Justice Department Escalates Trump’s “Grand Conspiracy” Probe

The Justice Department is pressing on with its “grand conspiracy” case against federal officials who investigated President Trump, even after the head of that effort—Joe diGenova, counselor to the attorney general—controversially resigned.

DiGenova, a former Reagan administration prosecutor, Trump personal attorney, and peddler of the narrative that Trump was under attack from the liberal “deep state,” resigned earlier this month after insinuating that he was being pressed to find evidence of corruption that wasn’t there.

“If you want indictments where there’s no evidence, you have an ethical problem,” diGenova said. He later claimed that those comments weren’t what he actually meant. “There’s plenty of evidence in all of these cases to prove the theories of prosecution,” he clarified. “It just takes time to get there, and some people want to get there a little faster than others—and you can’t do that.”

The investigation is centered around Trump’s claim that federal investigations against him—from the 2016 probe into Russian election interference to his indictments after he left office in 2021—were a calculated deep state plot.

Despite diGenova’s resignation, the DOJ has issued multiple subpoenas, including to former CIA Director John Brennan last week. This is an extreme escalation of the quest to blame someone for this “grand conspiracy” against Trump, even after the DOJ’s main guy in charge left because even he couldn’t find any kind of conspiracy. No one who’s been subpoenaed has been charged with a crime thus far.

“I’ve spent decades in and around the Justice Department. I’ve never even conceived of a situation like this,” Ken Wainstein, Brennan’s attorney, told the Associated Press. “[The Justice Department is] blatantly trying to frame somebody for a crime that is complete fiction.”

Representative Lauren Boebert’s various affairs are apparently just a bunch of fake news, according to the MAGA lawmaker and her allies.

The House Ethics Committee received a sworn complaint last week that accused Boebert of having sexual affairs with three of her staffers: District director Clarice Navarro Ratzlaff, district chief of staff Raven Finegan, and Boebert’s former chief of staff Jeffrey Small.

The complaint, filed by American Muckrakers’ David Wheeler, also claimed that Boebert paid Ratzlaff $200,000 in 2025 to “secure her silence” after Ratzlaff threatened to take the allegations of their relationship public. Wheeler’s accusations included evidence from “House payroll records, Federal Election Commission filings, court records, and on-the-record sources.”

A spokesperson for Boebert said in a statement Saturday that there is “zero truth” to the allegations, and further suggested that complaint was a violation of House Ethics rules since it was filed within 60 days of the election.

“Swearing to it does not make it a complaint,” the spokesperson said. “This was a political smear packaged as an ethics filing and published before anyone checked whether it even qualifies under the Committee’s rules.”

Also on Saturday, Boebert insisted that she’s “not a lesbian” and derided a group of reporters inquiring about the complaint on Capitol Hill, asking, “Why is everybody so horny here?”

She followed up the next day with a video statement in which she called the complaint a “smear” and Wheeler a “sloppy, desperate, obsessive hack.”

“This is more filthy garbage that reaches beyond me. This reaches into the homes of people who have dedicated years of service to Coloradans alongside of me,” she said, defending the staffers named in the complaint.

Ratzlaff told the Colorado Times Recorder that the accusations were “entirely false, defamatory, and beyond ridiculous.”

“There is absolutely no truth to any part of this claim,” Ratzlaff added.

But Ratzlaff’s ex-husband took a remarkably different tone when speaking with the Muckrakers’ boss.

“I assumed this would eventually surface,” Jace Ratzlaff told Wheeler. “I’ll have no further comment on this topic.”

It wouldn’t be the first time that Boebert’s romantic interests have crossed a line: The congresswoman was ejected from a Denver theater in 2023 for allegedly groping her date during an evening performance of Beetlejuice—a caught-on-camera spectacle that has continued to plague her political career.

But the recent allegations connote a bitter hypocrisy. The Colorado Republican has spent years tearing down the LGBTQ community for cheap political points. She has campaigned to end same-sex marriage, has repeatedly likened child-friendly drag performances such as Drag Queen Story Hour to “child abuse,” has introduced and supported legislation to end gender-affirming research that could help minors, and has claimed that gender-affirming surgery is tantamount to “mutilation.”

President Donald Trump is looking for a way to veto billions of dollars’ worth of scientific grants from the National Institutes of Health in order to punish elite universities.

Following a contentious meeting Friday, the White House began drafting an executive order that would establish an external committee to oversee NIH grants and keep federal funding away from schools that fail to comply with the president’s agenda.

