Trump Loses It After Hush-Money Judge Says He’s Not Immune

Donald Trump is incensed after the New York judge in his hush-money trial refused to toss the entire case, per his request.

Judge Juan Manuel Merchan on Monday ruled that Trump’s guilty conviction, based on 34 felony counts, will stand, regardless of what the Supreme Court has said about immunity. And that didn’t sit well with Trump, who spent the next day venting angrily on his personal posting platform, Truth Social.

“BREAKING: In a completely illegal, psychotic order, the deeply conflicted, corrupt, biased, and incompetent Acting Justice Juan Merchan has completely disrespected the United States Supreme Court, and its Historic Decision on Immunity,” Trump ranted.

“But even without Immunity, this illegitimate case is nothing but a Rigged Hoax. Merchan, who is a radical partisan, wrote an opinion that is knowingly unlawful, goes against our Constitution, and, if allowed to stand, would be the end of the Presidency as we know it. Merchan has so little respect for the Constitution that he is keeping in place an illegal gag order on me, your President and President-Elect, just so I cannot expose his and his family’s disqualifying and illegal conflicts….”

Merchan on Monday ruled that Trump’s hush-money conviction cannot be dismissed on the grounds of immunity because the actions he was found guilty of—falsifying business records regarding hush-money payments he made during his 2016 campaign to adult film actress Stormy Daniels, with whom he had an affair—were part of his personal, not presidential, life.

The Supreme Court’s immunity decision made it so that former presidents are protected from prosecution for official acts. But Trump’s actions took place well before he was even elected.

“I am the only Political Opponent in American History not allowed to defend myself - A despicable First Amendment Violation! … It is time to end the Lawfare once and for all, so we can come together as one Nation and, Make America Great Again,” Trump wrote.

Indiana Representative Victoria Spartz has announced she will be stepping away from the “circuses” of doing what she was elected to do—governing—so that she could join forces with a fake advisory group that wants to dismantle the government.

Spartz pledged her services Monday to the Department of Government Efficiency, led by technocrat Elon Musk and failed presidential candidate Vivek Ramaswamy.

“I will stay as a registered Republican but will not sit on committees or participate in the caucus until I see that Republican leadership in Congress is governing,” Spartz wrote in a post on X. “I do not need to be involved in circuses.”

Spartz wrote that she would rather spend her time in office not carrying out the functions of that office but helping DOGE and Representative Thomas Massie, who similarly committed himself to working with DOGE, “to save our Republic.”

Spartz currently serves on the U.S. House of Representatives Judiciary Committee, including two subcommittees: the Subcommittee on the Administrative State, Regulatory Reform, and Antitrust, as well as the Subcommittee on Immigration Integrity, Security, and Enforcement. She also holds positions on the Commission on Security and Cooperation in Europe and the Republican Policy Committee.

Apparently, DOGE’s mission to gut federal funding to essential services is far more important than any of those things. Musk and Ramaswamy have floated plans to slash the budgets of public broadcasting, Planned Parenthood, and “entitlement programs” such as Medicare and Medicaid—with the hopes of cutting government spending by $2 trillion by July 2026.

This isn’t the first time Spartz, who was elected in 2020, has tried to get out of doing her job.

In October 2023, Spartz criticized Congress’s approach to the national debt and threatened to resign. “If Congress does not pass a debt commission this year to move the needle on the crushing national debt and inflation, at least at the next debt ceiling increase at the end of 2024, I will not continue sacrificing my children for this circus with a complete absence of leadership, vision, and spine,” she warned. “I cannot save this Republic alone.”

Spartz’s latest move reportedly comes in response to the House Republican Steering Committee declining to give her a post on the Ways and Means Committee. Her decision could further imperil the caucus’s already razor-thin majority in the chamber.

House Democrats voted Tuesday to elect Representative Gerry Connelly as the party’s ranking member on the House Oversight Committee, beating a bid from Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and proving once again that they have learned absolutely nothing. 

Connolly beat Ocasio-Cortez by 131 to 84, Politico reporter Daniella Diaz posted on X. 

