Handicapping the Thanksgiving Turkey Pardons

Handicapping the Thanksgiving Turkey Pardons 1

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Handicapping the Thanksgiving Turkey Pardons 2

It was reporterd in Axios last week that Senate Democratic Leader Chuck Schumer desperately tried to keep his conference together and preserve the effects of the shutdown through the Thanksgiving holiday. 

That’s right, the flight cancellations and delays, the staffing shortages in air traffic control making the skies a little less safe, people in real need dependent upon food assistance programs continuing to go hungry, and the men and women in uniform, and their families, not getting paid for a full two months. That’s what the Democratic leader wanted to gift the country next week while still referring to the chaos as Trump’s shutdown. 

Thankfully, eight Democrats did cave, along with six more in the House, and voila, the government reopened with a fortnight to spare before the four-day weekend. Now that we can shift into more normal debris, like the Epstein files, blowing up drug boats, and what Tucker Carlson or anyone sharing partial DNA with him does, I’m all for lightening the mood. The annual event of pardoning a turkey or pair of turkeys at the White House has become an official event since George Herbert Walker Bush first spared the axe to an anonymous bird residing in an undisclosed location. That tradition continued for all of Bush the Elder’s four-year term. 

Naturally, with any goverment program, even one that’s silly, it expanded over time. By 1999, in President Bill Clinton’s outer years, the birds were officially recognized. First, it was Harry the Turkey, followed in his final year of office by clemency for Jerry the Turkey. 

President George W. Bush ushered in the two turkey pardon era in 2001, just a couple months after the horrific 9/11 terrorist attacks on New York and Washington, D.C. Liberty and Freedom were the appropriately named turkeys that survived the dining room table that year. 14 more birds would go free during Bush’s time in office. 

The only notable events during President Obama’s term were passing Obamacare, setting the stage for bankrupting the healthcare system and bringing us full circle to Chuck Schumer’s shutdown stunt he so desired to continue through your holiday. But in the turkey pardoning department, 2015’s Honest and Abe were the standout birds given their freedom papers by Obama, and if you go all the way back to 1863, that’s the first time any American president spared the life of a bird on Thanksgiving. 

Historic America has a wonderul site that has a page devoted to the history of presidential turkey pardons. After being beseeched by Tad, who had taken a liking to a bird gifted to the Lincolns for the upcoming Thanksgiving Day dinner, Abe decided to spare its life. Tad had already named the turkey Jack, taught it to follow him around the White House, and had made him his pet. Abe didn’t have the heart to eat him.

Finally, during the Joe Biden regency, thankfully lasting only four years, staff there couldn’t even do this ritual ceremony right without screwing it up. In 2022, Biden the Feeble pardoned Chocolate and Chip. Two years later, obviously acting as though they had just met, Biden again pardoned Chocolate and Chip. Or maybe it was autopen that pardoned the same birds twice. One can never fully know what went on during that fog of American leadership.

As for me, I find the whole exercise pointless and silly. Turkeys have three purposes – eat, reproduce, be delicious. 

It’s always around this time of year that the PETA folks show up and demand we consume tofurkey instead. PETA-UK tweeted five times in all caps, because apparently the messaging the first time didn’t sink in to the desired effect. 

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Look, my attitude to all the animal rights people is this. If you want to have an honest discussion about what I get to eat, first, you all must come out and spend just as much energy sparing the lives of every human being in utero. Call for the ban of abortions and spare the lives of the unborn, and then we can have a conservation about what’s for dinner. 

Of course, in their heart of hearts, most animal rights people and/or vegans are just fine with aborting human life. It’s the poor turkeys and such that can’t advocate for themselves, you see. But if they did choose to surprise me and sanctify human life the way they’re trying to do with walking food, I’d be happy to have that conversation – over a cheeseburger. I would not consider changing for a nanosecond the way I eat, but I would at least show them respect for finally getting their priorities straight in the overall hierarchy of the food chain. 

