Republican Lawmakers Urge Biden to Directly Attack Iran Right Now

GOP hawks are demanding that President Joe Biden hit back against Iran after a drone strike from an Iran-backed militia killed three American soldiers and injured at least 34 U.S. personnel at a Jordan base on Sunday.

“I am calling on the Biden Administration to strike targets of significance inside Iran, not only as reprisal for the killing of our forces, but as deterrence against future aggression,” Senator Lindsey Graham said in a statement just hours after the news broke.

“The only thing the Iranian regime understands is force. Until they pay a price with their infrastructure and their personnel, the attacks on U.S. troops will continue,” he added. “Hit Iran now. Hit them hard.”

Other members of Republican leadership—who have spent months stalling on supplying aid to two other war fronts America is already involved in—showed similar bloodlust.

“He left our troops as sitting ducks, and now three are dead and dozens wounded, sadly as I’ve predicted would happen for months,” said Arkansas Senator Tom Cotton. “The only answer to these attacks must be devastating military retaliation against Iran’s terrorist forces, both in Iran and across the Middle East. Anything less will confirm Joe Biden as a coward unworthy of being commander in chief.”

Senate Minority Mitch McConnell issued a similar statement, highlighting that all eyes are on Biden as to whether he will “exercise American strength to compel Iran to change its behavior” and impose “serious, crippling costs” for Iran’s “front-line terrorist proxies” and the country’s sponsors “who wear American blood as a badge of honor.”

Senator John Cornyn specifically called for the U.S. military to “target Tehran,” the capital city of Iran, before later backtracking to say that he meant the “IRGC and Quds Force terrorist facilitators.”

“The head of the snake is Iran,” Representative Don Bacon, a senior member of the House Armed Services Committee, told Axios. “We should find smart Iranian targets that are low risk of our aircraft getting shot down and teach Iran a lesson.”

The Iranian government denied involvement in the attack on Monday.

Biden has vowed to retaliate against Iran for the attack, though foreign policy experts believe he is likely weighing a “Goldilocks” response—not too hard that it would incite a full-fledged war or escalate the situation in Gaza but not too soft that it prolongs the conflict, according to The New York Times.

Writer E. Jean Carroll revealed Monday she has some big plans for the $83.3 million Donald Trump owes her for defamation.

Trump owes Carroll the massive amount for defaming her in 2019 after she revealed he sexually abused her in the mid-1990s. A jury awarded Carroll $7.3 million for damage to her reputation, $11 million for emotional harm, and $65 million for punitive damages.

In a Monday morning interview with Good Morning America, Carroll described the overwhelming “elation” she felt after the verdict. When asked if she knew what she wanted to do with the money, Carroll said she had an idea.

“I’d like to give the money to something Donald Trump hates,” she said. “If it will cause him pain for me to give money to certain things, that’s my intent. Well, perhaps a fund for the women who have been sexually assaulted by Donald Trump.”

Carroll is far from the only woman to accuse Trump of sexual assault, with at least 26 other women accusing Trump of some form of misconduct. Carroll’s lawsuits were the first to make it to a courtroom. Trump has vehemently denied all of the allegations, aiming particular vitriol at Carroll, including multiple times during this most recent trial.

In fact, even after the verdict was handed down, Trump continued to insist that he had never met Carroll before and to share negative posts about her on TruthSocial.

Trump now owes Carroll a total of $88.3 million. In May, a separate jury unanimously found Trump liable of sexual abuse and battery against Carroll and of defaming her a different time. That jury recommended Carroll be awarded $5 million in damages.

While Donald Trump and his associates were peddling election fraud schemes in an effort to undermine the 2020 presidential election results, pro-Trump broadcast network One America News was operating its own mission to sabotage voting machine company Smartmatic.

In the immediate aftermath of the January 6 Capitol riot, OAN’s chief executives passed along a volatile email to Trump attorney Sidney Powell that included a spreadsheet of Smartmatic’s employees with their company passwords.

The sender of the January 8, 2021, email was identified by CNN as OAN president Charles Herring, via public materials related to Smartmatic’s case and court documents from other 2020-related lawsuits.

Lawyers for Smartmatic related to a federal judge that the contents of the full email and its attached spreadsheet suggest that OAN executives “may have engaged in criminal activities” because they “appear to have violated state and federal laws regarding data privacy,” per CNN.

“OAN denies that its executive team ‘may have engaged in criminal activities.’ This vague accusation is a clumsy attempt to smear OAN and to divert attention from Smartmatic’s own misconduct,” OAN lawyer Charles Babcock told the outlet.

