Rapist Who Wanted Vice President Dead Compares Self to Navalny

Donald Trump thinks he has a lot in common with Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny, likening his own legal comeuppance for fraud and rape to the plight of the Russian opposition leader, who died in one of Russia’s harshest penal colonies on Friday.

“It is a form of Navalny. It is a form of communism or fascism,” Trump said at a Fox News town hall on Tuesday evening, referring to his recent court judgments, which are expected to top nearly $540 million.

That stems from losing just two cases: a defamation case brought by writer E. Jean Carroll, whom a jury determined had been sexually abused by the former game show host, and Trump’s New York fraud trial, in which Judge Arthur Engoron ruled that Trump’s lack of contrition and remorse “borders on pathological.”

But using Navalny to make himself a martyr can only go so far for Trump, who won the 2016 general election in part due to Russian election interference that his campaign welcomed, per the 2020 report by the GOP-led Senate Intelligence Committee, and who consistently kowtowed to Russian President Vladimir Putin during his presidency.

Instead of condemning Putin for Navalny’s death—like President Joe Biden, former South Carolina Governor Nikki Haley, and Navalny’s wife, Yulia Navalnaya—Trump instead opted to simply refer to it as a “horrible thing.”

“People thought that could happen, and it did happen,” Trump said, vaguely referring to Navalny’s death before quickly turning the spotlight back on himself.

“It’s happening here,” he continued, claiming that his indictments are “all because of the fact that I’m in politics.”

Earlier on Fox, Haley took a stronger stance against the Kremlin, describing Navalany as a “a hero who challenged Putin” and “lost his life because of it.”

“This is on the heels of Trump saying that he would encourage Putin to invade any NATO countries that didn’t pull their weight,” she said, keeping the heat on Trump rather than the Russian dictator.

“He’s gonna compare himself to Navalny, and the victim that he is in his court cases?” she added.

One day after a transgender Oklahoman teen hit their head on the floor while getting attacked in their school bathroom, they were dead.

Nex Benedict, a 16-year-old from Owasso, Oklahoma, was the victim of transphobic torment from school bullies that started at the beginning of the 2023 school year, just a handful of months after the state signed into law a transgender bathroom ban, mandating that students use restrooms that match the sex listed on their birth certificates.

The bullying reached an apex on February 7, according to Benedict’s family, when three older girls beat Benedict and another transgender student in the girls’ bathroom. The fighting left Nex bruised, with wounds on their face and eyes and scratches on the back of their head, reported The Independent.

Benedict’s mother, Sue Benedict, told the publication that she was furious the school didn’t call an ambulance or the police. To add insult to injury, the school then informed her that the bloodied teen—a straight-A student who enjoyed drawing, reading, and taking care of the family cat—would be suspended for the next two weeks.

Instead, Benedict collapsed on their family’s living room floor the following day. When EMTs arrived, they discovered that Benedict had stopped breathing. They were declared dead that evening.

Tragically, it’s not the first time that Owasso has punished one of its LGBTQ+ members. In April 2022, one of Benedict’s teachers at Owasso High School, Tyler Wrynn, was featured in a video by Libs of TikTok, a far-right account run by professional agitator Chaya Raichik whose other posts have led to multiple bomb threats across Oklahoma. In the clip, Wrynn told his students that he was proud of them and encouraged them to love themselves despite outside pressures, adding that “if your parents don’t accept you for who you are, fuck them.” Following Raichik’s post, Wrynn became the subject of harassment and death threats and, after fiery local backlash, resigned from the district—much to the disappointment of Benedict.

“Nex was very angry about it,” their mother told The Independent.

Oklahoma is one of 11 states in the nation that have legislation on the books regulating bathroom access, which conservatives have framed as a student safety issue. But that flies in the face of the data. More than three-quarters of transgender students across the country—76 percent—reported that they felt unsafe at school because of their gender, according to a 2021 GLSEN report. They were also five times more likely to be threatened or attacked while at school than their peers, according to data from The Trevor Project.

LGBTQ+ advocates within the state have made no qualms about placing the blame for Benedict’s death on Raichik’s inflammatory and hateful posts and Oklahoma’s lawmakers.

“We want to be clear, whether Nex died as a direct result of injuries sustained in the brutal hate-motivated attack at school or not, Nex’s death is a result of being the target of physical and emotional harm because of who Nex was,” wrote Freedom Oklahoma in a statement.

Meanwhile, Raichik’s influence will only continue to grow in the state. In January, the provocateur found a new role of authority within Oklahoma, landing herself a cushy government position supervising school libraries and deciding which books students in the state will be allowed to read.

Republicans’ main witness in their efforts to impeach Joe Biden has already been charged with lying to the FBI. Now he has also admitted to having ties to Russian intelligence officers.

Alexander Smirnov, a longtime FBI informant with ties to Ukraine, had claimed to have proof of Biden and his son Hunter accepting bribes from a Ukrainian oligarch. Republicans repeatedly touted Smirnov’s claims in their quest to impeach the president. But last week, the Justice Department announced that it was charging Smirnov with making a false statement and creating a false record related to the bribery allegation.

