Alina Habba Rushes to Brush off Tulsi Gabbard’s Syria Ties

Donald Trump’s lawyer Alina Habba is claiming that Tulsi Gabbard was never actually a fan of Syria’s fallen dictatorial regime—even though Gabbard publicly defended it.

During an appearance on Fox News Tuesday, host Laura Ingraham claimed that Trump’s nominee to be the next director of national intelligence had been wrongfully smeared as “an apologist” for Syrian President Bashar Al Assad, the dictator who fled Syria for Russia last week after rebels overtook Damascus.

“It looks like, both with Tulsi and with Pete Hegseth, that this stuff doesn’t seem to be sticking. Am I reading this right?” Ingraham asked, almost as if to clarify she’d gotten the Republican messaging right.

“Are you saying that perhaps they could create a dossier, or say that there’s a Russia-Russia hoax and continue it for years on end. I don’t believe it, Laura!” Habba deadpanned. “Yeah, no kidding. This is what they do when they’re desperate, we know this.”

Unfortunately for Habba, Gabbard, and the fate of U.S. foreign relations, Gabbard’s statements supporting Assad aren’t the invention of her critics or the liberal media.

In 2017, Gabbard, the then–Democratic Representative from Hawaii, met with Assad during a secretive four-day trip to Syria. She said she couldn’t turn down the opportunity to meet the leader responsible for the deaths of hundreds of thousands of Syrians.

“When the opportunity arose to meet with him, I did so because I felt that it’s important that if we profess to truly care about the Syrian people, about their suffering, then we’ve got to be able to meet with anyone that we need to if there is a possibility that we can achieve peace,” she told CNN’s Jake Tapper at the time. She also criticized Assad’s opposition, insisting that there were no moderate rebels left in the country.

“Let the Syrian people themselves determine their future, not the United States, not some foreign country,” Gabbard said.

During an appearance on MSNBC in February 2019, Gabbard proclaimed, “Assad is not the enemy of the United States because Syria does not pose a direct threat to the United States.”

Gabbard has been criticized for her coziness with a slew of autocratic leaders, including Assad, Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi, and Egypt’s Abdel Fattah Al Sisi. When Trump nominated her to become the next director of national intelligence, the reaction in Moscow was reportedly “gleeful.”

Habba went on to describe Gabbard and Hegseth, both of whom are unqualified and preposterous nominees in their own rights, as “really strong candidates, with really amazing backgrounds.”

Diversity, equity, and inclusion is one of the first items on the Trump Justice Department’s chopping block. And they’re willing to destroy the Civil Rights Division to do it.

Trump’s nominee to lead the key division, conservative San Francisco lawyer Harmeet Dhillon, is expected to do a clean sweep of DEI initiatives in universities, government jobs, and other public organizations, sources familiar with the plans told CNN. And if there was any doubt about the DOJ’s new priorities, Trump’s announcement of her nomination put that to rest.

“Harmeet has stood up consistently to protect our cherished Civil Liberties, including taking on Big Tech for censoring our Free Speech, representing Christians who were prevented from praying together during COVID, and suing corporations who use woke policies to discriminate against their workers,” Trump wrote on Truth Social Tuesday. “Harmeet is one of the top Election lawyers in the Country, fighting to ensure that all, and ONLY, legal votes are counted.”

Dhillon, yet another faithful MAGA soldier in the right’s broader culture war, will likely overturn Biden-era policies regarding transgender rights, critical race theory, police behavior, and voting.

Book banning, genitalia policing, and censoring American history to make white people feel better will now all be on the table for a Civil Rights Division that is historically known for fighting discrimination and enforcing protective policies like the Voting Rights Act. Under Biden, the Civil Rights Division opened civil rights investigations into countless police departments for brutality and discrimination. The Division usually quiets down during Republican presidencies, but under Trump, it could become an anti-wokeism attack dog.

“The Civil Rights Division’s historical mandate from the beginning was to help fight against othering, was to help fight against societal branding of certain Americans as other,” Justin Levitt, Obama’s deputy attorney general for the division, told CNN. “And I am concerned the prospective nominee’s approach has been to lean into branding people as other rather than fighting against it.”

Luigi Mangione’s notebook details his rationale for allegedly killing UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson last week.