The White House press shop has not as of yet decided upon who gets the coveted Trump pardon signed in his own hand. I’m suggesting a break of protocol. Eat the bird, and issue a honorary pardon to a human turkey who really doesn’t deserve it, but should at least be recognized for acting like a turkey recently. 

My 2025 nominees: 

Marjorie Taylor Greene. I think over the course of the hundreds of columns I’ve been privileged to write for Hot Air, I’ve written her name exactly one time – now. Donald Trump had comments on her on a Florida tarmac before coming back to Washington Sunday night. 

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Zohran Mamdani. Apparently, Trump is going to try to give him a chance to be normal. My guess is the appearance might resemble Volodymyr Zelenskyy’s first visit to see Trump in the Oval Office earlier in the year. 

Kate Sullivan: This one is a little inside baseball, but the White House reporter who left CNN to go work for Bloomberg in February seems to befoul the President’s mood every time she pops off at a press gaggle. 

Mike Barnicle – On Morning Joe last Friday with Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent, Barnicle walked into a door so hard as to cause damage to both Barnicle and the door. 

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Michelle Obama. This one really might be a no-brainer. Just give her a nice field somewhere to go live out her days in peace and comfort, clucking away about how white people expect too much out of Black people’s hair, and this, apparently. 

If there was ever a national incentive to remain as immature as the Senate Democrats who wanted to keep the shutdown going indefinitely, this woman would be that catalyst. In all of my years of doing politics, I’ve never seen so consistent a message of ingrattitude from a person who has fame, fortune, and the esteem of millions of people. Just go ahead and give her the paper with the Butterball approved sticker under the presidential seal and be done with the whole process. 

And then, could we get back to focusing a smidge on affordability before we punt away 2026? Thanks. 

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Washington Post: California’s Wealth Tax Is a Terrible Idea

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Last month a group of progressive academics introduced a plan to put a new wealth tax on the ballot. The initiative is aimed at billionaires who reside in California as of January 1, 2026. The tax isn’t a standard income tax, it’s a “one time” wealth tax which would take 5% of whatever the state’s billionaires own as of the end of next year.

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Supporters say that if this passes it would raise $100 billion from about 180 people. That money would then be used at a rate of $25 billion per year for the next four years to cover the state’s budget shortfall. Why is California is such dire straights? Partly because the state extended Medicaid to illegal immigrants. This cost of this program turned out to be about twice as much as anticipated and the state had to borrow billions to cover the cost. The program itself was also put on hold.

Today the Washington Post published an editorial calling the plan the “greatest act of economic self sabotage in recent history. The editorial praises Gov. Newsom for pushing back on this tax plan.

California Gov. Gavin Newsom has been trying to position himself as the leader of a listless Democratic Party ahead of his likely presidential run. He’s had some success energizing the base, but will the ambitious governor survive standing up to what could be his state’s greatest act of economic self-sabotage in recent history?…

Set aside the legal challenges that would inevitably follow and could prevent the tax from ever being levied. The most likely result is that billionaires would flee, so the state would also lose non-wealth-tax revenue. The risk of the measure passing might even cause some billionaires to leave, just in case. This initiative seems almost tailor-made to drive most Silicon Valley tech companies to Austin, Texas.

No doubt, Newsom understands the state probably wouldn’t recover from such an event, which is why he opposes the measure. His allies have already launched a political action committee to fight it…

More interesting than his electoral calculation, however, is what policy and moral arguments he uses against the tax. His approach, and how voters respond, will speak volumes about the state of Democratic Party as it seeks its way out of the political wilderness.

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How will Newsom push back on this plan exactly? Will he not that a wealth tax that only applies to a fraction of the population is a matter of basic fairness? Forbes actually used this in it’s case on behalf of the tax.

California has nearly 40 million residents. The proposal suggests that a tax on just 200 of these people could address two significant concerns. Put differently, a tax on just 0.00005% of the population would address a significant set of problems facing all of California.

Regarding the second point, California billionaires tend to own superfluous assets. For instance, Zuckerberg owns 11 homes in Palo Alto, California, according to the New York Times. Many would argue that if he had to sell one or two of his homes, his life would not be materially impacted.

