Ken Paxton’s Own Lawyer Gives Him Middle Finger Over Senate Race

Texas turning blue wouldn’t have been on any Democrat’s bingo card back in November 2024, when President Donald Trump took the state with 56.2 percent of the vote and Ted Cruz easily held the senator’s seat. But thanks to Republican Senate nominee Ken Paxton’s controversial past, and the popular progressivism of Democrat James Talarico, the Lone Star State stands a good chance of swinging left come midterm season.

Just ask the Texas lawyer who represented Paxton in his impeachment trial, Dan Cogdell, who endorsed Talarico on Monday.

Paxton “has lost sight of his core mission, which is to represent the people of Texas,” Cogdell said. “Unlike Ken, I believe to my core that James Talarico believes in unity over division and that he knows how to assemble not only Democrats, but Independents and Republicans, and we need that right now.”

Cogdell defended Paxton in his 2023 trial, during which prosecutors alleged the attorney general accepted bribes and used his office to cover up his infidelity. The case saw Paxton impeached by the Texas House of Representatives but acquitted by the state Senate. Cogdell also represented Paxton in a separate securities fraud case, which was settled in 2024 after Paxton was made to pay $300,000 in restitution.

More recently, Paxton was criticized for offering a sweetheart plea deal to a repeated child molester, which would see the offender spend just one day in jail.

It’s difficult to ascertain where the Houston-based Cogdell falls on the political spectrum. He criticized Trump frequently in recent years, but gave $6,500 to the hard-right Paxton’s campaign in 2025, according to campaign finance reports. He then gave Talarico’s campaign $1,000 in March.

Talarico appeared thrilled with his new ally, using the defection to petition others to do the same.

“If you voted for John Cornyn, you have a place in this campaign,” he said in a statement. “If you’re a Republican tired of the corruption you’re seeing in government, you have a place in this campaign. Even if you’re Ken Paxton’s impeachment lawyer, you have a place in this campaign.”

Mail-in ballots continue to be counted in the race to determine which candidates will square off in Los Angeles’s Mayoral election, as California state law allows them to be received for seven days after Election Day (Tuesday, June 2), and they are verified before being counted. But a late surge for Los Angeles city councilmember Nitiya Raman, a progressive Democrat challenging incumbent mayor and fellow Democrat, Karen Bass, is driving right-wingers nuts.

They were hoping that Republican Spencer Pratt, known for his time on reality TV show The Hills, would perform well enough to finish in the top two, allowing him to advance to November’s general election under California’s jungle primary rules. After initial reports last week showed him behind Bass in second place, his right-wing supporters thought his advancement was in the bag.

But ballot returns for the past few days now show him falling into a distant third, and MAGA supporters from far beyond L.A. are crying conspiracy. Several conservative influencers and pundits are calling Raman’s surge “impossible,” attacking the results as illegitimate and calling L.A. Democrats “cheaters.” X user DC Draino said the results showed “Insane levels of fraud.” Republican Representative Abe Hamadeh, whose district is in faraway Arizona, said “the steal is blatant.” Elon Musk spent his Monday morning amplifying conspiracy theories about the results.

President Trump has also weighed in, calling the mayor race a “rigged election” in a Truth Social post Monday morning. But all of that whining belies the fact that the last polls before Election Day predicted Bass and Raman finishing first and second, respectively. And late arriving mail-in ballots tend to favor younger, more left-leaning voters, especially in a solidly left-leaning city like Los Angeles. The right will just have to realize that L.A. voters are Democrats who aren’t going to be taken in by a reality TV star.

The New York Knicks have canceled their rambunctious, wildly popular outdoor watch party at Madison Square Garden to accommodate President Trump’s attending Game 3 of the NBA Finals on Monday night. The most recent watch party saw 12 people arrested.

Fans must now arrive two hours early and without bags. Trump, a native New Yorker, is also friends with embattled Knicks owner James Dolan.

This move has the potential to curse the Knicks in the midst of their most successful run of the century. The reason so many fans gather outside the Garden in the first place is because the cost of getting in is astronomically high. Now they’re shutting all that energy down to accommodate one of the least popular presidents ever.