Police have recovered the notebook, which details Mangione’s thought process behind shooting Thompson on a midtown Manhattan street as he walked to an investor’s conference.

“What do you do? You wack the CEO at the annual parasitic bean-counter convention. It’s targeted, precise, and doesn’t risk innocents,” one passage in the notebook said, according to two law enforcement officials who spoke with The New York Times.

Mangione allegedly concluded that using a bomb targeting Thompson “could kill innocents” and that a shooting would be more precise. The notebook also included a list of tasks to be completed before the killing and justifications for it, CNN reported, citing sources close to the case.

The notebook contained writings about the Unabomber, Ted Kaczynski, who killed three people and injured 23 others in a mail bombing campaign from 1978 to 1995 in the name of fighting environmental destruction and technological advancement. Mangione had given Kaczynski’s book a nearly four-star review in his (now removed) Goodreads account, attacking the bomber’s methods but appreciating his perspective.

“When all other forms of communication fail, violence is necessary to survive. You may not like his methods, but to see things from his perspective, it’s not terrorism, it’s war and revolution,” Mangione’s review said. “Fossil fuel companies actively suppress anything that stands in their way and within a generation or two, it will begin costing human lives by greater and greater magnitudes until the earth is just a flaming ball orbiting third from the sun.”

In his alleged manifesto, revealed Tuesday, Mangione stated that he was working alone and that planning the shooting was “fairly trivial,” and referenced the spiral notebook.

“This was fairly trivial: some elementary social engineering, basic CAD, a lot of patience. The spiral notebook, if present, has some straggling notes and To Do lists that illuminate the gist of it. My tech is pretty locked down because I work in engineering so probably not much info there,” he wrote.

“It is not an issue of awareness at this point, but clearly power games at play. Evidently I am the first to face it with such brutal honesty,” Mangione’s manifesto concluded.

It looks like bullying works. A frenzy of activity from the most determined MAGA acolytes appears to have moved the dial for some Republican senators who voiced their concerns about confirming television host Pete Hegseth to be the next secretary of defense.

During an interview Tuesday on Newsmax’s Rob Schmitt Tonight, Texas Senator John Cornyn said that he and his fellow Senate Republicans planned to confirm Hegseth.

“I’m supporting Pete’s confirmation, and I believe that ultimately he will be confirmed,” Cornyn said. When asked whether Hegseth had secured the “full support of the party,” Cornyn said he wasn’t aware of any Republican holdouts.

“I know of no one who said they will vote against him,” Cornyn explained, despite previous reports indicating at least six Republican senators opposed Hegseth.

This comes after weeks of MAGA losing it online over any Republican who has shown the slightest bit of reticence about Donald Trump’s pick to lead the Defense Department, or voiced their willingness to do their due diligence about the allegations against Hegseth, who is not only radically unqualified but also accused of excessive drinking and sexual assault.

“What a disgrace. If you’re a GOP Senator who voted for Lloyd Austin, but criticize @PeteHegseth, then maybe you’re in the wrong political party,” Donald Trump Jr. wrote in a post on X last week.

Elon Musk replied, “Yes.”

Iowa Senator Joni Ernst’s reluctance to readily back Trump’s bad pick led to an online firestorm of criticism from MAGA activists, who couldn’t seem to understand why a ​​retired Iowa National Guard lieutenant colonel would vote to confirm Democratic nominees but not a man who made disparaging remarks about how women should not serve combat roles in the military.

“Senator Joni Ernst (R) voted to confirm Lloyd Austin for Secretary of Defense who turned our military into a woke laughingstock but is refusing to say if she will confirm Pete Hegseth,” wrote LibsofTiktok, a prominent far-right troll account on X. “So she supports all this trash but doesn’t support a strong Conservative who will strengthen our military and hold the DC war machine accountable?”

LibsofTikTok was just one among a swarm of MAGA trolls attacking Ernst and threatening to mount challenges to unseat her in the next election.

As a top Trump ally anonymously told Fox News Digital, “It’s really this simple: If you oppose President Trump’s nominees, you oppose the Trump agenda and there will be a political price to pay for that. We are well aware that there are certain establishment Senators trying to tank the President’s nominees to make him look weak and damage him politically, and we’re just not going to allow that to happen.”