I don’t think anyone believes that taxing billionaires would materially impact their lives. That’s missing the point. The wealth of billionaires is almost always tied up in their ownership of valuable companies like Tesla or Amazon or Netflix. When you create a wealth tax you’re not asking them to give up a 10th home (which would be worth a few million, at most), you’re forcing the owner to cede a portion of his ownership of the company he created. You are effectively seizing the means of production piecemeal and saying that once any enterprise becomes really successful, the government has the right to claim it.

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Will Newsom admit that once created it’s very unlikely this wealth tax will only be used once? Whatever he says against this tax will be running up against the popularity of this idea on the far left and attempts to install similar taxes in other states. And as the Post notes, creating this tax is all but begging these very successful people to go someplace where success isn’t punished.

The most common issue raised by skeptics of wealth taxes is “capital flight”. As discussed in a Tax Notes article, “such a tax would signal to wealthy taxpayers that they should reside elsewhere.” This article goes on to discuss that high-income taxpayers pay the majority of state income taxes in California, and even if a small number of those individuals leave, it could lead to long-term tax collection consequences.

This concern has been underscored by numerous academic studies. Most recently, an NBER working paper co-authored by Jakobsen, Kleven, Kolsrud, Landais, and Munoz finds that 1 one percentage-point increase in the top wealth tax rate in Sweden and Denmark leads to an outward migration of wealthy taxpayers by two percent. Other work in the American Economic Review by Moretti and Wilson documents that variation in jurisdictional taxes significantly influences the location of talent, suggesting that higher tax burdens lead individuals to relocate.

Anecdotally, we can look no further than Jeff Bezos (founder of Amazon), who moved from Washington to Florida in 2023. Even though he has many non-tax reasons to make this move, the move just so happened to coincide with Washington proposing a 1% wealth tax on individuals with over $250 million in total assets. Different from California, Washington is already a very competitive state as it comes to overall tax liabilities. As high-income Californians face the highest level of state income tax liability, this proposed wealth tax could be the straw that breaks the camel’s back toward their relocation decision.

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Speaking of Elon Musk, the article continues:

If even a small number of the current California billionaires follow his lead in response to the proposed wealth taxes, not only would California not be able to collect $100 billion in incremental revenue, but it could also end up in a situation where the state is worse off financially.

Newsom isn’t opposed to this because he loves billionaires. He’s opposed because he’s smart enough to realize this would be a disaster for his state. If even a dozen billionaires leave, that will blow an even bigger hole in the state’s budget and mark California as a place where you should not choose to launch a potentially successful company in the future. This tax is how the golden state kills the golden goose.

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UK Cops Pay Up After BS WhatsApp Arrest

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If it’s any comfort to the parents here who found out that Joe Biden’s authoritarian FBI had branded them Enemy No. 1 aka ‘domestic terrorists,’ and was monitoring their every move for having the unmitigated gall to show up and squawk at local school board meetings… 

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…In 2021, while working with the National School Boards Association (“NSBA”) the Biden Administration tried to paint concerned parents as not just political enemies, but as enemies of the state who should be labeled as “domestic terrorists.” Following this absurd description of parents who advocate for their children and push back against woke ideologies in schools, states submitted FOIA requests to get further details on this alarming escalation by the Biden Administration.  

…at least the regime hadn’t gotten to the stage where it sent brownshirts banging on front doors.

You know, and then hauled parents away in front of weeping little ones.

They only did when they couldn’t arrest a parent at an actual school board meeting, or there was some sort of religious tie, which was an aggravating factor they could use to whip up charges with. Religious folks really aggravated POTATUS and his handlers.

For the most part, un-woke people with opposing opinions only found out later they were ‘terrorists’ on government ‘lists.’

Not so in Keir Starmer’s United Kingdom.

You find out right quick that the local teachers, principals, and school officials don’t care for your opinion.

That’s what happened to a couple back in January who were in the middle of a long-running dispute with their handicapped daughter’s school.

Maxie Allen and Rosalind Levine had been banging heads with school officials for months, and, yeah – it had gotten frosty, even though, mind you, Allen had been a former ‘governor’ for this very school.

