No One Watched Nikki Haley’s CNN Town Hall

CNN continues to let Republicans come on the air and push extreme views and falsehoods. And people continue not to watch.

The network hosted presidential hopeful Nikki Haley for a town hall on Sunday. During the 90-minute event, she advocated for the use of “bulletproof tape” to tackle gun violence, said women who get abortions shouldn’t be executed, and called transgender girls playing girls’ sports “the women’s issue of our time.”

But no one was interested in what she had to say. Just 562,000 people tuned in to watch Haley. In comparison, when CNN had a town hall with Donald Trump—whom Haley says Americans are tired of—nearly six times as many people watched, for a total of 3.3 million viewers.

And that audience size pales in comparison to what Trump could bring in at his peak. Almost 71.5 million people watched him win the 2016 election. In 2020, an average of 21.6 million viewers watched the Republican National Convention—far fewer than the previous election, but still miles away from his CNN event.

It’s an embarrassingly low number for Haley, who is trying to position herself as a new direction for the Republican Party, away from Trump. But it would seem that people are still more interested in him than they are in her.

Of course, neither of them could beat the viewership record at CNN. The network hosted a town hall with President Joe Biden in 2020, which brought in 3.47 million viewers—the most for a single-candidate town hall to date.

Former New Jersey Governor Chris Christie on Tuesday formally filed paperwork for his presidential run, hoping that he can bridge the gaping political divide in the United States.

Unfortunately, we’ve been here before, and it’s unlikely that Americans are going to want to go any further down this bridge to nowhere.

Christie ran for president in 2016 but flamed out spectacularly in the New Hampshire primary. He had taken multiple attacks from Donald Trump up until that point, but apparently it was all water under the bridge, as Christie threw whatever clout he had behind Trump.

Christie worked fairly closely with Trump throughout his presidency and on his failed 2020 reelection campaign. He finally broke with Trump when the former president refused to accept the election results, which was apparently a bridge too far. Christie has since been vocal in opposing Trump and may make that criticism a central tenet of his campaign, though it remains to be seen.

During his two terms as New Jersey governor, Christie seemed to take nothing but political beatings. The trouble began in 2012, when fellow Republicans accused him of getting too close to then-President Barack Obama during the aftermath of Hurricane Sandy.

The following year, two of the three lanes of the George Washington Bridge connecting New York and New Jersey were shut down for several days. Christie was accused of ordering the lane closure, which came to be known as Bridgegate, to create traffic jams and punish a local Democratic mayor who didn’t support him.

All of these scandals took a real toll on Christie’s popularity. By 2016, he had the lowest approval rating of any Garden State governor in 20 years. That wasn’t helped when, the following year, New Jersey suffered a government shutdown. State parks and beaches were closed as a result of the shutdown, but Christie took his family to the beach for July 4, an outing that came to be known as Beachgate.

And of course, there is Christie’s bizarre and unrequited fanboy love for Bruce Springsteen, who called out Christie for his financial policies and for Bridgegate, and reportedly said Christie was not allowed to use any Springsteen songs on his campaigns.

Christie is, to his credit, one of the few Republican lawmakers actually willing to call Trump out for his actions. But it’s unclear whether Christie actually has enough political pull to do some damage during the race. You could say let’s cross that bridge when we get there, but a Monmouth University poll published at the end of May found that only 21 percent of voters have a favorable view of him, while 47 percent view him negatively.

Two weeks ago, Representative Virginia Foxx demanded Representative Maxwell Frost’s comments on student debt be removed from the record. And now, this week, the North Carolina Republican is at it again, interrupting Representative Jamaal Bowman and forcing him to suspend his comments on racism in House proceedings.

In a meeting for the House Committee on Education and the Workforce on Tuesday, representatives were debating House Resolution 461, which condemns “the use of elementary and secondary school facilities to provide shelter for aliens who are not admitted to the United States.” The resolution, introduced by Republican Representatives Mariannette Miller-Meeks and Brandon Williams, comes in response to lawmakers in New York and Maine merely exploring options to consider unoccupied student housing buildings as temporary options for migrants, certainly nothing that would impede students’ safety or education.

Republican Representative Bob Good, however, went further, offering an amendment to the bill to strip federal funding from public schools that shelter undocumented people.

