Graham Platner Reveals His Nazi Tattoo Cover-Up

Maine Senate candidate Graham Platner has been under fire this week after revelations that he has a skull tattoo associated with Germany’s Nazi Party on his chest. On Wednesday, he announced that it has been covered up.

In an interview with Vanity Fair published on Wednesday, Platner said that the tattoo has been covered up with “some kind of Celtic knot with a dog on it, because that’s far more in line with my opinions about nature and animals now than my connection to the violence that I partook in when I was a young man.” On Wednesday, Platner revealed his new tattoo in an interview with Maine TV station WGME.

The oyster farmer turned progressive political candidate vehemently denied any connections or affinity to Nazism, saying that he got the tattoo on a drunken night out in Croatia in 2007 while serving in the Marines. A video posted to Instagram earlier this week showed Platner singing shirtless at a wedding where the skull tattoo, known as a Totenkopf or “death’s head,” is visible.

Platner told the magazine that he wasn’t aware of the tattoo’s background until recently, saying that he got it because “skull and crossbar motifs are popular amongst military units.” He said that his tattoo had been reviewed at a Military Entrance Processing Station when he later joined the U.S. Army, and before he began work as a contractor for the State Department.

Platner added that the wedding where he was singing was that of his sister-in-law, who is Jewish, and that several members of his extended family are Jewish.

“If I thought that I had a Nazi tattoo, I would not have just been taking my shirt off in front of everybody. I just had a skull and crossbones that I got when I was in the Marine Corps,” Platner said.

Speaking to the Associated Press, Platner said that he chose to cover up the tattoo because a full removal would be a longer and more difficult process where he lives in rural Maine, and he “wanted this thing off my body.”

Platner is looking to unseat Republican senator Susan Collins, who has held her seat for 25 years despite shedding her once-moderate image in favor of the GOP’s ideological shift toward Donald Trump. While Collins has faced rising unpopularity in Maine, even being jeered and booed at a public appearance over the summer, Platner now has a well-funded Democratic primary challenger in Governor Janet Mills, who has the support of Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer and the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee.

Platner burst onto the scene in August with a now-viral campaign launch video where he pledged to “topple the oligarchy that’s destroying our country” and end “endless wars,” and has appealed to to many voters in Maine by calling Israel’s massacre in Gaza a genocide and refusing to “take money from AIPAC or any group that supports the genocide in Gaza.” Now, his upstart candidacy faces the obstacle of convincing those voters that he isn’t hiding secret Nazi inclinations and is running for the right reasons.

This story has been updated.

President Trump is blatantly attempting to weasel his way into a $230 million payout from his own Justice Department. Unsurprisingly, the GOP couldn’t care less. 

“How comfortable are you with the president apparently seeking $230 million from the Department of Justice?” a reporter asked House Speaker Mike Johnson on Wednesday, a day after the news broke. Johnson, of course, reverted back to his favorite response: ignorance.

“I don’t know the details about that, I’ve just read it, I didn’t talk with him about that,” Johnson replied. “I know that he believes he’s owed that reimbursement. What I heard yesterday was if he receives it, he was gonna consider giving it to charity, he doesn’t need those proceeds.” 

How does Johnson know that Trump (known for being forced to shut down his own charity foundation after being caught using it for personal funds) might give the millions to charity if he just said seconds before that he didn’t know any details? 

“It’s absurd,” the speaker continued. “They attack him for everything he does.” He then quickly changed the subject to defend Trump’s bulldozing the White House’s East Wing to clear room for his upcoming ballroom.  

Trump is essentially demanding that the DOJ pay him hundreds of millions of dollars for investigating his 2016 campaign’s ties to Russia and his mishandling of classified documents after he left the presidency. This is an unprecedented, deeply questionable move. 

“What a travesty,” ethics professor Bennett L. Gershman, told The New York Times. “The ethical conflict is just so basic and fundamental, you don’t need a law professor to explain it.… And then to have people in the Justice Department decide whether his claim should be successful or not, and these are the people who serve him deciding whether he wins or loses. It’s bizarre and almost too outlandish to believe.”

This reimbursement, if successful, will likely have to be covered by the American taxpayer. 

At least one GOP member, Thom Tillis, had the courage to speak out.

“It’s terrible optics, particularly right now,” he told CNN’s Manu Raju. “We’re talking about a quarter of a billion dollars transferring, maybe to the president when we’re in a shutdown posture.” 

But the majority of Republicans seem to be staying quiet.

Zohran Mamdani’s preventative crime plan is so effective that criminals are fleeing New York City before he’s even mayor.

Disgraced ex–Long Island Representative George Santos revealed his plans to exit the Big Apple Tuesday, claiming that the New York Democratic mayoral candidate’s policies would make the city unsafe for him.

