Pam Bondi’s Justice Department in Uproar After Comey Indictment

The Justice Department is in an uproar against Attorney General Pam Bondi’s indictment of former FBI director James Comey.

Comey, who has drawn the ire of President Trump ever since he led the Russiagate investigation in 2016, has been charged with one count of making a false statement during a Senate hearing and one count of obstructing Congress. Bondi’s office also tried to get Comey on a second charge of making a false statement to Congress, but that was struck down. If convicted, Comey could face up to five years in prison.

But even Bondi’s own staff think this is a weak move designed to make Trump feel better in spite of the fact that the charges will be hard to prove.

“What I am hearing from DoJ sources: The Comey indictment is among the worst abuses in DOJ history,” MSNBC’s Ken Dilanian wrote Thursday on X. “Shocking. It’s hard to overstate how a big a moment this is.”

“Everybody is in shock,” former DOJ Director of Public Affairs Xochitl Hinojosa told CNN’s Erin Burnett OutFront. “It doesn’t surprise them, though, because this is the way the Justice Department has been. Career officials have largely been either pushed out or silenced and are not in meetings about major decisions about cases.”

Hinojosa also commented on Bondi’s reasoning that “no one is above the law” in indicting Comey.

“That is what we all believe in, in that building,” Hinojosa added. “But the reality is that the actions over the last nine months are not the case. Donald Trump was charged on 44 counts. He is the sitting president of the United States.... And now Donald Trump is going after his political enemies.”

“I think this is a tragic day for America,” former White House lawyer Ty Cobb told CNN. “What we have here is a clear vindictive prosecution, a clear selective prosecution. We have a president for the first time in history ordering his Attorney General to indict his enemies,” Cobb said. “And the Attorney General, instead of being the independent force that she’s supposed to be saying: ‘Yes, sir. How fast can I get that done for you?”

Even Bondi herself seems to be feeling hesitant about going after Comey. CNN reported on Thursday that Bondi was apprehensive at best about the indictment, and some of her attorneys indicated similar feelings in a written memo. Bondi denies all of this.

Regardless, it’s clear that this indictment is the result of Trump personally calling for it, rather than some stringent, by the book investigation. Only time will tell how it’ll all play out.

Immigration and Customs Enforcement has once again been caught on camera violently arresting people in the halls of immigration court. 

Conservative journalist Elaad Eliahu on Thursday filmed a man desperately holding onto his wife and children as about five ICE agents—all but one masked—surrounded them in a New York City immigration court. Two of them wrapped their arms around the man’s neck, putting in him a chokehold as they attempted to drag him away. The agents eventually ripped him away from his distraught, screaming family and detained him. It’s a gut-wrenching scene. 

After he was dragged away, the man’s wife walked up to the only unmasked ICE officer, pleading with him in Spanish. The agent just yelled “Adios! Adios!” in her face. She continued to beg him, until he quickly shoved  her into the wall, and then the ground, standing over her as her children screamed in horror. 

“I was back at 26 Federal Plaza today, where an ICE agent violently threw this bereft woman to the ground in front of her kids,” New York City Comptroller and former mayoral candidate Brad Lander wrote. “She had not touched him. She did not pose any threat. She had to be taken to the hospital.” 

“Seconds earlier, her husband had been abducted by masked ICE agents who did not identify themselves, did not present a warrant, did not give any lawful grounds for his detention,” Lander continued. “Every day, masked ICE agents are acting violently against our neighbors, illegally abducting them, holding them in cruel and inhumane conditions. Treating them as less than human and not deserving due process.”

There have been so many scenes like this since the Trump administration initiated its deportation campaign. Mothers, fathers, laborers, students, and community members have been ripped off the streets by men who often refuse to identify themselves, and sent to God knows where. And as of right now, there is no end in sight. 

Democratic Representative Ro Khanna has collected almost 50 signatures on a petition of lawmakers urging the Trump administration to acknowledge the State of Palestine. 

Since the letter was first reported early last month, dozens of House Democrats have signed on, and it now bears the names of 46 representatives, or more than one-fifth of the party’s House members.

