MAGA Is Already Spinning Wild Conspiracies on Eric Adams’s Indictment

New York City Mayor Eric Adams is finding some strange defenders in the wake of a federal indictment: the MAGA crowd.

Donald Trump’s fans—who are eager to demonize the Department of Justice, New York courts, and what they claim is the “weaponization of our country’s prosecutorial resources”—came to Adams’s defense in droves Wednesday night.

Adams is expected to face federal charges in a federal corruption investigation. Federal agents raided his residence Thursday morning, and top officials in his administration have similarly been raided by the FBI and indicted, with several resigning.

In a Trumpian turn, Adams has protested his innocence by implying that the probe is a witch hunt and saying that the charges are “based on lies.” The New York City mayor also cast blame on the federal government’s immigration response in the city, stating, “The federal government did nothing as its broken immigration policies overloaded our shelter system with no relief.”

Republicans pounced on Adams’s comments about migrants and decided the investigation must be a hoax. “If you’re wondering why the system turned on one of its own …” wrote commentator Tomi Lauren, attaching a separate video of Adams complaining about the pressure on public services from increased immigration.

“He was told to shut up by the ‘Democratic’ Party after this,” wrote Elon Musk, responding to a right-wing account posting the same speech. Some even suggested it was Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s doing.

Billionaire Bill Ackman agreed. “Eric loudly spoke the truth on the migrant problem in NYC and what the consequences would be for New Yorkers and the country,” wrote Ackman. “Doing so required bravery, as sharing these views publicly as a Democratic mayor did not win him any friends in the Party or with the Biden/Harris administration.” (Ackman later stated he believed the indictment was “devastating and credible.”)

Overall, it could become the GOP party line that because Adams criticized the Biden-Harris immigration policy, he had to be punished.

In reality, though the specific charges Adams will face are currently under wraps, the investigation is likely related to illegal campaign contributions from foreign sources and a violation of the Foreign Agents Registration Act, not his policy on migrants.

This story has been updated.

Rudy Giuliani was disbarred Thursday by the District of Columbia Court of Appeals, ending the legal career of another one of Donald Trump’s former lawyers.

It’s the second disbarment for Giuliani, who lost his law license in New York in July over his many false statements about the 2020 presidential election. In May, Giuliani’s D.C. law license was suspended after the D.C. Board on Professional Responsibility recommended that he lose the license over his involvement in lawsuits alleging election fraud in 2020.

“We conclude that disbarment is the only sanction that will protect the public, the courts, and the integrity of the legal profession, and deter other lawyers from launching similarly baseless claims in the pursuit of such wide-ranging yet completely unjustified relief,” the board’s recommendation at the time said.

This is a developing story.

Despite deleting an offensive, racist social media post against Haitian Americans on Wednesday, Representative Clay Higgins has doubled down, claiming that it was “all true.”

After making the post, which referred to multiple stereotypes, including the debunked racist rumor that Haitian immigrants in Springfield, Ohio, are capturing and eating pets, Higgins faced immediate backlash online, and Representative Steven Horsford introduced a resolution to censure him.

Higgins deleted the post, and was defended by House Speaker Mike Johnson, who called Higgins a “dear friend of mine” and told the press, “I’m sure he probably regrets some of the language he used. But you know, we move forward. We believe in redemption around here.”

But later Wednesday evening, Higgins said the exact opposite. “It’s all true. I can put up another controversial post tomorrow if you want me to,” he told CNN. “I mean, we do have freedom of speech. I’ll say what I want.

“It’s not a big deal to me. It’s like something stuck to the bottom of my boot. Just scrape it off and move on with my life,” Higgins said.

Horsford told CNN that he confronted Higgins on the House floor, trying to convince him that his comments had real consequences, and he was attacking people who have done nothing wrong.

“I asked him specifically to remove this post, and he said, ‘I’m going to pray about it.’ What do you need to pray about? Just do what is right and stop this hateful rhetoric that is causing people to feel targeted. He told me no,” Horsford said to Anderson Cooper. “And that is when I said, if you refuse, I will take this to the floor, we will move for a resolution to censure you, and that is exactly what we did.”

Republicans, led by Donald Trump and J.D. Vance, have continued peddling racist attacks against Haitian immigrants, with Trump using them to bolster his call for mass deportations. Vance has been unrepentant, even defending his fabrication of the story. Meanwhile, Springfield has faced violent threats to its hospitals, schools, and government buildings, and Trump is trying to spread the rumor to another small town: Charleroi, Pennsylvania. Will Republicans face any consequences for their racist fearmongering?

Did Donald Trump just make Jack Smith’s job that much easier by admitting that he knows he lost the 2020 election?

During a speech Wednesday in Mint Hill, North Carolina, Trump appeared to give up the game when speaking about his performance four years ago.

