Johnson Denies Scratching Backs to Flip GOP Holdouts

Mike Johnson is trying to convince everyone that he rewon the speakership on his good word alone. Johnson was awarded speaker of the House on Friday after the second vote, flipping Republican votes from Keith Self and Ralph Norman that he initially didn’t have. They flipped their votes very quickly, leading to suspicions that Johnson may have capitulated in some way to these congressmen’s demands regarding policy priorities.

But Johnson denies this. “My simple message to my colleagues is, make suggestions about process improvements, we’re open to that at all times. But I don’t make deals with anyone. There’s no quid pro quo here. I don’t do anything in exchange for a vote,” said Johnson, according to CNN’s Manu Raju.

The platform Johnson announced after winning the speakership harps on fiscal responsibility and tackling the “swamp’s” corruption, something that Republican holdouts like Representative Victoria Spartz had demanded.

“I understand why President Trump is endorsing Speaker Johnson as he did Speaker Ryan, which is definitely important,” Spartz posted on Thursday. “However, we still need to get assurances that Speaker Johnson won’t sell us out to the swamp.”

Johnson spoke of a “promise of fiscal responsibility” and holding people “accountable” in an X post after winning the speakership.

Nancy Mace got Trump on the phone to persuade holdout Republicans to support Mike Johnson’s speakership, according to The Washington Post. After Republicans Ralph Norman and Keith Self initially opposed Johnson, Representative Nancy Mace called Donald Trump directly and then passed the phone to her two colleagues. Norman and Self then spoke to Johnson before flipping their votes to him to give him the 218 votes needed for speaker.

Self told reporters he had a “lively” phone call with the president-elect. “We shored up the reconciliation team because we know that this will be a heavy lift to get the Trump agenda across the line in the reconciliation package.… That’s all we did,” said Self, according to CNN’s Manu Raju. Trump publicly congratulated Johnson on Truth Social following the vote.

What exactly convinced these congressmen to change their votes in 30 minutes remains to be seen. But even with this flip, the Republican infighting seems to be just getting started.

Rudy Giuliani could be fined or jailed Friday for his continued refusal to transfer $11 million in assets to a pair of Georgia poll workers that he repeatedly defamed while pushing Donald Trump’s 2020 election interference conspiracy. But that’s not what flooded Giuliani’s mind as he appeared in federal court in lower Manhattan.

Instead, Giuliani was more concerned with his depiction by veteran court sketch artist Jane Rosenberg, whom he tasked with making him look good this time around.

“The last time you made me look like my dog,” he told the artist, per the New York Daily News’s Molly Crane-Newman.

Giuliani is on trial to determine whether he must hand over his multimillion-dollar Florida condominium to Ruby Freeman and Shaye Moss, a mother-daughter duo of election workers whom he’s spent the last year worming his way out of paying nearly $150 million in damages.

Earlier this year, Giuliani claimed that the condo was his permanent residence, granting it homestead protection from debt-collection proceedings under state law. But his legal opposition has argued that Giuliani was less than forthcoming during the discovery process, suggesting that the disgraced politico wasn’t being honest about how he utilizes the property.

In November, the former gang-busting federal prosecutor tried on a new legal defense to keep his stuff, arguing in a Manhattan courthouse that he couldn’t possibly hand over his assets to Freeman and Moss because he simply didn’t know where they were. Some of those assets include his Manhattan penthouse, a famously immovable object, as well as his Mercedes convertible, which he was seen driving in Florida on Election Day. In response, Judge Lewis Liman said that the idea that neither Giuliani nor anyone else in the world has knowledge about the location of his assets was “farcical.”

And Giuliani’s own legal representation in the Freeman and Moss case ditched him that same month, declaring in a motion in federal court that they had reached a “fundamental disagreement” with the ex–New York mayor.

New York State Supreme Court Justice Juan Merchan has ordered Donald Trump to be sentenced for the 34 felony counts in his hush-money case on January 10, before his inauguration.

In an 18-page decision filed Friday, Merchan denied Trump’s request to vacate the verdict and dismiss the indictment. Merchan made clear, however, that he had no intention of sentencing Trump to jail time, fines, or probation.

“While this Court as a matter of law must not make any determination on sentencing prior to giving the parties and Defendant opportunity to be heard, it seems proper at this juncture to make known the Court’s inclination to not impose any sentence of incarceration,” the filing said.

