Trump Jan. 6 Pardonee Gets Life Sentence After Trying to Take Revenge

A federal judge sentenced a January 6 rioter to life in prison Wednesday for plotting to assassinate the federal agents who’d investigated him.  

U.S. District Judge Thomas Varlan ordered 36-year-old Edward Kelley to spend the rest of his life behind bars, after Kelley was convicted on the charges of conspiracy to murder federal employees, solicitation to commit a crime of violence, and influencing a federal official by threat.

Kelley received his sentencing in front of more than a dozen of the targets on his “kill list,” which had specifically taken aim at individuals working at the FBI’s headquarters in Knoxville, Tennessee. Prosecutors said that Kelley had created the list while awaiting trial in his insurrection case, and that he had attempted to recruit others to help him target the office with car bombs and drones, or attack individuals at their homes or public places. 

Kelley was previously convicted in November 2024 of multiple felonies and misdemeanors related to his participation in the January 6 riot at the U.S. Capitol, where he pushed a police officer to the ground before being one of the first rioters to break into the building. 

He was one of the more than 1,500 recipients of Donald Trump’s sweeping Inauguration Day pardon for violently opposing his loss in the 2020 presidential election. 

Not every January 6 rioter is getting the same shake. Former FBI agent and January 6 rioter Jared L. Wise—who shouted “Kill ’em! Kill ’em! Kill ’em!” while the mob attacked law enforcement at the Capitol—will now work alongside former interim U.S. Attorney Ed Martin on the Department of Justice’s “weaponization” working group. 

Trump adviser Stephen Miller is up in arms after a federal district court judge dealt a significant blow to Trump’s immigration agenda Wednesday.

U.S. District Judge Randolph Moss ruled unlawful Trump’s day-one proclamation shutting down the right to claim asylum at the southern border on the dubious grounds that an “invasion” is occurring there.

In response, Miller claimed that Moss, an Obama appointee, is a “marxist judge” attempting to “circumvent the Supreme Court.” Quote-tweeting that post, Miller added, “The West will not survive if our sovereignty is not restored.”

In his 128-page ruling, Moss said that Trump’s proclamation asserted “sweeping authority” that far exceeds the powers he legally possesses under the Constitution and the Immigration and Nationality Act. And the Trump administration’s “appeal to necessity cannot fill that void.”

Contrary to Trump’s arguments, Moss wrote, the president does not have “the unilateral authority to limit the rights of aliens present in the United States to apply for asylum,” nor does he have the “authority to adopt an alternative immigration system, which supplants the statutes that Congress has enacted and the regulations that the responsible agencies have promulgated.”

The ruling, which applies to all people “who are now or will be present in the United States,” effectively stops the proclamation in its tracks—at least after a two-week stay, during which the president is expected to appeal. In the interim, Moss said the administration “shall take steps to ensure that they … are fully prepared to implement the Court’s order without further delay.”

Deborah Pearlstein of Princeton University noted that Moss’s ruling exemplifies how courts may still rein in Trump’s unlawful actions, even after the Supreme Court recently impeded their ability to do so in a ruling restricting lower courts’ ability to issue nationwide freezes on Trump’s anti-constitutional executive orders.

Moss mentioned that Supreme Court case in his ruling, but cited the Administrative Procedure Act, a federal law that directs courts to “set aside” federal actions found to be “not in accordance with law.”

Republican Representative Derrick Van Orden made sure to let reporters know that he wasn’t President Trump’s bitch—as he prepared to vote “yes” on the budget bill that will leave at least 30,000 of his constituents without health care by 2034.

“The president of the United States didn’t give us an assignment. We’re not a bunch of little bitches around here, okay? I’m a member of Congress,” Van Orden said, according to Punchbowl News’s Kenzie Nguyen. “I represent almost eight hundred thousand Wisconsinites.”

Van Orden really had the audacity to take this kind of tone with reporters after a “yes” vote on the House’s previous version of the budget bill. He is also expected to vote “yes” on the new version of the bill approved by the Senate.

Aside from the aforementioned health care cuts, the House-approved version of Trump’s One Big Beautiful Bill Act would remove $607 million from rural Wisconsin hospitals, placing important care centers like Aspirus Stanley Hospital, the ​​Mayo Clinic Health System-Oakridge in Osseo, and Froedtert Holy Family Memorial Hospital in Manitowoc at risk of shutting down. While the Senate bill includes slightly higher funding for rural hospitals, advocates say it’s still not enough given the cuts to Medicaid.

