Putin Aide Issues Ominous Warning About Trump’s New “Obligations”

Donald Trump may have secured a second term in the White House, but his Russia problems are far from over—at least according to suspiciously phrased comments by some of Russian President Vladimir Putin’s closest allies.

Speaking with Russian state media on Monday, Russian presidential aide Nikolay Patrushev noted that while the U.S. election may be over, Trump is still beholden to “certain forces.”

“To achieve success in the election, Donald Trump relied on certain forces to which he has corresponding obligations,” Patrushev told the business daily Kommersant in response to a question about whether the outcome of the presidential election would bode well for Russia. “As a responsible person, he will be obliged to fulfill them.”

That statement was elevated by Tass, the Russian news agency.

In a curious follow-up about Trump’s susceptibility to being pressured and influenced, Patrushev made another eyebrow-raising comment: Rather than answer the question directly, the Putin aide made a point to bring up assassination attempts against the president-elect.

“We know of two cases of attempts on his life during the election campaign,” Patrushev told Kommersant. “In general, throughout the history of the United States, attempts have been made on the lives of presidents and candidates regularly—more than 20 times. Four U.S. presidents have died at the hands of assassins while in office. Therefore, it is extremely important for U.S. intelligence agencies to prevent a repetition of such cases.”

Trump’s history with Russia goes way back to the early days of his first campaign. In 2019, former FBI director and Trump-Russia special counsel Robert Mueller noted that Russia had blackmail material on Trump during the 2016 presidential election.

And that relationship appears to be ongoing. On Wednesday, veteran journalist Bob Woodward revealed that he had spoken about the unusual relationship between Trump and Putin several months ago with Trump’s former Director of National Intelligence Dan Coats.

“It’s so close, it seems like it might be blackmail,” Coats said, according to Woodward.

Woodward also recounted a separate conversation he had with CIA Director Bill Burns, who reportedly emphasized that “Putin manipulates” and is “professionally trained” to do so. According to Woodward, Burns believed that Putin has “got a plan” to repeat what he did during the forty-fifth presidential administration by “playing Trump.”

Senator Tom Cotton will be gaining a lot more power in the Senate thanks to Donald Trump’s Cabinet appointments.

On Monday night, The New York Times reported that Trump will appoint Senator Marco Rubio as secretary of state, allowing Cotton to move up and become chair of the Senate Intelligence Committee as Republicans take control of the Senate.

Cotton was initially reportedly in the running to be Trump’s vice president, but ultimately was passed over in favor of his Senate colleague JD Vance. If he does take over the Senate Intelligence Committee, he will bring his record of foreign policy hawkishness and support for violent solutions with him.

Before his political career began, Cotton called for American journalists to be jailed for reporting on classified information, and in the Senate, he made a name for himself by constantly calling on the United States to attack Iran.

In 2020, the Arkansas senator called for invoking the Insurrection Act and sending in federal troops to crush Black Lives Matter demonstrations. Later that year, he claimed that America’s Founding Fathers saw slavery as a “necessary evil upon which the union was built.” Recently, Cotton has made headlines for again calling for the military to be used against protesters, this time against opponents of Israel’s brutal massacres in Gaza and Lebanon, which he staunchly supports.

As the Intelligence Committee chair, we can expect more sound bites like his racist badgering of TikTok CEO Shou Zi Chew in January, where he repeatedly asked the Singaporean social media executive if he was a member of the Chinese Communist Party and ignored Chew’s protests about his actual place of birth.

Cotton’s support of military force against Americans probably endears him to Trump, who has also called for military force against his domestic enemies. The Arkansas senator will also be pushing to use the full force of America’s intelligence apparatus against Americans he disagrees with. Cotton and Trump will very likely be working together to stamp out any dissent, especially if Congress grants the presidency unprecedented new powers.

House Republicans want to be in Trump’s Cabinet so badly that they—and the president-elect—are willing to leave Speaker Mike Johnson vulnerable in the next Congress.

Trump on Monday announced that New York Representative Elise Stefanik will serve as his U.N. ambassador and Florida Representative Mike Waltz will serve as his national security adviser.

With even more appointments on the way and a slim GOP majority, some Republicans have warned the president-elect’s transition team that they cannot select any more Republican representatives for Trump’s Cabinet. At least 12 other Republican House members have already been floated for Cabinet positions. Five of them are from Florida alone.