…They had been banned from entering the premises, including being blocked from attending the parents’ evening for their daughter Sascha, 10, who suffers from epilepsy and is neurodivergent and registered disabled.

The ban came after Allen, a former governor, had written to school governors questioning the recruitment process for a new head teacher.

The school complained to the police in June last year of a social media campaign by the parents, and again in December complaining of “persistent” emails. Allen and Levine say that they emailed regularly to address issues relating to Sascha’s needs and repeatedly tried to persuade the school to overturn the ban.

After the parent body was warned about “inflammatory” comments on social media, Levine used WhatsApp to make a disparaging comment about the acting head teacher at the time and cast aspersions on the abilities of the head of governors.

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So, school administrators were already complaining to the police about the couple a year ago, in June, and then did so again last December, after they’d already banned them from the school their handicapped daughter was still attending.

In her frustration with the entire situation, Levine commented on WhatsApp in an uncomplimentary fashion. In nothing I’ve read does it say she at any time threatened anyone.

I can only posit she ripped them up.

Still in December, after the WhatsApp comment, the police issued a warning to the couple and instructed them to remove their daughter from the school. They did so shortly thereafter.

What a trip, right?

One comment, the daughter’s out of school, that should be the end of it, right?

Not in the UK, it’s not.

A week later, a half dozen scruffy nerfherders dressed as British constabulary wander up to the couple’s front door.

And proceed to arrest them both, for complaining about the school, all in front of their crying youngest daughter. (Whole front door video is here)

Astonishing.

…The case led to a national debate about police overreach after The Times revealed that Allen and Levine had been detained in January in front of their young daughter before being fingerprinted, searched and left in a police cell for eight hours.

They were questioned on suspicion of harassment, malicious communications and causing a nuisance on school property. After a five-week investigation, police concluded that there should be no further action.

Six officers, who arrived in a police van and two marked vehicles, arrested the couple after Cowley Hill Primary School, which their daughter attended, complained of a high volume of emails and disparaging comments on WhatsApp.

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THERE WERE A LOT OF MEAN EMAILS AND THEN WHATSAPP WAAH!

The chief of the Hertfordshire cops defended the bold action of his valiant, hands-in-their-pockets professionals.

…In April, Andy Prophet, chief constable of Hertfordshire, defended the arrests.

He said that the inspector who had approved them did not believe Allen and Levine would consent to a voluntary interview and also needed to preserve electronic devices.

THEY MIGHT HAVE TOLD US TO PISS OFF WAAH!

Back in April, the Free Speech Union, which took up Allen and Levine’s case, noticed that there was some extraordinary overreach for simply complaining in public about a child’s school. It turns out Hertfordshire police also took to leaning on family friends and advisors not to ‘help the couple,’ which included attempting to intimidate a member of Parliament.

WHUT

… As the police searched their home, the couple were detained in front of their three year-old daughter before being held in cells for eight hours.

And all this for querying the recruitment process for a new headteacher. No wonder that Mr Allen, a Times Radio producer, said the police’s behaviour represented “massive overreach”.

But it now transpires that the force’s intervention wasn’t restricted to him and Ms Levine. Hertfordshire Police also warned Michelle Vince, a local county councillor, to stop helping the family by sending emails to the school on their behalf — or risk being investigated herself.

It then asked her to pass on the same warning to anyone she’d cc’ed when contacting Cowley Hill. This included the local Conservative MP Sir @OliverDowden, who has professed himself “astonished that a situation could have arisen where any police officer could think it would be remotely acceptable to suggest that an MP should be curtailed in carrying out their democratic duties”.

All of which rather backs up the FSU’s research findings that the British police have very little understanding of free speech.

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After five weeks investigating themselves, the Hertfordshire police have grudgingly admitted they jacked this one up. 

But ONLY the arrest part, mind you. They did everything else perfectly.

So, to shut the couple up and keep this ugly incident from escalating further, they’re going to pay them off.

Awfully big of them.

