GOP Senator, 92, Gives Nonsensical Answer to Journo’s Simple Question

Republican Senator Chuck Grassley—92 years old, head of the Senate Judiciary Committee, and third in line for presidential succession—was not able to answer a basic, clearly stated question from a reporter on Wednesday, offering a response that had little to do with the topic at hand.

“Do you agree with your colleagues that Judge Boasberg should be impeached, and if so, what do you think that process would look like?” a reporter asked Grassley, referring to a federal judge who has drawn the ire of the Trump administration for his resistance to Trump’s deportation campaign, becoming a target of Attorney General Pam Bondi in the process.

Grassley paused for a beat to process the question. “Uh, I’m sorry. I’ve got hearing problems, so speak louder.”

The reporter repeated the question exactly.

“Well, first of all, we wanna make sure that we have all the documents, all the information that we can possibly get, so we know that these people who come before us, they know what to say or not to say,” Grassley replied, completely disregarding the question of Boasberg’s impeachment. “We gotta make sure that we have all the documents, all the information that we can possibly get, so we know when these people that come before us … they know what to say or not to say. And we gotta make sure that we got the documents so that when they lie to us, we can challenge ’em.”

Grassley’s rambling was so off-base that fellow GOP Senator Lindsey Graham had to jump in for cleanup.

“Can I say somethin’ about that? Uh, impeachment starts in the House,” Graham said.

It’s abundantly clear at this point that the U.S. has a gerontocracy issue. It’s not shocking that Grassley can’t hear well, that Senator Mitch McConnell has trouble with standing upright and zoning out, that D.C. Congresswoman Eleanor Holmes Norton is showing signs of dementia, or that former President Joe Biden had visible cognitive issues on that debate stage in 2024—all of those people are over 80 years old. The issue is that elderly politicians are wielding immense amounts of power, and would rather die in office than cede their positions to someone even 20 years their junior.

ICE agents are making Portland worse, not better, according to local law enforcement.

Portland Police Commander Franz Schoening testified in court Wednesday that federal officers had escalated a No Kings protest in the city on October 18—not because of crowd violence, but because one of their own had accidentally shot tear gas onto the roof of an ICE facility, reported Politico’s Kyle Cheney.

That day, federal officers tried to use a launcher to fire tear gas at protesters occupying the ICE headquarters’ driveway. But they missed, and instead sent a can flying onto the roof of the building, where more federal officers were stationed. Those officers mistook the friendly fire for an attack by the protesters, and retaliated by firing tear gas and rubber bullets into the crowd, ultimately hurting local law enforcement in the process, according to Schoening.

“The types and amounts of force being used by federal officers is disproportionate to the level of criminal conduct or violence we’re seeing down there,” Schoening said during the first day of a federal trial deliberating the Trump administration’s deployment of the National Guard to the supposedly besieged city.

The trial, before the U.S. District Judge Karin Immergut, is the first instance in which a court weighs in on whether a protest at an immigration facility constitutes a rebellion. Oregon accused the White House in a 41-page legal complaint of having “trampled” the U.S. Constitution by federalizing Portland’s law enforcement, arguing that Donald Trump had legitimately threatened Portland’s peace by “inciting a public outcry.”

Schoening recalled that the city’s anti-ICE protests had been mild in September, but ramped up once Trump got the troops involved.

Rather than rely on data before commanding the National Guard across the country, Trump decided last month to target Rose City after he claimed he witnessed its “destruction” while “watching television.” He then directed Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth and Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem to “provide all necessary Troops to protect War ravaged Portland” in order to defend ICE and his immigration agenda, authorizing the use of “full force.”

Progressive Democratic congressional candidate and former journalist Kat Abughazaleh was indicted by the Justice Department Wednesday for allegedly preventing a federal officer from “discharging the duties of his office” at the Broadview ICE detention center near Chicago.

Abughazaleh and five others are accused of blocking a Department of Homeland Security vehicle from carrying out deportations, banging and scratching on the window.

“It was further part of the conspiracy that Abughazaleh joined the crowd at the front of the Government Vehicle, and with her hands on the hood braced her body and hands against the vehicle while remaining directly in the path of the vehicle, hindering and impeding Agent A and the vehicle from proceeding to the BSSA,” the court documents read. “[Abughazaleh] forcibly impeded, intimidated, and interfered with an officer of the United States.”

Abughazaleh, a 26-year-old Palestinian American House candidate in Illinois’s 9th congressional district, condemned the indictment.