“It creates Medicaid winners and losers, with Wisconsin at the bottom,” Wisconsin Hospital Association President Eric Borgerding wrote recently in a column for the Wisconsin State Journal.

The bill passed the Senate on Tuesday and is currently under deliberation in the House, with no clear end date in sight.

The monstrous, recently constructed immigrant detention facility in the Florida Everglades, flippantly dubbed “Alligator Alcatraz,” literally took on water within a day of President Trump visiting the camp Tuesday to commemorate its planned Wednesday opening.

Florida officials have assured the public that the facility, which will cost an estimated $450 million per year to operate, was built to withstand a Category 2 hurricane (though the Naples Daily News notes that winds of recent hurricanes in the area have significantly exceeded Category 2 levels).

A report by the Miami Herald further casts into doubt official claims about the facility’s durability. According to the Herald, “a garden-variety South Florida summer rainstorm” on Tuesday afternoon—of about an inch-and-a-half of rain—caused flooding in the facility.

The Herald reports: “Rainfall seeped through the edges of the facility as the roofs and walls trembled. Drips leaked from above a door frame. The water spread under poles hoisting the Florida and U.S. flags.”

On Wednesday, the Florida Division of Emergency Management told the Herald that contractors, overnight, “went back and tightened any seams at the base of the structures that allowed water intrusion during the heavy storm,” claiming flooding had been “minimal.”

The news validates growing concerns about the condition of the facility, which was jury-rigged on a site known to be prone to flooding.

On Wednesday, two dozen House Democrats, led by Representatives Janelle Bynum of Oregon and Maxwell Frost of Florida, railed against the “makeshift unsafe, unsanitary, overly crowded, and environmentally destructive” facility in a letter to Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem and Immigration and Customs Enforcement acting Director Todd Lyons.

“Detainees will be kept in tents with inadequate sanitation facilities and will face unbearable living conditions, including exposure to deadly pathogens, constant threats from unpredictable flooding and extreme weather events, and daily temperatures averaging 90 degrees, with a heat index often over 100 degrees Fahrenheit,” the lawmakers wrote.

The site, the letter continues, is “known as being one of the most dangerous and inhospitable environments in the United States. This remote swamp is notorious for oppressive heat, relentless humidity, severe storms, and perilous terrain infested with venomous snakes, disease-carrying insects, and large predatory wildlife, including alligators and crocodiles.”

The Trump administration and MAGA more broadly, meanwhile, have relished the cruelty of the facility—which journalist Andrea Prizer, who authored a book on the history of concentration camps, deemed a concentration camp. For example, Trump on Tuesday joked to reporters that detainees will have to be taught to run in a zigzag in order to evade alligators.

The assessment from House Democrats, borne out by reports that the facility apparently had trouble withstanding a commonplace rain shower, continues: “The deliberate placement of vulnerable immigrants into such a hostile and lethal environment is morally reprehensible, inherently cruel, and starkly violates basic humanitarian standards.”

Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem is seeking creative ways to staff her agency with sycophants of Donald Trump, Bloomberg Government reported Wednesday.

At the first-ever meeting of Trump’s revamped Homeland Security Advisory Council Wednesday, Noem outright asked the members “how to fire people that don’t like us.”

Noem complained that she was “surrounded by bureaucrats,” and wanted to root out employees who “don’t support what we’re doing.”

Under the leadership of Noem and White House deputy chief of staff Stephen Miller, the DHS has enacted brutal immigration reform that pushes the boundaries of U.S. law. Their efforts have involved making absurd changes to Customs and Border Control policies, stripping immigrants of their lawful immigration status, and conducting widespread paramilitary raids that target average civilians, not criminals.

In April, Trump announced that he had “revamped” his Homeland Security Advisory Council by once again fishing from the Fox News talent pool, recruiting host Mark Levin and former Fox News contributor Bo Dietl.

The council also included Trump’s disgraced former lawyer Rudy Giuliani, DHS adviser Corey Lewandowski, South Carolina Governor Henry McMaster, and Florida state Senator Joseph Gruters, who serves on the Republican National Committee and is a close ally of Trump’s.

Opposition to the president’s “big, beautiful bill” is growing in the House of Representatives.

