Sheriff Has Pathetic Defense for Using Trump Lies to Threaten People

An Ohio sheriff who threatened local supporters of Vice President Kamala Harris is doubling down on his dangerous rhetoric, insisting that people need to “accept responsibility” for their political leanings.

Portage County Sheriff Bruce Zuchowski took to Facebook on Tuesday to elaborate on his controversial remarks that spurred the sudden, protesting resignation of a county commissioner from the local Republican committee.

“As the Chief Law Enforcement Officer of Portage County, I have sworn to protect ALL citizens of my County. Recently, I placed a post on my personal facebook page that may have been a little misinterpreted??” Zuchowski wrote on his official page.

“I … as the elected sheriff, do have a First Amendment right as do all citizens. If the citizens of Portage County want to elect an individual who has supported open borders (which I’ve personally visited Twice!) and neglected to enforce the laws of our Country … then that is their prerogative,” Zuchowski continued. “With elections, there are consequences. That being said … I believe that those who vote for individuals with liberal policies have to accept responsibility for their actions! I am a Law Man … Not a Politician!”

The warning came days after Zuchowski willingly threw himself into electoral politics in their yards in a Facebook post that referred to the vice president as a “Flip-Flopping, Laughing Hyena.” He suggested Friday that his constituents send him the personal addresses of locals with Harris’s campaign signs in their yards.

“I say … write down all the addresses of the people who had her signs in their yards!” Zuchowski wrote on Friday. “Sooo … when the Illegal human ‘Locust’ (which she supports!) Need places to live … We’ll already have the addresses of their New families … who supported their arrival!”

The post was seemingly made in reference to a virulent conspiracy theory spread by top Republicans, including Donald Trump and J.D. Vance, about Haitian immigrants eating other residents’ pets in Springfield, Ohio—roughly 200 miles away from Zuchowski’s district.

Since Vance and Trump began elevating the myth last week, Springfield has received at least 33 bomb threats, forcing it to evacuate and temporarily shutter several of its schools, colleges, festivals, and a significant portion of its government facilities, including City Hall, the Bureau of Motor Vehicles, the Ohio License Bureau, the Springfield Academy of Excellence, and Fulton Elementary School.

Multiple city officials, Ohio Governor Mike DeWine, and even Vance himself have stated in no uncertain terms that the conspiracy is false.

The Trump campaign would rather sow more chaos in Springfield, Ohio, over the Haitian immigrant conspiracy than make it right.

The MAGA leadership is reportedly “not displeased” that its virulently racist pet-eating conspiracy has drawn widespread condemnation, according to The Bulwark. Instead, the campaign would seemingly rather keep the topic in the news, believing Trump could win big on immigration in November as opposed to thornier issues that Republicans have routinely lost over in recent elections, such as abortion.

“We talk about abortion, we lose. We talk about immigration, we win,” one Trump adviser told The Bulwark.

Multiple city officials and Ohio Governor Mike DeWine have categorically denied the conspiracy, and local authorities have said there were no reports or evidence of pets being stolen or eaten. On Sunday, Republican vice presidential pick J.D. Vance effectively admitted himself that the anti-immigration conspiracy was bogus.

“If I have to create stories so that the American media actually pays attention to the suffering of the American people, then that’s what I’m going to do,” he told CNN.

But having no evidence and, frankly, not believing the lie themselves doesn’t seem to matter to the Trump-Vance ticket.

“We’ll take the hit to prove the bigger point,” the adviser told The Bulwark.

Springfield, the epicenter of the conspiracy, is practically on its own with regard to the fallout of becoming a national punch line. Since Vance and Trump began elevating the myth last week, Springfield has received at least 33 bomb threats, forcing it to evacuate and temporarily shutter several of its schools, colleges, festivals, and a significant portion of its government facilities, including City Hall, the Bureau of Motor Vehicles, the Ohio License Bureau, the Springfield Academy of Excellence, and Fulton Elementary School.

Trump, meanwhile, will likely not be paying a visit to the location of his pet conspiracy, according to a source familiar with his travel who spoke with Columbia Journalism Review.

