Israel Finally Releases Detained American Journalist—With a Catch

Israel has released American journalist Jeremy Loffredo four days after arresting and detaining him for reporting on Iranian missile strikes in the country.

Still, the judge who ordered Loffredo’s release said that the journalist must remain in the country until October 20 to give investigators more time to bring forth additional charges or for further interrogation, his attorney Lea Tsemel told The Intercept. An Israeli news outlet also reported that police took Loffredo’s phone, jailbroke the device, and are searching it for more evidence.

Loffredo, an independent journalist working for The Grayzone, reported on where Iran’s missiles landed in Israel, including the Israel Defense Force’s Nevatim Air Base as well as an intelligence base, according to Israeli news site Ynetnews.

Loffredo’s charges included aiding the enemy during wartime and providing information to the enemy. He reported that Israel’s attacks on Gaza were launched from the Nevatim base and that Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s private jet was located there.

Much of the information Loffredo reported on was similar to reports from Israeli media, as well as footage of where a missile landed feet away from Mossad headquarters. The arrest drew the attention of the U.S. government, and representatives from the U.S. Embassy in Israel attended a hearing at the Jerusalem Magistrate’s Court where police requested to extend his detention.

According to Tsemel, the charges against Loffredo carry a maximum sentence of life imprisonment or death. Israeli authorities argue that Loffredo’s reporting aids Iran in studying future targets. The IDF censor barred Israeli media from publishing the exact locations where Iran’s missiles landed.

“He published the information openly and fully, without attempting to hide anything. If this information constitutes aiding the enemy, many other journalists in Israel, including Israeli reporters, should also be arrested,” said Tsemel. “A spy would not have acted so publicly and transparently.”

Police in Israel argued for Loffredo to be detained for seven days, only to be overruled by a judge who ordered a one-day detention. On Thursday, a different judge ordered Loffredo’s release, and an Israeli journalist testified that Loffredo’s reporting did not violate the government censor, saying that Israel’s outlets had produced similar work. However, police filed a last-minute appeal late Thursday to keep Loffredo in custody.

On Friday morning, a district court judge finally ordered Loffredo’s release, citing a lack of evidence and stating that he doesn’t pose a threat, Tsemel said.

Israel’s year-long war in Gaza has killed at least 128 journalists and media workers, according to the Committee to Protect Journalists, and Israel has refused to allow international journalists into the territory to report on the war. It seems the country might be afraid of what independent journalists might discover.

Finally, the mainstream media is willing to say it: Elon Musk is meddling in November’s election.

As The New York Times reported Friday in a sweeping roundup of Musk’s campaign to elect Donald Trump, “the richest man in the world has involved himself in the U.S. election in a manner unparalleled in modern history.”

As the owner of X (formerly known as Twitter), Musk has been able to propagate conspiracy theories about the election, immigrants, and Democrats freely without pushback to his 201 million followers and the platform’s 500 million monthly active users. As the Times pointed out, since he endorsed Trump in July, Musk has posted at least 109 times about the Republican candidate and the election.

But the Times also confirmed something not previously known: Musk is coordinating with the Trump campaign to suppress negative stories about Trump.

Last month, X deactivated a reporter’s account after he shared leaked information from the Trump campaign about JD Vance. X blocked links to the findings and the journalist remains banned from the platform. The Times reported that X did so after the Trump campaign “connected with X to prevent the circulation of links to the platform, according to two people with knowledge of the events.”

Musk has used X to help Trump in other ways as well. Most recently, Musk took over the @America handle on the website to promote his America PAC, which now aims to mobilize nearly one million voters to cast ballots for Trump in November.

They are doing so by building out a ground game with 2,500 organizers in the field but also through digital efforts such as paying individuals $47 to get information on swing-state voters. As the Times highlights, Trump’s team seems to be leaning on Musk’s PAC and other outside groups to carry out these operations. This is, in part, because of new federal guidelines that allow this kind of campaign outsourcing.