“I have 10 colleagues who think they’re going to the Cabinet,” an anonymous House GOP member told CNN. “If we’ve got a four-seat minority, you can let one or two go. But you’re not going to let three or four go.”

“I think we have some really qualified people. But I wouldn’t want to drop us down to a one, two (seat) majority tactically,” said outgoing GOP Representative Kelly Armstrong. “We have a lot of talent.… But you have to give Mike [Johnson] some room to operate.”

Trump may also dip his fingers further into Senate Republicans’ majority, as he already did with his pick of Senator Marco Rubio for secretary of state.

Donald Trump has selected South Dakota Governor Kristi Noem as his next Secretary of Homeland Security, CNN reported Tuesday.

In the flurry of horrific appointments for a second Trump term, that may not seem to qualify as good news—and really it doesn’t—but this appointment isn’t as bad as it might’ve been.

Noem has her issues, to be sure. She was banned from more than 16 percent of her own state after she suggested Native American tribal leaders were catering to drug cartels. She killed her chance at being Trump’s vice presidential nominee after she bragged about executing her family’s dog. She was caught lying about meeting with foreign leaders. She also didn’t appear to know that Texas wasn’t one of the 13 original colonies, during an interview on Fox News.

Still, it could have been worse.

Trump’s former political strategist Steve Bannon floated another name for the gig last week: Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene, known for parroting extremist conspiracy theories, who recently suggested that Democrats had used weather manipulation to create Hurricane Helene.

One week since Election Day and roughly three months since he joined the campaign in earnest, and Elon Musk is already rubbing Donald Trump’s team the wrong way.

The world’s richest man has reportedly spent “nearly every single day” of the last week at Trump’s Mar-a-Lago estate in Florida, according to CNN. Musk has been spotted golfing with the president-elect, dining with him and his wife, Melania, and has even been in the room while Trump phones world leaders, hopping on a call with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy on Wednesday.

And while the Tesla CEO will likely not hold a Cabinet position in the forthcoming administration due to his companies, he’s playing no small role in staffing it—something that has particularly frustrated Trump’s transition team, according to tech journalist Kara Swisher. Swisher noted that Musk’s ongoing presence at the resort has some members of Trump’s entourage viewing him as the “guest that wouldn’t leave.”

“He definitely inserts himself all the time, that’s his style,” Swisher explained about the South African billionaire to CNN on Monday. “I’ve heard from Trump people, calling me saying, ‘Oh, wow. This is odd’. And it is.”

But, as Swisher notes, that will keep happening until Trump throws him out.

Musk and his policies will be the likely benefactor of his extended stay with the president-elect, whose opinion is famously swayed by whomever he last interacted with. But, according to Swisher, the relationship between the two self-imagined strongmen is destined to flame out.

“They’re both narcissists, and there can be only one narcissist as head of the country, and that’s Donald Trump, who just won the election,” Swisher said. “You know he owes things to Elon, but at some point, you know if he takes too much of the attention—think about Steve Bannon. You remember he was on the cover of that magazine and how quickly he got out, even though he was critical to Trump’s first campaign and he was right in the middle of the White House, and then he wasn’t.

“Trump goes through people like tissues, essentially,” Swisher continued. “And even if it’s Musk, they’re going to clash at some point.”

Arizonans have elected Representative Ruben Gallego as the next senator of the Grand Canyon State, according to the Associated Press. Gallego clinched 50 percent of the votes, besting far-right darling and local TV news anchor Kari Lake by 2.2 percent with 95 percent of the state reporting.

Bipartisan polls stretching back to July had placed Gallego squarely in the lead, sometimes with a double-digit jump on the former news anchor.

“Gracias, Arizona!” Gallego wrote on X late Monday night.

Gallego’s win will revert both of Arizona’s upper chamber seats back to the liberal party. After running as a Democrat in 2018, Senator Kyrsten Sinema—whom Gallego will replace—opted to become an independent, citing partisan extremism as her reasoning for the intra-office switch-up in an Arizona Republic op-ed. Earlier this year, Sinema announced she would not be seeking reelection, skirting a three-way race in the swing state.

Gallego’s victory is a bright spot for Democrats, who have lost control of the Senate to Republicans. The GOP holds 53 seats in the chamber.

