A Quick Reminder on the Trump Organization’s Tax Evasion in Panama

Donald Trump has an outstanding tax evasion case in Panama, the same country he’s just publicly accused of financial wrongdoing, according to Newsweek.

Trump railed against Panama’s commerce policies while speaking at the Turning Point USA conference in Arizona on Sunday, threatening to take over the Panama Canal.

“The fees being charged by Panama are ridiculous, highly unfair. Especially knowing the extraordinary generosity that has been bestowed to Panama, I say very foolishly, by the United States,” the president-elect told the conference crowd. “If the principles, both moral and legal, of this magnanimous gesture of giving are not followed, then we will demand that the Panama Canal be returned to the United States of America, in full, quickly and without question.”

Panamanian President José Raúl Mulino, himself a conservative, rebuked Trump.

“As president, I want to express clearly that every square meter of the Panama Canal and its adjacent zone belongs to Panama, and will continue to do so,” he said in a video statement. “The sovereignty and independence of our country are not negotiable.”

Every analysis of this new Trump threat should come with a reminder: In 2019, the owners of a Panama City hotel tower that was previously managed and operated under the Trump brand, accused Trump Panama Hotel Management LLC and Trump International Hotels Management LLC, of not paying the required 12.5 percent taxes to the Panamanian government. Instead, the lawsuit alleges, the companies simply kept the money, “intentionally evading taxes” and leaving the new owner liable for millions.

A tax audit of the hotels submitted as evidence found massive inconsistencies. The case is still pending in New York District Court.

President Joe Biden on Monday commuted the sentences of 37 men on federal death row, before Donald Trump could return to office and carry out his planned “execution spree.”

“I am more convinced than ever that we must stop the use of the death penalty at the federal level,” Biden said in a statement. “In good conscience, I cannot stand back and let a new administration resume executions that I halted.”

The prisoners on death row will now serve life in prison instead. Biden also noted that he wouldn’t commute the sentences of those charged with hate crimes or terrorism. Dylan Roof, who killed nine Black people at Mother Emanuel Church in Charleston in 2015, Robert Bowers, who killed 11 people at the Tree of Life Synagogue in Pittsburgh in 2018, and Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, who helped carry out the 2013 Boston Marathon bombing, will each remain on death row. 

Biden’s announcement has already infuriated the right, who see it as some great injustice that men who were set to be executed will instead be spending the rest of their lives in a cage.

“It’s horrifying that Pres. Biden has granted clemency to some of our nation’s most monstrous killers,” Senator John Kennedy wrote on X. “Their victims deserve better, and justice demands more.”

“I think it’s yet another abuse of the pardon power,” said Fox News contributor Andy McCarthy. “He wiped the slate clean … and he did it in a way that is a categorical change of the law.” 

“It wasn’t BAD ENOUGH Joe Biden let in violent criminals and terrorists across our border ON PURPOSE. Now, he’s commuting the sentences of 37 of America’s OWN most dangerous criminals,” chimed Speaker Mike Johnson on X. “This is a slap in the face to the families who have suffered immeasurably at the hands of these animals.”

Luigi Mangione’s lawyer slammed Mayor Eric Adams during a hearing Monday, after the embattled New York politician made public statements about her client. 

“I’m very concerned about my client’s right to a fair trial in this case,” said Karen Friedman Agnifilo, Mangione’s lawyer. “He’s being prejudiced by some statements that are being made by government officials.”

Friedman Agnifilo said that her client was being used as “political fodder” when New York officials on Thursday made a theatrical show of transporting him from Pennsylvania to New York, where he will face state and federal charges.

“He was on display for everyone to see in the biggest staged perp walk I’ve ever seen in my career,” Friedman Agnilio said. “It was absolutely unnecessary.”

She argued that it was also illegal, given that a perp walk is unconstitutional if not used for a “legitimate law enforcement objective,” citing a Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit ruling, Lauro v. Charles.

Mangione was escorted away from a helicopter surrounded by a massive entourage of more than 15 people, including some heavily armed New York Police Department officers, and one special guest. 

“And what was the NYC mayor doing at this press conference? That just made it utterly political,” Friedman Agnifilo said. 

New York City Mayor Eric Adams, who was indicted on federal corruption charges in October, inexplicably loomed behind Mangione.  

“There was absolutely no need for that whatsoever, and frankly, your Honor, the mayor should know more than anyone of the presumption of innocence that he too is afforded when he [is] dealing with his own issues,” Friedman Agnifilo said. “And frankly, I submit that he was just trying to detract from those issues by making a spectacle of Mr. Mangione.”