The suggestion prompted Bowman to speak in opposition, detailing how essential federal funding is for New York City schools (especially given the federal government’s history of racist redlining policies that left many schools underfunded). He argued that Good’s amendment “seeks to double down on prior racist policy by implementing present-day racist policies.” Bowman also took issue with the suggestion that migrants are part of an “invasion,” noting its white supremacist origins and associations with the racist great replacement theory.

“Now I know none of my colleagues on the other side of the aisle will admit to being racist—and I don’t think they are,” Bowman said. “But when you look at the rhetoric, and you hear the talking points, and look at the legislation that’s put forward, what are we to say?”

In the middle of Bowman’s comment, Foxx slammed the gavel nine times, demanding Bowman suspend his remarks, saying he cannot “engage in personality characterizations.”

“Thank you Madam Chair, it’s just very frustrating because it seems like the legislation itself engages in personalities, when it refers to a group of people that is derogatory,” Bowman countered. “So if the legislation is doing it, and we’re using words on the other side of the aisle like ‘invasion,’ as if it’s an army coming to our country, is that not personalities? Thank you, and I yield back.”

Foxx’s reaction to Bowman’s comments echoed her interruption of Frost’s comments two weeks ago, which also referenced racist policies. The Florida representative argued against the conservative logic surrounding student debt, “that because there was an injustice, we can’t fix it because it’s unfair to those who never had it fixed, means we would never progress on any issue in this country.”

“If we legislated using the logic that you bring to this issue today, women and Black folks wouldn’t have the right to vote because it would be unfair to those who never got to vote before them… Why do you bring that bigoted logic to this issue as it relates to students, but not any other issue?” Frost asked.

The “bigoted logic” remarks prompted Foxx to “demand his words be taken down.” Frost, like Bowman, generously heeded Foxx’s outrage towards his coolly reasoned argument, before proceeding.

House Judiciary Committee Chair Jim Jordan has demanded the Justice Department hand over internal documents showing the extent of the investigation into Donald Trump’s alleged mishandling of classified documents at Mar-a-Lago.

Special counsel Jack Smith is investigating the former president for keeping classified material and for his role in trying to overturn the 2020 election. Jordan, a staunch Trump ally who has tried to interfere in other Trump investigations, has decided that he needs to step into the fray.

Jordan sent a letter to Attorney General Merrick Garland requesting “an unredacted copy of the memorandum outlining the scope of Mr. Smith’s probes regarding President Trump and any supporting documentation related to his appointment as special counsel,” NBC reported Tuesday. He gave Garland until June 20 to submit the papers.

The letter comes a day after Trump’s legal team met with the Justice Department to argue that the former president should not be charged for keeping classified material after leaving office. They gave no indication of how the meeting went, but Trump melted down on Truth Social shortly after, demanding to know “HOW CAN DOJ POSSIBLY CHARGE ME, WHO DID NOTHING WRONG.”

Smith has been circling ever closer to Trump, and many experts speculate that he will issue criminal charges soon.

This isn’t the first time Jordan has attempted to intervene in one (of many) investigations into Trump. It isn’t even the first time he’s gotten involved in this one. Last week, Jordan asked for details on the FBI employees involved in Smith’s investigation.

Jordan complained about the “institutional rot that pervades the FBI,” a favorite bugbear of his, and demanded to know which FBI personnel were working on the investigation and whether any had previously investigated Trump. (Trump is reportedly looking to purge all employees involved in investigating him.)

In March, after Trump was criminally indicted for his role in paying hush money to porn star Stormy Daniels, Jordan also attacked the Manhattan district attorney for that investigation. Jordan, House Administration Chair Bryan Steil, and House Oversight Chair James Comer alleged Alvin Bragg had a political agenda and demanded he testify in Congress about the investigation.

Bragg hit back, calling the attacks “baseless and inflammatory” and accused them of “acting more like criminal defense counsel trying to gather evidence for a client than a legislative body seeking to achieve a legitimate legislative objective.”

It’s been more than two years since hundreds of rioters stormed the Capitol in efforts to overturn the 2020 election. And Republicans are still busy trying to downplay the outcome of their own conspiratorial, inciteful rhetoric. On Monday, for instance, Wisconsin Senator Ron Johnson said the whole ordeal just consisted of mere “pockets of rioting.”

“We’ve seen people staying within the rope lines, we’ve seen the Shaman, we’ve seen video of him calling for you know, everybody staying peaceful,” Johnson said. “So, we just don’t hear that in the mainstream media, though. They want to paint a picture of just a mass riot all over the place—there were definitely pockets of rioting, but by and large, the vast majority of people there in Washington were just there to exercise their First Amendment rights to peacefully assemble, and that’s what most of them did.”

