Trump Names Top Targets in Chilling Revenge Threat

Trump wants anyone involved with the House January 6 investigation committee in jail ASAP.

In an interview aired Sunday on Meet the Press—Trump’s first since his election night win—the president-elect laid out the framework for his draconian vision, starting with his revenge list.

“I think those people committed a major crime, and [Liz] Cheney was behind it,” he said of the House select committee tasked with investigating January 6. “And so was Benny Thompson. Everybody on that committee.… For what they did, yeah, honestly, they should go to jail.”

The committee, run by the aforementioned Cheney and Thompson, as well as six other Democrats and another Republican, was shut down when Republicans won the House back in 2023.  

The committee accurately deduced that Trump did indeed incite acts of violence during his attempt to hold onto the office after his 2020 defeat, which he refuses to acknowledge to this day. He also accused the committee of deleting and destroying evidence regarding January 6, a claim with no evidence. 

Cheney responded to Trump’s threat in a statement to The Washington Post. “Here is the truth: Donald Trump attempted to overturn the 2020 presidential election and seize power. He mobilized an angry mob and sent them to the United States Capitol, where they attacked police officers, invaded the building, and halted the official counting of electoral votes,” she said. “Donald Trump’s suggestion that members of Congress who later investigated his illegal and unconstitutional actions should be jailed is a continuation of his assault on the rule of law and the foundations of our republic.”

Former Illinois Representative Adam Kinzinger, the other Republican on the committee, also fired back at the president-elect. “If Donald wants to pursue this vindictive fantasy, I say bring it on,” he stated on his Substack. “I’m not intimidated by a man whose actions on January 6th showed a cowardly disregard for democracy and the rule of law.”

In the Meet the Press interview, Trump went on to express distaste for special counsel Jack Smith, who was heading the investigation into January 6, saying that he would let attorney general nominee Pam Bondi “do what she wants to do” to Smith. 

Trump used the entire election cycle to fill out his “prosecute and imprison” list, and is so deep in his lies about January 6 that he’s convinced himself of his own victimhood. It’s us who are the problem, not him. When asked if he would finally concede the 2020 election now that the dust has settled and he’s won again, Trump replied, “No, why would I do that?” 

Various outlets have reported that President Biden has put preemptive pardons on the table for anyone who might be on one of Trump’s lists.

Kash Patel, Donald Trump’s pick to take over the FBI, has put together an enemies list composed of members of the so-called “deep state.” But he may have already ruined his own plans to prosecute any of those people.

Paul Rosenzweig, the former deputy assistant secretary for policy in the Department of Homeland Security under President George W. Bush, thinks that Patel has doomed his revenge plot by openly discussing it, he wrote in The Bulwark Friday.

Rosenzweig explains that if accused criminals can prove that their prosecution is vindictive, they have grounds to rebut the charges. Usually, that’s very hard for defendants to prove, but Patel’s many interviews and the long enemies list in his book Government Gangsters provide that proof.

“If Kash Patel becomes director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, as President Trump has suggested he should, he will be the poster child of vindictiveness—and his infamous public declarations of retribution may lead to the dismissal of any politically motivated prosecutions he initiates against his enemies list of ‘Deep State’ opponents,” Rosenzweig writes.

Even if Patel has actual credible evidence against any of the people on that list, he has preemptively hurt those efforts, according to Rosenzweig.

“A defendant can still succeed if he or she can present direct evidence showing that the prosecution was intended as retribution, notwithstanding the fact that actual crimes may have occurred,” the ex-Bush administration official writes.

Patel has already demonstrated a willingness to go after his own critics, threatening legal action against Olivia Troye, his former colleague from the first Trump administration, after she criticized him during an appearance on MSNBC. Democratic and Republican senators alike reportedly aren’t in favor of his nomination, preferring that current FBI Director Christopher Wray serve out the rest of his 10-year term. If Patel has actually messed up Trump’s chances to take revenge against enemies, the MAGA loyalist might soon lose the support of the president-elect too.

Elon Musk was behind a pro–Donald Trump Super PAC that falsely claimed the president-elect’s position on abortion aligned with the late Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s.

Politico reported Thursday that the world’s richest man was the only funder behind RBG PAC, giving the group $20.5 million to spend on ads claiming that Ginsburg was of “one mind” with Trump on the issue of abortion. The PAC’s website even displayed photos of Trump and the justice, saying that “great minds think alike.”

Ginsburg’s family vehemently opposed the ads. In October, her granddaughter Claudia Spera said in a statement that using the late justice’s name to “support Donald Trump’s re-election campaign, and specifically to suggest that she would approve of his position on abortion, is nothing short of appalling.”