In an interview with Pix11 News Thursday, a transcript of which Friedman Agnifilo read out for the record,  Adams had explained why he wanted to be present for the stunt. 

“I wanted to send a strong message with the police commissioner that we are leading from the front,” Adams said. “I’m not going to just allow him to come into our city. I wanted to look him in the eye and state that, ‘You carried out this terrorist act in my city, the city that the people of New York love.’ And I wanted to be there to show the symbolism of that.”

Agnifilo pointed out that Adams was missing a crucial “allegedly” in there. “Your Honor, he’s not a symbol. He is somebody who is afforded the right to a fair trial, he’s innocent until proven guilty.”

Mangione pleaded not guilty to the murder of Brian Thompson, the CEO of UnitedHealthcare. Last week, Mangione was indicted on several charges, including “murder in the second degree as a crime of terrorism.”

The House Ethics Committee report on former Representative Matt Gaetz released Monday details the downright shady ways the Florida Republican would allegedly pay—or not pay—several women and an underage girl with whom he had sexual encounters.

The long-awaited report that chased Gaetz out of his House seat determined that the Trump-backed Republican had “regularly paid women for engaging in sexual activity with him,” between at least 2017 and 2020. And the bill is nothing to scoff at.

To one woman, whom the committee determined had a long-term relationship with Gaetz from 2017 to 2020, the Florida Republican allegedly shelled out a whopping $63,836.58.

The report determined that due to the nature of their relationship “some of the payments may have been of a legitimate nature,” but the woman pleaded the Fifth Amendment when asked if the payments were for sexual activity, drugs, or distributing payments to other women.

“Based on that assertion combined with evidence received from other sources, the Committee found substantial reason to believe that most of these payments were for such activity,” the report stated.

In addition to his payments to that woman, Gaetz allegedly paid nearly a total of $27,500 to eleven different women between 2017 and 2020. This total includes the $400 that Gaetz paid to a 17-year-old girl with whom he allegedly had a sexual encounter, according to the report.

An additional $3,950 was paid to Joel Greenberg between 2018 and 2019. Greenberg is Gaetz’s associate who would find girls for them to party with through sugar dating websites and be reimbursed for payments made by the former lawmaker, according to the report. In 2021, Greenberg pleaded guilty to underage sex trafficking, wire fraud, identity theft, stalking, producing a fake ID card, and conspiring to defraud the U.S. government. The Committee did not conclude that Gaetz had committed sex trafficking.

The report alleged that Gaetz would not set an amount to be paid before his sexual encounters, but that “the women had a general expectation that they would typically receive some amount of money after each sexual encounter.”

Gaetz allegedly used this power imbalance to his advantage, according to the report.

In one instance, a 21-year-old woman who had expressed to Gaetz that she needed help with her tuition said that he had told her to meet him at a hotel room where he would provide her with a check, which she noted to the Committee was “interesting because he had normally sent Venmo payments.”

When the woman arrived at the room, she said she was surprised to find Gaetz, Greenberg, and another 20-year-old woman, and she said there was an “expectation” of a “sexual encounter.” The four engaged in sexual activity, and the 21-year-old woman received a $750 check with “tuition reimbursement” as the memo line. She told the Committee she believed that the encounter “could potentially be a form of coercion because I really needed the money.”

Sometimes, it seems, Gaetz would get a little stingy, or fail to make payments to the women.

In another instance, Gaetz balked at a woman’s request for money in a text exchange reviewed by the committee. Gaetz bashed the woman for “ditching” him when she was feeling tired, claiming she only gave him a “drive by.” The woman told Gaetz that she was being “treated differently” than the other women he paid fo sex.

In a third instance, Gaetz’s then-girlfriend informed some of the women that he paid for sex that Gaetz and Greenberg were a “little limited in their cash flow this weekend,” and said that Gaetz was hoping it could be “more of a customer appreciation week.” In a message a few months later, she wrote that Gaetz now intended to be “a bit generous cause of the ‘customer appreciation’ thing last time.”

One woman recalled to the committee a conversation with Gaetz about Greenberg’s issues with “following through” on expected payments after Greenberg’s sexual encounters.

According to the report, Gaetz was given opportunities before the committee to discuss his payments to women, but he did not take them.

“While he has been unwilling to address the allegations under oath, Representative Gaetz has made several public statements regarding the allegations under the Committee’s review, including that his ‘generosity to ex-girlfriends’ is being misconstrued and that he has ‘never, ever paid for sex,’” the report stated. “The Committee found this to be untrue.”

