“Belongs in Jail”: Billionaire Republican Donor Warns Against Trump

A hedge fund billionaire and GOP megadonor has a message for voters: Stay clear of Trump.

Leon Cooperman, chairman and CEO of Omega Advisors, blasted the former president in a call with CNN last week, insisting that Trump cannot return to the Oval Office.

“It would be terrible for the country if Donald Trump were reelected,” Cooperman told CNN in a phone interview late last week. “He’s a divisive human being who belongs in jail.”

Trump is currently staring down 91 felony charges across four criminal cases, including 44 federal charges and 47 state charges. Trump has denied wrongdoing in all of them.

It’s not the first time that Cooperman has gone on the attack with Trump. Last year, the CEO told the PBD Podcast that he would rather take a chance with progressives than put a “would-be dictator into a second term where he has no allegiance to anybody but himself.”

Cooperman admitted he “reluctantly” voted for President Joe Biden in the 2020 election, but he has a long history of supporting the political ambitions of right-wing candidates, including the late Senator John McCain, Senator Marco Rubio, former President George W. Bush, and Florida Governor Ron DeSantis, according to OpenSecrets.

Cooperman also said that both Biden and Trump are “bad choices,” making a long-shot prediction that neither of them will be their party’s nominee this time next year. If they reach the ballot, however, he told CNN he won’t vote.

Instead, the executive is hunting for a more centrist option. According to Federal Election Commission records, in August Cooperman donated $1,000 to the 2024 presidential campaign of former New Jersey Governor Chris Christie, who himself has come out in full force against Trump’s candidacy.

President Joe Biden’s stance on Israel has caused his support levels among Arab Americans to plummet, a result that could cost him a key swing state (or several) in the 2024 presidential election.

Since fighting broke out between Israel and Palestine, Biden has pledged total support to Tel Aviv. He only recently changed his stance to call for a humanitarian pause—instead of a complete cease-fire—so that aid can enter Gaza and foreigners can evacuate.

His position could cost him dearly. A poll conducted by the Arab American Institute following the outbreak of violence in Palestine and Israel found that support for Biden among Arab Americans has more than halved since 2020.

Just 17 percent of Arab American voters support the president, down from 59 percent during the previous election cycle—a 42 percent drop. Two-thirds of Arab Americans disagree with Biden’s response to the violence in Israel and Palestine.

“This is the most dramatic shift over the shortest period of time that I’ve ever seen,” James Zogby, the founder and president of the Arab American Institute, told Time.

This shift could cost not just Biden but the entire Democratic Party the election in 2024. The largest Arab American community lives in Dearborn, Michigan, a crucial battleground state. There are smaller populations in Pennsylvania and Georgia, both of which are still larger than Biden’s 2020 margin of victory in those states.

More than half of Arab Americans voted for Biden in 2020, but now, community leaders are turning on him. “Just changing his tone—that’s not enough,” Sami Khaldi, the president of the Dearborn Democratic Club and a former 2020 Biden delegate, said to Time about Biden’s new call for a humanitarian pause.

“Every president comes here and says the best solution for the Middle East crisis is to have a two-state solution, but you don’t see anyone have the courage to do it. We need him to do that.”

Vivek Ramaswamy’s recent take on Ukraine was enough to boggle Piers Morgan’s mind.

In an interview released Monday, the GOP presidential candidate claimed that if elected, he would give Russian President Vladimir Putin “a deal” that would effectively hand over the annexed sections of Ukraine.

“Here’s the deal: He has to exit his military alliance with Xi Jinping. End the Russia-China military alliance,” Ramaswamy said. “In return, what they get is a hard commitment that NATO will not admit Ukraine to NATO.”

“And then, here, we’d freeze the current lines of control,” Ramaswamy quickly threw in.

That idea shocked even the controversial news host, whose eyes shot wide open.

“You would give Putin everything he’s stolen?” asked Morgan.

“I’m not going to give him anything, I’m giving him a deal,” Ramaswamy retorted, vaguely justifying the notion by noting that those regions are predominantly Russian-speaking while acknowledging that Putin is an “evil dictator.”

