James Comer Is About to Become Trump’s New Enemy

Republican Representative James Comer has teamed up with an unlikely ally—Democratic Representative Katie Porter—on a landmark ethics bill. And it’s sure to piss off Donald Trump.

On Wednesday, Comer and Porter introduced a bill that would require candidates for president and vice president to disclose tax filings for the two years before entering the White House, for every year they are in office, and for two years after that. The bill would also require presidential and vice presidential candidates, along with their close family members, to make any payments, big gifts, and loans from foreign entities public. While it doesn’t attach any legal penalties, the bill does extend Congress’s authority to pursue such financial documents.

Comer told The Wall Street Journal that the bill is not a partisan political tool from either Porter or himself.

“She’s not doing it to pick on Trump, and I’m not doing it to pick on Biden,” Comer said.

That seems hard to believe, though. Comer, as chair of the House Committee on Oversight, has led a long and futile effort to impeach President Joe Biden on sham corruption charges. Comer’s so-called evidence against Biden and his son Hunter was later found to have come from an indicted former FBI informant who was working for Russian intelligence officials, but as recently as last month, Comer was still saying impeachment was on the table.

Contrary to what Comer and many other Republicans say, though, Biden has been forthcoming about releasing his tax returns, releasing them for several years before and after being elected president. In contrast, Trump’s tax returns were only released after a long, drawn-out fight with Democrats in Congress.

Porter, a protégé of Senator Elizabeth Warren and a former college professor, has a reputation for strong research and asking tough questions in Congress, unlike Comer, meaning that Trump and his family ought to be worried about their finances and foreign dealings. The former president’s son-in-law Jared Kushner has made several controversial deals during and after Trump’s presidency. Trump’s businesses took in millions of dollars from foreign governments while he was president, including profits from the hotel he used to operate in Washington, D.C.

Like it or not, Comer may have just accidentally made himself Trump’s next top enemy.

A Tennessee Democrat is taking formal action against “shameless” Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito after revelations that an upside-down American flag flew at his home in Alexandria, Virginia, in the wake of the January 6 insurrection.

Representative Steve Cohen introduced a resolution Tuesday to censure Alito for “knowingly violating the Federal recusal statute and binding ethics standards and calling the impartiality of the Supreme Court of the United States into question.”

“Beyond poor judgment, Justice Alito’s misuse of the American flag is a knowing and shameless demonstration of his political bias,” Cohen said in a statement. “He literally flew a flag in front of his house showing the world he supported the January 6th insurrectionists. What’s more, he continues to participate in litigation directly related to the 2020 election and the Insurrection, in direct violation of the federal recusal statute and the Supreme Court’s own ethics rules.”

“There must be accountability to protect the integrity and impartiality of the High Court,” Cohen continued. “We must protect the Constitutional rights to fair and impartial proceedings. Justice Alito should be censured for flagrant breaches of the law and court rules, and he must recuse himself from all other 2020 election and January 6th related litigation.”

The New York Times revealed on Friday that the upside-down flag was spotted in Alito’s yard on January 17, 2021. In the weeks and months after Donald Trump lost the 2020 election, many of his supporters flew the flag upside down in protest of what they wrongly believed to be a stolen election. Alito, like a true gentleman, blamed it on his wife, claiming that she had hung it upside down to protest a neighbor’s yard signs.

As TNR’s Matt Ford wrote earlier this week, “The revelation casts doubt on whether Alito can ethically decide cases related to the January 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol. Multiple such cases are pending before the court, including one on whether Donald Trump himself is immune from prosecution for his role in the coup attempt.”

Cohen’s statement echoes that of a conservative member in the upper chamber, Senator Lindsey Graham, who said the flag choice was “not good judgment.” But not all GOP lawmakers felt similarly. On Tuesday, Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell brushed off a question about Alito’s behavior, telling reporters that the country needs to “leave the Supreme Court alone.”

No doubt Alito feels the same. “Alito doesn’t care,” Ford wrote. “He abides by judicial ethics requirements, and the general principle that judges should appear to be impartial and nonpartisan, only to the degree that they suit his own preferences.”

All nine tribal nations of South Dakota have officially banned the state’s Republican governor (and puppy murderer) Kristi Noem from their lands.

The Flandreau Santee Sioux Tribe moved to ban the governor following a meeting on Tuesday as an act of solidarity with eight Oceti Sakowin tribes that had done the same in response to inflammatory comments Noem has made about Indigenous communities since January, ICT News reported.

Noem has repeatedly accused South Dakota’s tribes of “personally benefiting” from Mexican drug cartels, falsely alleging “the cartels are using our reservations to facilitate the spread of drugs throughout the Midwest” in March. Noem also lashed out at Indigenous families, claiming systemic poverty is a matter of parental failure—a tired conservative talking point long used to justify inequality they create. “Their kids don’t have any hope,” Noem said without evidence in March. “They don’t have parents who show up and help them.”