Yes, it was the mainstream media that “painted” this picture:

Last year, Johnson insisted the riot was not an “armed insurrection.”

In March 2021, Johnson told a radio host that the rioters who attacked the nation’s Capitol in an attempt to overturn an election “were people that love this country, that truly respect law enforcement, would never do anything to break the law.” Nearly 150 officers were injured from the riots, but Johnson said that he would only have been concerned if they were Black Lives Matter or anti-fascist protesters.

Johnson’s desperate revisionism isn’t surprising. 

The House Select Committee investigating the January 6 attacks revealed that Johnson tried to personally give then–Vice President Mike Pence “alternate” electors for Michigan and Wisconsin (two states Joe Biden won). Such electors were indeed found to have been fraudulent; Pence’s team rejected them.

Last year, Johnson hired Pam Travis, one of 10 Wisconsin Republicans who signed fraudulent paperwork claiming to be a Donald Trump elector, to work on his reelection campaign.

Johnson was also one of 45 Senate Republicans who voted to declare Trump’s second impeachment trial unconstitutional, and one of 35 who voted against creating a commission to investigate the Capitol riots at all.

A Florida judge on Tuesday temporarily blocked a law banning gender-affirming care for minors, ruling there was “no rational basis” for the measure.

In addition to banning care for children, the law, which Governor Ron DeSantis signed last month, also makes it significantly harder for trans adults to access care. Medical facilities could lose their license if they offered health care to trans or nonbinary children.

U.S. District Judge Robert Hinkle issued a preliminary injunction against the law on Tuesday, meaning it is blocked while lawsuits against it play out in court. Hinkle cited multiple doctors who testified against the law that “denial of this treatment will cause needless suffering for a substantial number of patients and will increase anxiety, depression, and the risk of suicide.”

“There is no rational basis for a state to categorically ban these treatments,” he wrote.

This detail gets at the heart of the main Republican argument for blocking gender-affirming care. They argue they are protecting children, but these laws actually put LGBTQ people of all ages at risk of more harm, both physical and mental.

While the injunction only applies to the three immediate plaintiffs in the suit, legal principle would prevent the law from being applied to other people, legal expert Alejandra Caraballo explained. The injunction should also ensure adults can access care, although Florida may argue otherwise because the plaintiffs are all minors.

Hinkle’s injunction does not block the most horrifying part of the law, though. The measure allows the state to take custody of a child if they are being “subjected to or threatened with” gender-affirming care, which was categorized as a form of “physical harm.” Caraballo explained to The New Republic that technically, a state cannot be sued, so state officers in charge of enforcement are sued, instead.

Since there is no state officer in charge of enforcing custody, that particular provision cannot be addressed in this lawsuit. It can only be blocked once it is challenged directly during the legal process.

Tuesday’s ruling “would provide a lot of persuasive basis for challenging it if it comes up in actual family court,” said Caraballo, but people might not have the means or resources to use this as a defense.

“It creates a chilling effect” that could scare people away from seeking their still-legal care, she added.

In his 44-page ruling, Hinkle systematically dismantled all arguments that had been made in favor of the law, starting with the fact that “gender identity is real” and trans people do not choose to identify a certain way. That is who they are.

Hinkle’s decision also called out a Florida Republican legislator who called trans people “demons,” as proof of the bigotry the community faces. 

Hinkle pointed out that the state could not overrule parental rights in deciding what medical care was appropriate for their child, nor could they remove an adult patient’s right to make their own decision about treatment, especially since Florida had not proved that gender-affirming care is dangerous. “There are well-established standards of care for treatment of gender dysphoria,” he wrote. “Not a single reputable medical association has taken a contrary position.”

Florida had provided “nonexistent” evidence to the contrary and argued that the medical professionals who testified against the bill were acting out of “good politics, not good medicine.”

“If ever a pot called a kettle black, it is here,” Hinkle wrote. “The statute and rules were an exercise in politics, not good medicine.”

This post has been updated.

More than 15 hours of public comment and protesting. More than 230 comments against Cop City, just four in favor of it. And still, at 5:30 a.m. on Tuesday morning, the Atlanta City Council voted 11–4 to approve $67 million in taxpayer money to raze down forest land and build a gargantuan police facility for a force that has killed a protester in cold blood and arrested dozens more on the grounds of having muddy shoes.

