New Attorney General Admits Trump Is Calling the Shots at DOJ

Acting U.S. Attorney General Todd Blanche proudly admitted his deference to Donald Trump regarding using the Department of Justice to attack the president’s political enemies.

“President Trump has made no secret of the fact that he wants to see his perceived political enemies prosecuted,” a reporter asked Blanche at a Tuesday press conference. “So now that you’re in this position, how are you going to balance that relentless pressure with this administration’s promise to end the weaponization of this department?”

“First of all we have thousands of ongoing investigations and prosecutions going on in this country right now. And it is true that some of them involve men, women, and entities that the president in the past has had issues with, and believes should be investigated,” Blanche replied, offering zero pushback to the notion that Trump is controlling the DOJ. “That is his right, and indeed it is his duty to do that, meaning to lead this country.”

Under former Attorney General Pam Bondi, the Trump administration has used the DOJ to go after former FBI Director James Comey, Democratic Senators Adam Schiff and Mark Kelly, former national security adviser John Bolton, New York Attorney General Letitia James, every Democratic leader in Minnesota, and more. Each one of those people criticized Trump in some way, and nearly all of the DOJ’s attacks against them failed. And while DOJ criminal investigations are supposed to be free of White House influence, it seems clear that Blanche, who previously served as Trump’s lawyer in the Stormy Daniels hush-money case, will continue to dutifully carry out Trump’s revenge.

“At his first press conference, Trump’s Acting AG says it out loud: The DOJ is there to target Trump’s political enemies,” the press office of California Governor Gavin Newsom wrote. “A disgusting abuse of power!”

It looks as if Donald Trump’s new attorney general is ready to pick up right where Pam Bondi left off: declining to investigate fraud committed by Republicans.

Todd Blanche, Trump’s pick for acting head of the Department of Justice, was asked by a reporter Tuesday whether he would investigate the Strategy Group, a firm associated with Kristi Noem that received over $200 million in taxpayer money for an anti-immigrant ad campaign featuring the former homeland security secretary.

First reported by ProPublica, the Strategy Group is run by the husband of Tricia McLaughlin, a former spokesperson for DHS and underling of Noem. Instead of listing the name of the firm on the contracts, officials within the Trump administration covered their tracks by employing a subcontractor called Safe America Media, which had been founded eight days before it was granted the nine-figure contract.

The reporter noted that there have “been a lot of questions” around the firm.

“When you say a lot of questions, you mean you all have decided to write about it hoping that it generates something,” Blanche replied. He went on to call the proposed investigation a “speculative idea.”

It seems Noem, like other Trump-affiliated fraudsters, will escape scot-free.

Deflecting away from serious issues to attack the media is hardly a new strategy among Trump and his disciples, but Blanche doing it is particularly ironic given his boss’s insistence that his administration will deliver the biggest crackdown on fraud in American history.

In reality, Trump has no problem with fraud as long as it’s committed by the right people. Whether it’s Noem, FBI Director Kash Patel using government-owned jets as personal Ubers, Donald Trump Jr.’s work from within the suspiciously unregulated Kalshi and Polymarket, Eric Trump’s crypto company secretly receiving $500 million from the UAE in exchange for political capital, or Trump himself ripping off the American people for literally billions of dollars, the amount of fraud in America right now is indeed enormous. But its main perpetrators sit in the White House.

The United Nations is warning Donald Trump against further escalation in the Iran war after he threatened Tuesday that “a whole civilization will die tonight, never to be brought back again.”

“Even wars have rules,” the U.N.’s official X account posted along with a link to its human rights office. “The Geneva Conventions protect civilians in conflict and help ensure assistance reaches those in need, without discrimination.”

U.N. High Commissioner for Human Rights Volker Türk issued a statement against “incendiary rhetoric” and warned that anyone who commits war crimes should face legal justice, strongly hinting at Trump without mentioning him by name.

