Abbott Releases—and Blacks Out—1,400 Pages of Emails With Elon Musk

After Texas news outlets made a public records request to see emails between the office of Texas Governor Greg Abbott and tech oligarch Elon Musk’s companies, state officials took months fighting and delaying their release.

Then, they released 1,374 pages of mostly redacted documents, with all but 200 of those pages entirely blacked out.

According to The Texas Newsroom, a collaboration between NPR and Texas public radio stations that made the request, the emails don’t reveal much about the relationship between Musk and Abbott, or how the tech oligarch influences Texas’s government. The unredacted documents contained little new information, consisting mostly of things like old incorporation records and some meeting agendas.

Abbott’s office claimed over the summer that the governor’s emails with Musk were private and too “intimate or embarrassing” to be released to the public, which begs the question of what law protects that reasoning. Musk has also fought against disclosing communications, claiming that releasing emails could hurt his competitive advantage.

Musk has relocated many of his businesses to Texas and has lobbied for new state laws to help those companies, making his communications with the state of vital public interest to Texans. But thanks to a June court ruling, Texas officials have increased protections from having to disclose public records, leaving news outlets with little recourse to get more documents released.

In effect, Musk’s activities in Texas are taking place with little oversight or scrutiny. It seems that his presence in Texas shields him from accountability, and Abbott is only too happy to protect him.

Saudi Arabia is so invested in U.S. development that the country’s leadership is apparently willing to give more than they’ve got.

Hours after the U.S. president penned a $1 trillion economic agreement with Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, Donald Trump told a crowd at the U.S.-Saudi Investment Forum Wednesday that he had actually pressed for $1.5 trillion, billions more than the nation’s gross domestic product.

“While we were taking the picture, I said, ‘Could you make it $1.5 trillion?’ So he’s got something to think about,” Trump said, to laughs. “We’ll get something, I think we’ll get something.”

Given that Saudi Arabia’s GDP is $1.24 trillion, that seems unlikely.

The deal came as an enormous upgrade to Saudi Arabia’s previously pledged investment of $600 billion, the details of which included “investments and trade” but were otherwise vague. It also came after Trump promised to sell highly coveted F-35 fighter jets to the newly appointed non-NATO ally, ignoring Pentagon concerns that the sale could provide China with a golden opportunity to steal U.S. military technology.

“We will be doing that, we’ll be selling F-35s,” Trump told reporters at the White House Monday, adding that the Saudis “want to buy them, they’ve been a great ally.”

Trump has touted several major investment deals over the span of his second administration to detract from the failures of his wildly unpopular tariff plan, claiming that he has reeled in $17 trillion in just eight months. But that figure is fiction, even according to the digits highlighted on the White House website, which lists $8.8 trillion in active investment.

That includes the Saudi sum, as well as $600 billion from firms in the European Union, though the coalition of countries has made clear that the amount is simply an estimate of potential investment rather than a legitimate commitment.

It also includes a $1.2 trillion deal with Qatar, which was an “economic exchange” rather than direct investment; a seemingly impossible $1.4 trillion investment from the United Arab Emirates that is more than double that nation’s GDP, and $1 trillion from Japan, which in actuality is roughly half that and will be predominantly composed of loans.

Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent hopes that Americans will save their $2,000 checks President Donald Trump promised for a rainy day—if they get them at all.

During a disastrous appearance on Fox News Tuesday, host Brett Baier asked whether Trump’s repeated promise to deliver $2,000 dividends of tariff money to every American would be inflationary.

“Well, there are a lot of things that are gonna happen next year, and that could be one of them,” said Bessent. “And maybe we could persuade Americans to save that.”

Bessent suggested that parents could potentially put the money into their children’s “Trump accounts,” where the government plans to deposit $1,000 for Americans born between 2025 and 2028. Parents are encouraged to contribute up to $5,000 annually. Bessent has claimed that the accounts will give disillusioned young people a stake in the economy, while providing a “backdoor” to privatize Social Security.

But if the secretary’s plan to fight steadily rising inflation relies on Americans not immediately spending a $2,000 check, we’re in some serious trouble. Americans are increasingly worried about how to pay for necessities such as food and health care, concerns helped in no small part by the Trump administration’s attacks on SNAP and Obamacare. Some extra cash would likely go straight into paying for bills.

