“Imaginary and Unfounded”: Jack Smith Finally Hits Back at MAGA

After being much maligned by MAGA for leading criminal cases against Donald Trump (until he returned to the presidency), Jack Smith is finally striking back.

Earlier this month, the Office of Special Counsel heeded Republican Senator Tom Cotton’s call to launch a Hatch Act investigation into the former special counsel, on the allegation that Smith’s efforts to prosecute Trump for mishandling classified documents and conspiring to overturn the 2020 election constituted “unprecedented interference in the 2024 election.”

Smith’s lawyers responded with a withering three-page letter to the OSC, published Tuesday by The New York Times, in which they defended Smith’s integrity and skewered Cotton’s allegations.

“The predicate for this investigation is imaginary and unfounded,” the lawyers wrote, as many of Cotton’s purported findings of wrongdoing amounted to “routine,” court-approved actions—such as requesting to exceed the 45-page limit for opening motions, proposing a trial date roughly five months after a grand jury indictment, and seeking expedited review by an appeals court.

Such “unremarkable examples,” the lawyers wrote, were in keeping with the typical duties of a prosecutor.

And while Cotton accused Smith of circumventing standard legal processes in his unsuccessful attempt to bypass a lower court and get the Supreme Court to rule on presidential immunity, Smith’s lawyers pointed out that this decision was backed by precedent in “the most analogous prior case,” i.e., the United States v. Nixon case related to Watergate.

Thus, the lawyers wrote, the OSC investigation is “premised on a partisan complaint that suggests the ordinary operation of the criminal justice system should be disrupted by the whims of a political contest. But the notion that justice should yield to politics is antithetical to the rule of law.”

Department of Government Efficiency whistleblower Charles Borges has revealed that DOGE employees uploaded a copy of an important Social Security database containing the full names, dates of birth, and addresses of hundreds of millions of Americans onto a cloud server, making the data vulnerable to leaks and hackers.

Borges, the Social Security Administration’s chief data officer, indicated that DOGE refused to put “independent security or oversight mechanisms in place,” creating “enormous vulnerabilities.”

“Should bad actors gain access to this cloud environment, Americans may be susceptible to widespread identity theft, may lose vital health care and food benefits, and the government may be responsible for reissuing every American a new Social Security number at great cost,” Borges wrote in his whistleblower complaint.

Despite cybersecurity officials at the SSA expressing their concern, DOGE stooges said that its mission was more important than the basic safety and security of American citizens’ personal information.

“I have determined the business need is higher than the security risk associated with this implementation and I accept all risks,” said SSA Chief Information Officer Aram Moghaddassi, who previously worked for former DOGE leader Elon Musk at X and Neuralink.

This only reaffirms the well-documented concerns about the security risk that giving young, Silicon Valley-coded DOGE-bros like Edward Coristine (aka “Big Balls”) access to sensitive information on millions of Americans raises.

The White House has yet to comment on Borges’s most recent complaint.

President Trump continues to let America know that he has no issue with being considered a dictator. In fact, he’s embracing it.

Trump spent much of his Tuesday Cabinet meeting touting his federal takeover of D.C. and lashing out at Democratic governors like Maryland’s Wes Moore and California’s Gavin Newsom for what he thinks is rampant crime in their major cities.

“[Wes Moore] goes on television and says, ‘Oh, Trump is a dictator.’ … So the line is that I’m a dictator. But I stop crime. So a lotta people say ‘You know, if that’s the case then I’d rather have a dictator,’” Trump said in the meeting while his Cabinet members chuckled. “But I’m not a dictator, I just know how to stop crime.”

This comes just 24 hours after he claimed that the American people actually do want a dictator while speaking on his proposal to send National Guard troops to Chicago.

“A lot of people are saying, ‘Maybe we’d like a dictator,’” Trump said on Monday. “I don’t like a dictator, I’m not a dictator,” he quickly added. “I’m a man with great common sense, and I’m a smart person.”

Trump is certainly flirting with dictatorship. He has set the National Guard loose on D.C. and L.A., criminalized flag burning, attacked his political enemies relentlessly, and consistently alluded to an unconstitutional third term for himself. He might as well just admit the obvious at this point: He certainly wants to be a dictator, and he’s not that far off from it.

The U.S. is not monitoring foodborne illnesses like it used to.

As of last month, the only federal-state partnership responsible for overseeing food contaminants at the national level has massively scaled back its operations, reported NBC News.

