Trump’s Trash Defense Pick Hit With New Allegations—From Former In-Law

Defense secretary nominee Pete Hegseth’s former sister-in-law accused him of making his second wife fear for her safety, according to an affidavit shared with the Senate Armed Services Committee Tuesday.

The stunning new allegations once more raise questions about the FBI’s background check on Hegseth, which reportedly failed to speak to multiple witnesses.

Danielle Hegseth submitted the affidavit after the ranking member on the committee, Rhode Island Senator Jack Reed, issued a letter to her requesting her knowledge of the Fox News star’s “fitness to occupy this important position,” NBC reported.

“As I have said for months, the reports of Mr. Hegseth’s history of alleged sexual assault, alcohol abuse, and public misconduct necessitate an exhaustive background investigation,” Reed said in a statement, adding that the behavior would disqualify any service member from a position of leadership, let alone running the Pentagon. “I have been concerned that the background check process has been inadequate, and this sworn affidavit confirms that fact.”

Danielle’s affidavit described “volatile and threatening conduct” from Hegseth that made his wife at the time, Samantha Hegseth, fear for her safety, according to NBC. In a statement to the network, Samantha Hegseth dismissed the allegations, refusing to comment on her marriage to Donald Trump’s defense nominee, and saying that she did not believe the information shared in the affidavit was accurate.

“First and foremost, I have not and will not comment on my marriage to Pete Hegseth. I do not have representatives speaking on my behalf, nor have I ever asked anyone to share or speak about the details of my marriage on my behalf, whether it be a reporter, a committee member, a transition team member, etc.,” she told NBC in an email.

“There was no physical abuse in my marriage,” she continued. “This is the only further statement I will make to you, I have let you know that I am not speaking and will not speak on my marriage to Pete. Please respect this decision.”

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.

But Hegseth’s FBI background check ahead of his Senate hearing barely touched on the scandals, failing to interview Hegseth’s ex-wives or the woman who accused him.

This story has been updated.

Trump’s U.N. nominee, Elise Stefanik, bent over backward in her confirmation hearing Tuesday to avoid admitting that Elon Musk did indeed perform a Nazi salute. 

“What do you think of Elon Musk, perhaps the president’s most visible adviser, doing two ‘Heil Hitler” salutes last night at the president’s televised rally?” Connecticut Senator Chris Murphy asked Stefanik. 

“No, Elon Musk did not do those salutes,” Stefanik answered disdainfully. “I was not at the rally, but I can tell you I’ve been at many rallies with Elon Musk, who loves to cheer when president Trump says ‘We need to send our U.S. space program to Mars.’” 

“Elon Musk is a visionary,” Stefanik continued. “That is simply not the case. The American people are smart, they see through it, they support Elon Musk.”

But when Murphy pivoted to reading positive reactions to Musk’s salute from white supremacists and others on the right, Stefanik seemed to fumble. 

“Lemme share with you what a few Americans have said about it,” Murphy began. “Evan Kilgore, a right wing-political commentator, wrote on X, ‘Holy crap! Did Elon Musk just Heil Hitler at the Trump inauguration rally? This is incredible, we are so back.’ Andrew Torba, who’s the founder of the right-wing Christian nationalist social platform Gab said, ‘Incredible things are happening,’ as he amplified the visual. The Proud Boys chapter in Ohio posted the clip on a Telegram channel with the text ‘Heil Trump.’ The chapter of the white nationalist group White Lives Matter posted on Telegram ‘Thanks for hearing us Elon, the white flame will rise again.’ I could keep going. Over and over last night, white supremacist groups and neo-Nazi groups in this country rallied around that visual,” Murphy said. 

“Does it concern you that those elements of the neo-Nazi and white supremacist element in the United States believe that what they say last night was a Neo-Nazi Salute?”  

“What concerns me is these are the questions you believe are most important to ask,” Stefanik responded. 

Anyone with eyes to see and an awareness of world history can deduce that Musk’s gesture looked much closer to a Nazi salute than it did a nervous tic.

Donald Trump’s executive order taking aim at birthright citizenship is already facing several lawsuits. 

On Monday night,  Trump was hit with lawsuits in federal court in both New Hampshire and Massachusetts, with more than a dozen Democratic states filing another lawsuit the following day. More lawsuits against the order are expected to be filed in California and Illinois, Politico reports. 

The lawsuits come after Trump on his first day as president signed an executive order ending the right to birthright citizenship for some children born in the United States. The order directs the Social Security Administration and other federal agencies not to recognize the citizenship of anyone whose mother was not a legal U.S. resident and whose father wasn’t a U.S. citizen or lawful permanent resident; people whose mothers only had temporary legal residency in the U.S.; and people with fathers who were not citizens or legal permanent residents when they were born. 

The lawsuits allege that Trump’s order violates the Constitution’s Fourteenth Amendment, as well as other federal law going back over 80 years, and may leave some children stateless. 

“Neither the Constitution nor any federal statute confers any authority on the President to redefine American citizenship,” the New Hampshire lawsuit states. “By attempting to limit the right to birthright citizenship, the Order exceeds the President’s authority and runs afoul of the Constitution and federal statute.”

Trump’s executive order came on the same day that he took an oath to “preserve, protect and defend the Constitution of the United States.” Trump’s choice for attorney general, Pam Bondi, was evasive about protecting birthright citizenship during her first confirmation hearing last week, saying only that she would “study” the issue. But the language of the Fourteenth Amendment is explicit: 

All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside. No State shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States; nor shall any State deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws. 

Trump’s barrage of executive orders from his first day in office have been met with several lawsuits, including over his removal of certain employment protections and over the authority of the so-called Department of Government Efficiency. 

Those lawsuits have now entered the federal court system, where their fates will depend on which judge will preside over them. During Trump’s first term, he appointed 234 federal judges, many of whom are now responsible for approving conservative priorities and defending Trump from legal action. Now Trump will depend on these friendly judges to rule against the lawsuits filed against his executive orders. 

President Biden and his fellow Democrats did prioritize appointing liberal judges over the last four years, throwing a snag into conservative hopes for a rubber-stamp judiciary. Ultimately, though, the decision over birthright citizenship will likely reach the Supreme Court itself, where conservatives enjoy a 6–3 majority. Will they be willing to disregard the Fourteenth Amendment altogether?

This story has been updated.

Tulsi Gabbard’s team scrambled to minimize the appearance of her 2017 meeting with former Syrian President Bashar Al Assad, The Washington Post reported Tuesday.

Donald Trump’s pick for director of national intelligence has repeatedly come under fire for her defense of violent authoritarians, including Assad, the brutal dictator who fled Syria for Russia after opposition forces overtook Damascus in December.

Gabbard’s two meetings with Assad during her three-day trip to Syria in January 2017 were not originally on her itinerary delivered to the Ethics Committee. In fact, her schedule included no meetings with any Syrian politician or official.

Apparently, Gabbard’s team was also kept in the dark about her meeting, according to correspondence and files reviewed by the Post. Four staffers involved in discussions about the meeting told the Post that they were surprised to learn that Gabbard had met with the Syrian president at all. One of the staffers, who opposed the meeting, said that they had a difficult time getting Gabbard to provide answers about the details of her schedule.

Gabbard has claimed that while her meeting with Assad was not originally planned, she couldn’t pass up the opportunity once it arose.

One of Gabbard’s meetings with Assad on January 16, 2017, was scheduled to begin at 12:15 p.m. Her next appointment was with Assad’s wife at 3 p.m., according to a timeline reviewed by the Post. This differs from the report delivered to Congress, which detailed that her meeting with Assad had lasted only 90 minutes and her face time with Assad’s wife began at 2 p.m.

Once her staff learned about her meeting, they knew that it looked bad. Gabbard’s deputy chief of staff had warned that her meeting with the dictator seemed “rather long” and urged that “formalities” be skipped to “cut down on the time that it appears you two sat and talked.” Gabbard’s press secretary pitched grouping her meeting with others so it could “appear more like” one of many “protocol meetings.”

One of Gabbard’s former staffers recalled that the ex-representative’s first meeting with Assad was listed as “somewhere around three hours.”

“I remember thinking, ‘That’s insane,’” the staffer told the Post. “What do you talk about for three hours in a supposed unplanned meeting?”

Gabbard’s confirmation hearing is still forthcoming, but this report draws into sharp relief the efforts of nearly 100 former U.S. diplomats and intelligence and national security officials who urged Senate leadership to review the government’s files on Gabbard behind closed doors.

Officials said in December that her past actions “call into question her ability to deliver unbiased intelligence briefings to the President, Congress, and to the entire national security apparatus.”

Now that he’s in office, Donald Trump suddenly doesn’t seem so confident in his position on Israel’s war on Palestine.

“How confident are you, Mr. President, that you can keep the ceasefire in Gaza?” asked a reporter in the Oval Office while Trump signed a flurry of executive orders Monday night.

“I’m not confident,” Trump responded. “It’s not our war. It’s their war.”

The comments stood in stark contrast to a more defiant version the forty-seventh president pitched at his inaugural address, in which Trump claimed that America’s success would be measured “not only by the battles we win but also by the wars that we end.”

And just last week, Trump—who at the time hadn’t been in office for any portion of the war—jumped to take credit for the historic and fledgling ceasefire deal between Israel and Hamas.

“This EPIC ceasefire agreement could have only happened as a result of our Historic Victory in November, as it signaled to the entire World that my Administration would seek Peace and negotiate deals to ensure the safety of all Americans, and our Allies,” Trump wrote on Truth Social. “I am thrilled American and Israeli hostages will be returning home to be reunited with their families and loved ones.”