It’s also not clear that an actual payout is coming. Earlier this month, Bessent claimed that the president’s promise of a two-grand payout “could come in lots of forms,” listing the supposedly “substantial” tax deductions outlined in Trump’s behemoth budget bill that passed in July, and falsely claiming that Social Security would no longer be taxed.

Additionally, Trump’s tariffs haven’t actually collected enough money to pay for the kind of payout the president promised. The Trump administration has collected more than $220 billion in tariff revenue, but the $2,000 paid to all 163 million Americans who filed their taxes would cost roughly $326 billion, according to CNN. So that would leave -$106 billion to pay off the national debt.

A Ponzi schemer who Donald Trump saved from prison is headed right back to the clink.

Eliyahu “Eli” Weinstein was sentenced Friday to 37 years in prison in a New Jersey courtroom, capping the career criminal’s third fraud conviction.

Prosecutors argued that Weinstein, who in recent years went by the alias Mike Konig to hide his criminal history, milked roughly $35 million from dozens of investors who believed they were putting their money into Covid-19 masks, baby formula, and first aid kits for Ukraine, according to the indictment.

It was a crime that Weinstein never would have been able to cook up if the president hadn’t lifted him out of federal prison in 2021. At the time, Weinstein had served just eight years of a combined 24-year prison sentence for two fraud convictions—a real estate fraud scheme in which he utilized a portfolio of fake property investments to reel in $200 million from unsuspecting buyers, and another in which he duped dozens of investors into investing in Facebook just before the social media company went public (swindling at least one investor of $6.7 million).

For whatever reason, Trump decided Weinstein was the guy who deserved a get-out-of-jail-free card. The 51-year-old was a part of a whopping 143-person pardon the president issued the day before he left office in 2021. Other recipients of the unexpected clemency included former Trump adviser Steve Bannon, rapper Lil Wayne, and former Detroit Mayor Kwame Kilpatrick, who was sentenced to 28 years on corruption charges.

But Weinstein wasn’t ashamed of his behavior. In August 2022, he recalled that he “finagled, and Ponzied, and lied to people,” according to court documents. Shortly after he was released from prison, he started defrauding people again, orchestrating the Ponzi scheme that he was sentenced for last week.

U.S. District Judge Michael Shipp ruled that Weinstein must pay more than $44 million in restitution for his most recent offense, due immediately.

Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent struggled to sell President Donald Trump’s outrageous claims about how much money the United States is making from his trade deals.

During an interview on Fox News Tuesday night, host Brett Baier asked Bessent how much money Trump was bringing in through trade deals, corporate commitments, and tariff revenue.

“Well, the president uses the number ‘20 trillion’ in terms of total investments, and I think that those commitments are real,” Bessent replied, sounding slightly unsure.

He rattled off a few examples of major investments as part of trade deals with Japan and Korea, as well as a commitment from Apple, calling them “investments like we’ve never seen.” But the Treasury secretary offered no exact number, just the president’s own propaganda.

Bessent’s waffling answer could indicate that he knows how ridiculous that “20 trillion” claim actually is. The White House’s own investments website lists the total of all U.S. and foreign investments at only $9 trillion—but crucially, the Trump administration also misstated some investments.

They claimed that Japan had agreed to make a $1 trillion investment, when the most recent deal from July was for only a little more than half of that. The website claimed that Korea has pledged a $450 billion investment in U.S. energy products, when the number is actually $350 billion, made up of $200 billion in cash installments capped at $20 billion per year and another $150 for shipbuilding. Similarly, Apple has pledged to spend more than $500 billion, and the White House website bumped that up to $600 billion.

At the same time, tariff revenue for FY 2025 was only $195 billion, which is a significant increase from the year before, but doesn’t push that number anywhere near the $20 trillion Trump has claimed.

The Trump administration’s attempt to prosecute former FBI Director James Comey hit two major snags on Wednesday.

First, interim U.S. attorney for the Eastern District of Virginia Lindsey Halligan, who brought the indictment, admitted the entire grand jury did not vote on the final indictment—a shocking development. Instead, only two grand jurors reviewed the indictment before it was presented in court.

Earlier in the day, Justice Department lawyer Tyler Lemons, who is prosecuting the case, also told U.S. District Judge Michael Nachmanoff that someone in Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche’s office ordered him not to disclose whether career prosecutors in the Department of Justice authored a memo recommending that Comey should not be indicted. Lemons said that he was told he couldn’t disclose privileged information without permission.

