MAGA Official Says Everyone Investigating Him for Porn Should Resign

Oklahoma state Superintendent Ryan Walters wants the board members who say they caught him watching porn to “resign in disgrace.”

Last week, two school board members told the press they’d seen Walters displaying a pornographic video on a TV in his office during the closed-door portion of a Board of Education meeting at the time. 

In a video statement shared to X Tuesday night, the Trump fanboy attempting to reshape the Oklahoma school system went on the offensive, claiming the allegations were a “political attack.”

“These are lies by board members, by a corrupt news media, and perpetuated by the teachers union to try and stop the will of Oklahoma voters, and the Oklahoma parents,” Walters said. “What we are going to continue to do is move this education reform for the families of Oklahoma.”

“These board members should resign immediately in disgrace over the lies that they have pushed about me to try to destroy my character.” 

The Oklahoma Office of Management and Enterprise Services (OMES) had opened an investigation into Walters’s actions Friday, and on Monday asked the Oklahoma County Sheriff’s Office (OCSO) to begin a criminal investigation, according to News4. 

When he’s not going after board members or the media or teachers, Walters’s other tactic seems to be straight up lying about what happened. Earlier on Tuesday, Walters claimed that he’d had his name cleared by both OMES and the sheriff’s office—but that wasn’t true at all. 

“That simply isn’t the case,” OSCO spokesperson Aaron Brilbeck told News4. “Our investigation is still ongoing. In fact, I would categorize it as being in its infancy. This is going to be a very thorough investigation. And once the investigation is complete, we’re going to be very transparent with our findings.”

In his video statement Tuesday night, Walters again claimed that he’d already had “two independent groups come in and prove there was no wrongdoing going on,” but he offered no further details.  

Ryan Deatherage and Becky Carson, the two school board members who’d spoken to the press about the incident, released a joint statement Tuesday. “No board member has accused Superintendent Walters of anything, we only brought attention to inappropriate content on a TV—content that would cause a teacher in our state to lose their license. As the investigation continues, we urge Superintendent Walters to cooperate with law enforcement and refrain from smearing the names, characters and reputations of board members,” they said.

Donald Trump might have thrown himself into hot water by admitting that he knew Virginia Giuffre.

Speaking with reporters on Air Force One Tuesday, Trump said that he had confronted Jeffrey Epstein in the early 2000s about abducting underage girls who were on his payroll at Mar-a-Lago, including one of Epstein’s most prominent accusers.

The anecdote partially corroborated Giuffre’s account of being abducted in 2000 by Ghislaine Maxwell at Mar-a-Lago, where she worked at the time as a pool attendant. But admitting to knowing the characters of the chilling story could backfire on Trump in a court of law, according to New York University law professor Ryan Goodman.

“It’s that much of a significant statement,” Goodman told CNN host Erin Burnett Tuesday night. “If he had said he was aware of it from the court documents, then he’s OK in that regard. But I think that’s a very potentially bad situation for him to be in.”

Rather than release the Epstein files and provide the transparency so demanded by Trump’s base, the administration has decided to go in a different direction and accrue a new list of Epstein’s clients from Maxwell. Maxwell, in turn, has directly appealed to the president and the Supreme Court in pursuit of a pardon.

Last week, The Wall Street Journal reported that the Justice Department notified Trump in May that his name appeared several times throughout the “truckload” of documents that are the Epstein files.

Trump has previously claimed he cut off contact with Epstein after the financier was indicted in 2006 for soliciting underage prostitutes, referring to Epstein as a “creep.” But if Trump is taken at his new word, then that means that Trump continued to maintain ties with the pedophilic sex trafficker years after he was aware of Epstein’s criminal activities. Several reporters at The Miami Herald found that Epstein was still on Mar-a-Lago’s membership logs until October 2007, when his account was labeled “closed,” as chronicled in their 2020 book The Grifters Club.

Earlier this month, the former president and chief operating officer of Trump Plaza Hotel and Casino in Atlantic City, Jack O’Donnell, revealed that he had caught Trump and Epstein in the late 1980s shepherding underage girls into the establishment.

“They were pretty good buddies,” O’Donnell told CNN, recalling that he warned Trump against spending more time with Epstein.

After barely six months of leading the nation’s military, embattled Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth wants to hang it up and run for office.

NBC News sources have reported that Hegseth has privately considered running for governor in his home state of Tennessee next year.

While unconfirmed, Hegseth’s exit would be a fitting end to a tumultuous time as defense secretary, in which he somehow successfully endured a confirmation process that aired out allegations of rape, sexual assault, domestic violence, alcoholism, misogyny, and racism—only to enter immediate chaos and dysfunction in the Pentagon. If this is the end, Hegseth will be remembered for SignalGate, Defense Department infighting, and pausing aid to Ukraine without telling the president.

The DOD has vehemently denied any rumors of Hegseth’s exit

“Fake news NBC is so desperate for attention, they are shopping around a made up story … again,” Pentagon chief spokesman Sean Parnell said in a statement. “Only two options exist: either the ‘sources’ are imaginary or these reporters are getting punked. Secretary Hegseth’s focus remains solely on serving under President Trump and advancing the America First mission at the Department of Defense.”

If the rumors are true, Hegseth would face a crowded field. Republican John Rose has already announced his gubernatorial campaign, and GOP firebrand Marsha Blackburn is expected to do the same next week.

The New York Times on Tuesday evening issued a statement announcing that it had updated its report on the starvation gripping Gaza—and particularly afflicting children—due to Israel restricting supplies.

The report touched, among other tragic stories, on that of Mohammed Zakaria Al Mutawaq, a 18-month-old suffering from severe malnutrition, whose photo has circulated widely as international attention turns increasingly to Gaza’s starvation crisis.

“We have since learned new information” about the child, the Times stated, “and have updated our story to add context about his preexisting health problems” and give “readers a greater understanding of his situation.”

The added paragraph is as follows:

Mohammed, according to his doctor, had pre-existing health problems affecting his brain and his muscle development. But his health deteriorated rapidly in recent months as it became increasingly difficult to find food and medical care, and the medical clinic that treated him said he suffers from severe malnutrition.

Contrary to those already claiming that this detail proves Israel is not culpable for the crisis unfolding in Gaza, Al Mutawaq is still being starved to death. (As Nathan J. Robinson of Current Affairs notes, “This actually makes it even more grotesque. Of course the first people to die have pre-existing health problems. Starvation is a eugenic policy which first kills off the weakest and sickest.”)

And the detail doesn’t change the enormity of the crisis in Gaza. Thousands of children are starving—and, it’s worth noting, a doctor cited elsewhere in the Times report observes that “many of the children he sees have no pre-existing medical conditions.” The Times’ description of scenes in Gaza’s strained hospitals—of “hollow-eyed, skeletal children” with “protruding ribs and shoulder blades, and emaciated limbs resembling brittle sticks”—is no less haunting, and no less the result of an Israeli blockade, than it was before.

The man who ordered Justice Department staff to ignore judges to speed up deportations is now a federal judge himself.

On Tuesday, the Senate voted 50–49 to confirm senior Justice Department official Emil Bove, formerly Donald Trump’s personal lawyer, for a lifetime seat on the the Third Circuit Court of Appeals. Republican Senators Susan Collins and Lisa Murkowski joined Democrats in voting against Bove.

Last month, it was revealed that Bove, while orchestrating the extrajudicial deportations of hundreds of men to El Salvador, “stressed to all in attendance that planes needed to take off no matter what,” although he was well aware of “the possibility that a court order would enjoin those removals before they could be effectuated.”

“Bove stated that DOJ would need to consider telling the courts ‘fuck you’ and ignore any such court order,” according to whistleblower Erez Reuveni’s report. But instead of having his nomination rescinded for obvious corruption and insubordination, Bove will now hold a powerful judicial position until the day he dies. This is also the same man who fired prosecutors for investigating January 6 and accused the FBI of “insubordination” for not snitching on staffers who worked on the investigation. As a New York state prosecutor, he was described by colleagues as someone who could not “be bothered to treat lesser mortals with respect or empathy.”

“He is a Trumpian henchman—the extreme of the extreme of the extreme. He is openly hostile to the rule of law. He is fundamentally opposed to democratic norms. He lacks the temperament to serve as a jurist,” Minority Leader Chuck Schumer said. “And above all, Mr. Bove is religiously obedient to Donald Trump.”

“Shame on you,” Schumer continued after the vote. “This is a dark, dark day.”