Trump Adviser Fumbles Key Question in Bad Sign for Ukraine Peace Talks

Russia will get practically everything it wants so long as the Trump administration is overseeing the peace talks over the Ukraine war.

Over the past several weeks, Trump’s officials have negotiationally ceded land and military protection for Ukraine—but words fail them when pressed about what exactly Russia will have to give up in order to end the war.

Real estate developer turned U.S. special envoy to the Middle East Steve Witkoff spoke with Russian officials last week regarding a potential peace deal. While speaking about the meeting with CNN’s State of the Union on Sunday, Donald Trump’s longtime friend couldn’t detail one thing that Russia would actually have to compromise on in the arrangement.

“What concessions will Russia have to make?” prompted CNN host Jake Tapper.

“Well, I think, in any peace deal, each side is going to make concessions, whether it’s territorial concessions, whether it’s economic concessions. I think there’s a whole array of things that happen in a deal,” Witkoff said.

“And you’ll see concessions from both sides,” Witkoff continued, not naming a single item that Russia will have to concede. “And that’s the president’s—that’s what he does best. He brings people together. He gets them to understand that the pathway to peace is concessions and consensus-building. And I think you’re going to see a very successful result here.”

Russian forces crossed the Ukrainian border on February 24, 2022, which Russian President Vladimir Putin tried to justify by falsely claiming that he needed to protect civilians in eastern Ukraine. But in a jarring attempt to rewrite history, Witkoff also denied those facts.

“The war didn’t need to happen. It was provoked. It doesn’t necessarily mean it was provoked by the Russians,” Witkoff told CNN. “There were all kinds of conversations back then about Ukraine joining NATO. The president has spoken about this. That didn’t need to happen. It basically became a threat to the Russians.”

While speaking at a NATO summit earlier this month, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth explicitly outlined that the Trump administration’s peace talks with Russia had taken several bargaining chips “off the table.”

That included Ukraine’s possible NATO membership (something the military alliance had promised in 2008), the possibility of a U.S. military presence in Ukraine to enforce postwar security guarantees, and the end of NATO missions to Ukraine. He also added that it would be “unrealistic” for Ukraine to return to its prewar borders, effectively ceding land to Moscow.

The announcement came as a complete 180 on American and NATO policy regarding the Eastern European country, and left U.S. allies and defense experts reeling. The deal, per Trump’s former national security adviser John Bolton, amounted to Russian propaganda and was practically “written in the Kremlin.”

On Friday, Politico noted that Trump had caved to Russian talking points several dozen times, closely aligning the U.S. president with the foreign dictator.

Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth admitted Sunday that he’d fired top military lawyers so that Donald Trump’s administration can get away with whatever it wants.

During an appearance on Fox News, host Shannon Bream asked Hegseth to respond to a post on X from Georgetown Law Professor Rosa Brooks criticizing his decision to fire three judge advocates general, or JAGs, Friday. 

“Trump also firing the Army, Navy and Air Force JAGs. In some ways that’s even more chilling than firing the four stars,” Brooks wrote Friday. “It’s what you do when you’re planning to break the law: you get rid of any lawyers who might try to slow you down.”

Hegseth responded dismissively and tried to offer a different explanation, but ended up just saying the same thing.  

“Yeah, I don’t know who Rosa is, and what her hyperbole is all about,” Hegseth said. “Ultimately, we want lawyers who give sound constitutional advice and don’t exist to attempt to be roadblocks to anything.”

Hegseth continued, describing his problem with experts elevating other experts in the field of defense: “Traditionally they’ve been elected by each other, or chosen by each other, which is exactly how it works often with the chairman as well. Small group of insulated officers who perpetuate the status quo. Well guess what? Status quo hasn’t worked very well at the Pentagon.”

Hegseth never made contact with any of the three lawyers he claimed had upheld the status quo, Lieutenant General Joseph B. Berger III, Air Force Lieutenant General Charles Plummer, and Rear Admiral Lia M. Reynolds, according to The New York Times.

