Trump Kicks Out Another Prosecutor for Refusing to Heed His Whims

President Donald Trump’s administration forced out yet another U.S. attorney for not going along with their flimsy case, The New York Times reported.

Todd Gilbert, the U.S. attorney in the Western District of Virginia, was forced to resign in August after he refused to sideline a high-ranking prosecutor who said there wasn’t sufficient evidence of criminal misconduct during the FBI’s investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 election.

After being appointed in July, Gilbert was ordered to open a grand jury investigation into whether anyone at the FBI had criminally mishandled documents relating to the decade-old Russia investigation—still a sore spot for the grievance-addled president. When Gilbert told his superiors that the evidence he’d reviewed was flimsy, they blamed his deputy, Zachary Lee, for swaying Gilbert’s opinion with his decades of experience, people familiar with the matter told the Times in the Tuesday story.

DOJ officials viewed Lee, a veteran prosecutor, as a holdover from the Biden administration, even though he’d been hired during the Bush administration, the people added.

Gilbert was instructed to replace Lee with Robert Tracci, which he did, but his superiors still suspected he was consulting with Lee, people familiar told the Times. When his bosses pressed him to remove Lee, Gilbert refused—and was reportedly threatened with termination. So he resigned, posting an Anchorman meme on X to mark his departure.

“Well, that escalated quickly,” the meme said, with a photo of Gilbert being sworn in only a month before.

Now he has been replaced by Tracci.

In Virginia’s Eastern District, Trump recently installed his (apparently incompetent) former lawyer Lindsey Halligan to replace U.S. Attorney Eric Siebert, whom Trump officials had pressured to seek an indictment for mortgage fraud charges against New York Attorney General Letitia James. In doing so, Trump has also sidelined Maggie Cleary, who was briefly named acting head of the U.S. Court for the Eastern District of Virginia.

It’s been more than three weeks since Representative-elect Adelita Grijalva won the special election in Arizona, and the state has had enough of Congress’s delays.

Republican leadership has refused to swear in Grijalva until Congress returns to its regular session, breaking precedent set in April when party members swore in a pair of Florida Republicans during a pro forma session, the day after they won their special elections.

Arizona Attorney General Kris Mayes told CNN Tuesday that Speaker Mike Johnson had left Arizonans with one option to acquire their constitutionally mandated representation: taking him to court.

“I really think that we are going to have no other choice, Laura, except to take Speaker Johnson to court,” Mayes told host Laura Coates, emphasizing the recent flooding that has occurred in Grijalva’s district and her constituents’ need to access Congress.

Grijalva became the first Latina the Grand Canyon State has sent to Congress when she won an election to determine the replacement for her father, Raul Grijalva. She’s also the last signature that the House needs on a petition to force a vote on releasing government documents related to the investigation of deceased pedophilic sex-trafficker Jeffrey Epstein.

“If I have to, I’ll take him to court,” Mayes continued. “Again, there’s no legitimate reason for him to refuse to swear her in right now. No other reason that I can think of except that perhaps she is the final vote to discharge the Epstein files.

“And it’s not fair for Mike Johnson to be holding the state of Arizona hostage because he doesn’t want to release the Epstein files,” Mayes added.

Grijalva’s swearing in appears to be background noise for Republican House leadership, which is floundering to muster solutions to a gridlock over continuous funding for Donald Trump’s “big, beautiful” budget and its seismic cuts to Obamacare subsidies and Medicaid.

But there’s plenty of precedent for Grijalva to be sworn in, even in such complicated circumstances. For instance, the entire House was sworn in during a shutdown in 2019, during Trump’s first term.

Grijalva has already vowed to sign the bipartisan petition advancing the immediate release of the Epstein files. Just four Republicans have penned their signatures on the petition, demanding more transparency from the Trump administration regarding the investigation into Epstein and his potential associates. Those conservative lawmakers include Representatives Thomas Massie, Marjorie Taylor Greene, Nancy Mace, and Lauren Boebert.

Federal immigration enforcement agents allegedly interfered with—and even threatened to “shoot and arrest”—emergency personnel rescuing an injured protester last week in south Portland, as first reported Monday in Willamette Week.

Citing public dispatch records and two confidential internal reports filed by the ambulance workers, Willamette Week reported that agents blocked an ambulance on the evening of October 5 as it tried to exit an ICE facility with a protester who had suffered a collarbone injury.

Federal agents allegedly delayed the emergency workers operating the vehicle for several minutes, repeatedly requesting to ride in the ambulance to the hospital—even after having agreed, due to their lack of arrest paperwork, to simply follow along in their own vehicle instead.

After some delay, the driver began moving the vehicle toward the garage’s exit, when a plainclothes man with a partial face covering reportedly stepped in its path, urging the driver to stop so as not to hit a group of officers in riot gear standing about 15 feet away.

Eventually, seeing the group of officers line up in apparent “preparation for the gate to open so they could escort the ambulance” off, the driver reported having inched forward a bit further. But the delay stretched on, as federal agents stood “incredibly close” to the vehicle and behaved aggressively, the driver recounted. One of the crew members decided to get out to “calm and deescalate the situation,” they later wrote.

Deciding to join them, the driver, according to their report, put the emergency vehicle in park, which caused it to lurch forward slightly. An agent evidently interpreted the vehicle’s forward movement as deliberate, and is said to have begun threatening the driver.