Lake launched herself into the far-right stratosphere in 2022, when she made a national splash in Arizona’s gubernatorial race as a disciple of Donald Trump, carving her own candidacy out of mimicking the Republican presidential nominee’s bombastic and divisive rhetoric. Her narrow loss in that race to Democrat Katie Hobbs appeared to indicate that the MAGA tide had dried up in Arizona, but the state still voted for Trump this time around.

In the final months of the race, Gallego and Lake’s matchup boiled down to a handful of issues plaguing voters in the state, including immigration, the border, the economy, and abortion access, all of which took center stage during a feisty debate between the two candidates in October.

Over the course of 55 minutes, Gallego and Lake traded personal barbs while Lake positioned herself as a local radical.

“Kari Lake is an unreformed fanatic. Ruben Gallego is an adult,” wrote Phil Boas for the Arizona Republic in the wake of the debate, noting that Gallego was the only candidate in the race who had grown from their radical campaign positions in 2022.

After opening the debate by remarking that there are no Republicans or Democrats in war, Gallego—an Iraq War veteran—took aim at Lake’s track record, claiming that the local TV star had “failed the basic test of honesty.” In turn, Lake argued that Gallego, a former progressive, had “undergone an extreme makeover” in favor of his political ambitions.

Lake also attacked Gallego for his prior comments on immigration, in which he called Trump’s border wall “stupid” and “dumb.”

In April, women in Arizona were rattled by a state Supreme Court decision to revive a 160-year-old anti-abortion law that offered no abortion exemptions, even in cases of rape or incest. That radical policy was quickly nipped by the state legislature but not before Lake reversed course on her “100 percent pro-life” position, telling Arizona voters that she sympathized with women in need of abortions and that she didn’t believe the ruling was in line with the state’s current politics. That same week, Lake backed Arizona Republicans’ bill to replace the 1864 ban with a law banning abortion after 15 weeks. The proposed bill also did not make exceptions for rape or incest.

And, a week before Election Day, the Republican nominee copied one more Trumpian strategy: refusing to concede that she had lost her race in 2022. When pressed by CNN to answer a question that she has spent two years dodging, Lake claimed that she was unable to speak on the issue since she was still in litigation over the outcome, though she added that she intended to “make sure our elections are run properly” and that she wanted to “look forward” rather than backward.

President-elect Donald Trump has selected an almost cartoonishly evil man to head the Environmental Protection Agency.

Trump said he will nominate former Republican House member and failed New York gubernatorial candidate Lee Zeldin for the next administrator of the EPA. And Zeldin has gleefully accepted the role.

“Lee, with a very strong legal background, has been a true fighter for America First policies,” Trump said in a statement posted to Truth Social Monday. “He will ensure fair and swift deregulatory decisions that will be enacted in a way to unleash the power of American businesses, while at the same time maintaining the highest environmental standards.”

“It is an honor to join President Trump’s Cabinet,” Zeldin posted on X in reply. “We will restore US energy dominance, revitalize our auto industry to bring back American jobs, and make the US the global leader of AI. We will do so while protecting access to clean air and water.”

If confirmed by the Senate, Zeldin would be an absolute disaster for the environment. A staunch climate denier, Zeldin wants to make fracking and offshore drilling easier and supports new pipeline construction. He is also one of Trump’s biggest fans, refusing to admit he lost the 2020 election—and so he’s all but guaranteed to do Trump’s bidding.

Zeldin has made his pro-business vision for the EPA crystal clear. “So day one and the first 100 days, we have the opportunity to roll back regulations that are forcing businesses to be able to struggle,” Zeldin said on Fox News Monday, shortly after news of his pick broke. “They’re forced to cut costs internally, they are moving overseas altogether to be able to bolster liquidity in the American economy, where businesses strive to grow, expand here and have the ability to export what they produce, as opposed to exporting their jobs in the company—the companies themselves.”

Rest assured, this EPA head won’t be protecting anything.

January 6 protesters are learning the hard way that their fearless leader plays by a different set of rules than they do.

The Justice Department on Monday rejected requests from several January 6 defendants who tried to have their cases tossed out, on the grounds that special counsel Jack Smith paused his prosecution of President-elect Trump’s incendiary actions on January 6 after his election win.