And while the Department of Defense is rife with corruption, and likely the most ripe target for massive spending cuts in the U.S. government, it’s clear from Hegseth’s own limp denial that he fired the three JAGs for the purpose of replacing them with MAGA loyalists who won’t stop the Trump administration from doing whatever it wants.

On Friday, Trump fired Joint Chiefs Chairman General Charles Q. Brown, to be replaced by Air Force Lieutenant General John Dan “Razin” Caine, who is not only retired but also not a four-star general. 

Trump also dismissed Chief of Naval Operations Lisa Franchetti and General James Slife, the vice chief of the Air Force. The dismissal of the lawyers was not included in the Pentagon’s official announcement. 

In another post on X, Brooks made a fitting reference to Henry VI, Part 2, Act IV: “‘First thing we do, let’s kill all the lawyers.’ If you plan to commit crimes, best to get rid of any lawyers who might try to stop you,” Brooks wrote. 

Donald Trump’s war on the media rages on. This time, it’s MSNBC drawing his ire.

The president posted a lengthy, angry message at 11:18 p.m. Sunday night, in which he used the news of anchor Joy Reid’s show getting canceled to excoriate the network for essentially not being as nice to him as he’d like them to be.

“Lowlife Chairman of ‘Concast,’ Brian Roberts, the owner of Ratings Challenged NBC and MSDNC, has finally gotten the nerve up to fire one of the least talented people in television, the mentally obnoxious racist, Joy Reid. Based on her ratings, which were virtually nonexistent, she should have been ‘canned’ long ago, along with everyone else who works there,” Trump wrote on Truth Social.

He went on to attack the ratings and intelligence of Rachel Maddow and “low IQ con man” Al Sharpton, before pivoting to what the network owed him. “This whole corrupt operation is nothing more than an illegal arm of the Democrat Party. They should be forced to pay vast sums of money for the damage they’ve done to our Country. Fake News is an UNPARDONABLE SIN!”

Reid’s firing was announced on Sunday, to the surprise of many casual MSNBC watchers. Her 7 p.m. show, The ReidOut, will be replaced with a panel that includes former senior Biden adviser Symone Sanders, never-Trump Republican Michael Steele, and author Alicia Menendez, the daughter of the corrupt (and currently incarcerated) former Senator Bob Menendez.

Trump’s angry rant comes as he banned the Associated Press—an international news organization—from the White House Press Corps over its refusal to call the Gulf of Mexico the “Gulf of America,” as Trump named it in an executive order. He is also in the midst of suing CBS for very basic editing of a Kamala Harris interview on 60 Minutes. It’s clear that Trump is very sensitive to any negative coverage on the airwaves, regardless of how accurate it is.

At least one Republican lawmaker is openly admitting that he’s interested to see how Donald Trump’s unconstitutional challenges to the federal government will “play out.”

During an interview on CBS’s Face The Nation Sunday, Utah Senator John Curtis appeared to encourage a constitutional crisis by suggesting that the president’s decision to freeze congressionally appropriated funds to agencies such as the U.S. Agency for International Development should be welcomed as a test to the Constitution.

“Do you believe the president has the unilateral authority to cancel funds appropriated by Congress?” asked CBS’s Margaret Brennan.

“Well what we’re seeing play out is this wrestle between the three branches of government,” Curtis said. “We’ll find out.”

“You don’t have a point of view?” pressed Brennan.

“Well, listen, I believe in the Constitution, right? I believe this is how we test the Constitution,” Curtis continued. “And people have said, ‘Oh this is a constitutional crisis.’ And I say exactly the opposite. It’s proving to work. We have the courts play in, we have Congress who will play in.

“Let’s let this play out by the Constitution, and then Congress—let’s step up. Right? I’ll be the first to say it, this is a problem that Congress has, in many cases, given the American people,” Curtis added.

