Trump Celebrates New York Fraud Win by Lying His Butt Off

Donald Trump declared “total victory” over New York Attorney General Letitia James Thursday after a state appeals court tossed his bank fraud disgorgement.

In several lengthy Truth Social posts, the president incorrectly claimed that the court had voted “5 to 0” in his favor (it did not) and that “every single dollar was thrown out” (which is also untrue).

Trump also inanely suggested that the civil trial was yet another example of election interference, and that the attorney general’s case was the brainchild of former President Joe Biden and former Vice President Kamala Harris.

“It was a Political Witch Hunt, in a business sense, the likes of which no one has ever seen before,” the president wrote in a lengthy Truth Social post. “This was a Case of Election Interference by the City and State trying to show, illegally, that I did things that were wrong when, in fact, everything I did was absolutely CORRECT and, even, PERFECT.”

The president also posted a video of a still image of himself in court, set to DJ Khaled’s song “All I Do Is Win.”

What actually happened in the New York appeals court was, nonetheless, a major coup for Trump. Three judges on a five-judge panel voted to throw out Trump’s $500 million disgorgement Thursday, claiming the resulting penalty for the Trump Organization’s bank fraud case was an “excessive fine.”

At least two judges on the court agreed with the original ruling that found Trump and his codefendants liable for fraud, noting that the injunctive relief ordered by the presiding judge was “well crafted to curb defendants’ business culture.” However, the final page of the order stated that “three out of the five members of this panel clearly believe that the judgment should be vacated,” on the basis that the “attorney general has not yet proven her case.”

In her own statement, James underscored that the court had still affirmed that “Trump, his company, and two of his children are liable for fraud,” and that her office would appeal the ruling.

“The court upheld the injunctive relief we won, limiting Donald Trump and the Trump Organization officers’ ability to do business in New York,” she said. “It should not be lost to history: Yet another court has ruled that the president violated the law, and that our case has merit.”

The Israeli Defense Force’s own database has confirmed what has been obvious for almost two years now: The overwhelming majority of Palestinians killed in Israel’s war on Gaza are civilians, not Hamas fighters, as Israel has claimed.

On Thursday, +972 Magazine reported that recently declassified documents reveal five in six people killed in the genocide in Gaza were noncombatant civilians—around 83 percent. Israel has stated that it killed or “probably killed” 8,900 Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad fighters.

The total reported death toll in Gaza is around 62,000, although the true number is thought to be much higher.

While the IDF did not object to +972’s report when it came out, it told The Guardian that “figures presented in the article are incorrect.”

These numbers, though, appear to accurately reflect the indiscriminate killing campaign that Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu launched on Gaza after the attacks of October 7, 2023. Israel had occupied Gaza and subjected Palestinians to violence for many decades before the war began.

Even the IDF’s own soldiers admit to exaggerating the number of Hamas deaths in the war.

“People are promoted to the rank of terrorist after their death,” one source on the ground told The Guardian. “If I had listened to the brigade, I would have come to the conclusion that we had killed 200% of Hamas operatives in the area.”

Israel has always claimed it was killing militants in order to justify the bombings, aid-drop assassinations, targeted killings of more than 250 journalists, and a brutal famine.

It’s worth noting that nearly 20,000 of the Palestinians killed in Gaza have been children.

Itzhak Brik, a retired Israeli general, said serving Israeli soldiers were aware that politicians exaggerated the Hamas toll.

Brik advised Prime Minister Netanyahu at the start of the war, and is now among his most strident critics. “There is absolutely no connection between the numbers that are announced and what is actually happening,” Brik told The Guardian. “It is just one big bluff.”

Escalating its mission to eliminate so-called “woke” content from the Smithsonian, Trump’s team has just publicly identified artwork it hopes to censor.

On Thursday, the White House’s official rapid response X account shared a post casting aspersions on a Rigoberto A. Gonzalez painting titled Refugees Crossing the Border Wall Into South Texas.