Prior to July 1, the Foodborne Diseases Active Surveillance Network—also known as FoodNet—was tracking infections caused by eight pathogens, including campylobacter, cyclospora, listeria, shigella, vibrio and Yersinia, some of which are the root cause of serious or life threatening illness.

That number has now been reduced to just two: salmonella and the Shiga toxin-producing E. coli, according to the report.

A spokesperson for the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said in a statement that monitoring all eight pathogens is no longer federally required of the 10 states participating in the food monitoring program.

“Although FoodNet will narrow its focus to Salmonella and STEC, it will maintain both its infrastructure and the quality it has come to represent,” the CDC spokesperson wrote. “Narrowing FoodNet’s reporting requirements and associated activities will allow FoodNet staff to prioritize core activities.”

A memo provided to the Connecticut Public Health Department by the CDC, reviewed by NBC, indicated that the downsized project was due to a lack of available funding for America’s food safety.

“Funding has not kept pace with the resources required to maintain the continuation of FoodNet surveillance for all eight pathogens,” the note read.

FoodNet is a federal-state collaboration that surveils food-borne illnesses for 54 million Americans. It combines the efforts of the CDC, the Food and Drug Administration, the Agriculture Department and 10 state health departments, including in Colorado, Connecticut, Georgia, Maryland, Minnesota, New Mexico, Oregon, Tennessee, and certain counties in California and New York.

Food safety experts stress that the pared down project could hold serious ramifications for America’s public health policy and make it more difficult for federal officials to respond to—or even learn of—serious outbreaks.

Federal Reserve Governor Lisa Cook is suing President Donald Trump for attempting to remove her, a move that appears to be part of his crusade against the central bank.

Cook’s attorney Abbe Lowell announced Tuesday morning that Cook intended to launch a legal challenge to the president’s shocking attempt to meddle with the Federal Reserve Bank.

“President Trump has no authority to remove Federal Reserve Governor Lisa Cook,” Lowell said in a statement. “His attempt to fire her, based solely on a referral letter, lacks any factual or legal basis. We will be filing a lawsuit challenging this illegal action.”

Trump announced Monday that he was removing Cook “for cause,” citing unproven allegations of mortgage fraud from Federal Housing Finance Agency Director William Pulte.

Cook dismissed Trump’s attempt to fire her in a statement. “President Trump purported to fire me ‘for cause’ when no cause exists under the law, and he has no authority to do so. I will not resign. I will continue to carry out my duties to help the American economy as I have been doing since 2022,” she said.

Pulte’s allegation against Cook suggests a trend of politically motivated mortgage fraud claims, as similar allegations have been made against Senator Adam Schiff and New York Attorney General Letitia James.

It’s also worth noting that mortgage fraud would not necessarily constitute “cause” for her removal, as its entirely unrelated to her duties.

Trump has undertaken a months-long campaign to undermine the credibility of the Federal Reserve Bank, as his desire for interest-rate cuts to stave tariff-driven inflation has been met with resistance from Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell.

Powell, who has repeatedly issued grave warnings about Trump’s economic policies, has also received threats of removal from the president—something that is not within the executive’s power to do. On Friday, Powell warned that the jobs market had suffered a “much larger” slowdown than the bank had determined just a month earlier.

President Donald Trump is expected to soon place longtime loyalist Dan Scavino in charge of White House personnel matters—passing over far-right provocateur Laura Loomer, who was apparently eyeing the job.

As the previous personnel chief moves to a diplomatic role, Scavino will add “Presidential Personnel Office Director” to a resume already stacked with experiences working for Trump—from golf course manager to deputy chief of staff in his first administration.

The appointment is a snub to Loomer, whom some within the MAGA base were hoping would get the job, according to Politico. Loomer told the publication that it would be an “honor” to be chosen for the role.

The MAGA agitator already holds something of a de facto personnel role at the White House, with several of the administration’s recent staffing decisions traceable to her influence. The MAGA influencer regularly gins up campaigns against insufficiently loyal Trump officials, and even maintains a tip line where one can report Democratic sleeper cells in the administration.

Loomer has repeatedly expressed her interest in working for the president. And while Trump has reportedly considered fulfilling that wish in the past, she claims these attempts have been blocked by jealous staffers.