“A sentence of unconditional discharge appears to be the most viable solution to ensure finality and allow Defendant to pursue his appellate options,” the filing continued.

Trump may appear in person or virtually, according to the filing, and must respond by January 5.

In November, Merchan granted Trump’s application for a stay of sentencing, but made no mention of throwing out his felony convictions, which seemed to signal that Trump’s sentencing would be canceled indefinitely if not until the end of his four-year term.

The following month, Merchan ruled that Trump’s guilty conviction would stand, regardless of what the Supreme Court has said about immunity. Trump absolutely lost it, calling Merchan a “radical partisan,” even though he’d previously railed against critics who claimed judicial decisions were political. Of course, Trump was only referring to judges who rule in his favor, such as Judge Aileen Cannon, who helped him sidestep charges of mishandling classified documents.

Trump was charged for falsifying business documents to cover up a $130,000 payment to adult film actress Stormy Daniels, to conceal their affair ahead of the 2016 election. Trump was found guilty by a jury of his peers in May.

Should the sentencing proceed as scheduled, Trump will officially enter the White House as a convicted felon.

This story has been updated.

House Speaker Mike Johnson ultimately retained his gavel Friday afternoon.

The Louisiana Republican was able to convince Representatives Ralph Norman and Keith Self to swap their protest votes in favor of a second Johnson term, securing the 218 votes required to keep him at the top of House leadership. Since the first vote was never officially gaveled in, Johnson technically won on the first round. One holdout remained, however: Representative Thomas Massie, who proclaimed the night before that he wouldn’t vote for the MAGA acolyte.

“You can pull all my fingernails out. You can shove bamboo up in them. You can start cutting off my fingers. I am not voting for Mike Johnson,” Massie said Thursday.

It looked like Johnson had lost at first, ending the initial round just shy of the goal, with 216 votes in the pocket. A handful of aimless Republican votes for other candidates (who weren’t running for the House’s most prized position) made it mathematically impossible for Johnson to win.

Johnson had faced near-impossible margins from the jump: With a full House floor and a unified Democratic caucus, the speaker could only afford to lose one Republican on his path to 218 votes.

Initially, Massie voted for Representative Tom Emmer, Norman voted for Representative Jim Jordan (who quietly weighed running last week before dropping the bid), and Self voted for Representative Byron Donalds. Johnson managed to convince Norman and Self to change their votes.

Representative Chip Roy, another speculated holdout, also caved to the Johnson vote.

“Everything we do needs to set the Congress up for success and to deliver the Trump agenda for the American people,” Roy wrote on X after the vote. “Speaker Johnson has not made that clear yet, so there are many members beyond the three who voted for someone else who have reservations.”

Roy’s ominous post and Johnson’s inability to unite his caucus from the get-go do not bode well for the incoming Congress’s ability to get things done. Republicans can only afford to lose a few votes on each issue. The previous Congress, in which Republicans had a similarly tight House majority, failed spectacularly at accomplishing almost anything, marking one of the most unproductive congressional sessions in the history of the country.

Matt Gaetz’s absence in the House of Representatives on Friday led to cheers from his Democratic peers. The 119th session, highlighted by the contentious speakership election, started with an announcement of new members from House Clerk Kevin McCumber. Once he got to Gaetz, he stopped.

“The clerk is in receipt from the Honorable Matt Gaetz of the state of Florida indicating he will not serve in the House in the 119th Congress,” McCumber told the floor. Clapping ensued, while Republicans looked on.

Gaetz was reelected for another two-year term in November. He then resigned his seat, however, when Donald Trump announced him as pick for attorney general, amid a House Ethics Committee investigation that found Gaetz had “engaged in sexual misconduct and/or illicit drug use, shared inappropriate images or videos on the House floor, misused state identification records, converted campaign funds to personal use, and/or accepted a bribe, improper gratuity, or impermissible gift, in violation of House Rules, laws, or other standards of conduct.” Republican senators balked, and the nomination was scrapped. There had been some speculation that Gaetz might show up to the speaker vote on Friday.

If the first vote for House Speaker is any indication, even though Representative Mike Johnson was reelected Friday to lead Congress, his trouble keeping the gavel may be far from over.

Johnson nearly failed to win the first vote, with Representatives Thomas Massie, Ralph Norman, and Keith Self voting for other candidates.