“We did much better by the way, in the election of 2020, than we did in 2016,” Trump said.

“Millions and millions of votes more—more votes than any sitting president in the history of our country,” Trump said. This election-denying claim simply isn’t true, because Trump got roughly 74 million votes, while President Joe Biden got 81 million.

“But they beat us by a whisker. They beat us by a little whisker,” Trump said. “He beat us from the basement.”

Of course, it’s important to know that pretty much every time Trump opens his mouth, his words are admissible in court. So admitting that he didn’t win the election could potentially hurt the former president in court—specifically, in his election interference case in Washington, D.C., where special counsel Smith is seeking to prove that Trump knew he lost the 2020 election but still tried to overturn the results.

Trump has said he lost the 2020 election “by a whisker” before, during an interview earlier this month with podcaster Lex Fridman.

“We had a man in there that should’ve never been in there,” Trump said, speaking about Biden. “They kept him in a basement, they used Covid, they cheated, but they used Covid to cheat. They cheated without Covid too.”

Moments later, the former president claimed he had “lost by a whisker” in 2020. But after his interview, Trump claimed he was just joking.

“I did that sarcastically,” he said. “All you have to do is look at it, and they should have sent it back to the legislatures for approval. I got almost 75 million votes, the most votes any sitting president has ever gotten. I was told if I got 63, which is what I got in 2016, you can’t be beaten.”

Despite the obvious confusion Trump’s little joke caused, the former president has decided that “lost by a whisker” will be part of the hot air he intends to blow on the campaign trail and that its meaning, like everything he says, is whatever suits him.

Republican Representative Clay Higgins made a racist attack on Haitians Wednesday, referencing several racist tropes and the debunked pet-eating conspiracy from Ohio.

In his post on X (formerly Twitter), the Louisiana congressman said, “These Haitians are wild. Eating pets, vudu, nastiest country in the western hemisphere, cults, slapstick gangsters … but damned if they don’t feel all sophisticated now, filing charges against our President and VP.”

Higgins was apparently upset that a Haitian American nonprofit organization took advantage of an Ohio law allowing citizens to file affidavits for criminal offenses, and filed charges against Donald Trump and J.D. Vance for spreading the debunked rumor that Haitian immigrants in Springfield, Ohio, captured and ate pets, ducks, and geese.

Higgins’s post is not only bigoted but also echoes the same sentiments as Trump, Vance, and many other right-wing figures who have called for Haitians legally in the United States to be deported. Many of these figures, led by the Republican presidential and vice presidential nominees, have continued attacking Haitians despite the uptick in violent threats against schools, hospitals, and government buildings in Springfield.

Recently, Trump has expanded his attacks against Haitian immigrants from Springfield to another small town, Charleroi, Pennsylvania. As was the case in Ohio, Charleroi’s town officials have pushed back, with Charleroi Borough Manager Joe Manning remarking, “There’s what the former president is saying, and then there’s easily observable reality.”

Manning told The New Republic’s Greg Sargent that the Haitian community has helped fill jobs in the small Pennsylvania town and even showed solidarity with workers at a factory that was closing. But details like that are of little concern to people like Higgins, Trump, and Vance, who refuse to let the facts get in the way of a racist narrative they think will help them politically.

It seems as though Donald Trump’s son-in-law has mastered the art of the scam.

According to an investigation by the Senate Finance Committee, Jared Kushner’s private equity firm, Affinity Partners, has yet to return even a cent of profit to its foreign investors.

The shady firm has received billions from Saudi Arabia, Qatar, the United Arab Emirates, and other foreign governments. In fact, 99 percent of the firm’s approximately $3 billion in funding came from overseas sources, according to a New York Times report that spurred the Senate investigation. Yet Trump’s son-in-law has returned no profit to the governments. All the while, it’s estimated his firm has pocketed an additional $112 million in fees from the governments since 2021, according to the findings.

“Affinity’s investors may not be motivated by commercial considerations but rather the opportunity to funnel foreign government money to members of President Trump’s family, namely Jared Kushner and Ivanka Trump,” wrote Senator Ron Wyden, head of the Finance Committee, in a letter to the company this week.

Thus far, Kushner and Affinity have made seemingly innocuous investments in companies like Shlomo Group, an Israeli car-leasing company; Zamp, a UAE-backed fast-food company; and Dubizzle Group, a UAE-based classified websites operator. But if Trump were to win in November, Wyden warned, the financial conflict of interest could heighten.

As it stands, “sovereign wealth fund investments and prospective real estate deals give foreign governments leverage over the Trump family,” wrote the senator. Further, “a potential future Trump administration will have financial motives to make foreign policy decisions that may be counter to the national interest in order to ensure Kushner and Ivanka Trump continue to collect millions of dollars in fees from foreign governments through Affinity.”

