Trump Quietly Tries to Free FBI Informant Who Lied About Bidens

He worked with Russia and Republicans to build a web of lies that could incriminate President Joe Biden. Now he’s being rewarded.

Alexander Smirnov’s various deceptions about Biden and his family—which included telling the FBI that both Biden and his son Hunter had pocketed millions in bribes from the Ukrainian gas company Burisma—were central to Republican efforts to impeach the former president. Smirnov was the caucus’s star witness.

In a plea deal in 2024, Smirnov admitted that he had not only completely fabricated the Biden-Burisma connection but that it was conjured with the assistance of at least four Russian officials.

Yet Smirnov vanished mere months into his six-year prison sentence. In early March, it became clear that the Trump administration was helping him sweep the whole ordeal under the rug, despite the deleterious impacts that Smirnov’s lies and Russian collusion had on American politics.

On March 4, deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche submitted a bizarre and atypical brief supporting Smirnov’s attempts to throw out his sentence and withdraw his plea, reported Mother Jones Monday. Deputy attorneys general have not historically involved themselves in such matters.

In 2025, the DOJ filed a joint motion alongside Smirnov’s attorneys to release him pending appeal. U.S. District Judge Otis Wright tossed the effort in April, but legal experts stressed that the effort could be an early sign that the Trump administration was considering pardoning Smirnov.

Smirnov’s appeal hinges on a stipulation related to his plea deal. At the time, the arrangement stated that Smirnov was “entitled” to a credit for time served, though that credit was never determined by a judge, as specified by the plea. Smirnov and his team are now claiming that his entire sentence should be thrown out since Wright did not comply with the specifications of the plea deal, even though the Russian asset was credited for time served by the Bureau of Prisons.

Instead, Smirnov’s team has pitched that his legal arrangements should be reset to their status before the FBI plea deal. The Justice Department filing supports this sequence of events.

One of President Trump’s most extreme, Nazi-sympathizing counterterrorism officials is leaving his post over the war on Iran.

National Counterterrorism Center director and former GOP congressional candidate Joe Kent announced his resignation, in a letter on X Tuesday morning.

“I cannot in good conscience support the ongoing war in Iran. Iran posed no imminent threat to our nation, and it is clear that we started this war due to pressure from Israel and its powerful American lobby,” he captioned it.

Kent’s protest resignation is unprecedented for the Trump administration.

“In your first administration, you understood better than any modern President how to decisively apply military power without getting us drawn into never-ending wars,” Kent wrote in his longer letter. “Early in this administration, high-ranking Israeli officials and influential members of the American media deployed a misinformation campaign that wholly undermined your America First platform and sowed pro-war sentiments to encourage a war with Iran. This echo chamber was used to deceive you into believing that Iran posed an imminent threat to the United States, and that should you strike now, there was a clear path to a swift victory. This was a lie and is the same tactic the Israelis used to draw us into the disastrous Iraq war that cost our nation the lives of thousands of our best men and women. We cannot make this mistake again.”

Kent’s resignation highlights a major fault line between the anti-interventionist MAGA right wing—the Marjorie Taylor Greenes and Tucker Carlsons—and the more traditional neocons. Many of the former cheered on Kent’s focus on Israel as a primary catalyst for aggression, while the latter rejoiced at his departure.

“REAL COURAGE,” wrote extremist Steve Bannon acolyte Grace Chong. “This is what putting America first actually looks like.”

“The MAGA Coalition is shattered,” commentator Tim Pool chimed. “Trump can say ‘I AM MAGA’ all he wants, and it may be true, but lost support means MAGA is meaningless.”

“Good riddance. Iran has murdered more than a thousand Americans. Their EFP land mines were the deadliest in Iraq,” Republican Representative Don Bacon said. “Anti-Semitism is an evil I detest, and we surely don’t want it in our government.”

The White House has yet to comment.

Read Joe Kent’s full resignation letter here.

Donald Trump can’t back up his claim that an ex-president supported his decision to wage war on Iran.

All four living former presidents denied speaking to Trump recently, NBC News reports. A George W. Bush aide told the news outlet that “they haven’t been in touch,” and one of Bill Clinton’s aides said that Trump couldn’t have been referring to the forty-second president. Likewise, “no recent conversations” have taken place between Trump and former President Barack Obama, an aide to Obama said. An unnamed source told NBC that Trump couldn’t have been referring to Joe Biden, either.

