Trump Invents Bizarre New Conspiracy About Charlie Kirk and Jack Smith

President Donald Trump went on a wild rant against former special counsel Jack Smith for allegedly investigating Charlie Kirk’s Turning Point USA.

“Why was the wonderful Turning Point under INVESTIGATION by ‘Deranged’ Jack Smith and the Corrupt & Incompetent Biden Administration,” Trump wrote. “They tried to force Charlie, and many other people and movements, out of business. They Weaponized the Justice Department against Sleepy Joe Biden’s Political Opponents, including ME!”

The short answer to Trump’s question is because of his alleged efforts to remain in power after losing the 2020 presidential election.

During a Senate Judiciary Committee hearing Wednesday, Chairman Chuck Grassley said that Turning Point USA, Kirk’s conservative youth organization, was one of several Republican organizations targeted by Arctic Frost, an FBI probe into Trump’s alleged efforts to overturn the 2020 presidential election results.

A read-out published by Grassley explained that operation Arctic Frost was a joint effort started in April 2022 between the FBI, the DOJ Office of Inspector General, the U.S. Postal Inspection Service, and the National Archives and Records Administration that had been assigned to Smith.

Turning Point USA received a subpoena in December 2022, along with several other event-organizing groups, such as the Make America Great Again PAC. These groups had been subpoenaed along the “thread” of possibly supplying money for the deadly riot at the Capitol on January 6, 2021.

Kirk had publicly promoted the January 6 rally, as well as Trump’s infamous call to “fight like hell,” before the riot turned deadly, according to The Guardian. Turning Point Action, the advocacy arm of Kirk’s organization, had been one of a dozen groups to deliver busloads of Trump allies to the “March to Save America.”

Unable to dwell on a single thought, even in writing, Trump continued to rant about a gag order placed on him by New York state Supreme Court Justice Juan Merchan, after the president led attacks against Merchan’s family and staff nearly a year ago.

An Immigration and Customs Enforcement report revealed that officials at Camp East Montana, the new detention facility at Fort Bliss, have already violated dozens of federal standards for immigrant detention since welcoming detainees in August, The Washington Post reported Tuesday.

Construction began hastily in late July, after the government awarded a nearly $232 million contract to Virginia-based company Acquisition Logistics to establish and operate a 5,000-bed short-term immigrant detention facility. The company specializes in supply chain management, and has no experience in detention—and it’s showing.

The first detainees arrived on August 1, only days after construction began. Just 50 days later, and with 1,400 detainees in its charge, the facility had racked up at least 60 violations, according to a recent ICE inspection.

Detainees at Camp East Montana were held in large tents on an active construction site without basic amenities, similarly to detainees at the now shuttered Alligator Alcatraz. Some toilets and sinks did not work for the first few weeks, according to an August memo obtained by the Post. Detainees were not given access to telephones, the Post reported, only tablet computers that sometimes didn’t work.

Ricardo Quintana Chavez, a 57-year-old asylum-seeker who was held at Fort Bliss for 24 days before being deported to Peru, told the Post that water seeped into his cell when other people used the showers.

Chavez also told the Post that he was rarely allowed outside. ICE policy requires one hour of recreation a day, five days per week, but inspectors at Camp East Montana found that detainees were only given 40 minutes of recreation per session, and some only received three sessions over a two-week period. Chavez also said he was fed junk food, such as cookies, candies, and potato chips, instead of substantive meals.

Detainees were kept in the dark about their cases, and many said they didn’t know who their deportation officer was, in violation of ICE standards. Chavez told the Post that he received no information about the status of his asylum case over his three-week stay at Camp East Montana.

ICE inspectors also said that officials at the detention center failed to provide proper and mandatory medical care for detainees, failing to conduct intake screenings and complete medical charts that could be used to identify medical and mental conditions.

Detainees’ family members and legal representatives struggled to get hold of them while they were at Camp East Montana, as their location was not available on ICE’s website. Legal representatives reported being turned away from the facility, as did Texas Representative Veronica Escobar. She said she’d complied with ICE’s demand for a week’s advance warning but was still told she couldn’t visit until construction was completed.

Michelle Brané, a former immigration detention ombudsman, said that the report was one of the most concerning evaluations of an immigrant detention center she had ever seen. “There is no way that this facility should be operating with their current numbers, let alone expanding,” she told the Post.

President Donald Trump on Tuesday was asked about how he’s profited off the presidency—and did not take kindly to the line of questioning.

Ahead of Trump’s state visit to the U.K., John Lyons, an editor at the Australian Broadcasting Corporation, asked the president how much wealthier he is now than when he assumed office.

“Well, I don’t know,” Trump replied. “The deals I made, for the most part, other than what my kids are doing—you know, they’re running my business. But most of the deals that I’ve made were made before.”

The president quickly changed the subject to his latest hobby horse—the new ballroom he’s having built at the White House—before Lyons asked, “But is it appropriate, President Trump, that a president in office should be engaged in so much business activity?”