“Just as the lives of Palestinians must be immediately protected, so too must their rights as a people and nation urgently be acknowledged and upheld,” the letter states, according to The Guardian.

Khanna says he hopes to have more than 50 before it is delivered to the White House on Friday. His office says he is accepting signatories until Friday at 4 p.m. 

“This week, the UK, France, Canada, and Australia officially recognized Palestinian statehood,” Khanna said in a statement. “We cannot be isolated from the rest of the free world. We must stand up for the dignity and rights of the Palestinian people. That is why I am pushing for the US to join in recognizing Palestinian statehood.”

The following are the 46 House Democrats who have signed on to the letter as of Thursday at 4 p.m. E.T., per Khanna’s office:

• Becca Balint — VT
• Donald Beyer —  VA
• André Carson — IN
• Greg Casar — TX
• Joaquin Castro — TX
• Judy Chu — CA
• Danny Davis  — IL
• Madeleine Dean — PA
• Diana DeGette — CO
• Christopher Deluzio — PA
• Mark DeSaulnier — CA
• Maxine Dexter — OR
• Lloyd Doggett — TX
• Veronica Escobar — TX
• Dwight Evans — PA
• Bill Foster — IL
• Maxwell Frost — FL
• John Garamendi — CA
• Jesús García — IL
• Sylvia Garcia — TX
• Al Green — TX
• Val Hoyle — OR
• Jared Huffman — CA
• Jonathan Jackson — IL
• Sara Jacobs — CA
• Pramila Jayapal — WA
• Henry Johnson — GA
• Marcy Kaptur — OH
• Ro Khanna — CA
• Zoe Lofgren — CA
• Stephen Lynch — MA
• Betty McCollum — MN
• James McGovern — MA
• Chellie Pingree — ME
• Mark Pocan — WI
• Mike Quigley — IL
• Emily Randall — WA 
• Mary Gay Scanlon — PA
• Janice Schakowsky — IL
• Bennie Thompson — MS
• Mike Thompson — CA
• Jill Tokuda — HI
• Paul Tonko — NY
• Nydia Velázquez — NY
• Maxine Waters — CA
• Bonnie Watson Coleman — NJ

As the destruction and humanitarian crisis wrought on Gaza by Israel draws increased international scrutiny, 10 countries recognized Palestinian statehood in the past week, bringing the total to 157 of 193 U.N. member states. 

“We encourage the governments of other countries that have yet to recognize Palestinian statehood, including the United States, to do so as well,” Khanna’s letter states. An August Reuters/Ipsos poll found that most Americans, 58 percent, agree. Trump, meanwhile, has dismissed recognizing Palestinian statehood, claiming it would be a “reward to Hamas.”

This story has been updated.

A federal court has ordered the University of South Dakota to reinstate an art professor who was removed for calling Charlie Kirk a “hate spreading Nazi.”

U.S. District Court Judge Karen Schreier in South Dakota’s Southern Division granted Professor Phillip Michael Hook’s request Wednesday night to block the school from firing him over the post on his personal Facebook page, ruling that Hook had a fair chance of proving that his First Amendment rights had been violated.

Hours after the right-wing activist was fatally shot in Utah, Hook posted on Facebook calling Kirk a “hate spreading Nazi” and questioned why there had been no equivalent outrage for the shootings that killed Minnesota state Representative Melissa Hortman and her husband in June.

In a subsequent post, Hook said he’d taken down his original post and apologized to “those who were offended.”

Soon after, Hook received a letter from the university placing him on administrative leave and expressing school leadership’s intent to terminate his contract for violating USD’s speech policy requiring employees with “special obligations” to “be accurate, show respect for the opinions of others, and make every effort to indicate when they are not speaking for the institution.”

But Schreier didn’t buy it. “The court concludes that Hook spoke as a citizen and his speech was on a matter of public concern,” she ruled, adding that the university had blatantly punished him because of his speech, and done so without proving his words had an adverse impact on the institution. Therefore, Hook was likely to win First Amendment protections.

Schreier ordered the university to reinstate Hook until the preliminary injunction hearing early next month.

