Trump’s DOJ May Have Violated Luigi Mangione’s Right to a Fair Trial

A federal judge said Wednesday that Department of Justice officials may have violated a criminal rule and a court order by making prejudicial statements about Luigi Mangione, the 27-year-old accused of killing UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson.

U.S. District Judge Margaret Garnett issued an order responding to a letter from Mangione’s lawyers, saying that it appears that multiple DOJ employees had violated a New York criminal rule barring lawyers from making public statements that could produce prejudice in a criminal case.

Garnett said that the employees had also violated an April court order “specifically identifying the structures of this rule for counsel and directing the prosecution team to ensure that the highest levels of the Department of Justice up to and including Attorney General Bondi were aware of and understood they were bound by this Rule.”

On Tuesday, lawyers for Mangione had submitted a letter containing evidence of public statements made by DOJ employees and White House officials that they argued had ruined his right to a fair trial. Mangione’s lawyers said federal officials had “indelibly prejudiced” their client by linking him to other unrelated acts of violence, including Ryan Routh’s attempted assassination of Donald Trump and the recent assassination of right-wing activist Charlie Kirk.

One such instance was on September 19, when Chad Gilmartin, deputy director of the Department of Justice Office of Public Affairs, posted on X that Trump was “absolutely right” to claim that Mangione “shot someone in the back,” during an interview on Fox News. Gilmartin’s post was then shared by Brad Nieves, the chief of staff and associate deputy attorney general, and later deleted.

The letter also pointed to unfair statements the White House made against Mangione. Press secretary Karoline Leavitt called Mangione a “left-wing assassin [who] shot United Healthcare CEO Brian Thompson right in the back in New York City.” Earlier this week, in a press release accompanying Trump’s illegal designation of antifa as a terrorist organization, the White House had included Mangione’s name.

During an interview on Fox News earlier this week, White House deputy chief of staff Stephen Miller referred to Mangione while complaining about a so-called “organized campaign of domestic terrorism” from the left.

CEO Brian Thompson “was brutally gunned down by another self-described so-called anti-fascist that was then celebrated by other self-described anti-fascists, so of course, really Communist revolutionaries,” said Miller, who reposted a clip of him saying this on X.

Mangione’s lawyers argued in the letter that “the Government very well knows this statement to be false as they are in possession of his alleged extensive journal writings where the writer never once mentions being anti- (or pro) fascist.”

“The attempts to connect Mr. Mangione with these incidents and paint him as a ‘left wing’ violent extremist are false, prejudicial, and part of a greater political narrative that has no place in any criminal case, especially one where the death penalty is at stake,” the letter stated. “Mr. Mangione in fact does not support these violent actions, does not condone past or future political violence, nor is he in any way aligned with the group mentioned in the White House press release.”

Garnett gave the government until October 3 to provide an explanation as to how the violations occurred and what steps they would take to prevent any more. She specifically warned the deputy attorney general that further violations could result in sanctions, such as personal financial penalties or contempt of court findings.

President Donald Trump’s efforts to suppress comedian Jimmy Kimmel were thwarted by the Streisand effect, whereby attempts to censor something only cause it to circulate wider.

Kimmel’s Tuesday monologue—the first since Jimmy Kimmel Live! was canceled, then uncanceled, by ABC—has reached a massive audience and garnered significant media attention.

Whereas, CNN data analyst Harry Enten reported, the median video on Kimmel’s YouTube channel in the last six months has been viewed 240,000 times, Kimmel’s returning monologue has already garnered more than 11 million views on YouTube, with the number still rapidly growing. Another indicator of significant interest in Kimmel’s show, Enten observed, is a record-high number of Google searches for the time Jimmy Kimmel Live! airs, which were up over 10,000 percent.

Kimmel joked about the influx of attention in his monologue, saying of Trump, “You almost have to feel sorry for him. He tried his best to cancel me. Instead, he forced millions of people to watch the show. That backfired bigly! He might have to release the Epstein files to distract us from this now.”