The piece depicts a family of four in Baroque style: two parents with a young boy and a baby, at a ladder leaning against the southern border wall. A finalist for the National Portrait Gallery’s 2022 Outwin Boochever Portrait Competition, the piece appeared in that Smithsonian Museum from 2022 to 2023, according to the competition’s website.

The White House social team, seemingly irked by this humanizing portrayal of people demonized by the Trump administration, accused the work of “commemorating the act of illegally crossing the ‘exclusionary’ border.”

“This is what President Trump means when he says the Smithsonian is ‘OUT OF CONTROL,’” the post says—quoting from a recent Truth Social post in which the president lamented that the Smithsonian overemphasizes negative aspects of America, such as “how bad Slavery was.”

In a Thursday press release, the White House listed Gonzalez’s painting with other supposedly damning proof that the institution is in the grip of wokeness, including an American History Museum collection on LGBTQ+ history.

National Intelligence Director Tulsi Gabbard, who was previously criticized for acting like a Russian asset, is planning to gut the agency responsible for monitoring influence from foreign governments.

The Office of the Director of National Intelligence published a fact sheet saying it would begin “refocusing functions” within the supposedly “redundant” Foreign Malign Influence Center, alleging that it had been used by the Biden administration to “justify the suppression of free speech and to censor political opposition.”

ODNI cited FMIC coordinating with Twitter, Facebook, and Google on the companies’ responses to the 2020 New York Post story about Hunter Biden’s laptop, which was removed from several platforms over government concerns that it was part of a Russian disinformation operation. Since it was first reported on, the laptop has been proven to be authentic, but many of Republicans’ allegations that it tied the Bidens to corrupt foreign business dealings have not been.

ODNI claimed that FMIC had developed a “hyper-focus” on election-related issues after a 2017 Intelligence Community Assessment reported that Russian President Vladimir Putin had “aspired” to see Donald Trump enter the White House. In the last month, Gabbard has launched a campaign to discredit this report, claiming that the Obama administration had sown a false narrative about Putin supporting Trump, even though Putin has openly admitted that he’d preferred Trump over Hillary Clinton.

ODNI’s efforts to “refocus” FMIC are particularly ironic considering that Gabbard has a history of foisting foreign misinformation on the American public herself. Gabbard previously defended Russia’s incursion into Ukraine, claiming that the U.S. had provoked Russian aggression, and that Ukraine housed U.S.-funded biolabs that were developing secret bioweapons—a piece of foreign state propaganda that earned her the reputation of being a Russian asset.

More recently, she parroted the conclusions of Russian spies during a White House press briefing, claiming that Clinton had experienced “psycho-emotional problems, uncontrolled fits of anger, aggression, and cheerfulness,” a rumor that was based on debunked Russian intelligence.

ODNI’s fact sheet claimed that “refocusing FMIC’s mission” would save taxpayers at least $7 million per year. The massive restructuring would also refocus the National Counterproliferation and Biosecurity Center and the Cyber Threat Intelligence Integration Center. Gabbard has announced plans to cut her department’s staff by 50 percent and reduce its annual budget by $700 million.

U.S. Attorney General Pam Bondi is boasting about—well, not doing much of anything in regard to gun seizures in Washington, D.C.

“We’ve now made a total of 630 arrests and seized 86 illegal guns in DC. 53 arrests were made yesterday, plus 24 ICE arrests and 10 guns taken off the streets. Our incredible US Marshals even helped recover a missing child,” Bondi wrote Thursday morning on X. “Our mission to make DC safe again isn’t slowing down.”

Bondi’s right about one thing: The mission isn’t “slowing down.” It’s not moving anywhere at all. Law enforcement is taking guns off the street at around the same rate it was last year, even with the increased show of force from the federal government.

“DC police records show they recovered 2,895 firearms in 2024—works out to an average of about 8 per day & ~100 over two weeks,” wrote Courthouse News’s Benjamin S. Weiss. “Federal gun seizures on track to be more or less the same in roughly that same period, per AG.”

This kind of blatant posturing has become commonplace in the past few weeks. The federal government wants so badly for us to believe that its influx of police has made the nation’s capital much safer, when in fact, it’s been a lot more show than substance.