This ruling comes as Vice President JD Vance has come down hard against calling political enemies Nazis (something he once did to the sitting president), and Donald Trump warned that violent rhetoric from the left had sparked a recent spate of violence—and would soon invite “bad things” from the right.

Yet another Trump nominee is facing scrutiny for their history of incendiary and racist social media posts.

Jeremy Carl is a current senior fellow at right-wing Claremont Institute who is up for a position at the State Department in which he would head the Bureau of International Organization Affairs. He has a trove of despicable online statements that he went out of his way to wipe from X, according to CNN’s KFile. He also tried to delete his posts from the archival website The Wayback Machine, though posts from his previous username can still be found.

In one post, Carl called for the execution of American Federation of Teachers president Randi Weingarten. “If the U.S. were a serious nation,” he wrote, “Weingarten would be tried for crimes against America’s children and would get the death penalty.”

“I’m sure George Floyd is looking up from hell right now and he is so proud of America,” Carl wrote in another post, referring to the unarmed Black man who was choked to death by police in 2020. Carl also reposted that “statues in [Floyd’s] honor are a disgrace and an embarrassment to our country.”

“There is no ‘peaceful coexistence’ we are going to have when our opposition is led by people like this,” Carl said in response to former Representative Cori Bush commenting on the mass incarceration of Black folk on Juneteenth in 2021.

“If you’re a white person celebrating Juneteenth, you’ve already surrendered,” he said a day later.

Carl is also an ardent believer in the “great replacement,” the conspiracy theory that immigration is part of a plot to replace white people and destroy the United States.

“The great replacement is real,” he said in 2021. “And they’re going to try to make you pay for it.”

“We must utterly defeat the Great Replacement as a political strategy, and permanently remove from power all who advance it,” he wrote in 2022.

He also lamented what he saw as an insufficient number of white Anglo-Saxon Protestants in government.

“I just can’t understand why the under-representation of white Christians and the total absence of white Protestants in the Biden Administration isn’t a huge story,” he said. “The media loves covering stories of systemic exclusion and lack of representation.”

Carl was of course very pro–January 6. He considered the insurrectionists to be political prisoners and blamed Representative Nancy Pelosi, not Trump, for the events on that day.

“Donald Trump addressed a political rally and said ‘I know that everyone here will soon be marching over to the Capitol building to peacefully and patriotically make your voices heard,’” he said. “Pelosi attempted a military coup and must be prosecuted.”

So a man who is racist and thinks “Dems R the real fascists” has an excellent chance to be nominated and begin to impact U.S. policy at the United Nations and elsewhere. Carl would head more than 100 diplomats in over six countries.

This isn’t the first time a Trump nominee’s older tweets have been dug up. Current Undersecretary of State for Public Diplomacy Darren Beattie declared that “competent white men must be in charge if you want things to work,” among other racist statements. “Unfortunately, our entire national ideology is predicated on coddling the feelings of women and minorities, and demoralizing competent white men.”

There’s also E.J. Antoni, the MAGA rioter Trump tapped to replace Erika McEntarfer as head of the Bureau of Labor Statistics, who said that former presidential candidate Kamala Harris couldn’t run for office “on [her] knees.”

It seems that the Trump administration is going out of their way to select the most despicable, incendiary characters to join their team. It might be time to fire up the Wayback Machine if you want a job with them next.

The Trump administration has not won over the hearts of America.

Instead, approval ratings among independents for the chief members of the president and his Cabinet have dropped to a two-to-one negative ratio, according to a Quinnipiac poll published Wednesday.

In that bracket, Donald Trump received a 29 percent approval rating, Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. received a 28 percent approval rating, FBI Director Kash Patel received a 26 percent approval rating, Attorney General Pam Bondi received a 21 percent approval rating, and FCC Chair Brendan Carr received an abysmal 14 percent approval rating.

Their numbers were not much improved when all voters were taken into account. Trump’s total job approval was just 38 percent; Kennedy’s was 33 percent, as was Patel’s; Bondi’s was 30 percent; and just 19 percent of the country approved of the way that Carr is utilizing his office.