“The defendant’s citation to Special Counsel Jack Smith’s motion to vacate a briefing schedule in the matter of United States v. Trump … is inapposite,” Assistant U.S. Attorney Isia Jasiewicz wrote in acknowledgment of a defendant’s extension request.

“That motion refers to the ‘unprecedented circumstance’ of a criminal defendant being ‘expected to be certified as President-elect on January 6, 2025, and inaugurated on January 20, 2025.’ The need to ‘determine the appropriate course going forward consistent with Department of Justice policy,’ is not similarly implicated in this case, where the defendant is a private citizen.”

January 6 defense attorneys have called foul on their cases, noting the inconsistencies in how the special counsel is handling January 6 for the president-elect compared to his followers. But just because you and Trump both committed crimes on the same day doesn’t mean you get to be prosecuted in the same way. At least for the remaining few months that Merrick Garland is still in charge of the Justice Department.

Israel’s top leadership has indicated that they see Donald Trump’s forthcoming administration as a free license to settle Palestine.

In a statement celebrating Trump’s win, Israeli Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich announced on Monday that “the time has come” to extend Israeli law over the occupied West Bank, reported The Washington Post.

Smotrich, himself a settler who also wields a defense ministry supervisory role overseeing the West Bank and settlements, added that he hoped the new administration would recognize the Israeli sovereignty push, and that the “only way to remove” the “threat” of a Palestinian state would be to force sovereignty “over the entire settlements in Judea and Samaria,” referring to the West Bank by its biblical name.

Earlier on Monday, the nation’s new foreign minister, Gideon Sa’ar, said that the government had not yet made a decision about annexing the West Bank, but explained that the issue had been discussed with Trump during his first term and that it would be “discussed again with our friends in Washington” if relevant, reported CNN.

Israel has occupied the West Bank since 1967, when it claimed the Palestinian territory from Jordan. Since then, it has increasingly encroached on the land, expanding Jewish settlements in the West Bank (which violate Article 49 of the Fourth Geneva Convention) despite decades of peace agreements with Palestine.

More than 43,000 people have been killed in Gaza during the war, with an additional 102,000 people injured in the conflict, according to the Gaza Health Ministry. A report by the United Nations Human Rights Office, published last week, found that close to 70 percent of those killed were women and children, with 5- to 9-year-old children comprising the majority of the dead. Roughly 80 percent of the victims were killed in residential buildings or similar housing.

With Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell on his way out, a MAGA power play amid the fight for Senate leadership is starting to rub some Republicans the wrong way.

After 17 years in the hot seat, McConnell is expected to exit his post at the top of Senate Republican leadership on Wednesday, ending his run as the longest-serving Senate party leader in U.S. history.

At the top of the billing to replace the 82-year-old are South Dakota Senator John Thune and Texas Senator John Cornyn, two establishment conservatives and longtime McConnell allies who have not always seen eye to eye with the president-elect.

Meanwhile, a gamut of Trump’s key allies, including Elon Musk, Tucker Carlson, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., Vivek Ramaswamy, and Charlie Kirk, are aggressively lobbying for Florida Senator Rick Scott to take the helm. (Trump, notably, has so far avoided endorsing any of the contenders.) But the overzealous pressure campaign—which is also being pushed along by some far-right social media influencers and their harassment tactics—is on the verge of combusting, according to Politico.

That’s because most of the Senate Republican conference won’t have to face reelection until 2028 or later. On top of that, the vote is by secret ballot, ensuring that no one—from their constituents to MAGA’s top brass—will know if they voted for or against Trump’s candidate.

“Senators do not take kindly to having an army of social media trolls attack them,” one unnamed aide told Politico on Sunday, noting that the effort was only “pissing off senators whose votes Rick needs” to win.

Still, all three candidates passed a Trumpian litmus test Sunday night, quickly bending the knee to the chief Republican’s unusual demand that they unequivocally agree to recess appointments and thwart the appointment of Democratic judges.

“Any Republican Senator seeking the coveted LEADERSHIP position in the United States Senate must agree to Recess Appointments (in the Senate!), without which we will not be able to get people confirmed in a timely manner,” Trump posted on X on Sunday. “Sometimes the votes can take two years, or more. This is what they did four years ago, and we cannot let it happen again. We need positions filled IMMEDIATELY!”