It appears that Musk is trying his best to become the “unofficial president” and take over the Trump campaign, like he’s taken over all his other failed projects.

A nine-minute, unedited, undercover interview with Roger Stone revealed some of the MAGA ally’s more disturbing goals for a second Trump administration.

The covert recording of a discussion between Stone and an undercover journalist at a meet and greet in Jacksonville, Florida, on August 4, published by documentarian Lauren Windsor, caught Stone admitting live on camera that he already intends to send “armed guards to dispute the election in Detroit” and to imprison “former Attorney General Bill Barr if Trump returns to power.”

Under the guise of discussing a far-right program to get more like-minded people back into the federal government, Stone shared his disdain for Barr, deriding him as a “traitorous piece of human garbage.” He also lamented that, while president, “Donald Trump never controlled the Justice Department.”

“He’s a CIA general counsel,” Stone said. “He’s a piece of shit. Trump read a law review article, never checked his background, and made him attorney general. Once we get back in, he has to go to prison! He has to go to prison. He’s a criminal.”

On the topic of retaking the government, Stone specified that it’s a “state question, not a federal question.”

“So it’s not who controls the federal government, it’s who controls the state government,” Stone continued. “They use the election system to harass you when you’re in office, but this is about an election. We gotta fight it out on a state-to-state basis.”

At the same event, Stone was witnessed insisting that millions of voters were being purged from voter rolls in battleground states, including North Carolina, Wisconsin, and Nevada, as well as Republican strongholds like Florida.

It’s not even the first time this year that Windsor has caught Stone on a hot mic.

During a Catholics for Catholics event at Mar-a-Lago in March, the liberal filmmaker got Stone to spill the beans on the right’s preemptive effort to undermine the 2024 election results.

“We’re working on this,” Stone said at the time, noting that “overconfidence” in voter turnout was one of the biggest issues for Republicans. He then said that Trump’s side would be armed with “lawyers, judges, [and] technology” to challenge the official results if necessary.

“At least this time when they do it, you have a lawyer and a judge—his home phone number standing by—so you can stop it,” Stone said. “We made no preparations last time, none.… There are technical, legal steps that we have to take to try and have a more honest election. We’re not there yet, but there’s things that can be done.”

Another voting bloc advertised as pro–Donald Trump has turned out to be a bust.

The Republican presidential nominee’s rally in Scranton, Pennsylvania, on Wednesday featured a crowd of people holding signage that read, “Scranton Firefighters for Trump.” But by Friday, it became clear that the Scranton Fire Department firefighters’ union had absolutely nothing to do with the initiative, and the people waving the signs at Trump’s campaign event were not, in fact, firefighters.

The International Association of Fire Fighters union has not yet endorsed a candidate in the 2024 presidential election, nor has its Scranton chapter, Local 60, reported The Scranton Times-Tribune.

“Local 60 would like to address the rally held earlier today in Scranton for former President Trump and the Office of President of the United States,” the chapter wrote in a Facebook post Wednesday. “This is not a political post, rather a clarification post for anyone who sees or may see the event. Multiple CITIZENS were seen with ‘Scranton Firefighters for Trump’ signs at today’s rally. It is noted that no member of Local 60 were carrying those signs as the IAFF has chosen not to endorse a candidate this election.

“We honor and respect each and every person’s political opinions as well as our members own opinions on what they believe is the right choice for them,” the post continued. “We just want to clarify that Local 60 has not endorsed a candidate for the Office of President following the path of the IAFF. The signs seen were not a representation of SFD Local 60 nor an endorsement of any candidate.”

The Trump campaign also attempted to distance itself from the charade. In an interview with the Times-Tribune, campaign spokesperson Kush Desai claimed that the “Firefighters for Trump” signs “were not something that the campaign made or handed out.”

