Republican Mayor Physically Charges at Resident as He Loses It

Matthew Bianchini, the Republican mayor of Pemberton Township, New Jersey, physically charged at one of his constituents during a township meeting Wednesday night.

Video footage from a reporter with the Pine Barrens Tribune shows Bianchini having to be restrained by multiple people and escorted from the council chambers while he yelled, “I am getting you—I am fucking get you!” Bianchini was upset at Michael Sawka, a frequent critic. Sawka called for Bianchini to resign and to be arrested after the incident.

“He just threatened me! That is on video! That is on audio,” Sawka said. “I want the police here to arrest him for that threat. That is assault!”

During the meeting, Sawka allegedly insulted Bianchini’s wife and daughter, who were at the meeting, and then made an obscene gesture at Bianchini.

Later, Bianchini told TV station WPVI, “Was it wrong? Absolutely. Was it justified? Absolutely. And I would do it again if I had to.”

“Don’t attack my family. I think any good husband, any good father, would’ve done just what I did.”

Sawka denied provoking the mayor.

“His family behind us started saying stuff. I turn around, and I start waving my hands, like kinda just—why don’t you all just shut up? I didn’t even say a word; I just was waving my hand,” Sawka said.

Bianchini has a history of confrontation since becoming mayor in January. He told a councilmember to “shut the fuck up” during a budget dispute in May.

President Trump went on another unprompted homoerotic tangent at a rally on Thursday, this time about military generals.

“Just recently I gave all members of the United States military $1,776,” Trump said at the Iowa rally, speaking of his one-time “warrior dividend” for service members. “And everyone said, ‘Oh, it can’t be done. You can’t do it. It won’t be done. You can’t do it.’ Well, I did it. I said, generals, I want to give them a bonus. They’ve been so great. Tell me what we can do.... These three guys who were so handsome. I hate handsome men. I’ve always hated. They’re like central casting, four-star guys.” Trump went on to finish his anecdote.

This is becoming a trend for Trump, which is especially strange given that he likes to present himself as particularly hypermasculine. For the last week, he has been obsessing over Senator Jon Husted’s buttocks.

“I don’t do this with men very often. I started examining his body. And I looked and I watched up and down. I watched his ass and I looked at the whole. And then I looked at his hands. Look at his hands, he’s got these, like, claws. And I got it. You are a great athlete. I didn’t know that because he doesn’t talk about that. Congratulations, now they finally know. That was very good,” Trump said last week.

“I’m studying his body,” Trump said again days later. “I’ve never studied the body of a man before. It’s not my thing. Nothing wrong with it, of course. But it’s never been my thing. But I looked at his ass. And then I looked at his legs. I said, ‘His ass, shit, it’s like a pile of muscle.’ Then I looked at his legs and I said, ‘Man, his feet are big.’”

“Every night now he plays out a new gay fantasy in public and makes bizarre noises. His words increasingly make no sense. Dementia is overtaking him, and the fact that his party refuses to see it makes the whole party a danger to the United States,” Trump biographer Seth Abramson wrote online. “Vote to protect your country.”

Jared Kushner oversaw foreign slush funds filled and managed by the leaders of the United Arab Emirates, Saudi Arabia, and Israel, Vanity Fair reported Thursday.

In the forthcoming book Princes and Thieves: Jared Kushner and Mohamed bin Zayed’s Secret Plot to Remake the Middle East, author Matthew Cole made a shocking revelation about Donald Trump’s son-in-law’s potentially illegal dealings with foreign dictators.

During the first Trump administration, the Netherlands Defense Intelligence and Security Service discovered a way to hack into Kushner’s iPhone. Officials learned that he was secretly moving hundreds of thousands of dollars through a bank account at First Dubai Bank.

Crucially, Kushner did not own the account, but was merely a signatory for the account managed and owned by the Watani Al Emarat Foundation, a government-funded charity run by Dherar Belhoul Al Falasi, a close friend of UAE President Mohamed bin Zayed Al Nahyan, referred to as MBZ.

Starting in 2017, the Saudis and Emiratis transferred roughly $750 million into the account to be used as a foreign policy slush fund. The charity was used to fund the UAE government’s covert intelligence operations overseas, as well as its secret weapons-purchasing programs, one confidential source told Cole.

First Dubai Bank is run by Tahnoon bin Zayed Al Nahyan, MBZ’s brother. (Tahnoon also oversees a fund called Lunate, which is among the largest stakeholders in Kushner’s shady private equity firm Affinity Partners.) The money was sent by a bank in Azerbaijan, where banks have a well-established but unadvertised practice of exchanging Saudi riyals or Emirati dirhams for an equal amount of American dollars.

Four senior Trump administration officials—including two national security advisers, a White House chief of staff, and a former CIA director—told Cole they were not aware that the president had authorized Kushner to access a foreign government bank account.

Kushner’s lawyer denied that his client had any knowledge of the charity or the bank account, and claimed that Trump’s son-in-law did not make any arrangements with foreign leaders that the president did not agree to.

But that wasn’t the only account Kushner managed. By the spring of 2018, MBZ had also put roughly $1 billion for Kushner into a second account at Israel’s Central Bank—at Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s urging. Unlike the political slush fund, Kushner’s activity in this account indicated that it was for his personal use. The money was difficult to access, and so Kushner would channel requests to Netanyahu for the funds to be released through then-Ambassador David M. Friedman, and then move the money through an account in Cyprus. The former diplomat denied any involvement in the scheme, and claimed that “there are no accounts, and never were.”

Additionally, the UAE secretly put money into yet another account at Israel’s Central Bank as a “rainy-day defense fund” in case of an attack from Iran.

It should go without saying, but Kushner did not disclose his access to these accounts to the IRS—potentially violating federal law. At the time, Kushner was a government employee who worked in the White House, meaning he was required to submit both public and confidential financial forms and disclose any bank account on which he had access as a signatory or beneficiary. Kushner also failed to disclose himself as an agent of a foreign government, having been paid nearly $2 billion in total by foreign leaders. If he offered anything in return for the money, even just conversations with his father-in-law, then he would have violated U.S. bribery laws and the foreign agent statute.

This is far from the first time that Kushner has been accused of blatant self-dealing in his service to Trump. He used used peace negotiations with Russia to concoct a multibillion-dollar deal to benefit his business partners, invested in a firm that saw massive gains from Israel’s ongoing military campaign in Gaza, and used his gig as special envoy as an opportunity to try to raise funds from foreign governments and individuals in the Middle East.

Attorney General Todd Blanche is open to blocking states from certifying the November midterm elections.

Blanche made the comments during a Thursday press gaggle in Virginia.

“Is there any scenario in which DOJ would weigh in on that certification process or try to block states from certifying?” a reporter asked.

“Is there any scenario? Yes,” Blanche said. “Of course there’s scenarios that we could all come up with hypothetically, some doomsday scenario for example, right? I don’t think it’s proper to make any kind of conclusory statements about what’s gonna happen in the future.... It is not DOJ’s intention to—and it’s never our intention—to improperly interfere with our elections.”

“But to say that there’s no circumstances that we would ever do that, of course I’m not gonna say that,” he continued.

The federal government is not supposed to play a role in state certification of elections. The soundbite quickly raised alarm to Blanche’s left.

“THIS IS CODE RED !!” wrote California Governor Gavin Newsom’s press office. “Trump’s politicized DOJ is now saying out loud that they may interfere in the election in a desperate, unprecedented, and completely unAmerican and anti-democratic attempt to keep Trump and MAGA in power.”

“He answered the question of whether Donald Trump’s DOJ may interfere in the midterm elections with a ‘Yes,’” said Campaign for New York Health’s Melanie D’Arrigo.

It is incredibly abnormal for a sitting attorney general to float the possibility of interfering with an election, especially one who believes the Justice Department is not independent from the president (in this case, a president who has spent six years trying to manufacture a baseless voter fraud scandal). Yet Blanche, Trump’s formal personal attorney, did it with ease.

Mail-in ballots are being rejected at a growing rate in rural areas thanks to U.S. Postal Service cuts. 

ProPublica reports that in the primaries this year in Oregon, North Carolina, Washington, California, and Ohio, a staggering amount of ballots arrived too late to be counted due to delays in mail delivery. Three days after primary elections in Stevens County, Washington, election workers checked the mail for late ballots. They found over 500 envelopes when they were only expecting a few dozen. 

The same thing happened in all of eastern Washington’s 11 rural counties. Over 2,000 ballots came in late, compared to just 600 late ballots in 2022’s midterm elections. The nonprofit news outlet traces the issues to a number of changes at the USPS. 

First, over the past three years, the postal service moved to process first-class mail at regional hubs instead of smaller plants closer to local post offices. Then, just after the presidential election two years ago, the USPS cut in half its pickups from post offices at least 50 miles away from those hubs.

That increased delivery time by at least one day. Postmarks, which are critical for legally verifying if a ballot can be counted, were also pushed back as those stamps aren’t added until mail reaches a regional processing center. In rural counties in the five states, late ballots have a grace period as long as they are postmarked by Election Day, but rejections still shot up compared to 2022 according to ProPublica’s findings. 

The postal service’s policy changes were pushed by Trump administration officials, and likely unintentionally hurt the Republican Party.  

“I don’t think they realized how much it was going to affect their voter base,” Washington Secretary of State Steve Hobbs, a Democrat, told ProPublica, noting that his state has “a lot of rural Republican voters.”

USPS officials claim that delays are much less likely for November’s general election because of “extraordinary measures.” The postal service sent a memo to every post office in the country earlier this fall instructing them to separate ballots from other mail for the 10 days preceding Election Day on November 3. The memo said that the post offices should deliver the ballots on the day they arrive. 

“We work to identify and address issues quickly,” said the chair of the Postal Service board of governors Amber McReynolds in a press conference last week, “so ballots can continue to move swiftly from election offices to voters and from voters back to election offices.”

If they are wrong, though, many races could be affected. A few thousand or even hundred ballots could swing many contests in rural areas, leaving voters across the political spectrum disenfranchised. Trump’s attempts to undermine the entire process aren’t helping, either.