At a Tuesday night campaign rally in Michigan, Donald Trump briefly strayed from a point about international affairs to make an absurd remark about climate change.

Claiming that nuclear proliferation is the true “global warming” (even as the former president has faced criticism for accelerating the nuclear arms race), Trump said, “When I hear these people talking about global warming, that’s the global warming you have to worry about, not that the ocean’s going to rise in 400 years an eighth of an inch.”

Trump then went on to speak rosily about rising sea levels: “You’ll have more seafront property, right, if that happens. I said, is that good or bad? I said, isn’t that a good thing? If I have a little property on the ocean, I have a little bit more property—I have a little bit more ocean.”

According to a CNN fact-check of similar claims Trump has made in the past, his estimate is a severe lowball: “Sea level rise is already more than an eighth of an inch annually—and it is accelerating.” But perhaps more baffling is the idea that climate change will create more opportunities for real estate.

Shared on social media by the Kamala Harris campaign and other accounts, Trump’s comments immediately generated ridicule.

Users on X, for example, have pointed out that the Michiganders Trump was addressing would probably not “have more seafront property,” barring an impossible catastrophe in which oceans rose hundreds of feet. (In reality, climate change reportedly threatens the region in other ways, including rising lake levels.)

Reporter Tom McKay posted, “Won’t there actually be less ‘seafront’ property because the land area necessarily contracts when sea levels rise.” Jim Swift of The Bulwark shared a meme noting that rising sea levels could threaten Donald Trump’s Mar-a-Lago resort.

Others criticized Trump’s comments for trivializing the grave threat climate change poses to human life. The youth climate group Climate Defiance, for example, cited the World Economic Forum’s estimate that 410 million people “could be displaced or harmed by sea level rise this century.”

Senator Bernie Sanders is attempting to block over $20 billion in arms sales to Israel through a series of resolutions.

The Associated Press reports that Sanders wrote a letter to his fellow senators Wednesday saying that “we must end complicity in Israel’s illegal and indiscriminate bombing campaign, which has caused mass civilian death.”

Sanders plans to introduce the resolutions next week under Senate rules that would quickly force a vote on stopping the weapons sales. The Vermont senator is using a joint resolution of disapproval of the sales, a means of congressional oversight of foreign issues.

Sanders said he has support for the proposal, which would halt the sale of missile systems, tank rounds, new fighter jets, and other weapons responsible for the destruction in Gaza. Israel’s war in the territory has killed more than 41,000 people, including nearly 16,500 children, and injured over 95,000, according to Al Jazeera, very likely an undercount.

“We cannot ignore what the Netanyahu government has done in Gaza,” Sanders wrote, adding that “much of this carnage in Gaza has been carried out with U.S.-provided military equipment.”

“We cannot be complicit in this humanitarian disaster, we must act.”

It’s not the first effort from Sanders to halt weapons sales to Israel. In January, the Vermont senator sought to require the State Department to document human rights abuses committed by Israel after October 7, 2023. The Senate rejected that effort at the time 72–11. Similarly, this effort is a long shot and is likely to encounter significant opposition, not just in the Senate but in the Republican-controlled House.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s actions are considered war crimes by many experts, and the International Criminal Court is also seeking arrest warrants against him and Hamas leader Yahya Sinwar. The response from the United States has been almost unequivocal support for Israel’s actions, and Democratic presidential nominee Kamala Harris hasn’t offered any new solutions to end the war, instead refusing to engage on the issue.

J.D. Vance attempted to fill in the gaps of Donald Trump’s health care “concepts of a plan” over the weekend, but buried behind his pledge to protect those with preexisting conditions came the promise of policies that would actually jeopardize their access to care. And Trump is doing nothing to deny that this would be the case.

During an appearance Sunday on Meet the Press, NBC’s Kristen Welker asked Vance if he could assemble the breadcrumbs Trump has offered into an actual policy plan. Vance responded by pointing out that during Trump’s first term, he chose to build on the Affordable Care Act rather than destroy it.

