MAGA Defectors Convinced Correspondents’ Dinner Shooting Was Staged

Right-wing commentators and conspiracy theorists have expressed doubts about the legitimacy of the attempted assassination at the White House Correspondents’ Dinner on Saturday. 

“Does anybody else just not care about the White House Correspondent’s Dinner shooting like at all,” said white nationalist and former Trump dinner guest Nick Fuentes. 

“Was this just a coincidence or another staged incident? Hours before the chaos, Karoline Leavitt told America to watch tonight because Donald Trump would bring the heat, and there would be ‘shots fired.’ Then suddenly, real shots were fired near the White House Correspondents’ Dinner,” Tucker Carlson posited on his show. “Shots fired? The Secret Service rushes in and they let Trump continue to sit there? And now they’re going to resume the White House Correspondents’ Dinner, and Trump still plans to deliver a speech?”

“I’m not saying this was staged to boost Trump’s tanking approval numbers, but it certainly looks odd,” Carlson continued. 

Sandy Hook conspiracy theorist  Alex Jones didn’t seem convinced the shooting was staged, but he still lent some credence to the idea, acknowledging that a lot of people he “really, really, really” respected who were “dead on on every other issue” believed it was. 

Former MAGA Representative Marjorie Taylor Green also raised questions regarding the alleged shooter’s manifesto. 

“Why does every shooter have a manifesto? Most shooter’s manifestos remain classified so they don’t inspire more would be shooter’s,” she wrote. “Why did they release Cole Allen’s manifesto almost immediately?”

This cloud of doubt on the right surrounding the correspondents’ dinner comes just over a week after Wired reported that a notable section of Trump’s base, including Carlson, believe the 2024 assassination attempt on President Trump in Butler, Pennsylvania, was fake as well—suggesting eroding trust from those who were once his staunchest supporters. 

Musician Kid Rock reportedly got an AH-64 Apache helicopter ride with Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth Monday morning.

Ryan Grim of Drop Site posted on X that the musician, whose real name is Robert James Ritchie, flew to Fort Belvoir in northern Virginia on his private jet for the ride. The helicopters usually fly with two pilots, but Ritchie and Hegseth each rode in their own helicopter with one pilot. Apache helicopters aren’t stationed at the military base, raising questions as to where these aircraft came from. A base spokesperson referred questions to Hegseth’s office, according to Grim.

Last month, two Apache helicopters flew over a “No Kings” protest in Nashville, Tennessee, and then performed maneuvers next to Ritchie’s mansion in the suburbs nearby, prompting an investigation and the air crews’ suspension. Days later, Hegseth lifted their suspension and announced that the soldiers would not be punished, posting “Carry on, patriots. 🇺🇸” on X.

Ritchie seems to be hanging out with Cabinet officials a lot these days, having taken part in a bizarre ice bath and workout video with Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. in February to promote his public health policy. The purpose of the alleged helicopter flights doesn’t seem to be national security, and as of 2022, an Apache helicopter costs $5,171 per hour to operate.

One of the Trump administration’s newest immigration judges said that some women are just a “warm, wet hole.”

Melissa Isaak, an Army veteran and reservist, was hired by the Justice Department on April 8 as a temporary immigration judge. She was permitted to begin hearing cases immediately, according to an announcement from the Executive Office for Immigration Review.

In 2007, Isaak graduated from Barry University School of Law, a low-ranked law school where less than half of recent grads passed the bar exam on their first try. Afterward, she joined the law firm Brock & Stout in Alabama for two years, and in 2009 began her own private practice, self-styled as a “divorce attorney for men,” where she has worked ever since.

She does not have any immigration court experience, but her name was attached to several high-profile, non-divorce cases. Isaak was a defense attorney for three of the January 6 Capitol rioters (she later withdrew from two of the cases), and she also helped Alabama Republican Roy Moore dismiss a defamation suit from a woman who said he molested her when she was 14. That legal saga is still ongoing—an appeals court overturned Moore’s multimillion-dollar win against his accuser late last week.

During an interview with pickup artist Anthony Dream Johnson in 2021, Isaak claimed that “there are two types of women.”

“There are good, solid, valuable women who are major assets to men, if you’re a good woman,” Isaak said. “And then there’s a warm wet hole.”

The following year, she gave a speech on the matter for Johnson’s manosphere convention, 21 Studios’ Make Women Great Again, titled “Divorcing Feminism.”

“If the only thing you have to offer a man is sex, that’s what you are,” Isaak said. “And guess what? Guess who else has a warm, wet hole? Every other woman out there. What a horrible existence.”

