Last Day of Trump’s Fraud Trial Starts With a Bomb. Almost Literally.

The final day of Donald Trump’s New York civil fraud trial kicked off Thursday with a bomb threat at the presiding judge’s house.

Nassau County police as well as a bomb squad rushed to Judge Arthur Engoron’s house on Long Island after someone threatened to blow up the dwelling Thursday morning, The Daily Beast first reported. The threat is believed to be an attempt to delay closing arguments in Trump’s trial. It is unclear whether proceedings will be affected.

The bomb threat came just hours after Trump posted a long rant on TruthSocial complaining about Engoron. Trump accused Engoron of colluding with New York Attorney General Letitia James to “‘SCREW ME,’ EVEN THOUGH I HAVE DONE NOTHING WRONG.”

“THIS IS A RIGGED AND UNFAIR TRIAL—NO JURY, NO VICTIMS, A GREAT FINANCIAL STATEMENT—JUST BEFORE THE IMPORTANT IOWA PRIMARY—ELECTION INTERFERENCE,” Trump wrote.

Trump wanted to present his own closing arguments, which Engoron said he could do so long as the former president abided by a strict set of rules about what he could actually discuss. This included sticking to the matter at hand instead of giving “a campaign speech” and not attacking James or the court staff. When Trump’s lawyers refused to agree, Engoron barred Trump from speaking, a move that Trump called “MEAN & NASTY” on TruthSocial.

James has accused Trump, his sons Don Jr. and Eric, the Trump Organization, and other company executives of fraudulently inflating the value of various real estate assets to get more favorable terms on bank loans. Engoron determined in September that Trump committed fraud and ordered that all Trump’s New York business certificates be canceled, making it nearly impossible to do business in the state and effectively killing the Trump Organization.

The current trial is primarily just to determine how much Trump owes in damages. And there isn’t a jury because his own legal team failed to ask for one.

Trump has repeatedly taken aim at Engoron and his law clerk Allison Greenfield throughout the trial, accusing them both of improper actions and bias. Engoron has saddled Trump with multiple gag orders, but the judge and Greenfield have still received multiple death threats from Trump supporters.

This is at least the third time that Trump supporters have tried to perpetrate an attack on one of the former president’s perceived enemies. In the past few weeks, both Judge Tanya Chutkan and special counsel Jack Smith have been the victims of “swatting” attacks. Swatting is when someone falsely reports an incident with the intent of initiating a potentially dangerous police response.

Smith has indicted Trump for mishandling classified documents and for his role in trying to overturn the 2020 election. Chutkan is presiding over the election interference case. Trump has complained bitterly about both people on social media.

Ron DeSantis said Wednesday that he would not stop Israel from forcibly removing Palestinians from Gaza if he is elected president.

The Republican primary debate featured just DeSantis and Nikki Haley, and saw a shocking return to actual policy discussion. At one point, moderator Jake Tapper asked DeSantis if he supported the mass removal of Palestinians.

“I am not going to tell [Israel] to do that,” DeSantis said. “But if they make the calculation that to avert a second Holocaust, they need to do that,” then he wouldn’t stop them.

The word for the mass expulsion of an ethnic group is ethnic cleansing.

DeSantis also said he did not believe in a two-state solution to the conflict between Israel and Gaza, instead accusing “Palestinian Arabs” of refusing to recognize the existence of Israel. The Palestinian Authority does, in fact, recognize Israel.

Israel, however, only seems open to a two-state solution if the second state is on an entirely different continent. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s far-right coalition has reportedly been secretly speaking with the Democratic Republic of Congo about resettling thousands of Palestinians in the African nation.

Netanyahu and his allies have repeatedly floated the idea of forcibly removing Palestinians, but the idea has been vehemently rejected by the international community.

Israeli officials, however, have made it increasingly clear in recent days that their plan is to completely eliminate Palestine. Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich said last week that a way to solve the war was to “encourage the voluntary migration of Gaza’s residents to countries that will agree to take in the refugees.”

Separately, National Security Minister Itamar Ben Gvir told reporters that the war was an “opportunity to concentrate on encouraging the migration of the residents of Gaza.”

White House National Security Council spokesman John Kirby refused to answer whether Israel cutting off Palestinians’ access to water is a war crime.

During a press conference on Wednesday, Kirby was asked about the upcoming International Court of Justice case accusing Israel of committing genocide against Palestinians in Gaza.

South Africa brought the charges against Israel and, as proof of its case, submitted an 84-page filing in December documenting Israeli war crimes as well as statements by various Israeli officials that it says proves “genocidal intent.” The ICJ will hear its first public hearing on the case on Thursday.

Kirby—and the Biden administration writ large—have completely dismissed the case thus far. Kirby last week called it “meritless, counterproductive, and completely without any basis in fact whatsoever.”

On Wednesday, however, Kirby was again asked about whether he had read the actual filing against Israel.

“You dismissed a few days ago the case brought by South Africa against Israel at the ICJ. Did you read the indictment, and if you did, do you believe that cutting off water, electricity, and fuel from a civilian population does not constitute a war crime by itself?”

“Yes I read the indictment,” Kirby replied angrily. “And as I said, we stand by what we said about this. We find it without merit. We find it counterproductive. And I’ll leave it there.”

South Africa’s filing links to several reports of Israel cutting off water, electricity, fuel, and food supplies—all of which has been documented extensively in the media.

In December, Unicef Executive Director Catherine Russell warned that clean water is so hard to find that “children in Gaza have barely a drop to drink.” Public health officials have repeatedly raised “grave concerns” over the lack of clean water and the outbreak of infectious diseases, including waterborne illnesses like cholera and typhoid.

