Trump’s Hush-Money Sentencing Could Hit Him Where It Actually Hurts

Donald Trump will face virtually no legal consequences related to his hush-money sentencing, but he will have to endure some undesirable, tangentially connected ramifications as a result.

Trump received an unconditional discharge in New York Friday, stripping the possibility that he would face any fines, court-appointed supervision, or incarceration related to his criminal conviction. But while the president-elect may not be facing the music in the Empire State, Trump is reportedly at risk of losing his liquor license in New Jersey due to Friday’s proceedings.

New Jersey law prohibits the distribution of licenses to anyone convicted of a crime “involving moral turpitude.” The state’s Alcoholic Beverage Control issued a notice following Trump’s hearing that the agency “will proceed in determining whether President-elect Trump is qualified to continue to hold an interest in the licenses,” according to a statement obtained by Forbes.

Liquor licenses for two of Trump’s clubs in the Garden State expired in July while state officials weighed whether his criminal conviction would prevent him from ever renewing the beverage license again.

“The final judgment of conviction that raises the prospect of disqualifying Mr. Trump from an interest in a New Jersey liquor license due to the guilty verdict in New York will not be entered until after his sentencing,” a spokesman for the New Jersey attorney general’s office told The Hill at the time, adding that the burden of proof remains on the applicant to prove they meet the requirements for the license.

The Trump Organization pushed back on the New Jersey investigation, arguing that the conviction should be irrelevant to the clubs’ operation as Trump himself is not the holder of the liquor licenses.

Donald Trump’s incoming national security adviser, Mike Waltz, wants to get rid of all the nonpolitical appointees and career intelligence officials on the National Security Council, so that the president-elect will be surrounded by loyalists and face absolutely no accountability once he’s in the White House.

Waltz told Breitbart News Thursday that he hopes to oust career intelligence officials from the FBI, CIA, and NSA, among other agencies, from the NSC. These officials traditionally help the president make informed decisions about foreign and domestic affairs.

“Everybody is going to resign at 12:01 on January 20,” Waltz said in a phone interview with Breitbart. “We’re working through our process to get everybody their clearances and through the transition process now. Our folks know who we want out in the agencies, we’re putting those requests in, and in terms of the detailees they’re all going to go back.”

Why does Waltz want them out? Well, they aren’t all Trumpers, for one thing, so they’d be more likely to push back on the president-elect’s stupider impulses to, say, try to acquire Greenland or something. More crucially, these detailees have the tendency to report up the chain of command on the White House’s activities, a totally normal thing to do, unless you’re trying to get away with something you don’t want anyone to know about. Officials doing their jobs properly can become a huge problem when it comes time for them to testify about stuff later on.

That’s what happened with Lieutenant Colonel Alexander Vindman, who joined the National Security Council as an expert on Ukraine in 2018. The next year, he testified about an “improper” phone call Trump made to Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy, pressuring the foreign leader to investigate Trump’s Democratic rivals.

According to Breitbart, “Waltz told Breitbart News that he is taking very serious steps to ensure that there are no more Vindmans.”

It’s not clear how serious Waltz’s threat is, but he shared the article in a post on X Friday, captioning it “Day 1.”

Vindman responded to Waltz’s comments in an X post of his own Friday, saying that ensuring only political loyalists could serve on the NSC set a “dangerous precedent.”

“Such an approach will have a chilling effect on senior policy staff across the government. Talented professionals, wary of being dismissed for principled stances or offering objective advice, will either self-censor or forgo service altogether,” Vindman said. “This undermines the very purpose of the NSC: to provide the president with the best possible advice as well as the coordinating team to advance U.S. national security interests.

“The implications of this loyalty-above-competence model are dire. By purging the NSC of apolitical, experienced professionals, Trump and Waltz are hollowing out the institutional expertise required to navigate complex global challenges,” Vindman wrote. “This will create a policy apparatus incapable of discerning sound policies from reckless impulses—or worse, one that actively disregards legal and ethical obligations to implement Trump’s personal whims.”

House Republicans have begun devising plans to slash health care and environmental protections as wildfires engulf Los Angeles County. 

The GOP is aiming to cut $5.7 trillion from the budget over the next 10 years, and is considering cuts to important government services like welfare, climate protections, Medicaid, and the Affordable Care Act to get there. They then want to use that money to pay for Trump’s draconian immigration plans and tax breaks for the wealthiest Americans, according to Politico. 

These potential cuts are “not intended to serve as a proposal, but instead as a menu of potential spending reductions for members to consider,” one GOP source told Politico. But the specific policies on the list, such as Joe Biden’s beta version of the Green New Deal, electric vehicle tax credits, the  Affordable Care Act, and even food stamps, seem like cruelly ironic things to cut while the country experiences yet another horrifying climate disaster. 