Punchbowl News reported last week that Connolly had a powerful ally pulling for him: former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, who had set her sights on quashing the New York progressive’s shot at leading the House of Representatives’ key investigative arm.

As of last week, Ocasio-Cortez had reportedly won the support of the majority of Democrats on the Oversight Committee, a group made up of younger, more progressive members of the party, but Connolly was triumphant in Monday’s House Democratic Steering Committee vote, which selected him 34 to 27.

Connolly was ultimately favored by the majority of the House’s Democratic Caucus. 

MAGA Republican Representative James Comer, the chair of the House Oversight Committee, said last week that he favored Ocasio-Cortez for the coveted spot.  

While Connolly, a 16-year House veteran, is a seasoned investigator, he has some serious red flags. He is part of the old guard of establishment Democrats who have struggled in recent elections, and earlier this year, the 74-year-old Virginia lawmaker announced that he had been diagnosed with esophagus cancer. 

By comparison, the 35-year-old Cortez has proven to be a lightning rod in the House—both good and bad—and winning a high-ranking position would have signaled a significant shift in party leadership following a bruising election. She is also popular among younger voters, a key demographic among whom Vice President Kamala Harris underperformed in November.

This story has been updated.

Republicans seem to be very serious about sending Liz Cheney to jail.

GOP Representative Barry Loudermilk, the chairman of the House Administration Subcommittee on Oversight, released his own findings on the House January 6 select committee. The report accused former Cheney, who sat on the committee, of witness tampering, alleging that she “colluded with ‘star witness’ Cassidy Hutchinson.” Hutchinson is the former Trump White House aide turned MAGA villain after she testified before the January 6 committee on the chaos surrounding the attack on the Capitol.

Loudermilk’s findings also called for Cheney to be criminally investigated and repeatedly claimed the January 6 committee withheld or destroyed evidence. He conveniently notes that “this interim report reveals that there was not just one single cause for what happened at the U.S. Capitol on January 6; but it was a series of intelligence, security, and leadership failures at several levels and numerous entities.”

This is yet another installment in the string of extrajudicial threats lobbed at Cheney. Most of them are from President-elect Donald Trump, who has long despised Cheney after she supported his first impeachment.

This all comes after Trump clarified his revenge list for the umpteenth time earlier this month on Meet the Press.

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

Rumors about potential preemptive pardons for Cheney and other members of the January 6 committee have circulated, but no one has been granted one at this juncture.

Critics of Pete Hegseth have slammed the defense secretary nominee as many things: a vitriolic television host, an alleged drunk, and an accused sexual abuser. But he’s also, apparently, a January 6 “truther.”

In the wake of the Capitol riot, Hegseth appeared on Newt’s World, a podcast hosted by former House Speaker Newt Gingrich, espousing baseless allegations that the mob that delayed the certification of the 2020 presidential election results was actually coordinated by leftists, CNN’s K-File reported Tuesday.

“There are reports, you know, in the New York Post and elsewhere. And just from, you know, common sense, that Antifa folks took advantage of this to try to get to the front and try to agitate and create openings for themselves,” Hegseth said on the show.

“They want chaos, ultimately,” Hegseth continued, referring to the decentralized, nonviolent antifascist group. “I could even spot it. You can see the helmets where there’s a Donald Trump bumper sticker on the back, quickly put on it so they could look like they wanted to stop the steal. But what they really wanted to do was further the narrative.”

The articles that Hegseth was citing at the time have since been debunked, according to CNN. The FBI found no evidence that antifa was connected to the events that took place on January 6, 2021, with Trump’s own appointee, FBI Director Christopher Wray, repeatedly rebutting the conspiracy.

Hegseth, a 44-year-old former infantry officer, has been under fire since Trump tapped him to lead the Pentagon. The heat has primarily stemmed from 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.

Hegseth has also come under fire for supporting a return of the military’s “don’t ask, don’t tell” anti-LGBTQ policy, and has attempted to walk back comments he made disparaging female U.S. soldiers.

Republicans at the forefront of the Senate confirmation process initially bristled at Hegseth’s nomination, with some taking particular note of his drinking problem, before eventually bending to Trump’s will. Earlier this month, 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.