Slotkin Refuses DOJ Request in Sham Probe Over “Illegal Orders” Video

Senator Elissa Slotkin has denied an interview request from the Justice Department regarding its sham investigation into her participation in a video message telling troops they should “refuse illegal orders.”

Slotkin, a former CIA analyst, joined five other military and intelligence veterans in Congress last fall to urge service members to refuse illegal orders.  The video angered President Trump, who accused them of sedition and suggested they be executed.

The Justice Department announced an individual probe into Slotkin’s role in January, and her recent refusal to cooperate is a confrontational move that will force the administration to show how serious it really is about this sedition thing. 

“I did this to go on offense,” Slotkin said on Wednesday. “And to put them in a position where they’re tap dancing. To put them in a position where they have to own their choices of using a U.S. attorney’s office to come after a senator.”

Slotkin’s lawyer, Preet Bharara, requested that U.S. Attorney Jeanine Pirro “immediately terminate any open investigation and cease any further inquiry concerning the video.”

Senator Mark Kelly has also struck back, suing Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth for retaliating against him and violating his rights to free speech and due process.

The White House is letting Attorney General Pam Bondi take the heat for Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard’s presence at the Fulton County, Georgia, election office during an FBI raid.

Last week, Gabbard was photographed overseeing FBI agents as they packed up and walked out with ballots from the 2020 presidential election, despite the fact that she is prohibited from taking part in domestic law enforcement operations. As public scrutiny boiled over, Gabbard told Democratic lawmakers that Donald Trump himself had asked her to be there—but he is apparently not sticking by her side.

Instead, Trump blamed Gabbard’s attendance on Bondi Thursday, telling attendees at the National Prayer Breakfast that Gabbard “took a lot of heat ... because she went in at Pam’s insistence ... and she looked at votes.

“They say, ‘Why is she doing it?’” Trump said. “Because Pam wanted her to do it.”

But the president’s explanations have been far from consistent. During a sit-down interview with NBC News Wednesday, Trump tried to explain away Gabbard’s latest controversy by blaming the whole fiasco on China’s alleged attempts to infiltrate U.S. elections.

“Why is Tulsi Gabbard there?” asked NBC’s Tom Llamas, point-blank.

“I don’t know, but you know, uh, a lot of the cheating comes from, it’s international cheating,” Trump told the network. “You have people—they say—from China trying to, let me ask you, do you think China tries to influence our election?”

“We know that foreign governments try to influence a lot of things in this country,” Llamas replied.

“Well, therefore, she’s foreign governments,” Trump said.

Since Trump first planted the seeds of doubt about the results of the 2020 election, a litany of his allies have continued to tend and water the theory—so much so that within a handful of years, refusing to admit that Trump ever lost to Joe Biden has become a fealty test for MAGA membership.

But there is no doubt: Trump lost that election by a landslide, coming up short by 38 electoral votes. More evidence that Trump did not win is the fact that he was not inaugurated in 2021, and did not serve a day as president until he succeeded in 2024.

But for anyone still in doubt, know that the theory has been thoroughly debunked by the president’s own appointees. Trump’s previous attorney general, Bill Barr, announced in 2022 that despite an intensive, multi-agency investigation, no evidence of widespread fraud had been discovered that supported the president’s wild claims.

Fulton County Commission Chair Robb Pitts announced a lawsuit Wednesday aimed at challenging the FBI’s sudden seizure of the county’s electoral ballots.

Donald Trump’s frivolous $10 billion lawsuit against the IRS over his leaked tax returns, if he were to win or get a settlement, would be paid entirely by U.S. taxpayers.

That’s what Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent said during a Senate Committee on Banking, Housing, and Urban Affairs hearing Thursday. Democratic Senator Ruben Gallego asked Bessent, who is also acting director of the IRS: “Where would that be cut from? Let’s say, for some reason, he actually wins that lawsuit. Where would that $10 billion come from?”

Bessent had trouble getting the words out.

“Um, it would come from—” Bessent began.

“Process-wise; I’m not asking your opinion whether it’s right or wrong,” Gallego interjected.

“It would come from Treasury,” Bessent said. Gallego pressed him on if those funds would come from the U.S. Treasury’s general fund, to which Bessent said yes, “the Treasury’s general account.”

“So, taxpayers?” Gallego asked. Bessent said yes, adding, “part of the 44,000 taxpayers whose returns were leaked,” referring to how the same person who leaked Trump’s returns also leaked those of thousands of other wealthy people.

“They’re not suing,” Gallego replied.