“Sadly it seems that my family and I will be departing the city I’ve called home my entire life. NYC will become a very dangerous place to live in if we elect mayor Mamdani and that is a risk I am unwilling to take now that I want to start growing my family,” Santos posted to X.

Of course, Santos was the danger. The reputed hustler was caught fabricating his entire résumé and lying about his relation to Holocaust survivors, his connection to the 2016 Orlando nightclub shooting, and the kidnapping of his niece, among many other things. He had victims across continents, having graduated from stealing wallets in Brazil to using political donations to his congressional campaign to bankroll his personal lifestyle—namely, his designer shoe addiction.

Santos pleaded guilty last year to wire fraud and aggravated identity theft, as well as credit card fraud and illegally receiving unemployment benefits. He was sentenced to seven years in prison—a detention commuted by President Donald Trump on Friday for no clear reason other than the prolific fraudster’s undying loyalty to the president.

“He lied like hell,” Trump said of his fellow Republican to Newsmax in August. “But he was 100 percent for Trump.”

Santos served just 84 days, while his victims described the presidential pardon as a knife to the gut.

But if the fabulist con man’s prior statements are to be believed, then Santos isn’t planning on staying stateside, either.

“Once I finish my obligations with the U.S. criminal justice system I will leave and never return,” Santos posted in May. “I rather take my chances in other countries than live in a country that has a weaponized justice system and is run by the industrial prison complex.”

But Santos may have another reason for trying to get as far from New York as possible: Although Trump commuted Santos’s sentence for federal crimes, his move does nothing about state-level charges. Nassau County District Attorney Anne T. Donnelly released a statement Tuesday regarding Santos’s newfound freedom.

“While the office cannot comment on ongoing investigations, suffice it to say that I remain focused on prosecuting political corruption wherever it exists regardless of political affiliation,” she said in the statement.

An Immigration and Customs Enforcement agent accidentally injured a deputy U.S. marshal while firing shots at a TikTok streamer known for documenting ICE raids.

The violent incident occurred during a traffic stop in South Los Angeles Tuesday, when agents attempted to detain Carlitos Ricardo Parias, known as Richard LA, who had previously received recognition for his work as a citizen journalist documenting ICE operations.

In a statement, Department of Homeland Security Assistant Secretary Tricia McLaughlin said the operation was “a targeted enforcement traffic stop,” and that the 44-year-old Mexican immigrant “had previously escaped from custody” and “attempted to evade arrest yet again.”

McLaughlin claimed that Parias was pulled over using “standard law enforcement procedure,” but acting U.S. Attorney Bill Essayli said that agents had “boxed him in,” which is not considered standard procedure for a traffic stop.

According to the affidavit, Parias ignored commands to exit his vehicle, hitting two law enforcement vehicles before “accelerating aggressively” with his car.

The affidavit claimed that the spinning wheels of Parias’s Toyota Camry produced smoke and debris, and Essayli shared an image of the arrest on X that showed a plume of white smoke beside the car. However, an eyewitness claimed that officers had fired tear gas during the arrest, which could also explain the cloud of smoke.

McLaughlin claimed that officers “followed their training and fired defensive shots” when Parias “weaponized his vehicle and began ramming the law enforcement vehicle in an attempt to flee.”

CNN reported that an ICE officer confronted Parias and used his weapon to smash Parias’s window, according to a law enforcement source who spoke to the outlet. Authorities believe the agent’s weapon fired while he was attempting to grab Parias, striking Parias and a deputy marshal. McLaughlin made no mention of this interaction in her statement.

Parias was struck in the elbow, and a ricocheted bullet hit one deputy marshal in the hand. Both are expected to recover.

Parias has been charged with assault of a federal officer. His lawyer Carlos Jurado told CNN affiliate KCAL/KCBS that his client was “a very pacifist man. He’s very calm. A lot of the police officers here know him. They know that he’s very respectful.”

This is not the first time ICE has opened fire during an attempted arrest. Earlier this month, a Border Patrol agent in Chicago shot a woman five times during a traffic stop. DHS claimed that the woman had attempted to ram law enforcement vehicles, but her lawyer claimed it was the other way around.

Republican Representative Brandon Gill threw a fit over a clip posted on X of journalist Mehdi Hasan pointing out America’s freedom of religion clause applies to all religions—and then doubled down on his own bigotry.

On Tuesday afternoon, Gill quoted a post from far-right account End Wokeness showing a video clip of Hasan pointing out that American Muslims have a right to play their call to prayer from mosque loudspeakers, just like Christians do to ring church bells. The Texas representative then accused Muslims of moving to the U.S. “en masse” to “fundamentally transform the landscape of American public life.”

