John Bolton Has a Hilarious Way to Stop Trump From Pulling Out of NATO

Former national security adviser John Bolton has an unconventional suggestion for saving the U.S. alliance with NATO through a potential second term under Donald Trump: Just keep the former reality TV host distracted.

“So as Donald Trump’s former national security adviser, you believe that all Americans and everyone should take it very seriously when he says he wants to withdraw from NATO, and a second Donald Trump term, you believe, would mean an almost immediate withdrawal from NATO,” prompted MeidasTouch’s Ben Meiselas on Wednesday.

“Well I think he would do it very early in the term,” Bolton replied. “The remedy I would propose to anybody who doesn’t want us to withdraw from NATO is find a way to distract his attention.

“Since he has a short attention span, that can work, at least for a while, until it pops back into his head,” he said. “This is, I think unfortunately, a very good example of what a second Trump term would be like. A lot of things he talked about in the first term, maybe made some tentative steps toward but didn’t actually carry through on, we’ll see again in a second term.”

According to Bolton, a policy hawk who also served in Ronald Reagan’s administration, the consequences of America’s exit from the Cold War alliance could be dire, effectively resulting in the end of NATO, leaving behind a fractured and significantly weakened European alliance, while devastating America’s international credibility as an ally.

Trump has long criticized America’s relationship with the international military alliance, baselessly insisting that other NATO members have failed to pay their dues, and argued that the U.S. has been shortchanged by other members, even though that’s not how the alliance operates.

The Cold War organization has “no ledger that maintains accounts of what countries pay and owe,” according to former Obama staffer Aaron O’Connell, who explained to NPR in 2018 that “NATO is not like a club with annual membership fees.”

In February, Bolton claimed that Trump had completely fabricated a story in which he allegedly told a European leader that he’d allow Russia to “do whatever the hell they want” to NATO allies if they didn’t “pay their “bills.”

“But … the fact that it’s an imaginary conversation that makes Trump look very good—as all of Trump’s imagined conversations do—doesn’t mean that he doesn’t believe what he’s saying,” Bolton said at the time.

The White House has canceled its yearly iftar banquet, a tradition where the president hosts Muslims in government, community leaders from across the country, and members of the diplomatic corps to break their daily Ramadan fast with an evening meal. And President Biden’s Gaza war policy appears to be why.

The White House decided Tuesday to cancel the meal, Al Jazeera English reported, citing two sources familiar with the matter. The move came after many Muslim community members declined invitations and warned leaders not to attend in protest of Biden’s support for Israel’s war on Gaza.

“The American Muslim community said very early on that it would be completely unacceptable for us to break bread with the very same White House that is enabling the Israeli government to starve and slaughter the Palestinian people in Gaza,” Edward Ahmed Mitchell, the deputy director of the Council on American-Islamic Relations, told Al Jazeera.

On Monday, CNN reported that the White House would be hosting a scaled-back iftar dinner the next day, but hours later, the White House announced that there would only be a smaller meal for Muslim government staffers, with a separate meeting for Muslim community leaders.

Even that meeting with the president didn’t go as planned, when a Palestinian American doctor walked out in protest.

“I said it was disappointing I’m the only Palestinian here, and out of respect for my community, I’m going to leave,” Dr. Thaer Ahmad, an emergency physician from Chicago who traveled to Gaza earlier this year, told CNN. That meeting also included national security adviser Jake Sullivan and Vice President Kamala Harris, as well as other administration officials.

The cancellation comes on the heels of better than expected results for a protest vote in Wisconsin’s Democratic presidential primary elections Tuesday. Voters who selected an “uninstructed” option on their ballot instead of voting for Biden or Representative Dean Phillips (who has suspended his campaign) currently make up 8 percent of the results, or just over 48,000 votes, exceeding organizers’ goal of at least 20,000 votes, which was Biden’s margin of victory over Donald Trump in 2020.

Wisconsin’s results follow similar efforts in states across the country, which began with Michigan’s “uncommitted” movement, spearheaded by the state’s Arab and Muslim American communities. The results on Super Tuesday in March shattered expectations in the swing state, also exceeding Biden’s 2020 margin of victory.

Biden’s support from the Muslim community has sharply declined since the start of the Israeli offensive against Palestinians in Gaza in October. Since then, his disaffected Muslim supporters have demanded he call for a cease-fire in the war before they agree to support his 2024 campaign.

But recent news of Israel’s bombing of an aid convoy in the territory, as well as fresh U.S. shipments of fighter jets and bombs to Israel are not likely to help matters. As Michael Tomasky wrote for The New Republic in February, the president needs to change his Israel policy, and fast.

Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg has two words for Donald Trump’s latest attempt to throw out his New York hush-money trial: no way.

In March, the former reality TV host and his legal team filed a formal request to adjourn his hush-money trial on the basis of too much “pretrial publicity,” arguing that the nature of his charges were too widely known in New York, making it impossible for him to get a fair trial.

But in a Wednesday legal filing, Bragg argued that Trump’s language, which admits the pretrial publicity will never end, reflects his true intentions: to keep the trial at bay indefinitely.

“Defendant appears to acknowledge that there is no end in sight to public coverage of this criminal proceeding, laying bare his strategy of obtaining an open-ended delay of the trial,” Bragg wrote in a 38-page memo. “The answer to defendant’s complaint about pretrial publicity is thus to hold this trial sooner rather than later.”