During the meeting, Trump had repeatedly complained that the NIH hadn’t done more to crack down on Harvard University and other Ivy League schools, The New York Times reported Sunday.

The meeting reportedly brought the simmering conflict between Russell Vought, director of the Office of Management and Budget, and Dr. Jay Bhattacharya, the NIH director, to a head. Vought accused Bhattacharya of funding projects that contradicted the administration’s priorities to gut diversity, equity, and inclusion programs at the expense of scientific research.

In June 2025, a federal judge ruled that the Trump administration’s initial efforts to cut more than $1.81 billion from DEI-related grants constituted illegal racial discrimination. A few months later, another federal judge blocked the White House’s attempt to freeze $2 billion in federal research funding from Harvard University. Earlier this year, the White House wanted to impose a political test on federal grants, but was rebuked by the scientific community and blocked by Congress.

Still, under the second Trump administration, the NIH has already slashed more than half a billion dollars in medical research on some of the leading causes of death in America—and all for political reasons.

During the meeting Friday, Vought also sought to access NIH funds for the year that had not already been spent, but he was denied. This move follows allegations that the Department of Defense has tried to steal cash from the NIH in order to fund Trump’s disastrous war in the Middle East.

South Dakota’s outgoing secretary of state, a Republican, is endorsing a Democrat to replace her.

Monae Johnson, whose job includes administering elections, is supporting Terrence Davis, a former police officer, in November’s upcoming election, The New York Times reports. Johnson lost the Republican Party nomination at the state party’s convention in June to Heather Baxter, a state representative who supports President Trump’s crackdown on voting rights.

“I understand that this decision will disappoint some people in my party and anger others,” Johnson wrote for a political blog, the South Dakota War College, on Saturday.

“South Dakota deserves a Secretary of State who will strengthen confidence through performance rather than provocation; who will support election officials rather than burden them for political effect; who will protect voter access and election security without pretending those goals are enemies; and who will treat the office’s employees, voters, candidates, and business owners with dignity,” Johnson added.

Johnson was elected to the position in 2022 on promises to prevent election fraud and manipulation, including the hand counting of ballots and audits of every precinct in South Dakota. She even refused to acknowledge that Joe Biden was the winner of the 2020 presidential election. But after being elected, she did not institute many of the changes she promised during her campaign.

Though she did end up establishing a process for auditing precincts, Republicans at the state convention decided it wasn’t enough and ultimately decided to withdraw their support and back Baxter.

“In June, Republican delegates considered the record and nominated me over incumbent Secretary of State Monae Johnson, 59 percent to 41 percent,” Baxter said in a statement Sunday. “That was not confusion. That was self-government in action. The letter beside a name is not decoration. It tells voters what governing philosophy they will carry into the office that runs our elections and business services.”

Election denialism and an obsession with nonexistent fraud is now a prerequisite for Republicans holding office, thanks to Trump. Johnson, who worked in the secretary of state’s office for eight years before she ran and won, doesn’t want South Dakota’s election run by someone who will further undermine democracy.

President Donald Trump announced that he wants to build a military complex in a public traffic circle—as part of a strange bid to save his plans for his Triumphal Arch.

Trump wrote on Truth Social Sunday that he plans to build a “top grade Military Complex/Triumphal Arch” in order to store and launch drones that would be guarded by snipers. The president claimed the project came “at the strong request of the United States Military” and was for “National Security purposes.”

It was immediately clear that this was a terrible idea.

Virginia Representative Don Beyer called Trump’s plan “idiotic,” and pointed out that establishing a drone launching site so close to Ronald Reagan National Airport was incredibly dangerous. FWIW, planting snipers in an active traffic circle doesn’t sound like a great idea, either.

The decision to loudly declare the construction of a military storage facility within spitting distance of the Pentagon also doesn’t seem like the best way to safeguard national security—so what exactly is Trump up to?

Trump’s announcement comes after the National Park Service warned that the Triumphal Arch would be harmful to other historical landmarks, including the nearby Arlington Cemetery and the Lincoln Memorial.

Similarly to Trump’s controversial White House ballroom, which he claimed will provide a secure underground facility in case of a national emergency (even though one already exists), it appears that the president believes that tying his frivolous construction projects to national security will help them actually get built.

But Trump’s reason for all these construction projects is much more pathetic: He thinks that no one will honor him after he’s gone.