“At this point, my position would be, whether there was a declination memo, is privileged,” Lemons said. “I don’t know in the world of documents there is a declination memo.”

Nachmanoff pressed Lemons on whether that actually meant that he was told not to say anything by someone in Blanche’s office, but Lemons wouldn’t elaborate.

“I hope you understand that I am trying to answer your questions,” said Lemons.

While Lemons refused to answer the question, ABC News reported in September that career prosecutors did in fact recommend against indicting Comey. This latest development suggests that Blanche, formerly Donald Trump’s personal attorney, is trying to keep that info from being part of the official record.

The indictment is being challenged by Comey for being politically motivated and tainted by government misconduct, and Comey seems to have a lot of evidence on his side. Halligan, who had no prosecutorial experience prior to this case, is only in her position because her predecessor, Erik Siebert, refused to indict Comey due to a lack of evidence. With each development in Comey’s trial, Siebert’s decision is looking more and more correct.

Donald Trump’s approval rating is at an all-time low for his second term, and the president has his old pal Jeffrey Epstein to thank—and those pesky grocery prices.

Only 38 percent of Americans approve of Trump’s performance in office, according to a Reuters/Ipsos poll published Tuesday evening. That’s down a whopping nine points from Inauguration Day. But there’s still a far way to fall: Trump’s approval rating for his first term bottomed out at 33 percent.

Unsurprisingly, the Trump administration’s handling of the Epstein files seemed to be a particularly sore spot for respondents. Only 20 percent of Americans—including only 44 percent of Republicans—approved of how Trump has handled the case against the alleged sex trafficker. A whopping 70 percent of respondents, including 60 percent of Republicans, said that they believed the government was concealing information about Epstein’s clients.

After months of dismissing calls for more transparency as a Democratic “hoax,” Trump claimed Sunday that he was prepared to sign a bipartisan measure to force the release of all the government’s documents related to Epstein’s alleged sex trafficking.

The bill finally made its way to Trump’s desk Wednesday after being approved by the House and Senate, but it’s not clear that the president intends to sign it into law. House Speaker Mike Johnson suggested that Trump shared some of his so-called concerns about the unamended bill, indicating that Trump could still choose to veto the legislation.

Epstein wasn’t the only area of concern for Americans: Only 26 percent of respondents approved of Trump’s work managing the cost of living, down from 29 percent earlier this month.

After sweeping election victories for Democrats campaigning on the cost of living earlier this month, Trump ranted that he didn’t want to “hear about affordability.” And so far, it seems that the president’s renewed efforts to address Americans’ economic anxieties is simply to lie.

Trump has repeatedly claimed to have brought grocery prices down despite consumers experiencing the biggest price jump in more than three years, and pushed claims he has defeated Biden-era inflation even though it has steadily increased for the last five months in a row. Again, Trump has claimed that voter concerns were the result of a “con job” by Democrats. In reality, Trump’s tariffs and his crackdown on immigrants have significantly contributed to rising prices.

A January 6 rioter decided to lead a hate march Tuesday in Dearborn, Michigan, a city with a sizable Muslim and Arab American populace, and got punched in the face.

Jake Lang, who was pardoned by Donald Trump while facing 11 charges related to his actions at the Capitol in 2021, decided to hold his own march in the city while Michigan Republican gubernatorial candidate Anthony Hudson led a march of his supporters. Lang had a clear agenda in mind, holding a banner that read “Americans Against Islamification,” taunting counterprotesters with bacon, and threatening to burn the Quran.

One counterprotester decided that Lang needed to be taught a lesson, and, while pretending to march next to him, suddenly turned and punched a smiling Lang in the face. Lang tried to shrug it off, telling a throng of cameras, “I was punched harder by Capitol police officer ladies,” while the puncher ran away across a busy street.

Lang, who is running as a Republican for Marco Rubio’s vacated Senate seat in Florida, was accused of assaulting law enforcement with a deadly weapon and engaging in physical violence on restricted grounds at the Capitol over four years ago. He also tried to form his own paramilitary militia in 2021, and in his remarks on Tuesday, even expressed concern about a growing non-white American population.

Dearborn has been targeted by anti-Muslim and anti-Arab protesters before. The latest protests came after Hudson claimed that Dearborn was under sharia law, only to walk back his claims after visiting the city and meeting Muslims last week. The stated goal of his march was to promote unity, but it seems to have attracted people like Lang, a bigot with a history of violence. Unfortunately for Lang, his actions led to a violent punch in the face.

