Former Trump Lawyer Breaks Ranks and Cuts Deal in Fake Electors Case

Donald Trump’s former lawyer Jenna Ellis, who played an active role in his campaign’s attempts to use fake electors to overturn the 2020 presidential election results, is now cooperating with Arizona prosecutors in that state’s election fraud case.

Arizona Attorney General Kris Mayes announced Monday that Ellis had signed an agreement with the AG’s office to cooperate with their investigation in exchange for charges being dropped.

“This agreement represents a significant step forward in our case,” Mayes said in a statement. “I am grateful to Ms. Ellis for her cooperation in our investigation and prosecution. Her insights are invaluable and will greatly aid the State in proving its case in court.”

Previously, Ellis was one of 18 individuals, including Rudy Guliani, charged with trying to overturn Arizona’s election results. Ellis had been charged with nine felonies, including fraud, forgery, and conspiracy prior to the agreement. Ellis’s deal with prosecutors is going to be bad news for some of Trump’s biggest allies, both in the state of Arizona and nationally.

It’s the second such deal Ellis has struck in investigations over fake electors. In 2023, Ellis agreed to cooperate with Fulton County, Georgia, prosecutors, which led to her losing her law license in Colorado after pleading guilty to election fraud charges as part of the agreement. However, she still remains active in Republican politics, most recently complaining about the removal of strong anti-abortion language from the GOP platform at the Republican National Convention.

This story has been updated.

Nicknaming President Joe Biden “Sleepy Joe” doesn’t seem to be looking so good for Donald Trump now that he’s the old man in the race.

A Morning Consult poll published Monday revealed that voters are suddenly viewing Trump as the decrepit candidate after Biden dropped his campaign. Americans are apparently far more likely to describe Vice President Kamala Harris as healthy, mentally fit, and a strong leader than the 78-year-old Republican presidential nominee.

According to the poll, 71 percent of respondents agreed that Harris was “in good health,” while 52 percent said the same about Trump—6 percent fewer than believed the same about Trump when Biden was the presumptive Democratic nominee.

The number of respondents who thought that Trump was “mentally fit” for the job also dropped. Roughly 64 percent of respondents believed that Harris was mentally fit, while just 48 percent believed the same about Trump—a 5 percent drop from before Biden withdrew.

Meanwhile, the number of respondents who believed that Trump is too old for the job rose. Whereas just 12 percent of polled Americans believed that the 59-year-old vice president was too old to be president, 51 percent thought that Trump had aged out of the position—7 percent more than had previously felt the same when Biden was Trump’s opponent.

Voters also said they were more concerned about Trump’s erratic behavior worsening with age should he retake the White House in November. Roughly 82 percent of polled voters said that Trump’s “poor decision making” and “erratic behavior” was a major concern, while roughly three-quarters of polled respondents listed his inability to communicate effectively with the American public, U.S. officials, and foreign officials, as well as a weakened perception of strength on the international stage, as other points of “major concern.” Another 49 percent and 44 percent of polled Americans described the potential onset of illness and death as major concerns, respectively.

The conservative Supreme Court has surprisingly chosen not to help out their buddy Donald Trump for once.

On Monday, the high court declined to postpone Trump’s hush-money trial sentencing, after Missouri Attorney General Andrew Bailey tried to sue the state of New York to delay the legal proceedings. Bailey also sought to remove Trump’s gag order on claims that it violated the First Amendment rights of voters who could not hear the former president and convicted felon speak.

The case was a long-shot effort, but still, it is surprising given the Supreme Court’s decision to grant Trump near total immunity last month. The Supreme Court did not provide comment on their ruling.

Trump is scheduled to be sentenced on September 18. The former president’s gag order will also remain in place through his sentencing.

“Allowing Missouri to file this suit for such relief against New York would permit an extraordinary and dangerous end-run around former President Trump’s ongoing state court proceedings,” New York Attorney General Letitia James wrote in her brief.

Though the case by Bailey seemed unlikely to succeed, if the Supreme Court had ruled in Trump’s favor, it could have presented frightening ripple effects for a state to intervene in pending criminal cases in other states.

Bailey of Missouri has called the New York trial a “political witch hunt” that was “replete with legal error from the beginning.” In a statement on X on Monday, he declared he would fight on “against [Kamala Harris and Joe Biden’s] DOJ for coordinating the illicit prosecutions against President Trump.”

This story has been updated.

Republicans in Arizona who oppose Donald Trump are forming a new task force to reach out to other GOP voters in the swing state who feel alienated by the MAGA movement.

The Republican mayor of Mesa, John Giles, appeared at a press conference Monday to launch a new advisory committee to “engage Trump-skeptical Republican voters,” according to Harris’s campaign.

