Matt Schlapp Attempts to Mock Reporter—and Regrets It Immediately

Trump ally Matt Schlapp is poking the bear—or should we say, the Beast.

Schlapp, chairman of the American Conservative Union, took to social media Friday to taunt the Daily Beast over the reported exit of its new D.C. bureau chief, Martin Pengelly, who joined the embattled outlet only recently.

In his post, Schlapp tagged the Beast’s senior political reporter Roger Sollenberger, who in January 2023 was the first to publish anonymous allegations that Schlapp had sexually assaulted Carlton Huffman, a former campaign staffer for Herschel Walker.

Schlapp and his wife, Mercedes, have since crusaded against the Beast, calling it “Satan’s publication to persecute Christians and their families.”

Sollenberger has continued to rigorously document the subsequent sexual battery and defamation lawsuit against Schlapp, and when it was dropped earlier this year, the reporter revealed that it was because Schlapp had paid Huffman $480,000 to do so, through the ACU’s insurer.

And Friday was no exception, with Sollenberger hitting back hard at Schlapp’s post on X, formerly Twitter, toasting Pengelly’s exit.

“Life’s a real bitch,” Schlapp wrote, tagging Sollenberger. He may yet live to regret the popcorn bucket emoji he added, as Sollenberger was quick to respond.

“Heard about your wedding. Heard about the DC parties in the 90s. Heard about the Meatpacking District,” Sollenberger wrote. “Why didn’t you run for Senate in 2020?”

“I can keep going,” he continued in a separate post.

“Matt is saying this knowing full well what was in our first comment request and apparently does not give a damn about the restraint we’ve shown him,” Sollenberger wrote in another tweet.

It seems that Sollenberger has plenty of dirt to drop, and the disgraced conservative lobbyist might do well to remember that.

The co-author of a bill mandating that the Ten Commandments be displayed inside public school classrooms in Louisiana took to cable news for her victory lap after the measure was signed into law. Needless to say, her justifications for the blatant violation of religious freedom crumbled under the most basic scrutiny.

On two different CNN programs, Louisiana state Representative Lauren Ventrella trotted out the same defense. “Boris, I bet you CNN pays you a lot of money, and I bet you’ve got a bunch of dollar bills in that wallet,” she told anchor Boris Sanchez, who was floored by her apparent non sequitur. “I got a dollar bill in my wallet. ‘In God We Trust’ is written on that dollar. It is not forcing anybody to believe one viewpoint; it’s merely posting a historical reference on the wall.”

When Sanchez pointed out Ventrella’s ahistoricism, she retreated into crime-wave fearmongering: “This nation has gotten out of hand, with crime, with the bad, negative things that are going on. Why is it so preposterous that we would want our students to have the option to have some good principles instilled in them?” she said.

Sanchez asked what she would tell parents, students, and teachers of different faiths who objected to the commandments’ mandatory classroom presence, and Ventrella’s mask slipped. “Don’t look at it,” she replied.

The Republican lawmaker repeated her dollar bill argument during an interview with Abby Phillip Thursday night. “Look, ‘In God We Trust’ is on the dollar bill. If I had one right, I’d show you,” she said.

Phillip reminded Ventrella that the phrase did not appear on dollar bills until the 1950s and does not represent an original document comparable to the Constitution, from which references to God are absent.

“Well, it’s still on our dollar bill, no matter how you want to look at it,” Ventrella shot back.

Ventrella then laid bare the mechanisms by which Christian nationalists, cloaked in religious liberty and “good principles,” hope to install their broadly unpopular agenda. “You have to remember,” she told Phillip, “this is a new bench.”

“The Lemon decision was completely different. Now, it is a different bench,” she said, referring to a previous Supreme Court precedent that banned religious displays in publicly funded schools—and blatantly rejecting the very idea of precedent.

Minoritarian institutions like the conservative-majority Supreme Court and Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals have been shown to dispense with precedent when conservative lawmakers knowingly bring unconstitutional laws up through the courts until they find a friendly one. Ventrella, after struggling to articulate a convincing alternative defense, just gave away the game.

Donald Trump is still awaiting sentencing after being convicted in his hush-money trial, but he thinks that means his gag order should be lifted. Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg vehemently disagreed Friday.

In an emphatic brief, Bragg took Trump and his legal team to task, pointing out bomb threats made to two people involved in the case, as well as an avalanche of other threats to the district attorney and his employees. The New York Daily News reported Thursday that the D.A.’s office has received more than 100 threatening emails, including several with racial slurs.

Bragg also called out Trump for lying, saying that his motion to drop the gag order “includes a number of categorically false assertions.”

“For example, defendant claims that the District Attorney is acting in concert with defendant’s electoral opponent and an unspecified ‘cast of associates’ in an effort to restrict defendant’s speech at an upcoming presidential debate,” the brief stated. “Defendant offers no factual basis for this assertion, and there is none: this claim is a lie.” Bragg has thrown Trump a bone, though: He asked that the restriction on criticizing witnesses be lifted.