Is Kushner failing up? Or is it a masterful political play?

If Ukraine were to suddenly surrender to Russia, everything would be “much better,” at least according to Donald Trump.

During an afternoon press conference Wednesday, the Republican presidential nominee urged the Eastern European nation to submit to the foreign power, claiming that any deal, no matter how dismal for Ukraine’s freedom, would have been better than the current state of affairs.

“Ukraine is gone. It’s not Ukraine anymore. You can never replace those cities and towns, and you can never replace the dead people, so many dead people,” Trump said. “Any deal, even the worst deal, would have been better than what we have right now.

“If they made a bad deal, it would have been much better, they would have given up a little bit,” he continued. “And everybody would be living, and every building would be built, and every tower would be aging for another 2,000 years.”

Trump turned his attention quickly to Vice President Kamala Harris, claiming that she “doesn’t know what she’s doing”—despite the fact that she’s not the current president overseeing the ongoing war. Trump then went on a spiraling tirade that had startling similarities to foreign propaganda, claiming that “more cities will fall” and “the ones that fell will continue to receive more and more bombs” unless Ukraine bends the knee to Russia.

“It didn’t need to happen,” Trump said.

The former president also slammed Ukraine’s leader, President Volodymyr Zelenskiy, for continuing to lobby the U.S. government for increased military aid, though Trump conveniently failed to mention how he personally worked to block a $110.5 billion foreign aid package to Ukraine last winter while pressuring Senate Republicans to bargain for a more extreme border security package.

But Trump does have his own plan to institute peace in the besieged region. In June, Trump’s advisers announced that, should he win in November, Trump would facilitate talks between the two nations that would more or less force Ukraine to cede part of its territory occupied by Russian forces. The plan’s obvious benefit to Russia resurfaced concerns over Trump’s notoriously cushy—and sometimes subservient—relationship with Russian President Vladimir Putin.

Zelenskiy is currently scheduled to meet with President Joe Biden on Thursday, where he will present a so-called “victory plan” to end the conflict, reported The Washington Post.

The two-year conflict has seen the decimation of the vast majority of Ukraine’s energy infrastructure at the hands of Russian forces. At the United Nations on Wednesday, Zelenskiy warned international leaders that Russia was planning to attack Ukraine’s nuclear plants.

“Just imagine, please, your country, with 80 percent of its energy system gone.… What kind of life would that be?” Zelenskiy said. “If, God forbid, Russia causes a nuclear disaster at one of our nuclear power plants, radiation will not respect state borders.”

On Wednesday morning, Secretary of State Antony Blinken blew off a question about how he reportedly ignored two U.S. government assessments about Israel blocking aid to Gaza.

On CBS, Blinken was asked about recently leaked documents showing that he received two U.S. government reports that Israel deliberately blocked aid to Gaza but then told Congress the opposite. He claimed that his response was “actually pretty typical.”

“We had a report to put out on the humanitarian situation in Gaza and what Israel was doing to try to make sure that people got the assistance they needed, and I had different assessments from different parts of the State Department, from other agencies that were involved, like USAID,” Blinken told CBS’s Adriana Diaz.

“My job was to sort through them, which I did, draw some conclusions from that, and we put our report, and we found that Israel needed to do a better job on the humanitarian assistance. We’ve seen improvements since then; it’s still not sufficient,” Blinken added.

Blinken’s spin in the interview sounds quite different from his report to Congress in May, when he said, “We do not currently assess that the Israeli government is prohibiting or otherwise restricting the transport or delivery of U.S. humanitarian assistance.”

Blinken’s own report contradicted two other reports he allegedly received from the State Department’s Bureau of Population, Refugees, and Migration as well as the U.S. Agency for International Development. Both stated that Israel was deliberately blocking food and medicine from entering Gaza during its brutal assault on the territory.

For some reason, neither Diaz nor Tony Dokoupil nor Nate Burleson pressed Blinken on his nonanswer on CBS, or the fact that it seemed very different from his May assessment, which itself was at odds with the other agency reports. At the time, Blinken’s memo to Congress caused discontent within the State Department, with one official even resigning, saying, “That report and its flagrant untruths will haunt us.”

On Tuesday, the Council of American-Islamic Relations called on Blinken to resign for misleading Congress, calling his memo “a violation of U.S. law.” But the Biden administration has taken little, if any, action to stop Israel’s alleged war crimes in Gaza, which have claimed at least 41,467 Palestinian lives, including 16,500 children.

Donald Trump claimed Wednesday that the towns he smeared with anti-immigrant lies actually suffered “hostile takeovers” by immigrants, and insisted that immigrants have been “taking over” cities across America.

During a campaign stop in Mint Hill, North Carolina, Trump continued to escalate his violent rhetoric about immigrant populations in Springfield, Ohio, and Aurora, Colorado.

