GOP Senator Bashes Pete Hegseth for Dumpster Fire NATO Speeches

Donald Trump may have given his defense secretary a pass on spelling out America’s negotiating position on Ukraine, but that doesn’t mean the rest of the Republican conference has been equally forgiving.

Senate Armed Services Chair Senator Roger Wicker torched Pete Hegseth’s speeches at the NATO conference in Munich this week, calling it a “rookie mistake” to tell the summit—and the world—that it would be “unrealistic” for Ukraine to return to its prewar borders.

Wicker said that the ex–Fox News co-host’s speech was akin to a Tucker Carlson monologue, whom he called a “fool.”

“Hegseth is going to be a great defense secretary, although he wasn’t my choice for the job,” Wicker, who nonetheless voted to confirm Hegseth, told Politico at the Munich Security Conference Thursday.

He slammed Hegseth’s decision to cede Ukraine’s border: “But he made a rookie mistake in Brussels and he’s walked back some of what he said but not that line.”

The staunch Ukraine supporter also said that he was “puzzled” and “disturbed” by Hegseth’s comments.

“Everybody knows … and people in the administration know you don’t say before your first meeting what you will agree to and what you won’t agree to,” Wicker said.

The editor of the conservative National Review also trashed Hegseth’s “disappointing” performance. Even though Hegseth (sort of) walked back his Ukraine claims, Mark Antonio Wright noted in an editorial that that “doesn’t excuse Hegseth and his staff for the amateur-hour bungling of yesterday’s speech and policy declaration.”

NATO allies were left reeling Wednesday after Hegseth pitched that America would effectively end its role as the steward of European security. He revealed that the administration’s peace talks with Russia had taken several chips “off the table,” including Ukraine’s possible NATO membership (something the military alliance had promised in 2008), the possibility of a U.S. presence in Ukraine to enforce postwar security guarantees, and the end of NATO missions to Ukraine.

The defense secretary’s “unrealistic” comment also drew the ire of defense experts, who saw the admission as another lost chip that effectively forces Ukraine to cede territory to Russia.

It was a stunning show of inexperience for the former Fox News host, who apparently needed to walk back some of those brazen settlement terms while speaking before NATO on Thursday. Hegseth insisted that, despite his having already shown America’s hand, “everything is on the table” when it comes to arranging peace between Russian President Vladimir Putin and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy.

“What he decides to allow or not allow is at the purview of the leader of the free world, of President Trump,” Hegseth said Thursday. “I’m not going to stand at this podium and declare what President Trump will do or won’t do.”

During an Oval Office press conference Thursday unveiling his new “reciprocal tariff” plan, Trump denied telling Hegseth to walk back his comments, describing them as “pretty accurate.”

Donald Trump and his wife, Melania, have been making deals and raking in money ever since Trump won the election, including a cool $40 million to license Melania’s documentary about returning to the White House as first lady.

That’s just one of Trump’s numerous moneymaking schemes since his return to office, which have netted him and his family nearly $80 million so far, according to a Wall Street Journal analysis. That includes donations to his future presidential library and a hefty $10 million settlement with Elon Musk’s X. That sum doesn’t include the millions the president and first lady have each netted from “meme coin” cryptocurrency ventures, a blatant means of scamming MAGA supporters.

Melania’s upcoming Amazon documentary may be one of the most obviously corrupt deals. The Journal reports that the first lady, the president, Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, and his fiancée, Lauren Sánchez, all had dinner at Mar-a-Lago in December, where Melania sold Bezos on her movie. Two weeks after that dinner, Amazon agreed to shell out the $40 million, nearly three times as much as the next best offer and the most the company has ever spent on a documentary.

The first lady is reportedly getting over 70 percent of the $40 million, and her agent is trying to sell “sponsorships” to executives and billionaires for the movie, with $10 million as the starting price. In return, these sponsors would get thanked in the credits and be invited to the premiere.

Some of Amazon’s competitors weren’t even interested in the film. Netflix and Apple declined to field offers, while Paramount only bid $4 million on distribution rights. The only other company that showed some interest was Disney, but their offer was just $14 million.

According to an Amazon spokesperson, “We licensed the upcoming Melania Trump documentary film and series for one reason and one reason only—because we think customers are going to love it.”

That seems hard to believe. Amazon and Bezos are shelling out money not because they love the documentary but because they are cozying up to the president to stay on his good side and hopefully get some favorable decisions from the Republican-controlled government. In Trump’s second term, it’s all about cash for favors, with no concern about appearing corrupt.

The DOGE website is wide open and vulnerable to hackers, according to reporting from 404 Media. Two coders had already infiltrated the site and left their own messages on it at the time of 404’s reporting on Thursday evening: “THis is a joke of a .gov site,” said one, and “THESE ‘EXPERTS’ LEFT THEIR DATABASE OPEN -roro” said another. 