But that doesn’t mean that Trump didn’t try to reap the rewards of the signage’s confusing appearance there. Just shy of an hour into the rally, Trump called out to the supposed firefighters, claiming that he got their union’s endorsement.

“We got the firefighters endorsed us, you probably heard,” Trump said.

It turns out, there isn’t a single thing JD Vance isn’t willing to politicize.

During a town hall in Greensboro, North Carolina, on Thursday, Vance made a weirdly hostile joke after a woman in the audience fell down, letting out a shriek of terror.

Vance stood up and walked over to see what had happened, while security rushed to her. “We OK?” Vance asked. There was a moment of silence and awkward laughter from the crowd.

“Kamala Harris built this platform behind us, that’s what happened,” Vance joked, and the audience started to laugh and clap.

“We doing OK, ma’am, we good?” Vance asked again, before returning to his seat on stage.

While awkwardly joking about bleachers was just one weird moment of divisiveness, Vance also politicized the federal response to Hurricane Helene, claiming that Donald Trump would not abandon the people of western North Carolina.

When speaking about his favorite topic, illegal immigration, Vance tried to connect it back to what was happening in North Carolina by falsely claiming that programs for immigrants come at the expense of North Carolina residents.

“And if the message that our country sends after 25 million illegal aliens coming into this country is you get to stay here, you get to collect housing benefits, you get to collect welfare benefits, while folks in western North Carolina are struggling to survive, we will never have a border in this country again,” Vance said, according to The Independent.

Vance’s appearance in North Carolina comes as the Republican ticket pushes the lie that the federal government has been using money meant for FEMA to assist immigrants. Similar versions of this claim have been repeated by Trump, Elon Musk, and other Republican lawmakers. Both FEMA and a White House spokesperson have said the claim is false.

Vance also repeated his racist attacks against immigrant children. While he pretended to soften his hard-line message, he still managed to baselessly claim that immigrant children were somehow decreasing the quality of American education.

“It’s nothing against those kids,” Vance said. “It’s saying something against Kamala Harris who let those kids come in and deprive Americans of good education.”

Earlier this week, Vance falsely claimed that second-generation immigrant students, who by definition were born in the U.S., were creating a strain for schools.

At one point, moderator Danica Patrick referred to “globalists” who want Americans to own nothing. Vance agreed with Patrick, noting that “they want you to live in a pod, eat bugs, and own nothing.”

While Vance may have put on the sheen of civility during his vice presidential debate performance, his appearance in North Carolina shows that he is anything but civil, and his talking points rely on the most base of misinformation and fearmongering.

While promoting her new book, Melania, on Fox News Tuesday, Melania Trump mentioned two websites, MelaniaTrump.com, and USMemorabilia.com, that she said supported “fostering children” and “fostering community.”

But neither website contains much information about specific charity efforts, Juliet Jeske of Decoding Fox News posted on X Thursday evening. Her research into USMemorabilia found that the website doesn’t mention any charities, or whether any proceeds from the website go to any charities. Instead, the website was focused on selling United States merchandise and NFT collectibles.

Likewise, MelaniaTrump.com seemed focused on selling products and not on charitable efforts. Jeske found that there was a section on Trump’s “Be Best” anti-bullying program that she spearheaded as first lady, but it didn’t have any links to a charity. She went to a section on the website titled “Fostering the Future,” but again, there was no information about a charity there either, only a link to send emails about scholarships or corporate sponsorships.

So, was the former first lady taking a page out of her husband’s book, and talking a big game about charity while doing very little? For years, Donald Trump had the Donald J. Trump Foundation, only for it to be exposed as a money-laundering grift, with Trump having to shut it down. His son, Eric, was even involved in the particularly egregious transgression of taking away money meant to fight against cancer in children. And this isn’t the first time Melania was caught in a fake charity scandal of her own.

On the surface, Melania Trump doesn’t appear to have committed any fraud or crimes, but, considering her own past and her family’s, maybe she ought to be more careful speaking. After all, the last thing the Republican presidential nominee needs is another scandal or extensive criminal investigation.

