Steve Bannon Finally Admits to Border Wall Grift in Guilty Plea

MAGA muse Steve Bannon pleaded guilty to fraud in New York Tuesday morning.

Bannon is taking a plea deal for defrauding New Yorkers who gave money to his “We Build the Wall” online fundraiser, which was allegedly pooling money from normal civilians for Trump’s border wall during his first term.

“Nobody lost money, find one,” Bannon told New York Daily News’s Molly Crane-Newman when asked how the Trump supporters he scammed felt, even though he had just confessed to the fraud.

Bannon will avoid jail time completely for this second criminal conviction, instead receiving a three-year conditional discharge after pleading guilty to one count of defrauding donors. He was originally facing five felony counts and up to 15 years in prison. The War Room host is likely to blame this all on corruption and cast himself as a political prisoner rather than admit that his “We Build the Wall” program was as flimsy as Trump’s original promise to construct it.  

This story has been updated.

Trump’s Justice Department is dropping its corruption case against New York City Mayor Eric Adams—not because the charges aren’t credible, but because Adams could help MAGA’s extreme immigration agenda.

Acting Attorney General Emil Bove told New York prosecutors to dismiss the charges against Adams on Monday, while openly admitting that the Justice Department “reached this conclusion without assessing the strength of the evidence or the legal theories on which the case is based.”

Instead, the memo notes that a criminal trial against Adams might restrict his ability to “devote full attention and resources to the illegal immigration and violent crime that escalated under the policies of the prior administration.”

“The Eric Adams memo doesn’t even pretend to be dropping the prosecution for a legitimate reason,” researcher Will Stancil wrote on X. “It says he shouldn’t be prosecuted because he’s running for reelection (?) and so he can carry out the president’s agenda (??). OPEN corruption: ‘MAGA politicians are above the law.’”

This isn’t just obvious and blatant corruption. It’s also a sign that the Justice Department has fully transformed into nothing more than a political tool for the president.

Adams has been begging for a pardon for months, and he bet on Trump giving it to him if he started acting like he was auditioning for a role in the administration. In December, the New York City mayor cast his indictments as political targeting akin to that of Trump and Hunter Biden. “Those who are here committing crimes, robbery, shooting at police officers, raping innocent people … I would love to sit down with the border czar and hear his thoughts on how we are going to address those who are harming our citizens,” Adams bizarrely said at the time. “This is not a new position. In the era of cancel culture, no one is afraid to be honest about the truth. Well, cancel me.”

That same month, he requested a meeting with Trump’s draconian border czar Tom Homan to help him crack down on immigrants who “snuck in” to New York City. In January, he met with Trump at Mar-a-Lago, and days later he was sitting down with Tucker Carlson talking about how the Democratic Party “left him.” The quid pro quo agreement has been cooking for some time now, and Adams got the best outcome possible. He gets off scot-free, and Trump and Homan get to run rampant through New York City.

Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth’s decision to withdraw Army recruiters from the nation’s top Black engineering event has ushered blunt criticism from military leadership.

“It’s fucking racist,” one active duty Army general told Military.com on the condition of anonymity. “For the Army now, it’s ‘Blacks need not apply’ and it breaks my heart.”

The Baltimore-based Black Engineer of the Year Awards (BEYA) has historically been a key event for the Pentagon to recruit high-caliber STEM talent. One Army recruiter told the servicemember news outlet that BEYA is one of the “most talent-dense events we do,” and that the branch “need[s] the talent.” BEYA, in turn, recognizes on its website that the “U.S. military is one of the largest STEM employers in the nation.”

But despite its abundance of talent, recruiters were concerned that attending the event could infringe on Donald Trump’s anti-diversity, equity, and inclusion executive order. Hegseth has, from the jump, been totally on board with the radical shift, making the dissolution of long-standing diversity efforts a priority of his tenure.

On January 31, Hegseth declared that Black History Month, Women’s History Month, and other heritage month observations were officially “dead” and would no longer be recognized by the military. And on Monday, Hegseth made the first move in implementing Trump’s transgender ban on the armed forces, initiating a pause on integrating new trans troops.

“I think the single dumbest phrase in military history is, ‘Our diversity is our strength,’” Hegseth said Friday in an address to Pentagon staff. “I think our strength is our unity. Our strength is our shared purpose, regardless of our background, regardless of how we grew up, regardless of our gender, regardless of our race. In this department, we will treat everyone equally.”

“We will treat everyone with fairness,” he continued. “We will treat everyone with respect. And we will judge you as an individual by your merit and by your commitment to the team and the mission.”

Recruiters that would have attended BEYA weren’t left with nothing to do. Instead, they were redirected to participate in a National Rifle Association-sponsored event in Pennsylvania, which Military.com described as a “predominantly white gathering that recruiters acknowledge is less likely to yield high-quality applicants.”

Donald Trump is continuing to pretend that being a blathering fool is impressive.

During an interview with Fox News’s Bret Baier, which aired in full Monday evening, Trump went on several unwieldy tangents, skirting around answering simple softball questions that the interviewer offered on a silver platter.

