Karoline Leavitt Claims It’s Not Weaponization When Trump Does It

Karoline Leavitt is performing mental gymnastics to justify President Trump’s crackdown on free speech.

“Going back to the president’s social media posts from over the weekend regarding the DOJ and his seeming frustration that they hadn’t taken action quickly enough,” a reporter raised during Leavitt’s Monday press briefing, “I wanna point to something the president said during his inaugural address: ‘Never again will the immense power of the state be weaponized to persecute political opponents. We will not allow that to happen.’ Is the president going back on his promise?”

“No. In fact the president is fulfilling his promise to restore a Department of Justice that demands accountability. It is not weaponizing the Department of Justice to demand accountability for those who weaponized the Department of Justice,” Leavitt replied, employing some weak verbal trickery to coat the lie she was telling.

Then she brought out the therapy language. “We are not going to tolerate gaslighting from anyone in the media from anyone on the other side who is trying to say that it’s the president who is weaponizing the DOJ.... You look at people like Adam Schiff, and like James Comey, and like Letitia James, who the president is rightfully frustrated [with]. He wants accountability for these corrupt fraudsters who abused their power, who abused their oath of office to target the former president.”

So according to Leavitt, anyone who was involved in trying to hold Trump accountable for anything in his past—Letitia James, who successfully sued him for fraud, James Comey, who didn’t drop an investigation Trump wanted him to as FBI director, Adam Schiff, who was a key figure in both of Trump’s impeachments—was just wrong. Trump, who in MAGA’s mind has never done anything to deserve that kind of legal scrutiny, should now have free rein to target them.

Leavitt is one again lying through her teeth. The president is weaponizing state power to politically persecute his opponents, and it isn’t just at the DOJ. He sicced FCC Chair Brendan Carr on ABC and Jimmy Kimmel last week, and made it clear that any negative reporting of him should be illegal.

“Ninety-seven, 94, 95, 96 percent of the people are against me in the sense of the newscasts, are against me.… They’ll take a great story, and they’ll make it bad,” Trump said on Friday. “See, I think that’s really illegal, personally.”

It’s clear that if anyone is doing the gaslighting here it’s Trump and Leavitt.

White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt crumbled Monday when pressed about President Trump’s lawfare against New York Attorney General Letitia James.

Trump last week forced Erik Siebert out of his post as U.S. attorney for the Eastern District of Virginia for failing to find (read: concoct) evidence of James’s criminality during a five-month-long investigation.

James previously filed a civil case against Trump, in which he was ultimately found liable for business fraud in September 2023. (An appeals court last month tossed a $500 million penalty—but not the verdict.) Now, like several other Trump foes, James faces a thinly veiled retribution campaign, in which she’s accused by the administration of mortgage fraud.

ABC White House correspondent Selina Wang laid these facts before Leavitt at a Monday press conference. Considering that a monthslong investigation into James by Siebert (a Trump appointee) yielded no evidence, she asked, “Is the president saying here it doesn’t matter if there’s a crime, he just wants his political enemies to be charged?”

Leavitt launched into a tirade against James, who, she said, “completely abused her oath of office” and “was actively and openly engaged in lawfare.” The press secretary also falsely claimed that last month’s removal of Trump’s half-billion-dollar civil fraud penalty meant the president was “exonerated” of James’s “witch hunt”—when, in reality, the appeals court upheld the lower court’s verdict that Trump is indeed liable for fraud.

“Why won’t the president accept the conclusions of his Justice Department to not bring charges against Letitia James?” Wang followed up, observing that Siebert’s ouster was reportedly privately opposed by Attorney General Pam Bondi and Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche.

“I just answered that question for you,” Leavitt shot back—though she very much hadn’t. Trump, she added, “wants to see accountability for those who abuse their office and abuse their power, and Letitia James absolutely did that whether you want to admit it or not.”

“Is that not retribution, though?” Wang asked, to which Leavitt replied, “It’s accountability,” before brusquely taking another question.