Donald Trump’s claim about being Man of the Year just got debunked… again.

During a speech at the Detroit Economic Club Thursday, Trump took aim at The New York Times’s Peter Baker, whom he dubbed an “Obama disciple,” for asserting that the former president had never won any such award.

Trump claimed that Baker “said that uhhh, I would go around saying that ‘I was honored here, years ago as the Man of the Year’ or whatever.”

“And he made the statement that that never took place. That honor never took place. I was never honored here,” Trump said. “Which was quite insulting, actually.”

Last month, when asked about his plan to keep jobs in the U.S., Trump launched into a rant about being “honored as the Man of the Year” by “a group,” and complained that the news media had said it “never happened.” Baker, and others, have noted Trump’s insistence that he won the non-existent award as evidence of his cognitive decline.

“I didn’t remember the specifics of it, it was 18 or 20 years ago, but he said it never took place. Very much like Kamala she said she worked at McDonalds, and she didn’t,” Trump noted.

In an attempt to clear up uncertainty, Trump had his team search for proof of the award. “I asked my people, ‘you gotta find it,’” Trump said. Why not? It’s not like they have anything better to do, like work on fleshing out his “concepts of a plan” health care proposal.

“And guess what? They found it,” Trump said, holding up a printed-out copy of a 2023 article from The Oakland Press. The article, titled “Oakland County GOP to Honor Donald Trump,” was not an original article about the Republican nominee being named Man of the Year, but mentioned the fact that he had previously been awarded the honor by the local Republican party in 2013—not 18 or 20 years ago.

“And it says down here, ‘The county party gave Trump the Man of the Year Award at the dinner’…and he was honored. So here’s your article, right here,” Trump said.

But shortly after Trump’s speech concluded, an editor’s note appeared at the top of the Oakland Press article online.

“A story published in May 2023 online and print editions of the Oakland Press reported that former President Donald Trump was honored with a Man of the Year award at the 2013 county GOP Lincoln Day dinner,” the note read. “A reference in the 2023 story, headlined ‘Oakland County GOP to honor Donald Trump,’ about the 2013 award was incorrect.”

“Trump was the keynote speaker at the 2013 dinner in Novi, which drew a record crowd. He was not honored as Man of the Year. During the 2023 dinner, Trump was honored as the Man of the Decade which was reported in the 2023 story,” the note continued.

“We’re setting the record straight after the former president incorrectly cited the 2013 Man of the Year award during a recent speech to the Detroit Economic Club,” the note added.

So, it appears that Trump’s inane brag was based on a reporting error.

Two Georgia election workers falsely accused of rigging the 2020 election have settled a defamation lawsuit with the far-right conspiracy website The Gateway Pundit.

After the 2020 presidential election, Ruby Freeman and Shaye Moss were accused of committing election fraud and counting illegal ballots in a series of stories published to the website. The pair then sued the website for defamation, and The Guardian reported that the final settlement was filed on Thursday in circuit court in Missouri.

Terms of the settlement were not disclosed, but Freeman and Moss successfully sued Trump’s former lawyer, Rudy Giuliani, for libel last year and won a judgment of $150 million.

The Gateway Pundit, along with Giuliani, repeatedly attacked Freeman and Moss even after the lies about them were debunked and the pair were found to have just been doing their jobs. The election-rigging conspiracy quickly spread among the right wing, with the likes of Sean Hannity and even Trump repeating them.

Jim Hoft, who founded The Gateway Pundit, refused to back down about the false claims, and his brother Joe, a contributor to the website, repeated the lies again at the Republican National Convention in August.

The lies led to death threats and harassment against the mother and daughter, and the two were forced to go into hiding after right-wing fanatics showed up at Freeman’s home. Moss’s son even received threats on his phone, and Freeman testified last year that she had nowhere to live.