This will be unsurprising to anyone who has visited the DOGE.gov website since its inception—it looks like a high schooler could’ve made it. 404’s Jason Koebler previously referred to it as “just a Wordpress theme placeholder page.”  

Anonymous experts told 404 Media that the DOGE.gov website is supported by a Cloudflare page outside of government servers, making it easily accessible to third-party hackers. 

“Feels like it was completely slapped together,” one of the sources said. “Tons of errors and details leaked in the page source code.”

Musk has yet to comment on the hacks as he continues promising “transparency.”

It seems like New York Mayor Eric Adams got exactly what he wanted from Donald Trump’s Department of Justice—and then some.

Acting U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of New York Danielle Sassoon resigned Thursday, two days after acting U.S. Deputy Attorney General Emil Bove ordered federal prosecutors in New York to drop the charges against Adams. Bove claimed that they hindered the mayor’s ability to target immigrants at Trump’s behest.

In a scathing eight-page letter announcing her resignation, Sassoon revealed that her office was preparing to hit Adams with a superseding indictment from a new grand jury.

“We have proposed a superseding indictment that would add an obstruction conspiracy count based on evidence that Adams destroyed and instructed others to destroy evidence and provide false information to the FBI, and that would add further factual allegations regarding his participation in a fraudulent straw donor scheme,” Sassoon wrote.

Sassoon, who has a strong conservative record and clerked for late Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia, warned that dismissing the case against Adams would amplify—rather than abate—concerns about weaponization in the Department of Justice.

Adams was previously hit with a 57-page indictment, including five damning public corruption charges, alleging that he’d sought out and taken bribes from the Turkish government. The indictment refers to “a senior official in the Turkish diplomatic establishment” who “facilitated many straw donations” to Adams on behalf of foreign nationals and businesses.

Sassoon’s letter revealed that Adams’s attorneys were up to a similar gambit during his negotiations with the Justice Department. During a meeting on January 31 with Bove, Adams’s lawyers, and members of the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Southern District of New York, “Adams’s attorneys repeatedly urged what amounted to a quid pro quo, indicating that Adams would be in a position to assist with the Department’s enforcement priorities only if the indictment were dismissed,” Sassoon wrote, in a footnote of her letter.

“Mr. Bove admonished a member of my team who took notes during that meeting and directed the collection of those notes at the meeting’s conclusion,” Sassoon said, indicating that Bove didn’t wish for a record of Adams’s request to exist. It seems that Adams got exactly what he wanted from Trump’s DOJ.

In her letter, Sassoon criticized the rationale behind dismissing the charges, arguing that Bove and the DOJ had “reached this conclusion without assessing the strength of the evidence or the legal theories on which this case is based.” Instead, Bove argued that dismissal was necessary on policy grounds because the “pending prosecution has unduly restricted Mayor Adams’ ability to devote full attention and resources to the illegal immigration and violent crime that escalated under the policies of the prior administration.”

Sassoon pointed out that “Adams has already seized on the memo to publicly assert that he is innocent and that the accusations against him were unsupported by the evidence and based only on ‘fanfare and sensational claims.’”

“Confidence in the Department would best be restored by means well short of a dismissal,” she added.

Three senior Justice Department officials resigned Thursday rather than drop corruption charges against New York City Mayor Eric Adams. 

On Monday, acting U.S. Deputy Attorney General Emil Bove ordered federal prosecutors in New York to drop the charges against Adams, claiming that they limited Adams’s ability to help President Trump’s crackdown on immigrants. Apparently, that did not sit well with the acting U.S. attorney for the Southern District of New York, Danielle Sassoon, who opted to resign instead.   

After her office refused to drop the charges against Adams, the DOJ then sought to move the case over to the agency’s Public Integrity Section in Washington, D.C., which handles all federal public corruption cases. But then, the section’s acting head, John Keller, left his position rather than drop the charges. 

As a result, Adams’s case went to the DOJ’s criminal division, which oversees every federal criminal case in the country. Kevin Driscoll, the division’s acting head, didn’t want to drop the charges either, and he then resigned. 

Of all three, Sassoon’s resignation is the most surprising, considering that she has a strong conservative resume. A member of the influential Federalist Society, she once clerked for Supreme Court Justice and conservative stalwart Antonin Scalia. More recently, she captured the national spotlight for prosecuting cryptocurrency fraudster Sam Bankman-Fried.

The stunning sequence of events evokes memories of the “Saturday Night Massacre” of 1973, when President Nixon tried to fire special prosecutor Archibald Cox, who was tasked with investigating the infamous Watergate scandal, causing the top two officials in the DOJ to resign instead. It was only the third ranking DOJ official at the time, conservative Robert Bork, who finally agreed to carry out the firing. 

