“Genocide”: Elizabeth Warren Sounds Alarm About the War in Gaza

Senator Elizabeth Warren is warning that Israel’s devastating military campaign in Gaza, which has killed more than 33,000 people, could legally be considered a genocide.

Warren made the comments during an event last week at a Boston-area mosque. Video of her speech began circulating on social media on Monday. The death toll in Gaza, which includes at least 13,000 children, is considered a low estimate due to the difficulty in counting the dead.

“If you want to do it as an application of law, I believe that they’ll find that it is genocide, and they have ample evidence to do so,” Warren said, speaking at the Islamic Center of Boston in Wayland, Massachusetts. She was responding to an audience question about the International Court of Justice ruling that it was “plausible” Israel has committed acts of genocide in Gaza.

Warren noted that, for her, “it is far more important to say what Israel is doing is wrong. And it is wrong.”

“It is wrong to starve children within a civilian population in order to try to bend to your will. It is wrong to drop 2,000-pound bombs, in densely populated civilian areas,” she said.

Warren faced criticism for her stance on the war when she backed Israel after Hamas’s October 7 attacks. As Israel’s war ramped up, along with international criticism of its actions, protesters have shown up outside of Warren’s offices, as well as her home. One Palestinian American even confronted Warren at a restaurant in Cambridge, Massachusetts, in November. Warren also voted to send more military aid to Israel in February, part of a bill that defunded the U.N. Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees.

Warren’s new stance is the latest example of Democrats criticizing Israel’s actions. On March 22, Representative Alexandria Ocasio Cortez warned that the United States was complicit in the humanitarian crisis in the territory, and on March 15, Senator Chuck Schumer gave a speech criticizing Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s conduct in Gaza.

Warren was also among eight Democratic senators who called on President Joe Biden in an open letter in March to suspend military aid to Israel while it blocked U.S. humanitarian aid to Gaza.

More recently, the White House had to cancel its annual iftar banquet with American Muslim leaders last week after invitations were rejected in protest of America’s Israel military campaign. On Monday, the Foreign Press Association issued a statement urging international journalists to be allowed unfettered access into Gaza, which Israel’s government continues to block.

Former associates of Donald Trump, look out—the Manhattan District Attorney’s Office is lining up witnesses as his hush-money trial is set to begin.

Rhona Graff, Trump’s former assistant, and Madeleine Westerhout, his former director of Oval Office operations, are expected to testify in the trial, ABC News reported Monday, citing anonymous sources. They will join Hope Hicks, the former White House communications director and onetime aide to Trump, who has already testified before a grand jury investigating Trump’s interference in the 2020 election.

In addition, Deborah Tarasoff, a former employee in the Trump Organization’s accounting department, as well Jeffrey McConney, the organization’s onetime controller, will likely be called to testify. They all join the most well-known name on this list: Michael Cohen, Trump’s former fixer and personal attorney.

The list extends beyond Trump’s ex-employees. David Pecker, a former executive with American Media Inc., will likely testify, as well as National Enquirer editor Dylan Howard. American Media Inc. used to own the tabloid newspaper, and prosecutors say both Howard and Pecker were involved in “catch and kill” methods to keep negative stories about Trump from spreading during his 2016 presidential campaign.

The trial has already gotten off to a rough start from Trump’s perspective. He’s facing an expanded gag order after he repeatedly attacked the daughter of presiding Judge Juan Merchan on Truth Social. Trump has tried to delay the trial numerous times, including by making the claim that there’s too much “pretrial publicity” and by suing Merchan.

The former president faces 34 felony charges for falsifying business records regarding a payment made to adult film actress Stormy Daniels just before the 2016 election to hide a 2006 affair they had. It’s his first criminal trial, and jury selection is set to begin on April 15.

Despite threats by Representatives James Comer and Jim Jordan to hold Attorney General Merrick Garland in contempt of Congress, the Department of Justice said Monday it will not turn over the audio of President Joe Biden’s interview with special counsel Robert Hur regarding his storage of classified documents, bringing bad-faith Republican impeachment efforts (or whatever was left of them) to a screeching halt.