“This is a political prosecution, and a gross attempt to silence dissent, a right protected under the First Amendment,” she said in a video posted to social media Wednesday afternoon. “This is a major push by the Trump administration to criminalize protest and punish anyone who speaks out against them. That’s why I’m gonna fight these unjust charges.”

Federal forces have been particularly violent and confrontational in Chicago, where the Trump administration is carrying out its “Operation Midway Blitz” crackdown on immigration, resulting in shows of dissent from local residents. Abughazaleh herself was body-slammed and beaten by ICE at a previous protest in September. Other protesters in Chicago, such as Reverend David Black and United Methodist Reverend Hannah Kardon, have also been shot at with pepper balls.

“ICE has hit, dragged, thrown, shot with pepper balls, and tear-gassed hundreds of protesters, simply because we had the gall to say that masked men coming into our communities, abducting our neighbors, and terrorizing us cannot be our new normal,” Abughazaleh said.

“This case targets our right to protest, speak freely, and associate with anyone who disagrees with the government,” Abughazaleh added. “We cannot diminish ourselves in the face of these attacks. That’s why we have to unite and stand up for humanity, our rights, and everyone terrorized by Trump’s lawless secret police.”

Abughazaleh and the other five protesters face charges carrying up to eight years in prison if convicted.

FBI Director Kash Patel met his girlfriend at Penn State this past weekend to watch a wrestling match—but his travel to the university stadium appears to have been on the American public’s dime.

Patel made the trek to support his girlfriend, country singer Alexis Wilkins, who performed a song as part of “Real American Freestyle,” a wrestling promotion co-founded earlier this year by the late Hulk Hogan. The federal law enforcement director was definitely there—Wilkins snapped and posted a picture of him.

While there’s nothing particularly controversial about attending a wrestling match, how Patel made his way to the college has become the focus of some unflattering attention. Former FBI agent Kyle Seraphin noted on X that it was a government jet that arrived at and departed from State College Regional Airport, the runway nearest Penn State, on Saturday.

The jet owner’s listed address, according to its FAA registration, is the FBI’s national headquarters in Washington.

After Penn State, the plane flew to Nashville, where Wilkins lives. The jet’s recent flight log pre–Penn State jaunt also matches Patel’s itinerary, paralleling his travel last week between Washington and Philadelphia, reported The Bulwark.

It’s a bit of a hypocritical development for the former podcaster, who used to regularly chastise government officials for needless spending before joining the Trump administration. He relentlessly hounded the man who previously filled his shoes—former FBI Director Chris Wray—even arguing in 2023 that the FBI should “ground” Wray’s private jet “that he pays for with taxpayer dollars to hop around the country.”

Meanwhile, the government has been shut down for more than 28 days. Thousands of federal workers have gone weeks without pay (not FBI agents), Affordable Care Act marketplace credits have lapsed in several states, some 42 million Americans stand to go hungry when SNAP benefits expire on November 1, and Donald Trump is building a $300 million ballroom.

Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. admitted Wednesday that he doesn’t have “sufficient” evidence that pregnant people’s use of Tylenol can cause autism in their children.

While speaking about President Donald Trump’s controversial TrumpRx program, Kennedy made a crucial clarification about the administration’s recent claims linking autism to Tylenol, the number one drug prescribed to pregnant patients for pain relief and fever reduction.

“The causative association between Tylenol given in pregnancy and perinatal periods is not sufficient to say it definitely causes autism, but it is very suggestive,” Kennedy said.

Kennedy’s comment came just one day after Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton filed a lawsuit against Kenvue, Tylenol’s parent company, alleging that it failed to alert consumers that using its product during pregnancy posed a “significantly increased risk of autism” and ADHD. But that claim isn’t true by Kennedy’s own admission.

Several large studies have found “associations” between substantial use of acetaminophen during pregnancy and higher rates of neurodevelopmental disorders in children, but experts have stressed that these studies are not conclusive. During a Cabinet meeting earlier this month, Kennedy cited a number of studies that allegedly support his suspicions about Tylenol but said the existing evidence was “not proof.”

“We’re doing the studies to make the proof,” he admitted—which made the whole thing sound more like a hunch than anything else.

Speaking on Wednesday, Kennedy suggested that pregnant women should consult with their doctors before taking Tylenol, but generally, the Trump administration hasn’t been quite that diplomatic with its recommendations.

In September, Trump seemed to suggest that all Americans should stop taking acetaminophen (though he could hardly pronounce it), especially pregnant women and young children.

