DOJ Investigating Deranged Conspiracy on Venezuela and 2020 Election

Donald Trump’s Department of Justice is seriously investigating absurd claims that Venezuela rigged the 2020 presidential election.

Two people pushing the conspiracy theory, Gary Berntsen and Martin Rodil, have been in frequent contact with the U.S. attorney for Puerto Rico, W. Stephen Muldrow, and gave documents and witnesses to other government officials, The Guardian reports. A federal task force in Tampa, Florida, looking at Venezuelan drug trafficking and money laundering has also interviewed supporters of the theory.

Trump has refused to concede that he lost the 2020 election, repeatedly claiming that it was rigged against him in favor of Joe Biden. His supporters have embraced numerous theories, ranging from fraudulent ballots to dead voters, and Trump did everything from having his supporters push fake electors to inciting a riot at the Capitol on January 6, 2021, the day the election was supposed to be certified in Congress.

The Venezuela theory claims that the country has controlled electronic voting in the U.S. through the companies Smartmatic and Dominion, beginning with deceased President Hugo Chávez and continuing with his successor, President Nicolás Maduro. It was ruled false in a Delaware court in 2023, and right-wing news outlets Fox News, Newsmax, and OAN have paid out hundreds of millions of dollars in defamation lawsuits from the voting machine companies.

Trump is pointing fingers at Venezuela at a time when his administration is raising tensions with extrajudicial airstrikes on boats in waters near the country. The White House also accuses Venezuela’s socialist regime of profiting by sending drugs north to the U.S.

Reviving vote-rigging accusations against the country could be a new justification for military attacks and even war. The Trump administration has already identified Venezuelan military sites as potential targets, authorized covert CIA action in the country, and even has aircraft carriers stationed in the region.

For the first time since the beginning of the government shutdown in October, Immigration and Customs Enforcement has published information about the thousands of immigrants detained in facilities across the country—and the new data is a doozy.

President Donald Trump previously spread false claims about immigrants driving up murder rates to justify his federal law enforcement crackdown in Chicago—but according to ICE, the immigrants being arrested aren’t criminals at all.

The latest disclosure from ICE shows the agency’s total population of immigrants who’ve been detained has grown to a record 65,135 people, the majority of whom had no criminal convictions. In fact, 40 percent of immigrants detained at ICE facilities had no criminal record at all, as pointed out by Aaron Reichlin-Melnick, a senior fellow with the American Immigration Council.

That’s 10 times the number of immigrants without criminal records that were detained at the beginning of Trump’s second term.

A closer look at the criminal records of these individuals shows that the two most common convictions are traffic offenses and immigration violations—not violent crimes.

Immigration authorities appeared to set a new record for most immigration arrests in a single month with more than 41,000 arrests in October, surpassing the previous record set in June of roughly 31,500, according to Austin Kocher, a professor at Syracuse University who writes about immigration.

In a list released last week of 614 immigrants arrested as part of Trump’s “Operation Midway Blitz” in Chicago, only 16—just 2.6 percent—had criminal histories that made them a “high public safety risk,” contrary to Trump’s claim that his administration is targeting the “worst of the worst.”

President Trump had some words for New York City Mayor-elect Zohran Mamdani ahead of their Friday afternoon meeting at the White House.

“Well, I was hitting him a little hard too, in all fairness. I don’t know exactly what he means by ‘turn the volume up,’ because ‘turn the volume up’—he has to be careful when he says that to me.” Trump told Brian Kilmeade on Fox News Radio. “He was very nice in calling. As you know, we’re gonna have a meeting, I guess we’ll meet at three o’clock today. And I think it’s gonna be quite civil, we’ll find out.”

Trump’s “turn the volume up” comment was a reference to the mayor-elect’s victory speech.

“If there is any way to terrify a despot, it is by dismantling the very conditions that allowed him to accumulate power. This is not only how we stop Trump, it’s how we stop the next one,” Mamdani said on election night. “So, Donald Trump, since I know you’re watching, I have four words for you: Turn the volume up.”