Doctors are warning that the Trump administration’s move to force companies to pay $100,000 for employees on H-1B visas may very well cripple the country’s medical apparatus and make it even harder for Americans to get lifesaving care in a timely manner.

“Raising the H-1B visa fee to $100,000 risks shutting off the pipeline of highly trained physicians, especially in rural and underserved communities,” the American Medical Association said in a statement Monday.

“The H-1B nonimmigrant visa program was created to bring temporary workers into the United States to perform additive, high-skilled functions, but it has been deliberately exploited to replace, rather than supplement, American workers with lower-paid, lower-skilled labor,” the administration said in a statement announcing the new visa restriction on Friday. “The large-scale replacement of American workers through systemic abuse of the program has undermined both our economic and national security.”

International medical students and residents make up a huge portion of health care employment. Making their companies pay $100,000 in order to employ them would simply wipe many of them out, and rob their patients in the process.

“When you’re putting a doctor in the middle of rural Ohio or rural Indiana, and they have to serve the underserved—that kind of a price tag is going to wipe out a lot of health care for a lot of people across the country who really need it,” attorney David Leopold, who represents H-1B visa doctors serving in health care deserts, told Bloomberg. “If that visa’s not available, then we’re not able to place physicians in these areas.”

Scientist and former H-1B visa holder M.E. Siddall warned that this kind of tax on foreign professionals will lead to a reverse brain drain, as the world’s medical talent may look elsewhere for work.

“The history of the United States is attracting the best minds of the world,” he said. “Princeton would have to pay $100,000 for Einstein?”

The federal government is nixing its most prominent research program designed to track national food insecurity.

The Agriculture Department ended its Household Food Security Report over the weekend, referring to the 30-year study as “redundant.”

“These redundant, costly, politicized, and extraneous studies do nothing more than fear monger,” the USDA said in a press release Saturday, further deriding the research as “liberal fodder.”

“Trends in the prevalence of food insecurity have remained virtually unchanged, regardless of an over 87 percent increase in SNAP spending between 2019-2023,” the release noted, referring to ​​​​the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program.

But there is about to be a dramatic uptick in the number of Americans struggling to eat. Donald Trump’s One Big Beautiful Bill Act expanded the work requirements to qualify for SNAP earlier this year, a rescission that’s expected to leave at least 2.4 million Americans without food aid, according to NPR.

Further still, experts say the Agriculture Department’s claim that food insecurity has remained “unchanged” is patently untrue. Kyle Ross, a policy analyst with the progressive research group the Center for American Progress, told NPR that there was an uptick in food insecurity as recently as 2023. That year, the rate of food-insecure children in the United States grew by 3.2 percent over the year prior, according to data from the Food Research and Action Center.

“At that point, it has been the largest rate of food insecurity that the country has seen since 2014 and substantially larger than just two years prior,” Ross told the radio network.

The last iteration of the Household Food Security Report, published in 2024, found that 13.5 percent of American households were food insecure “at least some time during” 2023, which the report noted was “statistically significantly higher than the 12.8 percent in 2022.”

Anti-hunger researchers described the data provided by the national food insecurity survey as “critical.”

“Without that data, we are flying blind, and we don’t know the impact,” Crystal FitzSimons, president of the Food Research and Action Center told NPR.

Justice Elena Kagan slammed the Supreme Court’s conservative majority Monday for handing “full control” of independent agencies to President Donald Trump by allowing him to fire anyone he wants “for any reason or no reason at all.”

The Supreme Court issued a 6–3 ruling along ideological lines approving Trump’s emergency request to remove Rebecca Slaughter, a Democratic commissioner on the Federal Trade Commission. The court also announced that it would hear arguments for the case in December.

In a brief, scathing dissent, Kagan accused her conservative colleagues of allowing Trump to discharge a member of the FTC “without any cause,” just as they had let him do with the other independent agencies made up of bipartisan members: the National Labor Relations Board, the Merit Systems Protection Board, and the Consumer Product Safety Commission.