At one point, in the middle of a thought, Trump diverted his answer to congratulate himself on just how obtuse he was being.

“And you know, let’s go back over there, because I’m the weaver,” Trump said, abruptly switching topics. “I’m the great weaver, you know that right? OK? I’m the great weaver.”

“Trust me,” Baier replied. “I get it.” The Fox News host put one hand up as if to physically stop the president from getting off track, but Trump chugged along like a runaway train.

“Somebody said, ‘Oh, he rambles,’ no, no. Only the fake news says that,” Trump said. “To weave you have to be brilliant; to ramble you don’t have to be brilliant at all.”

A smiling Baier interjected again, gently corralling the ranting president back toward coherence. “I’ll just get back in the weave there. I have to get you back in,” he urged.

“But I like the weave because it covers a lot of territory, and it covers it much more quickly,” Trump continued, before segueing back into a point about Israel.

Over the course of the chaotic interview, Trump tactlessly sidestepped a question about whether he was actually capable of lowering inflation, and went way off course when responding to a softball question about uniting the country. Trump also took the opportunity to throw Vice President JD Vance so far under the bus you could hear the bones crunch.

Donald Trump fumed over the state of New York’s fraud judgment against him in a Truth Social post Tuesday morning.

The president used to call New York his home, but in his post, he said it “is the most corrupt State in the Union.”

“We need great Judges and Politicians to help fix New York, and to stop the kind of Lawfare that was launched against me, from falsely valuing Mar-a-Lago at $18 Million Dollars, when it is worth, perhaps, 100 times that amount (The corrupt judge was replaced by another judge, only to be immediately put back on the case when the Democrat political leaders found out that a change of judges was made. It has become a great embarrassment for the New York Judicial System!),” Trump’s post read.

Last year, a New York state court ruled that Trump had to pay $454 million in fines for fraudulently inflating the value of his properties (including Mar-a-Lago). He had to scramble to come up with a reduced $175 million bond for his appeal, benefiting from the help of a shady surety company. But Ol’ Donny Trump might wriggle out of this jam again, as an appeals court seemed skeptical of the massive sentence against him in oral arguments in September. Regardless of that court’s judgment, Trump isn’t likely to stop crowing about it online, as the judgment against him now stands at over $500 million.

Donald Trump has struck a new, incredibly dismissive tone on Ukraine and its war against Russia—right before Vice President JD Vance’s meeting with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy. 

“They may make a deal, they may not make a deal, they may be Russian some day, or they may not be Russian someday, but we’re gonna have all this money in there … I want it back,” President Trump told Fox News’s Bret Baier Monday evening. 

“I told them that I want the equivalent, like $500 billion worth of rare earth,” he continued, tripling down on his demand for his newest fascination. “And they’ve essentially agreed to do that. So at least we don’t feel stupid. Otherwise we’re stupid. I said to [Ukraine], ‘We have to get something, we can’t continue to pay this money.’”  

This is exactly what Vladimir Putin—whose military occupies nearly a fifth of Ukraine at this point—wants to hear. This is a stark contrast from former President Biden’s approach of providing aid to Ukraine (and not expecting rare earths in return) on the grounds that the country was being illegally invaded. 

Trump’s version of “ending the war” might just be giving the Kremlin everything it wants. Are they really “peace talks” if one side is expected to surrender? 

A federal judge has indefinitely extended the deadline for federal workers to accept Donald Trump’s buyout offer.

The president had posed a “fork in the road” ultimatum for federal employees via the Office of Personnel Management late last month: Either opt for a “deferred resignation” that would pay them through September, or face a possible furlough.

The temporary restraining order on the program put in place by U.S. District Judge George O’Toole will remain in place while the court weighs the legality of the buyout, reported CNN Monday.

Eligible federal workers had originally faced a midnight deadline on Thursday to accept or deny Trump’s offer. O’Toole imposed an initial restraining order, just hours before the offer expired, delaying the deadline to late Monday.

“The pressure that comes from that deadline where people have to make their choice about their livelihood,” argued Elena Goldstein, an attorney for the plaintiffs: “Irreparable harm will continue. They will be asking what they actually accepted. OPM is making it up as they go along.”

Unions for federal employees were behind the lawsuit, calling OPM’s “Fork Directive” a “sweeping and stunningly arbitrary action to solicit blanket resignations of federal workers,” according to court filings.

Attorneys for the Justice Department counterclaimed that Trump had “campaigned on reducing the federal workforce” and that the mass dismissal program should come as no surprise to Washington’s civil servants. The administration “knew they’d come to a disappointment to a lot of the workforce … so this would be an off-ramp for those employees,” said Justice Department attorney Eric Hamilton, per NBC News.

Vice President JD Vance is exactly as irrelevant to Donald Trump as he is to everyone else.

In an interview Sunday with Fox News’s Bret Baier, Trump threw Vance under the bus when asked about the future for the former never-Trump Republican who sold out his principles, his dignity, and even his own family, to boost Trump’s shot at unchecked power. His reward? Nothing, it seems.