The Trump administration’s prerogative, however, seems less inclined to follow the law on this particular issue.

The Impoundment Control Act of 1974 grants Congress the authority to reexamine executive branch withholdings from the budget. In a 1985 memorandum, Supreme Court Chief Justice John Roberts argued that the executive branch has no authority to block such spending and that “impoundment is not a promising avenue for resolving budget disputes with Congress on any significant scale.” He also urged that the power could not be wielded under “normal” circumstances.

“Our institutional vigilance with respect to the constitutional prerogatives of the presidency requires appropriate deference to the constitutional prerogatives of the other branches, and no area seems more clearly the province of Congress than the power of the purse,” Roberts wrote at the time.

But when asked during his confirmation hearings if he would obey the Impoundment Control Act, Trump’s then-nominee to run the Office of Management and Budget (and Project 2025 architect), Russell Vought, claimed that the law itself was unconstitutional and that he would defer to the Trump administration as to whether his office would act in accordance with the law.

Former lawmakers haven’t been shy about criticizing the current state of the Republican Party for failing to stand up to Trump’s overbearing administration.

Speaking with MSNBC earlier this month, former Florida Representative David Jolly argued that the country is in a “constitutional crisis,” and his party has been “facilitating it.”

“The constitutional crisis is because the Republican Congress has collapsed,” the Republican told the network.

“It is listless and meaningless, it is not providing the check that the Constitution suggests it should in this environment,” he said, arguing that the only existing check that remains on the “lawlessness and corruption” of Trump and Elon Musk’s power is in the courts, which “takes time.”

“But the immediate ability to rush to the fire is the Congress, and they’ve just laid down and said, ‘Hey, Donald Trump is running this place, and Elon Musk is as well, and we’re giving up any authority,’” Jolly said.

Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency effort experienced a setback in court Monday when a federal judge blocked the Office of Personnel Management and Department of Education from sharing sensitive information with the pseudo-agency.

U.S. District Judge Deborah Boardman noted that DOGE has been granted access to information including “Social Security numbers, dates of birth, home address, income and assets, citizenship status, and disability status—and their access to this trove of personal information is ongoing. There is no reason to believe their access to this information will end anytime soon because the government believes their access is appropriate.”

Boardman denied the plaintiffs’ motion to block the Treasury Department from sharing information with DOGE, noting that another judge had already done so.

DOGE has already sought access to taxpayers’ personal information right in the midst of tax season—and it hasn’t exactly been careful with sensitive data in the past. Its own website was hacked because its developers made coding errors, left open too many vulnerabilities, and hosted the page outside of government servers.

Musk has attempted to gain access to other sensitive government agencies as well, such as the Social Security Administration, leading some top officials to resign rather than hand over data. What the tech mogul plans to do with his new trove of sensitive information is unclear, although some Democrats think he’s trying to train his AI model Grok 3. There are also numerous benefits from that data for his business ventures, including ending government investigations into his activities.

This story has been updated.

Donald Trump named right-wing talking head and MAGA hard-liner Dan Bongino as deputy director of the FBI on Sunday—and received congratulations from some of the worst people.

“Dan Bongino, a man of incredible love and passion for our Country, has just been named the next DEPUTY DIRECTOR OF THE FBI, by the man who will be the best ever Director, Kash Patel,” Trump wrote Sunday evening on Truth Social. “He was a member of the New York Police Department (New York’s Finest!), a highly respected Special Agent with the United States Secret Service, and is now one of the most successful Podcasters in the Country, something he is willing and prepared to give up in order to serve. Working with our great new United States Attorney General, Pam Bondi, and Director Patel, Fairness, Justice, Law and Order will be brought back to America, and quickly. Congratulations Dan!”

The appointment of the former Fox News host, who once declared his entire life is “about owning the libs,” drew applause from some of MAGA’s most reprehensible foot soldiers.

“Even the WWE never constructed a tag-team better than: KASH / BONGINO,” former Representative Matt Gaetz wrote on X. “We are making @FBI great again!”