Peter Lengkeek, chairman of the Crow Creek Sioux Tribe that banned Noem last week, stated: “We do not have cartels on the reservations. We have cartel products, like guns and drugs. But they pass over state highways getting to the reservation. So, putting us all together like that and saying that all tribes are involved in this really shows the ignorance of the governor’s office.”

The Flandreau Santee Sioux Tribe repeatedly met with representatives for Noem ahead of its vote on Tuesday, according to ICT News. In a press release announcing its decision, the tribe indicated Noem’s administration is drastically underinformed:

The Executive Committee calls on the governor to reconsider the effectiveness of the liaisons she has appointed and whether or not they truly have an understanding of the issues affecting tribal nations as well as their ability to foster a cooperative relationship between the Tribes and the State of South Dakota.

On Friday, as the Flandreau Santee Sioux Tribe met with representatives of Noem’s office, Noem held a press conference to address her being banned from the eight Oceti tribal lands and reiterated her cartel conspiracy.

“I ask them right back, ‘Why have they not banished the cartels? Why have they not banished the cartel affiliates?’” Noem said. “Why have they only focused their attention on me, who has offered them help, and not gone after those who are perpetuating violence?”

A vast majority of illicit drugs that enter the United States come from legal ports of entry—and not with migrants as Republicans insist—yet Noem has refused to give up the goat, instead throwing communities systematically oppressed by U.S. colonialism for 500 years under the bus for cheap political points.

The tribes have requested Noem apologize for her remarks and cease making future inflammatory statements against them. Until then, Noem is banned from visiting over five million acres of South Dakota—more than 10 percent of the state.

Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis won her primary election in Georgia Tuesday night and immediately sent a message to the man her office is prosecuting, Donald Trump.

“I am just so humbled and so grateful to the citizens of Fulton County who made this possible. Tonight, they delivered a strong and powerful message: They want a district attorney who believes everyone deserves to be safe and everyone is entitled to some dignity,” Willis said in her victory speech.

“And it’s a message that’s pissin’ folks off, but there is no one above the law in this country, nor is there anyone beneath it,” Willis added in a pointed jab at the former president.

Willis’s victory in the solidly Democratic county is good news in the face of Republican efforts to thwart her prosecution of Trump and his allies for their attempts to overturn the 2020 presidential election. Willis was accused of appointing former special prosecutor Nathan Wade, with whom she had a personal relationship, to the case for financial gain—and the Trump campaign sought to have her thrown off the entire case. A Georgia judge ultimately ruled in her favor, provided that she replace Wade.

The rest of Willis’s speech didn’t focus on the case against Trump, instead highlighting her efforts to lower crime and thanking her supporters and local law enforcement. But she did allude to the attacks against her both in Georgia and the U.S. at large.

“All the attacks in the world can’t stop us. And they will not stop us. This is a fight for safety. It’s a fight for justice. But most, it’s a fight for the rule of law. And we are just at the beginning of this fight,” Willis said.

“Nobody is supporting me but the people of Fulton County,” Willis added.

Right now, however, the case against Trump and his more than a dozen co-defendants is in limbo, as the Georgia Court of Appeals reviews an appeal seeking to overturn the order keeping Willis on the case. Similarly, federal charges against the Republican presidential nominee are also stalled in Washington, D.C., and Florida, thanks to the efforts of a Trump-appointed judge and the Supreme Court’s decision to review the issue of presidential immunity. It seems that Trump’s ongoing hush-money trial may be the only sure avenue to see him face some kind of accountability.

Recently unsealed court documents suggest that prosecutors in Donald Trump’s classified documents case have even more damning evidence that he tried to obstruct the government’s attempts to retrieve the documents.

According to supporting documentation for a motion filed by Trump’s legal team, the government subpoena for Mar-a-Lago’s security footage seemingly led Trump to try to cover up the relocation of the classified documents. Trump was notified of the subpoena in a June 2022 call with one of his attorneys, which probably prompted Trump to tell staffers to evade security cameras when moving boxes thereafter—or so concluded the district judge who oversaw the grand jury in the case.

“The government has provided sufficient evidence to demonstrate that the June 24, 2022 phone call may have furthered the former president’s efforts to obstruct the government’s investigation,” Judge Beryl Howell wrote in a 2023.

The damning detail is just one of many revelations that have come out of hundreds of pages of court documents that were unsealed Tuesday. Howell’s opinion also described how four more documents with classified markings were discovered on Trump’s property, stashed away in his bedroom, even months after the FBI raid on Mar-a-Lago.

Howell also found that prosecutors provided sufficient evidence that Trump had “intentionally concealed the existence of additional documents” in order to mislead the government and impede the FBI’s investigation.

Trump faces 42 felony charges in the case related to illegally retaining national security documents and conspiracy to obstruct justice. But the judge overseeing the case has been dragging her feet for months. Judge Aileen Cannon indefinitely delayed the trial earlier this month, purportedly over issues about how to handle classified evidence. Legal analysts worry that these delays could be the Trump-appointed judge’s way of surreptitiously dismissing the trial altogether.