Police accountability: the unicorn of American society.

Only four city councilmembers, Liliana Bakhtiari, Jason Dozier, Keisha Waites, and Antonio Lewis, had the stones to heed the will of thousands of their constituents and vote against the funding.

The vote approved $31 million in public funds for construction, while green-lighting a provision that requires the city to pay $36 million over a 30-year period ($1.2 million per year) for the facility. The vote came after nearly 16 hours of hundreds of residents insisting the city reject the project’s bloated funding package. Chants of “Stop Cop City!” and “Vive vive Tortuguita!” rang off the walls of Atlanta City Hall.

The latter chant was in reference to Manuel Esteban Paez Terán, known as Tortuguita, who was shot and killed by Atlanta police in January. Contrary to the police’s claims that the officers only shot after being shot at first, an independent autopsy found Tortuguita’s hands were raised during the shooting. Even worse, police shot Tortuguita at least 57 times.

Fifty-seven times.

Then in March, dozens of people were indiscriminately arrested at a music festival organized by protesters, many of them charged with domestic terrorism. The protesters were detained on accusations of participating in vandalism and arson at a construction site that was over a mile away from where the music festival was being held. Many were arrested and denied bond on the grounds of having muddy shoes (they were all in a forest, where it had rained), or being “part of the team” because they were wearing black.

And last week, Atlanta police used a heavy-duty police truck and hordes of riot police to arrest just three individuals who had been helping organize bail funds and legal support for protesters. The trio were arrested on charges of “money laundering” and “charity fraud,” though there has been no public evidence of any mishandling of funds raised to support arrested protesters.

While granting bond for the organizers, the judge did not appear compelled by the prosecution. “I don’t find it very impressive,” he said. “There’s not a lot of meat on the bones.”

Former President Donald Trump thinks that one of E. Jean Carroll’s defamation lawsuits against him should be dismissed because he was only found liable for sexually abusing her, not raping her.

Trump was unanimously found liable in May for sexual abuse and battery against Carroll in the mid-1990s, and for defaming her in 2022 while denying the assault. Carroll has two more defamation lawsuits against Trump pending: one from 2019 and one from last month after he bashed Carroll during the CNN town hall.

But Trump and his legal team argued Monday that he couldn’t have defamed Carroll in 2019, because he was technically telling the truth when he denied raping her.

“The operative question in this case is, and has always been, whether a rape occurred in the Bergdorf Goodman dressing room,” Trump’s lawyers wrote in the court documents. The jury “found that one did not.”

Carroll accused Trump in her 2019 memoir of raping her in the Manhattan Bergdorf Goodman department store in the mid-1990s. She initially sued him twice for defamation: first in 2019, when he said she made up the rape allegation to promote her book, and again in November for posts he made about her on social media.

A New York jury unanimously found Trump liable of sexual abuse and battery against Carroll and of defaming her in 2022. They recommended she be awarded a total of $5 million in damages.

Carroll is not the only woman to accuse Trump of sexual assault, but her case was the first to make it to a courtroom. Trump continues to vehemently deny all of the allegations, and launched fresh vitriol at Carroll during the disastrous CNN town hall last month. So Carroll sued him for defamation again.

Carroll’s lead lawyer, Roberta Kaplan, rejected Trump’s claim that he hadn’t defamed Carroll, referring to the unanimous verdict in the recent trial. “The jury believed E. Jean Carroll when she testified that Trump sexually abused her. As a result, the jury concluded that Trump knowingly lied about Ms. Carroll when he claimed otherwise,” Kaplan said in a statement Monday.

This is not the first time a member of Trump’s inner circle has tried to get the 2019 lawsuit thrown out. Last week, the judge denied an attempt by Trump ally James H. Brady, who argued that the former president was being unfairly treated because he is a “white Christian.”

There’s been a flood of evidence coming out about Donald Trump’s alleged mishandling of classified documents at his Mar-a-Lago estate—and now there is also flooded evidence.

A resort employee drained the pool last October, straight into a room full of computer services used to store surveillance footage from around the property, CNN reported Monday, citing anonymous sources. It is unclear whether the room was intentionally flooded, but smart people generally try to drain water away from buildings.

You can see here just how far the pool is from the main property:

Federal prosecutors for special counsel Jack Smith, who is investigating Trump over the classified documents, have asked at least one witness about the flooded room. They were told that none of the equipment was damaged (have they tried putting the servers in rice, just in case?).