Musk’s donation is a small fraction of the more than $250 million he spent on the 2024 presidential election for Trump’s candidacy but among the most secretive of the tech CEO’s political expenditures. He donated the $20.5 million on October 24, which was not disclosed until Thursday in a Federal Election Commission filing, conveniently a month after Election Day.

The RBG scheme isn’t Musk’s only deceptive political action during the campaign. The billionaire, through his larger America PAC, spent money on ads that touted Vice President Kamala Harris’s support for Israel, aimed at pro-Palestine Arab and Muslim voters in Michigan, while also funding ads attacking her as supporting anti-Israel policies, which were aimed at Jewish voters in Pennsylvania.

Musk brazenly gave away daily $1 million “lottery” prizes to voters in battleground states in the weeks leading up to the election and successfully avoided any legal consequences for it. But all of this is his known spending. He may have spent much more on right-wing dark money groups and in downballot races, which could remain hidden to the public. And thanks to America’s easily exploitable campaign finance laws, it’s all perfectly legal.

As Donald Trump drilled down in support of his defense secretary nominee, Pete Hegseth, his MAGA acolytes fell in line—but some are pushing a little too hard on the throttle to illustrate their deference to the president-elect’s choices.

During an interview Friday on Real America’s Voice’s Charlie Kirk Show, while blowing off the rape allegations plaguing Hegseth’s nomination process, Texas Representative Chip Roy practically admitted to his own sexual assault scandal.

“I think Pete Hegseth was an exceptional pick,” Roy said of the former Fox News anchor, who has been decried as “inordinately unqualified” for the top Pentagon position by former Army National Guard officials.

“He’s under fire from squishy senators who’ve been against everything we want to do,” Roy continued. “So I hope that Pete holds the line all the way through. And we should all defend him.

“Look, we’ve all had some indiscretions in our past and things like that,” Roy added, seemingly referring to Hegseth’s situation. “Every human has. But good grief, Pete Hegseth—you know, he has the support of so many people. And he represents somebody who would take on the defense establishment.”

Hegseth, a 44-year-old former infantry officer, has been under fire since Trump tapped him to lead the Pentagon, primarily over a shocking 2017 police report that revealed the Army veteran was accused of raping an attendee at a Republican women’s conference in Monterey, California. Hegseth has also admitted to several other scandals, including five affairs that he had during his first marriage. Some of Hegseth’s former Fox colleagues have accused him of being “handsy” and groping them. Nearly a dozen of his former co-workers have spoken to various media outlets to warn that his drinking habits are “concerning,” and some noted that they had smelled alcohol on Hegseth as recently as last month.

Republicans at the forefront of the Senate confirmation process have bristled at Hegseth’s nomination, with some taking particular note of the 44-year-old’s drinking problem. In an interview with CNN earlier this week, Republican Senator Kevin Cramer specified that Hegseth needed to stay away from the bottle and offer a promise of sobriety before taking the reins of the country’s military intelligence.

Robert F. Kennedy Jr., Donald Trump’s pick to run the Department of Health and Human Services, is already taking applications for people to work for him—and they include some bizarre questions. 

Puck News reported Friday that the anti-vaccine activist has a form on his “Make America Healthy Again” website where applicants can respond to a series of questions by selecting some odd pre-written responses.

Job hunters have to fill out a 90-minute questionnaire that recommends one be “well rested, have recently eaten, and will not be disturbed” before beginning. The questions themselves seem to concern personality traits, with applicants having to choose responses such as “Modesty doesn’t become me,” “I get upset when people don’t notice how I look when I go out in public,” and “I can usually talk my way out of anything.”

Kennedy has some unusual views, including believing that the Covid-19 pandemic was planned, AIDS isn’t caused by HIV,  and that WiFi causes cancer, so it’s not a big surprise that he would have an unusual application process. However, at this point, Kennedy has not even begun his Senate confirmation hearings, let alone been sworn into Trump’s Cabinet, so these applications don’t meet federal hiring standards and laws.

If Kennedy is confirmed, it will be interesting to see if his application process faces legal challenges, especially since many federal agencies are unionized. Trump has pledged to purge the civil service of his opponents and is putting Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy in charge of “government efficiency,” which effectively means massive cuts to government programs and the firing of civil servants in large numbers. 

Kennedy’s strange hiring standards may not initially hold up, but if Trump and his new friends get their way on overhauling the civil service, these kinds of unusual applications could become the norm in the federal bureaucracy, to the detriment of the government actually functioning well.