“You’ll take a Tylenol, but it’ll be very sparingly. Can be something that’s very dangerous to the woman’s health, in other words a fever that’s very, very dangerous and ideally a doctor’s decision because I think you shouldn’t take it,” he said.

And as recently as Sunday, Trump was still urging people, “DON’T USE TYLENOL UNLESS ABSOLUTELY NECESSARY.

“DON’T GIVE TYLENOL TO YOUR YOUNG CHILD FOR VIRTUALLY ANY REASON,” the president, who has no medical training, wrote on Truth Social.

Toyota has denied President Trump’s recent claim that the company recently pledged to invest $10 billion in the United States.

Trump bragged about the $10 billion figure at least twice during his trip to Asia this week, visiting an American naval base in Yokosuka, Japan, and meeting with the country’s newly minted right-wing Prime Minister Sanae Takaichi on Tuesday.

“Yesterday I was with Mr. Toyoda in Japan, and he’s just announced he’s gonna spend, uh, they’re gonna spend $10 billion, and they’re gonna build new car plants,” Trump said Tuesday, referring to the company’s CEO, Akio Toyoda. “And they’re gonna build ’em in numerous states, about six or seven different states.”

No such deal has been made, as Toyota made sure to clarify. On Wednesday, company executive Hiroyuki Ueda basically confirmed that Trump was either making it up or mixing it up with a deal from his first term nearly eight years ago.

“During the first Trump administration, I think the figure was roughly around $10 billion, so while we didn’t say the same scale, we did explain that we’ll keep investing and providing employment as before,” Ueda told reporters. “So, probably because of that context, the figure of about $10 billion came up. Therefore, we didn’t specifically say that we’ll invest $10 billion over the next few years.”

It seems that acting U.S. Attorney Bilal “Bill” Essayli couldn’t care less whether he was illegally appointed by President Donald Trump—or maybe he just didn’t read a judge’s order closely enough.   

U.S. District Judge J. Michael Seabright ruled Tuesday night that Essayli had been “unlawfully serving” as the U.S. attorney for the Central District of California and was “disqualified” from serving in that role. Essayli was, however, properly appointed as a special attorney and could serve as “First Assistant United States Attorney.”

Essayli took to X soon after to assure his followers that everything would remain the same. 

“For those who didn’t read the entire order, nothing is changing. I continue serving as the top federal prosecutor in the Central District of California. It’s an honor and privilege to serve President Trump and Attorney General Bondi, and I look forward to advancing their agenda for the American People,” he wrote on X, posting a screenshot of the judge’s order. 

Incidentally, the excerpt he shared relayed that he was “never lawfully serving as Acting United States Attorney.”

Journalist Adam Klasfield pointed out the admission on X, adding: “If he’s claiming First Assistant US Attorney is the same thing (it isn’t), he shouldn’t mind identifying himself accurately.”

While the positions are functionally similar, some requests require the signature of the U.S. attorney specifically. 

The Trump administration has attempted to stretch the 120-day limits on interim appointments to avoid embarrassing Senate confirmation votes. Trump’s appointments of Alina Habba in New Jersey and Lindsey Halligan in Virginia have both summoned legal challenges. 

While illegally serving as acting U.S. attorney, Essayli provided cover for the Trump administration’s federal law enforcement crackdown in Los Angeles and pursued dozens of (mostly failed) cases against protesters opposing immigration raids earlier this year. Seabright declined to toss the cases Essayli had been prosecuting because they had been “lawfully signed by other attorneys,” and there was no evidence of due process violations. 

Two Department of Justice prosecutors were put on leave Wednesday for accurately describing January 6 as “thousands of people comprising a mob of rioters.”

Carlos Valdivia and Samuel White were prosecuting a separate case involving Capitol insurrectionist Taylor Taranto, who was pardoned by President Trump for his participation in the 2021 riots. Taranto faced separate convictions for being found outside former President Obama’s old home in 2023 with two guns, hundreds of rounds of ammunition, and a machete.

Valdivia and White only briefly mentioned Taranto’s January 6 involvement in their sentencing memorandum:

On January 6, 2021, thousands of people comprising a mob of rioters attacked the U.S. Capitol while a joint session of Congress met to certify the results of the 2020 presidential election.… Taranto was accused of participating in the riot in Washington, D.C., by entering the U.S. Capitol Building. After the riot, Taranto returned to his home in the State of Washington, where he promoted conspiracy theories about the events of January 6, 2021.

The two prosecutors were furloughed due to the government shutdown, and told they would be placed on administrative leave when the shutdown ends. They were also locked out of their offices, making them the latest federal employees to be punished for refusing to capitulate to President Trump’s narratives surrounding January 6.