Trump “may now remove—so says the majority, though Congress said differently—any member he wishes, for any reason or no reason at all. And he may thereby extinguish the agencies’ bipartisanship and independence,” Kagan wrote.

Kagan cited the 1935 case Humphrey’s Executor v. United States, in which the court rejected Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s attempt to fire a conservative commissioner appointed by President Herbert Hoover overseeing his New Deal policies. “Congress, we held, may restrict the President’s power to remove members of the FTC, as well as other agencies performing ‘quasi-legislative or quasi-judicial’ functions, without violating the Constitution,” Kagan wrote, noting that that siding with the court here would be a reversal of that ruling.

“Our emergency docket should never be used, as it has been this year, to permit what our own precedent bars. Still more, it should not be used, as it also has been, to transfer government authority from Congress to the President, and thus to reshape the Nation’s separation of powers,” Kagan wrote.

Trump attempted to fire Slaughter in March, leading the commissioner to challenge the move, as presidents may only legally remove FTC commissioners for “inefficiency, neglect of duty, or malfeasance in office.”

In July, a federal court blocked Trump’s “unlawful” attempt to remove Slaughter, citing Humphrey’s Executor. That decision was then upheld by the U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia, which last week stated that Trump “has no likelihood of success on appeal given controlling and directly on point Supreme Court precedent.”

The Supreme Court previously allowed Trump to oust Gwynne Wilcox at the National Labor Relations Board and Cathy Harris at the Merit Systems Protection Board—whose terms weren’t due to expire until 2029—as well as three Democratic appointees on the Consumer Product Safety Commission.

Less than a week after Disney-owned ABC drew mass outrage by censoring Jimmy Kimmel’s late-night show at the behest of the Trump administration, the company has reversed its decision, and Jimmy Kimmel Live! will return to air Tuesday.

“Last Wednesday, we made the decision to suspend production on the show to avoid further inflaming a tense situation at an emotional moment for our country. It is a decision we made because we felt some of the comments were ill-timed and thus insensitive,” the Walt Disney Company said in a statement. “We have spent the last days having thoughtful conversations with Jimmy, and after those conversations, we reached the decision to return the show on Tuesday.”

The late-night host was suspended after making comments ridiculing President Donald Trump and MAGA’s response to the fatal shooting of conservative activist Charlie Kirk. In response, Federal Communications Commission Chairman Brendan Carr threatened companies that platform the comedian, and Nexstar Media Group and Sinclair Broadcast Group—both of which own ABC affiliate stations and reportedly have business before the FCC—took the show off air. Shortly thereafter, ABC announced the show’s cancellation.

Trump celebrated ABC’s initial decision (saying media figures are “not allowed” to excessively criticize him) and even called his next shots—urging NBC to suspend the shows of Jimmy Fallon and Seth Meyers, while Carr floated that The View could be next. Meanwhile, the move was decried by major figures in politics and culture, with calls for a boycott gaining traction, including among actors who have worked for Disney.

In the end, the protests seem to have worked.

This story has been updated.

Did the White House just gift $50,000 in stolen bribes to President Donald Trump’s border czar Tom Homan?

A reporter asked White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt Monday if Trump had asked the Department of Justice to close a bribery investigation into Homan, and whether the border czar would be forced to return the $50,000 payoff he allegedly received from undercover FBI agents posing as business executives.

“Well, Mr. Homan never took the $50,000 that you’re referring to, so you should get your facts straight, number one,” Leavitt replied.

But Homan was reportedly caught on camera accepting a Cava bag containing a $50,000 bribe from undercover agents during a meeting in Texas in September 2024. He allegedly promised agents who he thought were potential business partners that if Trump won, Homan could ensure favorable contracts for border enforcement. It was not immediately clear what happened to the money.

MSNBC’s Ken Dilanian, who’d broken the story about Homan, hit back at Leavitt’s claim Monday. “That was not part of their statement when we first went to them on Saturday. Multiple people familiar with the case say he did accept the money, as does an internal government document reviewed by MSNBC,” Dilanian wrote on X.

