Vance Claims Everyone Is “Pearl Clutching” Over Racist GOP Group Chat

Vice President JD Vance late Tuesday decried “pearl clutching” over a Politico story unearthing a private group chat in which prominent members of Young Republicans chapters called Black people monkeys, spoke approvingly of rape and slavery, and wrote other odious remarks, such as “I love Hitler” and messages containing racial and homophobic slurs.

Opting for whataboutism, Vance highlighted unearthed messages by Jay Jones, a Democratic nominee for attorney general in Virginia, who recently apologized for leaked private messages from August 2022, in which he joked about shooting then-state House Speaker Speaker Todd Gilbert. Jones also said Gilbert would not take action on gun safety unless his children were endangered, writing, “Only when people feel pain personally do they move on policy.”

Vance posted a screenshot of the latter comment on X, with the caption: “This is far worse than anything said in a college group chat, and the guy who said it could become the AG of Virginia. I refuse to join the pearl clutching when powerful people call for political violence.”

For one, it’s not a matter of fact that Jones’s messages are worse than those of the Young Republicans, who spoke about having their political opponents raped and sent to gas chambers.

Vance is also trying to downplay the importance of the messages by claiming they were shared in a “college group chat.”

But Young Republicans groups include those between 18 and 40 years old, with members of the reported group chat well into adulthood. The man Politico identifies as “the most prominent voice in the chat spreading racist messages,” for instance, is 31. The members held notable positions in Republican politics, with several leading state affiliates of the GOP’s youth arm. Some worked in state politics, and at least one serves as a state senator.

Vance’s tweet exemplifies his time-tested willingness to excuse vitriol in his own ranks, embracing a “no-enemies-to-the-right” stance that is seemingly limitless.

Former Justice Department special counsel Jack Smith—who has been tormented by MAGA for years over his dual criminal investigations into President Trump for illegal possession of classified documents and his role in January 6—is pulling out receipts.

“One of the major differences between the [Biden and Trump] cases is the obstructive conduct in the case that I investigated.… To prove illegal possession of classified documents, you need to show that the defendant possesses the documents willfully. That means [Trump] knew what he was doing was wrong,” Smith said in a sit-down interview at the University College London Centre for Global Constitutional Democracy, made available Tuesday. “We had tons of evidence of willfulness.”

The case Smith is referring to, in which Trump was charged with keeping classified documents in Mar-a-Lago after leaving the White House, resulted in a 40-felony-count indictment against the president in 2023. The case was eventually dropped after Trump won the election in 2024.

“The government even tried to get them back before there was a criminal investigation, and then after the investigation started, [Trump] still [refused] to give them back, and then [tried] to obstruct the investigation,” Smith continued.

Even with this knowledge, it’s virtually impossible that Trump will receive any kind of consequence for these crimes, as he continues to harangue Smith—calling him a “sleazebag”—and anyone else who dared to investigate him, like New York Attorney General Letitia James and former FBI Director James Comey.

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.”

It looks like President Donald Trump may have jumped the shark on declaring peace in the Middle East: Less than 24 hours after declaring that the war between Israel and Hamas had finally finished, Trump promised to disarm Hamas by force, if they did not do it themselves.

During a meeting with Argentinian President Javier Milei Tuesday, Trump made a startling threat while dodging a question from a reporter about Hamas disarming. “How long will it take Hamas to disarm, and can you guarantee that is going to happen?” the reporter asked.

“Well, they’re going to disarm, because they said they were going to disarm. And if they don’t disarm, we will disarm them,” Trump replied.

“How will you do that?” the reporter pressed.

“I don’t have to explain that to you,” Trump bit back, adding, “They know I’m not playing games.”

Trump continued in a weaving ramble before circling back to the issue of disarming Hamas. “We have told them, we want disarm, and they will disarm. And if they don’t disarm, we will disarm them. And it will happen quickly, and perhaps violently. But they will disarm. Do you understand me?” he said.

It quickly became clear that Trump lacked any actual details about disarming Hamas. The president claimed that he’d spoken directly to Hamas, but later clarified he’d heard of their plans to disarm “through [his] people at the highest level.”

When asked how long the group would be given to disarm, Trump said they’d have a “reasonable period of time, pretty quickly.”

On Monday, Trump attended the signing of a peace deal between Israel and Hamas in Sharm El Sheikh, Egypt, following the release of the remaining 20 Israeli hostages in Gaza and nearly 2,000 Palestinian prisoners in Israel, including 1,700 taken over the last two years and held without charges. Speaking before Israel’s Knesset that day, Trump said, “This is not only the end of a war, this is the end of an age of terror and death and the beginning of the age of faith and hope and of God.”