At the Reagan National Defense Forum on Saturday, Ernst expressed a desire to hear more from Hegseth.

“I am a survivor of sexual assault, so I have worked very heavily on sexual assault measures within the military, so I’d like to hear a little more about that, and I’d like to hear about the role of women in our great United States military,” she said.

And by Monday, after a second meeting with Hegseth, Ernst seemed to have changed her tune.

Without outright saying she’d support his nomination, Ernst said that she’d had “encouraging” conversations with Hegseth, and said she was supporting Hegseth “through the process,” according to Politico. She also said Hegseth was suddenly “very supportive of women in the military.”

Without holdouts such as Ernst, it’s more likely than not that Hegseth’s nomination will go through. How long he’ll last in Trump’s Cabinet is another matter entirely.

Just shy of 75 million Americans voted against a second Donald Trump presidency—but the Capitol police officers who stood between the forty-fifth president’s supporters and Congress on January 6, 2021, are especially aggrieved.

Former Capitol officer Harry Dunn told MSNBC on Tuesday that the MAGA leader’s election night win felt like a “dagger through the heart.”

“I honestly can say I wish I was surprised,” Dunn said. “This has been four years in the making.”

“I had the opportunity to speak to Michael Fanone today, and he said something, that what we spoke out for was just accountability,” Dunn continued, referring to a fellow ex-officer who defended Congress during the riot. “It was doing what’s right. To see that he skated that, and there are people in this country that prioritized him being president over seeking accountability, it was a dagger through the heart, to be very candid with you.

“Election Night it was like our spirits were crushed because we thought all of our efforts had been in vain,” he added.

Dunn, who served 15 years in the Capitol Police, has claimed that Trump’s supporters attacked him and shouted racial slurs at him on January 6. He was a witness for the House select committee on the January 6 attack, and testified in the seditious conspiracy trial of the Oath Keepers.

In the years following the attack, Dunn tried and failed to win one of Maryland’s House seats, but ultimately used his residual funds to continue his fight against Trump, starting a PAC in June to exclusively support candidates running against Trump’s acolytes.

Trump, meanwhile, has made his loyalty to his most violent and ardent followers clear: On Sunday, he reaffirmed his intentions to free the men and women who rioted through Congress in 2021 on his behalf, forcing the legislature to delay the certification of the presidential election results. In an interview with NBC News’s Meet the Press, the MAGA leader said he would act “very quickly” to release the January 6 defendents—as soon as his “first day” in office.

“They’ve been in there for years, and they’re in a filthy, disgusting place that shouldn’t even be allowed to be open,” Trump said.

He also invited one of the protesters to serve on his transition team.

Trump has nominated Kimberly Guilfoyle for U.S. ambassador to Greece, fueling rumors that her longtime engagement to his son has come to a public end.

“Today, I am very pleased to announce the appointment of Kimberly Guilfoyle as the United States Ambassador to Greece,” President-elect Trump wrote on X on Tuesday. “For many years, Kimberly has been a close friend and ally. Her extensive experience and leadership in law, media, and politics along with her sharp intellect make her supremely qualified to represent the United States, and safeguard its interests abroad.”

The timing of this announcement is intriguing, amid reports of Guilfoyle and Donald Trump Jr. breaking off their engagement. Guilfoyle, 55, and Trump Jr., 46,. have been together since around 2018. But recently, Trump Jr. has been spotted with well-known Palm Beach resident Bettina Anderson, 38, according to The Daily Mail. The outlet posted pictures of Trump Jr. and Anderson walking hand in hand together just hours before the announcement of Guilfoyle’s nomination for U.S. ambassador. This was the third time The Daily Mail had spotted the pair since September. And according to the tabloid, Guilfoyle has known for a while. 

“Kimberly either didn’t know about Bettina—or didn’t want to know. Did she hear whispers that Don Jr. was fooling around with someone else? Probably,” a friend of Guilfoyle told The Daily Mail. “She’s no fool but it’s easy to deceive yourself when you’re so committed to someone and believe he’s committed to you.”

Trump Jr. chimed in on the news of her nomination. “I am so proud of Kimberly. She loves America and she always has wanted to serve the country as an Ambassador,” he wrote on X. “She will be an amazing leader for America First.”

