AOC Is Gunning for a Powerful Committee Spot

New York Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez is on the rise.

The progressive breakout began notifying her colleagues Thursday that she intends to run for ranking member on the Committee on Oversight and Accountability, the key investigative arm of the legislature and one of the most influential positions in the House.

At least three lawmakers who had discussions with Ocasio-Cortez confirmed the bid, reported NBC News. The 35-year-old currently serves as the vice ranking member on the committee.

Her race, which pits her against a senior member of the committee—Virginia Representative Gerry Connolly—will serve as a measure of Democratic priorities in the wake of a brutal November election, as the caucus weighs whether to continue to reward and back its longtime leaders or lean into its up-and-coming changemakers.

Fellow progressives are already endorsing her for the job. In an interview with NBC News, Representative Ro Khanna described Ocasio-Cortez as “very collaborative” and someone who “helps lift up all members.”

“She has been so passionate about the work of this committee for two years as vice chair, and we need progressives moving into leadership in our Congress and country to enact a working-class agenda,” Khanna told the network. “I’m all in for her.”

The top spot became an open race after Maryland Representative Jamie Raskin challenged New York Representative Jerry Nadler to become the top Democrat on the Judiciary Committee. In a letter to his colleagues announcing his candidacy, Raskin warned that the next four years under Donald Trump would be “the fight of our lives,” pointing to the incoming Republican trifecta as well as a “complicit Supreme Court waiting in the wings” and a “dominant media propaganda system parroting all the lies.

“This is where we will wage our front-line defense of the freedoms and rights of the people, the integrity of the Department of Justice and the FBI, and the security of our most precious birthright possessions: the Constitution and the Bill of Rights, the rule of law, and democracy itself,” Raskin wrote, referring to the House Judiciary Committee.

On Wednesday, Nadler bowed out of the race, caving to internal party pressures that demanded a younger face for the coveted position. His exit came with a full endorsement of Raskin, 61, who will effectively waltz into the position in a race with no other challengers.

Pete Hegseth’s lawyer is resorting to threats to help his client’s nomination to secretary of defense.

Tim Parlatore told CNN’s Kaitlan Collins Thursday night that the sexual misconduct allegations against the former Fox & Friends Weekend host were “extortion,” in his opinion.

“Quite frankly, with the violation of the [confidential settlement] agreement, if he is not confirmed as the secretary of defense, we may still bring a civil extortion claim against her,” Parlatore said.

Parlatore said that the agreement between Hegseth and his accuser was not a nondisclosure agreement but a confidential settlement between the two parties, and claimed that the accuser and one of her friends had violated it. The lawyer added that Hegseth’s accuser was free to speak publicly but faced the risk of a defamation lawsuit.

This flies in the face of what Republican senators have been saying in recent days to defend Hegseth. Senators Lindsey Graham and Rick Scott each attacked the credibility of Hegseth’s accuser for remaining anonymous and not coming forward. Now it appears that she will be hit with a defamation lawsuit and branded as an extortionist if she starts speaking publicly.

Kevin Roberts, president of the powerful Heritage Foundation and architect of the Project 2025 manifesto, is throwing his organization’s heft (and cash) behind Donald Trump’s nominee. However, the president-elect is reportedly souring on Hegseth, and last month, his team began compiling a list of alternative candidates for secretary of defense. With Hegseth’s nomination reportedly hanging on by a thread, Trump might have to deal with the same embarrassment he faced with Matt Gaetz.

The crypto industry is about to have another friend inside the White House.

In a post on Truth Social, Donald Trump announced the appointment of Paypal COO David Sacks to a new position with an influential-sounding title: “White House A.I. & Crypto Czar.”

“In this important role, David will guide policy for the Administration in Artificial Intelligence and Cryptocurrency, two areas critical to the future of American competitiveness,” Trump wrote late Thursday. “David will focus on making America the clear global leader in both areas. He will safeguard Free Speech online, and steer us away from Big Tech bias and censorship. He will work on a legal framework so the Crypto industry has the clarity it has been asking for, and can thrive in the U.S. David will also lead the Presidential Council of Advisors for Science and Technology.”

Trump continued to pile on the praise for his prominent Silicon Valley backer in a follow-up post, promising that the tech executive has the “knowledge, business experience, intelligence, and pragmatism to MAKE AMERICA GREAT in these two critical technologies.”

The new role—and his appointment of a longtime tech billionaire to initiate it—underscores Trump’s growing intent to leverage D.C. to the better benefit of Silicon Valley. A member of the “Paypal Mafia,” Sacks will be the latest associate of Peter Thiel to enter the echelons of the executive branch, following fellow Paypal co-founder Elon Musk and Vice President–elect JD Vance, who has had a long work history with the anti-tax billionaire. Trump has also tapped Thiel’s colleagues to run critical agencies: Jared Isaacman, who financed Musk’s SpaceX initiative, was nominated to run NASA earlier this week.