There were six additional Republican holdouts who declined to vote the first time around, including Representatives Andy Biggs, Michael Cloud, Andrew Clyde, Paul Gosar, and House Freedom Caucus Chair Andy Harris. Eventually, each of those six swung for the Louisiana Republican—but the numbers are starting to add up on another problem.

Norman and Self changed their votes after speaking with Johnson on the House floor.

A new rule Congress is set to vote on as soon as a speaker is elected would raise the threshold for a motion to vacate. If the rule change is implemented, it would require a lawmaker from the majority party to be joined by eight other co-signers from that party to force a vote on removing the speaker.

Nine lawmakers united against the speaker, and they could choose to drop the trap door again anytime they please—so even though Johnson was reelected, his potential firing squad may be beginning to materialize.

This story has been updated.

House Speaker Mike Johnson nearly lost the first floor vote Friday to retain the gavel.

When the vote was unofficially called, a handful of aimless Republican votes for other candidates (who weren’t running for the House’s most prized position) appeared to make it mathematically impossible for Johnson to win.

Johnson had faced near-impossible margins from the jump: With a full House floor and a unified Democratic caucus, the speaker could only afford to lose one Republican on his path to 218 votes. Johnson ended the round just shy of the goal, with 216 votes in the pocket.

But three votes against his bid by Representatives Thomas Massie, Ralph Norman, and Keith Self threw that into shambles. Massie voted for Representative Tom Emmer, Norman voted for Representative Jim Jordan (who quietly weighed running last week before dropping the bid), and Self voted for Representative Byron Donalds. Norman and Self ultimately changed their vote to Johnson, clinching the necessary 218.

Representative Chip Roy—a speculated holdout—also changed his vote at the last minute in favor of Johnson.

This story has been updated.

Those who worked tirelessly for President-elect Trump during campaign season may not get the coveted administration jobs they were promised, according to reporting from NOTUS. The lower-level roles that Trump has yet to fill were apparently supposed to go to the bureaucrats of Project 2025. But Trump’s strategic separation from the project put the future jobs of many of those bureaucrats in jeopardy.

Trump has apparently been unclear about what those jobs will even be, and incredibly slow at announcing them. “There’s growing frustration among the would-be’s,” an anonymous Republican told NOTUS. “There’s only three weeks left til inauguration and some people are trying to figure out what their future is going to look like with no clarity.”

The best way to actually get a job in the Trump administration is apparently to be in the right place at the right time. “You basically just blast around [a name] until you get a response, and then you make sure they apply on the inside, and then you follow up weeks later, and you keep on pushing,” a Trump loyalist told NOTUS. “I haven’t heard of a better way to guarantee anything.”

Donald Trump’s incoming “border czar,” Tom Homan, claimed that there was likely a “terrorist connection” between Wednesday’s Cybertruck explosion in Las Vegas and the deadly truck attack in New Orleans on New Year’s Eve—but then admitted he’s just going off a feeling.

Fox News’s Sandra Smith pressed Homan for information during an interview Thursday where he repeatedly referred to a “connection” between the two incidents. Smith told Homan that law enforcement had presented no evidence tying them together.

“You said you believed as this investigation carries out in Las Vegas … they will find a connection. Do you have any other information? Or have you been privy to any other information, other than what we just directly heard from the police there in Las Vegas?” Smith asked.

“No, I don’t. This is a gut feeling,” Homan explained. “I’ve done this for three and a half decades, I just think there’s too many similarities, too much—too much coincidence.

“I think something down the road, they’re gonna show, there’s some sort of connection. Whether some same network, or where they got the tools to pull these terrorist attacks off. I just feel like there’s gonna be something down the road. And I could be wrong, just a gut feeling I have,” Homan said.

So Homan’s got nothing, and his appearance was simply an opportunity to politicize the deaths of 14 people in New Orleans; to fearmonger ahead of Trump’s administration and its plan to enact draconian mass deportations.

Homan warned that “the threats aren’t over,” quickly switching the subject to the southern border, even though neither event seems to have been related to immigration at all. Homan continued to insist that the Cybertruck explosion was a “terrorist attack,” despite Las Vegas authorities suggesting it was a suicide.

Homan also ranted about the “insider threat” from members of the military and federal service, because both Matthew Livelsberger, the Cybertruck driver, and Shamsud-Din Bahar Jabba, the driver in New Orleans, served in the U.S. military.