“I think the time has come for us as Arizona Republicans to admit the obvious, and to start saying the quiet part out loud, which is that our party’s nominee is not qualified for office,” Giles said, joined onstage by other Republicans.

Giles endorsed Harris over Trump last week in an opinion column in The Arizona Republic. “Now more than ever, we need leaders who will put country over party,” Giles wrote.

Former state Republican Representative Robin Shaw also voiced her support for Harris at the event Monday. “It is time to put partisan loyalties aside, and vote for the leadership that will truly represent who we want to be in the eyes of the world. Character matters,” Shaw said.

The event is part of Republicans for Harris, a new program announced Sunday by Harris’s presidential campaign. Similar events are scheduled to take place Monday in North Carolina and Pennsylvania.

The rollout of the “campaign within a campaign” seeking to court anti-Trump Republicans also included endorsements from 25 prominent GOP members from across the country, including former governors, lawmakers, and former Trump administration officials.

Former Trump press secretary Stephanie Grisham, who is also from Arizona, said she would be backing Harris.

“I might not agree with Vice President Kamala Harris on everything, but I know that she will fight for our freedom, protect our democracy and represent America with honor and dignity on the world stage,” Grisham said in a statement.

Harris’s campaign is hoping to capture moderate Republicans, whom Trump has actively sought to remove from his party. Trump also previously claimed that his party is probably 100 percent MAGA, but that’s obviously not the case.

In a swing state such as Arizona, that difference could prove to be important.

Democrat Ruben Gallego, who is running against MAGA Republican Kari Lake in Arizona’s Senate race, released a list of 39 prominent Arizona Republican and independent voters who had pledged to support him. Several included on the list were former aides to the late Senator John McCain, an outspoken Trump critic. Giles also announced his support of Gallego.

“I cannot in good conscience stand on the sidelines while extremists like Kari Lake, who have hijacked our party for the sake of personal gain, undermine the very fabric of what makes America exceptional,” said Giles in a statement released alongside Gallego’s list of endorsements.

A new poll released Monday—seemingly the first large-sample poll of Latinos since Harris became the presumptive Democratic nominee—found that Harris holds a nearly 14-point lead over Trump among Hispanics in Arizona.

As Kamala Harris continues to out-fundraise Donald Trump by double margins and Trump continues to pay millions in legal fees, the former president has to find some way to line his pockets.

Trump, therefore, is hiking the membership fee of his Mar-a-Lago club to $1 million per person, from a previous rate of $700,000. The application for membership will open October 1, conveniently ahead of the 2024 election.

“Of course, the people who are most interested in this are going to look at it as a really sound investment. Why not pay a million dollars and talk to the president?” Robert Weissman of the nonprofit Public Citizen told The Guardian.

The price gouging was announced last month by Mar-a-Lago’s longtime manager Bernd Lembcke in an interview with Bloomberg. Only four spots are available, “so we are not desperate,” said Lembcke.

The list of 500 Mar-a-Lago members is not public, but at least eight past or present members of  Trump’s clubs were appointed to the Trump administration, USA Today reported in 2019, with some going on to become ambassadors to Romania, South Africa, Dominican Republic, and Hungary, despite some having no relevant experience.

In the interview with Bloomberg, Trump bragged that when he began at Mar-a-Lago, memberships were priced at only $25,000. If that were true, the rate would have increased 3,900 percent since 1985. Talk about inflation!

Representative Byron Donalds thinks that Vice President Kamala Harris’s racial identity is up for discussion and Donald Trump’s attacks on her race make total sense.

In an interview on ABC’s This Week With George Stephanopoulos on Sunday, Donalds called criticism of Trump for questioning Harris’s racial identity “a phony controversy.”

“I don’t really care, most people don’t, but if we’re going to be accurate, when Kamala Harris went into the United States Senate, it was [the Associated Press] that said she was the first Indian American United States senator. It was actually played up a lot,” Donalds said.

Stephanopoulos challenged the congressman.

“And you just repeated the slur again. If it doesn’t matter, why do you all keep questioning her identity? She’s always identified as a Black woman. She is biracial. She has a Jamaican father and Indian mother. She’s always identified as both. Why are you questioning that?” Stephanopoulos replied.

“There are a lot of people who are trying to figure this out, but again, that’s a side issue, not the main issue,” Donalds said, claiming the issue was being widely discussed on social media. Stephanopoulos interrupted and said over Daniels, “You just did it again. Why do you insist on questioning her racial identity?”

Donalds kept coming back to the issue, but Stephanopoulos kept calling him out on it.

“Every single time you repeat the slur,” Stephanopoulos said. “That’s exactly my point.”