Sacks is a part of a contingent of tech bros, including Musk and Thiel, who have leveraged their immense wealth, power, and influence to unite conservatives and former leftists behind a cynical and conspiratorial reactionary vision against liberalism. As The New Republic’s Jacob Silverman noted in 2022, Sacks has spent years “quietly becoming the leading practitioner of a new right-wing sensibility that has emerged in the political realignments provoked by Trumpism and the pandemic.

“On foreign policy, it offers a blend of isolationism, Trumpist nationalism, suspicion of the deep state, and the anti-empire realism of John Mearsheimer,” Silverman wrote. “Domestically, the vision is more muddled, a series of angry poses, a politics of pique, much of it playing out on Twitter, Callin, YouTube, Rumble, Substack, and other online media, especially among people who may have once counted themselves on the left but now can’t countenance the sight of homeless encampments.”

But despite his political affinity for Trump’s politics, Sacks hasn’t always been on the president-elect’s side. In the immediate wake of January 6, the longtime Republican said on his podcast, All-In, that Trump was “clearly” responsible for the insurrection because “he is the one who put forth this theory that the election was stolen and was constantly repeating it for the last two months” and had “disqualified himself from being a candidate at a national level.”

“If you want to see this mob as a gun, I think he loaded the gun,” Sacks said at the time. “He pointed it in a certain direction, but did he tell them to storm the Capitol? No, not specifically. I think therefore it’d be a very hard case to prosecute, but I think, you know, prosecuting him in a court of law is sort of unnecessary and redundant. I mean, I think that in the eyes of the public, politically, he is—I think most see that he’s culpable.”

With Pete Hegseth’s nomination for secretary of defense is in trouble on Capitol Hill, he still has the support of a powerful conservative backer: Project 2025 architect and Heritage Foundation president Kevin Roberts.

Roberts said Thursday that his organization plans to spend $1 million to lobby senators unwilling to back the former Fox News personality accused of sexual assault.

“It’ll be messaging right now with their constituents about how out of step they are with the Trump agenda,” Roberts told the Associated Press in an interview, saying that “the establishment” was behind the opposition to Hegseth.

The conservative think tank also has a lot of supporters in the Republican Party, and Roberts’s move could sway Republican senators who are put off by Hegseth’s personal views and the allegations against him.

During his presidential campaign, Donald Trump repeatedly denied that he had anything to do with the conservative Project 2025 manifesto, despite his running mate JD Vance and multiple campaign staffers having links to the project. Since he won the election, however, Trump has made staff picks with close ties to the policy plan, and his allies have spoken openly about adopting some of its policy proposals, such as eliminating the Department of Education.

If Roberts is openly supporting Hegseth and backing up lobbying efforts with cash, it could signal that Trump’s nominee is Project 2025–approved. It may also be an effort to curry favor with the president-elect in exchange for something else.

With Trump no longer in campaign mode, his administration’s true motives and affiliations no longer have to be hidden or explained away. Likewise, the unpopular people and organizations who support him don’t have to keep their distance. Project 2025 and its leaders are now operating openly to defend the president-elect in exchange for being able to implement their horrific agenda for America.

Tulsi Gabbard’s PAC spent thousands in political funds to help get her personal manifesto on The New York Times bestseller list, Forbes reported Thursday.

Gabbard founded the leadership PAC Defend Freedom, Inc., in March. Although it initially reported having no cash on hand, the PAC would go on to spend $33,000 of its donors’ funds on a bunch of copies of Gabbard’s book.

The book, For Love of Country: Leave the Democrat Party Behind, debuted in fourth place on The New York Times hardcover nonfiction bestseller list during the week of May 4, but it was flagged for bulk purchases, as large orders might have affected its ranking. The book stayed on the list for one more week.

At least some of those bulk purchases came from Gabbard’s PAC: On July 11, Defend Freedom made the first of four disbursements for “printing” to BulkBooks, a book wholesaler based in Franklin, Tennessee, that specializes in large orders. The disbursements totaled $33,000.

“For a limited time, Defend Freedom PAC supporters who gave $100 or more received Tulsi Gabbard’s NYT bestselling book For Love of Country,” Gabbard spokesperson Erika Tsuji confirmed.

Authors normally receive royalties for book copies purchased wholesale, which indicates that Gabbard profited personally from the bulk order (rather than if her PAC had requested copies from the publisher directly). Her spokesperson didn’t comment on this when asked over email.

