Sotomayor Rips Lawyer Who Claims Elon Musk’s DOGE Job Wasn’t Shady

Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor torched a lawyer Tuesday for suggesting that Elon Musk didn’t buy his way into the White House.

While hearing oral arguments in a case on campaign finance law, Sotomayor warned that if the Supreme Court removed the limits on coordinated expenditures, then there would be “no control” over how much one donor could give to a presidential campaign—opening the door for blatant corruption.

“So, with all respect your honor, I don’t have a problem with the various statistics you just cited in the absence of any evidence or any suggestion it was tied to quid pro quo corruption,” replied Noel Francisco, the attorney for the National Republican Senatorial Committee.

“You mean to suggest that the fact that one major donor to the current president—the most major donor to the current president—got a very lucrative job immediately upon election from the new administration does not give the appearance of quid pro quo?” Sotomayor pressed. She was clearly referring to Elon Musk, who was appointed as head of the Department of Government Efficiency after donating a whopping $288 million to Trump’s 2024 presidential campaign.

Prior to bringing up Musk, Sotomayor also cited Hillary Clinton’s 2016 joint victory fund with the DNC, “which allowed a single donor to give up to $356,000” just to show it wasn’t a solely Trumpian problem.

Francisco tried to dismiss Sotomayor, saying that Musk’s meager salary was not “an effective quid pro quo bribery, which may be why nobody has even remotely suggested that.”

Actually, a lot of people have suggested that—and it has nothing to do with his salary as a special government employee. It’s no secret that Musk used his time as DOGE czar working to dismantle the very agencies that regulate his companies, clearing the way for the richest man in the world to amass even more money.

Musk also used his proximity to Donald Trump to boost his many businesses in foreign countries. In some cases, the administration even pressured foreign governments into approving his products. Not to mention that Musk was the biggest individual winner when Trump announced a 90-day pause on tariffs, sending Tesla stock shooting up 23 percent.

Just because their plan didn’t work perfectly—and Musk ended up losing twice as much as he cut in government spending—doesn’t mean it wasn’t still corrupt.

Illinois Governor JB Pritzker is taking aim at the Trump administration’s violent and excessive immigration actions.

On Tuesday, Pritzker signed a bill that makes it easier for Illinois residents to sue federal immigration agents for up to $10,000 if they believe their rights have been violated, and also restricts those agents from enforcement outside courthouses. The bill also requires hospitals to safeguard patient access, and prohibits schools from disclosing the immigration status of students, employees, and contractors unless required by law.

Democratic lawmakers passed the bill in October in the midst of Operation Midway Blitz, the Trump administration’s attempt to crack down on illegal immigration in the Chicago area. The initiative was met with protests and a violent crackdown from federal agents including ICE and Border Patrol.

“Residents should be able to go to court, take their kid to day care and have access to the university they attend without fear they will be kidnapped off the street,” said state Representative Lilian Jiménez, who represents parts of Chicago, in a statement at the time.

Pritzker has sharply criticized President Trump and his federal actions in Illinois. Last month, he called out Border Patrol agents for mocking a neighborhood they had tear-gassed while staging a photo op in front of the Chicago art installation The Bean.

“Making fun of our neighborhoods and communities is disgusting,” Pritzker posted online at the time. “Greg Bovino and his masked agents are not here to make Chicago safer. As children are tear gassed and U.S. citizens detained, they are posing for photo ops and producing reality TV moments.”

Pritzker again called out the Trump administration after signing the bill on Tuesday.

“After what our communities have experienced, we understood that our response needed to be deep and comprehensive to counter the Trump administration’s depravity,” Pritzker said.

Assistant Attorney General Harmeet Dhillon and the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division are pretending to care about prisoners’ human rights in an apparent effort to get conspiracy theorist, former state official, and convicted 2020 election fraudster Tina Peters out of a Colorado jail.

“Under my direction, @CivilRights has opened an investigation into the entire Colorado prison system following multiple reports of unconstitutional and legally insufficient carceral conditions. Prisoners have civil rights,” Dhillon wrote Tuesday afternoon.

Dhillion’s letter is addressed to Colorado Governor Jared Polis, and accuses the Colorado prison system of “failing to provide adequate medical care and safe sanitary physical conditions of confinement,” and will determine if the state violates prisoners’ rights by “housing biological males in units designated for females.”

