is understood about Crooks or his motives, save that he was a 20-year-old white male from Bethel, Pennsylvania. Former classmates described him as a bullied “loner” and “outcast” with a penchant for wearing military and hunting clothes, and who was by all measures “definitely conservative.” The FBI announced on Monday that forensic experts with the agency had infiltrated Crooks’s cell phone and were examining his digital footprint, though they have not yet released their findings.

Speaking with CNN on Monday, Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas conceded that Crooks never should have reached that vantage point on a warehouse roof, just 430 feet away from the former president.

“We are speaking of a failure,” Mayorkas told CNN. “We are going to analyze through an independent review how that occurred, why it occurred, and make recommendations and findings to make sure it doesn’t happen again.”

U.S. Secret Service Director Kimberly Cheatle described the error as “unacceptable” in an interview with ABC News, noting that the “buck stops with me.”

Jones has lost practically everything to his incessant need for the spotlight. In 2017, the InfoWars host lost primary custody of his children in a case that pinned him as a “cult leader” on an online conspiracy network. In 2022, Jones lost a defamation case brought by the families of the children killed in the Sandy Hook Elementary School massacre, who argued that Jones had caused them irreparable harm by baselessly claiming to his far-right followers the shooting was a “hoax.” That case cost the right-wing conspiracy theorist $1.5 billion and forced Jones into bankruptcy months later. He has since lost his stake in his media company, Free Speech Systems, and has been court-ordered to liquidate all of his assets in order to cover the tremendous damages.

After Donald Trump selected J.D. Vance for his running mate in 2024, more and more of his previous gripes with Trump keep popping up, much to the Republican Party’s dismay.

In two 2016 audios uncovered by CNN’s Andy Kaczynski, Vance appeared on a podcast to promote his book The Hillbilly Elegy and argued that Trump is a fraud who preyed on white voters’ fears to achieve victory.

“I don’t think he actually cares about folks,” said Vance on The Matt Jones Podcast in August 2016. “I think I’m going to vote third party because I can’t stomach Trump. I think that he’s noxious and is leading the white working class to a very dark place,” he told NPR that same month.

Vance criticized Trump throughout his press tours at the time. “I’m definitely not gonna vote for Trump because I think that he’s projecting very complex problems onto simple villains,” Vance told CNN’s Jake Tapper before the 2016 election. “Trump makes people I care about afraid. Immigrants, Muslims, etc. Because of this I find him reprehensible. God wants better of us,” he wrote in October 2016.

Vance built his early political brand on being a “Never Trump” Republican, and the receipts show it. He called Trump a total fraud in public and asked if Trump may be “America’s Hitler” in private. Before the election, in a since-deleted tweet, Vance claimed he would be writing in Evan McMullin, a former CIA officer who ran as an independent. In 2018, he revealed that he did in fact vote for a third-party candidate in 2016.

Since winning his Senate seat in 2022 with Trump’s backing, Vance has changed his tune, deleted tweets, and retracted his negative statements about the former president.

Ever since talk began that Vance could be on the list for vice president, he’s been sucking up to Trump and denouncing his previous views. “He was a great president,” said Vance, who didn’t vote for him, “and it’s one of the reasons why I’m working so hard to make sure he gets a second term.”

Judge Aileen Cannon’s decision to toss out Donald Trump’s classified documents case by ruling special counsel Jack Smith’s appointment unconstitutional flies in the face of legal precedent, and the law itself, according to a former federal solicitor.

Neal Katyal, who while serving as acting solicitor general helped draft the Department of Justice’s regulations for installing special counsels, challenged the Trump-appointed judge’s ruling in a New York Times op-ed Tuesday. He slammed Cannon’s claim that no congressional law authorized the special counsel’s appointment as “palpably false.”

Cannon’s decision “is legally unsupported, ignores decades of precedent and is deeply dangerous,” Katyal said, describing her actions as “highly erratic.”

Katyal argued that the regulations on special counsel appointments were drafted under specific congressional laws. In particular, Katyal referred to U.S. Code 28 Section 515, which grants the attorney general, in this case Merrick Garland, the power to commission attorneys “specially retained under authority of the Department of Justice” as “special assistant[s] to the attorney general or special attorney[s].”

The same law also states that those attorneys can then “conduct any kind of legal proceeding, civil or criminal,” that other U.S. attorneys are “authorized by law to conduct,” and Section 533 permits the attorney general to commission officials “to detect and prosecute crimes against the United States.”

“These sections were specifically cited when Attorney General Merrick Garland appointed Mr. Smith as a special counsel. If Congress doesn’t like these laws, it can repeal them. But until then, the law is the law,” wrote Katyal.

Katyal wrote that when he proposed new regulations on appointing special counsels to Capitol Hill in 1999, not a single lawmaker challenged the legality of the new rules. Regulation 28 CFR 600 would come to replace the expired Independent Counsel Act with the Office of Special Counsel.

In her ruling, Cannon referred to the expired Independent Counsel Act as the basis for her decision, claiming that the Department of Justice had appointed Smith under the since-defunct provision.