“I’ve spoken to a certain president—who I like, actually. A past president, former president. He said: ‘I wish I did it. I wish I did.’ But they didn’t do it. I’m doing it. Yeah?” Trump said about the Iran war while at a lunch for Kennedy Center board members Monday afternoon. Later, Trump said in the Oval Office that he “spoke to one of the former presidents who I actually like.”

“I actually speak to some,” Trump said. “And he said, ‘I wish I did what you did.’” When Trump was asked to be specific, Trump said it wasn’t Bush, and when asked if it was Clinton, he replied, “I don’t want to say.”

“I don’t want to say because a member of a party, a member of a party, they have Trump derangement syndrome, but it’s somebody that happens to like me, and I like that person, who’s a smart person, but that person said, ‘I wish I did it.’ OK, but I don’t want to get into who. I don’t want to get him into trouble,” Trump said. “You know, it’s interesting. And maybe he’d be proud. And I could even ask him that: ‘Would you like me to reveal your name?’”

A former president backing Trump up on this war doesn’t even make sense. Bush rejected calls from within his Cabinet to go to war with Iran while he was president, and Obama actually negotiated a landmark deal with the country over its nuclear program. Biden avoided offensive military action during his four years in office, and Clinton last year publicly asked Trump to “defuse” tensions between Iran and Israel. Trump must be feeling some kind of insecurity or pressure over his decision to attack Iran if he’s trying to claim, without anyone going on the record, that a former president supports his reckless decision to bomb the country.

Trump-appointed National Economic Council head Kevin Hassett proudly admitted that the Iran war’s negative impact on the average U.S. consumer is “the last” of the administration’s concerns—a shockingly tone-deaf message 18 days into an extremely unpopular war. 

“The fact is that the U.S. economy is fundamentally sound, and that if [the war on Iran] were to be extended, it wouldn’t really disrupt the U.S. economy very much at all,” Hassett said Tuesday morning on CNBC. “It would hurt consumers, and we’d have to think about if that continued, what we would have to do about that. But that’s like really the last of our concerns right now because we’re very confident that this thing is going ahead of schedule.” 

Trump made this same conflation of the average consumer with the larger U.S. economy last week. 

“The United States is the largest Oil Producer in the World, by far, so when oil prices go up, we make a lot of money,” he wrote in a Truth Social post Thursday morning. But that “we” isn’t normal people dreading their visit to the gas station right now. It’s American gas and oil companies that will see these headwinds, while consumers get hit with skyrocketing prices at the pump.

These tactless comments invoke the same criticisms of the Biden administration during the 2024 campaign. No one wants to hear about how great the economy is doing while they can’t buy a house, or eggs, or gas. Hassett’s comments make it seem like the economy is a game to him rather than life or death for most people. If Democrats needed any more midterm attack advertisement fodder, they should look no further.  

Donald Trump is joking about making a new fifty-first state.

The president took to Truth Social Monday night to celebrate—and take credit for—Venezuela’s victory in the semifinal round of the World Baseball Classic.

“Wow! Venezuela defeated Italy tonight, 4-2, in the WBC (Baseball!) Semifinal. They are looking really great. Good things are happening to Venezuela lately! I wonder what this magic is all about? STATEHOOD, #51, ANYONE?” he wrote.

It was a particularly dark joke from the leader who abducted Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro in January. Afterward, Trump claimed that the United States would “run the country now” and would likely keep its hands in Venezuela for years. While the new regime Trump has installed looks a lot like the old one—it’s run by Maduro’s former Vice President Delcy Rodríguez—it’s friendlier to U.S. oil interests. Now Trump’s trying a similar gambit in Iran—but with much more disastrous results.

Trump has previously warned that Cuba could be next for annexation.

Trump continually made gestures last year at annexing both Canada and Greenland, but thankfully hasn’t launched an all-out coup.

The president’s allies once believed that Donald Trump had the ability to end the Iran war whenever he saw fit. That is no longer the case.