“I’m not sure it’s gonna be a good reception for him,” House minority leader and fellow New Yorker Hakeem Jeffries said over the weekend. “Why does Donald Trump always have to ruin a good thing? Literally the Knicks haven’t been in the NBA Finals for 27 years, the city is trying to celebrate this, we’ve embraced this team, and this guy has to inject himself.”

Mayor Zohran Mamdani is offering an alternative, free watch party in Bryant Park.

President Donald Trump blew up his party’s own Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, or FISA, renewal in order to install yet another wildly inexperienced MAGA loyalist.

A bipartisan coalition of lawmakers has been planning since April to pass a long-term extension of FISA Section 702, which is intended to shield U.S. citizens from the country’s warrantless surveillance program overseas.

The key spy power is set to expire Friday, but Democrats have pulled their support over Trump’s decision to install Bill Pulte as director of national intelligence.

The federal housing official has none of the military or intelligence background necessary to lead the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, and has instead made a name for himself by being Trump’s pit bull, targeting the president’s political enemies and making himself wildly unpopular in the process.

“The idea that we’re going to allow Mr. Pulte to be potentially in charge of how this tool is used or manipulated, that’s going to be a very uphill path to convince Democrats,” Virginia Senator Mark Warner told CNN Sunday. “This was a self-inflicted harm.”

Trump’s move to place one of his goons at the head of the U.S. intelligence apparatus is yet another example of the president acting impulsively despite the fallout for his own party.

“I don’t think he thinks about the impact on us and the timing,” Alaska Senator Lisa Murkowski told reporters. “Which is unfortunate because it really has had an impact. Quite honestly, I’m worried about what we’re going to do on FISA.”

Scott Pelley is going scorched earth on former boss Bari Weiss.

Pelley, a longtime 60 Minutes correspondent and CBS employee since 1989, was fired last week after months of discord between him and Weiss, the founder of The Free Press, who was controversially appointed CBS News editor in chief in October.

In Pelley’s resignation letter, he wrote that new management “instructed me to inject falsehoods and bias” into his work. Speaking to The New York Times’ Lulu Garcia-Navarro on Sunday, Pelley stated Weiss had put “a thumb on the scale” for President Donald Trump’s version of events.

When Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents violently besieged Minnesota last winter, Pelley said Weiss sent an email to Tanya Simon—at the time the executive producer of 60 Minutes—asking if the show could make local protesters appear more violent.

“We had gone out of our way in our plan from the very beginning to show the protesters for the responsibility that they had,” Pelley said. “We had already scrubbed the video archives looking for those scenes. But it somehow wasn’t enough for Ms. Weiss.”

After protester Renee Good was shot and killed by ICE agent Jonathan Ross, Pelley said Weiss sent an email asking staff to describe Good’s car as veering toward the agent, despite video evidence showing otherwise.

“The video showed that the officer wasn’t standing in front of the car, and she wasn’t driving toward him, but that’s what the president said,” Pelley said.

Since Weiss took over as editor in chief, her tenure has been marred by clashes with CBS’s experienced reporters. One high-profile conflict came in December, when she pulled a 60 Minutes report on the suffering of Venezuelans deported to CECOT prison in El Salvador by the Trump administration. Weiss argued the story was not balanced enough and suggested the reporters reach out to Stephen Miller, the curmudgeon behind Trump’s deportation policies, for an interview.

The journalist responsible for the CECOT report, Sharyn Alfonsi, wrote a damning email about the decision that was leaked to the press. “Our story was screened five times and cleared by both CBS attorneys and Standards and Practices. It is factually correct. In my view, pulling it now—after every rigorous internal check has been met is not an editorial decision, it is a political one,” she said.

Weiss’s tenure has also coincided with the departure of Anderson Cooper, who left 60 Minutes in May. In his final episode, Cooper stressed the importance of the program’s editorial freedom, in remarks seen as a jab at Weiss and CBS.

Simon was fired and replaced by Nick Bilton, a tech journalist with zero experience in broadcast television, in late May. Pelley reportedly said in a staff meeting last week that Bilton would “never be welcome” at the show—the final straw for CBS’s new upper brass, who fired Pelley a day later.