Trump and his Republican allies continue to defend questioning Harris’s Black and Indian identities despite the fact that it makes them look bad and isn’t likely to win them any popular support. Even other Republicans think the attacks hurt Trump’s standing. Donalds himself has spearheaded events meant to draw Black support to the Trump campaign, only for them to fail badly. If he keeps defending Trump in this way, not only will Trump’s prospects be hurt, but his will be too.

Despite spending the better part of the last month aggressively distancing his campaign from Project 2025, Donald Trump will likely give a chief architect of the far-right policy blueprint a key role in his administration should he win in November.

Russell Vought “is likely” to be appointed to a high-ranking position in a second Trump administration, the Associated Press reported Monday. Vought, who ran Trump’s Office of Management and Budget from July 2020 to January 2021, has been working on a 180-day “transition playbook” to expedite Project 2025’s implementation into the federal government.

That position could be as major as managing Trump’s White House, as rumors swirl that Vought is in the running to be Trump’s chief of staff.

Project 2025 reflects Trump’s core political philosophy and has been boosted by key allies, including former advisers Stephen Miller and John McEntee. The 920-page Christian nationalist manifesto has advanced seemingly outrageous policy positions, including dismantling wholesale staples of the executive branch, such as the Department of Education. It also proposes revisiting federal approval of the abortion pill, a national ban on pornography, placing the Justice Department under the control of the president, slashing federal funds for climate change research in an effort to sideline mitigation efforts, and increasing funding for the U.S.-Mexico border wall.

On July 5, Trump claimed that he “knew nothing about Project 2025” and had “no idea who is behind it.”

“I disagree with some of the things they’re saying and some of the things they’re saying are absolutely ridiculous and abysmal,” he wrote on Truth Social. “Anything they do, I wish them luck, but I have nothing to do with them.”

Despite Vought’s apparent opportunities at the top of a possible second Trump administration, the Republican nominee’s message was a clear attempt to obscure the fact that his own super PACs have run ads highlighting Project 2025’s policy goals. And as much as Trump has tried to distance himself from the conservative apparatus, Project 2025 has been thoroughly involved in staffing a future Trump presidency: Heritage Foundation President Kevin Roberts has claimed the project has already “trained and vetted” more than 10,000 people to replace executive branch employees should the presumptive GOP presidential candidate win in November.

But they may have more on the way: in November, Trump allies claimed they were looking to install as many as 54,000 pre-vetted Trump loyalists to the executive branch via a “Schedule F” executive order.

“Never before has the entire movement … banded together to construct a comprehensive plan to deconstruct the out-of-touch and weaponized administrative state,” Project 2025’s director, Paul Dans, told Axios at the time.

Regardless, senior Trump advisers have warned news outlets against reporting on the connections, repeatedly insisting that Project 2025 has no affiliation or involvement with the Trump campaign, and have instead pointed to Agenda47 as Trump’s official platform. They do not offer an explanation as to why Agenda47 is almost identical to Project 2025.

Usha Vance tried to walk back her husband’s comments about “childless cat ladies,” but couldn’t quite explain away his misogynistic rhetoric.

In a taped interview that aired on Fox & Friends Monday, Vance spun her own toned-down interpretation of J.D. Vance calling Democrats “a bunch of childless cat ladies” who “want to make the rest of the country miserable, too.” She said that, unlike everyone else, she’d actually paid attention to the “context” of his quote.

“The reality is, he made a quip in service of making a point that he wanted to make that was substantive, and it had actual meaning,” said Usha.

“And I just wish sometimes that people would talk about those things, and that we would spend a lot less time just sort of going through this three-word phrase or that three-word phrase, because what he was really saying is that it can be really hard to be a parent in this country, and sometimes our policies are designed in a way that make it even harder,” Usha continued.

“And we should be asking ourselves, ‘Why is that true? What is it about our leadership and the way that they think about the world that makes it so hard sometimes for parents?’”

Despite what his wife insisted, Vance’s statement was not just a quip. It was specifically an attack on Democratic leaders without biological children. He even listed them.

“It’s just a basic fact—you look at Kamala Harris, Pete Buttigieg, AOC—the entire future of the Democrats is controlled by people without children,” Vance said in a 2021 interview with then-Fox News host Tucker Carlson. “And how does it make any sense that we’ve turned our country over to people who don’t really have a direct stake in it?”

Vance has since claimed that the remark was a “sarcastic comment” that was taken “out of context” by Democrats—but his claim was integral to a tax policy he once proposed that would levy higher taxes on childless adults to “reward the things that we think are good” and “punish the things that we think are bad.”

He also has a long documented history of disparaging people without children. During a podcast interview in 2020, Vance said childless people, particularly those in positions of leadership, were “more sociopathic” than people with children and were making the U.S. “less mentally stable.”