The agent “pointed his finger at me in a threatening manner,” the driver recalled, “and began viciously yelling in my face, stating, ‘DON’T YOU EVER DO THAT AGAIN, I WILL SHOOT YOU, I WILL ARREST YOU RIGHT NOW.’”

“I was still in such shock,” the driver said, “that they were not only accusing me of such a thing, but crowding and cornering me in the seat, pointing and screaming at me, threatening to shoot and arrest me, and not allowing the ambulance to leave the scene. This was no longer a safe scene, and in that moment, I realized that the scene had not actually been safe the entire time that they were blocking us from exiting, and that we were essentially trapped.”

After the driver’s crew member explained the situation—that the vehicle had not been driven forward, but rolled slightly as it was being parked—another agent replied “that this was not the first time this had happened,” wrote Willamette Week.

Donald Trump on Tuesday compared conservative commentator and Turning Point USA founder Charlie Kirk to Socrates as he posthumously awarded him the Presidential Medal of Freedom, which apparently means nothing now.

The award was announced on what would have been Kirk’s 32nd birthday, if not for his assassination in Utah at the hands of 22-year-old Tyler Robinson.

“Charlie never missed an opportunity to remind us of the Judeo-Christian principles of our nation’s founding, or to share his deep Christian faith. In his final moments Charlie testified to the greatness of America, and to the glory of our savior with whom he now rests in Heaven,” Trump remarked at the ceremony. “Charlie Kirk was a martyr for truth and for freedom. And from Socrates … and to Saint Peter, from Abraham Lincoln to Martin Luther King, those who change history the most—and he really did—have always risked their lives for causes they were put on earth to defend.”

Trump also used the award ceremony to continue to spread falsities about the prevalence of organized left-wing violence.

The Presidential Medal of Freedom was established by President John F. Kennedy to serve as the highest honor a civilian could receive, for people who “have made especially meritorious contributions to the security or national interests of the United States, to world peace, or to cultural or other significant public or private endeavors.”

Kirk did not embody that, no matter how much the right tries to sanitize his image. Aside from helping Trump successfully push a significant number of young people toward the MAGA movement, Kirk made his name by talking down to and clipping college undergraduates, pushing blatant anti-Black and anti-Latino racism, and using the Bible to deny the humanity of gay and transgender folk. His life was not one that held the essence of an award that has been given to cultural heavyweights like Maya Angelou, Desmond Tutu, Stephen Hawking, Nelson Mandela, and Martin Luther King Jr.

The medal has lost some of its shine in recent years, as Trump has awarded it to people simply for helping him, not adding meaning to American life and culture. In his first term, he gave the award to right-wing commentator (and Kirk inspiration) Rush Limbaugh, Zionist conservative megadonor Miriam Adelson, and Republican Representative Jim Jordan. And in his second, Trump’s disgraced former attorney Rudy Giuliani and now Kirk have received the medal, with Ben Carson expected to be honored next.

Politico got a hold of a group chat of leaders of Young Republicans groups across the country—which was teeming with racism, antisemitism, rape jokes, and other filth. Pejoratives like the homophobic f-slur, the n-word, and the r-word appeared more than 251 times combined in the Telegram chat, which contained Young Republican leaders from New York, Kansas, Arizona, and Vermont.

The chat, called “RESTOREYR WAR ROOM,” seemingly included young Republicans aligned with the “Restore YR” faction of the Young Republican National Federation, or YRNF.

Peter Giunta, who at the time was chair of the New York State Young Republicans, was “the most prominent voice in the chat spreading racist messages,” Politico reports. (He apologized for the messages but told the publication he has “no way of verifying their accuracy.”)

In the group chat, Giunta reportedly referred to Black people as “watermelon people,” and wrote of an NBA playoff game: “I’d go to the zoo if I wanted to watch monkey play ball.” While discussing his support of another young Republican group, he wrote that “they support slavery and all that shit,” which he approvingly called “Mega based.”

On another occasion, Giunta told his fellow chat members: “If your pilot is a she and she looks ten shades darker than someone from Sicily, just end it there. Scream the no no word.”

“I love Hitler,” Giunta joked elsewhere. He also said those who voted against his ultimately unsuccessful bid to become YRNF chair would be sent “to the gas chamber,” leading his fellow New York State Young Republicans to crack additional jokes about the Holocaust.

Giunta lost the YRNF chair in August to Hayden Padgett, whom Giunta referred to as “Hayden F—t.” Numerous other members of the group chat used demeaning language against Padgett; for instance, Luke Mosiman, the chair of the Arizona Young Republicans, wrote, “RAPE HAYDEN.”

Another joke about sexual violence, unrelated to Padgett, came from Bobby Walker, the vice chair of the New York State Young Republicans, who called rape “epic” in a separate exchange. (Walker, like Giunta, apologized but told Politico some of the chat could have been “altered, taken out of context, or otherwise manipulated.”)

Another frequent contributor to the chat was William Hendrix, vice chair of the Kansas Young Republicans and, until last week, a communications assistant for Kansas’s Republican Attorney General Kris Kobach. Hendrix reportedly used variations of the n-word more than a dozen times in the chat, in addition to making jokes employing racist stereotypes and approvingly mentioning that the Missouri Young Republicans organization “doesn’t like f--s.”