“The Republican ‘menu’ cuts food and health care for low income people to put more money in the pockets of the rich,” said Aaron Fritschner, deputy chief of staff to Representative Don Beyer. “Even the item names are dystopian: $490B Medicare cut= ‘Strengthen Medicare For Seniors.’ Cutting food for low income people= ‘Ending Cradle-To-Grave Dependence.” 

The viability of these cuts remains to be seen, as Republicans have already experienced infighting over budget reconciliation. Speaker Mike Johnson has thus far agreed to $2.5 trillion in cuts. 

MAGA Mark Zuckerberg’s Meta announced Friday that it would be repealing all diversity, equity, and inclusion policies.

An employee memo from Meta’s vice president of human resources Janelle Gale, which was obtained by Axios, announced five major changes to Meta’s “hiring, development and procurement practices,” amid the shifting “legal and policy landscape surrounding diversity, equity and inclusion efforts in the United States”—i.e., the return of Donald Trump.

Gale announced that Meta would scatter its DEI team, pull the plug on its equity and inclusion programs, roll back efforts to work with diverse-owned suppliers, and scrap its representation goals and “diverse slate approach” to hiring, which ensured that a diverse pool of candidates was considered for every open position.

“We believe there are other ways to build an industry-leading workforce and leverage teams made up of world-class people from all types of backgrounds,” Gale wrote in the memo.

Gale’s memo tops off a week of disturbing developments at the company, signaling a total meltdown on the part of “Zuckerbucks,” who seems to be giving in to his anti-woke fantasies in preparation for Trump’s return to the White House later this month. He even did a three-hour interview with Joe Rogan—marking his MAGA transformation as complete.

Earlier this week, Zuckerberg announced that Meta will scrap its third-party fact-checking service in favor of community notes and allow for a larger range of opinions about issues such a immigration and gender. He also said that the company will raise the threshold for what posts need to be removed. The lack of digital guardrails now allows users to freely suggest that being gay is a mental illness, among other things that make it more disastrous to go online and dangerous to be offline.

Meta also announced that Ultimate Fighting Championship CEO Dana White, a close Trump ally, would be joining its board of directors. When Meta’s own employees complained about White’s hiring, the company purporting to be going all in on free speech censored them. A new era of internet speech is off to a great start, it seems!

But at the end of the day, Facebook is just a useless AI-generated content farm now, not a real website, Instagram is for ads, and Threads is for … no one? Maybe the people who are reading this article. The jury is still out on that one.

A federal judge on Friday held Rudy Giuliani in contempt for continuing to defame two Georgia election workers. 

In a federal courtroom in Washington, D.C. Judge Beryl Howell ripped into Giuliani for defaming Ruby Freeman and Shaye Moss despite signing a previous agreement to stop doing so. This is the second time Giuliani has been found in contempt this week, after another judge ruled he was failing to comply with discovery requirements in the defamation case.

Friday’s proceedings concerned how Giuliani, despite losing the defamation case against him, continued to make false statements against the two women who served as poll workers in the 2020 election. 

“Mr. Giuliani engaged in the worst kind of defamation,” Howell said during the verdict, attacking him for playing the victim in the case. “It is outrageous and shameful.”

Even before proceedings began, Giuliani was on the offensive, attacking Howell as “bloodthirsty” and trying to speak over her. He even retweeted an attack on her after the courtroom was called to order. 

During the hearing, Freeman and Moss’s attorney noted that the massive $148 million judgment against Giuliani hadn’t stopped him from repeating his lies about the 2020 poll workers, and asked the judge to impose a $20,000 fine against Giuliani for every violation of the ruling. In response, Giuliani’s lawyer, Eden Quainton, tried to relitigate the entire defamation ruling against him—and Howell wasn’t having it. 

“I’m going to move on. This really is a waste of time,” Howell added as Quainton continued to claim that Donald Trump’s former attorney really believed what he was saying. She then called out Quainton’s client, pointing out that Giuliani hasn’t appeared to learn his lesson. 

“So what you’re saying is that this defamation is never going to stop. He believed it in 2020 when he made the original statements. He believed it all throughout the trial. He believes it today. That’s chilling,” Howell said. 

Giuliani keeps embarrassing himself further and further following his efforts to try to help Trump overturn the 2020 election results. He initially tried to get out of Friday’s court appearance by claiming his life was in danger due to terrorism threats. Despite being ordered to pay Freeman and Wandrea Moss $148 million, he’s been less than forthcoming, leading to a new trial and public outbursts. 

Unlike other Trump cronies, Giuliani isn’t getting any support from the president-elect or a plum job in the White House, either. It looks like the man once called “America’s mayor” may be close to rock bottom.

This story has been updated.