…Maxie and Rosalind had the case against them dropped after five weeks – but it raised serious questions how a few critical comments shared on WhatsApp can lead to such a police response.

Maxie said: ‘Quite a lot of people close to us were put through the ringer by these events, such as our two children.

‘Our three year old daughter was there when we were arrested. She saw her mum being led away by uniformed officers.

‘Our 80-year-old mother in law had to be brought round to the house to look after the kids.

‘And our neighbours, and some of neighbours were left in tears by the sight of the all the police cars and officers.

What they’re not getting out of the Hertfordshire Starmtroopers is a ‘We’re terribly sorry‘ because they’re not.

…He added: ‘They’ve not apologised. They’re not going to apologise, and I don’t think they were ever going to apologise – sorry is not a word in the police’s vocabulary.’

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I don’t think it’s anywhere near enough. This little video is mind-blowing.

‘…Okay, you’re interviewing me and you don’t know what’s malicious…’

This is precisely where a Democratic administration would have us now, had Harris won in November. Were I in a blue state, I would still be prepared for battle.

That’s what all the lists were for. They still have them.

No. These people didn’t get near enough, and I’d want some payback from the school, too.

That’s what would be up.

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NEW: Epstein Files Exposes Dems on ‘Brooklyn’s Barack,’ Pritzker Family

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The Epstein Files will eventually prove to be the most politically defective hand grenade in recent memory. Everyone who picks it up as a weapon has eventually had it explode in their own faces. The Trump administration has already learned that lesson the hard way. 

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Now, apparently, it’s the Democrats’ turn. After demanding the release of all material related to the investigations of Jeffrey Epstein, they are about to find out why one should be careful about what one wishes for. It turns out that Democrats kept engaging with Epstein long after his plea deal for sex crimes in 2007. One e-mail connects a Democrat fundraising group’s efforts on behalf of Hakeem Jeffries and Epstein himself in 2013 (via Twitchy):

That has reminded some of an earlier revelation from almost two years ago about the Pritzker family. The cousin of Illinois governor J.B. Pritzker got named by one of the victims in the investigation:

The story on Tom Pritzker came out during the 2023-24 holiday doldrums, and has been mainly forgotten since. A federal judge had ordered the release of Epstein investigation documents, and this story emerged shortly after New Year’s Day:

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Hyatt Hotels billionaire Thomas Pritzker, a cousin of Illinois Gov. JB Pritzker, is among the names of more than 100 people connected to Jeffrey Epstein in documents made public on Wednesday, following a federal judge’s December ruling that the information be unsealed. …

In a deposition, Giuffre accused Thomas Pritzker, a Chicago businessman and Hyatt Hotels executive chairman, of serious sexual allegations, naming him as one of several men she was trafficked to have sex with.

A spokesperson for Pritzker told Reuters that Pritzker “continues to vehemently deny” the allegation.

Gov. JB Pritzker’s office did not immediately respond to a request for comment on the documents listing his cousin.

Furthermore, Tom Pritzker’s contact with Epstein continued until at least 2016. An email exchange shows JB’s cousin discussing James Comey, Bill Clinton, and disgraced financier Marc Rich:

So let’s recap. The Pritzker family — who provide massive amounts of resources for Democrats and progressives, and now hold the governor’s office in Illinois — kept close contact with a known and notorious sex trafficker for years after his conviction in Florida. Democrat fundraisers tried to woo Epstein to support their candidates, including the current House Democrat caucus leader, who has been lecturing everyone on the moral stain of Epstein. It’s exactly the kind of hypocritical projection that has left everyone else vulnerable to the Epstein grenade. 

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Allow me a prediction: We will shortly find plenty of material that will implicate fundraisers and organizers, plus Epstein’s connections on both sides of the political divide — at least until Donald Trump’s first-term DoJ initiated a new prosecution of Epstein that finally took him and eventually Ghislaine Maxwell down. I’d guess that these revelations will embarrass Democrats more than Republicans, given Epstein’s political connections, but I won’t be surprised if there are some on both sides. I’ll also predict that no one of any real political standing will be directly implicated, because those connections would almost certainly have leaked waaaaay before now. 