Recent polling shows that Ramaswamy’s hypnotic hold over some GOP voters is beginning to fade. A Des Moines Register poll published Monday found that the share of Iowa voters who view him unfavorably shot up from 20 percent to 37 percent.

“Anecdotally, several voters I’ve talked to in New Hampshire say that they were considering Ramaswamy early on but the more they hear from him the less they like him,” tweeted The Washington Post reporter Meryl Kornfield.

Senate Democrats have finally taken the first steps to address the ethics crisis rocking the Supreme Court.

The Senate Judiciary Committee announced Monday that it will seek to subpoena Republican billionaire megadonor Harlan Crow and ultraconservative activist Leonard Leo. Both men feature prominently in the ethics scandal for their relationships with Justices Clarence Thomas and Samuel Alito. The committee will also seek to subpoena wealthy GOP donor Robin Arkley II.

“The Supreme Court is in an ethical crisis of its own making,” the committee said in a statement. “In order to adequately address this crisis, it is imperative that we understand the full extent of how people with interests before the Court are able to use undisclosed gifts to gain private access to the justices.”

All three men have so far either refused to cooperate with the committee’s investigation or offered to share an insufficient amount of information. The committee could authorize the subpoenas after a vote as soon as next week.

Crow, a Republican billionaire megadonor and Nazi memorabilia collector, has repeatedly lavished Thomas with expensive gifts. These include island-hopping yacht vacations, private school tuition for Thomas’s nephew, and buying and renovating a Thomas family property, where Thomas’s mother still lives.

Thomas has also been Crow’s guest at Bohemian Grove, which ProPublica describes as a “secretive all-men’s retreat in Northern California” that attracts major corporate and political players. It costs thousands of dollars for a member to bring a guest to the Grove, but Crow has reportedly brought Thomas there almost every year for the past two decades.

Thomas’s visits to the Grove helped him develop a relationship with the Koch brothers. Thomas has participated in events for the Koch donor network for at least a decade. All of his appearances were arranged with the help of dark-money king Leo.

In addition to securing Thomas’s goodwill, Leo also helped organize a luxury vacation that Alito went on. Neither Thomas nor Alito have disclosed any of these lavish gifts on their financial statements.

The Supreme Court does not have a formal code of ethics. Since the Thomas and Alito scandals broke, many people have called on the court to establish an ethics code to help prevent such situations in the future. Six of the justices have resisted such a move, with Alito being one of the most vocal. But Elena Kagan, Amy Coney Barrett, and Brett Kavanaugh have all backed implementing such a code.

The Senate Judiciary Committee advanced a bill in midsummer that would require the justices to adopt a code of ethics, create new financial disclosure rules, and establish a process for submitting and investigating ethics complaints against the justices. But the bill has not yet gone up for debate, and it will have a hard time passing the chamber, where Democrats have only a razor-thin majority.

Former New Jersey Governor Chris Christie has a message for Republican voters holding out for Donald Trump: It’s time to stop.

Christie’s warning comes days after news that Mark Meadows, Trump’s last chief of staff and so-called “special friend,” flipped against his former boss, dishing dirty details on election fraud claims in exchange for immunity. It’ll be Meadows’s testimony, according to Christie, that seals Trump’s fate.

“This is deadly. It’s done. He’s going to be convicted. It’s over,” Christie told MSNBC’s Joe Scarborough on Tuesday, describing Meadows as someone “velcroed to Trump’s hip” through the entire 2020 campaign and beyond.

In several alleged meetings with special counsel Jack Smith’s team this year, Meadows told federal investigators that Trump knew he was lying when he claimed he won, mere hours after the polls closed on election night. To this day, Meadows said he has yet to see any evidence of election fraud.

“I think everybody watching needs to understand from somebody who did this work for seven years, you don’t give Mark Meadows immunity unless the evidence he has is unimpeachable,” Christie noted.

And Christie believes Trump knows it too. The 2024 GOP presidential candidate pointed to a flurry of Trump’s recent gaffes and verbal slipups on the campaign trail as evidence of heightened stress following the news of Meadows’s deal.

“I want all Republican voters to understand this, what’s going to be happening in March,” Christie said. “He’s going to be sitting in a courtroom in Washington, D.C., with Mark Meadows 20 feet away from him, saying, he committed crimes in front of me, on my watch.”