ABC’s since-reversed decision to cancel Jimmy Kimmel Live! came after Trump’s Federal Communications Commission chair threatened companies that platformed Kimmel, due to the host’s jokes about MAGA’s reaction to the killing of conservative activist Charlie Kirk.

An hour before Kimmel’s show returned to air Tuesday, Trump complained, “I can’t believe ABC Fake News gave Jimmy Kimmel his job back. The White House was told by ABC that his Show was cancelled!” The president vowed to go after the network for being too favorable to his political opponents.

New Mexico Republican state Senator Jay Block’s own daughter excoriated him for putting the priorities of the Israeli government over those of his constituents with a recent trip to Israel for the “50 States, One Israel” conference.

“My dad and a bunch of other loser politicians from New Mexico went to meet with Netanyahu, and I don’t know what they could possibly discuss,” Maddie Block, 28, said in a TikTok posted on Tuesday. “How does meeting with Netanyahu help the local people of New Mexico?”

“I genuinely belive that Israel is like, paying my dad now to pedal propaganda,” Maddie Block said, directly mentioning a “dissertation-length” pro-Israel post from her father. “He was … saying that the genocide is a lie, and that civilians aren’t being killed, and the IDF is doing everything they can to minimize casualities. And I’m like, how much are they paying my dad? How much is his soul? ’Cuz it seems like he has sold his soul to the devil.” 

Senator Block was one of 250 politicians from both parties who attended the “50 States, One Israel” conference earlier this month, in which they were lobbied by the Israeli government for more funding in their genocide of Palestinians (and met with a uniquely awful rendition of “Somewhere Over the Rainbow” that has now gone viral). That’s what Maddie Block’s father was doing instead of representing New Mexicans. 

“It was a privilege to be part of the largest diplomatic delegation to ever visit the state of Israel,” Senator Block wrote before moving to shamelessly deny and justify the genocide of innocent Palestians, which has left at least 65,000 men, women, and children dead. 

“If Israel has genocidal intent, they’re sure bad at it. Just one day of bombing Gaza (with the capabilities the Israeli Army and Air Force has) would utterly destroy them, but instead the IDF does everything possible to avoid killing Gazan civilians who are being used as human shields,” the Republican state senator said after the conference. “They strive to limit casualties by warning Gazans ahead of time to leave battle zones with millions of text messages, phone calls, dropping leaflets, and making smaller targeted attacks.” 

This is a false narrative straight from Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. Israel continues to bomb hospitals, execute aid seekers, and shoot children in the head for fun.  

Oklahoma will soon have Turning Point USA chapters in every high school across the state.

Superintendent Ryan Walters unveiled the alliance with the far-right youth organization via social media Tuesday, celebrating the partisan compact while accusing teachers across Oklahoma of “lying about American history.”

“Radical leftist teachers’ unions have dominated classrooms for far too long, and we are taking them back,” Walters said in a post.

The development comes barely two weeks after Turning Point USA founder Charlie Kirk was assassinated on a college campus in Utah. The announcement was recirculated by Turning Point’s X account.

There are some 900 official college chapters and around 1,200 high school chapters of Turning Point USA across the nation, but the conservative advocacy nonprofit received more than 54,000 inquiries for new campus chapters in the 48 hours after Kirk’s assassination, according to TPUSA spokesman Andrew Kolvet.

“We have seen the outpouring from parents, teachers, and students, who want to be engaged in the meaningful work going on at Turning Point,” Walters said in a video statement. “They want their young people to be engaged in a process that understands free speech, open engagement, dialogue about American greatness, and a dialogue around American values.”

Oklahoma’s educational bureaucracy has proven to be one of the most MAGA-friendly in the nation. Last year, Walters filled a 55,000-unit order for Donald Trump’s $60-a-pop God Bless the U.S.A. Bible to be used as classroom editions. Months prior, Walters unveiled new guidelines for teaching Bibles in schools, as well as new consequences for districts that refused to participate.