She compared that to a “real woman,” a subtype that she said was meant to “catapult a man.”

“We’re powerful women, we are, if we use it in the right way,” Isaak said, specifying the necessity to use that energy for men.

“I’ve had people get offended, and they say, ‘You know, it’s horrible that you say warm, wet hole.’ I mean, well, if you have one and it’s not warm and wet you might want to seek some gynecological intervention,” Isaak said to crickets.

Germany thinks Iran is getting the better of Donald Trump in negotiations.

On Wednesday, German Chancellor Friedrich Merz told a group of secondary school students in western Germany that “there is a sense that a whole nation is being humiliated by the Iranian leadership, particularly by these so-called Revolutionary Guards,” Bloomberg reports. 

“It is quite obvious that the Americans have absolutely no coherent strategy whatsoever,” Merz said to students in his home district of Marsberg. “And the fundamental problem with these kinds of conflicts is always the same: It is not enough to simply get yourself in—you must also figure out how to get yourself out.”

Merz’s criticism is a bad sign for Trump, who has complained about a lack of support from European powers for his war with Iran. Merz visited Trump last month and seemed to be on good terms with the president at the time, telling the press that “we are on the same page in terms of getting this terrible regime in Iran away.”

“We will talk about the day after, what will happen then, if they are out,” Merz said March 3, less than a week after the U.S. and Israel began bombing Iran.

Days later, though, German Defense Minister Boris Pistorius said the country would not send ships to the region. Last week, Merz said that he and other leaders were not consulted prior to the initial attacks on Iran, adding that he has expressed his concerns to Trump in two separate conversations. 

“If I had known that this would go on for five or six weeks and keep getting worse, I would have made my point to him even more forcefully,” Merz said. Rising fuel prices as a result of the war are affecting economies all around the world, especially Germany, the leading economy in Europe, a point Merz stressed in his remarks. 

“This war against Iran has a direct impact on our economic performance and must therefore be brought to an end as soon as possible,” Merz said.

Iran’s closure of the Strait of Hormuz has given it the upper hand in the conflict with the U.S., and the world is noticing that Trump hasn’t produced any results from negotiations in Pakistan. The longer this conflict drags on, the worse it reflects on the president.  

A prominent commercial contractor with government ties built a secluded residence in the New Mexico desert for Jeffrey Epstein.

Epstein purchased Zorro Ranch from former Democratic Governor Bruce King in 1993. Then he hired Bradbury Stamm Construction, a company better known for building classified facilities at Los Alamos National Laboratory and Kirtland Air Force Base, to erect him a mansion on the 10,000-acre property. They also built him a sprawling courtyard, a private airstrip with a hangar and helipad, a ranch office, a firehouse, and a seven-bay heated garage.

Bradbury Stamm is the largest industrial commercial contractor in New Mexico, and is not known for constructing private homes, according to journalist and author Alisa Valdes-Rodriguez. Yet they did it anyway. The company’s telephone number was listed under a series of contacts pertaining to Zorro Ranch in Epstein’s personal phone book, according to unredacted pages released by the Justice Department.

Why the company would go out of its way to take on the Zorro Ranch project is not clear, though Valdes-Rodriguez speculates that it could have something to do with Ghislaine Maxwell’s father.

“Bradbury Stamm holds classified construction contracts at the New Mexico nuclear weapons labs that Ghislaine Maxwell’s father, Robert Maxwell, penetrated with backdoored spy software on behalf of Israeli military intelligence in the mid-1980s, per publicly available FBI files and the testimony of Rafael Eitan, the Mossad operations chief who ran Maxwell as an asset,” Valdes-Rodriguez wrote. “Bradbury Stamm brings in hundreds of millions each year in contracts.”

Zorro Ranch, located roughly 30 miles south of Santa Fe in the high desert, was rumored to be a hotbed of illicit activity while Epstein held the keys. Some of the notorious child sex offender’s victims, including Virginia Giuffre, claimed they were trafficked at the New Mexico estate.

Emails issued by ranch staffers allege that at least two girls were killed and buried under the building by Epstein’s order, according to documents made public by the Justice Department via the Epstein files. Epstein even contemplated turning the estate into a headquarters for genetic engineering experiments.

The property has since changed hands. In 2023, it was purchased by Donald Huffines, a former Texas state senator now running for comptroller as a self-styled “Trump Republican.” The Huffines family has renamed the site “Rancho San Rafael.”