“Representative Gaetz took advantage of the economic vulnerability of young women to lure them into sexual activity for which they received an average of a few hundred dollars after each encounter,” the report concluded. “Such behavior is not ‘generosity to ex-girlfriends,’ and it does not reflect creditably upon the House.”

The long-awaited House Ethics Committee report on Matt Gaetz is out, and it finds that the former Florida representative did have sex with an underage girl, among many other offenses. 

The committee found “substantial evidence” that Gaetz “regularly paid women for engaging in sexual activity with him,” and that he “engaged in sexual activity with a 17-year-old girl.” The report also mentioned that Gaetz possessed and used cocaine and ecstasy while in office, and even lied to the State Department about the identity of one of his sexual partners so that she could get a passport. 

“Representative Gaetz violated House Rules, state and federal laws, and other standards of conduct prohibiting prostitution, statutory rape, illicit drug use, acceptance of impermissible gifts, the provision of special favors and privileges, and obstruction of Congress,” the report stated. Even still, it found no evidence that Gaetz was involved in sex trafficking, as the women were over 18 when they traveled.

The report also noted that “nearly every woman that the Committee spoke with could not remember the details of at least one or more of the events they attended with Representative Gaetz and attributed that to drug or alcohol consumption.”

At least one woman told the committee that drugs at the events with Gaetz may have “impair[ed their] ability to really know what was going on or fully consent.”

Among other charges, Gaetz was also found to have accepted an illegal gift via a 2018 trip to the Bahamas, lodgings included, which exceeded the amount allowed for members of Congress.

Gaetz has denied all allegations, even going so far as to request a restraining order against the House Ethics Committee.  

“Giving funds to someone you are dating - that they didn’t ask for - and that isn’t ‘charged’ for sex is now prostitution?!?” Gaetz wrote on X ahead of the report’s release. “There is a reason they did this to me in a Christmas Eve-Eve report and not in a courtroom of any kind where I could present evidence and challenge witnesses.”

Not content with trying to incorporate Canada, President-elect Donald Trump has set his sights further north to Greenland. Too bad it’s not for sale.

Greenland’s Prime Minister Mute Egede told Trump Monday to back off his outlandish bid to control the world’s biggest island. “Greenland is ours. We are not for sale and will never be for sale. We must not lose our long struggle for freedom,” Egede said in a written comment.

In a post on Sunday, the president-elect announced that Ken Howery, co-founder of PayPal and former ambassador to Sweden during Trump’s first term, would serve as the ambassador to the Kingdom of Denmark, which holds control of the semiautonomous Greenland. He also re-upped a bid to take Greenland off its hands.

“For purposes of National Security and Freedom throughout the World, the United States of America feels that the ownership and control of Greenland is an absolute necessity,” Trump wrote on Truth Social.

Trump previously floated the idea of the U.S. buying Greenland in 2019, which the Danish prime minister at the time called “absurd.” His megalomaniacal musings never came to anything, and likely won’t this time around either.

Greenland is home to the U.S.’s Pituffik Space Base that, among other things, “detects and reports attack assessments of sea-launched and intercontinental ballistic missile threats in support of strategic missile warning and missile defense,” according to its website.

Greenland is strategically significant to the U.S because it sits between Russia and the eastern coast of the United States, and is the fastest way from Europe to New York. It’s also located beside the Norwegian Sea, which connects the Atlantic Ocean to the Arctic Ocean and the Barents Sea, where the Russian navy’s northern fleet operates.

U.S. expansion seemed to be on Trump’s mind Sunday, and the geopolitical mastermind also threatened to take control of the Panama Canal, which has been the property of Panama since 1999. “Welcome to the United States Canal!” Trump captioned a photograph of the canal in a post on Truth Social Sunday.

Earlier this month, when facing criticism about his plan for harsh tariffs on Canadian imports, Trump made a crack about Canada becoming the 51st state. The last time the U.S. tried to make a play for Canada, the British burned down the U.S. Capitol.

It’s difficult to consider Trump’s latest imperialist dreams as anything other than a distraction from his sinister plans stateside—which include violently rounding up undocumented immigrants into camps and deporting them en masse.

Former Representative Matt Gaetz is filing a restraining order against the entire House Ethics Committee to stop them from showing the world their findings, which reportedly includes evidence that he paid an underage girl for sex.

Gaetz accuses the committee of an “unconstitutional” attempt “to exercise jurisdiction over a private citizen through the threatened release of an investigative report containing potentially defamatory allegations, in violation of the Committee’s own rules.”

This is the result of a yearslong investigation into allegations that Gaetz had paid a teenage girl and multiple women thousands of dollars for sex and drugs since 2017.