“I was terrorized,” Freeman said during the trial against Giuliani last year. “I’d rather stay in my car and be homeless rather than put that on someone else.”

In that trial, Giuliani’s lawyer accused The Gateway Pundit of providing the basis for the false claims against Freeman and Moss. The pair also settled a lawsuit against the right-wing One America News last year, which issued an on-air apology afterward.

Thanks to Giuliani’s failed attempt to file for bankruptcy, Freeman and Moss could soon gain control over his assets. Hopefully, their victories will dissuade more right-wing personalities and organizations from throwing around false claims about next month’s election, but alas, the right isn’t exactly known for its introspection.

Donald Trump drifted in and out of coherency during an awkward, weaving speech Thursday at the Detroit Economics Club, where he ranted about tariffs and railed against government mandates on electric vehicles.

During a speech that stretched an hour and 55 minutes, Trump employed his typical “weave,” a catchall phrase the Republican nominee uses to explain scattered rambling so repetitive that it does occasionally reiterate the original point.

But while explaining his fears that Kamala Harris’s policies would cause domestic manufacturing to leave the United States, Trump seemingly got carried away by the tide of his own weave and swept out into a sea of complete nonsense.

“And, it’s so simple, I mean, you know. This isn’t like Elon with his rocket ships that land within 12 inches on the moon where they wanted to land,” Trump said. “Or, he gets the … engines back—that was the first I realized, I said, ‘Who the hell did that?’ I saw engines about three, four years ago. These things were coming—cylinders, no wings, no nothing—and they’re coming down very slowly, landing on a raft in the middle of the ocean someplace, with a circle, boom!”

“Reminded me of the Biden circles that he used to have, right?” Trump said, seemingly referring to President Joe Biden’s campaign events that took precautions for Covid-19, in an awkward non sequitur.

“He’d have eight circles, and he couldn’t fill ’em up. But then I heard he beat us with the popular vote. He couldn’t fill up the eight circles, I always loved those circles, they were so beautiful, so beautiful to look at,” Trump continued.

Trump claimed that Biden “used to have the press stand in those circles, cause they couldn’t get the people. And then I heard we lost, no we’re never gonna let that happen again.”

“But—” he continued. “We’ve been abused by other countries, we’ve been abused by our own politicians, really, more than other countries.”

Trump seemed to turn back to the subject at hand after being carried away by his gushing over billionaire technocrat Elon Musk and attacks against someone who is not running for president. As for his actual opponent, Trump quickly devolved into personal attacks that didn’t sound quite right either.

“I think she’s dumber than hell,” Trump sneered.

Trump then appeared to lose his train of thought as he complained about Democrats opposing the SAVE Act, a longshot Republican bill that would require proof of citizenship to vote in a presidential election—something that is already mandated by the federal government.

“Democrats don’t want voter ID, you know why because they want to cheat,” Trump said. “But they don’t wanna—I say, ohhh—they don’t wanna—when I first, I thought, I thought I was seeing things. I thought I was … like … I didn’t hear that when I first started this who—they’d say, ‘The Democrats will not approve voter ID.’ And it’s only gotten worse!”

Despite using a teleprompter, Trump often went off-script, and repeatedly seemed to get caught up in what he was saying. As the Republican nominee careened between subjects, he seemed to recall that he had talking points, but couldn’t quite nail down what they actually were.

“The word grocery—it’s a sort of simple word. It sort of means everything you eat. The stomach is speaking, it always does,” Trump said. “And I have more complaints about bacon, things going up. Double, triple, quadruple.”

Trump repeatedly got caught up over his choice of words. At another point, Trump continued to seem exceedingly insecure about his own incendiary rhetoric, as he attempted to deliver his fire-and-brimstone fearmongering about large foreign companies.*

“We allowed them to come in and raid and rape our country,” Trump said. “That’s what they did. ‘Oh, he used the word rape!’ That’s right, I used the word rape. They raped our country.”

