The Shocking Way This Tulsi Gabbard PAC Spent Its Money

Tulsi Gabbard’s PAC spent thousands in political funds to help get her personal manifesto on The New York Times bestseller list, Forbes reported Thursday.

Gabbard founded the leadership PAC Defend Freedom, Inc., in March. Although it initially reported having no cash on hand, the PAC would go on to spend $33,000 of its donors’ funds on a bunch of copies of Gabbard’s book.

The book, For Love of Country: Leave the Democrat Party Behind, debuted in fourth place on The New York Times hardcover nonfiction bestseller list during the week of May 4, but it was flagged for bulk purchases, as large orders might have affected its ranking. The book stayed on the list for one more week.

At least some of those bulk purchases came from Gabbard’s PAC: On July 11, Defend Freedom made the first of four disbursements for “printing” to BulkBooks, a book wholesaler based in Franklin, Tennessee, that specializes in large orders. The disbursements totaled $33,000.

“For a limited time, Defend Freedom PAC supporters who gave $100 or more received Tulsi Gabbard’s NYT bestselling book For Love of Country,” Gabbard spokesperson Erika Tsuji confirmed.

Authors normally receive royalties for book copies purchased wholesale, which indicates that Gabbard profited personally from the bulk order (rather than if her PAC had requested copies from the publisher directly). Her spokesperson didn’t comment on this when asked over email.

While this is not illegal, it is shady. “She is not a federal candidate or an officeholder, so she is allowed to personally profit when her PAC buys her book with donors’ funds,” campaign finance attorney Brett Kappel explained to Forbes.

Gabbard has shifted hard from an edgy Democrat to an unflinching, QAnon-adjacent Donald Trump loyalist. This book, and the subsequent bestseller scam, is straight from her new alt-right grifter playbook.

Rudolph Giuliani is facing more legal action from two Georgia election workers who successfully sued him for defamation in December last year.

Ruby Freeman and her daughter Shaye Moss asked a New York federal judge Thursday to impose “severe” sanctions and hold the former Donald Trump lawyer and ex–New York City mayor in civil contempt after Giuliani failed to turn over discovery documents related to the seizure of his property to settle the defamation ruling against him.

Giuliani ignored an October 28 court order to turn over the documents within 14 days and then disregarded a November 22 court order specifying a mandatory four-day window to produce the documents. After the November 26 deadline came and went with no action from Giuliani, Freeman and Moss’s attorneys told the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York that “the time has come for Court to hold Mr. Giuliani in contempt for violating both the October 28 and November 22 Orders, and enter a contempt sanction it finds appropriate.”

The MAGA gadfly has desperately tried to delay and disregard the legal proceedings against him for falsely accusing Freeman and Moss of manipulating ballots during the 2020 presidential election in Georgia, resulting in Trump supporters sending the pair death threats, engaging in harassment, and protesting at their homes.

Last month, Giuliani even cited Trump’s upcoming inauguration in a motion to delay his trial, only to be denied by the judge, sending him into a pathetic rant.

“It’s punishment for being the one who revealed first Joe Biden’s 30-year criminality,” Giuliani whined at the time. “He’s been trying to torture me, stop me, take everything away from me since then.” It wasn’t clear if he was complaining about Biden or the judge in the case, Lewis J. Liman.

It’s unclear if Trump will bail out his former lawyer with a pardon, as the president-elect has already stiffed Giuliani on unpaid legal fees. Giuliani has already had to give up some of his prized possessions to Freeman and Moss, including luxury watches, a diamond ring, and a 1980 Mercedes-Benz. He also blew off another legal deadline in Washington, D.C., on Wednesday. If Giuliani is held in contempt, the next penalty he faces could be prison.

Senator Tommy Tuberville is willing to do anything he can to make Donald Trump’s transition easier, even if it means completely forgoing one of the most important parts of his job.

Tuberville told reporters from CNN Wednesday that the Senate didn’t need to complete the vetting processes for Cabinet confirmations because Trump already did such a great job of that, even using the controversial Pete Hegseth as an example. Tuberville went so far as to suggest that Democrats who were merely doing their research were actually attacking nominees.

“Who are we to say that [the Senate is] a better vetter and picker of people than Donald Trump?” Tuberville asked CNN’s Manu Raju.

“Advise and consent, that’s your job,” Raju correctly replied, referring to the power vested in the Senate to approve treaties and appointments. Tuberville replied that that was more the Democrats’ job.