On Monday, a federal judge refused to release Peters, who is Trump’s only 2020 ally still behind bars. Trump can’t just pardon her like he’s done with virtually everyone else who’s committed felonies in his name, since she is being held on state charges, not federal—so instead, the administration has to use this “prisoners’ rights” loophole.

Those on both the left and the right acknowledged that Dhillon’s move is part of a larger plan to free the woman who committed seven felonies in Colorado for Trump.

“PLEASE focus on @realtinapeters,” one supporter wrote. “She is a victim of the system.”

“They’re going to get Tina out?” said another, attaching prayer hand emojis.

“New Trump pressure on Colorado to release election conspiracy theorist Tina Peters—who Trump can’t pardon because she’s imprisoned on state charges,” The Bulwark’s Will Sommer chimed in.

Right-wingers have been doing the “Free Tina” thing for some time now. Peters is currently serving nine years in jail for granting unauthorized access to Colorado voting machines and being charged with three counts of attempting to influence a public servant, two counts of conspiracy to commit attempting to influence a public servant, first-degree official misconduct, violation of duty, failing to comply with the secretary of state, obstruction, contempt of court, criminal impersonation, and identity theft.

The right, of course, views Peters as a political prisoner rather than someone who blatantly tried to use her power to swing the 2020 election in Trump’s favor. Her lawyers and MAGA-sphere supporters have alleged that her health is declining and that she was temporarily placed in solitary confinement last month.

“FREE TINA PETERS, a brave and innocent Patriot who has been tortured by Crooked Colorado politicians, including the big Mail-In Ballot supporting the governor of the State,” Trump posted on Truth Social back in August. “Let Tina Peters out of jail, RIGHT NOW. She did nothing wrong, except catching the Democrats cheat in the Election. She is an old woman, and very sick. If she is not released, I am going to take harsh measures!!!”

Trump called to free Peters last week too.

“The SLEAZEBAG Governor of Colorado, Jared Polis, refuses to allow an elderly woman, Tina Peters, who was unfairly convicted of what the Democrats do, cheating on Elections, out of jail! She was convicted for trying to stop Democrats from stealing Colorado Votes in the Election,” he wrote. “She was preserving Election Records, which she was obligated to do under Federal Law.”

Prisoners’ rights probably are being violated in Colorado, as they are in most prisons in this country. But it’s obvious that the Trump administration is more concerned with gaming the system than it is with prison conditions of any kind.

The Trump administration has moved to strip millions of student debt holders from the Saving on a Valuable Education, or SAVE, repayment plan.

The White House proposed a joint settlement with Missouri Tuesday that will force borrowers onto other repayment plans.

“As part of the proposed joint settlement agreement, the Department will not enroll any new borrowers in the illegal SAVE Plan, deny any pending applications, and move all SAVE borrowers into legal repayment plans,” the Education Department announced in a statement.

“If the agreement is approved by the court, it will mark the definitive end of the Biden Administration’s illegal student loan bailout agenda, putting it to rest once and for all, and end the limbo that more than 7 million borrowers currently face when it comes to not being able to make payments on their federal loans.”

The Joe Biden–era income-driven loan option has been blocked since February, when the Eighth U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals determined that the former president had overstepped his office’s authority when he invented the repayment alternative.

A coalition of Republican-led states argued in the lawsuit that Biden had intentionally attempted to craft the student loan relief scheme after an ultraconservative Supreme Court ruled 6–3 to shoot down his formal federal student loan forgiveness plan. That would have erased as much as $20,000 per borrower for 43 million Americans.

Since the court ruling, more than 7.6 million Americans have been placed in SAVE forbearance, the Education Department determined in July, offsetting their payments until 2028.

More than 42 million Americans—or one in six adults—currently have student loans. Their collective debt amounts to more than $1.6 trillion, according to the Congressional Research Service.

Donald Trump is blaming his predecessor, Joe Biden, too much, and his aides are trying to get him to stop.

Trump’s economic policies have caused food prices to go up and increased affordability issues, but the president remains in deep denial, calling affordability a Democratic hoax and “scam.” The president has chosen to respond to any bad news about the economy by complaining about a president who hasn’t been in office for almost a year, and his staff worries that this will backfire on the American people.

“Joe Biden is no longer a threat to them because he’s out of office, he’s never going to be in office again,” one adviser told CNN. “You’ve got to feel their pain. You’ve got to talk about it every day.”