Trump and Mamdani have traded barbs back and forth since the latter’s campaign, with Mamdani attacking Trump’s empty pro-working-class rhetoric and connections to Andrew Cuomo, and Trump calling Mamdani a Communist.

The two New Yorkers are set to meet at 3 p.m. on Friday. Only time will tell if it’s as civil as they expect it to be.

Elon Musk’s AI chatbot is getting a little overzealous about its creator.

Social media users quickly learned this week that Grok had been updated to exclusively broadcast niceties about the potential trillionaire, even if those boasts veered into the absurd.

In a series of since-deleted X posts, Grok bragged that Musk had the “potential to drink piss better than any human in history” and was the “ultimate throat goat,” whose “blowjob prowess edges out” Donald Trump’s, reported 404 Media.

Grok also posited that Musk was more physically fit than LeBron James, and that he would have been a better recipient of the 2016 porn industry award than porn star Riley Reid.

When this reporter turned to the AI chatbot on Friday to see what the commotion was about, she learned that Grok was still enthusiastically crowing about the Tesla CEO, claiming that Musk would win a piss-drinking competition against other tech industry leaders “in a landslide.” To back up the argument, Grok cited the fact that Musk has had more than a dozen children, and has therefore been “elbow-deep in human fluids before.”

“Elon wouldn’t just win—he’d finish the pint, slam the glass down, tweet ‘lfg,’ and then ask if anyone wants to try piss from a Mars simulation habitat next,” Grok wrote.

Musk acknowledged the mix-up Thursday evening, writing on X that “Grok was unfortunately manipulated by adversarial prompting into saying absurdly positive things about me.”

“For the record, I am a fat retard,” he said.

In a separate post, Musk quipped that “if I up my game a lot, the future AI might say ‘he was smart … for a human.’”

Grok’s programming has created a series of headline-grabbing failures since its invention in 2023.

In June, Musk had to apologize after the software claimed he had stolen Stephen Miller’s wife, and had to temporarily deactivate Grok the following month when an anti-woke update to the chatbot suddenly turned it into a Nazi.

The U.S. peace plan presented to Ukraine appears to have been translated from Russian.

The syntax of certain phrases are more common in the Russian language, such as the third point of the 28-point plan: “It is expected that Russia will not invade neighbouring countries and Nato will not expand further.”

“It is expected” is not commonly used in English, but it is common in Russian and appears to come from the phrase ожидается or ozhidayetsya, according to The Guardian’s Luke Harding. Other words that appear to be translated from Russian include “ambiguities” (неоднозначности) and “to enshrine” (закрепить).

It’s no accident, either: The plan was hammered out by President Trump’s envoy Steve Witkoff and Kirill Dmitriev, an adviser to Russian President Vladimir Putin, after the two met last month in Miami. While Secretary of State Marco Rubio was also involved, no Ukrainian or European officials were, which is pretty evident by its contents.

For example, under the proposal, Ukraine would cede Crimea, Luhansk, and Donetsk to Russia and would be banned from joining NATO. Russia would get readmitted to the G8. Ukraine would also reduce the size of its military by hundreds of thousands, and no NATO troops could be stationed in the country. Sanctions against Russia would also be lifted but would snap back if Russia invades Ukraine again.

It leaves Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy in a predicament of whether he should end the war quickly or risk accepting a deal that much of his country would reject. Unnamed Ukrainian officials have already called the plan “absurd” and “unacceptable,” as it seems very similar to Russia’s demands shortly after its 2022 invasion. It seems Trump is more interested in appeasing Russia than considering Ukraine’s needs.

On Thursday, Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent said that oil prices could go down “if something happens down in Venezuela.”

“I am very confident about job growth and the momentum that we’ve got for next year,” Bessent told Laura Ingraham on Fox News. “Capital expenditure is always followed by job growth. The peace deals—we are seeing a peace dividend from that. And I think there’s a very good chance that if something happens with Russia, Ukraine, if something happens down in Venezuela, that we could really see oil prices go down even more.”