The Trump administration appears to be doing Adams a favor for cozying up to the president, ignoring the multiple counts of fraud and bribery against Adams for actions going back to 2014, when he was Brooklyn borough president. It seems that some of the DOJ’s prosecutors can see the corruption coming from on high, even those with right-wing backgrounds.

Mexican President Claudia Sheinbaum threatened Thursday to sue Google after it changed the name of the Gulf of Mexico in its maps, in compliance with Donald Trump’s superficial executive order.

Google announced Tuesday that it had updated the name of the body of water on its maps system, keeping with the standards set by the federal Geographic Names Information System. In the U.S., the name would appear as the inane “Gulf of America”; in Mexico, the “Gulf of Mexico”; and everywhere else would see a monstrous “Gulf of Mexico (Gulf of America).”

During a press conference Thursday, Sheinbaum said that her government had exchanged letters with Google about the issue but that the company had not resolved the complaints.

“Who we have a dispute with is Google,” Sheinbaum said, according to Bloomberg. “If they keep insisting, we’ll consider a lawsuit.”

Sheinbaum argued that Trump’s vanity project could remain but that it needed to be limited to a small section of the gulf, saying that “the only place it was effective was where [the U.S.] has sovereignty, or up to 22 nautical miles from the coast,” according to Reuters.

It’s worth noting that Google CEO Sundar Pichai was among those invited to flank Trump at the inauguration, cementing just how important the administration’s ties to Silicon Valley are and just how much these pitiable tech bros hope to stay in the pocket of the president.

Trump wants a former Amazon executive to lead the country’s workplace safety agency.

On Wednesday, the president nominated David Keeling to serve as head of the Occupational Safety and Health Administration, which is tasked with maintaining safe and humane working conditions for American workers. Keeling previously oversaw safety at Amazon and UPS.

Both of those companies have been cited for various workplace safety violations by the very agency Keeling is set to control, if confirmed by the Senate. In 2019, OSHA cited UPS for forcing its drivers to work in “excessive heat” with no air conditioning. That same year, UPS was also cited for fire hazards at packaging facilities. Amazon has been cited numerous times for the dangerous, high-pressure environments in its warehouses, as well as the long hours its employees are forced to spend in them. Just last year, Amazon paid a $145,000 settlement over OSHA violations.

Keeling worked as director of safety compliance for UPS from 2011 to 2018 before serving as the vice president of global health and safety from 2018 to 2021, overlapping with OSHA’s 2019 safety citations. The same can be said for Amazon, where he worked from 2021 to 2023—a time when Amazon had one of the highest warehouse injury rates in the country.

Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi is visiting the United States, but before meeting with President Trump, he met with someone arguably more powerful: Elon Musk.

At Blair House in Washington, D.C., Thursday, Musk and Modi discussed “space, mobility, technology and innovation,” according to a post from Modi’s X account. Modi also met with three of Musk’s children.

Several parts of Musk’s businesses concern India. The tech mogul is trying to get access for his Starlink satellite internet service in the country, and is fighting with Indian billionaire Mukesh Ambani, who has competing interests. Musk also is trying to sell low-cost Tesla vehicles in India and get past the country’s tariffs on electric vehicles.

All of this has prompted critics to question what exactly Musk’s role is in the federal government—and why he’s meeting with foreign leaders. Senator Chris Murphy pointed out some of his conflicts of interests, and the self-serving nature of his meeting.

Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency is supposedly meant to reduce costs and streamline government for the benefit of the American people. If the tech mogul is meeting leaders like Modi in Washington, D.C., he is effectively acting like a diplomat, as Murphy noted, but in his own interests rather than those of the country. The fact that Modi is meeting with Musk before Trump suggests that the fascist Indian leader sees the fascist tech CEO as more important than the president.

Donald Trump on Thursday announced his intention to impose “reciprocal tariffs” on America’s trading partners.

Trump instructed his trade advisers and federal agencies to examine “reciprocal tariffs” on a “country-by-country” basis. The tariffs would begin with nations with which the U.S. determines it has the highest trade deficit, according to a senior White House official who spoke with the Financial Times. Trump’s memo likened the U.S. trade deficit to an issue of national security.

“India traditionally is just about the highest country, tariffs,” Trump said in a taped playback that the White House did not allow to be broadcast live from the Oval Office. “They’re at the top of the pack.”

Trump also highlighted what he perceived to be poor trade dynamics with the European Union and Canada, suggesting once again that America’s northern neighbor could become the country’s “fifty-first state” while referring to its outgoing leader as “Governor Trudeau.”

“Whatever they’re charging us, we’ll charge them,” the president said, bringing up Harley Davidson’s manufacturing issues with the country. Trump also promised that “prices will stay the same, go down,” or “go up short-term” as a result of the tariffs, that the nation will see an influx of jobs, and that “farmers will be helped very much.”