The Trump administration intervened in a New Mexico investigation at the property in 2019. In February, New Mexico lawmakers voted unanimously to pursue another investigation into Zorro Ranch, creating a bipartisan “truth commission” to examine the site’s history. New Mexico Attorney General Raúl Torrez also ordered his office to reopen the criminal investigation into Zorro Ranch, demanding “immediate access to the complete, unredacted federal case file.”

The Department of Justice has reached a second agreement to fork over taxpayer dollars to President Donald Trump’s former national security adviser Michael Flynn.

A brief document filed in the U.S. Court of Federal Claims Friday stated that the parties had agreed to a settlement “in principle,” but needed more time to finalize the details.

It’s not yet clear how much money Trump intends to hand off to his ally, in addition to the $1.25 million settlement the DOJ agreed to last month.

Friday’s settlement relates to a civil suit Flynn brought against the government, alleging that the U.S. Army had illegally garnished his retirement pay after it found he had accepted compensation from a foreign government source without first seeking approval from the Department of Defense, Lawfare’s Anna Bower wrote on Substack.

Flynn previously alleged he was wrongfully prosecuted for making false statements to federal agents as part of the investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 election—even though he pleaded guilty to lying, twice.

The Trump administration is coming after Jimmy Kimmel—again.

Both President Trump and White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt on Monday joined the train of hate kicked off by first lady Melania Trump in response to Kimmel’s jokes at a parody White House Correspondent’s Dinner last week.

“Wow, Jimmy Kimmel, who is in no way funny as attested to by his terrible Television Ratings … showed a fake video of the First Lady, Melania, and our son, Barron, like they were actually sitting in his studio, listening to him speak, which they weren’t, and never would be. He then stated, ‘Our First Lady, Melania, is here. Look at Melania, so beautiful. Mrs. Trump, you have a glow like an expectant widow,’” Trump wrote Monday on Truth Social. “A day later a lunatic tried entering the ballroom of the White House Correspondents Dinner, loaded up with a shotgun, handgun, and many knives. He was there for a very obvious and sinister reason.

“I appreciate that so many people are incensed by Kimmel’s despicable call to violence, and normally would not be responsive to anything that he said but, this is something far beyond the pale. Jimmy Kimmel should be immediately fired by Disney and ABC,” Trump concluded.

Trump, like Melania, is asserting that a joke a comedian told two full days before the White House Correspondents’ Dinner led directly to Cole Allen’s alleged shooting attempt. That assertion is facetious at best—Allen’s supposed manifesto specially referenced Trump’s lack of respect for Christianity, his decision to cut off funding for Ukraine, and the country being led by “a pedophile, rapist, and traitor” as primary grievances for his actions, not some poorly-aged joke from Kimmel of all people.

Leavitt joined in on the pearl-clutching earlier on Monday.

“Who in their right mind says a wife would be glowing over the potential murder of her beloved husband?” she said. “And having experienced what I did with the first lady on Saturday night, I can tell you that she was anything but that. This kind of rhetoric about the president, the first lady, and his supporters is completely deranged, and it’s unbelievable that the American people are consuming it night after night after night.”

The Trump administration is showing all of this concern and disgust over a bad joke that was ultimately nothing more than a joke, not a call to murder. Their boss has made comments much worse—and much more serious—than Kimmel.

This story has been updated.

Cole Tomas Allen, the suspected gunman who opened fire at the White House Correspondents’ Dinner on Saturday, has been charged with attempting to assassinate the president of the United States.

Allen appeared at a brief preliminary hearing Monday, where Magistrate Judge Matthew Sharbaugh announced that he’d been charged with attempting to assassinate the president of the United States, transportation of a firearm and ammunition across state lines, and use of a firearm during a crime of violence.

The charge for the firearm offense carries a minimum sentence of 10 years, and the transportation charge carries a maximum of 10 years, according to Politico’s Kyle Cheney on X.

Meanwhile, attempting to assassinate the president carries a potential life sentence. In February, Ryan Routh received life in prison after he was convicted of attempting to assassinate Donald Trump at the president’s eponymous golf club in Palm Beach.

Prosecutor Jocelyn Ballantine argued that Allen should be recommended for pretrial detention.

“He attempted to assassinate the president of the United States. We are asking the court to preventatively detain Mr. Allen. He’s charged with a federal crime of terrorism, which mandates detention,” she said, according to Scott MacFarlane on X.

It’s not clear, however, that Allen is facing a terrorism charge. Federal prosecutors may choose to charge Allen with terrorism if they believe his attempted act of violence was an effort to affect policy.

Allen has accepted the services of two veteran public defenders, Tezira Abe and Eugene Ohm, Politico reported.

