Trump Admits He Was “Doing Services” for Foreign Governments Who Paid Him

Donald Trump says it’s OK that he got paid by foreign governments while he was president because he was “doing services” for them.

Trump participated in a Fox News town hall Wednesday night instead of the Republican primary debate. At one point, he was asked about a recent congressional report that found he made almost $8 million from nearly two dozen foreign governments during his first two years in office.

Trump dismissed the amount as “a small amount of money.”

“You know, it sounds like a lot of money. That’s small,” he said.

He then said that it was fine he had received so much money because it was payment for accommodation at his various clubs and hotels.

“I was doing services for them,” Trump explained. “People were staying in these massive hotels, these beautiful hotels.”

“I don’t get $8 million for doing nothing.”

Democrats on the House Oversight Committee released a report last week that found Trump’s businesses had received at least $7.8 million from at least 20 different countries. The report acknowledged that its findings were likely incomplete, as it covers just half of Trump’s presidency and transactions at just four of his more than 500 businesses.

The money came from some of the “world’s most unsavory regimes,” according to the report, and Trump never asked for congressional approval to keep the funds, as mandated by the Constitution.

The countries included China—which gave Trump $5.5 million, the largest sum listed in the report—Saudi Arabia, Turkey, and Hungary.

The report came as Republicans are trying to impeach Joe Biden for allegedly benefiting from his son Hunter’s overseas business dealings. But the GOP has yet to produce any actual evidence of wrongdoing by the president.

A Florida school district has banned multiple versions of the dictionary for including sexual content. Yes, you read that right.

The Escambia County School District, located in Florida’s Panhandle, has allegedly removed five dictionaries, eight encyclopedias, The Guinness Book of World Records, and Ripley’s Believe It or Not from its library shelves after a December investigation found those books could violate House Bill 1069.

Those reference books are among 1,600 titles that the December investigation found inappropriate for county school library shelves. Other banned books include Anne Frank’s Diary of a Young Girl, some Sherlock Holmes books, and the autobiographies of Beyoncé, Oprah, and Lady Gaga.

“We can’t believe we have to say this but students have a right to read the dictionary in school,” the ACLU said in a TikTok posted Wednesday.

With the latest purge, Escambia County has now pulled more than 2,800 books from its library shelves because they might violate state law on teaching students about sex and sexuality. The other banned books cover subjects including race, racism, and LGBTQ identity. The nonprofit organization PEN America, along with county students and parents, has sued the school district for banning books.

Florida Republican lawmakers dramatically expanded Governor Ron DeSantis’s hallmark “Don’t Say Gay” legislation in May 2023. The legislation bans teaching material on sexual orientation and gender identity through eighth grade. The law also makes it easier for people to file complaints to ban books.

Since the law went into effect, Florida schools have undergone massive purges of books from both classroom and school libraries. Other titles yanked from shelves include “The Hill We Climb,” the poem read at Joe Biden’s inauguration, The Bluest Eye by Toni Morrison, the graphic novel Little Rock Nine, and the movie Ruby Bridges.

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.