“I deplore the tirade of incendiary rhetoric being used in the Middle East war over the last couple of weeks by all parties, including the latest threats to annihilate a whole civilisation and to target civilian infrastructure. This is sickening. Carrying through on such threats amounts to the most serious international crimes,” Türk said. “Under international law, deliberately attacking civilians and civilian infrastructure is a war crime. Anyone responsible for international crimes must be held to account by a competent court.”

Will any of this get through to Trump or his inner circle? Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth has already made clear his disdain for any restraint and his love for violence, calling for “no quarter” and “no mercy for our enemies.” Trump doesn’t have a problem with this, as evidenced by his outrageous threat and the fact that he seems to get his war news from a staff-prepared daily highlight reel of bombings in Iran.

If Trump sticks to his 8 p.m. E.T. deadline for Iran to reopen the Strait of Hormuz, and decides to follow through on his threat to bomb the country’s power plants, bridges, and other civilian infrastructure, the results could be catastrophic. That would no doubt be a war crime resulting in a humanitarian nightmare, in the eyes of not just the U.N. but many in the U.S. and around the world. The question is whether the White House or Republicans in Washington actually care.

While President Trump threatens complete annihilation in Iran, congressional Republicans are in complete disarray at home.

On Tuesday, the House Freedom Caucus announced that they actually opposed the Trump-approved two-pronged plan to end the partial shutdown of the Department of Homeland Security. The plan, which House Speaker Mike Johnson and House Majority Leader John Thune announced together last week, splits funding for DHS agencies like TSA from the more controversial funding for ICE and Border Patrol. They would later fund immigration enforcement through a reconciliation bill.

This was a notable concession to Democrats, and apparently has infuriated the most conservative Republicans in the House.

“We cannot leave ICE and CBP hanging with nothing but hopes and prayers that reconciliation 2.0 comes together,” the House Freedom Caucus wrote on X Tuesday. “That’s why we must use reconciliation to fully fund ALL of the Department of Homeland Security! We can tightly control this process with strict instructions to the various committees involved, so no one can sneak in unrelated garbage and distract us from our mission.

“We must provide robust funding for ICE and CBP, and it should be done with all of DHS in reconciliation 2.0. We can fund DHS for the rest of the President’s term to ensure Democrats can never again take our nation’s security hostage,” the statement continued. “We will never hand Democrats their ultimate prize: A defunded ICE, handcuffed CBP, and criminal aliens terrorizing our communities.”

“I will not fold on ICE or CPB,” said Freedom Caucus member Andy Ogles on X.

This internal revolt comes as Trump has demanded that DHS be funded by June 1.

The White House’s plans to completely annihilate Iran are so haphazard that even the vice president can’t keep up with them.

JD Vance was apparently caught off guard Tuesday when a journalist informed him that Donald Trump had threatened to obliterate the entire Iranian civilization by 8 p.m. Vance was onstage in Budapest at the time, feet away from Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán.

The exchange began when a Washington Post reporter asked Vance if there had been any recent developments in the war that could inform a peace deal, reported The Daily Beast.

“I don’t—unless I have a text message from Steve Witkoff,” Vance said, referring to Trump’s Middle East envoy.

But as Vance pulled out his phone to check his notifications, it became clear that he did have an urgent notification from Witkoff.

“I do have a message from Steve Witkoff,” Vance acknowledged awkwardly.

“Wouldn’t you like to know the subject of this message?” Vance continued. “But no, uh, I need to read it first before I talk about it. But here’s, here’s … uh, what time is it in the United States right now?”

The uncomfortable lapse became even more unsettling when a Reuters reporter urged Vance to properly read up before speaking with the press about his apparently misinformed analysis of the war.

“I do think you have to read that text because we have reporting that the United States is striking some targets in Kharg Island,” she said. “You did say that the military objectives of this war have been achieved. So could you help us understand why the president is still threatening to attack every bridge and every power plant in Iran?”

Kharg Island is an export hub off the Iranian coast that handles roughly 90 percent of the country’s crude oil exports. The U.S. struck Kharg Island in March, when U.S. Central Command claimed that 90 targets on the island had been hit, including “naval mine storage facilities, missile storage bunkers, and multiple other military sites.”