Trump’s gag order in his hush-money trial came after he repeatedly attacked not only prosecutors but witnesses, Judge Juan Merchan, and the judge’s daughter. He repeatedly violated the order, racking up fines totaling $10,000 and a warning from Merchan that he’d go to jail upon further infractions. Trump still criticized prosecutors after the warning, and even got some of his political supporters to make attacks on his behalf.

Why does Trump think he needs to attack prosecutors, jurors, and judges to mount a presidential campaign? It could be paranoia, fed by ongoing cognitive decline.

Donald Trump’s former ally took Judge Aileen Cannon to task after a shocking new report showed that she’s been fighting to protect the former president in his classified documents case since it first landed on her desk.

Cannon refused early calls from senior federal judges to hand off Trump’s classified documents case, according to a new report from The New York Times Thursday, making it clearer than ever that she has been determined to help the former president from the beginning.

Case in point: Cannon was set to begin a multiday hearing Friday to determine the constitutionality of special counsel Jack Smith’s appointment to the classified documents case, simply because Trump requested one.

Ty Cobb, a former lawyer in Trump’s White House, wasn’t having any of it.

In an interview on CNN Thursday night, he told Erin Burnett that the hearing is unlikely to remove Smith from the case, since “the law requires that she validate Jack Smith’s appointment, and not disqualify him.”

“The jurisprudence on this goes back to 1988 when the Independent Counsel statute, which preceded special counsel appointments … was fully vetted in the Supreme Court and upheld,” explained Cobb.

“The worst thing that could happen to her is that she actually does rule for Trump on this, because that would go to the Eleventh Circuit, and then I think this petty, partisan prima donna would be put in her place, and they would remove her,” the lawyer said.

Cobb called Cannon’s willingness to acquiesce to Trump’s requests “silly” and “shocking,” and said her actions go “way beyond” just being inexperienced. “The reality is, she is slow. And she’s slow on purpose,” he said.

Cobb has repeatedly spoken out against the former president, previously saying Trump “poses the gravest threat to American democracy that we’ve ever seen.” Cobb also signed onto a brief to the Supreme Court challenging Trump’s claim to presidential immunity.

He’s also been one of Cannon’s strongest critics. Last month, Cobb said the judge was “incapable of ruling intelligently,” and previously called her decision to consider the constitutionality of Smith’s appointment “ludicrous,” “ridiculous,” “dangerous,” and “incendiary.”

In a ruling delivered Friday, the Supreme Court decided 6–3 that U.S. citizens have no constitutional interest in their noncitizen spouses being able to enter the United States—despite the fact that a married person has an inherent interest in their spouse being able to live in the same country as they do. Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor warned the ruling is an obvious sign the court will seek to overturn protections for marriage equality next.

Sotomayor issued a dire warning in her dissent, accusing the conservative supermajority of chipping away at constitutional protections for married couples and saying they’re making “the same fatal error” as they did in Dobbs v. Jackson, the 2022 Supreme Court ruling that overturned federal abortion protections.

“The majority, ignoring these precedents, makes the same fatal error it made in Dobbs: requiring too ‘careful [a] description of the asserted fundamental liberty interest,’” Sotomayor wrote. “The majority’s failure to respect the right to marriage in this country consigns U.S. citizens to rely on the fickle grace of other countries’ immigration laws to vindicate one of the ‘basic civil rights of man’ and live alongside their spouses.”

The case involved Sandra Muñoz, a U.S. citizen whose husband was denied a visa by the U.S. consulate in El Salvador. That denial came from a broad provision in U.S. immigration law that disqualifies a person from obtaining a visa if the consulate knows “or has reasonable ground to believe” that a person is trying to enter the U.S. “to engage solely, principally, or incidentally in” unlawful activity. Her husband was denied because of tattoos he has, which a court-appointed gang tattoo expert later determined were not gang-related.

Muñoz sued the State Department, arguing that her husband’s inexplicable denial of entry into the U.S. infringed on her constitutional liberty interest in her husband’s visa application and their inability to start a life together in the U.S. In upholding the denial, the Supreme Court’s conservative justices decided not just that the State Department doesn’t need to provide reason for denying a visa but that a citizen’s right to be married doesn’t supersede the state’s strict, and often questionable, immigration processes. The conservative supermajority of the Supreme Court’s ruling chips away at the core of Obergefell v. Hodges—the landmark ruling that legalized same-sex marriage in 2015—which decided that citizens have a right to marriage.

In her dissent, Sotomayor cast urgent warnings on the impact of restricting who is allowed to be married in the U.S., noting that the conservative decision will extend to couples “like the Lovings and the Obergefells, [who] depend on American law for their marriages’ validity.”

“Same-sex couples may be forced to relocate to countries that do not recognize same-sex marriage, or even those that criminalize homosexuality,” Sotomayor added. “Obergefell rejected what the majority does today as ‘inconsistent with the approach this Court has used in discussing [the] fundamental rights’ of ‘marriage and intimacy.’”

“Despite the majority’s assurance two Terms ago that its eradication of the right to abortion ‘does not undermine … in any way’ other entrenched substantive due process rights such as ‘the right to marry,’ ‘the right to reside with relatives,’ and ‘the right to make decisions about the education of one’s children,’ the Court fails at the first pass,” Sotomayor wrote in dissenting the conservative supermajority’s decision issued on Friday.