“Huge congrats to my friend @dbongino. No better patriot or professional,” Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth wrote. “Patel-Bongino atop the FBI is pure [fire emoji].”

“This. Is. EVERYTHING!!” said known Trump groupie Lauren Boebert.

Others outside of the MAGA inner circle are horrified by the pick.

“Trump has chosen grifters to lead the FBI. Kash Patel sells “K$SH” branded merch, vaccine reversal pills,” Senator Chris Murphy wrote on X. “Dan Bongino’s entire show is telling listeners the world is ending so they buy the dozens of survivalist products he sells. I know this feels like a bad dream. It isn’t.”

After Elon Musk issued an ultimatum Saturday for federal employees to explain five things they accomplished last week or lose their jobs, several Trump appointees at federal agencies told their employees not to comply with the demand.

Musk posted on X Saturday afternoon, “Consistent with President @realDonaldTrump’s instructions, all federal employees will shortly receive an email requesting to understand what they got done last week. Failure to respond will be taken as a resignation.”

Shortly afterward, federal workers received an email from the Office of Personnel Management, asking them to email five bullet points listing their accomplishments from the previous week and copy their managers. Many federal agencies then told their employees not to respond, including the Department of Defense, the FBI, the State Department, and other intelligence agencies.

Newly confirmed FBI Director Kash Patel instructed the bureau’s employees not to respond as well, saying that the agency’s leadership would handle responding to the bureau and coordinating employee reviews tailored to the FBI. The State Department also issued a statement that “no employee is obligated to report their activities outside of their Department chain of command.”

Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard also told the intelligence agencies that she oversees not to respond to the email due to “the inherently sensitive and classified nature of our work.”

The Department of Defense followed suit, as Under Secretary of Defense for Personnel and Readiness Darin Selnick told employees that “when and if required, the Department will coordinate responses to the email you have received from OPM. For now, please pause any response to the OPM email titled ‘What did you do last week.’”

Some agency heads, like Robert F. Kennedy Jr. at the Department of Health and Human Services, told their employees to comply with the email. His instructions contradicted the department’s acting general counsel, Sean Keveney, causing confusion before new directives from the department’s leadership Sunday night told employees to “pause activities” on the request until noon Monday.

“I’ll be candid with you. Having put in over 70 hours of work last week advancing Administration’s priorities, I was personally insulted to receive the below email,” Keveney said in an email viewed by the Associated Press.

Employee unions across many agencies responded angrily to Musk’s ultimatum.

“We believe that employees have no obligation to respond to this plainly unlawful email absent other lawful direction,” said Everett Kelley, president of the 800,000-member American Federation of Government Employees, in a letter to the Trump administration. He also requested an apology from OPM to all federal employees, calling Musk “unelected and unhinged.”

Musk is exercising some kind of power play across the federal government with his demand. It remains to be seen whether others in the Trump administration, including the president himself, will ever push back against a tech mogul who doesn’t seem to see many, if any, limits on his own power.

U.S. District Judge Carl Nichols, who previously described the Trump administration’s orders to USAID employees as a total “mess,” on Friday allowed the president to move forward with gutting the agency.

Nichols removed his block on the mass firing spree, ruling that plaintiffs “overstated” the harm caused by Trump’s actions. Trump is now allowed to continue with his slashing of USAID, which he wrongly alleges is a woke, corrupt, Communist entity. USAID will move forward on placing an estimated 2,200 workers on leave, after already doing so with 500 during the first freeze.

“Weighing plaintiffs’ assertions on these questions against the government’s is like comparing apples to oranges,” Nichols said in his 26-page order. “Where one side claims that USAID’s operations are essential to human flourishing and the other side claims they are presently at odds with it, it simply is not possible for the Court to conclude, as a matter of law or equity, that the public interest favors or disfavors an injunction.”

