Tommy Tuberville’s Latest Claim on Putin Is Deranged—Even for Him

Senator Tommy Tuberville seems to be under the impression that Russia’s Vladimir Putin doesn’t want to control Ukraine.

The Alabama Republican made the claim on Steve Bannon’s War Room show on Wednesday after Bannon asked about Russia’s war with Ukraine.

“He doesn’t want Ukraine. He doesn’t want Europe. Hell, he’s got enough land of his own,” Tuberville said, referring to Putin. “He just wants to make sure that he does not have United States weapons in Ukraine pointing at Moscow.”

This is completely false. Putin has claimed that Ukraine historically and rightfully belongs to Russia from the start of the war. Tuberville’s claim is yet more proof he may be the biggest Putin sycophant in Congress.

“You can tell Putin’s on top of his game,” Tuberville said in February. “One thing he said that, it really rung a bell, is the propaganda media machine over here, they sell anything they possibly can to go after Russia.”

Also on Wednesday, Putin threatened to use nuclear weapons to continue his war on Ukraine and to provide weapons to other countries who could help attack Western countries who oppose his invasion of Ukraine.

“Ultimately, if we see that these countries are being drawn into a war against us, and this is their direct participation in the war against the Russian Federation, then we reserve the right to act in a similar way,” Putin said. “But, in general, this is the path to very serious problems.”

Watch Tuberville’s comments here:

Trump raised an oddly bigoted insult to Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer during an interview with Fox News’s Sean Hannity on Wednesday, claiming the strongly pro-Israel politician has become “like a Palestinian.”

“They don’t have the backing,” said Trump, referring to Israel and its devastation of Gaza. “Even Schumer, he’s become like a Palestinian. Chuck Schumer. Jewish. Always strong for Israel. He’s become like a Palestinian.”

Schumer, who is Jewish, has been an ardent supporter of Israel and has regularly warned about rising antisemitism in response to Israel’s violence. In March, Schumer spoke out against Israel’s far-right Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, calling him a major obstacle to peace who has “lost his way.” Schumer’s rebuke came while calling for new elections in Israel in response to Netanyahu’s refusal to accept cease-fire negotiations or to intervene against settler extremists blocking desperately needed aid to displaced and starving Palestinians.

“The Netanyahu coalition no longer fits the needs of Israel after October 7th,” Schumer said at the time. “The world has changed—radically—since then, and the Israeli people are being stifled right now by a governing vision that is stuck in the past.”

Schumer’s comments reflected the same calls that have been coming from Jews in Israel for months: Polls conducted in November 2023—just weeks after the Hamas attack—found nearly 60 percent of Israelis support a cease-fire. In January, only 15 percent of Israelis supported Netanyahu remaining prime minister after Israel concludes its destruction of Gaza. According to polling in April, 58 percent of Israelis believe Netanyahu should resign immediately. In Israel, hundreds of thousands of Israelis—including family members of those still held captive by Hamas—have protested in favor of a cease-fire and bilateral hostage deal, with anti-government protests breaking out across Israel against Netanyahu and his extremist bloc after they rejected a recent cease-fire deal.

Meanwhile, Trump has promised to deport student protesters in the United States and spoken favorably of Israel’s ongoing destruction of Gaza, saying Israel should “finish the problem” while griping that Israel is “losing the P.R. war.”

House Republicans are pushing for a bill that would allow a current or former president to lift any state case against them and plop it right into a federal court—a clear response to Donald Trump’s most recent New York conviction.

Several House GOP sources told Axios that Republican lawmakers are prodding House Speaker Mike Johnson to call for a floor vote on the bill.

It should surprise no one that the person behind this latest scheme is none other than Donald Trump. Last month, Rolling Stone reported that Trump held “several” meetings with Republican lawmakers and lawyers, asking them to pursue legislation that would permanently shield him from prosecution outside of a federal court.

Attempts to advance this proposed legislation is only the latest desperate effort from Trump’s allies to somehow undo the former president’s guilty verdict, as opposed to simply waiting for an appeal. The bill has reportedly already passed the House Judiciary committee.

At the moment, the floor vote seems unlikely, according to sources close to Johnson, because it’s a little unpopular among some Republicans. Not to mention, it doesn’t stand a chance in the Democratic-controlled Senate.

If it were miraculously passed into law, the proposed legislation could help Trump clear his record should he be elected in November. While presidents are able to pardon federal convictions, they cannot pardon state ones.

Trump is still facing state-level charges in Georgia for allegedly attempting to overturn the results of the 2020 elections in that state.

Senate Republicans on Wednesday killed legislation that would have protected access to contraception and codified access to birth control into federal law. The Right to Contraception Act failed the Senate by a vote of 51–39, after failing to reach the minimum 60 votes needed to pass. All of the opposition came from Republicans, with the exception of Senator Chuck Schumer who changed his vote from “yes” to “no” in a procedural move in order to bring the vote again in the future.