The whole conversation shows the absurdity of Trump becoming the first sitting president to sue the executive branch and demand that American taxpayers pay him for his taxes being leaked. The leak came from one IRS employee and wasn’t directed by the agency, and that employee was convicted and sent to federal prison.

Even then, the leak took place during Trump’s first term under a director he appointed, and he’d have a hard time proving damages in court. Trump’s net worth has nearly tripled to $6.4 billion since his taxes were disclosed in September 2020.

It looks a lot like a corrupt president is trying to pay himself billions of dollars—two-thirds of the IRS’s proposed budget—to soothe his ego.

In 1963, NAACP field secretary Medgar Evers was gunned down outside of his own Mississippi home by Byron De La Beckwith, a Ku Klux Klan member. Now the Trump administration wants the National Park Service to stop calling Beckwith a racist.

Anonymous Park Service officials told Mississippi Today that they were being ordered to make ahistorical and incredibly political omissions to the brochure that accompanies the Medgar & Myrlie Evers Home National Monument.

The original brochure stated that Beckwith was part of “the racist and segregationist White Citizens’ Council,” but it has now been removed from the monument.

If shooting Evers wasn’t evidence enough for Beckwith’s deep racism, his past interviews certainly are. An interview he did in 1990—four years before he was actually convicted for his 1963 murder—sees him calling the racist White Citizens’ Council “the first ray of light Dixie had seen since we fought through Reconstruction and captured the right to vote, the right of white people to run the South.”

“N—s are beasts. It says so here in the book of Adam,” he said in the same interview. Beckwith, who also belonged to the White Knights of the Ku Klux Klan, still called Evers a “mongrel” over 30 years after killing him, adding that “God hates mongrels.”

This is the legacy that President Trump is choosing to obscure as part of his “Restoring Truth and Sanity in America” executive order, an all-out disinformation campaign against any history that is honest about the oppressive actions of white Americans. Under the same act, the Trump administration removed a picture of Harriet Tubman from the National Park Service page on the Underground Railroad and changed the words “enslaved African Americans” to “enslaved workers.” It also removed a section that discussed Benjamin Franklin being a slave owner.

“You can talk about Martin Luther King Jr. overcoming.… You just can’t talk about what he overcame,” said Alan Spears, senior director for cultural resources at the National Parks Conservation Association. “It’s turning the assassination of Medgar Evers into something that is bloodless and had no impact. We can talk about him being a wonderful veteran, but not about what it cost him. He gave the last full measure of devotion, and now we want to ignore that.”

The Trump administration wants you to forget that Evers was murdered for his activism by a man who did not think Black people were dignified human beings. Don’t let them.

Donald Trump’s economy has led to the worst January in job cuts since the Great Recession in 2009.

U.S.-based employers laid off 108,435 employees last month, three times as many as in December and twice as many as January 2025, according to a monthly report from Challenger, Gray & Christmas, a firm that helps executives transition to new jobs. The country hasn’t had a January this bad in seven years, the report said.

Two companies are responsible for 40 percent of these job losses: Amazon, which cut 16,000 jobs, and UPS, which cut 30,000 jobs. The cuts are even related: UPS’s cuts are connected to how it is winding down a delivery agreement with Amazon.

The most layoffs were seen in five industries: transportation, technology, health care, chemical manufacturing, and financial.

“Generally, we see a high number of job cuts in the first quarter, but this is a high total for January,” said Andy Challenger, the firm’s chief revenue officer, in a statement. “It means most of these plans were set at the end of 2025, signaling employers are less than optimistic about the outlook for 2026.”

The report attributes 30,784 of the job losses to ending contracts, such as that of UPS. Market and economic conditions led to 28,392 layoffs, 20,044 were caused by restructuring, and 12,738 were due to closures. AI was responsible for 7,624 job cuts, and tariffs were only attributable to 294 last month.

Meanwhile, job creation did not come close to mitigating these layoffs. The payroll processing firm ADP announced only 22,000 jobs were created last month, the weakest numbers in three months and the worst January since the Covid-19 pandemic in 2021. Most of those job gains came from hiring in the health care industry, and came after 2025 had the weakest annual job growth in 22 years. Unemployment is also up, with 231,000 claims filed in the last week of January, an eight-week high, according to the Department of Labor.

All of this belies Trump’s claims that everything is going well and that his policies are good for American businesses and workers. His administration has resorted to pushing fake statistics to prop up its claims, but Trump can’t cover up the fact that more and more Americans are struggling to afford basic needs. All of this bad news is self-inflicted, as Trump has sabotaged an economy that was actually much better under Biden.