In the same poll, nearly eight in 10 voters agreed that the country is in a “political crisis.” The most pressing issue in the United States, according to the bulk of voters, is “preserving democracy.” Just 24 percent of surveyed Americans said that they were “satisfied” with the way that things are going in the country.

Political violence also took a front seat as a critical issue facing the nation. In the aftermath of Charlie Kirk’s assassination, 54 percent of queried voters said that they believed political violence would “worsen” over the next few years. That was compared to 14 percent of voters who said it would “ease” and 27 percent who believed that the current level of political violence affecting America would “remain the same.”

Their perspective on America’s political future was similarly bleak. Just 34 percent of the surveyed registered voters believed that it would be possible to lower the temperature of political rhetoric in the country—as opposed to 58 percent who reported that there wasn’t a shot in hell.

Colombian President Gustavo Petro this week called for criminal proceedings against Donald Trump, whom he compared to Adolf Hitler while speaking before the United Nations General Assembly.

In Petro’s final speech before the U.N. in New York on Tuesday, he observed (according to a live translation from the U.N.) that the world is in a “different situation” than it was when he first addressed the international body in 2022.

“The old societies of Europe are collapsing,” he said, “and the United States is applauding its new Hitler. It’s not listening to its own young people, or its older people who died in the battlefields of Europe, fighting against Hitler and against his criminal ideology. Today, the same thing is being done as Hitler did, building concentration camps for migrants, and it’s stated that migrants are of an inferior race, and they blame them just like Hitler blamed the Jews. They call them drug traffickers and thieves.”

In stressing the need for climate action, Petro said of Trump: “The most powerful man in the world does not believe in science. That is irrationality. And Germany, the country of great philosophers, of Kant, Feuerbach, and others, became prey of irrationalism in 1933, and today it’s this country that is becoming irrational. The solution is to stop consuming fossil fuels and to quickly switch to water, wind, hydrogen.”

He also described Trump as “an accomplice to genocide” in Gaza. “This forum,” he said of the U.N., “is a mute witness to a genocide, in a world where we thought that this was something only a legacy of Hitler.”

“A kind of stone age,” he said earlier in his remarks, has seemingly “descended on all of humankind”—citing inaction on the climate crisis, Trump’s strikes on “unarmed young people in the Caribbean,” Israeli strikes “that have killed some 70,000 people in Gaza,” and “the persecution, imprisonment, and expulsion of millions of migrants.”

The Colombian president denied Trump’s claim that the people on the Venezuelan boats the U.S. bombed (on shaky legal ground) earlier this month were trafficking drugs. “They said that the missiles in the Caribbean were used to stop drug trafficking,” Petro said. “That is a lie.”

“There should be criminal cases against those officials of the United States for doing this, including the utmost official, President Trump,” he said, “that allowed the shooting of missiles against these young people who were simply trying to escape poverty”—who “might have had a certain amount of drugs,” he added, but “were not drug traffickers.”

The U.S. mainstream media, for its part, has largely ignored his comments.

Every living former chair of the Federal Reserve Bank agrees that the Supreme Court should prevent President Donald Trump’s effort to oust Fed Governor Lisa Cook.

An amicus brief filed Thursday argued that removing Cook would “threaten [the] independence and erode public confidence in the Fed,” and stressed the historical importance of the agency’s freedom from political considerations.

“The independence of the Federal Reserve, within the limited authority granted by Congress to achieve the goals Congress itself has set, is a critical feature of our national monetary system,” the brief said.

The brief’s signatories represented decades of expertise on economic policy, and crossed political boundaries. They included former Federal Reserve Chair Alan Greenspan, who is 99 years old, as well as Ben Bernanke and Janet Yellen. The brief was also signed by former Treasury Secretaries Robert Rubin, Larry Summers, Jack Lew, Timothy Geithner, and Hank Paulson, a Republican. Multiple former chairs of the White House Council of Economic Advisers also lent their support, including Greg Mankiw, Christina Romer, Cecilia Rouse, Jared Bernstein, Jason Furman, and Glenn Hubbard, another Republican.