The people surrounding the president have interpreted a shift in power in the war, as the possibility of a quick and decisive victory moves out of reach, Politico reported Tuesday. Iran’s chokehold on the global oil supply has put the U.S. in a situation that could result in a boots-on-the-ground solution if the White House wants to amend the economic consequences of the war.

“We clearly just kicked [Iran’s] ass in the field, but, to a large extent, they hold the cards now,” one person close to the White House told Politico. “They decide how long we’re involved—and they decide if we put boots on the ground. And it doesn’t seem to me that there’s a way around that, if we want to save face.”

At issue is whether the U.S. can obtain control over the Strait of Hormuz, the water channel situated between Iran and the United Arab Emirates. The strait is the single most important energy transit point in the world, funneling approximately one-fifth of all crude oil shipments. Iran began laying mines across the passageway last week, effectively sealing the only sea passage from the Persian Gulf and the Gulf of Oman to the rest of the open ocean.

Ensuring the free flow of oil through the strait would likely require seizing control of portions of Iran’s shoreline, a warplan that would almost certainly require the physical presence of U.S. troops in Iran. But doing so could put America in yet another open-ended Middle East conflict—exactly the kind that Trump has railed against for more than a decade.

“The terms have changed,” a second person familiar with the U.S. operation in Iran told Politico. “The off-ramps don’t work anymore because Iran is driving the asymmetric action.”

In 2024, the U.S. imported roughly 500,000 barrels of crude oil per day through the strait, accounting for roughly 7 percent of total U.S. crude imports, according to the U.S. Energy Information Administration.

The diminished access to the strait has rattled American markets. Oil prices have skyrocketed since the U.S. and Israel jointly attacked Iran on February 28, jumping from less than $70 per barrel to approximately $100 per barrel. The national cost of gasoline has also grown by roughly 25 percent from February.

“For the White House, now the only easy day was yesterday,” the second source told Politico. “They need to worry about an unraveling.”

So far, 13 U.S. soldiers have been killed in the conflict, as have more than 20 Iranian officials, including Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei. More than 1,300 Iranian civilians have been killed, including dozens of children at a girls’ school in the country’s south. Some 3.2 million people have been displaced, as the U.S.-Israeli strikes have damaged more than 42,000 civilian sites—such as homes, hospitals, and schools—across Iran, according to Iranian government spokesperson Fatemeh Mohajerani.

The founder of the far-right Oath Keepers said Monday that he is no longer part of the MAGA movement because of President Trump’s war in Iran. 

While guest-hosting for conspiracy theorist Alex Jones’s show, Stewart Rhodes lamented “the obvious role of the influence of Zionism in our government, of the Israeli people, intelligence services, Mossad, and others in our government. 

“So that’s why I no longer call myself MAGA. I am an America-only patriot. I’m a Christian nationalist, an American Christian nationalist. I have to open my eyes to the reality in front of my face, and it’s caused a division inside of MAGA, and it’s caused a division on the political right. But so be it,” Rhodes said. 

Rhodes’s 18-month sentence for seditious conspiracy on January 6, 2021, was commuted, not pardoned by Trump last year, and he plans to visit Mar-a-Lago on Friday at the invitation of the Republican Party chair of Palm Beach in the hopes of getting a pardon from the president.  

“I can’t let that shut me up about calling out what I see happening in our country,” Rhodes said. “And so if I lose my pardon because of that, then so be it. That’s where my mind’s at. And I think I owe that to everybody who ever swore the oath like I did.”

It’s quite a revelation to see a January 6 insurrectionist break ranks with Trump. It goes to show that many of the president’s closest supporters believed his campaign pledge of no new wars, and aren’t willing to give Trump the benefit of the doubt over Iran. Before Trump made the decision to bomb Iran, some on the right begged him to hold off, including commentators on Fox News. Now Rhodes and others on the right are abandoning MAGA. 

A trio of Oklahoma teenagers are suing Elon Musk’s xAI, accusing the company’s artificial intelligence program of stealing images of them off the internet to create child pornography.

The lawsuit, filed Monday, accuses a single perpetrator of compiling images and videos of at least 18 girls, and digitally altering their appearances with tools such as Grok to create nude images of underage girls.