The Ohio senator explained that this time around, Trump’s elusive health care plan was “actually quite straightforward” and said that the former president would “want to make sure that preexisting coverage conditions are covered.” Vance also said Trump would “want to implement some deregulatory agenda so that people can choose a health care plan that fits them.” He criticized a “one-size-fits-all approach” that sorted people “into the same risk pools.”

However, the kind of deregulation Vance refers to is exactly the kind that would make it practically impossible for those with preexisting conditions to get affordable health care, according to Semafor.

When asked for clarification on this position, Trump campaign spokesman Brian Hughes declined to say whether Trump agreed with moving people with preexisting conditions into different “risk pools.”

“Senator Vance and President Trump share the underlying principles of using more choice in the marketplace and efficiency as tools for better, more affordable health care,” Hughes told Semafor.

In 2017, the GOP-led House passed the American Health Care Act, which included the proposal for a waiver that would do just what Vance had described: allow “insurers to set premiums on the basis of an individual’s health status,” including preexisting conditions. The opposite of a “one-size-fits-all” solution, right?

There’s only one problem: The Congressional House Budget Office issued a report analyzing the bill and predicting that the waiver would result in those with preexisting conditions inevitably being priced out of their insurance.

The report estimated that as a result of those waivers, “community-rated premiums would rise over time, and people who are less healthy (including those with preexisting or newly acquired medical conditions) would ultimately be unable to purchase comprehensive nongroup health insurance at premiums comparable to those under current law, if they could purchase it at all.

“As a result, the nongroup markets in those states would become unstable for people with higher-than-average expected health care costs,” the report said. “That instability would cause some people who would have been insured in the nongroup market under current law to be uninsured.”

With the waiver, healthier people could opt for non-group insurance plans, which would remain inexpensive, while less healthy people were pushed toward pricey community-rated options. The report estimated that the price of community-rated options would rise until “those premiums would be so high in some areas that the plans would have no enrollment.”

The Senate rejected that waiver, and Trump was ultimately unable to make any substantial changes to the ACA. However, Vance has made clear that Trump would be willing to make the same mistakes all over again should he make it to the White House a second time.

It’s not yet clear what exactly the former president’s plan is. When asked, Trump said he didn’t know because he’s “not president right now.” But his refusal to flat-out reject the concept of separate risk pools should be a huge red flag.

The Trump-appointed judge who threw out the former president’s criminal classified documents case wasn’t up-front about her own conflicts, and now the details of her backroom liaisons are beginning to trickle out.

Judge Aileen Cannon failed to disclose that she attended a banquet at a conservative law school in May 2023 to honor the late conservative Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia, flouting a 2006 rule requiring judges to file formal disclosures when they attend seminars or conferences that could influence their decisions. But it’s not the only time that Cannon has failed to notify the public of her partisan behavior, according to ProPublica.

In 2021 and 2022, Cannon took week-long trips for legal colloquiums sponsored by conservative judiciaries and hosted at an expensive resort in Pray, Montana, where rooms can cost upward of $1,000 per night. The retreats did not go reported until NPR reporters called Cannon out on the omission as part of NPR’s national investigation into gaps in judicial disclosures.

“Judges administer the law, and we have a right to expect every judge to comply with the law,” Virginia Canter, chief ethics counsel for the watchdog group Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, or CREW, told ProPublica.

Cannon, who seemed determined to hold up the classified documents case at every possible opportunity, ultimately tossed the case in July on the basis that special counsel Jack Smith’s appointment was unconstitutional. Smith is currently appealing the decision with the Eleventh Circuit. (William H. Pryor Jr., the chief judge of the Eleventh Circuit, was also at the May 2023 banquet, though he properly disclosed his attendance.) But her own future on the case isn’t clear: CREW has asked the appeals court to intervene and replace the controversial judge on the critical case.

If the government wins the appeal, they will be able to ask the court to assign a new judge to the case—though, ultimately, the future of the classified documents trial is contingent on the outcome of the November election. Should Trump lose, the case will move forward regardless of whether the government wins the current appeal. But should he win, Trump could use his presidential powers to wipe the federal case off the map.

It turns out that J.D. Vance and the Trump campaign can only point to one already debunked case as proof of their false and racist conspiracy about Haitian immigrants in Ohio.