But is the president willing to admit that costs have gone up for most Americans? In an interview with Politico Monday, Trump said if he were grading the economy, he would give it an “A-plus-plus-plus-plus-plus.”

If that were true, why did the president announce a $12 billion bailout for farmers on Monday? Trump told those farmers that it’s because “we inherited a total mess from the Biden administration.” But the public isn’t buying explanations like that. In a poll late last month, 49 percent of respondents said the president has done more to increase prices, while only 24 percent said he’s done more to lower prices. Trump is even losing Republican allies in Congress on the economy.

To try and fix the public perception, Trump is going to be making trips around the country, beginning with a Pennsylvania swing district on Tuesday. It may not be enough, especially in the likely event that Trump finds another excuse to blame Biden on the trip. That won’t convince working people, who can see prices shooting up with their own eyes.

Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth’s rollout Tuesday of the U.S. military’s new AI platform just fell flat on its face.

“The future of American warfare is here, and it’s spelled A-I,” Hegseth said in a video on X, announcing GenAi.Mil, the new “American-made” AI platform that will allow military members to “conduct deep research, format documents, and even analyze video or imagery at unprecedented speed”—and all without using their brains.

Unfortunately for Hegseth, his post presented a slight problem.

The name GenAi.Mil automatically produced a link to an empty website. So X users thinking they were about to get a sneak peak at the military’s new chatbot were greeted by a message reading: “Upstream connect error or disconnect/reset before headers. reset reason: connection termination.” Predictably, the platform can’t actually be accessed from external networks, but the wonky rollout triggered eyerolls across the internet.

One popular post on R/Army, the Reddit forum dedicated to military matters, suggested that service members had all received surprise invitations to use the new platform on their work computers. But having never heard about it before receiving the invite, the user deemed that it looked “really suspicious.”

“Is it real and safe,” the user asked.

The invite features a logo and short link, but no indication of what the invitation is actually for. “Victory belongs to those who embrace real innovation not antiquated systems of a bygone era. It’s time to deliver efficient, decisive results for the warfighter,” the e-vite reads. “I want YOU to use AI.”

The platform will house Google Cloud’s Gemini for Government, using a retrieval-augmented generation to connect the large language model chatbot to Google Search “to ensure outputs are reliable and dramatically [reduce] the risk of AI hallucinations.”

The Trump administration has been eager to embrace the AI industry, and in July, it awarded Google a massive $200 million contract to support AI solutions at the DOD.

After being President Trump and MAGA’s most boisterous supporter, Georgia Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene was on CNN Tuesday morning telling Wolf Blitzer how “sorry” she feels for the president. A lot can change in a year. 

“President Trump posted yesterday that you are … ‘not America First or MAGA’  and your ‘new views are those of a very dumb person’; that’s the president of the United States speaking about you,” Wolf Blitzter said to Greene. “What’s your response to these latest attacks?”

“Well actually Wolf, I feel very sorry for President Trump, I genuinely do,” Greene responded. “It has to be a hard place for someone that is constantly so hateful, and puts so much vitriol, name-calling, and really tells lies about people in order to try to get his way, or win some kind of fight. And I think that’s exactly what’s wrong in America today.… I personally think that that’s poor leadership from a president, it’s a very bad demeanor. And Americans are very tired of it.” 

While Greene’s comments are frustrating on some level given her own contributions to the hate and vitriol she decries, they also further reaffirm a Republican Party that is wavering ideologically, with the party pulling between the MAGA, America-first crowd and the more traditional neocons as a future without Trump looms. 

“It’s easy for me to say a prayer for him and forgive him. But the part that I have had a very hard time with is the fact that he called me a traitor, and because of his words, that brought serious threats against myself and my family,” Greene continued. 

This all comes as Greene and potentially more than 20 other Republicans plan to resign or retire ahead of the 2026 midterms. 

Donald Trump apparently can’t speak about Kyiv without making the Russia-Ukraine war all about himself.

When asked by Politico’s Dasha Burns Monday night if he believed Ukraine had lost its war with Russia, Trump said that the Eastern European nation had lost a lot of “very good land,” chuckling that he “wouldn’t say” Ukraine’s actions had amounted to “a victory.”

But then Trump chose to turn the spotlight back on himself, resurrecting his 2020 presidential election conspiracy while discussing the foreign country’s diplomatic options.