Guilfoyle is a former Fox News anchor who was formerly married to current California Governor Gavin Newsom and CEO Eric Villency before linking herself to Trump Jr. and his father in 2018, serving as a senior campaign adviser in 2020 and 2024. 

Guilfoyle, like many of Trump’s Cabinet nominees, is not without her fair share of controversy and allegations.  

She left Fox News in 2017 after she was accused of exposing herself and showing naked pictures of herself and the men she slept with to an assistant. Fox News settled with the assistant for $4 million. At a fundraiser in 2004, she said that her then husband, Newsom, had a large penis and pantomimed oral sex. In 2019, she offered an event’s top donor a lap dance, and in November 2020, she told fundraising event attendees that Trump Jr. liked it when she dressed up as a Dallas Cowboys cheerleader.

A bankruptcy court has rejected The Onion’s attempt to buy Alex Jones’s media platform Infowars, ruling Tuesday that the process lacked transparency. 

The decision came late at night after two days of proceedings in a Houston courtroom, where Judge Christopher Lopez said, “I don’t think anyone acted in bad faith here.”

“I think everyone was trying to buy an asset and put their best foot forward and play by the rules,” Lopez said, but added that he was troubled over the sealed bidding process overseen by court-appointed trustee Christopher Murray. 

The process “did not maximize value in any way, based on the record before me,” Lopez added. “I don’t think it was enough money.”

Jones celebrated the ruling, telling his followers on X, “A judge followed the law.” The  conspiracy theorist had been relentlessly whining about the sale to anyone who would listen, including right-wing personalities like Steve Bannon, and even had the support of tech billionaire Elon Musk, who sought to protect Infowars’ account on the X platform. 

Global Tetrahedron, which owns the satirical Onion, bought the conspiracy platform at a bankruptcy auction in November. Jones declared bankruptcy after losing a defamation lawsuit from the families of victims of the Sandy Hook school shooting, which his platform repeatedly suggested was staged in some way. 

The Onion’s bid to purchase Infowars was backed by the families of eight Sandy Hook victims, who “agreed to forgo a portion of their recovery to increase the overall value of The Onion’s bid, enabling its success,” according to a statement last month. One day after the auction, though, Lopez paused the acquisition amid complaints from a losing bidder, First United American Companies, which is connected to Jones’s nutritional supplements business.  

In a statement, The Onion’s CEO Ben Collins said it would continue to try and purchase Infowars.

“It is part of our larger mission to make a better, funnier internet, regardless of the outcome,” the statement said.

While many social media accounts belonging to Luigi Mangione, the man charged with murdering UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson, have been taken down since he was identified by police Monday, his X account remains online after a brief suspension.

Mangione’s X posts indicate engagement with center-right thought, self-improvement, and pop psychology and critiques of modern technology, consumption, and “wokeness.” Deleted posts from Mangione’s account reported by Business Insider Tuesday shed further light on the 26-year-old’s political views.

According to Business Insider, Mangione reshared a post in which Edward Snowden advocated for Robert F. Kennedy Jr. to be named the 2024 Democratic presidential nominee. “Darkly amusing to watch panicked dems suddenly searching under the couch cushions for a candidate when kennedy is literally standing right there,” Snowden posted in early July, as Biden faced increasing pressure to drop out amid concerns about his age and mental acuity.

Another post shows that Mangione viewed both Biden and Trump disapprovingly. “Both parties—Trump with his refusal to accept the results of an election, and Biden with his refusal to accept his age and step down—are simultaneously proving how desperately individuals will cling to power,” Mangione wrote in a reply to political writer and analyst Nate Silver, according to Business Insider.

Business Insider also uncovered that Mangione reposted a tweet from a self-described “fascist hipster,” which said: “My experience with the medical profession—and yours is probably similar—is that doctors are basically worthless unless you carefully manage them, and 2/3 of them are worthless even in that case.”

Mangione reportedly suffered from severe back pain and underwent back surgery. His manifesto, published by journalist Ken Klippenstein Tuesday afternoon, condemned companies that he said “abuse our country for immense profit because the American public has [allowed] them to get away with it.”

Luigi Mangione, the 26-year-old charged with the murder of UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson, was discovered with a brutal manifesto in which he admitted to the crime and apologized for the “strife” he caused, but stated plainly that “these parasites simply had it coming.”

