Trump Reveals Ominous Plot for 50 Years of Rigged Elections

President Trump is continuing his crusade against voting rights, claiming that mail-in ballots are “crooked as hell” and that eliminating them will guarantee Republican dominance of elections for the next half-century.

“Mail-in ballots are crooked as hell. We’re the only country in the world that use this type of mail-in ballot, the only country in the world,” Trump said at a rally in Rome, Georgia, on Thursday. “I’ll tell you what, Republicans have to win this one. We’ll never lose a race for fifty years, we won’t lose a race.”

He then launched into his broader attack on voting rights, which many see as a last-ditch attempt to salvage the GOP’s chances in the November midterm elections, which are predicted to go poorly for them.

“We want voter ID, we want proof of citizenship, and we don’t want mail-in ballots except for the military far away, except for people that are ill, disabled, or people that are away. Even for a vacation! We’ll be generous,” Trump added.

Trump had no complaints about mail-in ballots when he won the presidency in 2024. And the U.S. is not the only country to use them: 34 countries and territories use some kind of postal voting. Twelve even allow all voters to vote by mail, including the U.K., Germany, Poland, Greece, and Canada.

An Obama-era attorney disclosed “non-public” information to child sex trafficker Jeffrey Epstein with regard to the White House’s response to the Secret Service’s sex scandal.

Kathryn Ruemmler works as Goldman Sachs’s chief legal officer, but last week, the star attorney was forced to resign over her myriad ties to the man she warmly referred to as “Uncle Jeffrey.” Her resignation goes into effect on June 30.*

But recently released emails from 2014 reveal that the counsel’s fondness for the “international man of mystery” inspired her to share a draft of an official White House press response with him, dishing then-unreleased information to the convicted sex criminal, reported Bloomberg Thursday.

At the time of her emails, the White House was embroiled in a global controversy: In 2012, more than a dozen Secret Service agents (and military men) had decided to booze their way through a presidential trip in Cartagena, Colombia, hiring prostitutes along the way. The elite law enforcement personnel did so, despite the fact that Colombian sex workers were frequently hired as spies by the country’s powerful drug cartels, sparking questions about possible national security concerns in the fallout.

Ruemmler was one of the staffers handling the White House’s official response to the fiasco. Two years after the disastrous Cartagena trip, she spoke with Epstein about the situation, forwarding him a draft email that contained sensitive information about the role that the White House played in investigating the sexual misconduct.*

In return, Epstein offered advice and edits. “Breathe, smile. You’re free,” he wrote in one message.

The exchange took place six years after Epstein pleaded guilty to soliciting children as young as 14 to have sex with him. The Justice Department’s review of the Epstein files concluded that the well-connected financier had harmed more than 1,000 women and children in his global sex-trafficking ring, all of whom “suffered unique trauma.”

Jennifer Connelly, a spokeswoman for Ruemmler, told Bloomberg that the former White House counsel “has done nothing wrong and has nothing to hide. Nothing in the record suggests otherwise.”

“Ms. Ruemmler has deep sympathy for those harmed by Epstein and if she knew then what she knows now, she never would have dealt with him at all,” Connelly said.

Recent reports indicate that the DOJ has only released a fraction of the Epstein files, potentially holding onto upward of 50 terabytes that the agency has not yet disclosed. The recent releases, which include millions of pages of documents, amount to roughly 300 gigabytes, or 2 percent of the estimated total.

* This article previously misstated when Ruemmler’s work at Goldman Sachs ends, as well as the nature of her outreach to Epstein.

Is Donald Trump delaying action in Iran so he can go to the Winter Olympics?

This week, the so-called peacemaker president has assembled the greatest amount of air power in the Middle East since the 2003 invasion of Iraq, but reportedly hasn’t approved military action against Iran—yet.

One factor in the president’s pending decision is the ongoing Milano Cortina Winter Olympics, sources familiar with the matter told The Washington Post Thursday.

There has been increasing speculation that Trump is planning to make a surprise appearance at the men’s hockey finals on Sunday, if Team USA—the favorites to win gold—qualify for the match. Trump also announced last week that a presidential delegation led by Education Secretary Linda McMahon would attend the closing ceremony in Milan on Sunday.

The decision to launch a military strike on Iran would potentially jeopardize travel plans for Trump and his officials. (Obviously, it could also jeopardize a lot more—but that doesn’t seem to be Trump’s chief concern here.)

Speaking at the inaugural meeting of his so-called Board of Peace in Washington Thursday, Trump offered Iran 10 days to come to a diplomatic solution—or risk military action. That would give him just enough time to visit Milan, likely so he can get loudly booed just like Vice President JD Vance was at the opening ceremony.

In the meantime, the U.S. military has deployed 13 warships and a large fleet of aircraft to the Middle East, with a second aircraft carrier en route to the region.

Federal judges have ordered the release of at least three of 10 West African immigrants who were swarmed by federal agents in multiple immigration raids in October and November on New York City’s Canal Street, a popular site for street vendors.

Serigne Diop, Mamdou Ndoye, and Abdou Tall will be released, while the other seven men remain in ICE detention centers in Louisiana and New Jersey.

Manhattan District Judge Vernon S. Broderick noted that Immigration and Customs Enforcement failed to provide a warrant or probable cause to arrest Ndoye, in particular, writing, “Absent such procedures, the agency will be free to either engage in preplanned decisions to unlawfully detain individuals and then come up with post hoc rationalizations, or merely randomly stage ‘encounters’ without the intent to unlawfully detain individuals and then create post hoc rationalizations for these unlawful detentions.”

“The court-ordered releases for these three individuals confirm what we all know, which is that federal law enforcement officers carried out illegal and unconstitutional roundups on the streets of Chinatown,” said Elora Mukherjee, the director of Columbia Law School’s Immigrants’ Rights Clinic.

The Department of Homeland Security insists that the arrests were justified.

“Despite activist judges, President Trump and Secretary (Kristi) Noem will continue fighting for the arrest, detention, and removal of criminal illegal aliens who have no right to terrorize our communities,” DHS spokesperson Tricia McLaughlin said in a statement.

The Department of Justice’s headquarters in Washington now features a banner of Donald Trump.

The Robert F. Kennedy Department of Justice Building, also called Main Justice, on Thursday became the latest federal building to get plastered with a portrait of the Supreme Leader—in a symbolic blow to the agency’s independence.

After the Watergate scandal, the Department of Justice installed new safeguards to ensure the DOJ remained a “neutral zone” from the politics of the White House, and made assurances that the department’s attorneys “must always be committed to good judgment and integrity,” according to the Brenner Center for Justice.

Seeing Trump’s face on the facade of Main Justice simply verifies what Americans have been witnessing for months: Trump has completely taken over the federal agency intended to implement an impartial—and nonpartisan—rule of law.

Earlier this month, DOJ officials began to hold daily meetings to discuss Trump’s efforts to investigate and punish his perceived political enemies, such as former special counsel Jack Smith, Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg, and New York Attorney General Letitia James. The president later joked that he had a “right” to weaponize the DOJ.

Meanwhile, the Department of Justice appears to be engaged in a large-scale cover-up to protect many of the individuals implicated in the government’s files on Jeffrey Epstein—including the president himself. The agency’s leader, Attorney General Pam Bondi, has repeatedly lied about Trump’s alleged wrongdoing, and reoriented her department to exact his revenge fantasies and defend his billionaire buddies.