Jack Smith Testifies That He’d Prosecute Trump All Over Again

Former special counsel Jack Smith defended his investigations into President Donald Trump in a closed-door hearing with the House Judiciary Committee Wednesday, pushing back against Trump’s repeated attempts to delegitimize and undermine Smith’s findings.

“If asked whether to prosecute a former president based on the same facts today, I would do so regardless of whether the President was a Republican or Democrat,” Smith said in his opening statement, according to multiple news organizations who received copies of the remarks.

“The decision to bring charges against President Trump was mine, but the basis for those charges rests entirely with President Trump and his actions, as alleged in the indictments returned by grand juries in two different districts,” he continued.

Smith, like anyone else who’s ever tried to hold Trump to account, has been facing a pressure campaign from the president. Recently, White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt shared a story from Fox News claiming that the FBI initially doubted that there was probable cause for the Mar-a-Lago raid, something that might matter if a federal judge hadn’t signed off on the search warrant, and if over 100 classified documents weren’t indeed found all over Trump’s estate.

And Republicans snuck a petty provision into the shutdown deal allowing Senate Republicans who had their phone records accessed by Smith—in order to see who may have been involved with Trump’s efforts to overturn the 2020 election—to sue the Justice Department for millions.

Republicans rejected Smith’s request to testify publicly about his investigations into Trump’s mishandling of classified documents and his plot to overturn the election. But in Wednesday’s closed-door hearing, Smith still refused to let the Trump administration undermine his findings.

“Our investigation developed proof beyond a reasonable doubt that President Trump engaged in a criminal scheme to overturn the results of the 2020 presidential election and to prevent the lawful transfer of power,” Smith said in his remarks. “Our investigation also developed powerful evidence that showed President Trump willfully retained highly classified documents after he left office in January 2021, storing them at his social club, including in a bathroom and a ballroom where events and gatherings took place.

“He then repeatedly tried to obstruct justice to conceal his continued retention of those documents,” Smith added.

According to Smith, no matter what Trump claims, the cases against him are rock solid.

The U.S. military has conducted at least 25 strikes on boats in the Caribbean and eastern Pacific on the basis that the small watercraft were trying to smuggle drugs into the United States. But as it turns out, even top Trump officials don’t think that’s true.

So far, at least 95 people have been killed since the attacks began in early September. The White House has defended the violence, chalking it up to allegedly necessary efforts to thwart the pipeline of fentanyl into the country. Donald Trump has simultaneously leveraged the aggression to try to shove Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro out of power, something that he attempted and failed to do in 2019.

Yet America’s senators are hearing an entirely different rationale for the military offensive. Recalling details of a classified meeting held Tuesday, Connecticut Senator Chris Murphy said that Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth and State Secretary Marco Rubio admitted that no fentanyl is coming out of Venezuela. Instead, the boats are carrying cocaine—bound for Europe.

“I can tell you this,” Murphy said, noting he wasn’t discussing classified information. “The administration had no legal justification and had no national security justification for these strikes.

“And so we are spending billions of your taxpayer dollars to wage a war in the Caribbean to stop cocaine from going from Venezuela to Europe,” he said. “That is a massive waste of national security resources and your taxpayer dollars.”

Murphy underscored that Trump had overstepped his authority by attempting to use the seemingly fabricated drug threat to wage war against Venezuela without the express permission of Congress.

“Only Congress, only the American public, can authorize war,” he said. “And there is just no question that these are acts of war.”

Another Republican is retiring from Congress, in what is becoming an exodus before next year’s midterm elections.

Representative Dan Newhouse, whose Washington district is a safe Republican seat, announced Wednesday morning that he would not be running for reelection in 2026. Newhouse, who voted for President Trump’s impeachment after the January 6, 2021, insurrection, had survived primary challenges to his seat in 2022 and 2024.

Newhouse was also one of 35 Republicans who voted to establish the January 6 commission to investigate the Capitol insurrection, so it’s telling that after surviving two elections after that, he now thinks his time is up. Newhouse’s retirement means that only one Republican who voted to impeach Trump in Congress, Representative David Valadao of California, remains in office, although he has a tough election in a battleground district.

Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene, a strong supporter turned critic of the president, announced her own resignation last month. She told CNN’s Kaitlan Collins Tuesday night that she thinks “the dam is breaking” regarding Republican support for Trump.

“Many Republicans may not have called him out, but last week 13 Republicans voted with Democrats to overturn one of President Trump’s executive orders which enabled him to fire federal workers,” Greene said, referring to Trump’s deranged post criticizing Rob Reiner after he and his wife were killed in their home Sunday.

“We also saw Indiana Republicans vote against redistricting. He didn’t call any of them traitors and call for primaries against them,” Greene added. “I would like to say that that is a sign, where you’re seeing Republicans … entering the campaign phase for 2026, which is a large signal that lame-duck season has begun and that Republicans will go all in for themselves in order to save their own reelections.”

Greene’s assessment, along with Newhouse’s resignation, seems to indicate that Republicans can see the writing on the wall for 2026, and it’s not good for them. Almost all of the off-year elections that have already taken place have been big wins for Democrats, or narrow victories for Republicans. In less than one year, the same shifts could happen in congressional races and Democrats could take over the House.

President Donald Trump signaled he plans to go after former FBI Director Christopher Wray and former Attorney General Merrick Garland.

Trump took to Truth Social Tuesday to personally respond to a Fox News report on the 2022 raid of Mar-a-Lago, which was part of the investigation into his alleged mishandling of classified documents. According to Fox News, in the weeks leading up to the raid, FBI and Justice Department officials voiced concerns they had not dug up enough evidence to establish probable cause.

“Unreasonable Search and Seizure!!! That was the FBI’s CRIMINAL RAID on Mar-a-Lago. This can never be allowed to happen again!!!” Trump wrote on Truth Social.

Trump then shared a post from Truth Social user Jay Anthony, who wrote: “Someone should be arrested. Wray & Garland.”

“… And many others!!!” Trump added.

It seems that Trump’s revenge tour against his so-called “deep state” enemies will soon turn to those involved in the August 2022 raid.

It’s worth noting that the story about probable cause isn’t new. During Trump’s classified documents trial, Judge Aileen Cannon rejected the notion that dissent among the ranks at the FBI invalidated the probable cause used to obtain a search warrant for the president’s residence, an exceptional finding for the judge who would later toss out Trump’s 42 felony charges.

MAGA isn’t buying White House chief of staff Susie Wiles’s excuses for humiliating Donald Trump’s team.

Wiles tried Tuesday to explain away revealing her unfiltered opinions about several Trumpworld figures in an interview with Vanity Fair. She claimed the article was a “disingenuously framed hit piece” that “disregarded” context to “paint an overwhelmingly chaotic and negative narrative.”

While members of Trumpworld leaped to Wiles’s defense, MAGA wasn’t quite as forgiving. Lara Logan, a discredited former CBS correspondent and prominent figure in far-right media, slammed Wiles’s apparent naïveté.

“It is too late in the game for this to be a defense. Anyone close to the President should know that Vanity Fair leads the way in the information war for Trump’s most powerful & despicable enemies,” she wrote on X.

“If you do not know this, you are not qualified to be in a junior role let alone a senior one,” Logan added.

Joel Pollak, the opinion editor at the conservative tabloid California Post, also questioned Wiles’s decision to speak with Vanity Fair in the first place. “I don’t know why Republicans continue to give privileged access to mainstream media or center-left publications determined to destroy them,” he wrote on X, calling publications such as Vanity Fair and The New York Times “Democrat agenda-driven outlets.”

Mike Cernovich, a right-wing commentator with more than 1.4 million followers on X, accused Wiles of doing “glam interviews with Bolshevik media.”

In another post, Cernovich offered Wiles some advice: “You don’t have to do the media interview. You don’t have to talk to anyone. They will say, ‘We are going to write about you whether you cooperate or not.’ Who cares. Far worse than some hit piece (which don’t even work anymore) is hanging yourself with your own words.”