“Donald Trump did all the vetting they needed to do on Pete Hegseth,” Tuberville continued. I just can’t believe we even have people on our side that are saying, ‘Well I’ve got to look at this, gotta look at that.’ What they’re doing is throwing rocks at Donald Trump.”

Numerous Republican senators have expressed discomfort over Hegseth, a Christian nationalist accused of rape, assault, and misconduct who is up for defense secretary.

It’s unsurprising that the same senator who couldn’t name the three branches of government has no qualms about shirking the basic constitutional responsibility of his position. If these confirmations are a MAGA loyalty test, Republicans like Tuberville are passing with flying colors.

Republicans in Congress are taking further steps to ignore Palestinians in the occupied West Bank and start referring to the territory by Israel’s name “Judea and Samaria.”

Senator Tom Cotton proposed a Senate bill Thursday that would eliminate federal use of the term “West Bank,” removing it from all official U.S. government documents. His measure matches a bill that was filed in the House in February by Republican Representatives Claudia Tenney, Randy Weber, and Anthony D’Esposito.

Cotton claims that Judea and Samaria is the historically accurate name for the territory, and asserts Israel’s claims over what is internationally recognized as occupied territory.

“The Jewish people’s legal and historic rights to Judea and Samaria goes back thousands of years. The U.S. should stop using the politically charged term West Bank to refer to the biblical heartland of Israel,” Cotton said in a statement.

“Politically charged” is quite the exaggeration from Cotton. The International Court of Justice ruled in July that Israel’s occupation of the West Bank is illegal under international law, calling into question their terminology for the territory. Since Israel began its occupation of Palestine in 1967 following the Six-Day War, Israel has built 160 settlements that house close to 700,000 Jews in the West Bank and East Jerusalem.

The Republican-sponsored bills seem to confirm speculation that Israel plans to annex the West Bank with U.S. support. Israel has embarked on a military campaign in the territory, killing nearly 1,000 Palestinians in the West Bank since 2022. Israeli settlers have attacked Palestinian residents in addition to Israeli military raids, and those assaults have increased since Hamas’s attack on Israel on October 7, 2023.

Prior to Israel’s war on Gaza over the past year, which has killed more than 45,000 Palestinians, 2023 was considered the deadliest year ever for Palestinian children, according to human rights groups, and that was due to violence in the West Bank. Republican pro-Israel megadonor Miriam Adelson reportedly donated more than $100 million to Donald Trump’s presidential campaign so that the president-elect would recognize Israeli annexation of the West Bank.

The Adelson family has long donated to Republicans, and Cotton has been a pro-Israel hawk for many years. The Arkansas senator is poised to take over the Senate Foreign Relations Committee chairmanship with his colleague Marco Rubio’s nomination for secretary of state. With Trump making no secret of his support for Israel, coupled with this proposed bill by Cotton, U.S. policy for the next four years appears to be unconditional support for Israel’s efforts to squash Palestinian self-determination.

Donald Trump is willing to go to absurd, cruel lengths to accomplish his sweeping deportation goals—even if it means sending immigrants back to random countries.

Trump and his circle have already begun a list of countries to deport immigrants to if their home countries refuse to accept them, including Turks and Caicos, the Bahamas, Panama, and Grenada, among others, NBC reported Thursday.

This means that thousands of people could be permanently displaced if the president-elect is able to go through with his “largest deportation operation in American history,” leaving immigrants in unfamiliar countries with uncertain futures. Trump also wants Mexico to accept non-Mexican immigrants.

Groups such as the ACLU fought Trump on this issue in his first term, and they are prepared to do so again. “We sued over this type of policy during the first Trump administration because it was illegal and put asylum-seekers at grave risk,” ACLU lawyer Lee Gelernt told NBC.

Spokespeople for Turks and Caicos, Grenada, and Mexico did not respond to NBC, while a spokesperson for Panama told the network, “The Panamanian government does not respond to assumptions and rumors. We cannot not speculate in this regard.”

The Bahamas, however, has already “reviewed and firmly rejected the plan,” the prime minister’s office said in a statement. This raises a key question: What will Trump do if none of his chosen countries agree to cooperate?

Regardless, the Trump team is determined to carry out this chaotic policy. “President Trump was given a mandate by the American people to stop the invasion of illegal immigrants, secure the border, and deport dangerous criminals and terrorists that make our communities less safe,” said spokesperson Karoline Leavitt. “He will deliver.”