January 6 Rioters Pardoned by Trump Sue Over “Emotional Distress”

Rioters who took part in the January 6, 2021, Capitol insurrection, and were then pardoned by President Trump, are now suing Capitol and D.C. Police for excessive force.

Several of the rioters filed a lawsuit in the U.S. District Court Middle District of Florida Friday alleging that U.S. Capitol Police and the Metropolitan Police of the District of Columbia fired chemicals and pepper spray into the “peaceful crowd” that day.

The lawsuit also claims that the demonstrators were hit by billy clubs and strikes to the head, which caused injuries, including “chemical burns, concussive trauma, emotional distress, and other damages.” The plaintiffs say they were “overwhelmingly peaceful” until police used force against them, and that they weren’t given warnings.

The lawsuit’s allegations are rich, considering that 140 police officers were injured as a result of the rioters, who breached the Capitol building and caused extensive damage. At least seven people died in connection with the insurrection, including Ashli Babbit, who was shot by police, and Officer Brian Sicknick, who was attacked by the mob and died the next day. Four police officers committed suicide in the days and weeks following the attack.

Just days into his presidency, Trump pardoned over 1,500 rioters convicted for their role in the insurrection, including members of the radical Oath Keepers and Proud Boys who were charged with seditious conspiracy. But being let off for their crimes on that day isn’t enough for these people, who now want a payday from the police. If anyone should be paying, it should be the man who egged the rioters on—but Trump has gotten off scot-free.

Well, that was quick. Secretary of State Marco Rubio directly contradicted Donald Trump’s claims about negotiations with Iran.

Less than an hour after Trump declared Monday that the U.S. was in talks with a “A NEW, AND MORE REASONABLE, REGIME,” Rubio presented an entirely different picture of Iran’s leadership.

“We have to see if these people end up being the ones in charge, seeing if they are the ones that have the power to deliver,” Rubio said on ABC’s Good Morning America. “We’re gonna test it. We are hopeful that that’s the case. There are clearly people there talking to us in ways that previous people in charge in Iran have not spoken to us in the past.

“We always prefer to settle things through negotiation and diplomacy. But we also have to be prepared for the fact that that effort might fail. That we are dealing with a 47-year-old regime that still has a lot of people involved in it who aren’t necessarily big fans of diplomacy or peace,” Rubio said.

So which is it, a 47-year-old regime or a brand-new one?

Iran’s regime hasn’t actually changed all that much—and it certainly hasn’t been replaced. After Ayatollah Ali Khamenei was killed earlier this month, his son Mojtaba Khamenei, a hard-line cleric, was tapped to replace him. At the same time, the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps has only further consolidated power.

Still, Trump claimed last week that regime change had already been achieved in Iran, and the White House doubled down in a similarly nonsensical fashion.

Former national security adviser John Bolton also disagreed with Trump’s assessment last week.

“The faces may change, but the ideology remains the same,” Bolton told CNN’s Anderson Cooper. “The regime will change when the ayatollahs and the Revolutionary Guard are gone, and we’re not at that point yet, quite obviously. But it’s another way for him to say that we have won the objective and therefore are victorious and can leave.”

That’s one possible explanation for Trump’s outrageous regime change claims. Another might be that the president just wanted to make a splash before the markets opened. Either that, or Trump truly has no idea who he’s dealing with.

A woman who alleged that Donald Trump sexually assaulted her when she was just 13 years old has had new details about her story verified, following work from the South Carolina–based newspaper The Post and Courier and Substack journalist Ellie Leonard.

The anonymous victim was interviewed four times by the FBI in 2019. She claimed to have been sex-trafficked by the notorious predator Jeffrey Epstein and sexually abused by a variety of Epstein’s associates during the mid-’80s.

These associates allegedly included the president. The woman claimed Trump assaulted her in Atlantic City, New Jersey, in 1984, back when Trump was a New York real estate mogul. She said she bit Trump’s penis after he unzipped his pants and forced himself on her, leading Trump to smack her in the face. This allegation was initially withheld from the Department of Justice’s Epstein files release before being quietly released on March 3 after a storm of controversy.

The woman also alleged abuse by a man named “Jim Atkins” during the same time period. Leonard identified “Jim Atkins” as Jimmy L. Atkins of Fort Mitchell, Kentucky, earlier this month. He passed away in 2003 at the age of 69.