“I had four jobs given to me in this Trump administration that basically have been taken away from me because some of President Trump’s staff suffer from the incurable disease of professional jealousy,” Loomer recently told ABC.

“I wish I did work for the president,” Loomer said in June, during the deposition in her defamation lawsuit against late-night host Bill Maher, “but he asks me my opinions about [personnel] matters, and I give him my opinion. And so it’s an honor. It really is. But it would be an even bigger honor to be working in an official capacity in the White House.”

But, as conservative website The Free Press reported this month, White House officials are wary of Loomer, with one calling her “more trouble than she’s worth,” and questioning where the Trump loyalty enforcer’s own loyalties lie. “She used to pretty much just amplify the MAGA line,” the unnamed official said, “but now it’s pretty clear that she has her own agenda.”

Despite her unrequited desire to be brought officially aboard by Trump, Loomer says she’s intent on keeping her independent operation churning for his sake. “If I’m going to be denied access by jealous staffers … then I have to operate as my own independent agency,” she told ABC.

A Trump-appointed federal judge just did something truly unexpected.

On Tuesday, U.S. District Court Judge Thomas T. Cullen dismissed the Department of Justice’s lawsuit challenging a Maryland judge’s two-day waiting period on deportations—and offered a scathing rebuke of the administration’s attacks on the federal judiciary. 

The judge defended a previous ruling that granted immigrant detainees a 48-hour long temporary stay of removal, to provide judges with enough time to actually read their habeas petitions.  

In May, Chief Judge George L. Russell III had originally ruled that the brief stay was necessary to “preserve existing conditions and the potential jurisdiction of this Court over pending matters while the Court determines the scope of its authority to grant the request[ed] relief.”

The DOJ challenged the ruling, alleging that the court had overstepped its authority, violated local court rules, and wrongly granted automatic relief to a special class of litigants. 

But in his 39-page filing Tuesday, Cullen wrote that the government had gone about its grievances all wrong.

“Fair enough, as far as it goes. If these arguments were made in the proper forum, they might well get some traction,” Cullen wrote, adding, “But as events over the past several months have revealed these are not normal times—at least regarding the interplay between the Executive and this coordinate branch of government. It’s no surprise that the Executive chose a different, and more confrontational, path entirely.”

In a footnote, Cullen slammed the Trump administration’s “smear” campaign against the federal judiciary.

“Indeed, over the past several months, principal officers of the Executive (and their spokespersons) have described federal district judges across the country as ‘left-wing,’ liberal,’ ‘activists,’ ‘radical,’ ‘politically minded,’ ‘rogue,’ ‘unhinged,’ ‘outrageous, overzealous, [and] unconstitutional,’ ‘c]rooked,’ and worse,” Cullen wrote. “Although some tension between the coordinate branches of government is a hallmark of our constitutional system, this concerted effort by the Executive to smear and impugn individual judges who rule against it is both unprecedented and unfortunate.”

Cullen wrote that there was “no alternative but to dismiss” the government’s lawsuit. 

“To hold otherwise would run counter to overwhelming precedent, depart from longstanding constitutional tradition, and offend the rule of law,” the judge wrote. “All of this isn’t to say that the Executive is without any recourse; far from it. If the Executive truly believes that Defendants’ standing orders violate the law, it should avail itself of the tried-and-true recourse available to all federal litigants: It should appeal.”

There’s some good news in Utah: On Monday, Judge Dianna Gibson blocked the state’s Republican-controlled legislature from enacting their heavily gerrymandered congressional map, declaring it unconstitutional. Instead the state will defer to the independent redistricting reform that citizens voted for back in 2018, known as “Proposition 4.” 

“Proposition 4 is the law in Utah on redistricting. H.B. 2004, the 2021 Congressional Map, which was not enacted under S.B. 200 and not Proposition 4, cannot lawfully govern future elections in Utah,” Gibson wrote. “The Legislature intentionally stripped away all of Proposition 4’s core redistricting standards and procedures that were mandatory and binding on it.... To permit the 2021 Congressional Plan to remain in place would reward the very constitutional violation this Court has already identified and would nullify the people’s 2018 redistricting reform.” 

Republican attempts to supersede Proposition 4 began in 2021, when they ignored ballot measures and split up Salt Lake County, the district that contains most of the state’s Democratic voters. Now that their move has been struck down, lawmakers have just under a month to bring the map up to Proposition 4 standards.   