“Well, I’m really not,” Trump answered. “My kids are running the business. I’m here.” The president then derailed his own response, asking where Lyons is from and suggesting that he would hold the reporter’s queries against his home country.

“In my opinion, you are hurting Australia very much right now, and they want to get along with me,” Trump said. “You know, your leader is coming over to see me very soon. I’m going to tell him about you. You set a very bad tone.”

As Trump turned to another reporter, Lyons asked another question, and was shushed by the president, who pointed at him and sternly said, “Quiet.”

Australian Prime Minister Anthony Albanese is scheduled to travel to New York next week for the U.N. General Assembly. Trump had not previously announced, as he seemed to hint during his quarrel with Lyons, a one-on-one sit-down with Albanese. But the president apparently couldn’t help but mention it as leverage against a reporter.

Lyons’s questions come amid reports of Trump’s fortune having ballooned while in office—and of scandalous ways he’s profited off the presidency. On Monday, for instance, The New York Times published an exposé of two overlapping deals: one in which an Emirati royal’s firm invested $2 billion in a Trump family crypto business and another in which the United Arab Emirates will receive hundreds of thousands of advanced AI chips.

The White House denies the deals were linked—and, per the Times, there’s no evidence they constituted an explicit quid pro quo. (If they did, though, it would represent the biggest public corruption scandal in U.S. history by far, according to a former White House economist.)

Trump’s rapid-response social media team declared his outburst at Lyons to be a moment of strength, triumphantly tweeting that the president had “smack[ed] down a rude foreign Fake News loser.”

Friends and family of Tyler Robinson, Charlie Kirk’s suspected assassin, say that the national narrative has not aligned with what they know about the 22-year-old from Utah.

Speaking with independent journalist Ken Klippenstein, Robinson’s friends described him as smart, friendly, and largely uninterested in politics—a detail that has made the shooting all the more difficult for them to understand.

“I think the main thing that’s caused so much confusion is that he was always generally apolitical for the most part,” one of Robinson’s friends told Klippenstein under the banner of anonymity. “That’s the big thing, he just never really talked politics which is why it’s so frustrating.”

The Trump administration and its MAGA allies have thus far painted Robinson as an antifa (antifascist) agent, while left-wing verticals have portrayed him as a member of the far right. But close confidants say that neither is wholly accurate: Robinson held complicated, bipartisan views.

“Obviously he’s okay with gay and trans people having a right to exist, but also believes in the Second Amendment,” the friend said.

And although Robinson’s MAGA family have been giving sound bites to the press, there was a lot that Robinson’s family didn’t know about him, according to his friends. Case in point: his bisexuality, and his relationship with his roommate, a transgender person named Lance.

Even Lance was caught off guard by Robinson’s act, according to text messages that the two exchanged after Kirk was shot. The texts were published as part of Robinson’s criminal charges. When pressed as to why he murdered Kirk, Robinson told his partner: “I had enough of his hatred. Some hate can’t be negotiated out.”

Robinson said he had planned the assassination for a little over a week, and added that the etched engravings on his bullet casings—which refer to a couple of popular video games—were “mostly a big meme” that he thought would be amusing to see discussed on Fox News.

Robinson had a “stone cold poker face” and could be “super hard to read,” another friend told Klippenstein. Those close to Robinson didn’t believe he was hiding anything from them. “As far as we knew he was opened up,” the second friend said.

No one could have envisioned that Robinson, a well-liked straight-A student, would be capable of or even interested in killing Kirk.

“To all of us he just seemed like a simple guy who liked playing games like Sea of Thieves, Deep Rock Galactic, and Helldivers 2, loved to fish and loved to camp,” the second friend said. “It really did seem like that’s all he was about.”

Robinson turned himself in to authorities on Friday. He was charged Tuesday with aggravated murder, felony discharge of a firearm causing serious bodily injury, and obstruction of justice, among other charges. Prosecutors announced that they are seeking the death penalty in the case.

404 Media has reported that in the aftermath of Charlie Kirk’s murder, Trump’s Justice Department deleted a study from its website stating that right-wing violence “continues to outpace all other types of terrorism and domestic violent extremism” in the United States. This comes as the Trump  administration and Republicans generally blame political violence solely on the left.

The study was available online at least until Friday, according to 404 Media, but can now only be found via a Wayback Machine link. 

The study, published in 2024 and conducted by the National Institute of Justice, is titled, “What NIJ Research Tells Us About Domestic Terrorism.” The first words are: “Militant, nationalistic, violent extremism has increased in the United States. In fact, the number of far-right attacks continues to outpace all other types of terrorism and domestic violent extremism.”

“Since 1990, far-right extremists have committed far more ideologically motivated homicides than far-left or radical Islamist extremists, including 227 events that took more than 520 lives,” the study noted. “In this same period, far-left extremists committed 42 ideologically motivated attacks that took 78 lives.”

It’s highly likely that the DOJ took this study down because it doesn’t fit with the narrative the GOP is trying so desperately to push about the left being to blame for the bulk of political violence in this country, willfully ignoring countless examples of that not being the case at all.