Trump’s DOJ Reveals True Priorities With New Alex Jones Case

The Justice Department is going to bat for Alex Jones, the Sandy Hook conspiracy theorist who still has yet to pay the $1.3 billion he owes the victims’ families.

A DOJ letter, signed by U.S. Pardon Attorney Ed Martin and shared publicly by Jones, pledges the agency’s intent to investigate retired FBI Special Agent William Aldenberg, who testified in the Sandy Hook families’ joint defamation case against the InfoWars host. Aldenberg was one of the first responders to the elementary school shooting in Newtown, Connecticut, in 2012.

Martin accuses Aldenberg of “acting for personal benefit” by participating in the trial, which effectively bankrupted Jones and awarded Aldenberg $90 million.

“As you may know, there are criminal laws protecting the citizens from actions by government employees who may be acting for personal benefit. I encourage you to review those,” Martin wrote to Aldenberg’s attorney.

The specific requests made by the DOJ pertaining Aldenberg’s participation refer to his employment at the FBI, whether he made clear that his testimony was made in a “personal capacity,” whether he recused himself from certain cases due to a potential conflict of interest, and whether Aldenberg had a relationship with communications firm Berlin Rosen for purposes related to “newsjacking,” which the letter did not define.

Jones also shared an image of himself with Martin, the two gleefully posing next to each other.

In his own statement, Jones claimed that the “DOJ’s task force on government weaponization against the American people has launched an investigation into the democrat party / FBI directing illegal law-fare against Alex Jones and InfoWars.”

Jones made his name and living by labeling the Sandy Hook shooting, which killed 26 people, a “hoax.” His supporters, fueled by Jones’s rhetoric, harassed and intimidated the family members of the shooting victims, including an instance in which they urinated on and desecrated 7-year-old Daniel Braden’s grave, according to court testimony.

Jones reported $9 million in personal assets in a 2024 bankruptcy filing, while InfoWars’ parent company Free Speech Systems held $6 million in cash, with roughly $1.2 million worth of inventory, according to the Associated Press. The company was later auctioned off, with the satirical newspaper The Onion temporarily coming out on top as its next potential owner.

Jones filed for bankruptcy in 2022 after losing his case against the victims of the tragedy. Jones himself filed earlier this month to liquidate all of his assets so that he could begin to put a dent in paying off the massive debt. Days later, the judge overseeing the personal bankruptcy case, Judge Christopher Lopez, approved the switch from reorganization to liquidation. Lopez also dismissed the company’s bankruptcy filing, noting that InfoWars had failed to reach an agreement with the victims’ families that would have allowed Jones to keep the business in operation while paying them millions of dollars per year.

The former Senate aide who accused Joe Biden of sexual assault has just received Russian citizenship.

Tara Reade blew up national headlines in 2019 when she condemned the culture of Biden’s Senate office and further accused Biden of inappropriately touching her while she worked on his staff in 1993. Numerous major U.S. media outlets reported Reade’s story but backtracked once discrepancies and inconsistencies in her narrative began to appear.

After Biden was nominated as the official Democratic candidate in the 2020 election, Reade’s story shifted into one of sexual assault. She accused Biden of pushing her against a wall, putting his hands under her clothes, and penetrating her with his fingers. Biden vehemently denied the allegations, and former Senate office staff members did not recall or corroborate Reade’s account.

Some of Reade’s other accusations also lacked credibility: Reade claimed she was fired for retaliation, but a PBS investigation that interviewed more than 70 former Biden staffers found that wasn’t the case. Instead, her colleagues recalled that she was fired for poor performance.

Some of Reade’s fiercest critics speculated that she was a Russian asset, in part fueled by since-deleted Medium posts and tweets in which she publicly praised Russian President Vladimir Putin. Five years on, that theory has earned a bit more credibility.

“This was a very special day,” Reade posted on X Monday, resharing a clip of her on RT, a Russian state-controlled television station. “I am now a Russian citizen! What an honor. Thank you to President Putin for this amazing honor of signing a decree making me a citizen and keeping me safe when I applied for asylum.”

Reade also gave a pointed shout-out to Maria Butina, a Russian parliamentarian and self-admitted Kremlin agent who was convicted in 2018 for conspiring to act as a clandestine foreign agent on behalf of Russia in the 2016 U.S. election. Butina leveraged her ties at the National Rifle Association, including her boyfriend—longtime Republican fundraiser Paul Erickson—to develop back channels between Moscow and Donald Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign. Butina first attempted to get face time with Trump as early as July 2015.

Reade first announced her intention to defect to Russia in 2023, when she claimed she no longer felt safe in the United States. Around the same time, Moscow had announced its intention to build a migrant village for American conservatives to take refuge from “liberal gender norms.” However, the project has since collapsed due to low demand, Russian outlet Vot Tak reported in July.

“I am a lucky girl,” Reade concluded.

President Donald Trump’s administration is trying to squash acts of resistance to its authoritarian policies—including its extrajudicial immigration crackdown—by tying all opposition to the supposedly nefarious work of antifa, a group that doesn’t actually exist.

Trump signed an executive order Monday illegally designating antifa, short for anti-fascist, a domestic terror organization. “Antifa is a militarist, anarchist enterprise that explicitly calls for the overthrow of the United States Government, law enforcement authorities, and our system of law,” the order states.