Walters also appointed Chaya Raichik—the woman behind the far-right, anti-LGBTQ+ social media account Libs of TikTok—to the Oklahoma state Department of Education’s Library Media Advisory Committee, allowing the MAGA influencer to decide what children across the state are allowed to read. Prior to her appointment, Oklahoma was ranked fourth in the nation for the most banned books, according to a 2022 report by Pen America.

Top officials in the Trump administration rushed Wednesday to claim that a shooting at the Dallas Immigration and Customs Enforcement field office was part of a wider trend of violence targeting law enforcement.

It’s still unclear what the shooter’s motive was, or their intended target, but none of the victims of this shooting were ICE personnel. All three people injured were immigrant detainees who were being processed at the field office, according to the Department of Homeland Security. Two of those victims have died, and the shooter died from a self-inflicted gunshot wound, according to NBC.

Without knowing any information about the shooter, and with no acknowledgment that the victims weren’t actually law enforcement, officials quickly painted a picture.

“While we don’t know motive yet, we know that our ICE law enforcement is facing unprecedented violence against them. It must stop,” wrote Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem on X. “Please pray for the victims and their families.”

Vice President JD Vance echoed Noem’s attempt to tie the incident to a wider trend. “The obsessive attack on law enforcement, particularly ICE, must stop. I’m praying for everyone hurt in this attack and for their families,” he wrote on X.

These officials’ statements are just the latest in a series of attempts by the Trump administration to craft a narrative that law enforcement officers are under a broader attack.

Immigration authorities have put forward inconsistent claims about the rising rate of assault against ICE officers. In July, DHS claimed a nearly 700 percent increase in assaults against ICE officers—which is technically true, but raw data showed that was the result of low overall numbers. There were just 79 assaults against immigration enforcement agents between January 21 and June 30, up from 10 during the same period last year.

The actual figure wasn’t all that terrifying, especially when considering ICE’s embrace of warrantless arrests, masked agents, and aggressive policing tactics as part of its sweeping immigration raids. It’s also unclear whether this figure includes patently phony allegations of assault, which have become all too common. Across the country, Trump’s Department of Justice has repeatedly struggled to secure indictments against protesters accused of assaulting immigration officials.

Fox News’s Jesse Watters joined the MAGA outrage Tuesday over a mishap that occurred during Donald Trump’s arrival at the United Nations earlier that day. Watters mused about the appropriate response to an escalator halting as the president stepped onto it, in a joke that didn’t land quite well among his co-hosts on The Five.

Watters claimed that the international body had “sabotaged” the president. “And they could’ve hurt the first lady. Trump would’ve fallen and gotten back up,” he marveled, before decrying another malfunction, in which the president’s teleprompter failed during the beginning of his address before the U.N. General Assembly.

“I mean this is an insurrection,” Watters said, “and what we need to do is either leave the U.N., or we need to bomb it.”

The joke didn’t quite land. After a momentary silence, co-host Greg Gutfeld hemmed. “Interesting,” he said, laughing.

“It is in New York though, right? Could be some fallout there,” Watters jokingly conceded, winning some laughter from another co-host, before doubling down. “Maybe gas it?”

His co-hosts could be heard squirming off-screen.

“No—” one of them said.

“Don’t gas it, OK,” Watters replied.

“Let’s not do that,” said Dana Perino.

“Oh my goodness,” said Fox contributor Emily Compagno. “He’s kidding, he’s kidding.”

Watters tripled down. “But we need to destroy it. Can we demolish the building? Have everybody leave, and then we’ll demolish the building.”

The host went on to get somewhat more serious, saying, “No, this is absolutely unacceptable, and I hope they get to the bottom of it. And I hope they really injure, emotionally, the people that did it.”

But he was, apparently, unknowingly wishing ill on Trump’s own team. In a statement Tuesday, a U.N. spokesperson said the escalator stoppage was due to a safety mechanism, likely triggered by a cameraman with the president’s delegation, who ascended the elevator before him. Trump’s team was also responsible for the teleprompter issues the president complained about, per a U.N. official who told ABC the White House was operating it.