Leavitt said that the investigation into Homan was just “another example of weaponization of the Biden Department of Justice against one of President Trump’s strongest and most vocal supporters in the midst of a presidential campaign.”

Leavitt claimed the Biden administration had tried to “entrap” Homan but didn’t account for why his camp wouldn’t have released that information ahead of the presidential election.

“Mr. Homan did absolutely nothing wrong,” Leavitt said, adding that FBI Director Kash Patel had looked into it and found “zero evidence of illegal activity or criminal wrongdoing.”

In recent weeks, Trump appointees at the Department of Justice reportedly shuttered the probe into Homan, which had been part of a long-running counterintelligence investigation targeting multiple people, anonymous sources told The New York Times. DOJ officials reportedly determined that they had insufficient evidence to support charges against Homan.

Prosecutors were also concerned about whether they could actually prove corruption because Homan did not hold a government position at the time of the meeting. But as Leavitt noted during her briefing Monday, Homan was someone the Biden administration “knew very well would be taking a government position months later.”

This story has been updated.

A new report by Ben Terris of New York magazine scrutinizes the shadow role that Corey Lewandowski, a hot-headed MAGA operative and longtime associate of Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem, enjoys at DHS. Lewandowski’s reach is so extensive, and so disruptive, that it’s even ticked off the president.

Lewandowski and Noem are widely believed to be engaged in an extramarital affair with one another. They deny this, but such rumors were reportedly enough to help dash Lewandowski’s attempt to be named Noem’s chief of staff earlier this year.

But now he de facto serves in that role anyway, Terris writes. DHS officials describe him as Noem’s “handler” or “bulldog” (uh oh!), as well as a “shadow secretary.”

Lewandowski works at the department as a “special government employee,” a designation for temporary personnel who work unpaid for no more than 130 days a year—though he’s reportedly gone to great lengths to avoid counting days toward this limit. The designation comes with a key benefit for Lewandowski: He can work for Noem while still conducting business with undisclosed outside clients.

At DHS, Lewandowski is said to be “a micromanager who will approve and deny travel requests made by ICE employees.” He has also fired and reassigned dozens of staffers, who are afraid to say anything back lest he “rip their heads off,” according to one person close to the Trump administration.

Terris recounts several instances of Lewandowski’s influence at DHS.

When a DHS employee responded to orders from Lewandowski over the phone by saying he reported to Noem, “all of a sudden, you hear the secretary say, ‘It’s coming from me,’” a source told Terris. “She was on the call, in the background, not saying anything.”

Matt Strickland, a former government contractor for DHS, said “Lewandowski is running DHS. Kristi Noem is just the face of it.” Strickland said Lewandowski must greenlight every major decision in the department’s Countering Weapons of Mass Destruction Office.

Noem’s disastrous rule that all DHS expenditures exceeding $100,000 must get her approval also extends to Lewandowski. “Everything has to go through Corey,” a lobbyist who’s worked with DHS told Terris. “It’s all based on ‘You’re my buddy, or you’re not my buddy. You hired my friend, or you didn’t hire my friend.’ That place just runs that way.”

“It’s the Corey show over there,” said a former administration official.

Lewandowski and Noem, according to an administration official Terris cites, “sort of avoid being at the White House” so as not to be “overexposed.” Last month, reports about delays resulting from the $100,000 rule compromised this effort: Such reports “caught the attention of the White House, which is now monitoring Lewandowski’s hours and, according to the administration official, complaining about how difficult Noem can be to reach.”

This month, Terris reports, Noem and Lewandowski were summoned to the Oval Office by the president regarding “concerns about their management style.” An administration official said Trump was particularly “mad” about Lewandowski’s inability to “get along with anybody.”

They held onto their jobs despite that meeting, and so Lewandowski’s grip on DHS persists for the time being—for at least however many days he claims are left in his 130-day yearly limit.

