Trump Veers From Script to Mock Lindsey Graham at His Own Funeral

The president couldn’t resist taking issue with his speechwriters again Tuesday—even as he was in the midst of delivering a eulogy for late South Carolina Senator Lindsey Graham.

Graham’s funeral drew TV personalities, top lawmakers, and foreign heads of state including Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy. Yet Donald Trump didn’t hesitate to veer wildly off course from his pre-written remarks while recalling Graham’s life before the elite crowd, pushing back on one critical detail: Graham’s popularity.

“Virtually everyone—Republican or Democrat—liked Lindsey,” said Trump before jumping from his script. “Well, not everybody. But it sounds good. Not everybody. He was a tough cookie, okay? I have to be—I have to veer from this for a second.”

“He was a tough cookie, Darline, but he was beautiful,” Trump added, addressing Graham’s younger sister and temporary legislative successor, Darline Graham Nordone.

Graham passed away on July 11 after what his office described as a “brief and sudden illness.” The next morning, a preliminary medical report found that Graham had died from a tear in his aorta due to the hardening of his arteries.

During his brief remarks before the mourning crowd, Trump acknowledged that he and Graham had become close friends during his time in politics, fondly recounting the time he publicized Graham’s cell phone number during a heated debate during the 2016 presidential election.

“He said, ‘I had that number for 20 years.’ His phone totally—I don’t know what he did with it. But it exploded. That was the beginning of friendship in a way,” Trump said. “But it was Lindsey who had the last laugh, because while I blew up his phone for one day, we became great friends and Lindsey did not stop calling me for the next 10 years.”

He also reminisced about Graham’s warmongering, sharing with the assembly that Graham “never saw a war he didn’t like.”

“He felt in his bones that our destiny is to win, and that his job was to do everything he could to ensure our enemies would lose,” Trump said.

In a blow to voters everywhere, a federal appeals court just made it easier for President Donald Trump to suppress mail-in voting. The midterms are two months away.

The U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit affirmed a lower court’s decision Tuesday, arguing that a Democratic lawsuit challenging Trump’s mail-in voting executive order was premature. This result could have disastrous implications for the upcoming midterm elections: Not only does Trump’s executive order direct the Department of Homeland Security to create a national citizenship registry list, but it also orders the U.S. Postal Service to withhold mail-in ballots from states that don’t share voter registration data with the federal government.

“Cheating on mail-in voting is legendary. It’s horrible, what’s gone on,” Trump said while signing the order in March. “Democrats want to use it for cheating.… I think this will help a lot with elections.”

In reality, mail-in voting is proven to be a secure and reliable method used by hundreds of thousands of voters across the political spectrum. The president himself has voted by mail in recent elections—but it’s OK when he does it, he says, “because I’m president.”

This new ruling from the D.C. Circuit comes only one day after Trump’s Department of Justice asked the Supreme Court to weigh in on the issue, calling the Democratic legal challenge “premature” and “hypothetical” because Trump’s executive order hasn’t yet been entirely implemented into DHS or USPS policy.

The administration’s language is reflected in Tuesday’s D.C. circuit court ruling, which argues in favor of the Trump administration because the Democratic plaintiffs are concerned with “the lawfulness of proposed actions if implemented on the threshold of the upcoming federal election.” In other words, Trump’s executive order might be breaking the law, but the court isn’t comfortable saying so until it’s too late.

“If the defendant agencies take steps to implement the Executive Order in a manner that violates federal law or the Constitution, Plaintiffs can promptly seek relief,” the decision says.

Trump’s attack on mail-in voting goes hand in hand with the SAVE Act, a massive voter suppression bill Trump is trying to ram through the Senate this week. These increasingly desperate attempts to stop Americans from voting underscore the fact that the midterms aren’t looking so good for Republicans—and Trump likely knows he can’t win without cheating.

Former intelligence officials have singled out a recently declassified memo in Donald Trump’s recent 2020 election-related document dump as warranting a deeper investigation.

The Steady State, a group of former national security and intelligence officials, has called for an independent probe into a three-page CIA note on China titled “Sensitive PRC Reporting from 2018-2020.” The document’s date and author are redacted, and it’s not clear where the memo came from within the folds of the CIA.

An analysis by the group found that it “departs in both style and format” from CIA drafting culture, and does not include the tell-tale signs of a CIA review.

Yet Trump directly quoted the file during his national prime-time address on July 16, ignoring its dubious origin.

“In mid-2018 the Chinese Communist Party’s policy was to leverage all domestic and foreign elements that were opposed to the U.S. president in an effort to reduce the U.S. president’s votes and make him resign or prevent his re-election,” Trump read from the document. “Isn’t that nice?”

Over the span of his 25-minute speech, Trump repeated thoroughly debunked claims that there was interference in the 2020 presidential election, and that the intelligence community had intentionally withheld information from him during his first term about China’s attempts to undermine U.S. election integrity.

Trump leveraged the CIA memo to implore the Justice Department to “fire those involved in the cover-up” and “file criminal charges if appropriate.”