The Trump administration is begging General Service Administration employees fired by DOGE and Elon Musk to come back.

The GSA is a logistics-focused branch that acquires and oversees federal workplaces both physically and virtually. In March, Musk pushed thousands of GSA employees to either resign or retire early, and outright fired hundreds of others. Those who were fired by DOGE are now being given until the end of the week to decide whether to return to their jobs. If they accept, they will come back to work on October 6.

Musk’s impact on the agency has been debilitating. Headquarters staff was cut by nearly 80 percent, portfolio managers cut by 65 percent, and facility managers cut by 35 percent, according to an official who spoke with the Associated Press.

DOGE also planned to cancel more than half of the GSA’s 7,500 leases and sell hundreds of government-owned buildings. It’s clear now that it seriously overreached, with 131 leases expiring before employees actually moved out of the buildings.

The chaos DOGE caused—and the backtracking it’s doing now—shows that the federal bureaucracy is not as wasteful, fraudulent, and abusive as the world’s richest man constantly claimed it to be. DOGE’s “Wall of Receipts” pledged to save the United States $460 million just through lease cancellations. It didn’t even get close, as the savings are at an estimated $140 million.

“Ultimately, the outcome was the agency was left broken and understaffed,” former GSA real estate staffer Chad Becker, told the Associated Press. “They didn’t have the people they needed to carry out basic functions.”

GSA isn’t the only federal agency being negatively impacted by the cuts that were supposed to save it. From the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration to the Social Security Administration, DOGE has absolutely failed to make anything more efficient, leaving only more mess behind.

Senator Lindsey Graham said he hopes the president runs for an illegal third term.

Speaking on Fox New’s Hannity Tuesday night, the South Carolina Republican fawned over Donald Trump’s supposedly tough talk at the United Nations General Assembly.

“Trump 2028. I hope this never ends,” Graham said.

Graham was practically giddy as he recounted Trump’s surprising admission during a meeting with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy that NATO countries should feel free to shoot down Russian jets if they enter foreign airspace, following apparent incursions in Poland, Estonia, Norway, and most recently, Denmark.

“He’s tried to go out of his way to get [Vladimir] Putin to the table. We don’t want to humiliate Russia, we just want to end the war,” Graham said. In reality, Trump refused to say whether he still trusted Putin, granting Moscow yet another month to make progress on a deal with Kiev.

But Graham was mostly excited about Trump’s promise to supply weapons to NATO “for NATO to do what they want with them.” Russia would now face “high-end American weapons sold to NATO for the benefit of Ukraine, and this war is coming to your backyard here with no limitations like Biden,” Graham said.

“He’s everything Biden wasn’t. He stood up to the U.N. in the U.N. and called them out for who they are,” Graham said. Unlike Biden, Trump has figured out how to make a buck off the endless war, instead of sending military aid to finish it.

Graham wasn’t done singing Trump’s praises. “This guy is a cross between PT Barnum and Ronald Reagan,” he said. “He’s got—he’s in everybody’s head.”

The senator also applauded Trump for mocking Europe’s reliance on Russian oil. “We don’t have to live with a Europe that’s buying Russian oil at the time we’re all trying to stop the war with Russia and Ukraine. So I hope he runs again,” Graham said.

Again, the South Carolina Republican seems not to care that Trump’s remarks are part of his own plan for American energy expansion—though the Kremlin certainly saw it that way. Or maybe that’s what the fascism fanboy likes about the circus showman president: finding creative ways to make a dollar.

It’s not clear that Trump, who hocks “Trump 2028” hats, sees himself as constrained by the Twenty-Second Amendment—not to mention the Constitution in general. In March, he told NBC’s Kristen Welker that he was “not joking” about considering a third term, claiming that there were “methods” by which he could remain in the White House.

Donald Trump’s flubdub at the United Nations is apparently going to get people fired.

The president and his administration are still fuming over two technical difficulties that Trump experienced at the U.N.’s New York City headquarters, including a teleprompter error and a “broken” escalator that left his posse stunned and confused about how to advance up the static staircase.