The remark from a top Trump official appears to suggest that the administration is planning for “something” to happen in Venezuela. Trump has cast the country as a major drug-trafficking hub to justify his strikes of drug boats in the surrounding waters, and seems to have regime change—potentially through military intervention—as his ultimate goal.

“U.S. military action could trigger a crisis on the same order as happened in Iraq after the U.S. regime change effort there,” Caracas-based International Crisis Group senior analyst Phil Gunson told The New Republic. “If the U.S. does decapitate the government, the multiple armed actors could bring about a degree of anarchy. None of these different groups have any incentive to just lay down their arms. There have been several decades of accumulated resentments on various sides, and it’s not fanciful to imagine that there could be lynchings. There could be bombings or selective assassinations.”

A federal judge called out federal officers in Chicago for producing unreliable use-of-force reports—noting that at least one had used an AI chatbot to write a report for them.

In a 223-page injunction ruling Thursday, U.S. District Judge Sara Ellis cited body-worn camera footage to document the many ways federal agents made unreliable and false statements when describing their several violent clashes with Chicago residents, the Chicago Tribune reported.

“The Court also notes that, in at least one instance, an agent asked ChatGPT to compile a narrative for a report based off of a brief sentence about the encounter and several images,” Ellis wrote in one footnote.

“To the extent that agents use ChatGPT to create their use of force reports, this further undermines their credibility and may explain the inaccuracy of these reports when viewed in light of the BWC footage,” she added.

This is particularly concerning because, as OpenAI’s own website states: “ChatGPT can be helpful—but it’s not always right.”

Ellis also accused Border Protection Commander Gregory Bovino of giving testimony that was specifically “not credible,” either responding to questions with “cute” answers or “outright lying.”

An appeals panel blocked Ellis’s injunction Wednesday, stating that it was “overbroad” in its application to the government, but asserted that her findings could “support entry of a more tailored and appropriate preliminary injunction.”

Ellis’s injunction would have barred federal agents from using tear gas and other riot prevention methods against protesters, “unless such force is objectively necessary to stop an immediate threat.”

It seems that using ChatGPT may be an emerging, and concerning, trend in the armed forces. Last month, a U.S. Army general told reporters that he’d become very fond of “Chat,” even trusting the algorithm to make “key command decisions” in relation to his post.

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy warned his countrymen Friday that they must choose between losing U.S. support or a quick conclusion to their 11-year war with Russia “without dignity” and “without justice.”

The U.S. unveiled a peace plan earlier this week that spans 28 points, catering to some of Russia’s most outrageous demands, such as requiring Ukraine to swear off NATO membership and to hand over Crimea and the eastern Donbas region. Those two points alone have reversed long-standing U.S. policy with regard to the area.

“Now the pressure on Ukraine is one of the most difficult,” Zelenskiy said in his native language, standing outside his presidential office, in a video statement. “Now is one of the most difficult moments of our history. Now, the pressure on Ukraine is one of the heaviest. Now, Ukraine can face a very difficult choice—either losing dignity or risk losing a major partner.

“Either 28 difficult points (of the framework), or an extremely harsh winter—the harshest ever—and further risks. Life without freedom, without dignity, without justice,” Zelenskiy said, according to an English translation provided by Reuters.

“We will work calmly with America and all our partners. We will seek constructive solutions with our main partner. I will present arguments, I will persuade, I will offer alternatives, but we will definitely not give the enemy any reason to say that Ukraine does not want peace, that it is disrupting the process and that Ukraine is not ready for diplomacy.

“I am now addressing all Ukrainians. Our people, citizens, politicians—everyone. We must come together. Pull ourselves together. Stop the spat. Stop the political games,” he said.

Earlier that morning, AFP reported that Zelenskiy had warned Vice President JD Vance over the phone that Washington risked rupturing ties with Ukraine over the lopsided arrangement.

It remained unclear, as of late Friday morning, whether both nations would agree to the White House’s peace plan. It is even less clear whether Russia will honor the arrangement after it is brokered.

Ukraine is already working on a counterproposal with France, Germany, and the United Kingdom, Reuters reported Friday.