U.S. officials said that they had struck the island again Tuesday morning, though they claimed that the U.S. did not hit any of Kharg’s oil facilities.

The attack occurred moments after Trump pledged that a “whole civilization will die tonight, never to be brought back again” should Iran fail to reopen the Strait of Hormuz, another vital tradeway for the region. Iran has so far rejected potential peace deals. Iranian media responded just after 9 a.m. E.T., announcing through diplomatic channels that talks with the U.S. had stalled in the wake of Trump’s explicit threats. Shortly after, international paper the Tehran Times reported that “diplomatic and indirect channels” were not closed, after all.

Vance was supposed to be on “standby” and prepared to jump into peace talks with Iran should the moment arise, Politico reported Monday.

Nonetheless, Vance backed Trump’s explosive response to the rapidly devolving conflict Tuesday morning, telling the Budapest assembly that he hopes Iran makes the “right response” while emphasizing America’s need for free-flowing oil.

“The president of the United States is a man who recognizes leverage,” Vance said. “That if the Iranians want to exact a certain amount of pain, the United States has the ability to exact much, much greater pain.”

As President Donald Trump terrifies everyone around the world into thinking human civilization may end at 8 p.m. Tuesday, a growing number of political figures are calling for his removal, including a handful of slightly less spineless Republicans.

Drop Site News’s Julian Andreone compiled a list of the members of Congress calling to invoke the Twenty-Fifth Amendment, which would deem Trump unfit for office and transfer power to Vice President JD Vance. If Trump does not agree to cede power himself, Vance and a majority of Trump’s Cabinet would have to independently decide to wrest control from him. Considering how subservient Trump’s Cabinet is, this will likely never happen. Regardless, the Democrats calling to invoke the Amendment are:

• Arizona Representative Yassamin Ansari
• Colorado Representative Diana DeGette
• California Representative Ro Khanna
• California Representative Sydney Kamlager-Dove
• Delaware Representative Sarah McBride
• Florida Representative Maxwell Frost
• Illinois Representative Delia Ramirez
• Maryland Representative Johnny Olszewski
• Massachusetts Representative Ayanna Pressley
• Massachusetts Representative Seth Moulton
• Massachusetts Senator Ed Markey
• Minnesota Representative Ilhan Omar
• Michigan Representative Rashida Tlaib
• Michigan Representative Shri Thanedar
• New Mexico Representative Melanie Stansbury
• Pennsylvania Representative Summer Lee
• Texas Representative Julie Johnson
• Wisconsin Representative Mark Pocan

The New Republic found a few more Democratic congress members not on Andreone’s list calling to invoke the Twenty-Fifth Amendment, who are:

• California Representative Doris Matsui
  
• Connecticut Senator Chris Murphy
• New York Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez
• Washington Senator Patty Murray

The only congressionally affiliated Republican who has explicitly called for Trump’s ouster is Georgia Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene, who resigned from her duties in January. Prominent right-wing pundits Tucker Carlson, Alex Jones, and Candace Owens have also suggested Trump is not fit for office.

This story has been updated.

After Donald Trump escalated his threats against Iran Tuesday by warning that “a whole civilization will die tonight, never to be brought back again,” Republicans in Congress still came to his defense. 

Despite the fact that many of Trump’s former allies, as well as Democrats, think that he could be alluding to nuclear war or genocide, Republicans like Representative Jodey Arrington are saying, “Thank God we have a commander in chief that is not full of empty rhetoric, because we’ve delayed this inevitability for 50 years.”

“We’d have another North Korea,” the Texas representative told Fox Business only minutes after Trump made his genocidal threat, “save and except for President Trump, who is a man with a bias for action, and a man who presented with the facts that we have imminent threats, today and for our children’s future, is going to act even if it’s against his personal political interests. Thank God for President Trump and for the courage and political will to do what he’s doing.” 

Representative Mike Lawler tried to claim on CNN that Trump wasn’t “really talking about ending a civilization.” 