In a letter to Jordan and Comer obtained by The New Republic, Assistant Attorney General Carlos Uriarte effectively thwarted Republicans’ meritless effort to impeach Biden. “Neither branch [of Congress] has any constitutionally-based authority to seek conflict for conflict’s sake,” Uriarte wrote, identifying the politically motivated nature of the disastrous impeachment inquiry, which yielded more indictments of the GOP’s own star witnesses than actual evidence of the president’s wrongdoing.

“The Department is concerned that the Committees’ particular focus on continuing to demand information that is cumulative of information we already gave you—what the President and Mr. Hur’s team said in the interview—indicates that the Committees’ interests may not be in receiving information in service of legitimate oversight or investigatory functions, but to serve political purposes that should have no role in the treatment of law enforcement files,” continued Uriarte.

In a February 12 letter to Attorney General Garland, Comer and Jordan requested the audio of Biden’s interview with Hur, which made news when Hur, who did not recommend charges for the president, editorialized in his report, including “gratuitous” details about Biden’s poor memory and inability to recall details about his life. Critics have called the report a “partisan hit job.”

It’s become clear that, in demanding the audio, Comer and Jordan were scrambling at potential ammunition against Biden, who has faced questions about his age since his 2020 victory, to use in the lead-up to the 2024 election. Comer himself has already begun to back away from impeachment in the absence of evidence. Having all but admitted defeat, audio of Biden’s interview might have represented the last chance to squeeze some value out of a smear campaign that never even had enough Republican support to bring to a vote. For once, however, Garland’s Department of Justice did not cave.

It is the eleventh hour for Donald Trump in his bid not to stand trial in his criminal hush-money case. So he’s planning a new, frantic measure: suing the judge.

Trump’s legal team is expected to file a lawsuit against Manhattan Supreme Court Justice Juan Merchan, who has reprimanded the former president’s lawyers for their conduct in court. The team’s latest genius move is to file an Article 78 action against Merchan, effectively asking an appeals court to throw out the gag order issued by Merchan against Trump and, crucially, to push a potential trial back until after the 2024 presidential election.

Trump, with the backing of Fox News, has previously attacked Merchan and his daughter. Now he’s attempting to have Merchan removed. The action, described by The New York Times as “unorthodox,” is reportedly unlikely to succeed. The lawsuit is not yet public, but sources familiar with the matter confirmed to the Times that the legal team will likely file on Monday.

The hush-money case is Trump’s first criminal trial on the calendar—expected to begin later this month. The news of the lawsuit comes not long after it was revealed that the surety company backing Trump’s $175 million bond in his civil fraud case does not have the funds to do so, and may not have legally promised to pay the penalty if his appeal is unsuccessful.

Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has been described as a spoiler candidate for president by supporters of Joe Biden, and even by Kennedy himself. But the Kennedy campaign’s New York director is taking it a step further.

In a meeting with Republicans in the Empire State, Rita Palma said that “our mutual enemy is Biden.”

“The only way that Trump can even, remote possibility of taking New York is if Bobby is on the ballot. If it’s Trump versus Biden, Biden wins. Biden wins six days, seven days a week. With Bobby in the mix, anything can happen,” Palma said on video of the meeting, dated Friday and viewed by CNN.

The video, which was posted to YouTube before being taken down, showed Palma arguing for Kennedy’s candidacy as a way to block Biden from being reelected.

“The only way for him, for Bobby, to shake it up and to get rid of Biden is if he’s on the ballot in every state, including New York,” she said.

Palma even told people to go to Pennsylvania, a swing state, to knock on doors for Trump, saying that she had done so in 2016 and 2020.

She described the scenario of neither Biden nor Trump getting the required 270 electoral votes to win the 2024 election. If that were to happen, the House of Representatives would decide who will be the next president of the United States. Palma argued that Kennedy winning blue states like New York could make that happen.

“Who are they going to pick? If it’s a Republican Congress, they’ll pick Trump. So we’re rid of Biden either way,” she said.

It can be argued Kennedy’s supporter base draws from both the left and right, as many environmentalists, anti-vaxxers, and new age enthusiasts attend his fundraisers. But it remains to be seen if Democrats have anything to worry about at the polls, even as Kennedy continues to produce outrageous sound bites and make dangerous statements.