On Sunday, The Post and Courier uncovered records that confirmed details of the woman’s testimony on Atkins. This included Atkins’s relationship with an Ohio college, his age, his hair color, his general appearance, and details about his employment in Hilton Head, South Carolina.

Of course, the validated details about Atkins do not implicate Trump in any way. The White House, and the president himself, have furiously denied the woman’s claims since her testimony was publicly released, falsely claiming that the president has been “exonerated.” But every other detail of the woman’s testimony that turns out to be true gives more credibility to the rest of her story.

The Trump administration’s mishandling and smothering of the Epstein files do not exactly give one confidence in their truthfulness. As The Post and Courier reported, 30 pages of files relating to the accuser remain missing from the public view.

Recently appointed College Republicans of America political director Kai Schwemmer—an open supporter of white supremacist commentator Nick Fuentes—can envision a world in which slavery is legal.

The Guardian discovered a paywalled video from July 2025 of Schwemmer debating on the Modern Day Debate streaming channel with another right-winger by the name of Shell Shock. They were asked whether they prefer a world where “abortion is banned and slavery is legal” or one where “slavery is banned and abortion is legal.” Shell Shock chose the former. Schwemmer agreed.

In that same call, he said that a 15-year-old who was sexually assaulted by her uncle should still deliver the baby and that he was against gay marriage, and he questioned women’s right to vote. “I believe they currently have the right to vote. But I’m in favor of probably like a family voting thing,” Schwemmer said, referring to a right-wing proposal to have male heads of households vote for the whole family.

This is just the tip of the iceberg for the current Brigham Young University student who will now potentially become the most important youth outreach operative in the country.

“Appointing Kai Schwemmer, a longtime ally of white supremacist Nick Fuentes, as political director signals the College Republicans of America is normalizing antisemitism and white supremacy, full stop,” often embattled American Defamation League CEO Jonathan Greenblatt said last week. “Schwemmer has appeared at Fuentes’ conferences, streams on his platform and has spread conspiracy theories about ‘Zionists’ in America.”

Republicans are eyeing massive cuts to health care spending in order to scrounge up $200 billion for Donald Trump’s reckless war in Iran.

Top Republicans are looking for ways to offset the massive price tag the Pentagon has requested in order to pass the additional funding for U.S. military operations in Iran through a budget reconciliation bill, Axios reported Monday.

House Budget Committee Chairman Jodey Arrington is looking to revive cost-sharing reductions, programs that can assist low-income Americans in paying high deductibles, that were passed as part of Trump’s behemoth budget bill in July.

The Congressional Budget Office previously estimated that funding these reductions would save the federal government $30 billion but would increase out-of-pocket premium costs and drive up the number of people without health insurance by 300,000 through 2034. Arrington is selling the move as “fraud prevention.”

The discussions over cuts are in the early stages, but are likely to face opposition from moderate Republicans, who won’t support health care spending cuts in an election year.

Arrington suggested that the budget reconciliation bill would target fraud across a range of means-tested programs that assist low-income families, Roll Call reported. He pointed to the earned income tax credit, a refundable tax credit that boosts the income of low-income, working parents who claim a child. Arrington claimed that one of the most popular tax credits “loses 30 cents on the dollar.”

“You’ve got low-income housing tax credits, for example, another sort of welfare program within the tax code that doesn’t prohibit illegals from siphoning money off that and jeopardizing the sustainability of that program,” he said.

The reconciliation effort should target “widespread fraud, there is a boatload of waste and fraud,” Arrington said in the House.

Republicans seemed content to make struggling Americans suffer in the service of Trump’s increasingly expensive vanity war that has no clear objectives.

The Trump administration used untested weapons in a strike in Iran that hit a school and sports hall on February 28.

The New York Times reports that the United States launched a newly designed ballistic missile at a school in the city of Lamerd on the first day of the war—the same day that the U.S. bombed a girls’ school in Minab, hundreds of miles away. The strike and others nearby in Lamerd killed 21 people, according to the Times, which cited Iranian media.