The Wall Street Journal reports that one of Vance’s staffers reached out to Springfield, Ohio’s city manager, Bryan Heck, on September 9, one day before the presidential debate between Donald Trump and Kamala Harris. The staffer wanted to know if there was any truth behind rumors that Haitian Americans were capturing and eating pets, ducks, and geese in the town. By that time, Vance had already shared the conspiracy theory online.

Heck told the staffer that there was no “verifiable evidence or reports” and that the “claims were baseless.” But that didn’t stop Trump from repeating the false story at the debate, and Vance continued to spread the rumor even as his home state suffered the consequences.

In an attempt to back up the rumor, Vance’s campaign provided a police report to the Journal in which a Springfield resident, Anna Kilgore, said that her cat was possibly taken by her Haitian neighbors. When a reporter went to the woman’s home last week, she said her cat came home only two days after she reported it missing, and was found safe in her basement.

Kilgore, a Trump supporter, said that she apologized to her neighbors with a translation app and her daughter’s help. Another Springfield resident who spurred on the rumor in a Facebook post has also admitted that she was wrong, and took down the post, according to The New York Times. Vance, meanwhile, has not apologized, instead trying to blame the media.

The Republican vice presidential nominee somehow sees a political advantage in pushing the debunked and racist story, even as it has resulted in violent threats against the town’s schools, hospitals, and government buildings. Ohio Governor Mike DeWine has denounced the story but refused to blame Trump or Vance, but Springfield Mayor Rob Rue doesn’t want Trump anywhere near his town. Considering the threats, and the part that neo-Nazis have played in creating this problem, it’s easy to see why.

More than 100 former GOP officials have signed a public letter endorsing Kamala Harris for president and warning that Donald Trump is “unfit” for the presidency or “any office of public trust.”

Signatories include Republican national security officials who served in previous administrations—such as former Secretaries of Defense William Cohen and Chuck Hagel, former Bush Sr. official and World Bank President Robert Zoellick, and former CIA and FBI Director William Webster—as well as former members of Congress, including Barbara Comstock and Adam Kinzinger.

“We expect to disagree with Kamala Harris on many domestic and foreign policy issues,” the letter says, “but we believe that she possesses the essential qualities to serve as President and Donald Trump does not. We therefore support her election to be President.” The letter contains a bulleted list of reasons for their endorsement of Harris, including some of her more hawkish foreign policy stances.

The letter calls Trump “unfit to serve” and notes his “dangerous qualities,” including his coziness with “authoritarian leaders,” “contempt” for ethical and legal norms, and “chaotic national security decision-making.” As commander in chief, it says, Trump “promoted daily chaos in government, praised our enemies and undermined our allies, politicized the military and disparaged our veterans, prioritized his personal interest above American interests, and betrayed our values, democracy, and this country’s founding documents.” The letter goes on to condemn Trump’s incitement of the January 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol.

In the penultimate paragraph of their letter, the authors acknowledge Republican voters’ “potential concerns” about Harris but say they “pale in comparison” to Trump’s record of “chaotic and unethical behavior and disregard for our Republic’s time-tested principles of constitutional governance.”

This is just the latest showing of support for Harris by prominent Republicans. This week, over a dozen high-level alumni of the Reagan administration endorsed her presidential bid. The vice president has also been endorsed by other prominent Republicans, such as former Representative Liz Cheney and former Vice President Dick Cheney, and the Harris-Walz campaign has been courting moderate red voters through a “Republicans for Harris” initiative.

After controversially flip-flopping his opinion on Donald Trump last month, Joe Rogan has shared an unexpected review of Vice President Kamala Harris’s debate strategy: “fucking amazing job.”

During Monday’s episode of The Joe Rogan Experience, the multimillionaire podcaster and former Fear Factor host celebrated Harris’s performance during last week’s debate, joking that the “puppet master” behind her campaign was absolutely crushing it.

“Whoever’s helping her. Whoever’s coaching her. Whoever’s the puppet master running the strings,” Rogan said, “fucking amazing job. They did an amazing job from the moment Biden drops out, forcing Biden to drop out. Whatever they’re doing, whoever is writing those speeches, getting her to deliver, coaching her. She’s nailing it.”

