Trump DOJ slammed for ‘spying on lawmakers;’ president-elect picks Kimberly Guilfoyle for White House job: Live
President-elect rebuked by Republican House Intelligence Committee chair over Department of Justice actions during his first administration
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Your support makes all the difference.Donald Trump has been attacked by Republican Representative Mike Turner, who chairs the House Intelligence Committee, after it emerged that the Department of Justice (DOJ) had spied on members of Congress and dozens of staffers during his first administration.
Responding to the new report into the matter by Inspector General Michael Horowitz, Turner told CNN the Trump DOJ had committed a “grave constitutional violation” and described the department’s conduct as “outrageous”.
The president-elect has meanwhile nominated his son’s fiancee, Kimberly Guilfoyle, to serve as the next United States ambassador to Greece, making her the latest Trump family member to join his administration.
Guilfoyle is a close ally of the president-elect’s family and helped out his election campaigns in both 2020 and 2024.
“I look forward to delivering on the Trump agenda, supporting our Greek allies, and ushering in a new era of peace and prosperity,” she wrote in an X post accepting the honor.
However, the development comes amid rumors that she and Donald Trump Jr have split up, after he was pictured with Florida socialite Bettina Anderson.
The couple have not commented on the speculation.
Jimmy Kimmel jokes Trump has sent Kimberly Guilfoyle to Greece because of rumored Don Jr break-up
RFK Jr pushes for CIA spy daughter-in-law to join Trump administration
Suspect arrested after Rep. Nancy Mace claims she was assaulted
Trump lawyers, aide hit with ten new felony charges in Wisconsin fake electors case
Fox News floats Trump could expand America through a land purchase
The Trump-iana purchase!
A prominent Fox News host has floated that President-elect Donald Trump could be looking to make a major land purchase during his second term.
Her prediction comes as Trump continues to taunt Canada and its officials and has reportedly suggested the northern neighbor should be America’s 51st state.
“I actually think that the United States might make some sort of purchase. I don’t know, not Canada, but there might be some sort of like big real estate purchase in the next four years,” Dana Perino said on Tuesday’s episode of The Five on Fox.
Co-host Jessica Travlov then suggested Greenland as a potential purchase, given Trump’s interest in it in 2019, which sparked a memorable diplomatic beef with Denmark.
Alex Lang has more.
Fox News host floats idea Trump could expand America through a land purchase
The suggestions comes as Donald Trump has been trolling Canada about becoming a U.S. state
Republican senator blocks federal protection for journalists
Tom Cotton of Arkansas has blocked a federal shield law that would have protected reporters from revealing their sources and material to the government.
In the Senate on Tuesday, Oregon Democrat Ron Wyden called for the unanimous consent of the chamber to pass the Protect Reporters from Exploitative State Spying (or PRESS) Act, only for Cotton to object, arguing that the “liberal media” does not “deserve” further protections.
“The press badge doesn’t make you better than the rest of America or put you above the law,” he said on the Senate floor.
Cotton subsequently posted this on social media:
Nancy Mace says she was ‘accosted’ over trans rights dispute as man arrested
The South Carolina Republican Representative has said she was “physically accosted” on Capitol grounds on Tuesday evening, seemingly in relation to her recent string of anti-trans rhetoric.
“I was physically accosted tonight on Capitol grounds over my fight to protect women,” Mace wrote on X. “Capitol police have arrested him. All the violence and threats keep proving our point. Women deserve to be safe. Your threats will not stop my fight for women!”
In another post, Mace said she was hurt by a “pro-tr*ns man”.
Capitol Police have arrested the person accused of assaulting Mace, a Capitol Police spokesperson said in a statement.
Mace said the physical assault resulted in her being treated with a “new brace” on her wrists and ice on her arm.
Here’s Gustaf Kilander’s report.
Suspect arrested after Rep. Nancy Mace claims she was assaulted
Mace has been embroiled in controversy after she introduced a bill banning transgender women from using women’s restrooms on Capitol Hill
House Intelligence Committee chair slams Trump DOJ for spying on lawmakers
Republican Representative Mike Turner, who chairs the House Intelligence Committee, said the Department of Justice (DOJ) under the first Trump administration committed a “grave constitutional violation” when it secretly obtained phone records and emails belonging to Congressional members and staffers.
Turner attacked Trump’s DOJ for collecting communication logs from 43 congressional staffers and two House Democrats , which was revealed in a report from Inspector General Michael Horowitz.
“This report lays out outrageous behavior by the Department of Justice,” Turner told CNN on Tuesday.
“This is a grave constitutional violation.”
Between 2017 and 2018, prosecutors utilized subpoenas to demand that Apple and Google collect and hand over data, without approval from a court or from then-attorney general Bill Barr.
They then issued gag orders to prevent the companies from informing those targeted.
Federal investigators targeted two unnamed House members, congressional staffers and journalists as part of its investigation into the source of leaked sensitive information.
Ariana Baio reports.
House intel committee chair slams Trump DOJ for spying on lawmakers
New report found that DOJ officials under Trump administration secretly obtained phone, email and text communtions of lawmakers
Joe Biden says Trump dismantling ‘strongest economy in modern history’ would be a ‘major mistake’
The president said yesterday he is bequeathing President-elect Donald Trump what he described as “the strongest economy in modern history” and “the envy of the world” while warning that efforts by the next administration to roll back his economic policies would result in great harm to Americans’ pocketbooks.
Speaking at the Brookings Institution think-tank at what was billed as a major address on the economic legacy he is leaving behind after just a single four-year term, Biden recounted how he had come into office with a “fundamentally different theory” from the “trickle-down” beliefs that have dominated economic policy since the rise of Ronald Reagan and modern conservatism in the 1980s.