Speaking with Fox News Tuesday evening, White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt stated that the mistakes appeared to be “sabotage” and that the administration would sic the Secret Service on the individuals responsible.

“It does appear to be sabotage with the escalator and the teleprompter,” said host Jesse Watters. “What is the White House going to do about that?”

“Well Jesse, that’s definitely what it appears to be to me,” Leavitt responded. “There was some concerning reporting from the London Times, as you pointed out that U.N. globalist staffers were basically plotting to set up the president of the United States.”

Leavitt was referring to an article in The Times that reported U.N. workers had been overheard joking about shutting the escalator down on Trump, though no evidence has emerged indicating that they followed through on the joke.

Leavitt further accused the U.N. of lowering the president’s audio during his speech, highlighting the paranoia rampant amongst the MAGA elite.

“First it was the escalator, then it was the teleprompter.… The audio inside of the room was much lower and different for the president of the United States than for the previous speaker,” Leavitt said.

“When you put all of this together, it doesn’t look like a coincidence to me,” she continued. “And if we find that these were U.N. staffers who were purposefully trying to trip up, literally trip up, the president and the first lady of the United States, well, there better be accountability for those people, and I will personally see to it, Jesse.”

Trump warned in real time that whoever was behind the teleprompter fiasco would have to face the fire for troubling the start of his speech.

“I can only say that whoever’s operating this teleprompter is in big trouble,” the president said, drawing laughs from the audience.

But as it later turned out, the problems likely stemmed from his own team. According to a U.N. official, Trump staffers were in charge of operating his teleprompter and had also accidentally triggered a stop mechanism on the escalator ahead of the president’s ascent.

Add Theo Von to the list of Trump-supporting comedians who are finally realizing that this brutal deportation campaign is indeed what they voted for.

On Tuesday evening, the official Homeland Security X account posted yet another bizarrely aesthetic, meme deportation video with a viral TikTok sound in the background.

The video opens with Von—who hosted President Trump and Vice President JD Vance on his podcast last year, and attended the inaugration—bluntly saying, “Heard you got deported, dude. Bye,” in response to a fan asking him to record a message for their recently deported friend. The rest of the video details DHS’s arrest and deportation numbers.

The borrowed clip was from January, when MAGA shill Benny Johnson and others on the right applauded Von. “Theo Von is all of us,” Johnson said at the time.

Now Von is having the same second thoughts that many MAGA-leaning comedians who openly endorsed Trump are having.

“Yooo DHS i didnt approve to be used in this. I know you know my address so send a check. And please take this down and please keep me out of your ‘banger’ deportation videos,” Von posted late on Tuesday night. “When it comes to immigration my thoughts and heart are alot more nuanced than this video allows. Bye!”

Von is reaping what he happily sowed. He had the president and his vice president on his podcast during the campaign to talk about cocaine, was a guest at the inauguration, has traveled with the president since then, and is now the unwilling face of deportation. (Additionally, asking for DHS to cut you a check before asking to take the video down is tacky at best, but what else is to be expected from the podcaster?)

Von isn’t the only “funny” guy regretting his decision to cozy up to Trump. In July, podcaster Joe Rogan expressed his shock and horror at Trump deporting innocent people with no criminal records.

“We were told there would be no—well, there’s two things that are insane. One is the targeting of migrant workers. Not cartel members, not gang members, not drug dealers,” he said. “Just construction workers showing up in construction sites and raiding them. Gardeners. Like, really?”

Comedian Andrew Schultz felt similarly.

“Everything [Trump] campaigned on I believe he wanted to do. And now he’s doing the exact opposite thing of every single fuckin’ thing,” Schultz said on his Flagrant podcast in July. “There’ll be people that like, they’ll DM me and be like, ‘You see what your boy’s doing? You voted for this.’ I’m like, I voted for none of this!”

All of these men are foolish for thinking Trump just wouldn’t be as brutal as he had promised over and over again he would be. It absolutely is what they voted for. Maybe next time they’ll think about this before they pick up the microphone.