Another legal filing by an ex–Dominion Voting Systems employee accuses Herring’s father, OAN founder Robert Herring, of forwarding a similar spreadsheet to Trump’s wannabe friend, election-denier and broke MyPillow CEO Mike Lindell. The filing, from a defamation case against Lindell, specifies that the email contained “password information for employees of several voting systems providers.”

The court documents do not make clear how OAN accessed Smartmatic’s records or whether the passwords distributed to Trump’s allies were accurate.

OAN is already in boiling water in regard to its election denialism. The bite-size network—which has struggled financially since it was dropped by practically every cable provider, from DirecTV to Verizon—competed in a race to the bottom with Fox to seed election lies. That could put the MAGA station in the tank for a gigantic settlement payout like Fox, which last year paid out a historic $787 million settlement to Dominion for its election lies.

Representative Nancy Pelosi accused pro-Palestine protesters of having links to Russia and called for the FBI to investigate them.

During a Sunday interview with CNN’s State of the Union, Pelosi was asked if she was worried that younger voters would abandon President Joe Biden due to his resistance to a cease-fire.

“For them to call for a cease-fire is Mr. Putin’s message,” Pelosi said, referring to Russian President Vladimir Putin. “Make no mistake, this is directly connected to what he would like to see.”

“I think some of these protesters are spontaneous and organic and sincere. Some, I think, are connected to Russia.”

When asked if she thought some of the pro-Palestinian protesters were Russian plants, Pelosi said, “I don’t think they’re plants. I think some financing should be investigated. And I want to ask the FBI to investigate that.”

Israel’s constant bombardment of Gaza has killed more than 26,500 people, primarily women and children, since October 7, according to Gaza’s health ministry. The vast majority of Americans, particularly younger voters, support a cease-fire. Growing numbers of lawmakers have also begun to call for an end to the fighting, but the White House continues to back Israel.

Pelosi’s comments sparked immediate backlash. The executive director of the Council on American-Islamic Relations, Nihad Awad, called Pelosi’s claim “delusional” and her call for an FBI investigation “downright authoritarian.”

“Sadly, Rep. Pelosi’s comments echo a time in our nation when opponents of the Vietnam War were accused of being communist sympathizers and subjected to FBI harassment,” he said in a statement.

“Instead of baselessly smearing those Americans as Russian collaborators, former House Speaker Pelosi and other political leaders should respect the will of the American people by calling for an end to the Netanyahu government’s genocidal war on the people of Gaza.”

Many people on social media were quick to point out the hypocrisy of Pelosi’s comments. The majority of people who support a cease-fire are politically neutral or left-leaning, including thousands of Black American pastors, Doctors Without Borders, and according to some polls, 80 percent of Democratic voters.

Others pointed out that the specific call for an FBI investigation marked a dangerous shift in the government’s stance on involving law enforcement against anti-war efforts. Widespread crackdowns against pro-Palestine speech have been compared to a new wave of McCarthyism.

Biden’s refusal to call for a cease-fire could well cost him in November. His popularity among young voters has dropped dramatically, primarily due to his stance on Israel. Biden’s campaign manager traveled last week to Detroit, which has a large Arab-American community. Many of the community leaders refused to meet with her over Biden’s Gaza policies.

Judge Lewis Kaplan had just a few short words to share with the jury moments after they issued a whopping $83.3 million verdict against Donald Trump in the defamation case brought by writer E. Jean Carroll.

“My advice to you is that you never disclose that you were on this jury,” Kaplan said.

That foreboding warning—which sounds more like something you’d expect to hear in a trial against a mob boss rather than a former president—is just one of many extraordinary measures that Kaplan has taken to keep his jury safe. Prior to the trial’s start, Kaplan also decided to keep the jury partially sequestered and fully anonymous, instructing them not to use their real names even with one another.

Trump proved moments after the trial that there’s a good reason for the extra precautions, launching into a social media diatribe in which he claimed he would be attempting to appeal the decision.

“Absolutely ridiculous! I fully disagree with both verdicts, and will be appealing this whole Biden Directed Witch Hunt focused on me and the Republican Party,” Trump posted on Truth Social. “Our Legal System is out of control, and being used as a Political Weapon. They have taken away all First Amendment Rights. THIS IS NOT AMERICA!”

Trump was already found liable for sexually assaulting Carroll. With fines from the previous trial, he now owes Carroll a total of $88.3 million.