“You know, think of it, if our election wasn’t rigged ... there was a rigged election. Now everyone knows it. It’s gonna come out over the next couple of months too, loud and clear ’cause we have all the information and everything,” Trump said.

“But if the election wasn’t rigged and stolen, uh, you wouldn’t even be talking about Ukraine right now,” he added.

The Trump administration unveiled a 28-point peace plan last month that catered to some of Russia’s most outrageous demands, such as requiring Ukraine to swear off NATO membership and to hand Moscow Crimea and the eastern Donbas region. Those two details alone have reversed long-standing U.S. policy with regard to the area.

In the weeks since, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy has drafted his own peace plan, refusing to relinquish his country’s territory.

Elsewhere in the interview, Trump claimed that Europe would “drop” if the continent’s leaders continued to support Ukraine, and that his son Donald Trump Jr. “wasn’t exactly wrong” to suggest that the president would “walk away” from supporting the war-sieged nation himself.

“But you know, at some point, size will win, generally,” Trump said, referring to Russia’s advantages. “And this is a massive size, uh—you—when you take a look at the numbers, I mean, the numbers are just crazy.”

There is some evidence that the White House’s peace plan may have come directly from the Kremlin: Several sentences in the document were passively formatted with clunky English phrases that make more sense when translated into Russian. It was speculated that the awkward sentences could have been the influence of Kirill Dmitriev, Russian President Vladimir Putin’s envoy, who worked on the project alongside Trump’s special envoy, Steve Witkoff.

Trump has touted himself for months as a great peacemaker, pushing a narrative that he has—so far—solved at least 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 meaningful headway on the Russia-Ukraine war.

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.

Donald Trump took offense at an innocuous question while discussing his health care plans during an interview with Politico’s Dasha Burns Monday, snapping when Burns segued into families’ rising costs for the holidays.

“So right now, people are buying their holiday presents, they’re planning for—” Burns began in a cheery tone, before Trump cut her off.

“Look, don’t be dramatic,” Trump said abruptly, as if Burns had insulted him. Burns continued on her point, saying, “They’re planning their budgets for next year, Mr. President.”

Trump continued on, trying to make the point that he wants “to give the money to the people to buy their own health care” and that Democrats are responsible for any increases in health care premiums for next year “because they’re corrupt people because they’re totally owned and bought by the insurance companies.”

It’s clear that Trump was offended at the question, and he’s in denial about the fact that health care premiums are going to shoot up next year thanks to the expiration of Affordable Care Act subsidies. It was the major issue in Congress’s budget negotiations for months, even leading to the record-long government shutdown.

Even though Republicans promised to hold a vote on extending the subsidies, Trump’s plan seems to be to just let them end, which would likely leave millions of Americans without health coverage. The president continues to spout the delusional idea that Democrats could simply agree to lower health care costs on their own, and Republicans in Congress don’t seem to care.

Not even Trump can bring himself to defend his Defense Department’s second strike on two men in the Caribbean Sea.

“Have you watched the video?” Politico’s Dasha Burns asked Trump in a Monday interview.

“I watch everything, yeah.… I see a lot of things,” Trump replied.

“And do you believe that that second strike was necessary?”

“Well it looked like they were trying to turn back over the boat,” Trump said, contradicting Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth’s story.” “But I’m not involved in that, that’s up to them.”

Last week, the Defense Department alleged that the two men could have attempted to radio back to their cartel to continue their drug-trafficking mission. Lawmakers were informed in closed-door briefings that “it was judged that these two people were capable of returning to the fight.” But here, Trump echoes the Democrats’ story that the video shows the exact opposite.

“What I saw in that room was one of the most troubling things I’ve seen in my time in public service,” Representative Jim Himes, the top Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee, told CNN last week. “You have two individuals [in] clear distress, without any means of locomotion, with a destroyed vessel, [who] were killed by the United States.”

The fallout from this potential war crime has been an exercise in finger-pointing. First, Hegseth claimed the entire story was fabricated, then he made a point to blame the order for the second strike on Admiral Frank Bradley, who was heading the attack. Now Trump—who is above them both—implies that he doesn’t just disagree with the decision but that his Defense Department is lying about why they even struck twice at all.

Maybe Trump sees the writing on the wall and is just trying to absolve himself of any guilt before this goes any further. Or maybe he really is tired of Hegseth and his strike first, think later decision-making style. Either way, this saga seems far from over.