Dem Demands Transcript of Trump-MBS Call After Khashoggi Killing

Donald Trump’s claim Tuesday that Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman “knew nothing about” the murder of journalist Jamal Khashoggi may be undercut by a phone call he had with the monarch.

Democratic Representative Eugene Vindman said in a speech on the House floor Tuesday night that he reviewed the phone call at the time when he was a staffer on the National Security Council during Trump’s first term, calling it as problematic as the one between Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy and Trump that led to the president’s impeachment in 2019.

“After the murder of journalist Jamal Khashoggi, I reviewed a call between the president and the Saudi crown prince. The American people and the Khashoggi family deserve to know what was said on that call. If history is any guide, the receipts will be shocking,” the Virginia congressman said, calling for the president to release the full transcript of the call.

The phone call Vindman is referring to is suspected to be from June 2019, when the White House reported that a call took place.

On Tuesday, when a reporter asked bin Salman and Trump about the U.S. intelligence conclusion that the crown prince personally ordered Khashoggi’s killing, Trump rushed to bin Salman’s defense.

“You don’t have to embarrass our guest by asking something like that,” Trump snapped, adding “A lot of people didn’t like that gentleman that you’re talking about, whether you like him or didn’t like him, things happen.”

Based on Trump’s close ties with MBS, as the crown prince is commonly known, the phone call may be damaging to the president, especially considering that Trump claims to have protected MBS from congressional action over Khashoggi’s murder during his first term.

“I saved his ass,” Trump said to reporter Bob Woodward for his 2020 book Rage. “I was able to get Congress to leave him alone. I was able to get them to stop.”

The White House is close to implementing a new rule that would effectively eradicate congressionally approved whistleblower protections.

Congress has passed several laws since the 1970s extending protections to federal workers that call out governmental wrongdoing. But the Trump administration is planning on chipping away at that by updating its policy on accountability, which would “exclude senior employees from legal protections that prohibit U.S. government agencies from retaliating against whistleblowers,” reported Reuters Tuesday.

Federal employment attorneys noted that the new policy would make targets out of the people most likely to find themselves in positions to uncover serious corruption.

“Translation: Trump can fire federal employees who point out that he’s broken the law. That’s pretty damn dark,” wrote Miles Taylor, an ex-Homeland Security official who drew national attention in 2018 when he anonymously penned an op-ed for The New York Times claiming to be part of the internal “resistance” against Trump’s first term agenda.

It would follow through on Donald Trump’s April proposal to create a new federal employee category to “enhance accountability.”

“This rule empowers federal agencies to swiftly remove employees in policy-influencing roles for poor performance, misconduct, corruption, or subversion of Presidential directives, without lengthy procedural hurdles,” reads a White House fact sheet from the time on the proposed changes.

The Office of Personnel Management estimated at the time that the switch-up could affect as many as 50,000 positions across government agencies.

The Trump administration told Reuters Tuesday that the new rule would not strip employees of their current protections, but would “put individual federal agencies in charge of enforcing those safeguards.”

“This administration is making good on its determination to silence dissent in all forms, creating a culture of fear, silence and intimidation,” Andrew Bakaj, chief legal counsel of the nonpartisan group Whistleblower Aid, told Reuters in a statement.

President Trump joked (we think) about firing Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent while Bessent was sitting right in front of him.

“Interest rates are down despite the Fed. I mean Scott, you gotta work on this guy. He’s got some real mental problems. He has something wrong with him,” Trump said while addressing the Kennedy Center on Wednesday, referring to current Fed Chair Jerome Powell. “I’ll be honest, I’d love to fire his ass. He should be fired. Guy’s grossly incompetent. And he should be sued for spending $4 billion to build a little building. I’m building a ballroom that’s gonna cost a tiny fraction of that.”

“You gotta work on him Scott,” Trump continued. “The only thing Scott’s blowing it on is the Fed. Because … the rates are too high, Scott. And if you don’t get it fixed fast, I’m gonna fire your ass, OK?” The crowd roared with laughter. “I wanna get him out, Scott!”

This is a pretty stunning undermining of his own staff, even for Trump. And if the economy is doing so well, why is he so pressed about rates getting cut?

“Translation: the economy isn’t bad enough, let’s speedrun a recession!” California Governor Gavin Newsom’s press office posted in response.

Trump has been after Powell for months now, threatening to fire him over and over again for not cutting interest rates and refusing to fully capitulate to Trump’s aggressive economic plans.

It’s unclear how much power Bessent has to influence Powell’s job security, if any at all. Bessent is one of the frontrunners for Powell’s job, although he has told the president he doesn’t want it. That’s probably a smart decision.

“I get that Treasury Secretary is a cool job ... but if I were a billionaire, there is [no] way I’m staying in a job that requires me to spin indefensible, economically-illiterate policies for a morally-corrupt boss who tries to humiliate me publicly,” Manhattan Institute senior fellow Jessica Riedl wrote on X. “I’d be on a beach somewhere.”

President Donald Trump’s newest plan to end Russia’s invasion of Ukraine would give President Vladimir Putin exactly what he wants—and Ukraine isn’t happy.

Trump’s sweeping new proposal would require Ukraine to give up Donbas, an industrial region in the eastern part of the country, the Financial Times reported Wednesday. The framework deal would also require Ukraine to reduce the size of its armed forces, and not to use certain weapons. The deal would make it significantly harder for Ukraine to defend itself from Russian military incursion, and move the country’s border with Russia closer to the Ukrainian capital Kyiv.

A senior White House official told Politico that a peace agreement could come “as soon as this week.” But it’s not looking likely that Ukraine will accept.

The newest proposal was tantamount to surrendering Ukraine’s sovereignty, one person familiar with the deal told the FT. They said that Russia was attempting to “play” the United States, which was eager to “show progress” had been made on the deal.

The 28-point plan was reportedly drafted by Trump’s special envoy and business partner Steve Witkoff in collaboration with Russian envoy Kirill Dmitriev, as a follow-up to the president’s 20-point peace plan for Gaza, according to Axios. Of course, Trump’s plan for Gaza was a resounding failure, as Israel has continued its campaign of deadly military strikes.

Earlier this week, Witkoff discussed the plan with Ukraine’s Minister of Defense Rustem Umerov, a Ukrainian official told Axios. Dmitriev said that Moscow is likely to accept the plan, saying, “We feel the Russian position is really being heard.”

Trump has already tried and failed to get Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy to agree to concede territory during a disastrous meeting at the White House last month. Trump also reneged on an offer to supply Ukraine with Tomahawk missiles, and claimed that he didn’t think Ukraine stood a chance against Russia.

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.