The GOP seems to be allergic to acknowledging that January 6 was as violent, if not more, than any leftist “mob” they’ve spent the last five years fearmongering about. Thousands of people broke into the Capitol building with the intention of harming elected officials so that they could wrongfully install Trump as president. Multiple people died on that day, including rioter Ashley Babbitt, and three officers died in the aftermath.

“If you work for the Trump/Bondi Justice Department and tell the truth, you will be fired,” one X user wrote Wednesday. “Federal judges should take note.”

The speaker of the House is apparently in favor of totalitarian rule, so long as Donald Trump is in charge.

The government has been shut down for more than 27 days now. But instead of working to bridge the partisan gulf and restore critical social services to millions of Americans and paychecks to thousands of federal workers, House Speaker Mike Johnson is still hyperfixated on the nationwide No Kings protest that occurred two weekends ago.

Delivering what he clearly believed was a very clever “gotcha,” Johnson told reporters Wednesday that the country would be better off if Trump were king.

“They had a rally a couple weeks ago, they tried to portray President Trump as a king. We pointed out again, the obvious truth, that if Trump was a king then the government would be open,” Johnson smirked. “He’s been trying to do that.”

Johnson then appealed to low-income Americans with his pro-monarchy pitch, arguing that if Trump had singular authority, then he would have already advanced funding for SNAP benefits, which are set to expire November 1. (A coalition of 22 states sued the Trump administration Tuesday for allegedly withholding federal funds set aside specifically to continue the program through the month of November.)

The lower chamber leader has been complaining about the No Kings protests since before they even took place on October 18, trying every which way to leverage the movement to redirect attention away from his failures at the dais. He has falsely claimed that the peaceful, anti-authoritarian protest series—which produced the largest single-day protest in U.S. history—was actually advocating for violence against political officials.

By and large, the multi-month protest series has advocated for Americans’ First Amendment rights and rejected Trump’s agenda. Signage related to the event has emphasized the fight for democracy and against dictatorships. In the same political vein, No Kings participants have used their enormous visual footprint to fight against Immigration and Custom Enforcement’s unchecked authority, turn out for universal health care, condemn the release of disgraced former Representative George Santos, and raise national awareness on the rise of American fascism.

Meanwhile, Johnson appears to be doing everything in his power to keep the government closed. Week after week, he has sent representatives home instead of bringing them in to try to come up with a solution to the shutdown. When asked Wednesday if he would bring lawmakers back to negotiate government funding past November 1, he described doing so as a “futile exercise.” He then blamed Democrats for refusing to pass a continuing resolution that would strip health care away from millions of Americans.

House Speaker Mike Johnson is pretending that he’s never even heard about an ICE agent firing at a faith leader’s face—even though he was first asked about it two weeks ago.

During a press conference Wednesday, Religion News Service’s Jack Jenkins asked Johnson whether an Immigration and Customs Enforcement agent shooting a pepper ball at a Presbyterian minister outside an ICE facility in Broadview, a suburb of Chicago, had infringed on the faith leader’s freedom of religion.*

“I can’t comment on any of those instances. I haven’t seen or heard any of those videos,” Johnson replied.

But the House speaker had already used that line earlier this month. “I’ve not seen [ICE] cross the line yet,” Johnson said when he was first asked about the widely publicized incident.

Jenkins immediately caught the lie Wednesday. “I asked this question, and you’ll hear me say ‘yes you have’ here—because Johnson was already *directly asked* about one of these instances in one of earlier shutdown press conferences,” he wrote on X.

It’s not clear what’s worse: the idea that Johnson would hear a report about the use of excessive force against a faith leader and never think about it again—or that he actually expects Americans to believe he never heard about it in the first place.

But Johnson wasn’t done. For a guy who won’t comment on a video he claims not to have seen, the Louisiana Republican sure said a lot.

“Religious freedom does not extend and give you the right to get in the face of an ICE officer and assault them, if indeed that was what happened there,” Johnson continued Wednesday.

Crucially, video of the incident shows that the agent was standing on the facility’s roof firing at a clearly unarmed priest standing on the ground. But Johnson is so adamant about the alleged abuse of law enforcement by radical activists that he’s willing to take some creative liberties.

In his daily propaganda press conferences, the House speaker has embraced a sort of strategic blindness when it comes to the misdeeds of Donald Trump’s administration. Johnson even played dumb when asked about a report that ICE had detained scores of U.S. citizens, including children.

* This article originally misstated the ICE facility location.