This comes as Texas and California are locked in a heated gerrymandering battle, as the former carries out a Trump-backed effort to add multiple Republican seats to the House, while the latter starts its own retaliatory redistricting effort under Democratic Governor Gavin Newsom. The results in Utah, in addition to the language in Gibson’s ruling, serve as a positive sign for those who want to bring legal challenges on gerrymandering in the near future. 

Nobody seems to like Cracker Barrel’s brand overhaul—including the president.

Donald Trump weighed in on the culture war fiasco Tuesday, urging the Tennessee-born “old country store” to return to its design roots.

“Cracker Barrel should go back to the old logo, admit a mistake based on customer response (the ultimate Poll), and manage the company better than ever before,” Trump wrote on Truth Social. “They got a Billion Dollars worth of free publicity if they play their cards right. Very tricky to do, but a great opportunity. Have a major News Conference today. Make Cracker Barrel a WINNER again.”

The U.S. leader then took the opportunity to toot his own horn, absurdly claiming that he had resurrected America from a supposedly decrepit state last year.

“Remember, in just a short period of time I made the United States of America the ‘HOTTEST’ Country anywhere in the World,” Trump noted. “One year ago, it was ‘DEAD.’ Good luck!”

The restaurant chain’s redesign stripped down its logo, removing the imagery of the old man (known as “Uncle Herschel”) and his barrel, replacing it with simple, minimalist text. The stores are expected to undergo a similar redecoration, eschewing the company’s old-timey, gold and wood-toned brand for grayer, cleaner decor that would have been on trend if it was unveiled some 15 years ago.

It took the brains of three PR firms—Prophet, Viral Nation and Blue Engine—to cook up Cracker Barrel’s $700 million transformation.

While no one seems particularly jazzed about the overhaul—the company’s stock plummeted by almost $100 million in the wake of the announcement—MAGA pundits have taken particular issue with Cracker Barrel’s rebrand.

Podcaster Matt Walsh called the effort “generic.” Fox & Friends called it “woke.” Turning Point USA founder Charlie Kirk was particularly chuffed—in separate posts, Kirk claimed that Cracker Barrel was “targeted” to promote “LGBTQ propaganda,” and also used the fiasco as an opportunity to fat shame, likening the new logo to an overweight woman while comparing the old one to Sydney Sweeney in her “great genes” American Eagle ad campaign.

The division wasn’t entirely partisan, however. The official X account for the Democratic party chimed in on the rebrand last week, writing: “We think the Cracker Barrel rebrand sucks too.”

The company practically apologized for its new look Monday, releasing a statement recognizing the design misstep while emphasizing that the brand had not forgotten about Uncle Herschel.

“If the last few days have shown us anything, it’s how deeply people care about Cracker Barrel,” the company posted on its website Monday. “You’ve also shown us that we could’ve done a better job sharing who we are and who we’ll always be.”

President Trump on Monday signed an executive order to bolster his federal occupation of Washington, D.C., and create a “quick reaction force” in the National Guard that could be deployed to tamp down civil protests across the country.

Hidden in that executive order is a chilling directive to the “D.C. Safe and Beautiful Task Force,” led by White House adviser Stephen Miller to “establish an online portal for Americans with law enforcement or other relevant backgrounds and experience to apply to join Federal law enforcement entities” in support of his previous order declaring a “crime emergency” in D.C.

The order continues:

“Each law enforcement agency that is a member of the D.C. Safe and Beautiful Task Force, as well as other relevant components of the Department of Justice as the Attorney General determines, shall further, subject to the availability of appropriations and applicable law, immediately create and begin training, manning, hiring, and equipping a specialized unit that is dedicated to ensuring public safety and order in the Nation’s capital that can be deployed whenever the circumstances necessitate, and that could be deployed, subject to applicable law, in other cities where public safety and order has been lost.” [emphasis added]

The move is sure to receive a warm reception from the far-right vigilante groups that are already, as The New Republic’s Melissa Gira Grant recently wrote, nodding along to federal forces’ actions on the streets of D.C.

Grant observed, for example, that Oath Keepers founder Stewart Rhodes, in a recent interview, spoke favorably of Trump’s crackdown on the capital and urged him to call up a militia for immigration enforcement. “He should call up all of us,” Rhodes said. “Every able-bodied male in this nation, age 17 to 45 could be called up as the militia.” For Rhodes and his ilk, Trump’s Monday executive order is surely a step in the right direction.