While both sides have agreed to this first phase of Trump’s 20-point peace plan, it’s still unclear whether peace will persist. Trump announced Tuesday that the second phase would commence, meaning, “Hamas members who commit to peaceful coexistence and to decommission their weapons will be given amnesty. Members of Hamas who wish to leave Gaza will be provided safe passage to receiving countries.”

Reuters reported Tuesday that Israel has continued to block essential aid into Gaza, while Hamas has begun executing political rivals in the streets, after receiving approval from Trump to act as police for a “period of time.”

If Trump’s latest comments are anything to go by, more bloodshed may yet be in Gaza’s future, following the formal end of Israel’s catastrophic military campaign that has killed more than 65,000 people—including medics and journalists—displaced nearly two million more, and caused widespread famine.

President Trump refused to answer a question from an ABC reporter at his sitdown with Argentine President Javier Milei on Tuesday, citing host George Stephanopoulos’s embarrassment of Vice President JD Vance on Sunday.

“You’re ABC fake news, I don’t take questions from ABC fake news,” Trump said as a reporter shouted a question at him. “After what you did with Stephanopoulos to the vice president of the United States—I don’t take questions from ABC fake news.”

Stephanopoulos didn’t “do” anything to Vance—he simply called him out on his B.S. regarding the $50,000 cash bribe the FBI caught current White House border czar Tom Homan accepting in a sting operation in 2024. Vance and the Trump administration continue to state that Homan committed no crime while being unable to say where the $50,000 went.

“Tom Homan did not take a bribe,” Vance told ABC on Sunday. “It’s a ridiculous smear. And the reason you guys are going after Tom Homan so aggressively is because he’s doing the job of enforcing the law. I think it’s really preposterous.”

“But, wait, you said he didn’t take a bribe,” Stephanopoulos pushed. “But I’m not sure you answered the question. Are you saying that he did not accept the $50,000?”

“George, I don’t know what you’re talking about. Did he accept $50,000 for what?” Vance said, feigning ignorance.

“He was recorded on an audiotape in September of 2024, an FBI surveillance tape, accepting $50,000 in cash. Did he keep that money?” Stephanopoulos said.

“Accepting $50,000 for doing what, George?” Vance replied. “I am not even sure I understand the question. Is it illegal to take a payment for doing services? The FBI has not prosecuted him. I have never seen any evidence that he’s engaged in criminal wrongdoing. Nobody has accused Tom of violating a crime, even the far-left media like yourself.

“So I’m actually not sure what the precise question is. Did he accept $50,000? Honestly, George, I don’t know the answer to that question,” Vance continued. “What I do know is that he didn’t violate a crime.”

The nonanswer led Stephanopoulos to pull the plug on the interview, a move that clearly bothered Trump, especially given his past ire for Stephanopoulos.

Now the president is using the perceived slight to his vice president as an excuse to further censor the media.

Even the president can’t spell out how his Argentina bailout package will benefit the United States.

The White House is moving forward with its multibillion-dollar lifeline to Argentina, which will give $20 billion in U.S. taxpayer dollars to a nation on the verge of economic collapse. However, Donald Trump can’t seem to explain why Americans are the ones responsible for making “Argentina great again.”

“Just helping a great philosophy take over a great country,” Trump told one Spanish-speaking reporter during a meeting with Argentine President Javier Milei at the White House Tuesday. “Argentina is one of the most beautiful countries that I’ve ever seen, and we want to see it succeed, very simple.

“We don’t have to do it. It’s not going to make a big difference for our country,” he continued. “But it will for South America.”

Speaking to another reporter, Trump claimed that the bailout is “really meant to help a good financial philosophy.”

“So, when we can help our neighbors—you know we’re making tremendous progress in South America,” Trump said.

Whether or not Trump is willing to acknowledge it, $20 billion is no paltry sum. Stateside, the government is still shut down over how to fund Trump’s “big, beautiful” budget, which included details to slice billions from Obamacare subsidies and Medicaid.

And the U.S. will need a bailout of its own very soon. American soybean farmers have been pummeled by Trump’s tariff policies, which have ripped the Chinese market from their grasp. However, after it came to light that Argentina had replaced the U.S. as China’s top soybean supplier, Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent told CNBC that the anticipated Argentina-bound cash infusion had morphed into a “credit swap line.”