Rogan also argued that the debate—and the presidential race—had boiled down to which candidate had better prepared for the moment, and to Rogan, that choice was obvious.

“See, the difference in that debate was not a difference in, like, who’s gonna have better policies? Who’s gonna be better for the country?” Rogan told comedian Tom Segura. “The … debate, in my opinion, was who was better prepared. She was way better prepared.”

Rogan then continued to mock Trump for failing to work with his team, while praising Harris for building and landing effective sound bites and, effectively, being a “savvy politician.”

The podcaster shared an odd exchange with Trump in August, when Rogan appeared to side with Robert F. Kennedy Jr. over the MAGA leader, before the independent presidential candidate bent the knee to Trump. Trump then chose to clap back, writing on Truth Social that he was looking forward to Rogan getting “booed” at a UFC tournament.

Audiences online read between the lines of Rogan’s salute to Harris, noting that Rogan—who hosts one of the biggest podcasts in the country for Republican and independent men—has the potential to significantly sway undecided voters.

“This is a huge problem for Donald Trump,” wrote Obama-era Democratic strategist Tim Fullerton on X. “If Joe Rogan turns on him and starts praising Kamala Harris like he is here—Trump is toast.”

Right-wing pundit Tim Pool announced that he is suing Kamala Harris’s presidential campaign for interfering with his business by posting a false statement.

Pool declared on his podcast Tuesday night that he had filed a lawsuit in West Virginia against Harris’s presidential campaign alleging that the campaign had committed defamation and bad-faith misconduct.

Pool’s lawsuit is in response to a post on the KamalaHQ account, the campaign’s press account, that includes a clip of Pool speaking with right-wing conspiracy theorist Laura Loomer in late August.

“Trump operatives say their Project 2025 plan is to give Trump total, unchecked legal power so they can jail and execute those who don’t support Trump if he wins (They have since scrubbed this video from YouTube),” the post said, without referring to either Pool or Loomer by name.

“Should Democrats be in jail? No question,” Pool said in the clip. “When Donald Trump gets elected, should he start locking them up? No question. Should there be lists of Democrats that need to go to jail, one hundred percent. And the reason for that is they committed crimes.”

The right-wing pundit then went on to say that he wanted Trump loyalists as the attorney general, deputy attorney general, and the heads of the FBI and CIA.

“Not just jail—they should get the death penalty!” chirped Loomer.

The KamalaHQ account had originally posted the clip of Pool speaking with Loomer in June, when Joe Biden was still at the top of the Democratic ticket and the account was called BidenHQ, with a similar caption. Pool didn’t seem to take issue with that post, only the one in late August.

“I have engaged legal counsel,” he wrote on X in response to the August post. “We are preparing to take action. More to come.”

In a response video, Pool pushed back at the claims that he was a Donald Trump operative and that he had anything to do with Project 2025. He seemed most offended by the implication that he personally was calling for Trump’s political opponents to be killed.

“I am opposed to the death penalty in all circumstances. I have argued against the death penalty in every circumstance,” Pool ranted. He claimed that the video had cut off his response arguing with Loomer’s extremist view. Unfortunately for Pool, it’s unclear whether he actually “argued against” Loomer in this particular circumstance because, again, the video can no longer be found on the internet.

Earlier this month, the Justice Department alleged that Russian state media had funneled $10 million to an unnamed Tennessee-based media company, which was quickly determined to be Tenet Media, Pool’s employer. Tenet Media allegedly produced propaganda that aligned with the Russian government’s interests, and its employees were supposedly unwitting fonts of disinformation. The company has since shuttered, and Pool has claimed that if the allegations prove to be true, then he was “deceived.”

Still, the right-wing YouTuber has insisted that his business was directly affected by the Harris campaign’s post. It’s unclear why Pool would believe that his work was affected by the post and not, say, the revelation that he may have been an unwitting Russian operative.

Pool also claimed that there had been trespassers at his home and his neighbor’s home. It’s unclear why he believes the alleged trespassers to be in response to the Harris post, and not any of the other legal issues in which he’s found himself embroiled.