Using a playbook of working to grow the US economy “from the middle out and the bottom up, not the top down,” Biden explained how he had pushed Congress to enact the American Rescue Plan Act shortly after he took office, along with the bipartisan infrastructure law he signed, the CHIPS and Science Act and the Inflation Reduction Act clean energy and climate spending package that capped his first two years in the White House.
Those record investments, he said, have resulted in a record number of applications to start new small businesses, record-low unemployment and a “soft landing” for the economy that has seen inflation retreat to pre-pandemic levels at or below two percent.
There was plenty of Trump-bashing in amongst it.
Here’s a full report from Andrew Feinberg.
Conservatives still flooding right-wing media to make excuses for Pete Hegseth
Trump’s embattled nominee for defense secretary is expected to meet with more Republican senators today as he works to earn their support ahead of confirmation hearings, CNN reports.
Those senators include Idaho Senator Mike Crapo and Montana Senator-elect Tim Sheehy, with also reportedly making courtesy calls to Maine Senator Susan Collins, Louisiana Senator Bill Cassidy and Indiana Senator Todd Young.
On conservative media, you can get away from Republicans falling over themselves to absolve him of his alleged sins.
RFK Jr urges Trump to pick his daughter-in-law for top CIA post
The president-elect’s health czar is pushing for his former campaign manager and daughter-in-law Amaryllis Fox Kennedy to be the next deputy director of the CIA under John Ratcliffe, according to Axios.
RFK Jr has reportedly been putting in calls on her behalf for the position in the agency she spent a decade working in and wrote a memoir about, entitled Life Undercover (2019).
The role does not require Senate confirmation.
Gustaf Kilander reports.
RFK Jr pushes for CIA spy daughter-in-law to join Trump administration
The position of deputy director at the CIA is one of the top intelligence jobs that Trump has yet to nominate anyone for
Trump’s border czar says mass deportations will start in Chicago and pledges huge Texas detention center
Tom Homan attended a Christmas party hosted by the Law and Order PAC and the Northwest Side GOP Club in Chicago on Monday and told his audience the mass deportation of illegal immigrants would begin in the Windy City, according to CBS.
“Chicago’s in trouble because your mayor sucks and your governor sucks,” he said, deriding Mayor Brandon Johnson and Illinois Governor JB Pritzker.
“We’re going to start right here in Chicago, Illinois. If your Chicago mayor doesn’t want to help, he can step aside,” the ever-macho Homan continued.
“But if he impedes us – if he knowingly harbors or conceals an illegal alien – I will prosecute him.
“January 21st, you’re going to look for a lot of ICE agents in your city looking for criminals and gang members. Count on it. It will happen.”
Homan was also speaking to Dr Phil McGraw last night and told him he had plans in place for the more than 1,400 acres of Texas land in Starr County that the Lone Star State gifted the federal government last month.
“I’m writing the plan as we speak,” he told the doc. “I was working on it last night as a matter of fact.”
He went to thank Texas Governor Greg Abbott for the gesture and said he planned to use the land as a holding area for migrants before they could be put on deportation flights, according to The Daily Mail.
“The 1,400 acres of land, that saves us from acquiring the land,” Homan said.
“The government never buys things fast and when we do, we overpay for it, so having this from the state of Texas is great.”
Manhattan DA blasts Trump attempts to ‘menace’ hush money judge
New York City prosecutors are urging the judge overseeing Trump’s hush money trial to preserve the jury’s 34-count guilty verdict, even if it means postponing any sentencing until after his presidency comes to an end in 2029.
But Trump can’t be shielded from criminal prosecution as “president-elect,” because “president-elect immunity does not exist,” they wrote in a lengthy filing made public on Tuesday.
Even after his inauguration, Trump’s “temporary immunity” as the sitting president “will still not justify the extreme remedy of discarding the jury’s unanimous guilty verdict and wiping out the already-completed phases of this criminal proceeding,” lawyers for Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg told New York Judge Juan Merchan.
Prosecutors’ 82-page filing in response to Trump’s attempt to toss the case altogether after his election victory suggested that “at most” the judge could grant “temporary accommodations” to avoid interfering with the presidency.
But prosecutors shot down a long list of arguments from Trump’s attorneys, including their “false claims of misconduct” that have already been “examined and rejected by this and many other courts.”
Alex Woodward has more.
Manhattan DA blasts Trump attempts to ‘malign and menace’ hush money judge and family
Trump’s ‘dangerous pattern of harassment and intimidation’ should not be rewarded with a thrown-out verdict, prosecutors tell Judge Juan Merchan
Trump announces six more administration appointments
The president-elect announced another slew of new appointments to his administration on Tuesday night:
- Tom Barrack, an investor and major Trump donor, was nominated to serve as Ambassador to Turkey.
- Dan Bishop, a representative from North Carolina, has been nominated for Deputy Director for Budget at the Office of Management and Budget.
- Andrew N Ferguson, the commissioner of the Federal Trade Commission, was tapped to serve as Chair of the Federal Trade Commission.
- Jacob Helberg, an author, was tapped as Under Secretary of State for Economic Growth, Energy and the Environment.
- Ronald Johnson, the former ambassador to El Salvador in Trump’s fist administration and a veteran of the US military and CIA, was named as the president-elect’s pick to be the new Ambassador to Mexico.
- Ed Martin, author of the 2016 book The Conservative Case for Trump, has been nominated for Chief of Staff at the Office of Management and Budget.
- Mark R Meador, a former fellow at The Heritage Foundation, has been nominated Commissioner on the Federal Trade Commission.
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