Times analysts concluded the strike involved a Precision Strike Missile, or PrSM, a short-range ballistic missile that detonates just above its target and blasts tungsten pellets outward. A local video from Lamerd showed one strike about 900 feet away from the sports hall with the weapon exploding in a midair fireball.

Another video captured from a security camera across from the school and sports hall shows the structure being hit, with an explosion directly above it. Photos from both sites after the strikes show dozens of tiny holes apparently made by the tungsten pellets. At the school and sports hall, footage shows scorch marks, a partially collapsed roof, blown-out windows, fire damage, and blood spatters.

The PrSM only completed prototype testing last year, an Army press release from July states, but had been untested in combat until the strikes. U.S. Central Command posted a video on March 1 capturing a PrSM strike from the first day of the war. The leader of CENTCOM, Admiral Brad Cooper, said days later that the PrSM was used in combat for the first time during the war, and another post from CENTCOM on March 4 touted the system.

It’s not clear whether the strike was deliberate. The school and sports hall are close to an IRGC military compound but have been walled off from the compound for at least 15 years. The sports hall is identified as a facility for civilians on public map platforms including Apple Maps, Wikimapia, and Google Maps. An Instagram account linked to the school shows children regularly using the site, and Iran’s representative to the United Nations Amir Saeid Iravani said the sports hall was being used by a women’s volleyball team at the time of the strike.

The strike occurred on the same day as a U.S. attack on a girls’ school in Minab, which killed 175 people, an apparent war crime. Using an untested weapon on an elementary school and sports hall, without clear knowledge of its effects, would seem to fit the bill of a war crime, as well. Does that matter to the Trump administration?

Donald Trump has finally come clean about his objective for Iran—and threatened to launch a series of war crimes if he doesn’t get what he wants.

“The United States of America is in serious discussions with A NEW, AND MORE REASONABLE, REGIME to end our Military Operations in Iran,” he wrote in a post on Truth Social Monday.

Perhaps the Trump administration has finally given up pushing its original war rationale, based on unsubstantiated claims that Iran had obtained the materials to make nuclear weapons. There’s just one problem: Last week, Trump claimed that regime change had already been achieved in Iran, and the White House doubled down in a similarly nonsensical fashion.

It wasn’t true. After Ayatollah Ali Khamenei was killed earlier this month, his son Mojtaba Khamenei, a hard-line cleric, was tapped to replace him. At the same time, the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps has only further consolidated power.

Trump’s supposedly “serious discussion” for a new regime may be marred by his administration’s childish tactics: Just last week, they tried to start a rumor that the new ayatollah was a closeted gay man.

Trump claimed Monday that “great progress” had already been made, but if a deal did not materialize soon to open the Strait of Hormuz, the U.S. military would attack “all of their Electric Generating Plants, Oil Wells and Kharg Island (and possibly all desalinization plants!), which we have purposefully not yet ‘touched.’”

“This will be in retribution for our many soldiers, and others, that Iran has butchered and killed over the old Regime’s 47 year ‘Reign of Terror,’” the president added. Of course, extensive destruction not justified by a military necessity is a war crime. It wouldn’t be the first the U.S. military has committed in Trump’s reckless war.

Last week, the Pentagon ordered some 2,000 troops from the 82nd Airborne division to be dispatched to aid the war effort in the Middle East. The move has driven speculation that the U.S. military intends to seize Kharg Island, which handles 90 percent of Iran’s oil exports.

President Donald Trump and Indian Prime Minister Nahendra Modi had a phone call on Tuesday to discuss the war in Iran. For no apparent reason, they were joined by billionaire Elon Musk.

Musk—who is a private citizen with no present involvement in government—sat in on the discussion between the two heads of states, though it is unclear if he spoke, The New York Times reported Friday. The call was primarily to discuss Trump’s increasingly out-of-reach goal to reopen the Strait of Hormuz.

There is literally no rational justification for including the world’s richest man on a call between two national leaders during a global crisis.

Neither the White House nor the Indian government disclosed Musk’s presence on the call.

Several of the billionaire’s companies have been funded by state-owned investment entities in the Middle East, and global financial instability stemming from the war could possibly put those investments at risk. In February, Saudi Arabia’s intelligence company invested $3 million in Musk’s xAI. The company also received funding from Qatar and Abu Dhabi. Musk’s StarLink has signed deals with two of India’s biggest telecom companies, and he’s long sought to get a foothold for Tesla in the Indian markets.