“He is talking about the energy and civilian infrastructure, that’s what he’s talking about,” Lawler said to CNN’s John Berman, who emphasized that Trump’s message stated “never to be brought back again.”  

“He just means the bridges and the infrastructure?” Berman asked. 

Lawler paused and blinked for a few seconds, before trying to claim that “we’re talking about taking decisive action against Iran’s energy and civilian infrastructure. That is what the president is talking about. He’s not talking about obliterating innocent people.” 

Meanwhile, Senate Majority Leader John Thune and Speaker of the House Mike Johnson have not commented, as of this writing, on Trump’s threat of apocalyptic violence, either to reporters or on their social media accounts. As Trump’s arbitrary 8 p.m. E.T. deadline approaches and a U.N. Security Council resolution to reopen the Strait of Hormuz was vetoed, is there any chance of a sensible solution? 

At least one Republican senator is finally speaking out against President Trump’s genocidal threats against Iran. 

“I am hoping and praying that President Trump … [that] this really is bluster. I do not want to see us start blowing up civilian infrastructure. I do not want to see that,” conservative Wisconsin Senator Ron Johnson said on an episode of the John Solomon Reports podcast released Monday. “We are not at war with the Iranian people. We are trying to liberate them.” 

While this statement is stronger than that of most congressional Republicans, Johnson’s dreams of liberation have been all but deferred. On Tuesday, Trump warned that “a whole civilization will die tonight, never to be brought back again. I don’t want that to happen, but it probably will.” 

While former MAGA acolytes like Marjorie Taylor Greene and Alex Jones have criticized  Trump’s threats—even calling for his removal—Johnson is one of the few Republicans in Congress to voice a similar opinion. Other than him, Rand Paul has been the only Republican senator to try to rein in Trump’s war.

In fact, many Republicans spent their Tuesday morning doing incredibly unconvincing damage control.

“The new threat from the president is that a whole civilization will die tonight, never to be brought back again. You say the president doesn’t want to do it. Does being reluctant to end a civilization make it OK?” CNN’s John Berman asked GOP representative and staunch Israel supporter Mike Lawler on Tuesday.

“I don’t think we’re talking about ending a civilization, the issue—”

“Do you say you don’t believe the president’s threat?” the host said, interrupting Lawler. 

“It is their energy infrastructure and their civilian infrastructure, including roads and bridges. That will cripple the Iranian regime and certainly their economy,” Lawler said, deflecting. “It is not something we want to do.… We are not at war with Iranian people, we want them to be free from this oppression and tyranny that they have lived under for 47 years. But if the president has to take necessary action to strike their energy and infrastructure, that is going to cripple the regime. 

“You don’t take him at his word that he will end a whole civilization?” 

“He is talking about the energy and civilian infrastructure,” Lawler replied.

“He said ‘never to be brought back again.’ He just means the bridges and the infrastructure?” 

“Again John, we’re talking about taking decision action against Iran’s energy and civilian infrastructure. That is what the president is talking about. He’s not talking about obliterating innocent people.” 

This is sad and pathetic. We’re watching politicians trying to rationalize the president’s genocidal intent by arguing full-throatedly that he doesn’t actually mean it when he says, “A whole civilization will die tonight.” Trump has already bombed multiple civilian targets beyond bridges, including a school full of girls on the first day of the war. Why would we put anything past him at this point?

Once a staunch supporter of President Donald Trump, conservative political commentator Tucker Carlson has fully turned against him over the war in Iran, going as far as to liken Trump to the Antichrist on his eponymous podcast.

“Could there be a spiritual component to this?” Carlson said on The Tucker Carlson Show on Monday. “Is it just a conventional escalation ladder in a badly thought out war … [or] could it be something bigger? Is it possible what you’re watching is a very stealthy yet incredibly effective attack on what, from a Christian perspective, is the true faith: belief in Jesus?”

Carlson went on: “Is it possible that the president sees this in bigger terms? Sees this as the fulfillment of something? An elevation of some higher office beyond president of the United States?”