“Do you view Vice President JD Vance as your successor, the Republican nominee in 2028?” Baier asked.

“No,” Trump replied. “But he’s very capable!

“I mean I don’t think that it—you know, I think we have a lot of very capable people,” Trump continued. “So far, I think he’s doing a fantastic job. It’s too early, we’re just starting.”

“But by the time you get to the midterms, he’s going to be looking for an endorsement,” Baier pressed.

“Yeah, a lot of people have said this has been the greatest opening, almost three weeks, in the history of the presidency,” Trump said, weaving into a rant about how amazing he is at being president.

It’s possible that Trump tried to sidestep answering because he already has a candidate in mind for 2028, and—spoiler alert—it’s not Vance. Although he isn’t allowed to run again, Trump has repeatedly floated the idea of doing so, both on the campaign trail and since winning the presidency. It doesn’t seem as if Trump cares very much about what is legal and what’s not.

In lieu of actually governing, Vance seems to be filling his empty hours posting on X about a range of random topics, including rubber-stamping the rehiring of a racist to DOGE, undermining the checks and balances that underpin our democracy, and complaining about dog cross-breeding.

Refugee resettlement organizations are suing the Trump administration for indefinitely pausing America’s refugee system. 

The lawsuit was filed in federal court in Seattle Monday by a group of the country’s largest such organizations hoping to restart the program and the federal funding that allows refugees to be resettled in the United States. President Trump froze the admission of refugees on his first day in office as part of broader restrictions on immigration, ordering the leaders at the Departments of Homeland Security and State to recommend if refugee admissions should resume within 90 days. 

One of the organizations that filed the lawsuit said that Trump’s executive orders have “been sweeping and harmful for our refugee clients, our staff and our local faith community partners.

“These executive actions have abandoned refugee families both abroad and those who are already a part of our American communities,” Rick Santos, head of the Church World Service, said in a statement, citing a case in which two Afghan parents in Massachusetts were waiting for their children, who were supposed to arrive in January. 

“They now do not know if or when their children will be able to come home,” Santos’s statement said.

In the past, the U.S. refugee program enjoyed bipartisan support. That changed in 2017 when Trump was elected to his first term and began taking extreme measures to attack the refugee system and reduce refugee admissions his first week in office. By 2020, Trump proposed a record low of 15,000 refugee admissions, according to The New York Times. President Biden resuscitated the program, and in 2024, the U.S. admitted close to 100,000 refugees, the most in decades.  

Trump’s abrupt pause to resettlement and all related funding has had a ripple effect on organizations, as well as the more than 10,000 refugees on a path to enter the U.S. Refugee assistance organizations around the country may not be able to function without funding, and one refugee in Burma died after his U.S.-funded hospital was ordered to close. 

A telling description of Trump’s actions during his first term was coined by Atlantic writer Adam Serwer in a 2018 column: “The Cruelty Is the Point,” who argued that the president and his supporters took pleasure in the suffering of those they hate and fear. It appears that sentiment is back in full force for today’s Trump administration.

The Supreme Court’s decision to expand the definition of presidential immunity may have just caused a hiccup for Donald Trump’s administration.

A federal judge ruled Monday that Trump’s FBI must disclose records from its Mar-a-Lago case file, complying with a FOIA request by Bloomberg’s Jason Leopold. U.S. District Judge Beryl Howell decided that the Supreme Court’s decision—combined with his return to the White House and its executive privileges—has insulated Trump enough from further criminal prosecution to allow the release of documents.

“With the far dampened possibility of any criminal investigation to gather evidence about a president’s conduct and of any public enforcement proceeding against a president, the [Supreme Court’s] decision … has left a FOIA request as a critical tool for the American public to keep apprised of a president’s conduct,” Howell ruled.

Howell also ordered the FBI to provide a timetable of release for files pertaining to Leopold’s request, with a mandatory update required by February 20.

The FBI had used Glomar arguments to retain the privacy of the Mar-a-Lago case files, falling back on its typical refusal to “confirm or deny” a criminal investigation in order to safeguard ongoing investigations. But the decimation of any future case against Trump on the details of the case has completely undermined that argument, according to the judge.

“In these circumstances, defendants’ Glomar arguments crumble with no more weight than dust and just as little persuasiveness,” Howell wrote. “As plaintiff pointedly highlights, as to President Trump, ‘there is a reasonable argument that [he] is immune from prosecution for flushing his own records down the toilet while in office.’”

In a footnote, Howell torched the high court’s decision to grant Trump such sweeping protections, likening their actions to enablers of the fascist regime of Nazi Germany.

“Of course, while the Supreme Court has provided a protective and presumptive immunity cloak for a president’s conduct, that cloak is not so large to extend to those who aid, abet and execute criminal acts on behalf of a criminally immune president,” Howell wrote. “The excuse offered after World War II by enablers of the fascist Nazi regime of ‘just following orders’ has long been rejected in this country’s jurisprudence.”