The House Freedom Caucus released a three-page memo Wednesday heavily criticizing the Senate’s version of Donald Trump’s exorbitantly expensive tax cut, flaming the Senate draft for adding pork where the House had proposed cuts. The caucus’s three chief complaints include that the bill actually increases the deficit, “waters down” cuts to proposed Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act funding, and “fails to ensure illegals are fully removed from Medicaid rolls.” (Undocumented immigrants are already ineligible for federally funded Medicaid.)

The invite-only Freedom Caucus, which unlike other groups on Capitol Hill does not publicize its roster, is estimated to have at least 49 members or lawmakers affiliated with its agenda, Pew Research calculated in 2023. That’s far more than enough to torpedo the bill—House Speaker Mike Johnson can afford to lose just three votes to keep the bill alive.

But the hard-line fiscal conservatives aren’t the only party members opposing the bill: Moderates are worried about the high cost the legislation will have on safety-net programs, including some $880 billion in cuts to Medicaid, and swing-district Republicans are worried about political backlash in their Democrat-led states.

Any of these groups have the muster to keep the bill from passing. Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene said Tuesday that there’s no chance Republicans will be able to pass the bill through the House, deriding the situation on Steve Bannon’s War Room podcast as a “shit show” in which Republicans simply don’t have the votes.

Beyond that, Johnson is concerned about simply having enough of his caucus in attendance to advance the vote. Several lawmakers have already posted on social media that their flights back to Washington have been delayed or canceled in light of severe thunderstorm warnings, fueling concerns that the inclement weather could push back the vote into Wednesday night or even Thursday.

“I am worried about flights,” Johnson told Politico Wednesday morning. “We don’t know if we have a full House. So that’s what we’re working on.”

The no tax on tips provision of Donald Trump’s budget cannot be the pro-labor gift that the president has made it out to be while the rest of the bill slashes health care and other social programs for lower-income people. Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez shed some light as to why that’s the case.

“On this point of tax on tips, as one of the only people in this body who has lived off of tips, I wanna tell you a little bit about the scam of that text, a little bit of the fine print there,” she said on Wednesday. “The cap on that is $25,000—while you’re jacking up taxes on people who make less than $50,00 across the United States while taking away their SNAP, while taking away their Medicaid, while kicking them off of the ACA and their health care extensions.

“So if you’re at home and you’re living off tips, you do the math. Is that worth it to you? Losing all your health care? Not able to feed your babies? Not being able to put a diaper on their bottom, in exchange for what? This bill is a deal with the devil. It explodes our national debt, it militarizes our entire economy, and it strips away health care and basic dignity of the American people for what? To give Elon Musk a tax break and billionaires the greedy taking of our nation? We cannot stand for it, and we will not support it. You should be ashamed.”

It’s hard to be excited about perceived tax cuts—like the no tax on tips provision—when they’re easily outweighed by the costs incurred by cuts to SNAP, Medicaid, and the Affordable Care Act. And furthermore, lower-income people who rely on tips already qualify for the standard tax deduction in federal taxes. The math here only makes a significant difference for higher earners, and makes virtually none at all for those who need it the most. Many of the people this provision is supposed to help are already making below a living wage, which is why tips are so important here in the first place.

The deduction is also only available until 2028.

Donald Trump’s administration is claiming that the number of assaults against immigration enforcement officers has skyrocketed, but when pressed, even they can’t keep their phony numbers straight.

In response to CNN’s report about ICEBlock, an app that allows users to anonymously log sightings of ICE agents in their communities, ICE’s acting Director Todd Lyons claimed that officers and agents were “already facing a 500 percent increase in assaults.”

This number isn’t new, but it is getting a little ridiculous. Gizmodo’s Matt Novak wrote Wednesday that when he requested evidence about Lyons’s statement, ICE boosted its claim from a 500 percent increase to 700 percent. No evidence was provided for either figure.

Allegations of increased assaults against ICE have come under intense scrutiny after the Department of Homeland Security claimed that New York City Comptroller Brad Lander had assaulted officers while being detained at an immigration court last month. But a video of the incident showed that Lander hadn’t assaulted anyone and that he’d been detained for asking officers for an arrest warrant.

Fox News’s Bill Melugin reported Tuesday that raw data provided by DHS showed that there had been 79 assaults against immigration enforcement agents between January 21 and June 30, up from 10 during the same period last year. This figure isn’t particularly terrifying, especially when considering ICE’s embrace of warrantless arrests, masked agents, and aggressive policing tactics as part of its sweeping immigration raids. It’s also unclear whether this figure includes patently phony allegations of assault, such as those against Lander.