“Nobody really knows what will happen,” Trump said.

Trump’s unconfirmed Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick insisted that if “they drop their tariffs, prices will go down,” suggesting that nations around the world would drop their tariffs in order to aid American consumers. “It’s a two-way street,” he said.

White House officials said the administration would use a multipronged legal approach to implement the tariffs, in part pointing to Section 301 of the Trade Act and the International Emergency Economic Powers Act.

Trump initially announced the impending tariff proposal while aboard Air Force One on Sunday, promising that reciprocal tariffs would be coming for “every country” that imposes import duties on U.S. goods.

“Very simply it’s if they charge us, we charge them,” he said, according to NBC News.

The tariffs, which Trump first proposed would go into effect “immediately,” will actually not go into effect for several months. Instead, they have a possible start date of April 1, according to White House officials that spoke with CNBC.

The U.S. has a weighted average import tariff rate of 2 percent on industrial goods, an umbrella category that encompasses practically all consumer goods outside of food.

“Weighted average tariff rates give special consideration to the value of a country’s imports,” reported CNN. “That means that if one country’s exports are subject to tariffs in another country and they constitute a large portion of the country’s overall imports, their weighted average tariff rate will be higher compared to another country whose exports accounts for a small share.”

EU leaders have already vowed to fight back against Trump’s sweeping tariff plan. Although economic advisers have brushed off Trump’s campaign promise as a blunt negotiating strategy, top U.S. allies in Europe have spent months composing a “Trump Task Force” to ready their respective countries for what they believe could boil into a painful trade war.

“I will never support the idea of fighting allies,” Danish Prime Minister Mette Frederiksen told reporters in Brussels on Monday. “But of course, if the U.S. puts tough tariffs on Europe, we need a collective and robust response.”

Trump’s previous tariff proposals are predicted to affect just about every product under the sun, from ground beef and bananas to liquor and gas. On Monday, Trump reinstated his 2018 tariff on steel and aluminum, raising tariffs for both to 25 percent. The new regulation is slated to take effect March 12. Once it does, production costs for America’s automakers are likely to jump, as will costs for the country’s construction industry, which is already struggling to meet the demands of a historic nationwide housing crisis.

Trump has leaned into tariffs as a key component of affording an extension to his 2017 tax plan, which overwhelmingly benefits corporations and is projected to add as much as $15 trillion to the national deficit. But experts believe that a trade war would be to the overwhelming detriment of American consumers and its allies abroad—and that the self-inflicted pain could only serve to benefit U.S. adversaries around the globe.

The EU’s top diplomat Kaja Kallas warned Monday that if the U.S. and the European Union were to enter into a trade war, then “the one laughing on the side is China.”

Several U.S. attorneys in federal court districts were fired Wednesday night “at the direction of the President of the United States.”

At least two court-appointed U.S. attorneys were forced out. One of those included a career federal prosecutor who had worked on January 6 cases, reported NBC News Thursday.

The White House–instructed layoff came as a surprise to the Justice Department, which has historically been the entity to request resignations from politically appointed attorneys.

A Justice Department spokesman could not answer how many of the nation’s 93 U.S. attorneys were impacted, according to NBC.

U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of California Tara McGrath was informed that she would no longer serve as the chief federal law enforcement official for San Diego in a “communication from the White House,” according to a press release from McGrath’s office that noted First Assistant U.S. Attorney Andrew R. Haden would take her place, effective immediately.

U.S. Attorney for the Western District of Washington Tessa Gorman was also “removed from her post,” a spokesperson for the office told NBC.

U.S. Attorney for Maryland Erek L. Barron and U.S. Attorney for the Western District of North Carolina Dena J. King announced their departures Wednesday as well, though they did not specify if they had been similarly forced out by the Trump administration.

An unidentified source familiar with the matter told NBC that the notices had been issued by Trent Morse, the deputy director of the Office of Presidential Personnel. The letters read: “At the direction of President Donald J. Trump, I am writing to inform you that your position as U.S. Attorney is terminated, effective immediately.”

The unprecedented dismissals come at a time when Trump’s pick to run the FBI, Kash Patel, has been accused of lying to Congress about directing a “purge” of the bureau while still a private citizen.

Gutting America’s prosecutorial abilities is apparently a top priority for the convicted felon in chief’s second term. Last month, Trump’s team ransacked FBI leadership, firing the top five career positions at the bureau, according to The Hill. The administration also conducted a mass firing of more than a dozen career prosecutors who had worked directly with former special counsel Jack Smith as he developed two cases against Trump: one into Trump’s alleged retention of classified documents after he left the White House in 2021, and another into Trump’s involvement in the January 6 riots.

The matter boiled down to “trust” for the incoming administration, which claimed that the prosecutors had weaponized the government against the MAGA leader and had no place in his administration.