The Department of Homeland Security announced Friday that it will extend the temporary protected status of hundreds of thousands of South American immigrants living in the United States.

It’s a final Hail Mary by the Biden administration for undocumented immigrants, with little more than a week left on the clock before President-elect Donald Trump takes the White House.

The department noted that roughly 600,000 Venezuelans and more than 200,000 Salvadorans living in the U.S. would be permitted to stay for another 18 months, while the program maintaining their status faces an uncertain future under Trump.

Homeland Security cited “environmental conditions” in El Salvador, such as heavy storms, “that prevent individuals from returning,” as well as a “severe humanitarian emergency” in Venezuela under the “Maduro regime.” Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro was sworn in on Friday for a third six-year term, despite a six-month-long election dispute and international condemnation.

The extension of temporary protected status stands in stark contrast to the proposed policies of Trump, who has made aggressive immigration reform a cornerstone of his second-term agenda. The forty-seventh president has effectively promised a full-throttled immigration crackdown, including attacking birthright citizenship and ordering high-profile ICE raids against undocumented immigrants, which he plans to initiate as soon as his first day in office.

On Wednesday, Trump’s longtime immigration adviser Stephen Miller previewed some of Trump’s forthcoming policies in a meeting with Senate Republicans, revealing the administration’s intention to leverage Title 42—a pandemic-era public health policy—to expel immigrants from the country before they can request asylum, continue construction on Trump’s border wall, and heavily wield the Immigration and Nationality Act in order to allow more state and local law enforcement to assist ICE.

Years of Trump’s anti-immigrant rhetoric should be taken as a sign of his beliefs. During his recent presidential campaign, the MAGA leader leaned on appalling language that recalled Adolf Hitler’s fascistic verbiage designed to dehumanize his enemies. Trump referred to his political rivals—the GOP-anointed “Communists, Marxists, Fascists, and Radical Left Thugs”—as “vermin” and claimed that immigrants are “destroying the blood of our country.”

Donald Trump is looking to reclaim one of his most useful tools of corruption: the Trump International Hotel in Washington, D.C.

The Wall Street Journal reported on Friday that the president-elect’s real estate company is in negotiations to take back the hotel, which is owned by the federal government but currently leased to the Hilton hotel chain. Eric Trump met with the bank in control of the hotel’s lease at Mar-a-Lago this week, according to sources who spoke with the Journal, although the discussions were inconclusive.

The Trump International Hotel was a hotbed for corruption and foreign conflicts of interest during Trump’s first term. Malaysian Prime Minister Najib Razak, for example, spent at least $259,724 at the hotel in 2017 while he was under investigation for money laundering. He used the presidential suite, which at the time was $10,000 per night.

Saudi officials spent at least $164,929 from late 2017 through 2018, and Trump approved a $1.3 billion weapons sale to the country shortly afterward. In all, at least six governments spent more than $750,000 at the hotel during Trump’s first administration.

“Anyone looking to curry favor with his administration could simply walk over to his namesake hotel a couple of blocks from the White House and flash cash,” executive director of Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington Noah Bookbinder said in 2021.

The hotel is now a Waldorf Astoria. The Trumps could reacquire it for at least $300 million.

Immediately after Donald Trump was finally sentenced in his hush-money case, the president-elect decided to try and make some money off it.

On Friday morning, after Judge Juan Merchan sentenced Trump to unconditional discharge, a sentence without imprisonment, fines, or probation, the president-elect fired off a fundraising email to supporters asking them to “stand with him.”

“They’re trying to sabotage the Presidential Transition process. They’re trying to END the presidency as we know it—just before I take office,” Trump wrote. “But together, we will put a stop to the LAWFARE and make our country GREAT once again.”

The email linked to a website with the message “After my RIGGED SENTENCING, do you still Stand with Trump? RESPOND TO TRUMP,” with suggested donations ranging from $10 to $3,300 listed below it.

It’s hard to see how a sentence that carries no real penalties would “end the presidency,” but Trump has repeatedly claimed that the case, which resulted in 34 felony convictions, was rigged against him. The president-elect has not hesitated to use news about him, even negative developments, to solicit money from his supporters, and is not above inciting rage for money.

After he was found guilty in the hush-money case in May, Trump also sent out a fundraising email right away. The president-elect used the July assassination attempt against him to sell grotesque themed merchandise, including gaudy sneakers. He invoked guillotines in a July fundraising email, and even used a Valentine’s Day message to his wife, Melania, to raise money last February.

Trump has never missed an opportunity to grift, and his second term will likely be no different. And now that he has escaped consequences in all of the criminal cases against him, there won’t be any limits on how low he will stoop to make a dollar.

Republicans aren’t interested in providing disaster aid to Californians suffering from the devastating wildfires, unless those Californians are ready to do exactly what they say. 