But antifa is a movement, not a so-called organization. It lacks a central structure, and is instead a loose network of individuals and groups who act separately under the banner of opposing facism.

The order also lists activities the Trump administration claims are the work of the shadowy group, including “armed standoffs with law enforcement, organized riots, violent assaults on Immigration and Customs Enforcement and other law enforcement officers, and routine doxing of and other threats against political figures and activists.”

Some critics have argued that this language opens the door toward a law enforcement crackdown on protesters and activists who have nothing to do with actual political extremism or violence.

“Trump’s Executive Order on Antifa is written such that someone recording masked agents snatching people off the streets, or asking these agents what they’re doing, can be deemed a ‘terrorist,’” wrote Zeteo’s Prem Thakker on X.

Across the country, Trump’s Department of Justice has repeatedly struggled to secure indictments against protesters accused of assaulting immigration officials. The Department of Homeland Security has vastly overstated claims of widespread violence against ICE officers, claims that crumble under the slightest scrutiny.

Using Trump’s executive order, law enforcement officers and prosecutors could potentially tie protesters they wish to punish to antifa. Proving affiliation to a group with no actual members is impossible, so assigning membership to antifa becomes arbitrary and easily weaponized. It’s not surprising that Trump’s efforts to punish the anti-fascists green-lights a furtherance of, well … do I even need to say it?

Trump’s targeting of antifa is a grave misdirect committed in the backlash of right-wing activist Charlie Kirk’s death. The actual rate of political violence motivated by left-wing ideologies is dwarfed by the rate of right-wing violence, but the Trump administration has made fast work removing any evidence that doesn’t support its narrative.

President Trump stood before a room full of the most esteemed leaders in the world on Tuesday and decided to tout his (incorrect) poll numbers and plug his merch.

“The American public agrees … I was very proud to see this morning I have the highest poll numbers I ever had,” Trump said, in the midst of a meandering, hour-long speech that attacked climate change, immigrants, and more. “Part of it is because of what we’ve done on the border. I guess the other part is what we’ve done on the economy.” 

What polls is the president referring to? He had the worst first 100 days’ approval rating of any president in the last 80 years. As of Tuesday, just over half of Americans disapprove of the overall job Trump is doing. And he’s doing even worse than ever with women, as they disapprove of him at 61 percent. You’d be hard-pressed to find any poll that confirms Trump’s claim, which raises the question: Where is he getting this stuff from? Is his inner circle just lying to keep him happy?

Trump then moved on to the grifting. 

“I’m really good at predicting things, ya know? They actually said during the campaign that a hat, the bestselling hat: ‘Trump Was Right About Everything’—and I don’t say that in a braggadocious way,” he said, referring to the hats he often gleefully displays in gift shops and online. “But it’s true. I’ve been right about everything. Everything. And I’m telling you that if you don’t get away from the green energy scam, your country is going to fail.” 

It’s a sad state of affairs when the U.S. president is talking about his own $40 hats at the U.N. General Assembly. And the more he speaks about how great and respected America is again, the harder it is to take seriously.  

Faced on Tuesday with President Donald Trump’s broken campaign promises on the Russia-Ukraine war, Secretary of State Marco Rubio trotted out a convenient excuse.

When Today host Craig Melvin reminded Rubio of Trump’s long-broken vow to end the conflict within 24 hours, the secretary of state (falsely) claimed that the president had not been speaking literally on the campaign trail.

“The president repeatedly though did say that he would end the war in Ukraine on day one, and we are some 250 days into the administration,” noted Melvin.

“Yeah, but that’s not up to us to end the war,” Rubio cut in. “The Russians have to stop the war, and the Ukrainians have to agree to a peace deal. What the president expressed is that it would be a priority of his.”

In reality, Trump harped incessantly on the 2024 campaign trail about how he would achieve peace in Ukraine in 24 hours. This was not a figurative way to describe the war as a priority; he repeated a version of the statement over 50 times, often making a point to note that he was serious, and that it would be relatively easy to accomplish.

“I’ll have it done in 24 hours. I say that, and I would do that. That’s easy compared to some of the things,” he said in June 2023. A few days later, he said that “it won’t even be a tough one by comparison to other things.”

The following month, he emphasized his seriousness, despite naysayers. “I’ll get that done within 24 hours. Everyone says, ‘Oh, no, you can’t.’ Absolutely I can. Absolutely I can,” he said at one event, adding at another that “it’ll be done within 24 hours, you watch. They all say, ‘That’s such a boast.’ It will be done very quickly.”

During an August 2024 podcast appearance, Trump said, “I will have that war settled when I’m president-elect, meaning before I get to office on January 20.” When another podcaster in October expressed amazement at his vow to end the war before taking office, Trump said he would fulfill it because “you need that credibility.”

As his inauguration drew near, Trump walked back his statement in his December 2024 Time Person of the Year story, acknowledging ending the conflict wasn’t as easy as he made it out to be. About three months into his presidency, he told Time, “Well, I said that figuratively, and I said that as an exaggeration, because to make a point.”

Rubio seems to be taking that same convenient, but untrue, tack now.

Last week, the president came the closest he’s capable of getting to an admission of failure, saying that he’d thought Russia-Ukraine “would be easiest” to solve, but Russian President Vladimir Putin “really let me down.”