Republicans are turning the heat back up on the Trump administration for its handling of the Epstein files.

Kentucky Representative Thomas Massie torched FBI Director Kash Patel over the weekend after he caught the bureau chief off guard on information that Patel should have already been privy to.

“I told Director Kash Patel that the FBI has names of 20 men to whom Jeffrey Epstein trafficked women and girls,” Massie wrote on X. “This basic fact seemed to surprise him. Why?

“Is the FBI withholding those names to protect the President’s rich and powerful friends?” Massie continued, before demanding that the administration “release the Epstein files.”

Massie has been fighting for the release of more documents related to the investigation into Jeffrey Epstein, the deceased pedophilic sex trafficker with connections to the rich and powerful, including President Donald Trump.

“I believe that Trump is trying to protect rich and powerful people who are his friends, and that is why this material is not getting released,” Massie told CNN last week.

Even Patel ferociously argued for the total release of the Epstein files—before he formally entered the Trump administration. Months before Patel’s name was floated to run the bureau, Patel had told podcaster Benny Johnson that he believed the documents were being shielded from public view because of “who’s on that list.” During his confirmation hearing, the 45-year-old swore there would be “no stone left unturned” in the quest to make the Epstein files completely transparent.

But it all came to a head during a heated House Oversight Hearing Wednesday, when members of the lower chamber forced the bureau chief to confront the incongruencies between his prior stances and his recent lagging actions.

“This spring, you ordered hundreds of agents to pore over all of the Epstein files, but not to look for more clues about the money network, or the network of human traffickers,” said Representative Jamie Raskin. “You pulled these agents from their regular counterterrorism or drug trafficking duties to work around the clock—some of them sleeping at their desks—to conduct a frantic search to make sure Donald Trump’s name and image were flagged and redacted wherever they appeared.”

Raskin then highlighted a July memo from the bureau, in which Patel and Attorney General Pam Bondi determined “no further disclosure” regarding the Epstein files and the FBI’s investigation “would be necessary or appropriate.”

President Trump, a slumlord at heart, is quietly halting enforcement of the Fair Housing Act, a massive piece of civil rights legislation that made it illegal to deny housing to someone based on their race, gender, religion, disability, or familial status.

Whistleblowers at the Housing and Urban Development’s fair housing office told The New York Times that Trump officials have made it harder for them to investigate and prosecute landlords and real estate agents who don’t abide by the guidelines of the Fair Housing Act. One HUD memo from a Trump appointee told employees to abandon “tenuous theories of discrimination” and that any research or content that was “contrary to administration policy” would be cut out. Lawyers have also reportedly been blocked from communicating with certain clients without prior approval from the Trump administration.

“I never thought I would be in this position,” said fair housing lawyer Paul Osadebe, who was informed he’d soon be reassigned. “We have people who are trying to destroy a baseline that people relied on.”

HUD has only made four charges of discrimination since Trump took office. It usually has 35 per year. The fair housing office has been slashed heavily by DOGE cuts, with only six lawyers remaining and another staff reduction coming on October 5. The disdain for HUD’s fair housing arm makes it clear that the Trump administration sees it as some DEI excess and not an incredibly important watchdog for Americans everywhere.

“With one email, the entire process was shut down,” former fair housing enforcement director Jacy Gaige told the Times. “It essentially stopped the settlement process, which is time sensitive because complainants and respondents come to an agreement about what they want to do to resolve a case. And often that is driven by specific deadlines that are occurring in people’s lives.”

Meanwhile, the few lawyers still left at HUD are drawing in urgent requests for support, especially from women who file complaints under the Violence Against Women Act.

“These are life and death requests,” said Osadebe. “These women are legitimately in mortal danger, and often without the government stepping in, nothing will be done.… This is a deliberate plan, and it’s about shutting down fair housing.”

Trump’s HUD spokeswoman, Kasey Lovett, has dismissed this narrative as “patently false” and blamed the stagnation in the fair housing office on the “deeply inefficient case system” of the Biden administration.