This is a developing story.

Former Representative Matt Gaetz is filing a restraining order against the entire House Ethics Committee to stop them from showing the world their findings, which reportedly includes evidence that he paid an underaged girl for sex.

Gaetz accuses the committee of an “unconstitutional” attempt “to exercise jurisdiction over a private citizen through the threatened release of an investigative report containing potentially defamatory allegations, in violation of the Committee’s own rules.”

This all comes after CNN reported last week that the committee secretly voted to release its report into former Representative Matt Gaetz. The report is years long, and based on allegations that Gaetz had paid a teenage girl and multiple women thousands of dollars for sex and drugs since 2017.

Gaetz’s restraining order request states that the report would be unjustly tarnishing his reputation, arguing that it is “concerning matters of sexual propriety and other acts of alleged moral turpitude constitutes irreparable harm that cannot be adequately remedied through monetary damages.”

The clerk’s office has already told Gaetz his lawsuit must be refiled, as Gaetz’s attorneys made paperwork errors that must be corrected before it goes any further.

Gaetz has fervently denied any and all allegations.

“In my single days, I often sent funds to women I dated—even some I never dated but who asked. I dated several of these women for years. I NEVER had sexual contact with someone under 18. Any claim that I have would be destroyed in court—which is why no such claim was ever made in court,” Gaetz wrote last week. “It’s embarrassing, though not criminal, that I probably partied, womanized, drank and smoked more than I should have earlier in life. I live a different life now.”

This story has been updated.

Donald Trump dismissed the “President Musk” jokes Sunday, and it was less than convincing.

During his address at Turning Point USA’s AmericaFest conference in Phoenix, Arizona, the president-elect pushed back on claims that Musk planned to supplant him as president.

“No, he’s not gonna be president, that I can tell you,” Trump said. “And I’m safe, you know why? He can’t be, he wasn’t born in this country.”

But Trump carefully elided the actual criticism of Musk’s growing political influence. People aren’t worried that Musk is plotting to steal the presidency—they’re worried he already has.

Last week, Musk issued his own set of marching orders to Congress, ordering Republicans to oppose a massive spending bill to avert a government shutdown, or face being primaried by a Musk-backed candidate. Meanwhile, Trump stayed more or less silent, and Democratic leaders began to criticize the president-elect for allowing Musk to lead his party.

When Trump eventually did weigh in, also issuing a request to lift the debt ceiling, his spokesperson Karoline Leavitt issued a chilly statement to make sure everyone knew there was only one man in charge.

“As soon as President Trump released his official stance on the CR, Republicans on Capitol Hill echoed his point of view. President Trump is the leader of the Republican Party. Full stop,” said Leavitt.

Only when both Musk and Trump approved of the spending bill was it able to move forward. While the changes Musk sought were made, Trump’s request got left on the cutting room floor.

Musk’s recent behavior indicates not only a growing influence on Trump, but on the Republican Party at large, as Republicans immediately fell in line. Already, many have begun pledging themselves to assist the unelected bureaucrat with the so-called Department of Government Efficiency, a scheme to eradicate federal programs and workers and replace them with pricey corporate contracts and vendors.

The House of Representatives finally voted to avert a government shutdown Friday evening, just hours before government funding was set to expire, thanks to Democratic help and Republicans’ decision to exclude Donald Trump’s demand to extend the debt ceiling.

The bill to continue funding for the government passed with 366 votes in favor and 34 votes against, with every single “no” vote coming from a Republican.

This most recent vote comes one day after a whopping 38 Republicans joined 197 Democrats in voting against an abbreviated continuing resolution, endorsed by both Donald Trump and Elon Musk.

That bill had nixed several key provisions from the original, including ones to fund research into pediatric cancer, premature labor, and Down syndrome; to treat sickle-cell anemia and early cancer detection; and criminalize deepfake pornography.

The original 1,547-page bipartisan bill was scrapped Wednesday, after Musk railed against it on social media and Trump demanded that Republicans find a way to lift the debt ceiling, sending an embattled House Speaker Mike Johnson scrambling to come up with a new version of the legislation.

The massive bill underwent several stages on Friday, having been split up into three component parts for lawmakers to vote on separately: a three-month continuing resolution, a bill funding disaster relief, and a bill to grant $10 billion in relief for farmers and extend the farmer’s bill, while Trump’s request to raise the debt ceiling was nowhere to be found.

In the end, lawmakers voted on one single package, which would fund the government through March 14, provide roughly $100 billion for disaster aid, and extend the federal programs supporting farmers, providing $30 billion in economic relief.