“They will be locked out of all computer systems, all payment systems, email systems, as well as systems that inform them of security threats,” Karla Gilbride, the recently fired general counsel of the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, warned last week. “This would imperil their safety, the operations of USAID and their institutional partners, and it adds to the instability of these already unstable regions.

“Once the agency is dissolved, it cannot be put back together again.”

Nichols, a Trump appointee, was unconvinced.

Donald Trump joins the rest of the world in wanting to know what on earth is wrong with Elon Musk.

In his new book, All or Nothing: How Trump Recaptured America, author Michael Wolff wrote that Trump was bewildered by the bafflingly lame behavior of the billionaire technocrat, The Daily Beast reported Friday.

Wolff documented Trump’s disturbed reaction to Musk’s wild appearance at a campaign rally in October that marked the president’s triumphant return to Butler, Pennsylvania, where an assassin had attempted to end his life months earlier.

An exuberant Musk was called onto the stage, where he jumped up and down and thrust his arms into the air. As he leapt around, his too-tight “Occupy Mars” T-shirt slid up to reveal a pale stomach. Shortly afterward, Musk declared himself “dark MAGA.”

Trump was “bewildered” by Musk, Wolff wrote.

“What the f*** is wrong with this guy?” Trump reportedly asked. “And why doesn’t his shirt fit?”

These important questions remain unanswered as yet, while Musk embarks on his takeover of the federal government. As DOGE fires (and in some cases rehires) essential government employees, and lies about slashing massive government contracts, Musk has continued his cringey crusade to become the MAGA mascot.

“I am become meme,” Musk declared during an off-putting appearance at the Conservative Political Action Conference Thursday. But if Trump’s comments are any indication, Musk isn’t a meme; he’s a joke. And everyone is laughing but him.

Donald Trump got into an argument with the Maine Governor Janet Mills, a Democrat, during an address Friday to the nation’s governors, in the White House dining room. 

During his remarks, Trump referenced his executive order banning transgender women from competing in women’s sports, and singled out Maine for going against his order, directly calling out Mills, who didn’t back down.  

“Are you not going to comply with it?” Trump asked Mills.

“I’m complying with state and federal law,” Mills replied. 

“Well, we are the federal law,” Trump said, and continued to speak over Mills. “You better do it, because you’re not going to get any federal funding at all if you don’t.” 

“See you in court,” Mills replied, cutting into Trump’s rant. 

“Good, I’ll see you in court. I look forward to that. That should be a real easy one. And enjoy your life after governor because I don’t think you’ll be in elected politics,” Trump said. 

On Thursday, Trump made similar threats against Maine at the Republican Governor’s Association Dinner, saying, “We’re not going to give them any federal money. They are still saying, ‘We want men to play in women’s sports.’”

Trump’s Thursday comments came after a Republican state representative in Maine, Laurel Libby, criticized a transgender high school athlete on her Facebook page, drawing the ire of Maine’s Democrats. Libby also criticized the state’s Democrats on a conservative radio show this week, suggesting that Maine schools that allow transgender athletes to compete in girls’ sports should lose government funding. 

“I think that’s really the only thing that will ensure we have biological females competing in sports against other biological females,” Libby said to conservative radio host Todd Starnes. “I don’t think that the Democratic majority is going to listen to reason until money talks, and that includes the federal funding getting yanked for Maine schools.”

Before her in-person verbal fight with Trump, Mills had issued a statement earlier on Friday responding to Trump’s comments to Republican governors. 

“If the President attempts to unilaterally deprive Maine school children of the benefit of Federal funding, my Administration and the Attorney General will take all appropriate and necessary legal action to restore that funding and the academic opportunity it provides,” Mills’s statement read. “The State of Maine will not be intimidated by the President’s threats.”

Trump’s comment to Mills on Friday was a brazen attempt to intimidate her, and his proclamation that “we are the federal law” is a disturbing look at how he views his authority in his second term as president—beyond reproach, or any checks and balances.