Hasan responded by pointing out that Gill’s xenophobia doesn’t seem to extend to his own wife, the daughter of Indian immigrant and right-wing writer Dinesh D’Souza. Gill didn’t take kindly to that, making it clear that he is prejudiced against Muslims. Hasan seems to have gotten the last word, though.

Gill has a long history of bigotry and Islamophobia. In February, he called for his Muslim congressional colleague, Representative Ilhan Omar, to be deported, falsely claiming that she told undocumented immigrants how to break the law. He also joined fellow conservatives’ hysteria over a video clip of New York City mayoral candidate Zohran Mamdani, also a Muslim, eating with his hands.

Freedom of religion is explicitly granted in the First Amendment of the Constitution, so perhaps Gill needs a lesson on actual American values. His congressional district in the Dallas-Fort Worth suburbs includes at least one mosque, the Islamic Society of Denton. Maybe he ought to show more respect to religious diversity in the U.S. and his own backyard, if only for political reasons.

Republican rage over Jack Smith’s investigation was apparently all for naught.

Conservative lawmakers accused the former special prosecutor earlier this month of spying on them during his investigation of Donald Trump by tapping their phone lines and monitoring their phone calls. Iowa Senator Chuck Grassley dubbed the right-wing scandal “worse than Watergate.”

But none of those allegations have held up, especially not in light of a letter Smith’s legal team issued Tuesday that reveals just how legal—and common—the log request was.

“Although you have not reached out to us to discuss this matter, we are compelled to correct inaccurate assertions made by you and others concerning the issuance of a grand jury subpoena for the toll records of eight Senators and one Member of the House of Representatives,” attorneys Lanny Breuer and Peter Koski wrote.

“It is well established that obtaining telephone toll records pursuant to a subpoena is a routine and lawful investigative step that does not violate an individual’s expectation of privacy,” they continued, underscoring that phone toll records don’t contain the content of the calls—only the incoming and outgoing phone numbers, as well as the calls’ duration.

The practice was so ordinary, per Smith’s team, that another special counsel investigator requested the same information during his investigation of President Joe Biden.

“Indeed, Special Counsel Robert Hur subpoenaed toll records in his investigation of President Biden,” the letter reads.

“During the current Trump administration, the Department of Justice has routinely relied upon subpoenaed toll records in numerous criminal prosecutions. During Trump’s first term, the Justice Department purportedly obtained communications records of two Democratic Members of Congress—Rep. Eric Swalwell and then-Rep. Adam Schiff—and forty-three congressional staffers in connection with an investigation into media leaks. More recently, the Department of Justice used toll records in the prosecution of Senator Menendez,” Breuer and Koski continued.

Smith conducted two parallel investigations into Trump, both of which resulted in indictments. They centered on allegations that Trump mishandled and retained classified records after the end of his first presidential term, and his alleged efforts to subvert the 2020 presidential election. Trump pleaded not guilty on all charges before the charges were dropped altogether after the 2024 election due to Justice Department policy that prevents the prosecution of a sitting president.

Senior Trump officials have since deemed Smith an enemy of the administration, arguing that his investigation was tantamount to the political weaponization of the Justice Department.

In a historic turn of events revealed Tuesday, Trump has apparently demanded reparations for the legal comeuppance, expecting the DOJ to pay him millions because the agency investigated him.

ICE agents violently arrested a blind man outside of a Portland detention facility, slamming him to the ground and dragging him across the pavement after he sat where they didn’t want him to sit.

Quinn Haberl, who is 4 foot 6, believes that Immigration and Customs Enforcement wanted to make an example out of him with the incident on Saturday.

“I think they wanted to make a point,” he told The Oregonian. “So they picked the weakest person they could find and made a big show out of it.”

“I was sitting in the grass and my legs were just barely in the driveway and they came up, I think there were six of them and they grabbed me and they started to drag me across the driveway on the ground,” Haberl said in an interview with KGW. He was later cuffed.

The Department of Homeland Security told a different story.

“This rioter was arrested after he blatantly disobeyed law enforcement orders to remain off federal property, obstructed law enforcement, and continued to block the driveway so vehicles could not enter or exit the ICE facility,” they said in a statement.

Even still, the level of violence used against an unarmed, unthreatening, and clearly disabled person is another installment in an alarming trend of federal agents using excessive force to respond to protestors.

“I’m only 4 foot 6 and I can’t see, what harm was I gonna do to them?” Haberl said. “It was scary, being dragged across the ground when you can’t see what’s happening around you.”

Haberl was released and sent to the hospital with bruising, saying he needed some time before returning to the protests.

“They call Portland a war zone? The only people that’s making it a war zone is ICE.”

