Trump’s Classified Documents Lackeys Are Officially Free

Donald Trump’s Justice Department is moving to drop the charges against his two former Mar-a-Lago employees, Walt Nauta and Carlos De Oliveira, in the classified documents case.

The DOJ filed a motion Wednesday to dismiss an appeal to revive the charges against the pair, thus ending the last traces of the federal criminal cases against the president. In July, Trump appointee Judge Aileen Cannon dismissed the 42 felony charges against Trump, Nauta, and De Oliveira, on the grounds that special counsel Jack Smith had been illegitimately appointed. The Justice Department appealed the decision, asking that the charges against Nauta and De Oliveira remain.

The pair were accused of helping Trump move boxes of classified documents at his Florida estate so that federal investigators could not find them and of trying to delete security footage that showed them moving boxes. Trump also asked Nauta to lie on his behalf to the FBI and promised him a pardon if he faced any charges.

Earlier this month, Nauta and De Oliveira had also sought to block special counsel Jack Smith’s final report on the classified documents case from being released, but their appeal was denied. Cannon, who showed clear bias toward Trump during his classified documents case, did manage to block the release of a selected volume of Smith’s report to select members of Congress last week, leaving parts of the case still unknown to the public.

In November, following Trump’s election victory, Smith moved to have the federal charges against the president for trying to overturn the 2020 election dismissed without prejudice, meaning that they could be refiled after his term of office ends in 2029. For Nauta and De Oliveira, Wednesday’s action might be the end of the classified documents case. But for Trump, will it resurface four years from now?

The federal government’s most important hiring office is now overrun with Elon Musk’s underqualified stooges.

Wired reported on Tuesday that the highest positions at the Office of Personnel Management are now held by people close to Musk. And some of them have a woeful lack of experience.

Two people in OPM leadership are so young that Wired refused to name them. One is a 21-year-old who worked at Peter Thiel’s Palantir firm, and the other is a 2024 high school graduate whose résumé consists of a summer job at Musk’s Neuralink company, as well as previous experience as a camp counselor and bike mechanic. They were set to start college last fall.

There’s also OPM’s new chief of staff, Amanda Scales, who has worked for Musk’s AI-company xAI, the startup founded by Musk himself. Before that, she worked at other tech companies like venture firm Human Capital, defense technology company Anduril, and Uber. Her hire is seen as a key move in the further politicization of the federal hiring process.

Musk’s henchmen taking over OPM may explain much of the concerning news coming out of the agency in the last week. That includes a mass test email sent to every single federal employee, reports that OPM is funneling employee info to Musk himself, and most recently, an ultimatum to federal employees who don’t want to return to the office. That so-called “buyout” sounded eerily similar to an email Musk sent to Twitter employees in 2023.

The takeover comes as the world’s richest man begins his work with DOGE, hoping to continue Trump’s efforts in drastically culling the federal government.

Robert F. Kennedy Jr. was thoroughly and categorically torched by Democrats during his Senate Finance hearing on Wednesday.

Colorado Senator Michael Bennet held Kennedy to the flame on his own language around disease and vaccines, which included claiming that Covid-19 was a “genetically engineered bioweapon that targets Black and White people but spared Ashkenazi Jews and Chinese people” and that Lyme disease was constructed by the military.

“I didn’t say it was deliberately targeted, I just quoted an NIH-funded and NIH-published study–” Kennedy rattled out about Covid.

“Did you say that Lyme disease is highly likely a militarily engineered bioweapon?” Bennet said, changing the topic. “Did you say Lyme disease is a highly likely militarily engineered bioweapon?”

“I probably did say that,” Kennedy responded.

“OK, I want all of our colleagues to hear it, Mr. Kennedy. I want them to hear it. You said yes,” Bennet pressed, raising his voice. “Did you say that exposure to pesticides causes children to become transgender?”

Kennedy denied having said that, to which Bennet replied, “I have the record.”

“Did you write in your book that ‘it’s undeniable that African AIDS is an entirely different disease from Western AIDS’?” Bennet continued.

“I don’t know,” Kennedy shrugged back, to which Bennet once again informed the committee chairman that he would hand over records of Kennedy’s past remarks on the topic.

“This matters,” Bennet said, again raising his voice. “Because unlike other jobs we’re confirming around this place, this is a job where it is life and death.

“It’s too important for the games that you’re playing, Mr. Kennedy.”

“What is so disturbing to me is that out of 330 million Americans, we’re being asked to put somebody in this job who has spent 50 years of his life not honoring the tradition that he talked about at the beginning of this conversation, but peddling in half-truths, peddling in false statements, peddling in theories that, you know, create doubt about whether or not things that we know are safe are unsafe,” Bennet said.

Kennedy is slated for two confirmation hearings this week in his quest to become Donald Trump’s secretary of health and human services. He is appearing before the Senate Finance Committee on Wednesday morning and will face further questioning from the Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pension, or HELP, Committee on Thursday.

Kennedy’s history in public health is questionable at best. His stances, which include unscientific beliefs that AIDS is not caused by HIV and that a large number of vaccines should be stripped from the market, could have major impacts on the agency designed to protect America’s health, especially as bird flu outbreaks dot the country.

In December, Trump announced that Kennedy would spend his time at the top of HHS researching an already thoroughly debunked conspiracy that ties vaccine usage to autism rates.

And Kennedy’s vaccine conspiracies aren’t just easily refutable, anti-vax hogwash—they’ve caused legitimate, real-world harm. Preceding a deadly measles outbreak on the Pacific islands of Samoa in 2019, Kennedy’s anti-vax nonprofit Children’s Health Defense spread rampant misinformation about the efficacy of vaccines, sending the nation’s vaccination rate plummeting from the 60–70 percent range to just 31 percent, according to Mother Jones. That year, the country reported 5,707 cases of measles—an illness that was declared eliminated by the U.S. in 2000 thanks to advancements in modern medicine (read: vaccines)—as well as 83 measles-related deaths, the majority of which were children under the age of five.

Further still, the 71-year-old’s private life has given pause to a number of lawmakers responsible for confirming him. Kennedy has publicly admitted to dumping a dead bear cub in Central Park, was accused of (and sort of apologized for) groping his children’s babysitter in the late 1990s, and last week was described by his cousin Caroline Kennedy as a “predator” who is “addicted to attention and power.”

To the surprise of absolutely no one, it turns out that Trump press secretary Karoline Leavitt’s outlandish claim that the U.S. government was about to spend $50 million on condoms for Gazans was a lie.

During a White House press briefing Tuesday, Leavitt appeared defensive and struggled to answer questions about Donald Trump’s freeze on federal grants and loans that caused widespread chaos. The freeze immediately affected essential government services such as Medicaid and Head Start. (A brief administrative stay has paused this until next Monday.)

Leavitt ended up offering an excuse for the sweeping order that didn’t make much sense at all.

“DOGE and OMB also found that there was about to be 50 million taxpayer dollars that went out the door to fund condoms in Gaza,” Leavitt claimed. “That is a preposterous waste of taxpayer money. So that’s what this pause is focused on: being good stewards of tax dollars.”

If that doesn’t sound true, it’s probably because it’s not, according to The Guardian.

A September report from USAID for the fiscal year 2023 (the most recent year for which there is available data) found that USAID spent $60.8 million on contraceptives and condoms, with only $7 million of that going toward condoms specifically.

None of those condoms went to Gaza, and in fact, USAID didn’t distribute condoms anywhere in the Middle East. Just one small shipment of oral and injectable contraceptives was sent to Jordan.

So it would be unlikely—no, impossible, for Leavitt’s outlandish claim to be true.

It seems that as one of Trump’s lead propagandists, Leavitt has already taken up one of his favorite tactics: making stuff up on the spot when backed into the corner. The problem is that people actually believe it. Especially when people such as Elon Musk and Jesse Watters boost the obvious lies.

Musk posted a video of Leavitt on X Tuesday, saying her baseless claim was the “tip of iceberg.” On Fox News that night, Watters claimed that Hamas was making “condom bombs.”

“Look it up! It’s a dual-use technology!” Watters cried.

After Donald Trump froze nearly all U.S. foreign aid last week, international projects on health, education, food, and all other humanitarian areas were placed in jeopardy. 

On Tuesday night, newly confirmed Secretary of State Marco Rubio tried to undo some of the confusion by issuing a memo waiving the aid freeze for “livesaving humanitarian assistance.” The memo defines this assistance as “core lifesaving medicine, medical services, food, shelter, and subsistence assistance, as well as supplies and reasonable administrative costs as necessary to deliver such assistance,” according to The Washington Post.

Programs still subject to the aid freeze include anything involving diversity programs, gender, abortion, family planning,  and “transgender surgeries, or other nonlife saving assistance,” the memo states. 

The memo says that “implementers of existing lifesaving humanitarian assistance programs should continue or resume work if they have stopped” but added that “this resumption is temporary in nature, and except by separate waiver or as required to carry out this waiver, no new contracts shall be entered into.”

But this language hasn’t cleared up any of the confusion, as organizations and agencies are now scrambling to figure out what exactly is considered “lifesaving” under the new memo. For example, one of the programs halted last week is the President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief, which funds clinics, hospitals, and other organizations around the world combating HIV and AIDS. It’s unclear if that work can now resume.

Plus, USAID, contractors, and nongovernmental aid organizations experiencing “stop-work” orders and a sudden halt in funds have already fired many employees. The memo also said that any assistance to migrants and refugees could only continue for livesaving activities “and for repatriation of third country nationals to their country of origin or safe-third-country.”

Neither Friday’s order nor Tuesday’s memo offered any way to request or seek a waiver from the aid freeze, except to contact the “Director of Foreign Assistance at the Department of State.” This position has yet to be filled by Rubio or the Trump administration. 

The decisions coming from the Trump administration since last week’s inauguration have resulted in chaos throughout the federal government and cruelty against the people who depend on it, whether they are federal workers, international aid recipients, or even struggling Americans on Medicaid. The administration is now facing a number of lawsuits and a public outcry. But will that change anything?