While this is not illegal, it is shady. “She is not a federal candidate or an officeholder, so she is allowed to personally profit when her PAC buys her book with donors’ funds,” campaign finance attorney Brett Kappel explained to Forbes.

Gabbard has shifted hard from an edgy Democrat to an unflinching, QAnon-adjacent Donald Trump loyalist. This book, and the subsequent bestseller scam, is straight from her new alt-right grifter playbook.

Rudolph Giuliani is facing more legal action from two Georgia election workers who successfully sued him for defamation in December last year.

Ruby Freeman and her daughter Shaye Moss asked a New York federal judge Thursday to impose “severe” sanctions and hold the former Donald Trump lawyer and ex–New York City mayor in civil contempt after Giuliani failed to turn over discovery documents related to the seizure of his property to settle the defamation ruling against him.

Giuliani ignored an October 28 court order to turn over the documents within 14 days and then disregarded a November 22 court order specifying a mandatory four-day window to produce the documents. After the November 26 deadline came and went with no action from Giuliani, Freeman and Moss’s attorneys told the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York that “the time has come for Court to hold Mr. Giuliani in contempt for violating both the October 28 and November 22 Orders, and enter a contempt sanction it finds appropriate.”

The MAGA gadfly has desperately tried to delay and disregard the legal proceedings against him for falsely accusing Freeman and Moss of manipulating ballots during the 2020 presidential election in Georgia, resulting in Trump supporters sending the pair death threats, engaging in harassment, and protesting at their homes.

Last month, Giuliani even cited Trump’s upcoming inauguration in a motion to delay his trial, only to be denied by the judge, sending him into a pathetic rant.

“It’s punishment for being the one who revealed first Joe Biden’s 30-year criminality,” Giuliani whined at the time. “He’s been trying to torture me, stop me, take everything away from me since then.” It wasn’t clear if he was complaining about Biden or the judge in the case, Lewis J. Liman.

It’s unclear if Trump will bail out his former lawyer with a pardon, as the president-elect has already stiffed Giuliani on unpaid legal fees. Giuliani has already had to give up some of his prized possessions to Freeman and Moss, including luxury watches, a diamond ring, and a 1980 Mercedes-Benz. He also blew off another legal deadline in Washington, D.C., on Wednesday. If Giuliani is held in contempt, the next penalty he faces could be prison.

Senator Tommy Tuberville is willing to do anything he can to make Donald Trump’s transition easier, even if it means completely forgoing one of the most important parts of his job.

Tuberville told reporters from CNN Wednesday that the Senate didn’t need to complete the vetting processes for Cabinet confirmations because Trump already did such a great job of that, even using the controversial Pete Hegseth as an example. Tuberville went so far as to suggest that Democrats who were merely doing their research were actually attacking nominees.

“Who are we to say that [the Senate is] a better vetter and picker of people than Donald Trump?” Tuberville asked CNN’s Manu Raju.

“Advise and consent, that’s your job,” Raju correctly replied, referring to the power vested in the Senate to approve treaties and appointments. Tuberville replied that that was more the Democrats’ job.

“Donald Trump did all the vetting they needed to do on Pete Hegseth,” Tuberville continued. I just can’t believe we even have people on our side that are saying, ‘Well I’ve got to look at this, gotta look at that.’ What they’re doing is throwing rocks at Donald Trump.”

Numerous Republican senators have expressed discomfort over Hegseth, a Christian nationalist accused of rape, assault, and misconduct who is up for defense secretary.

It’s unsurprising that the same senator who couldn’t name the three branches of government has no qualms about shirking the basic constitutional responsibility of his position. If these confirmations are a MAGA loyalty test, Republicans like Tuberville are passing with flying colors.

Republicans in Congress are taking further steps to ignore Palestinians in the occupied West Bank and start referring to the territory by Israel’s name “Judea and Samaria.”

Senator Tom Cotton proposed a Senate bill Thursday that would eliminate federal use of the term “West Bank,” removing it from all official U.S. government documents. His measure matches a bill that was filed in the House in February by Republican Representatives Claudia Tenney, Randy Weber, and Anthony D’Esposito.

Cotton claims that Judea and Samaria is the historically accurate name for the territory, and asserts Israel’s claims over what is internationally recognized as occupied territory.

“The Jewish people’s legal and historic rights to Judea and Samaria goes back thousands of years. The U.S. should stop using the politically charged term West Bank to refer to the biblical heartland of Israel,” Cotton said in a statement.

“Politically charged” is quite the exaggeration from Cotton. The International Court of Justice ruled in July that Israel’s occupation of the West Bank is illegal under international law, calling into question their terminology for the territory. Since Israel began its occupation of Palestine in 1967 following the Six-Day War, Israel has built 160 settlements that house close to 700,000 Jews in the West Bank and East Jerusalem.