Katyal also said that Cannon’s ruling went against the Supreme Court precedent set in United States v. Nixon, which affirmed the process of appointing the special counsel under both Section 515 and 533.

“Congress has vested in the Attorney General the power to conduct the criminal litigation of the United States Government,” wrote Justice Warren Earl Burger in the majority opinion. “It has also vested in him the power to appoint subordinate officers to assist him in the discharge of his duties.

“Acting pursuant to those statutes, the Attorney General has delegated the authority to represent the United States in these particular matters to a Special Prosecutor with unique authority and tenure,” Burger wrote.

According to Katyal, Cannon attempted to dismiss this ruling as “dicta” because she deemed it irrelevant to the holding of the case. She did, however, manage to cite Justice Clarence Thomas’s solo concurrence in Trump’s immunity case several times. Thomas had suggested in one line that “if there is no law establishing the office that the Special Counsel occupies, then he cannot proceed with this prosecution.”

New Jersey Senator Bob Menendez was found guilty on all counts Tuesday in a sprawling, nine-week trial that charged the 70-year-old Senate Foreign Relations Committee chairman for accepting envelopes of cash and gold bars as bribes while acting as a middle man between local real estate moguls and foreign governments.

The New Jersey Democrat and his wife were accused last year of acting as foreign agents for Egypt, taking hundreds of thousands of dollars’ worth of flashy gifts in exchange for Menendez’s “power and influence to protect and enrich” the businessmen and government of Egypt.

In a superseding indictment filed in January, Menendez was also accused of other corruption-related charges, including allegedly taking bribes from Qatar in an attempt to help a New Jersey real estate developer secure a multimillion-dollar investment from a company tied to the Middle Eastern country and collecting lavish gifts in exchange for his handiwork.

Evidence in the trial included a set of gold bars stamped with the name “Menendez,” with serial numbers matching those reportedly owned by one of the senator’s alleged bribers, New Jersey real estate tycoon Fred Daibes.

Menendez had appeared hopeful Monday before the verdict was delivered.

“It’s obvious that the government’s case is not as simple as they made it to be,” Menendez told the Associated Press from outside the courthouse. “It’s not as simple as they made it to be. The jury’s finding that out.”

Menendez had refused to resign from the race for his Senate seat, but left the door open to run for reelection as an independent candidate. Tuesday’s verdict potentially pulls the plug on any future chances Menendez has at winning reelection in November.

But the convicted lawmaker’s opponents weren’t celebrating the news.

“This is a sad and somber day for New Jersey and our country,” wrote Representative Andy Kim, the Democratic candidate running for Menendez’s seat, in a statement. “Our public servants should work for the people, and today we saw the people judge Senator Menendez as guilty and unfit to serve.

“I called on Senator Menendez to step down when these charges were first made public, and now that he has been found guilty, I believe the only course of action for him is to resign his seat immediately,” Kim continued. “The people of New Jersey deserve better.”

This story has been updated.

Shortly after the attempted assassination on Donald Trump, creepy tech bros and Tucker Carlson campaigned for J.D. Vance to be Trump’s pick for vice president.

According to Axios, former Fox News host Tucker Carlson and billionaires Elon Musk and David Sacks all began a “secret lobbying campaign,” which involved calling Trump to secure Vance’s position as next in line in case there was another attack on Trump’s life.

Carlson told Axios he backed Vance because he was the only top contender that “doesn’t secretly hate Trump, as all the rest of them do. He fundamentally agrees with Trump.” Carlson also noted that the two shared the same values on cutting aid for Ukraine. According to The New York Times, Carlson dissuaded Trump from considering Marco Rubio or other “neocons” aligned with the Fox News ecosystem.

Perhaps the secret lobbying campaign by tech billionaires isn’t a huge surprise. Three years ago, Trump met with Vance for the first time, as he was shepherded by billionaire venture capitalist Peter Thiel. Despite Vance’s working-class facade, he is a former venture capitalist with strong relationships to those in Silicon Valley. According to Trump-world insiders, Vance’s tech and finance-world connections could also open up doors for GOP fundraising, sweetening the deal.

It seems like that promise is already coming true as the tech bros and crypto-fascists are lining up behind the Trump-Vance ticket. On Monday, The Wall Street Journal reported that Musk plans to donate $45 million per month to the pro-Trump America PAC, and right-wing tech-moguls Marc Andreesen and Ben Horowitz are pledging to donate as well.

With Trump’s pick of Vance, the growing reactionary tech movement may have secured a seat at the table.

Conservatives seemingly had no problem tapping someone with a history of covering up sexual abuse scandals to deliver the opening remarks at the Republican National Convention.

During the opening prayer Monday night, Archbishop of Milwaukee Jerome Listecki reminded the conference to pray for the “wisdom” to place the nation “above personal interest” and to “respect justice” and “equality before the law.” But that wasn’t always the spiritual leader’s prerogative.

Fourteen years ago, Listecki was caught in the midst of a cover-up within the church, with local outlets underlining how far he had gone to thwart investigations of priests involved in the Catholic Church’s child sex abuse scandal, and how he had even permitted some of the accused—and charged—church leaders to remain in leadership positions.