ICE agents violently restrained a woman in Minneapolis on Monday, dragging her through the snow and pinning her face down as onlookers shouted that the woman was pregnant.

During what was supposed to be a “targeted vehicle stop,” according to ICE officials, protesters swarmed the agents. Esme Murphy, a WCCO reporter, was on the scene, where she saw ICE holding a woman on the ground.

“Please let her go! She’s pregnant!” one onlooker shouted.

“Get her off of her fucking stomach,” another said.

In response to this, one agent fired a Taser into the crowd. “Who wants more?” he taunted, according to WCCO.

“We kept yelling, ‘She is pregnant, she’s pregnant,’” resident Tonika Deutch told Murphy. “They put their knees on her. We kept telling them, ‘She can’t breathe, let her up, let her up.’”

The woman was then dragged by one arm, as the crowd continued to yell and plead with the ICE agents. Bystanders threw snowballs, and ICE agents fired pepper spray into the crowd—hitting Murphy, the reporter, as well as her photographer.

ICE called the Minneapolis Police Department for backup. Once they arrived, the officers determined there was “no violence occurring” against the agents. “We have been training our officers for the last five years very, very intensely on de-escalation, but unfortunately that is … often not what we are seeing from other agencies in the city,” Minneapolis Police Chief Brian O’Hara told WCCO.

According to ICE, they succeeded in arresting the targets of their operation: a young Ecuadorian couple who were abducted from their car, its windows shattered by agents. The woman is currently in custody in Illinois, and it’s not known where her husband is being held. Two U.S. citizens were also arrested for assaulting federal officers, according to CBS.

Four House Republicans have rejected the party line to give Obamacare more juice.

In a major act of defiance against House Speaker Mike Johnson, GOP Representatives Brian Fitzpatrick, Mike Lawler, Robert Bresnahan, and Ryan Mackenzie signed Democrats’ Affordable Care Act discharge petition Wednesday morning.

They join every House Democrat in doing so, bringing the overall tally on the petition to the 218 signatures required to force a vote on whether to extend enhanced ACA subsidies for another three years.

Last week, Johnson granted Fitzpatrick and Representative Jen Kiggans an opportunity to vote on an amendment to extend the subsidies. But differing opinions over the amendment’s text had blocked efforts to make a deal.

Kiggans is not expected to sign the petition, people close to her told The Hill.

The successful effort does not translate into immediate action, however. Signatories on the petition will have to wait at least seven legislative days to recognize it, according to House rules, after which House leadership will have two days to respond. That would likely put the ACA vote on the agenda sometime around New Year’s Eve, but Johnson could voluntarily speed up the process if he wanted to.

Johnson did not respond when asked by CNN as to whether he would permit a vote before the year’s end.

The Obamacare subsidies that were enacted under the previous administration are slated to expire on December 31. Without them, health insurance premiums for more than 20 million Americans are expected to double.

If the subsidies completely lapse or expire—as most Republicans seemingly want them to do—practically everyone will feel the pain: Policy analysts expect a mass exodus from Obamacare plans altogether that could leave roughly four million Americans completely uninsured. The spike in uninsured Americans will spur a nationwide public health problem that has historically made premiums more expensive for the insured as hospitals look to recoup the lost cash.

But Johnson apparently doesn’t see that forthcoming domino effect.

“Here’s the false narrative: Democrats are pretending as though this affects everybody in the country,” Johnson told CNBC two hours before the Republican defection. “It affects 7 percent of Americans, this extended subsidy.”

This story has been updated.

Donald Trump got excited on Tuesday describing his bombing campaign against suspected drug boats, at a Hanukkah reception at the White House.

“The only time anybody could see those planes was when those bomb chutes open up, because it becomes totally un-stealth,” Trump began, making hand gestures to describe the airstrikes. “You’re going in, you go like this. And as soon as it goes like this, for some reason, the plane is totally visible, not good. And I watched it happening.”

Trump continued on, getting more animated, to scattered laughter in the crowd.