Trump responded in a typically petulant manner to Carlson’s comments on Tuesday morning. “Tucker’s a low IQ person that has absolutely no idea what’s going on,” he told the New York Post’s Caitlin Doornbos. “He calls me all the time; I don’t respond to his calls. I don’t deal with him. I like dealing with smart people, not fools.”

Carlson, a former Fox News host, aggressively campaigned for Trump during both of his winning presidential bids; Trump even told reporters in 2024 that he was considering picking Carlson as his vice president. But since the president’s reelection, Carlson has soured on Trump on issues such as the Epstein files and, in particular, the war on Iran.

On Easter Sunday, Carlson described Trump’s expletive-laden threat towards Iran’s civilian infrastructure as “vile on every level.” In his Monday podcast, he also criticized the president’s frequent disparaging of Islam: “No president should mock Islam. That’s not your job. This is not a theocracy. We don’t go to war with other theocracies to find out which one is more effective. We are not a theocracy, and God willing, we never will be.”

With millions listening to his show each week, Carlson is undoubtedly the most popular figure within a Christian isolationist sect popular with young, online Republicans, and that is increasingly unhappy with the president.

In fostering this crowd, Carlson has cozied up to white nationalists and Holocaust deniers such as Nick Fuentes and James Fishback. This has led to bipartisan criticism (though not, notably, from Trump himself, who apparently prefers to bash Carlson only when he feels personally slighted). Some expect Carlson to launch a presidential campaign himself in 2028, and he hasn’t yet ruled it out.

The willing publicization of some of the more sensitive information pertaining to Donald Trump’s White House ballroom has caused federal prosecutors to wonder if he’s inserting himself into the project’s legal filings.

Former assistant U.S. Attorney Glenn Kirschner spoke at length about the issue on his podcast Justice Matters Monday, arguing that certain details spelled out in the filings—such as the national security additions intended to be built beneath the 90,000-square-foot dance hall—were so naïvely included that he wondered if Trump hadn’t picked up his “beloved Sharpie” to edit the documents himself before they were submitted to the judge.

“I’m going to go out on a limb here and say it’s kind of curious that this public court filing is announcing not just to the American people, but to the world, including our enemies, exactly what kind of ‘top secret facilities’ this ballroom will contain,” Kirschner said.

“I find it impossible to believe that a legitimate, self-respecting Department of Justice attorney authored this garbage,” he continued. “It’s embarrassing. It’s an insult to the court. And more importantly, it’s an insult to the American people because that’s whose interests DOJ attorneys are supposed to represent.”

The filings make mention of planned bomb shelters, a hospital, a medical area, protective partitioning, and “top secret” military installations. They also clarify some of the building materials, which include missile-resistant steel columns, drone-proof roofing materials, and bullet-, ballistic-, and blast-proof glass.

The court filing is also riddled with typos and unconventional grammar choices, more akin to the president’s litany of social media posts than a judicial filing submitted by the DOJ. The first page is doused in exclamation points, improper capitalization, misplaced parentheticals, redundant synonyms for emphasis, rhetorical flourishes, and run-on sentences.

Trump’s idea to build a ballroom on the White House grounds larger than the executive estate itself has been riddled with problems and colored by lies since he first announced the project in July. Initially, Trump pledged that the development would “be near but not touching” the White House East Wing.

Months later, his construction teams completely razed the FDR-era extension, plowing forward without prerequisite approval from the National Capital Planning Commission or the express permission of Congress, both of which were conveniently unavailable at the time due to the longest government shutdown in U.S. history.

The ballroom’s estimated price tag has been similarly difficult to nail down. Trump originally claimed that the project would cost $200 million, but a decision to tack on extra construction to the site doubled its expenses to $400 million. The new building will have 40-foot ceilings, be able to accommodate up to 1,000 seated guests, and would constitute 22,000 square feet of the 90,000-square-foot development, according to projections offered by East Wing ballroom architect Shalom Baranes in January.