Senate Republicans are still planning to take advantage of a provision of the shutdown-ending bill that would allow them to rake in cash from the federal government.

At the close of the 44-day federal hiatus, the caucus quietly slipped in a self-serving resolution that granted senators the ability to pursue financial compensation from the Justice Department—up to $500,000 each—if they had their phone records seized by former special counsel Jack Smith as he investigated Donald Trump’s 2020 election conspiracy.

Despite passing the measure, the House adamantly opposed the detail: House Speaker Mike Johnson has signaled his support for an effort to repeal it altogether. As of last week, it wasn’t clear whether anyone in the Senate actually planned to pursue the new retribution pathway, save for Senator Lindsey Graham—but the upper chamber’s initial resistance appears to have ebbed in recent days.

“The House is going to do what they’re going to do with it. It didn’t apply to them,” Senate Majority Leader John Thune told CNN Tuesday. “There’s a statute that obviously was violated, and what this does is enables people who are harmed, in this case, United States senators, to have a private right of action against the weaponization by the Justice Department.”

When asked whether he believed Senate Republicans would actually line their pockets with U.S. taxpayer funds, Thune said he wasn’t convinced “anybody was talking about taking the money.”

“But I think the penalty is in place to ensure that in the future … there is a remedy in place,” Thune told the network.

Eight known Senate Republicans had their phone records subpoenaed as part of Smith’s inquiry: Senators Marsha Blackburn, Lindsey Graham, Bill Hagerty, Josh Hawley, Ron Johnson, Cynthia Lummis, Dan Sullivan, and Tommy Tuberville. Of that lot, five indicated late last week that they have no intentions to utilize the controversial provision.

“This fight is not about the money; it is about holding the left accountable for the worst weaponization of government in our nation’s history,” Blackburn told CBS News, signaling her support to change the language of the resolution. “If leftist politicians can go after President Trump and sitting members of Congress, they will not hesitate to go after American citizens.”

Smith’s team from the case has clarified that it was not spying on senators and, in fact, was well within its rights to request the phone records. Two of the team members issued a letter in October stating that they had requested phone toll records, which only show incoming and outgoing phone numbers, as well as call duration—not the contents of the calls.

Former Treasury Secretary and Jeffrey Epstein confidant Larry Summers has resigned from the board of Sam Altman’s OpenAI company amid renewed scrutiny caused by the release of his countless emails to the disgraced sex offender.

“I am grateful for the opportunity to have served, excited about the potential of the company, and look forward to following their progress,” Summers said in a statement. He was also cut from his temporary guest columnist position at The New York Times. Meanwhile, Harvard announced Tuesday that it has begun an investigation into Summers, who said he will still teach at the university.

Summers and Epstein were contacting each other back and forth frequently like high schoolers in 2018 and 2019, when both men were in their sixties.

“We talked on phone. Then ‘I can’t talk later’. Dint think I can talk tomorrow’. I said what are you up to. She said ‘I’m busy’. I said awfully coy u are,” Summers wrote to Epstein, seeking advice on the young female “mentee” he was trying to seduce at the time (he was married then, and still is). “And then I said. ‘Did u really rearrange the weekend we were going to be together because guy number 3 was coming.’ She said no his schedule changed after we changed our plans.”

“Shes smart. making you pay for past errors. ignore the daddy im going to go out with the motorcycle guy, you reacted well.. annoyed shows caring., no whining showed strentgh,” Epstein wrote back, just months before his death in prison.

Summers has addressed these new revelations in a “statement of regret.”

“Some of you will have seen my statement of regret expressing my shame with respect to what I did in communication with Mr. Epstein,” Summers told a lecture hall full of students at Harvard earlier this week, stating that he’d be stepping away from other public engagements. “But I think it’s very important to fulfill my teaching obligations.”

This is a former treasury secretary and high-powered Harvard professor who was asking Epstein—a known sex offender by then—for girl advice. Some think he should be far away from the undergraduate students he’s currently teaching too.

“If he had so little ability to distance himself from Jeffrey Epstein even after all that was publicly known about Epstein’s sex offenses involving underage girls, then Summers cannot be trusted to advise our nation’s politicians, policymakers, and institutions—or teach a generation of students at Harvard or anywhere else,” Massachusetts Senator Elizabeth Warren said on Monday.