But former intelligence officials have been wary of the document’s narrow perspective and thin context, suggesting that it could be a response to a targeted request from someone within the administration, MS NOW reported Tuesday.

Steven Cash, executive director of The Steady State and a former CIA and Department of Homeland Security official, told the digital news organization that he planned to send a letter Tuesday to top lawmakers about the note’s “anomalies.”

“It is particularly dangerous when intelligence products are presented piecemeal to the American people,” Cash wrote. “Confidence in the Intelligence Community is predicated not only on what it ultimately knows, but on the integrity of how its work is produced and presented.”

Dr. Anthony Fauci started off with a good relationship with President Trump but eventually came to believe he was an “obnoxious adolescent,” according to excerpts of his diary released by Republican Senator Rand Paul, the head of the Senate Homeland Security Committee.

The released diary entries start from December 2019, right before the Covid-19 outbreak, and continue to December 2022, when Fauci left his position as director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases. Paul released over 1,000 pages from the diary as part of an investigation into the origins of Covid-19, which Paul claims came from a laboratory leak in Wuhan, China.

The diary doesn’t have any kind of smoking gun on Covid’s origins, but it does show an inside view of different moments of the pandemic, as well as how Trump mishandled it. Fauci wrote glowingly about how he met Trump on January 29, 2020, in the White House Situation Room, and the president told him, “Anthony, you are really a famous guy. My good friend Lou Dobbs told me that you were one of the smartest, knowledgeable and outstanding persons he knows.”

“He then stayed for 20 minutes and asked most of his questions of me. I was surprised and very pleased and the deputies were clearly stunned and impressed,” Fauci wrote. He added that Trump thanked him after the meeting, telling him, “We are counting on you.”

Fauci’s entries show how Trump’s actions over the course of the pandemic quickly changed his mind. After a March 2020 press conference, Fauci complained about how Trump “wasted the opportunity to just focus on the relief package and went into his diatribe against previous administrations.”

Later, in August, Fauci wrote that he had a hard time explaining to Trump that increased testing did not increase Covid cases.

“All in all it was a manifestation that he is desperate and still does not understand the pandemic. Very interesting encounter,” Fauci wrote.

In November, Trump was angry at Fauci for a Washington Post report where Fauci said that Joe Biden’s campaign was “taking [the pandemic] seriously from a public health perspective,” while Trump was more concerned about the economy and reopening the country. Trump called Fauci and let loose.

“Tony, I really like you, and you know that, but what the f—k are you doing? You constantly drop bombs on me. Everybody wants me to fire you, but I am not going to fire you, you have too illustrious of a career, but you have to be positive,” Trump said on the call, according to Fauci.

“I like you but so many people, not only in the White House, but throughout the country hate you because of what you are doing.… And that f—ker Biden. He is so f—king stupid. You are 10 times smarter than he is. I am going to kick his f—king ass in this election. I will win by a landslide. Just wait and see.… Tony, you have to be positive. I do not want to keep you off TV, but when you are out there, you have to be positive.”

By March 2021, as vaccines became publicly available, Fauci called Trump an “obnoxious adolescent.”

Looking at these diary entries, it’s obvious that Fauci was simply trying to do his job in the face of an obstinate president, and wasn’t the devious or negligent mastermind that conspiracy theorists in the Republican Party make him out to be. They should be more concerned that Trump is back in power and can’t be trusted if a new pandemic arises.

FIFA President Gianni Infantino is reportedly plotting to transform the World Cup into a moneymaking scheme—so, is it any surprise he turned to these experts in corruption?

FIFA announced Tuesday that it would create the FIFA Forward Enterprise, or FFE, a new business entity, to raise up to $4.2 million in the next year by “carefully selecting long-term investors who will purchase minority, non-controlling interests in FFE.”

Critics have decried the decision to sell stakes in the World Cup, which is managed by FIFA, a nonprofit organization. The move could potentially earn Infantino tens of millions of dollars.

To make matters worse, Infantino reportedly held investor discussions with members of the Trump administration, The Times reported Tuesday. The move comes amid mounting concerns over Infantino’s relationship with Donald Trump, after the president openly bullied FIFA into lifting a red card against a player on the U.S. men’s soccer team.

In addition, FIFA reportedly stated that once the approval was granted, the investor group would be led by Thrive Eternal, a venture capital firm run by Joshua Kushner, the brother of Trump’s son-in-law Jared who is under investigation for alleged corruption.

FIFA said that it planned to expand football development funding to more than $10 billion, “subject to approval by FIFA Member Associations.”

The UEFA Europa League immediately released a statement outright rejecting the proposal.

“This crosses a line that football’s governing institutions should never cross,” the statement said. “UEFA takes it extremely seriously. So should every National Football Association. So should every stakeholder: leagues, clubs, players, supporters, governments and everyone who cares about the future of the game. The soul and governance of football are not assets to trade—especially with zero transparency as to who gains financially.

“None of us are the owners of football. It is not FIFA’s to sell,” the statement said.