Musk’s presence on Tuesday’s call likely indicates that he and the president are finally getting over their dramatic fallout this summer, sparked by a fight over Trump’s signature “big, beautiful bill.” During his stint as head of the Department of Government Efficiency before that, Musk fired thousands of federal workers, hijacked and dismantled major federal agencies, and waged war on the federal safety net.

It looks like the billionaire may be making his way back into government at the worst possible time.

A growing contingent of House Republicans is voicing opposition to Donald Trump potentially deploying ground troops to the Persian Gulf, Politico reported Friday.

As the deadline for Iran to respond to Trump’s 15-point peace plan approached Friday, the president was reportedly leaning toward ordering a ground operation in Iran. Some House Republicans urged the president to hold back.

Arizona Representative Eli Crane, a former Navy Seal who served five deployments, told Politico that members of Congress and supporters had grown “very concerned.”

“I’m really, really hopeful this doesn’t turn into a boots-on-the-ground situation,” he said. “My biggest concern this whole time is that this would turn into another long Middle Eastern war.

“Though I don’t want to try and take away any of the president’s ability to carry out this operation, I know a lot of our supporters and a lot of members of Congress are very concerned” about the possibility, he added.

“We lose 60 to 70 seats,” said another House Republican, who was granted anonymity by Politico, referring to November’s midterm elections.

Wisconsin Representative Derrick Van Orden, also a retired Navy Seal, said that he’d been “very clear” that he doesn’t support a ground operation in Iran, and believes Trump has “learned” from past presidents who’d been trapped in forever wars.

South Carolina Representative Nancy Mace said that she could break with Republicans to join the Democrat-led war powers measure next month.

“If we’re in this phase where there are troops on the ground, then we’re in a different phase of the conflict, which requires Congress’s input,” Mace said.

Earlier this week, the Pentagon ordered some 2,000 troops from the 82nd Airborne division, comprised of elite, rapid-response paratroopers, to be dispatched to aid the war effort in the Middle East, driving speculation that the U.S. military intends to seize Kharg Island, which handles 90 percent of Iran’s oil exports.

Independent journalist Ken Klippenstein pushed back on the panic that a ground invasion of Iran is imminent in a report Thursday, arguing that the 82nd Airborne wasn’t an ideal group to lead a ground invasion and that U.S. military forces weren’t aligned for a major operation.

Todd Lyons, the acting chief of Immigration and Customs Enforcement, has been hospitalized twice in the last seven months due to stress, Politico reported Friday.

Politico’s reporting is based on two current and two former sources within the Trump administration. The sources described one incident in which “Lyons became so distressed when ICE agents couldn’t locate a migrant on their target list after a ride along with top administration officials that one of his bodyguards took a portable defibrillator from a nearby government office to Lyons in case he needed medical intervention.” Lyons’s face became scarlet, and he began aggressively sweating, the sources said.

It’s hard to feel bad for Lyons when he continues to lead a department that terrorizes minorities on a daily basis, but the report does make it seem as if the White House heaps inordinate pressure onto him. Multiple sources told Politico that Stephen Miller frequently yells at Lyons during a daily 10 a.m. phone call for failing to meet the administration’s insanely high immigration quotas.

Other sources provided to Politico by the White House “disputed that Miller yells at Lyons directly, with one saying the deputy chief of staff is ‘passionate’ and another saying he asks ‘very pointed questions in a very assertive tone.’”

Lyons also responded to Politico in a statement declaring that his stress does not have to do with other Trump officials, while not addressing the two alleged hospitalizations. A NewsNation reporter later said Lyons had told her he had been hospitalized for “military deployment VA issues.”

White House deputy press secretary Abigail Jackson flipped out after the story was published. “Shame on Politico for publishing such inaccurate trash,” she wrote on X. “Todd Lyons is an American patriot who has worked tirelessly to undo Biden’s disastrous immigration policies.… Despite multiple on record denials and sources refuting their pathetic ‘reporting’ and [sic] *still* ran with this absurd article.”

But Jackson didn’t say which, if any, on-record denials failed to make it into the finished article. It’s possible Lyons is working too tirelessly, Abigail.