“And I watched it happening, it’s like I’m sitting home watching it, you know, it’s amazing, the situation room is an amazing place. But I watched ’em go bing, bing, it went bing, bing, and two massive hundred-thousand-pound bombs come pouring out, and the job they did was incredible,” Trump added, going on to call a particular strike “the single greatest military attack that anyone’s ever seen.”

Trump turns 80 next year, and is beginning to face more questions about whether he is physically and mentally up to the job of being president. Even though this is his second term in office, it’s evident that he has trouble understanding and explaining certain concepts. Trump won’t admit to any issues, though, lashing out reports of his cognitive decline.

It’s not good that Trump gets excited about dropping bombs and killing people, especially when the bombings are likely illegal and seem to be a prelude to regime change and war with Venezuela. And the fact that Trump seems to be experiencing early-stage dementia probably means that national security is in danger.

The price tag on the White House ballroom just keeps climbing.

Speaking at a Hanukkah reception at the White House Tuesday night, Donald Trump nonchalantly dropped that the cost of building the 90,000-square-foot dance pad had grown to $400 million.

“I think it’ll be the greatest ballroom anywhere in the world,” Trump said. “Who else but in our country would sue to stop a $400 million beautiful ballroom that people have been after for the White House?

“The White House has wanted a ballroom for 150 years,” he added.

But exactly who has been clamoring for the facility—which will dwarf the 55,000-square-foot mansion—is not clear. Even the architect of the project, James McCrery II, disagreed with the size and scope of Trump’s ginormous ballroom, claiming that its construction would violate basic architectural principles. But McCrery’s opinion eventually got him fired.

The project’s price tag has seemingly grown by 100 percent since Trump first pitched it in July. The original $200 million cost became $300 million in October, as soon as Trump started tearing into the White House East Wing. The historic wing has been completely razed in the process, despite the president’s initial promises to build the addition “near but not touching” the actual White House.

Since Trump’s other promises have fallen flat, there seems to be no guarantee that the cost of the development will actually be funded “100 percent” by Trump and “some friends” of his.

The White House suggested that the project would be paid for, in part, by some of the country’s wealthiest families and biggest corporations, including the likes of Apple, Google, Amazon, Microsoft, and Meta.

Some major players in the defense industry with massive federal contracts have also pledged significant cash to develop the ballroom, including Lockheed Martin and Palantir.

Donald Trump bragged about one of his biggest donors, Miriam Adelson, donating $250 million to his campaign in 2024, at a White House Hanukkah event Tuesday night. Adelson then told the audience that Trump could run for a third term and whispered something in Trump’s ear. Trump smiled widely as he announced she’d offer him another $250 million.

Adelson, a staunch supporter of right-wing Israeli causes, said that a third term, which is unconstitutional, was possible for Trump with the help of disgraced attorney and Israel supporter Alan Dershowitz, who is implicated in the Jeffrey Epstein files.

“Miriam gave my campaign, indirectly and directly, 250 million, she was number one,” Trump told the crowd. “When somebody can give you 250 million, I think that we should give her the opportunity to say hello. And Miriam, make it quick, because 250 million is not what it used to be.”

Adelson then came to the stage and told the crowd about how she had recently “met Alan Dershowitz, and he said the legal thing about four more years.”

“And I say, Alan, I agree with you. So, we can do it. Think about it,” Adelson said. Trump pointed out that Dershowitz was in the crowd as the audience started to chant, “Four more years.”

The whole thing raises numerous issues, like the influence that rich donors have on the president and the open declaration of plans to flout the Constitution to keep Trump in office beyond 2028. Adelson’s money doesn’t come without strings, either: Just like in 2024, the billionaire widow of casino magnate Sheldon Adelson will likely push for the United States to recognize Israel’s annexation of the West Bank.

Last year, Trump told pro-Israel donors including Adelson that he would set back the pro-Palestinian movement by “25 or 30 years,” and so far, it seems that at least Adelson is happy with the job Trump is doing. Meanwhile, more than 70,000 Palestinians have been killed by Israel in the last two years, including over 379 casualties two months after a ceasefire in Gaza was declared. But at least Trump will get paid to stay in office illegally, right?