The suit cites a police arrest that occurred in December, documenting an instance in which the individual used Grok to strip a blue bikini from a photo that a girl posted to her Instagram account in order to “depict her without any clothes.”

It is the first instance in which underage victims of such an act have taken legal action against the offender, reported The Washington Post.

The mother of one of the teens told the Post that the violating incident had “crushed” her daughter, who previously was an outgoing student-athlete.

“It definitely put her into a little bit of a shell, which we had never seen before,” the mother told the newspaper.

The proliferation of AI-generated media has conjured new legal quandaries in recent months, particularly as some of the major chatbot programs—especially Grok—have made their image-generating capabilities more accessible to the general public.

A December review by the content analysis firm Copyleaks found that Grok had—at the time—been generating “roughly one nonconsensual sexualized image per minute,” each of which was directly posted to X for public consumption. Some of the images circulated by the chatbot included sexually explicit deepfakes of children, reported The 19th.

Musk, nonetheless, vehemently defended his AI creation, writing on X in January that he was “not aware of any naked underage images generated by Grok” at the time. “Literally zero,” he said.

There is little recourse available for those whose images and likeness have been stolen to fuel the nonconsensual AI recreations. The Senate passed the bipartisan DEFIANCE Act in January, in an attempt to create a pathway for civil action against those who produce, distribute, receive, or possess digitally generated porn that uses the face or likeness of an individual without their permission. That bill is still waiting for the House to take action on it, though it is unclear exactly when that could happen.

Tech experts argue that the production of deepfakes is doubling every six months, in part due to the widespread availability of AI. While much reporting has focused on the influence of deepfakes and artificially generated imagery on electoral integrity, coverage has practically glossed over the worst victims of the practice. The vast majority of deepfakes—some 90 percent—are nonconsensually generated porn of women, reported Context News in 2024.

“These young people—these children—are facing a lifetime of having these … sexualized images of what appears to be a child’s body out there on the internet,” the teens’ lawyer, Vanessa Baehr-Jones, told the Post. “It wouldn’t have been possible but for this tool that xAI released knowing full well that this material could be generated.”

The Trump administration is rolling out a new task force, led by Vice President JD Vance, to go after claims of benefits fraud in majority-blue states.

Vance accompanied President Donald Trump in the Oval Office on Monday as the latter signed an executive order to create an official benefits fraud task force. Before doing so, Trump admitted that the task force would focus mostly on Democratic states.

“It seems that it’s usually in blue states. If it’s in red states, we’re going there too, but it seems that it’s heavily, heavily Democrat,” Trump said, before taking time to disparage Somali American Minnesota Representative Ilhan Omar.

“What we’ve found since President Trump came into office is that the Democrats have set up the system to funnel hundreds of billions and ultimately trillions of dollars to migrants that are in our country, oftentimes from places like Somalia,” White House adviser Stephen Miller added.

Trump had previously assigned Vance to investigate fraud in Minnesota. A document obtained by the New York Post says the order is necessary due to “similar vulnerabilities [in] California, Illinois, New York, Maine, and Colorado, where insufficient safeguards and weak oversight increase the risk of large-scale fraud.”

While talking on Monday about the war he started with Iran, President Trump claimed that he predicted 9/11 “a long time ago.”

“I knew about the Strait [of Hormuz], that it would be a weapon, which I predicted a long time ago, I predicted all of this stuff. You guys were very generous in that I predicted all of it,” he said, during a press conference at the Trump-Kennedy Center. “I predicted Osama bin Laden would knock out the World Trade Center, I made that prediction a year before he did it. I said ‘You better get him, he’s a bad guy.’ … One year before exactly, I wrote it in a book. You can even check. About a year before the World Trade Center came down. President Clinton actually had a shot at him, and he didn’t take it.”

Trump has made this claim countless times over the years. It is false. In his 2000 book, Trump wrote, “One day we’re told that a shadowy figure with no fixed address named Osama bin-Laden is public enemy number one, and U.S. jetfighters lay waste to his camp in Afghanistan. He escapes back under some rock, and a few news cycles later it’s on to a new enemy and new crisis.”

Recognizing bin Laden as a “shadowy figure” is nowhere close to predicting that he would order hijackers to fly planes into the Twin Towers.