Now, in a detention memo filed Tuesday, the Justice Department revealed that Smirnov confessed that Russian intelligence officers helped him smear Hunter Biden.

“During his custodial interview on February 14, Smirnov admitted that officials associated with Russian intelligence were involved in passing a story about” the younger Biden, the filing said.

Smirnov also told the FBI that he had had repeated contact with a Russian official who, as Smirnov told it, was “the son of a former high-ranking Russian government official, someone who purportedly controls two groups of individuals tasked with carrying out assassination efforts in a third-party country, a Russian representative to another country, and … someone with ties to a particular Russian intelligence service.”

Smrinov initially tried to spread the Biden Ukrainian corruption story just before the 2020 election, but Justice Department prosecutors are warning that Smirnov’s “misinformation” goes far beyond that.

“He is actively peddling new lies that could impact U.S. elections after meeting with Russian intelligence officials in November,” they said in the filing.

The memo notes that Smirnov himself reported several meetings with Russian officials as recently as December 2023.

The charges against Smirnov are the latest major fail in Republicans’ attempts to impeach Biden, which has been nothing but a comedy of errors. For almost a year, the GOP has insisted that Biden and his son are guilty of corruption. Republicans have not produced a shred of concrete evidence of their claims, but they have repeatedly upheld accusations from a supposedly credible but confidential FBI source (whom we now know is Smirnov) as reason enough to keep investigating the president.

Last July, Senator Chuck Grassley released the FBI materials, over the bureau’s objections, related to the bribery accusations. But the documents showed nothing.

Meanwhile, all of the other witnesses that Republicans have called, claiming that their testimony will blow the case wide open, have instead debunked every single accusation against the Biden family.

Hunter Biden’s attorneys argued on Tuesday that U.S. Attorney David Weiss’s investigation into their client included some major factual errors, including mistaking a pile of sawdust for cocaine.

In a court filing, the law team challenged that what the Department of Justice’s discovery revealed cannot be taken “at face value.”

In previous filings, Weiss had accused the president’s son of taking a picture of several lines of cocaine. But Biden’s team says otherwise, claiming that Biden not only didn’t take the photograph, but that the picture doesn’t depict cocaine at all.

Instead, the picture shows three lines of sawdust, jokingly propped by a carpenter who took the photograph and sent it to Biden’s then psychiatrist, Dr. Keith Ablow, who in turn sent it to the junior Biden.

“Mistaking sawdust for cocaine sounds more like a storyline from one of the 1980s Police Academy comedies than what should be expected in a high-profile prosecution by the U.S. Department of Justice,” the team wrote in its retort.

A court document sharing the image also included the texts from Ablow, who wrote, “This one in my office is of lines of sawdust sent to me by a master carpenter who was a coke addict. I told him that, ultimately, he would have to choose between his art and his drug. He sent me the photo and a message that said, ‘Made my choice.’”

“Hope you do, too,” Ablow added.

The new documents also accuse the special counsel of being swayed by Alexander Smirnov, whose entire testimony about the Biden family’s connection to Ukrainian company Burisma Holdings was blown up last week when he was indicted by the DOJ for lying to prosecutors.

“The Smirnov allegations infected this case,” Hunter’s lawyers wrote, arguing that the special counsel threw out Biden’s plea deal while following Smirnov “down his rabbit hole of lies.”

“Lo and behold, some seven months later, the Special Counsel finally figured out that Mr. Smirnov was lying—which should have been obvious to everyone, certainly by August 2020 when DOJ closed the investigation,” they wrote.

A Republican candidate for Ohio senator believes that women don’t actually need abortions, just someone to lift heavy things such as strollers for them.

Entrepreneur Bernie Moreno is one of three men running to face off against Democratic Senator Sherrod Brown in the fall. During a discussion with all Republican primary candidates Monday night, the moderator asked the men for their stance on abortion and reproductive rights.

Moreno said his daughter had recently flown home after visiting him. “Mom carrying what looks like an F1 team-worth of equipment,” Moreno said. “People helped her on that plane. Helped put the stroller away, helped her with her seat.”

“Those are the kinds of things that we can do,” he said. “Let’s be a pro-mom, pro-family policy.”

So apparently, Moreno has just volunteered to personally help every parent lift heavy strollers and navigate logistically complicated situations.

In all seriousness, Moreno is technically not wrong. If Republicans are going to force people to have children, then lawmakers need to put systems in place to help care for those children. Unfortunately, the GOP seems dead set on making childrearing harder.

Republicans nationwide are cutting back on free school lunch programs for lower-income families. And Moreno’s fellow Ohio Republicans have banned gender-affirming care for transgender and nonbinary teenagers, despite the fact that those treatments help reduce depression and suicidality in LGBTQ children.

Moreno may also find that his opposition to abortion is pretty unpopular with Ohio voters. In November, people overwhelmingly voted to enshrine abortion protections in the state constitution. The result was a massive blow to Secretary of State Frank LaRose, who had championed the anti-abortion side of the referendum and who is running against Moreno for the Republican Senate nomination.