On Sunday, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu told the press that “both President Trump and President Biden gave full backing to Israel’s right to return to fighting, if Israel comes to the conclusion that negotiations on Phase B are futile.” Phase two of the ceasefire agreement would see the removal of Israeli troops from Gaza.

But Trump’s perspective on Gaza, which he freely shared on Monday, appeared tainted by his years as a real estate developer. Referring to a photo he had seen of the devastation in the region, Trump referred to Gaza as a “demolition site” before going on to suggest that the territory could be completely remade.

“It’s got to be rebuilt in a different way,” Trump said. “Gaza is interesting. It’s a phenomenal location. On the sea. The best weather. You know, everything is good. Some beautiful things could be done with it, but it’s very interesting. Some fantastic things could be done with Gaza.”

It’s not the first time that a member of the Trump family real estate empire has hinted that Palestine could be a developer’s paradise. In March, Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner praised Gaza’s waterfront beachfront property as “very valuable.”

“It’s a little bit of an unfortunate situation there, but from Israel’s perspective I would do my best to move the people out and then clean it up,” Kushner told his interviewer, Harvard’s Middle East Initiative faculty chair Tarek Masoud. “But I don’t think that Israel has stated that they don’t want the people to move back there afterwards.”

Republican lawmakers are already shifting goalposts to justify Trump pardoning or commuting the sentences of nearly 1,600 January 6 insurrectionists—many of whom assaulted police officers, an issue Republicans hold near and dear. 

When asked about the pardons, Senate Majority Leader John Thune on Tuesday pointed the finger at Joe Biden, stating that the former president opened the floodgates by pardoning his son Hunter, according to CNN’s Manu Raju.

“We’re not looking backwards, we’re looking forward,” Thune continued. “I think they were case-by-case.” 

“I assume you’re asking me about the Biden pardons of his family,” said Senator Chuck Grassley, when asked by Semafor’s Burgess Everett. “I’m just talking about the Biden pardons, because that is so selfish.”

“I don’t know whether there were pardons given to individuals who assaulted police officers,”  said Senator Susan Collins, “or whether there were pardons given to people who damaged property, who rummaged through desks, who broke windows in the Capitol. I disagree with those pardons if they were given.”

Pardons were indeed given to individuals who assaulted police officers. Senator Tommy Tuberville told Raju that he “didn’t see it,” referring to the pardons of people who attacked police officers. 

Trump pardoned multiple Proud Boys who stormed the Capitol on January 6, 2021, including one man who pepper-sprayed a Capitol Police officer and another who swung a baseball bat at one. 

Congress is trying desperately to undo its own TikTok ban.

Representatives Ro Khanna and Thomas Massie introduced legislation Monday to repeal the Protecting Americans from Foreign Adversary Controlled Applications Act, also known as the TikTok ban.

Preventing the TikTok ban has become a top priority for Donald Trump, even though he was the one who originally urged the app to shutter in the United States.

Trump signed an executive order Monday to delay the enforcement of the ban for 75 days, “to permit my Administration an opportunity to determine the appropriate course of action with respect to TikTok.”

When asked why he changed his mind about TikTok, Trump said that the app was “largely about kids, young kids.”

“If China is gonna get information about young kids—I think, I think, to be honest with you, we’ve got bigger problems with that,” Trump said.

Over the weekend, TikTok preemptively locked out users in the United States, only to return hours later with a message thanking Trump for “providing the necessary clarity and assurance to our service providers that they will face no penalties providing TikTok to over 170 million Americans and allowing over 7 million small businesses to thrive.”

Trump’s sudden swerve to protect the app, which Republicans had spent months railing against, has created stark divides within the party over whether the app actually threatens national security.

TikTok’s CEO Shou Zi Chew was seated on the dais at Trump’s inauguration Monday, signaling a budding alliance with the president. Massie, the Republican who co-sponsored the bill to repeal the ban, posted a photo he’d taken of Chew from the crowd on X. “Tick tock, the TikTok ban is about to end,” Massie wrote.

Former President Joe Biden signed the TikTok ban, which passed Congress with overwhelming bipartisan support, less than a year ago, in April 2024.

The much-discussed Department of Government Efficiency is finally coming to fruition—but it’s not the stringent, $2 trillion cost-cutting agency that Elon Musk had promised.

Instead, the executive order Donald Trump signed Monday night officially actualizing the executive branch division is a simple rebrand of something that already exists: the U.S. Digital Service, which has little to do with budget cuts.

“The United States Digital Service is hereby publicly renamed as the United States DOGE Service (USDS) and shall be established in the Executive Office of the President,” the executive order reads.