Mangione was arrested Monday at a McDonalds in Altoona, Pennsylvania, carrying a 3-D printed gun similar to that used in the killing, several fake IDs, and the following manifesto. While sections of the manifesto have already been published, it was published in full on Tuesday by independent journalist Ken Klippenstein.

“To the Feds, I’ll keep this short, because I do respect what you do for our country. To save you a lengthy investigation, I state plainly that I wasn’t working with anyone,” Mangione wrote.

“This was fairly trivial: some elementary social engineering, basic CAD, a lot of patience. The spiral notebook, if present, has some straggling notes and To Do lists that illuminate the gist of it. My tech is pretty locked down because I work in engineering so probably not much info there,” he wrote.

“I do apologize for any strife of traumas but it had to be done,” Mangione wrote. “Frankly, these parasites simply had it coming.

“A reminder: the US has the #1 most expensive healthcare system in the world, yet we rank roughly #42 in life expectancy. United is the [indecipherable] largest company in the US by market cap, behind only Apple, Google, Walmart. It has grown and grown, but [h]as our life expectancy? No the reality is, these [indecipherable] have simply gotten too powerful, and they continue to abuse our country for immense profit because the American public has allowed them to get away with it,” he wrote.

“Obviously the problem is more complex, but I do not have space, and frankly I do not pretend to be the most qualified person to lay out the full argument. But many have illuminated the corruption and greed (e.g.: Rosenthal, Moore), decades ago and the problems simply remain,” Mangione wrote.

Mangione was likely referring to filmmaker Michael Moore, a staunch critic of the U.S. health care system who made the 2007 documentary Sicko, and Elizabeth Rosenthal, who wrote the 2017 book An American Sickness: How Healthcare Became Big Business and How You Can Take It Back.

The reality of the U.S. health care system is somehow even more grim than Mangione described. The U.S. was ranked sixtieth in the world for life expectancy per the most recent data from 2021, according to the U.S. News & World Report, and among its wealthy peer group in the OECD, the U.S. ranked 30 out of 38.

The U.S. does have the most expensive health care system in the world. Health care costs in the U.S. tallied up to an average of $12,318 per person in 2021, while in Germany, which has the second-most-expensive system, costs amounted to an average of $7,383 per person, according to the World Economic Forum.

“It is not an issue of awareness at this point, but clearly power games at play,” Mangione concluded. “Evidently I am the first to face it with such brutal honesty.”

Mangione appeared in Blair County Court in Hollidaysburg, Pennsylvania, Tuesday, where he was denied bail. On his way into the courtroom, Mangione could be heard shouting, “It’s completely out of touch and an insult to the intelligence of the American people and their lived experience!”

Mangione’s lawyer, Thomas Dickey, said that he would challenge his client’s extradition to New York.

Luigi Mangione, suspected of killing UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson last week, yelled out to the press and public as he was led to a Pennsylvania court Tuesday for his extradition hearing to New York.

“It’s completely out of touch and is an insult to the intelligence of the American people and their lived experience!” Mangione yelled as police officers escorted him, while wearing shackles, into the Blair County Court in Hollidaysburg, Pennsylvania.

It’s a statement sure to spark conspiracy theories and more discussions about Mangione’s motive. In court Tuesday, Mangione said he would challenge extradition to New York, where Thompson was shot outside of a midtown Manhattan hotel last Wednesday. Mangione is being held in Pennsylvania on charges related to his possession of a 3-D printed handgun and silencer, as well as multiple fake IDs and a U.S. passport.

Mangione’s motive has been highly scrutinized, with his complicated right-wing politics and a manifesto being pored over by media outlets. In recent years, according to online posts and one of his friends, Mangione suffered from severe back pain, and underwent surgery. His profile page on X had a picture of an X-ray showing screws in his spine.

Some Americans have reacted positively to the shooting due to widespread dissatisfaction with American health care, a sentiment allegedly shared by Mangione, who wrote in his manifesto that the U.S. has the “most expensive healthcare system in the world” but “ranks #42 in life expectancy.” Mangione’s legal proceedings promise to be closely followed and, if he is extradited to New York, will likely be a media circus.