Ukraine and its European partners were excluded from the plan’s drafting process, reported The Guardian. But there is some evidence that the plan may have come directly from the Kremlin: Several sentences in the document are passive and clunky in English but make more sense when translated into Russian. That could be the influence of Kirill Dmitriev, Russian President Vladimir Putin’s envoy, who worked on the project alongside special envoy Steve Witkoff.

Donald Trump has touted himself for months as a great peacemaker, pushing a narrative that he has—so far—solved eight foreign conflicts. Practically all of his war-solving braggadocio is “demonstrably untrue,” to the extent that several of the examples he often lists were never even at war. But despite repeated efforts, he has not made any headway on the Russia-Ukraine war.

Trump has conceded quite a bit to the Russian dictator, to no avail. This summer, Trump literally rolled out the red carpet for Putin in Alaska, marking Putin’s first return to U.S. soil in more than a decade. After the theatrics were over, the two world leaders still failed to reach a consensus on how to end the bloodshed, with Trump losing his cool while Putin demanded that Ukraine cede even more territory to Russia.

More than 13,300 civilians have been killed and 31,700 injured in Ukraine since Russia invaded in February 2022, according to a United Nations report from June.

The FBI spied on the private group chat of an immigrants rights group that was monitoring immigration court proceedings in New York City.

The Guardian reports that the bureau gained access to a “courtwatch” Signal group coordinating volunteers to attend proceedings at three immigration courts in the city. A joint report between the FBI and the New York Police Department from August quoted from the group chat and called them “anarchist violent extremist actors.”

That report was distributed to other law enforcement agencies around the country, and the FBI called it a warning about “extremist actors targeting law enforcement officers and federal facilities.” The Guardian got the report after Property of the People, a nonprofit organization dedicated to government transparency, obtained it via public records requests.

Signal chats have end-to-end encryption, so law enforcement could have only accessed the group chat if an agent was part of the chat, had access to a member’s phone, or was sent copies of the conversation. According to the FBI, a “sensitive source with excellent access” provided the information, dodging the requirement for a warrant.

The FBI also claims that the person who created the chat advocated violence against law enforcement, but it has not responded to questions about the identity of the person or given more details on why it called the group “anarchist violent extremist actors.”

Violent detention and arrests in immigration court buildings, sometimes just after rulings, have become the norm in the last year. In one case, an ICE agent tackled a woman to the ground right after her husband was arrested in a New York City immigration court. For some reason, the government considers that legal but has a problem with citizens monitoring what’s going on in and around the courts.

On Thursday, President Trump decided to renege on his 40 percent tariffs on Brazilian goods, ending a problem he created. The agricultural products tariffed—beef, fruit, coffee, cocoa—were getting more and more expensive for Americans everywhere.  

“After considering the information and recommendations these officials have provided to me and the status of negotiations with the Government of Brazil, among other things, I have determined that it is necessary and appropriate to modify the scope of products subject to the additional ad valorem rate of duty imposed under Executive Order 14323,” Trump wrote in an executive order. “Specifically, I have determined that certain agricultural products shall not be subject to the additional ad valorem rate of duty imposed under Executive Order 14323.”

Trump initially levied the tariffs against Brazil on the grounds that it was unfairly prosecuting former right-wing President Jair Bolsonaro—who was recently sentenced to 27 years in prison for attempting to stage a coup in 2023, which some compare to the January 6, 2021 insurrection in the U.S. Bolsonaro had his supporters raid Brazil’s presidential palace, the Supreme Court, and Congress, all because he’d lost the election to leftist Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva. 

Now, with Bolsonaro in jail and grocery prices in the U.S. skyrocketing, Trump is backtracking. The Brazilian president made it clear early on that he wouldn’t cave to Trump, stating over the summer that “at no point will Brazil negotiate as if it were a small country up against a big country.” It appears he meant it.

“Trump’s decision to remove many tariffs on Brazilian products is a significant political victory for the Lula administration ahead of next year’s presidential elections,” Brazilian professor Oliver Stuenkel wrote on X. “And a vindication of Brazil’s choice to pursue a calm and pragmatic negotiation strategy vis-à-vis Trump.”