Part of the mandate includes the development of a subagency, named the U.S. DOGE Service Temporary Organization, which will be “dedicated to advancing the President’s 18-month DOGE agenda.” The temporary subagency will expire on July 4, 2026. The administrator overseeing DOGE will report to White House chief of staff Susie Wiles.

And in reality, it appears that more bureaucracy will be on the agenda for the memeified division: The executive order requires the hiring of four-person “DOGE teams” for each agency (very efficient, much cost-cutting). They will include an agency-related team lead, an engineer, a human resources specialist, and an attorney, per the order, all in an effort to further advance Trump’s vague and unclear DOGE agenda.

Another executive order further grants DOGE a level of responsibility for enacting a federal hiring plan.

“The Federal Hiring Plan shall provide specific best practices for the human resources function in each agency, which each agency head shall implement, with advice and recommendations as appropriate from DOGE,” the order, titled “Reforming the Federal Hiring Process and Restoring Merit to Government Service,” reads.

The first job gutted by DOGE was apparently one of its own potential co-chairs, biotech executive Vivek Ramaswamy’s, who was ousted from Trumpworld in recent weeks for seemingly grating on the “rank and file” of the cost-cutting department. Last week, Trump personally implored Ramaswamy to consider taking Ohio’s Senate seat, recently vacated by Vice President JD Vance, if it was offered to him by Governor Mike DeWine. (Of course, it wasn’t, and the billionaire is instead expected to announce a bid to replace the term-limited governor in 2026.)

Musk has promised to trim $2 trillion from the federal budget under the helm of the agency, a sum that constitutes more than Congress has in discretionary spending. Doing so would practically defund the entire executive branch, which doles out funding for the military, national security, and all federal agencies.

On the second day of his presidency, Donald Trump secured yet another victory from his ally Judge Aileen Cannon.

Cannon on Tuesday blocked the Justice Department from sharing special counsel Jack Smith’s final report on Trump’s classified documents case with select members of Congress. The move is the latest example of Cannon’s deferential treatment to the president, including dismissing the classified documents case six months ago.

While Cannon didn’t block the entire report, protecting a selected volume is certainly to Trump’s advantage. Appointed to the federal bench by Trump in 2020, Cannon presided over his classified documents case and helped the president every step of the way, drawing criticism even from Trump’s former lawyers.

Smith resigned from the Justice Department earlier this month and in November ended his cases on Trump’s 2020 election meddling and hoarding of classified documents. However, he wasn’t issued a preemptive presidential pardon by President Biden, unlike others, and may find himself targeted by Trump’s Justice Department.

The report is the last unresolved part of the federal criminal cases against Trump, which were rendered moot by his election victory in November. Thanks to the Supreme Court’s ruling on presidential immunity, Trump will likely never see any legal consequences from the crimes he allegedly committed, including his efforts to overturn the 2020 election. For the next four years, as Trump repeatedly stretches the law to his advantage, the public will ask what could have been done to hold him accountable after 2020.

This story has been updated.

Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene is threatening to bring news outlets that accurately report on Elon Musk’s horrific Sieg Heil before Congress.

PBS News shared an unedited clip on X Monday of the billionaire technocrat speaking at a post-inauguration event for Donald Trump, when he did “what appeared to be a fascist salute,” the outlet wrote.

Musk “[put] his hand on his chest and then [raised] it in a salute that appeared similar to the ‘Sieg Heil’ used by Nazis at their victory rallies,” PBS wrote.

And Musk didn’t just do it once; he did it twice in a row.

But PBS’s reporting includes the essential word “appeared,” which is typically used by journalists to indicate that while describing something cannot necessarily determine its nature, one can understand something’s nature through describing it.

One might write that it was a Sieg Heil because that’s clearly what it was. But many outlets are declining to do so, for a slate of reasons that range from an abundance of caution to blatant cowardice. Fox News, for example, suggested that Musk—who previously voiced his support for Germany’s far-right party and a British neo-Nazi—had simply made a “questionable salute.”

Greene, who has pushed her own antisemitic conspiracy theories from time to time, came to Musk’s rescue from the dastardly American public broadcaster.

“As the Chairwoman of the Oversight Subcommittee on DOGE, I look forward to PBS @NewsHour coming before my committee and explaining why lying and spreading propaganda to serve the Democrat party and attack Republicans is a good use of taxpayer funds. We will be in touch soon,” Greene wrote Monday night.

Greene would have PBS testify to the dispassionate description of Musk’s apparent triumphant fascist salute, as if Congress doesn’t have enough of its own problems right now.

Not only is it not surprising that Greene would defend Musk from allegations of Nazism, it’s also not surprising that a MAGA Republican would target PBS. Trump has previously attacked publicly funded media such as NPR and PBS, and ye olde authoritarian playbook for Trump’s incoming administration, Project 2025, called for the government to strip federal funding and licenses for noncommercial education stations.