Scattered in the drivel was plenty of misinformation. Trump falsely claimed that Harris hoped to “ban” gas-powered vehicles, even though her campaign has been a little less than clear on whether she plans to support Biden’s electric vehicle mandate (which is also not a ban by any means).

Trump did say one thing that rang true, though: “Our biggest threat to democracy is stupid people.”

* This story originally misstated what Trump was describing.

Attorneys representing Donald Trump have threatened legal repercussions against the judge overseeing the former president’s January 6 election interference trial, arguing against the scheduled release of more documents pertaining to special counsel Jack Smith’s 165-page unsealed motion.

In a filing Thursday—just making the deadline to object, under seal, to the release of Smith’s redacted appendix—Trump’s team argued that there should be “no further disclosures” of Smith’s “cherry-picked and mischaracterized” evidence. If the court decides to release more information anyway, then Trump’s lawyers requested that Judge Tanya Chutkan delay doing so while the Republican presidential nominee weighs his litigation options related to her decision.

“If the Court decides to release additional information relating to the Office’s filing, in the Appendix or otherwise, President Trump respectfully requests that the Court stay that determination for a reasonable period of time so that President Trump can evaluate litigation options relating to the decision,” John Lauro and Todd Blanche wrote.

In the same filing, Trump asked Chutkan to limit the amount of evidence released ahead of the trial in consideration of the election schedule, a plea that has not swayed her decision-making in the past.

Shortly after the filing was made public, Chutkan issued a court order giving Trump’s team seven days to weigh in on the redactions, while also throwing his team’s threatening language back at them.

“For the same reasons set forth in its decision with respect to the Motion… the court determines that the Government’s proposed redactions to the Appendix are appropriate, and that Defendant’s blanket objections to further unsealing are without merit. As the court has stated previously, ‘Defendant’s concern with the political consequences of these proceedings’ is not a cognizable legal prejudice,” Chutkan wrote. “The court will grant Defendant’s request for a stay so that he can ‘evaluate litigation options’.”

It’s unclear what exactly the appendix would include, but it could offer insight into what former Vice President Mike Pence and other key witnesses shared with investigators, along with transcripts from the grand jury.

Reading between the lines of the filing, court reporters suggested that Trump’s attorneys were referring to a “writ of mandamus,” which would indicate their intention to have a higher court step in to undermine Chutkan’s authority in the case and prevent the appendix being made public.

Earlier this month, Smith’s team released an eye-opening report that included revelations about Trump’s behavior ahead of and on January 6, outlining what Smith described in the redacted document as Trump’s “private criminal conduct.”

“At its core, the defendant’s scheme was a private one,” prosecutors wrote in the massive motion. “He extensively used private actors and his campaign infrastructure to attempt to overturn the election results and operated in a private capacity as a candidate for office.”

The motion was broken into four separate sections: The first section outlined Smith’s case against Trump, while the second offered a roadmap to aid Chutkan in determining which actions undertaken by Trump were considered “official,” due to a July Supreme Court ruling that redefined executive protections by expanding the definition of presidential immunity.

The third section of Smith’s motion tied in how the principles will apply to Trump’s case, and the fourth section featured a conclusion requesting Chutkan rule that the actions outlined in the entirety of the document do not fall within the fresh definition of immunity.

The Supreme Court handed Trump one of the biggest wins of his career in July, when they ruled 6–3 to expand a president’s immunity and redefine what constitutes an “official act,” effectively deciding that Trump could not be held accountable for some of his behavior with regard to attempting to overturn the 2020 presidential election results.

In a dissenting opinion, Justice Sonia Sotomayor feared for the future of a country that legally permits the executive branch authority to commit crimes under the cloak of the office, arguing that the court’s decision made a “mockery” of the constitutional principle that “no man is above the law.” She warned that the court’s “own misguided wisdom” gave Trump “all the immunity he asked for and more.”

This story has been updated.