White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt attempted to justify the destruction of the White House by claiming Americans had actually voted for it.

Speaking on Fox News’s Jesse Watters Primetime Tuesday, Leavitt tried to douse fires sparked by viral photographs of a shredded East Wing, claiming that this was exactly what people liked about Donald Trump in the first place.

“He is the builder in chief,” Leavitt said. “In large part, he was reelected back to this people’s house because he is good at building things. He has done it his entire life, his entire career.”

She noted that the East Wing of the White House would be “more modern and beautiful than ever,” and again touted the 90,000-square-foot ballroom Trump had claimed in July would not “interfere with the current building.” Trump had announced earlier Tuesday the East Wing would be “fully modernized.”

But the Trump administration knows it has a massive problem. The Treasury Department, which sits across from the East Wing, sent a message to federal employees Monday evening asking them to stop taking photos of the gaping hole in the side of the building.

It also seems that Trump has allowed his “builder in chief” status to eclipse his actual duties. The president has reportedly become consumed by his large-scale remodeling at the White House, wandering away from his work to survey renovations.

President Trump has withdrawn more nominees than any president—at least since 1981—as his most recent pick bows out after his blatant racism and self-described “Nazi streak” was exposed in a series of unearthed text messages. 

Author Gabe Fleisher noted that at 49 failed nominations, Trump has easily eclipsed previous presidential standards. Obama was up next, with 35 withdrawals in 2009. Trump’s forty-ninth failed nominee, Paul Ingrassia, was up for a position at the Office of Special Counsel but announced he is withdrawing from consideration on Tuesday evening after it became obvious he didn’t have enough Republican support in the Senate. 

Ingrassia is a deeply hateful and racist person. “No moulignon holidays.… From kwanza [sic] to mlk jr day to black history month to Juneteenth,” he wrote in one text, using an Italian slur for Black people in the beginning of the message. “Every single one needs to be eviscerated.”

“MLK Jr. was the 1960s George Floyd and his ‘holiday’ should be ended and tossed into the seventh circle of hell where it belongs,” he said in January. He also said he had a “bit of a Nazi streak,” and to “Never trust a chinaman or Indian. NEVER.” 

Ingrassia, who has also been accused of sexually harassing a co-worker, essentially tanked his nomination. He isn’t the only nominee to step down due to controversy of his own creation. Attorney General nominee Matt Gaetz was forced to bow out over allegations that he paid a 17-year-old girl for sex. D.C. U.S. attorney nominee Ed Martin was forced out over his defense of January 6 insurrectionists. Potential Centers for Disease Control and Prevention nominee David Weldon was taken out over spreading vaccine misinformation, and Bureau of Labor Statistics nominee E.J. Antoni stepped down after misogynist tweets about Kamala Harris resurfaced, in which he implied that she slept her way to success. A slew of other withdrawals, like potential NASA head Jared Isaacman, have occurred due to internal MAGA beef.

This is an ominous record to hold, demonstrating the volatility of Trump’s nominees and the often disqualifying character traits they display. So many of them are clearly just awful, unpleasant people who think racism is at least funny, if not a preferred ideology. How many people with a “Nazi streak” already made it in?  

The government may be shut down, but at least one Democratic senator is still working—speaking around the clock from the Senate floor against the dangers of President Trump and his administration.

Senator Jeff Merkley of Oregon began speaking at 6:24 p.m. Tuesday night and is still holding the floor as of this article’s publication, with his Democratic colleagues at times interjecting to ask him questions.

“I’ve come to the Senate floor tonight to ring the alarm bells. We’re in the most perilous moment, the biggest threat to our republic since the Civil War. President Trump is shredding our Constitution,” Merkley said to begin his remarks.

The many topics Merkley has addressed so far in his more than 14-hour speech include the administration’s funding cuts to universities, Trump’s indictments of his political opponents, his deployment of National Guard troops to cities across the country, and his threat to do the same to Portland, Oregon.

“President Trump wants us to believe that Portland, Oregon, in my home state, is full of chaos and riots. Because if he can say to the American people that there are riots, he can say there’s a rebellion. And if there’s a rebellion, he can use that to strengthen his authoritarian grip on our nation,” Merkley said.

Merkley is following Senator Cory Booker’s record-setting speech of 25 hours and five minutes in March and April. The Oregon senator is no stranger to long speeches himself—in 2017, he spoke for over 15 hours against Trump’s nomination of Neil Gorsuch to the Supreme Court. And unlike 13 of his Democratic colleagues, Merkley didn’t vote to confirm a Trump judicial nominee Tuesday, putting some ideological weight behind his marathon speech.

Follow along with Merkley’s speech below: