Elon Musk Settles Lawsuit Over Lying to Trump Supporters

Elon Musk has settled a class action lawsuit over allegations that his shady super PAC offered President Donald Trump’s supporters a chance to win $1 million—when the winners had already been hand-picked.

Ahead of the 2024 presidential election, Musk’s America PAC offered to “randomly” give away $1 million each day to registered voters in several battleground states if they signed an online petition to support “free speech and the right to bear arms”—and forfeited their personal information in the process.

In response to a legal challenge in Pennsylvania, Musk’s attorney Chris Gober revealed that the recipients weren’t chosen randomly at all, but were picked based on their personal story and “suitability to serve” as spokespeople for the super PAC.

Considering that the petition was not an illegal lottery scheme, the judge allowed the payments to continue. But after the elections, multiple lawsuits were filed against Musk and America PAC.

A one-page filing announced that the parties had reached a settlement agreement, HuffPost reported Thursday. The exact details of the settlement, such as how much Musk will owe the plaintiffs, was not immediately published.

Dozens of Israeli settlers beat and robbed veteran Washington Post photographer Heidi Levine Friday during an attack on an olive tree grove in the West Bank.

The Israelis, masked and dressed all in black, beat the Palestinian villagers harvesting olives while chasing out a group of journalists there to document the work. The settlers descended from a nearby hilltop settlement, hurling rocks at the gathering before setting the grove aflame.

Levine was caught in the mix. She was in a vest that read “PRESS” on the front and the back, but the attacking Israelis did not care to differentiate her. Instead, they knocked Levine to the ground, kicked and beat her, and then stole her cameras and phone, reported the Post.

The settlers also threw tear gas into the crowd, according to video footage captured by independent journalist Andrey Khrzhanovskiy. Israel’s military, the Israel Defense Forces, were nearby in vehicles but did not intervene.

Levine told the Post that she was overtaken by the settlers. “They just kept kicking me and kicking me, like probably 50 times,” she told reporters.

Khrzhanovskiy said that settlers beat Levine with sticks while the villagers retreated. Levine was taken to a nearby hospital after the incident.

“This morning, a Washington Post photographer, Heidi Levine, was attacked by Israeli settlers while reporting in the West Bank. She was wearing visible markings clearly identifying her as a journalist,” the executive editor of the paper, Matt Murray, wrote in a statement Friday morning. “While we are relieved that Heidi has received medical care and is safe, we are outraged by this unwarranted attack on a journalist doing her job and urge a thorough investigation and follow-through from authorities.”

Israel has attacked dozens of journalists throughout its assault on Palestine, violating international law in the process. The attack on Levine came less than two weeks after settlers assaulted AFP photographer Jaafar Ashtiyeh. Israel has also killed at least 247 media workers since the conflict began three years ago, according to a September report by the Committee to Protect Journalists. At least 192 of those individuals were Palestinian journalists working in Gaza.

Someone in the White House is crippling Ukraine’s access to military-grade Starlink terminals.

Leaders at the Department of Defense received an order from inside the White House to slow the Starshield satellite system that Ukraine uses for battlefield communications and drone operations, two U.S. officials and a Western official briefed on the matter told Reuters Thursday.

A Ukrainian military official claimed Wednesday that Elon Musk’s SpaceX had interrupted functioning of the country’s military-grade Starlink terminals. Presidential adviser Serhiy Beskrestnov wrote on Telegram that Ukrainian defense forces “did not receive warning about this limitation, and this led to the disruption of several missions.”

Ukrainian officials said that the Starshield receptors mounted on fast-moving drones stopped working altogether. The receptors were working again Thursday, but only at speeds of up to 100 miles per hour, Reuters reported.

At first it seemed possible that Musk was directly behind the service disruption—but he claimed on X that “any limits on speed or usage are decided by the US military and ultimately POTUS.”

A senior White House official denied that President Donald Trump was behind it, but did not respond to questions about whether another administration official might have made the order. “No such request was ever made by the president,” they told Reuters.

The disruption began just days after Trump publicly criticized Ukraine for continuing to attack Russian oil refineries after the U.S. lifted sanctions on the sale of Russian oil in a last-ditch attempt to alleviate financial strain ahead of the midterm elections. Unfortunately, Russian President Vladimir Putin’s current commitments are only a small drop in the bucket in terms of the diesel shortage that Trump’s monthslong war with Iran has created.

President Donald Trump isn’t doing a good job of explaining why he would drop one of America’s largest bombs on Iran.

In an interview with Newsmax’s Rob Finnerty Thursday, Trump was asked about reports that he was considering dropping the “mother of all bombs,” one of the largest pieces of ordinance in the military’s arsenal, on Iranian nuclear and infrastructure sites.

“Well, the mother of all bombs is not nuclear,” Trump replied. “This is just an extremely large bomb. It’s like a tiny nuclear bomb. But the mother of all bombs is one big bomb but it’s not nuclear. No, I wouldn’t use nuclear.”

Sources told CNN earlier that day that using the 21,600-pound MOAB is unlikely to be effective in destroying any nuclear sites, nor would it tip the balance in the war, which is going abysmally as Iran has taken control of the Strait of Hormuz.

As the conflict stretches on with no clear end in sight, Republican poll numbers keep going lower with the midterms less than a month away. If Trump thinks that dropping a big bomb would allow him to declare some sort of victory in a fruitless war, he is delusional, and his other recent remarks about the war seem to prove that. Meanwhile, the economy continues to flounder, and gas prices keep going up.

White House Press Secretary Katie Zacharia crashed and burned Thursday as she struggled to defend pretending to be an actual attorney.

Appearing on Fox News’s Hannity, Zacharia was forced to answer for her train wreck first press briefing. “It’s been widely panned, I’m sure you’re aware. It only lasted 14 minutes. You only took three questions,” host Sean Hannity said.

Zacharia claimed that since being tapped as secretary last week, she’d been given “very little prep time” and had only received the press briefing materials earlier that morning—which is, you know, generally how the news works.

Then Hannity pressed Zacharia to respond to revelations that she lied about being an actual attorney. The former on-air legal analyst had confirmed earlier that day that she never passed the bar exam—just days after she’d told reporters that she had.

“You said you consulted with many people and they advised you that it was okay to call yourself a lawyer but not an attorney, correct?” Hannity asked.

“Correct,” Zacharia said. Hannity pointed to a CNN report that showed 15 social media posts she’d shared in which she was identified as an “attorney.”

“I think they were retweets and I corrected the record and said that [they’re] not endorsing the title, they’re retweets of a title that had been given,” Zacharia stammered. (That doesn’t quite explain why President Donald Trump would then announce that he’d appointed “an attorney” to be his new press secretary.)

“Why not just say, ‘I went to Pepperdine Law School and then took a different career path, and I took the bar once and didn’t pass it?’” Hannity asked. “Why get into this long drawn-out definition between the difference between a lawyer and an attorney, ‘cause I don’t think people see much of a distinction. Why didn’t you just say, ‘I never practiced law?’”

“Well, Sean, when I moved back from the United States I didn’t retake the bar, I had four kids in six years. It was never my intent to go into the practice of law,” Zacharia said.

“When I was at—when I went to go engage in media and give legal analysis, I consulted attorneys and legal professionals as to whether or not they agreed that I could be labeled a lawyer both because I had a valid juris doctor from a good law school, a reputable law school, Pepperdine law school, and in conjunction with the fact that I did have actual, substantive legal experience.”

“I wasn’t providing any legal analysis, Sean—or, I’m, excuse me, legal advice. I wasn’t being paid for legal advice, I was giving a general review of the legal circumstances surrounding it,” she said.

Trump’s new press secretary better get her story straight. At best, Zacharia wildly misrepresented her credentials—at worst, she gave unlicensed legal advice. If she can’t defend her own lies, how in the world will she ever defend Trump’s?