Bragg also argued that Trump’s insistence on the jury’s inherent bias was undercut by several legal precedents.

“Defendant’s request for an adjournment is based on the fundamentally flawed premise that any amount of pretrial publicity irreparably taints the jury pool,” Bragg continued. “That argument flouts bedrock law that expressly holds otherwise. Pretrial publicity, even when pervasive and adverse, ‘does not inevitably lead to an unfair trial.’”

If anything, Trump could get a fair trial despite all the publicity—as shown in a study commissioned by Trump’s own lawyers, which found that 67 percent of Manhattan’s denizens said they could “definitely” or “probably” set aside their opinion of Trump to give him a fair shake.

And, besides all that, it’s not just the press drawing attention to the first criminal trial of a former president, but Trump himself too. He has incessantly complained about the proceedings at his rallies and on his social media platform, Truth Social. Bragg argued it would be “perverse to reward” Trump with an “adjournment based on media attention he is actively seeking,” pointing to motions filed by Trump’s legal team attempting to protect his right to keep posting online about it.

“Moreover, defendant has made clear that he intends to continue stoking such publicity. In opposition to the People’s motion for an order restricting defendant’s extrajudicial statements, defendant insisted on preserving his ‘uncensored voice on all issues that relate to this case’ and his entitlement to make ‘unfettered’ comments about this case,” Bragg wrote.

James Comer just can’t let his Biden impeachment dream die.

The House Oversight Committee chair tried to make the case that “impeachment’s still on the table” Wednesday morning, during an interview on Fox Business. Comer insisted to host Maria Baritromo that the committee’s probe into President Joe Biden and his son Hunter “is a very serious investigation.”

“Impeachment’s still on the table. There’s still an overwhelming majority of Republicans in the House of Representatives that agree with me that Joe Biden has committed impeachable offenses,” Comer said.

This flies in the face of actual facts: All of the committee’s efforts have fallen flat, with House Republicans failing to produce any concrete evidence. Witness after witness has either said that they don’t have proof or been proven to be making things up.

One such witness, Alexander Smirnov, was indicted for lying to the FBI, which Comer claimed was a “deep state conspiracy.” As if this wasn’t damaging enough, Smirnov reportedly later admitted that he has ties to Russian intelligence.

What’s more, many Republicans have begun to back away from the impeachment effort, with some pointing to the fact that they likely do not have the votes to pass articles of impeachment.

Comer has been the main Republican spearheading the investigation into the Bidens. But even he doesn’t seem to be taking the investigation seriously. The Kentucky Republican didn’t even stay for Hunter Biden’s full deposition before the committee in February, and just last week, he seemed to admit defeat on impeachment efforts, saying that the Biden investigation’s new goal was criminal referrals.

But Comer now claims that these referrals would be a step toward impeachment. Such referrals are nonbinding, and the Justice Department is unlikely to choose to pursue them. But no worries: Comer has a plan for the long term. He told Bartiromo that “hopefully in a year, we will have a Department of Justice that can hold [the Bidens] accountable,” alluding to a victory by Donald Trump in November.

Since it seems unlikely that Republicans will impeach Biden while he is still in office, it appears that all the evidence they have presented only adds up to an effort to weaken the president’s image before November’s presidential election.

Donald Trump’s virulent anti-immigration campaign series offered an unexpected shout-out to a group of people who didn’t want it: the family of murder victim Ruby Garcia.

“She lit up that room, and I’ve heard that from so many people,” Trump claimed Tuesday at a news conference in Garcia’s hometown of Grand Rapids, Michigan. “I spoke to some of her family.”

But Garcia’s family said that the GOP presidential nominee had never reached out to them. Instead, they were at home, watching as Trump turned their family’s loss into a political stunt.

“He did not speak with any of us, so it was kind of shocking seeing that he had said that he had spoke with us, and misinforming people on live TV,” Garcia’s sister, Mavi Garcia, told NBC affiliate Target 8, noting that not only had Trump not reached out to the family, but neither had anyone from his campaign.

“It was shocking. I kind of stopped watching it. I’d only seen up to that, after I heard a couple of misinformations he said, I just stopped watching it,” she said.

Garcia, 25, was shot and killed on March 22 by Brandon Ortiz-Vite, an undocumented immigrant who confessed to murdering her and dumping her body along a highway in the city. Ortiz-Vite had previously been deported out of the United States by court order in 2020, and it was unclear when he had reentered.

The Trump campaign quickly took notice of the murder, leveraging it as an example of a rising wave in “migrant crime” and claiming that Ortiz-Vite had been “let back in by Joe Biden.” But that’s not the story that Garcia’s family wants Ruby’s name wrapped up in.

“It’s always been about illegal immigrants,” Mavi Garcia told Target 8. “Nobody really speaks about when Americans do heinous crimes, and it’s kind of shocking why he would just bring up illegals. What about Americans who do heinous crimes like that?”

“The focus should be on my sister right now, who she was in life. I want people to remember who she was in life,” she added, describing Ruby Garcia as a very happy and generous person.

Tuesday’s speech wasn’t even the first time in the last month that Trump lied about his interactions with a grieving family for his own political gain. In March, Trump’s campaign issued a statement claiming that he had been invited to attend the funeral of NYPD Officer Jonathan Diller by his family—but that wasn’t really the case. In reality, the invitation had been extended by Republican Nassau County Executive Bruce Blakeman.