In response to those who were offended by her husband’s comment, Usha said J.D. would “never, ever, ever want to say something to hurt someone who was trying to have a family, who really was struggling with that.”

“Let’s try to look at the real conversation that he’s trying to have, and engage with it and understand, for those of us who do have families, for the many of us who want to have families and for whom it’s really hard. What can we do to make it better? What can we do to make it easier to live in 2024?” she said.

Meanwhile, last week, J.D. Vance skipped a Senate vote on a $78 billion tax-cut package, which included expansions to a $2,000 child tax credit that would have benefitted an estimated 16 million children.

Vance also previously voted against the Right to IVF Act in June, which would have protected accessibility and affordability to the service nationwide—and might’ve made the lives of Americans trying to have kids a lot easier.

Elon Musk may have denied reports that he would donate $45 million a month to Donald Trump’s campaign, but his social media platform appears to be helping the Republican presidential nominee in more covert ways.

Two deepfakes of Vice President Kamala Harris racked up hundreds of thousands of views on X (formerly Twitter) over the weekend, despite the fact that they appear to violate the website’s own terms of service.

One video, which altered footage of Harris and President Joe Biden on Friday during a historic prisoner swap with Russia, falsely depicted the Democratic presidential nominee as fumbling over her words and repeating the same phrases. Trump then shared the phony video on his account on his own social media platform, Truth Social, on Saturday with a caption claiming that Harris is “really DUMB” and “unable to speak properly without a teleprompter.”

“She has an extremely Low IQ, and our Country does not need someone who is unable to put two sentences together,” Trump wrote. “She can’t, and besides, we just got finished with that—His name is Sleepy Joe Biden!”

That clip was then recirculated by an account on X, which copies and pastes Trump’s Truth Social posts verbatim, garnering the attention of hundreds of thousands of viewers before X marked the content as manipulated media.

Trump continued to elevate that lie during a rally in Atlanta that evening, insisting that Harris had a “low IQ” and was like “Bernie Sanders but not as smart.”

Another deepfake of Harris gained momentum after Musk himself shared a doctored audio recording of Harris on July 27 in which she appears to say she’s “the ultimate diversity hire” and accuses anyone of not voting for her as “sexist” and “racist.”

“This is amazing,” Musk wrote alongside a laughing emoji, disseminating the fake audio to his 192 million followers with zero additional context.

That clip has since been viewed by more than 132 million X users, and has not yet been tagged as manipulated media, despite the original poster’s comment that the clip is a parody.

Elsewhere on X, the platform’s A.I. chatbot Grok has been spreading false claims about Harris. Grok stated that Harris had missed the ballot deadline in nine states, which is untrue. But that didn’t stop millions of people from sharing the claim. Five secretaries of state sent Musk a letter on Monday calling on him to “immediately implement changes” to stop Grok from sharing disinformation.

Robert F. Kennedy Jr. is in the news again for all of the wrong reasons: It was revealed on Sunday that he left a dead bear cub in New York’s Central Park 10 years ago.

The bizarre news has left people confused and shocked, especially since Kennedy himself admitted his involvement with the bear in an interview with comedian and actress Roseanne Barr that he posted online because The New Yorker was about to break the story.

Kennedy posted the interview with Barr on X (formerly Twitter), saying, “Looking forward to seeing how you spin this one” and tagging The New Yorker’s account.

Kennedy said he saw the dead bear on the side of the road while falconing in New York state one day, and had the idea to skin the bear and refrigerate the meat. So he put the bear in his van and continued falconing, before heading out to dinner and realizing that he had a flight to catch.

“And the bear was in my car, and I didn’t want to leave the bear in the car because that would have been bad,” he said. But then he remembered that he had an old bicycle in his car, and remembered that there had been a series of bicycle accidents in New York at the time.

“I said, Let’s go put the bear in Central Park, and we’ll make it look like it got hit by a bike,” Kennedy said.

At the time, the bear story quickly gained national attention, and in a bizarre twist, The New York Times’ 2014 story on the incident was written by Tatiana Schlossberg, a granddaughter of John F. Kennedy who was then interning at the newspaper.

After news that Kennedy was responsible for putting the bear carcass in the park broke, the internet had a field day with jokes and general bewilderment, helped along by a photo The New Yorker had of Kennedy with his fingers in the carcass’s mouth. He even joked to the magazine, “Maybe that’s where I got my brain worm.”

In his quixotic presidential campaign, revelations about Kennedy have ranged from his history of womanizing and sexual assault to his once having a worm in his brain. His conspiracy theories and opposition to vaccines have led to him falling out with the environmental movement, where he was once much admired for his activism. This latest piece of news is already prompting incredulity in media coverage and likely seals Kennedy’s fate as a losing weirdo third-party candidate.