Phil Gramm, a Republican who previously served as chairman of the Senate Banking Committee, signed the brief as well, as did economists Ken Rogoff and John Cochrane.

Last week, Trump’s lawyer went running to the Supreme Court with a request to stay an appeals court decision keeping Cook in place. The appeals court said that Cook was likely to succeed in her statutory claim that she’d been fired without “cause,” as well as her procedural claim that she did not receive her due process prior to her removal. But attorney John Sauer argued that she was not entitled to due process, and that Trump has a sweeping discretion to fire whomever he wanted as long as he claimed it was related to their job.

President Donald Trump blamed “radical left Democrats” for recent violence, and warned that they were asking for trouble from their counterparts on the right.

Speaking to the press in the Oval Office Thursday, Trump was asked who he blamed for an “uptick” in violence. The reporter cited the Wednesday shooting at the Immigration and Customs Enforcement field office in Dallas, where the shooter reportedly left a note saying he hoped to inspire “real terror” in ICE agents.

“The radical left is causing the problem,” Trump replied. “They’re out of control. They’re saying things, and they’re really dumb people.”

Trump pointed to Representative Jasmine Crockett, a firebrand Democrat from Texas, who has pushed for more aggressive criticism of Trump, calling him a “piece of shit.” Earlier this month, Crockett criticized the administration for targeting Democratic cities with large Black populations, and likened ICE raids to modern day “slave patrols.”

Meanwhile, MAGA has always lauded Trump for speaking “authentically,” and ignored his use of violent language.

“It’s gonna get worse, and ultimately it’s going to go back on them. I mean bad things happen when they play these games” Trump warned. “And uh, I’ll give you a little clue. The right is a lot tougher than the left. But the right’s not doing this, they’re not doing it. And they better not get them energized, because it won’t be good for the left.

“And it’ll be a point where other people won’t take it anymore, and that will not be good for the radical left,” Trump added.

Trump’s framing conveniently ignores that the most recent shooting is in itself a response to right-wing violence: specifically, sweeping extrajudicial deportations carried out by masked agents directed by a far-right regime. State violence begets violence, as push comes to shove. And Trump’s own rhetoric has done little to lower the temperature.

Trump has also turned a blind eye toward violence targeting Democrats, including the shooting of two Democratic Minnesota state lawmakers in June, one of whom died. The deaths of state Representative Melissa Hortman, her husband, and their dog received little notice from the administration, and certainly no national holiday.

President Trump joked about rigged elections at the start of his press conference with Turkish President Tayyip Erdoğan, who has amassed power in Turkey for over two decades. 

“It’s a pleasure to be with President Erdoğan of Turkey, and we’ve been friends for a long time, actually, even for four years when I was in exile unfairly, as it turns out, rigged elections, you know,” Trump said on Thursday. “He knows about rigged elections better than anybody, but when I was in exile, we were still friends.” 

This is yet another example of Trump’s affinity for strongman authoritarian leaders with sketchy records on political transparency, human rights, and free speech, from El Salvador’s Nayib Bukele, to Hungary’s Viktor Orbán, to Erdoğan. 

Erdoğan first became prime minister of Turkey in 2003. Since then, he has jailed students, protesters (for things like throwing eggs), and hundreds of journalists. He has briefly blocked access to Wikipedia and nearly every social media platform and has overseen the Turkish Great Depression, all while hanging giant banners of himself throughout the country. (Sound familiar?)  

Most recently, Erdoğan arrested well-known opposition leader and political rival Ekrem Imamoglu on the grounds that he accepted bribes and rigged bids. Given Erdoğan’s history, it’s extremely likely that Imamoglu was arrested because he represents a serious threat to Erdoğan’s reign, even in the face of outright suppression and election rigging. 

Each thing listed here—muzzling journalists, cracking down on protesters, jailing political rivals, hoarding power for decades—is something Trump has already done or professed his desire to do. It’s no wonder he feels such a kinship with Erdoğan. 

Additionally, Trump referring to his losing the 2020 election and inciting a violent insurrection as his “exile” is rich. Let’s hope he doesn’t take any more notes from Erdoğan for 2028.