After a video recirculated of Zohran Mamdani eating food with his hands, many MAGA figures revealed their inability to engage with New York City’s Democratic mayoral nominee without being sent into a xenophobic tizzy.

In the video, a 2023 interview with Uncivilized Media, Mamdani describes growing up in the Third World and being surprised by a “glaring contradiction” in the U.S. political mainstream’s stance on Palestinian rights: “We say we care about freedom and justice and self-determination,” Mamdani said in the video, in which he is shown eating South Asian food with his hands, “and yet, for some reason, we draw a line when it comes to Palestinians.”

The clip, which made the rounds after being shared by the right-wing X account @EndWokeness on Sunday, was too much to bear for many in MAGA world.

Laura Loomer, a right-wing influencer who visited the White House last month—and wields considerable influence there—posted, “Honestly, being an Islamist and a Communist was enough for me to not want @ZohranKMamdani in office. He is from Africa. And you can tell in the way he eats. Disgusting. My dogs are cleaner and more civilized when they eat than little Muhammad.” (Loomer is oft-mocked online for eating “human-grade” dog food during an ad on her podcast.)

Fellow MAGA podcaster Charlie Kirk joined in, suggesting on his show that the two-year-old clip was a “calculated stunt” to “signal his Third World cred.” Kirk argued, “If he eats rice with his hands, whether he means it or not, he’s either authentically gross, or he’s being a fake, disgusting person.”

“Civilized people in America don’t eat like this,” wrote Republican Representative Brandon Gill of Texas, who told Mamdani to “go back to the Third World” if he refuses “to adopt Western customs.”

“Look at how this pig Zohran eats with his hands,” posted MAGA podcaster Mike Crispi of New Jersey. “Have some respect for our system,” he added, suggesting that “using a FORK and acknowledging the greatness of CAPITALISM” are twin pillars of American democracy.

Donald Trump’s great new deal with Vietnam may actually be terrible for America.

The president announced the trade arrangement Wednesday morning, writing on Truth Social that “Vietnam will pay the United States a 20 percent Tariff on any and all goods sent into our Territory,” as well as a 40 percent tariff on transshipping. In exchange, the United States will get “TOTAL ACCESS to their Markets for Trade.”

“In other words, they will ‘OPEN THEIR MARKET TO THE UNITED STATES,’ meaning that, we will be able to sell our product into Vietnam at ZERO Tariff,” Trump wrote. “It is my opinion that the SUV or, as it is sometimes referred to, Large Engine Vehicle, which does so well in the United States, will be a wonderful addition to the various product lines within Vietnam.”

But analysts reading between the lines of the deal didn’t see the good news.

“Vietnam doesn’t pay tariffs on goods we import!” posted American Immigration Council senior fellow Aaron Reichlin-Melnick, noting that Trump’s explanation is not how tariffs work.

“This deal means American businesses will pay a 20 percent tax on the $140 billion we import from Vietnam, while Vietnamese businesses will pay no taxes on the $13 billion we export,” he wrote.

The lack of taxes could incentivize Vietnamese businesses to buy more American products. But Reichlin-Melnick argued in a separate post that net taxes on American businesses caused by a 20 percent tariff on $140 billion in exports would amount to $28 billion, “which is more than twice the total value of all the goods we export to Vietnam.”

“There’s no way that’s a net positive for American businesses,” he said.

Some of America’s largest and most successful companies, such as Apple and Nike, have manufacturing facilities in Vietnam and could face higher import costs due to Trump’s negotiating—a spike that will undoubtedly be felt by the consumer.

Trump’s 90-day pause on his reciprocal tariff policy is scheduled to expire next week. So far, the administration has only struck revised deals with China, the United Kingdom, and now Vietnam.

Last week, the White House said that the deadline for countries to strike trade deals with the U.S. may be extended past July 9, with press secretary Karoline Leavitt describing the hard stop as “not critical.”

In the end, it will be the U.S. that pays the price when the Trump administration runs out of time on its “90 deals in 90 days” promise. Earlier this week, Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell said that the central bank likely would have lowered its key interest rate if Trump hadn’t announced his tariff plan. Companies have already decided to increase product prices this year in reaction to hampered global supply chains.