In 2010, the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel reported that Listecki claimed there wasn’t enough evidence to conduct a church investigation into a La Crosse-area priest who had reportedly been following little boys into water park restrooms—though there was apparently plenty of evidence to criminally investigate that priest, as he was later charged with possession of child pornography.

That same year, Listecki reportedly allowed two retired clergy members who had played prominent roles in the national sex abuse cover-up—Rembert Weakland of Milwaukee and Daniel Pilarczyk of Cincinnati—to lead local liturgies.

When pressed by the Wisconsin Radio Network on why he permitted the members’ continued involvement in the church, Listecki said that Weakland, who had admitted to concealing the rape and molestation of children, should still be celebrated despite being a “lightning rod” within the religious institution.

“Having said that, you know you do talk to some people who talk about some of the good things that he has done,” Listecki told the radio news outlet. “Now, certainly, those good things, a pall is cast upon them because of the direction and leadership he’s given in this area.”

Also in 2010, Listecki took the cover-up a step further, opposing legislation that would have lifted the statute of limitations on sex abuse crimes. He alleged that doing so would bankrupt the Archdiocese of Milwaukee.

“This bill will have the effect of doing something that everyone will go out of their way to tell you they don’t want it to do—that is, targeting the Catholic Church,” Listecki said at a public hearing before the state Senate Judiciary Committee that year, according to the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel.

A top official with Project 2025 has jumped in on Donald Trump’s effort to look like he’s not at all affiliated with the fascistic blueprint for his potential second term in the White House. Too bad for them, they already said the exact opposite.

Last week, Donald Trump tried desperately to distance himself from Project 2025 after a particularly bloodthirsty comment from Kevin Roberts, the president of the Heritage Foundation, the think tank behind the plan. Now it seems that the project is taking its lead from Trump. But it’s less than convincing.

Paul Dans, the director of Project 2025, worked overtime Monday to distance his brainchild from the former president it was designed for.

“What Democrats [have] said about Project 2025 is probably the greatest misinformation campaign since, I don’t know, the Russia hoax,” Dans said, claiming that Democrats “move from hoax to hoax,” according to Rolling Stone.

“Somehow that whole squad put all the marbles in vilifying Project 2025, and then making this fake attachment to President Trump,” he said. Dans previously served in the Trump administration as the chief of staff at the U.S. Office of Personnel Management.

The so-called “fake attachment” to Trump that Dans is complaining about must’ve at one point seemed real to him, as Dans previously touted the project’s connection to the former president during a radio interview.

On a May 2023 episode of the We the People Convention podcast, Dans boasted about having “great relationships” with Trump and other Republicans, according to Media Matters. Dans explained that Project 2025 focused on a presidential transition team, adding, “So ultimately, yes. I think, you know, President Trump’s very bought in with this.”

While at the time, Dans described the project as being “candidate neutral,” just last month he also called Project 2025 an “instruction manual” for a second Trump presidency. In May, he said he thought Trump would likely “adopt” many of the ideas in the lengthy mandate, which explains how to replace the administrative state with Trump loyalists, among other things.

Trump’s hopes of distancing himself from the plan is about to get a whole lot harder, with the announcement that he’s tapped Ohio Senator J.D. Vance to be his running mate. Not only does Vance have Kevin Roberts, the head of the Heritage Foundation, fawning over him, he’s also said that Project 2025 has “some good ideas in there.” It makes sense, because Vance pitched the same purge of civil servants in 2022, arguing that Trump should defy the law, if necessary, to “deconstruct the administrative state.”

Elon Musk plans to donate $45 million per month to the nascent pro-Trump America PAC, The Wall Street Journal reported on Monday.

The super PAC, formed in May, has already received millions in donations from tech giants and Musk orbiters using their fortunes to influence the democratic process in Trump’s favor in 2024. The Wall Street Journal reported that the PAC “had $8.75 million in contributions for the three-month period ending on June 30,” including from former Tesla board member Antonio Gracias, Cameron and Tyler Winklevoss, and Palantir co-founder Joe Lonsdale.

While Musk had not donated to America PAC as of June, he intends to begin the monthly donations in July, according to those familiar with the matter.

In March, Musk wrote on X, “I am not donating money to either candidate for US President.” But Musk’s political beliefs have taken a yearslong turn toward right-wing extremism, and in recent months, he has reportedly grown closer to Trump. Last week, he endorsed Trump after the assassination attempt against him and excoriated The New York Times for daring to run an op-ed critical of the presidential candidate after the shooting.

Musk has denied The Wall Street Journal’s reporting, posting a meme on X deeming the story fake news. Shortly after, however, he responded in the affirmative to a tweet saying, “Elon Musk went from being an Obama voter to pledging $180 million to elect DJT. The woke left really f*cked up. Badly.”

The details of the reporting on Musk and America PAC offer dizzying reminders of the vast power the superwealthy wield in our system of government—and how a party making increasing strides to appear populist of late happily benefits from these elites’ influence. Stressing the dire need for campaign finance reform, Senator Bernie Sanders responded to the story on X, writing, “This is oligarchy: a government of the billionaires, by the billionaires, and for the billionaires.”