The Republican-sponsored bills seem to confirm speculation that Israel plans to annex the West Bank with U.S. support. Israel has embarked on a military campaign in the territory, killing nearly 1,000 Palestinians in the West Bank since 2022. Israeli settlers have attacked Palestinian residents in addition to Israeli military raids, and those assaults have increased since Hamas’s attack on Israel on October 7, 2023.

Prior to Israel’s war on Gaza over the past year, which has killed more than 45,000 Palestinians, 2023 was considered the deadliest year ever for Palestinian children, according to human rights groups, and that was due to violence in the West Bank. Republican pro-Israel megadonor Miriam Adelson reportedly donated more than $100 million to Donald Trump’s presidential campaign so that the president-elect would recognize Israeli annexation of the West Bank.

The Adelson family has long donated to Republicans, and Cotton has been a pro-Israel hawk for many years. The Arkansas senator is poised to take over the Senate Foreign Relations Committee chairmanship with his colleague Marco Rubio’s nomination for secretary of state. With Trump making no secret of his support for Israel, coupled with this proposed bill by Cotton, U.S. policy for the next four years appears to be unconditional support for Israel’s efforts to squash Palestinian self-determination.

Donald Trump is willing to go to absurd, cruel lengths to accomplish his sweeping deportation goals—even if it means sending immigrants back to random countries.

Trump and his circle have already begun a list of countries to deport immigrants to if their home countries refuse to accept them, including Turks and Caicos, the Bahamas, Panama, and Grenada, among others, NBC reported Thursday.

This means that thousands of people could be permanently displaced if the president-elect is able to go through with his “largest deportation operation in American history,” leaving immigrants in unfamiliar countries with uncertain futures. Trump also wants Mexico to accept non-Mexican immigrants.

Groups such as the ACLU fought Trump on this issue in his first term, and they are prepared to do so again. “We sued over this type of policy during the first Trump administration because it was illegal and put asylum-seekers at grave risk,” ACLU lawyer Lee Gelernt told NBC.

Spokespeople for Turks and Caicos, Grenada, and Mexico did not respond to NBC, while a spokesperson for Panama told the network, “The Panamanian government does not respond to assumptions and rumors. We cannot not speculate in this regard.”

The Bahamas, however, has already “reviewed and firmly rejected the plan,” the prime minister’s office said in a statement. This raises a key question: What will Trump do if none of his chosen countries agree to cooperate?

Regardless, the Trump team is determined to carry out this chaotic policy. “President Trump was given a mandate by the American people to stop the invasion of illegal immigrants, secure the border, and deport dangerous criminals and terrorists that make our communities less safe,” said spokesperson Karoline Leavitt. “He will deliver.”

Tulsi Gabbard’s ex-aides say that the former congresswoman, whom Donald Trump has nominated as the next director of national intelligence, used to regularly consume Russian state media.

ABC News, citing interviews with three of her former staffers, reported Thursday that Gabbard regularly read and shared articles from RT (formerly Russia Today), a state-run media outlet, even after being advised that RT wasn’t a credible source.

Gabbard has defended Russia at least since she represented Hawaii’s 2nd congressional district. In 2017, she sent a memo to her staff with her views on foreign policy, blaming the U.S. and NATO for provoking Russia and complaining about America’s “hostility towards Putin.”

“There certainly isn’t any guarantee to Putin that we won’t try to overthrow Russia’s government,” Gabbard wrote in the memo. “In fact, I’m pretty sure there are American politicians who would love to do that.”

In her 2020 run for president, she attacked the U.S. involvement in Syria’s civil war as a “regime change war” on Russia-backed Syrian President Bashar Al Assad. When Russia invaded Ukraine in 2022, Gabbard blamed Ukraine’s bid to join NATO, drawing the ire of America’s national security establishment. Gabbard, a lieutenant colonel in the U.S. Army Reserve, has never worked in intelligence, another obstacle to Senate confirmation.

As a result of her pro-Russia views, Republicans in the Senate say Gabbard might have the toughest path of Trump’s nominees to confirmation, even as his secretary of defense pick, Pete Hegseth, faces sexual assault allegations and his FBI pick, Kash Patel, expresses a desire to prosecute Trump’s enemies.

“Behind closed doors, people think she might be compromised. Like it’s not hyperbole,” one Republican Senate aide told The Hill. “There are members of our conference who think she’s a [Russian] asset.”

Trump has already had two of his nominees drop out: his attorney general pick, Matt Gaetz, and his pick to run the DEA, Chad Chronister. Hegseth is drawing more negative news attention each day, and Patel is not winning over many supporters with his open threats to go after the so-called “deep state.” For now, Gabbard has flown under the radar, but that seems to be changing.