“Kamala should have closed the border years ago and we wouldn’t have hostile takeovers of Springfield, Ohio and Aurora, Colorado,” Trump said. “Where they’re actually going in with massive machine gun-type equipment—they’re going in with guns that are beyond even military scope.”

“And they’re taking over apartment buildings. They’re taking over real estate, they’re in the real estate development business. Congratulations!”

Trump has continued to completely ignore statements from local officials, including Aurora’s mayor, who said that the assertion that Venezuelan gangs had taken over the city was “simply not true.” Aurora’s police chief said there is no evidence to support Trump’s claim that a Venezuelan gang had taken over an apartment building, which was really left destitute by its management company, according to residents.

As for Trump’s claim about immigrants using weapons “beyond even military scope,” it’s unclear where this originates, except that it’s a shocking thing to say. Here, Trump’s penchant for hyperbole, divorce from reality, and anti-immigrant rhetoric coalesce into something almost novel: unabashed stupidity.

Later in Trump’s speech, the Republican nominee returned to the subject of his two favorite cities, to continue spreading lies about the people who live there.

“The 21 million illegals she let in are now creating havoc throughout the country. Aurora, Colorado, and Springfield, Ohio, are just two examples,” Trump said. “What they’re going through in those places, it’s unbelievable.”

“And they’re literally… taking over those towns. Taking over hundreds, those are two yer—hundreds of towns and cities throughout our country,” Trump said. “Including the big ones. Look at New York! All of the people, what’s happened to the quality of life.”

The Haitian migrants in Springfield, Ohio, are in fact not an “example” of “havoc” created by undocumented immigrants, because there was absolutely no evidence found to support the Republicans’ cartoonishly racist pet-eating rumors. And crucially, the immigrants are there legally as they have temporary protected status.

More than 200,000 immigrants have arrived in New York City since 2022, The New York Times reported in August. While the city has struggled to adapt to the influx of new residents, the asylum-seeking population represents only a fraction of the estimated 8.3 million people who live there—not exactly a takeover.

To that point, Trump’s claim that undocumented immigrants have been “taking over” hundreds of cities is plainly unfounded.

Trump had made a similarly outlandish remark about the right-wing claims that a Venezuelan gang had taken over an apartment building in Aurora, during a rambling speech on Tuesday. He quipped again that they’d become “real estate developers” with “weapons that even our military hasn’t seen.” It seems these are his new lines to be repeated at every speaking event.

“They’re going to take over a lot more than Aurora, they’re going to go through Colorado, take over the whole damn state, unless… I become president,” Trump said, grinning.

Here, Trump gives away the game. The Republican nominee is more than happy to spread violent lies about immigrants, creating stories about the terror they could bring, but it’s all in service of one thing: getting him back to the White House.

Though the International Brotherhood of Teamsters refused to issue an endorsement for the 2024 presidential election, this week, local Teamsters unions coast-to-coast have challenged national leadership by issuing their own endorsements of Vice President Kamala Harris.

Altogether, regional councils representing a million Teamsters have thrown their support behind Harris for president. The most recent endorsements come from chapters in several key battleground states, including Pennsylvania, Georgia, Wisconsin, Michigan, and Nevada.

“We decided we wanted to endorse the Harris-Walz campaign,” said Josh Zivalich, the president of the Teamsters Joint Council 75, which represents 45,000 members in Florida, Georgia, and southeastern Alabama. “We think the stakes are very high for working people, and certainly union people, and we thought it was important to make a stand.” 

Last week, Teamsters President Sean O’Brien announced the national union would not make a presidential endorsement. This comes after O’Brien spoke at the Republican National Convention in July and was subsequently snubbed for a chance to speak on the Democratic stage. In forgoing their endorsement for president, the Teamsters are one of the only major unions to not support Harris in November.

In its decision, the union cited division among its members nationwide. The Teamsters’ electronic member poll, which garnered over 35,000 votes, showed 59 percent of workers supporting Donald Trump and 34 percent supporting Harris. Similarly, after the Pennsylvania Conference of Teamsters endorsed
Harris on September 19, a limited informal survey showed 65 percent of its members supported endorsing Trump. But these numbers represent only a fraction of the union’s 1.3 million membership.

Another group of workers backing the Harris-Walz ticket is Teamsters Joint Council 32, which represents 85,000 members in Minnesota, Iowa, North Dakota, South Dakota, and Wisconsin. In their statement, they cited their appreciation for hometown hero Walz, writing, “He has stood beside us on our picket lines, listened to our concerns, and increased protections for Union workers.”

Also in the Midwest, Michigan Teamsters President Kevin Moore told local news in Detroit, “We’ve seen four years of Donald Trump. It’s the same old rhetoric and we’re not going back. Tim Walz and Kamala Harris give us a vision for all people.”