The timing of both the flood and the news report are remarkable. The server room was flooded just two months after FBI agents raided Mar-a-Lago and seized hundreds of classified documents. Prosecutors had subpoenaed surveillance footage before the raid, and they requested more video afterward, in order to determine how the documents were moved around the property.

At least two dozen people have been subpoenaed to testify in the investigation, ranging from resort employees to members of Trump’s inner circle. One person who spans both categories is Trump’s valet, Walt Nauta. Notes from Trump’s lawyer Evan Corcoran reveal that both Trump and Nauta knew exactly where and when Corcoran was planning to search for documents at Mar-a-Lago. Nauta had previously testified that Trump asked him to move boxes out of the storage room, both before and after they knew the Justice Department was seeking the return of classified documents.

According to Corcoran’s notes, Nauta had offered to help him look through the boxes in the storage room, which Corcoran declined. But Corcoran took breaks during the multiday search, leaving the storage room unattended multiple times. Prosecutors are reportedly possibly investigating whether Nauta knew exactly what was in the boxes he was moving.

Another employee who has been subpoenaed is a maintenance worker who helped Nauta move the boxes of classified documents. The maintenance worker is the same person who flooded the server room, according to CNN’s sources.

CNN’s story broke the same day that Trump’s legal team met with the Justice Department to argue that the former president should not be charged for keeping classified material after leaving office. They gave no indication of how the meeting went, but Trump took to Truth Social after, demanding to know “HOW CAN DOJ POSSIBLY CHARGE ME, WHO DID NOTHING WRONG.”

Smith has been circling ever closer to Trump, and many experts are speculating that he will issue criminal charges soon. In the meantime, Trump has plenty to keep him busy: He is under investigation in Georgia for his efforts to overturn the 2020 election, and he was indicted on 34 felony counts of falsifying business records for paying hush money to porn actress Stormy Daniels.

Trump was also found civilly liable for sexually abusing and defaming writer E. Jean Carroll—and two weeks ago, she sued him for defamation again over comments he made about her during a CNN town hall.

Florida Republicans passed a bill criminalizing the transport of undocumented people into Florida, requiring hospitals to ask about immigration status on intake forms, invalidating out of state driver’s licenses or other forms of government ID issued to undocumented people, and preventing local governments from issuing identification cards to undocumented people.

Now, after sparking backlash among thousands of immigrants (who make up a great deal of Florida’s economy), some Florida Republicans are trying to backpedal and do damage control.

On Monday, Representatives Alina Garcia, Rick Roth, and Juan Fernandez Barquin appeared at an event sponsored by Hialeah Mayor Esteban Bovo, also a Republican. The trio, all of whom voted to pass the anti-immigrant bill, clumsily attempted to appeal to the thousands of people their party has alienated.

“This bill is 100 percent supposed to scare you,” said Roth. “I’m a farmer, and the farmers are mad as hell. We are losing employees. They’re already starting to move to Georgia and other states. It’s urgent that you talk to all your people and convince them that you have resources, state representatives, and other people that can explain the bill to you,” he added, essentially begging Florida’s labor force to not leave the state that cares little for them.

“This is more of a political bill than it is policy. It does give more police state powers going forward to deal with immigration, but still this is mainly a political bill,” Roth concluded incoherently. It’s just politics and messaging, but also it ramps up the police state, but also it’s just all politics. OK.

“We had the best president in my life, the last 30 years, and I’m still supporting Donald Trump,” Roth continued. “I love my governor. He’s the greatest governor,” he said of Ron DeSantis, who led the charge to pass a bill stigmatizing and targeting the some 772,000 undocumented workers, students, and community members in Florida.

“I really didn’t prepare anything,” Garcia said while beginning her remarks, adding that she agreed with everything Roth said. “This is a bill basically to scare people from coming to the state of Florida, and I think it’s done its purpose.”

The pleading by Republicans who are reaping what they sowed comes after Latin American truck drivers began rallying behind calls to strike and not enter Florida, while thousands of workers and families have marched across the state protesting the bill and threatening to leave the state.

A spokesperson for Barquin provided a statement after publishing, assuring that the Florida representative does not see the bill as a mistake, or some messaging bill. “During [the] forum, some of my colleagues dismissed SB 1718 as merely a ‘scare tactic,’” Barquine says. “I, in no way, share their opinion.”

“I voted for this bill, support this bill, and applaud our Governor for making this a priority,” Barquin said.

This post has been updated.