During an interview on Fox Business Friday, Representative Warren Davidson, a Republican from Ohio, said GOP lawmakers would be reluctant to help Californians who had been affected by the wildfires because they don’t agree with California’s policies. 

“People are losing their home insurance coverage for fire because of policies that the state government’s doing, and if they want the money, then there should be consequences where they have to change their policies,” said Davidson.

Fox Business host Maria Bartiromo noted that Warren’s Californian colleagues would continue to push for aid to “states prone to disasters” to have money allocated to dealing with those disasters.  

“Yeah, but California wants the money without changing the policies that are making the problem bad or worse, and I don’t see how Republicans could possibly support that,” Davidson said. “I mean, we support the people that are plagued by disaster, but we have to put pressure on the California government to change course here.”

It’s important to note that there are no “states prone to disasters” anymore, there are only states. Every corner of the United States, even those that are not historically affected by severe weather, will only continue to experience escalating natural disasters as climate change worsens. Earlier this year, Asheville, North Carolina, which was previously considered a potential climate safe haven, was devastated by catastrophic flooding after it was struck by Hurricane Helene.

It seems that Republicans such as Davidson, ready to play politics with disaster aid, are taking a page out of Donald Trump’s book. While he was president, Trump was reportedly hesitant to send aid to areas where people voted against him, such as wildfire-stricken California. Trump had to be shown a map of Trump voters in Orange County before he agreed to send help. 

Bartiromo asked Davidson whether there had been any Republican “pushback” against sending aid to California. 

“Yeah I think so, and I think, how do you do that?” Davidson replied. “Because you don’t want to send the message to families, ‘Oh, we’re not going to take care of you!’ They certainly didn’t have a problem saying that to the people in western North Carolina, uh, in the Biden administration.

“Instead, the Biden administration said, ‘Oh, we’re gonna take care of everything! And so, different response when it’s out there where the Hollywood elites live. So that’s disappointing from the Biden administration. Help is on the way from President Trump and a new administration,” he continued.

“But when it comes to congressional funding, the idea that we’re going to have an open checkbook, no matter how bad your policies are, is crazy,” Davidson added.

It’s unclear what Davidson is referring to here. The Biden administration approved more than $300 million for emergency assistance across North Carolina, which included $118 million in individual assistance to more than 87,600 households. The only people convinced that they weren’t providing aid were the GOP politicians hoping to use Hurricane Helene as political fodder for the forthcoming election. 

Also, for what it’s worth, the only one threatening not to take care of people suffering from disaster is Davidson. If Davidson doesn’t want to give the impression that that’s his “message,” one possible way to get around that is to say something else.

The Supreme Court signaled on Friday that it is considering upholding Congress’s ban on TikTok until the platform separates itself from its parent company, Chinese-owned ByteDance.

The court declined to pause the law while deliberating the case, implying that a decision could arrive before the ban is slated to take effect on January 19.

TikTok’s lawyer Noel Francisco explained the impact of the law in blunt terms before the court on Friday: “At least as I understand it, we go dark,” Francisco said, according to Forbes. “It’s essentially gonna stop operating, I think that’s the consequence of this law.”

TikTok has argued that the law banning its presence in the United States is a violation of its First Amendment rights, while the government has claimed the app’s erasure from the American market is a matter of national security.

Justices on both sides of the ideological spectrum appeared skeptical of TikTok’s arguments, pointing out that the law did not target free expression on the app itself but rather ByteDance’s foreign ownership and the residual implications of a powerful foreign algorithm in the U.S.

President-elect Donald Trump filed a brief with the court last month, urging the bench to pass on ruling on the ban until he takes office, when his lawyers argue he could “pursue a political resolution that could obviate the Court’s need to decide these constitutionally significant questions.”

But Trump has not always been on TikTok’s side. Before he left office in 2020, Trump attempted to eradicate TikTok via an executive order. He claimed that the video-sharing platform threatened “the national security, foreign policy, and economy of the United States.”

ByteDance announced shortly after President Joe Biden signed the ban—which gave TikTok an ultimatum to either sell its I.P. to an American owner or stop operating within the U.S.—that the company didn’t “have any plans to sell.” But that may have changed since the law passed at the start of the year. Last month, James Lewis, director of the Strategic Technologies Program at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, told NPR that China could be willing to trade off TikTok and its proprietary algorithm to American investors in exchange for a better deal from Trump on his massive tariff proposal.

Some of Trump’s allies could be waiting in the wings for that to happen. Major Republican donor Jeff Yass reportedly owns a 15 percent stake in TikTok. Trump’s former campaign manager Paul Manafort has business ties to the Chinese media industry, and former Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin revealed his own plans to acquire the social media company via an investor group just a day after the ban passed with overwhelming bipartisan support in the House.