The only two Republican senators to vote for the bill were Senators Susan Collins and Lisa Murkowski. Seven Republican senators were not present for the vote.

The bill was first introduced after the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade. It made its way back through Congress on Tuesday as conservative attacks on bodily autonomy deepen ahead of the November election. Trump recently stated he’s exploring policies to restrict access to birth control, which would impact an estimated 46.9 million people in the United States. It’s not clear that the measure would pass the House, but the roll call is nonetheless a good record of where Republican senators stand on the issue.

Here’s a list of every Republican who voted against the measure:

• John Barrasso—Wyoming
• Marsha Blackburn—Tennessee
• John Boozman—Arkansas
• Ted Budd—North Carolina
• Shelley Moore Capito—West Virginia
• Bill Cassidy—Louisiana
• John Cornyn—Texas
• Tom Cotton—Arkansas
• Kevin Cramer—North Dakota
• Mike Crapo—Idaho
• Ted Cruz—Texas
• Steve Daines—Montana
• Joni Ernst—Iowa
• Deb Fischer—Nebraska
• Chuck Grassley—Iowa
• Josh Hawley—Missouri
• John Hoeven—North Dakota
• Cindy Hyde-Smith—Mississippi
• Ron Johnson—Wisconsin
• James Lankford—Oklahoma
• Mike Lee—Utah
• Cynthia Lummis—Wyoming
• Roger Marshall—Kansas
• Mitch McConnell—Kentucky
• Markwayne Mullin—Oklahoma
• Rand Paul—Kentucky
• Pete Ricketts—Nebraska
• James E. Risch—Idaho
• Mike Rounds—South Dakota
• Marco Rubio—Florida
• Eric Schmitt—Missouri
• Rick Scott—Florida
• Tim Scott—South Carolina
• John Thune—South Dakota
• Thom Tillis—North Carolina
• Tommy Tuberville—Alabama
• Roger Wicker—Mississippi
• Todd Young—Indiana

One former Trump White House staffer says that if The Wall Street Journal wants a story about cognitive decline in the White House, it should talk to people who worked under Donald Trump.

The Wall Street Journal published a story Tuesday evening about President Biden’s supposed mental decline that drew a lot of criticism, particularly from Democrats. Olivia Troye, a former adviser to Vice President Mike Pence, called out the newspaper on X (formerly Twitter), saying she was “happy to discuss Trump’s mental acuity & fitness for office.”

While right-wing media outlets like the WSJ aren’t likely to take Troye up on her offer, she has a point. Questions about Biden’s age and mental state have been pushed by Republicans for months, even after he made an energetic speech at the State of the Union in March. But Trump has demonstrated issues of his own.

When Trump was president, there were numerous stories about his mental state, calling attention to supposed psychological defects and lack of intelligence. It stands to reason that there are more details from his presidency that are known to those who worked for him but still not known to the general public. What people have seen since then from the Republican presidential nominee and convicted felon are still more examples of possible cognitive decline, ranging from wild rants in press conferences to bragging about putting his pants on. In March, Democrats put together a brutal montage of some of Trump’s many gaffes.

In February, Biden’s doctor said that there were “no new concerns” after the president’s annual physical, saying that he was “fit for duty and fully executes all of his responsibilities without any exemptions or accommodations.” Meanwhile, Trump continues to brag about passing a cognitive test but changes the details every time he relates the story.

In November, voters will have to decide whether any of this matters over something more pressing: the fate of American democracy.

If at first you don’t succeed, try, try again … and make criminal referrals, apparently.

Republican Representatives Jim Comer, Jim Jordan, and Jason Smith have finally concluded their juiceless push to impeach Joe Biden after providing no evidence of wrongdoing by the president and failing to drum up support in their own party. Their final product: referrals for prosecution for James and Hunter Biden for allegedly lying to Congress, a disappointing payoff for Republicans, given the “smoking gun” Comer promised to deliver.

“These false statements implicate Joe Biden’s knowledge of and role in his family’s influence peddling schemes and appear to be a calculated effort to shield Joe Biden from the impeachment inquiry,” a tweet announcing the referrals said.

The tortured logic on display is representative of the GOP’s half-hearted attempt to impeach Biden, which, after a disastrous House Oversight Committee hearing failed to turn up convincing evidence against the president, culminated in a resigned Comer admitting that Republicans did not have the votes to pass articles of impeachment. In March, Comer, lacking support from his own caucus, announced that he had begun preparing criminal referrals to send to the Department of Justice. Now, the referrals are here—and they represent an embarrassing anticlimax for House Republicans.

As Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump, now a convicted felon, faces his own legal troubles, GOP accusations of a “Biden Crime Family” aren’t likely to land.

The Republican National Convention in Milwaukee is just a month away, and a big mistake was made in promoting the event: A photo of Ho Chi Minh City in Vietnam was used on the convention website instead of the Wisconsin city.

After the blunder was pointed out on X on Tuesday, the Republican National Committee hastily changed the picture to one of Milwaukee, but not before the mistake was archived and Democrats began mocking the Republican Party.

“Maybe if Donald Trump and the RNC actually bothered to have a real campaign operation in Wisconsin, they could tell the difference between Milwaukee and Ho Chi Minh City. We encourage them to continue going all-in to win the voters of Ho Chi Minh City while Democrats earn the votes of Wisconsinites,” Democratic National Committee rapid response director Alex Floyd said in a statement.

The Democratic Party of Wisconsin and its chairperson, Ben Wikler, also got in on the fun.

The Virginia Young Democrats pointed out that Republicans have made this mistake before in their state.

According to an RNC spokesperson, a web developer who no longer works for the convention was responsible for the mistake. But there’s no word on whether the Republican Party plans to do anything about an even bigger mistake: picking a convicted felon as its presidential nominee.

Jared Kushner is apparently keenly adept at making choices that piss off everyone: His recent contract with the Serbian government to bulldoze the bombed-out ruins of the Yugoslav Ministry of Defense complex and convert it into a luxury hotel carries with it a fine-print commitment to build a “memorial dedicated to all the victims of NATO aggression”—a direct condemnation of the United States that whitewashes the ethnic cleansing of Albanians in Kosovo, according to intelligence blog SpyTalk.

Retired General Wesley Clark, who served as NATO Supreme Allied Commander during the 1999 bombing campaign, balked at the memorial commitment. Speaking to SpyTalk, Clark decried the proposed memorial as “worse than a reversal” of U.S. policies in the region, calling it “a betrayal of the United States, its policies and the brave diplomats and airmen who did what they could to stop Serb ethnic cleansing.”

In May, Kushner secured a massive $500 million contract with the state of Serbia to build a hotel on the memorialized ruins of a former military base in Belgrade, sparking protests in Belgrade against the deal. The contract is being bankrolled by Kushner’s Saudi-backed investment company, Affinity Partners. In defense of the contract, a Serbian government official described Kushner’s company, primarily funded by foreign interests, as a “reputable American company.”

Prior to approval of the contract, public officials in Serbia heavily opposed the deal for its insensitivity and potential for political manipulation. Serbian politician Borko Stefanovic described the location as “one of the pearls of pre-war architecture” to The Daily Beast, noting, “Most Serbs believe this site should not be desecrated in any way.”

The Yugoslav Ministry of Defense military complex was bombed by NATO forces in 1999 during a U.S.-backed campaign that killed an estimated 2,000 civilians and lasted until the Yugoslav Army retreated from Kosovo during the Kosovo War.

Clark criticized the overall contract between Kushner’s company and the Serbian government in addition to the memorial clause, arguing that the contract is not just an opportunistic gambit but “part of a broader Russian intelligence movement to split, discredit and weaken NATO.” Kushner’s father-in-law and Kremlin ally Donald Trump has long sought to build a hotel on the military complex ruins and has heavily criticized NATO, with looming threats of the U.S. leaving the alliance if he regains the presidency.

Hours after granting Donald Trump’s request to allow non-witness parties to weigh in on special counsel Jack Smith’s appointment, Judge Aileen Cannon has thrown another wrench into the former president’s Florida classified documents case.

In her latest round of judicial Calvinball on Wednesday, Cannon postponed key hearings compelling Trump’s attorneys to testify before a grand jury, rescheduling them in order to accommodate new hearings about Smith’s supposed “unlawful appointment,” as well as the gag orders he has requested (and she has denied) against Trump.

As Politico’s Kyle Cheney points out, the hearings—now scheduled for June 21, 24, and 25—will not be covering new ground on the issue of special counsel appointment, which has been resolved in previous cases.

It’s hard to see Cannon’s latest order as anything other than another effort to stall the trial, kicking the judicial can down the road as close to or past the presidential election in November as possible. Cannon, appointed by Trump after serving as a federal prosecutor, has come under fire for her conduct during the trial. She has reportedly been confused by court proceedings, requiring explanations from counsel on both sides, and has, since May 16, inspired more than 1,000 complaints filed against her with the 11th Circuit Judicial Court for delaying rulings.

The rescheduling is likely to bolster allegations that Cannon is not only running out the clock, but gunning to have the case against Trump dismissed entirely. If there’s any consolation, it’s that her actions could be used as ammunition in a potential motion to have Cannon removed from the case.