This story has been updated.

The U.S. Mint claims to be a symbol of the founding principles of America, its gold coins a product of the country’s personal success. But that’s not exactly true.

Instead, the U.S. Mint’s gold program is the amalgamation of several illicit sources, effectively serving as the final laundering point for foreign powers and cartels before the precious metal is clean and ready for sale on the international market.

An investigation by The New York Times, published Sunday, followed the money from its origins in dangerous and unlawful mines to American-based refineries as far north as West Point.

The Mint is the biggest name in the global gold coin market. Its profits are a boon to the U.S. Treasury that help to cover various government expenses.

In 1985, Congress banned the agency from making bullion out of foreign gold, an explicit attempt to distance the moneymaking institution from human rights abuses abroad. As a result, purchasing gold from the Mint is supposed to come with a vote of confidence, a promise that the bad actors of the world are not profiting from or exploiting the process.

But the Mint has blatantly and repeatedly violated that law since its implementation, regardless of which party is in charge of Washington. In doing so, it has allowed even some of the country’s most ardent adversaries to pocket cash from American operations.

Gold has become one of the most valuable commodities in the market. An ounce of gold in 1985 was worth, on average, $317, according to a gold tracker hosted by SD Bullion. Today, that same ounce is worth $4,688, nearly five times the value when adjusted for inflation.

The Times tracked hundreds of millions of dollars worth of gold from the far corners of the globe, including a mine in Colombia run by Clan del Golfo, a violent cartel blacklisted by the Treasury Department that traffics in gold alongside cocaine, as well as a Congolese mine that is partly owned by the Chinese government. Even terrorist groups linked to Al Qaeda have gotten into the American gold trade.

With the money they make, the various entities affiliated with the trade are able to wage war, sustain autocracies, and commit murder. Gold mining has funded Sudan’s civil war, which has so far displaced more than 14 million people, and bankrolled Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. The trade has bolstered Venezuela and Iran, helping the countries overstep economic sanctions.

Locally, the mining has produced toxic results. Many of the mines are just as bad for the environment as they are for the people running them: Portions of the Amazon rainforest have been indiscriminately deforested and polluted in order to make way for the mines. Where gold is found in mud, workers mix in mercury by hand, hoping to bind the metals together. In doing so, they poison themselves and the local ecosystems.

When first approached by the Times, a spokesperson for the Mint said that the agency’s gold came entirely from the U.S. But when confronted by the paper’s findings, the spokesperson changed their tune, claiming instead that the U.S. was the Mint’s “primary” source for gold and that it was taking steps to better track the trade.

Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent, whose department oversees the Mint, told the Times that he would open an investigation into the matter.

“This review is focused on ensuring that the U.S. Mint’s gold suppliers comply with the law and strictly satisfy their obligations, and that the Mint takes every step possible to continue to vigorously safeguard our national security and uphold market integrity,” Bessent said in a written statement.

Florida Governor Ron DeSantis released his new proposed congressional map Monday that aims to grab four more Republican seats in the House of Representatives.

DeSantis told Fox News that “Florida got shortchanged in the 2020 census, and we’ve been fighting for fair representation ever since.

“Our population has since grown dramatically, and we have moved from a Democrat majority to a 1.5 million Republican advantage. Drawing maps based on race, which is reflected in our current congressional districts, is unconstitutional and should be prohibited,” DeSantis added, without mentioning that his office also drew the state’s congressional maps in 2022 after the census.

The state House and Senate now have to approve the new map, which would then go to DeSantis’s desk to be signed into law and take effect for November’s midterm elections. If it is passed, the hope is that Republicans would increase their 20–8 congressional seat advantage to 24–4.

The Democrats most at risk by this proposal are Representatives Kathy Castor, Jared Moskowitz, Darren Soto, and Debbie Wasserman Schultz. But as Cook Political Report’s David Wasserman pointed out, redrawing Castor’s district will risk neighboring Republicans in Tampa Bay, who will suddenly have new Democratic constituents.

DeSantis, just as in 2022, is attempting to get around Florida’s Constitution, which bans legislators from drawing districts with “the intent to favor or disfavor a political party or an incumbent.” He’s trying to claim executive privilege, make the process as opaque as possible to frustrate legal challenges, and then run out the clock on those challenges.

If successful, Republicans hope that their nationwide redistricting will beat out efforts in Democratic-run states like California and Virginia and ultimately stem a backlash against Trump and the GOP this November. But eliminating four safe Democratic seats to create unsafe Republican seats could easily backfire and make the whole effort moot.