One in every 100 people in Gaza has been killed since October 7, according to the Palestinian Health Ministry in Ramallah. That’s nearly 23,000 people—and that’s the most conservative estimate. The nonprofit Euro-Med Human Rights Monitor puts the death toll at nearly 30,000.

Taylor Swift, 12-time Grammy Award winner, Spotify’s most streamed artist in 2023, and Time Person of the Year, can add another line to her résumé: Democratic Party psyop. At least according to Fox News.

Fox host Jesse Watters, and frequent  Fox contributor Stuart Kaplan, spent Tuesday evening musing that the Biden administration may have been behind Swift’s recent post encouraging people to register to vote.

“When she posted the link to the Vote.org, like hundreds of thousands of young Taylor Swift fans all of a sudden registered to vote,” Watters began. “I wonder who got to her, from the White House or from wherever?”

Kaplan went on to suggest that the administration had sought out Swift, “whether with [her] knowledge or without [her] knowledge,” to lend her 279 million Instagram followers for a “covert” get-out-the-vote initiative.

Watters, of course, offered no pushback on the psyops narrative.

For what it’s worth, 35,000 new voters registered on Vote.org as a result of Swift’s Instagram post in September.

It is hardly forbidden knowledge that the Democratic Party has made celebrity endorsements of its candidates part of its campaigning strategy. The 2020 and 2016 Democratic National Conventions were, to mixed reviews, studded with the stars of today and yesteryear. But Swift, whose forays into activism have been mostly limited to anodyne denunciations of Tennessee Republican Senator Marsha Blackburn and the Supreme Court’s Dobbs decision overturning abortion rights, and support for Black Lives Matter and LGBTQ+ rights, has not been outspoken in her support for Joe Biden ahead of the 2024 election.

This, of course, has not stopped conservatives like Watters and Kaplan from indulging their obsession with Swift and their suspicion that her popularity among young people betrays, at best, a symptom of national decadence and impending decline and, at worst, a government conspiracy.

This is not even the first time Swift has been accused of participating in psyops; the far-right provocateur Jack Posobiec previously linked her to a “2024 voter operation for Democrats on abortion rights.”

Swift is only the latest celebrity to incur the wrath of the right. It once famously harnessed outrage at Colin Kaepernick and made it into a foundational block of its brand of reaction. But the obsession with Swift, about as inoffensive a cultural figure as exists in the United States, may just be the strangest.

Watters closed the segment by lamenting that he “now [knows] a lot more about Taylor Swift than [he] ever wanted to know,” but it’s clear that the right’s Swift-hatred is a product of its own making. As 2024 approaches, it’s yet to be seen whether this fixation will reap electoral rewards.

The Anti-Defamation League has made a startling confession: It is now including pro-Palestine marches in its count of antisemitic incidents in the United States.

The ADL released its annual antisemitism report on Wednesday, announcing that there were a stunning 3,283 such incidents in 2023. That’s a 361 percent increase compared to the previous year, according to the organization, which noted the “American Jewish community is facing a threat level that’s now unprecedented in modern history.”

The organization also stated that two-thirds of the total incidents could be “directly related to the Israel-Hamas war.”

The ADL report was widely covered by mainstream outlets like CNN, NBC, and Axios, which simply took the organization’s word for the gigantic increase without actually checking the data behind the claim.

Not all media outlets fumbled the ball, however. As The Forward first noted, there’s one big problem with the numbers: The ADL admits in its own press release that it includes pro-Palestine rallies in its list of antisemitic incidents, even if these featured no overt hostility toward Jewish people. Any anti-Israel or anti-Zionist chants are enough for the ADL’s new definition of antisemitism.

The report’s full list of antisemitic incidents isn’t public, but under the new definition, it could even count anti-Israel protests by Jewish activists as antisemitic. Many Jewish Americans have been at the forefront of the pro-Palestine protests over the last three months.

The 2023 report includes a whopping 1,317 rallies in its list of antisemitic incidents, with no clear distinction between whether the rallies included antisemitic rhetoric or anti-Zionist chants and without regard for whether there were Jewish organizers or participants involved. In other words, the underlying data in support of this assertion is likely to be considerably inflated.

Antisemitism is a real, and growing, problem—especially in the United States. But the ADL isn’t helping anyone when it defines a bomb threat at a synagogue and a Students for Justice in Palestine rally as equally antisemitic.

The problems with ADL’s reporting methods have been obvious for some time to anyone paying close attention. As Eric Alterman wrote for The New Republic, the ADL has, since its founding, repeatedly changed its counting method—and then followed these periodic rejiggerings with reports asserting massive increases in antisemitic incidents. Even more troubling, the organization habitually fails to make distinctions between the various antisemitic incidents it is tracking. Graffiti found on the walls of a college dorm gets lumped together with more deadly tragedies, such as the 2018 shooting at the Tree of Life synagogue in Pittsburgh.

The organization’s reporting has taken an even greater turn for the worse under chief executive Jonathan Greenblatt. In 2015, he began his leadership at the organization with a speech that made virtually no mention of the dangers of white Christian nationalism. And on Israel, Greenblatt in 2022 firmly announced: “Anti-Zionism is antisemitism, full stop.”

In October, an ADL researcher resigned over Greenblatt’s condemnation of Jewish Americans protesting Israel’s war on Gaza. But the next month, Greenblatt only doubled down on his position, when he said that pro-Palestine activism has “clarified and confirmed that fanatical anti-Zionism from the hard left is as dangerous to the Jewish community as rabid white supremacy from the extreme right.”

Along the way, Greenblatt has demonstrated a hesitance to criticize one of the more appalling antisemites in public life: Elon Musk. The two men’s strange alliance has drawn criticism from Greenblatt’s predecessor, Abe Foxman.

All that to say, the ADL’s new counting method isn’t a huge surprise. But it sure is disappointing to see so many media outlets take the organization’s word at face value.