In the meantime, the real entertainment will come from watching people continue to pick up the Epstein grenade. I think we’re gonna need some reinforcements out here …

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Graham Platner Is Still a Socialist and Wants to Pack the Court

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It was a month ago that CNN’s Andrew Kaczynski revealed that Maine Senate candidate Graham Platner had referred to himself as a communist and a socialist on Reddit. At the time, Platner said he regretted those comments and denied he was a socialist.

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In one now-deleted Reddit comment from 2021, Platner responded to a thread about people becoming more conservative as they age by saying: “I got older and became a communist.” The comment was made on a subreddit called r/Antiwork, a far-left forum “for those who want to end work.”

In another Reddit post that year, Platner reflected on his life after his military service, saying he was “a vegetable growing, psychedelics taking socialist these days.”…

In his interview with CNN, Platner wanted to assure voters: “I’m not a communist. I’m not a socialist. I own a small business. I’m a Marine Corps veteran.”

There’s plenty of evidence that Platner really was a socialist and that it went beyond just the things he said on Reddit. For instance, he identified himself as a member of the Socialist Rifle Association and encouraged others to join a local chapter.

But even now, a month after his denial, his message still sounds a lot like socialism. Last week he posted a video from one of his town hall events in Maine in which he discussed billionaires.

“Nobody works hard enough to justify $1 billion,” the military veteran and oyster farmer told potential voters at the event. “Not in a world where I know people that have three jobs and can’t even afford their rent.”

With audience members nodding their heads in agreement, Platner continued by saying, “I refuse to believe that in a state like Maine, where people work as hard as we do here, that it is merely hard work that gets you that kind of success. We all know it isn’t. We all know it’s the structures. It’s the tax code. That is what allows that money to get accrued.”…

“The world that we live in today,” he explained, “is not organic. It is not natural. The political and economic world we have did not happen because it had to. It happened because politicians in Washington and the billionaires who write the policies that they pushed made this happen. They changed the laws, and they made it legal to accrue as much wealth and power as they have now.”

The solution? “We need to make it illegal again to do that,” says Platner.

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Here’s the video:

It’s “the structures”? What does that mean? What structures does he think are responsible for people becoming billionaires? Unless the structure in question is capitalism itself.

He mentions the tax code but taxes only take a portion of what you earned after the fact. Higher taxes on billionaires would take more of their money but it would only take what they earn, not what they own. Most billionaires are rich because they own some company that is worth a lot of money, not because they make a huge salary.

He bypasses this difference between income taxes, which tax money people take as salary, and wealth taxes, which take a portion of what people own. So, for instance, if you wanted to tax Jeff Bezos wealth, you’d need to force him to hand over part of his ownership of Amazon to the government, which is literally seizing the means of production. The government wouldn’t pay him for those shares of stock, they would just demand them in the form of a wealth tax. Is that what Platner has in mind?

He says he wants to make it “illegal again” to accrue that much wealth, but when was it illegal before? The answer is never. He’s just making stuff up.

And of course, he’s right that the capitalist system isn’t organic in the sense that it just happens. It requires laws and international cooperation to make sure people get paid for their work rather than just having it get stolen from them. To stick with Jeff Bezos, there are structures that make it possible for Amazon to exist and collect money in various countries for services they offter. So it’s fair to say a world where those structures don’t exist is one where Amazon doesn’t exist and Jeff Bezos is not a billionaire.

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So here’s the question someone should ask Graham Platner: Would you rather live in a world where Amazon can’t exist so that billionaires like Jeff Bezos don’t exist? Maybe Platner would but I don’t think the millions of people who use Amazon every day would prefer that it not exist. I suspect Graham Platner is one of those people. He’s bought things on Amazon before. Someone should ask him about these contradictions and see if he can explain them.

Platner wrapped up his thoughts on billionaires saying, “It’s up to us to organize, use our immense power as the working class, and win the world we deserve.” In other words, workers of the world unite. He still sounds like a socialist to me.

Platner is also making news for other comments he’s made recently at town hall events. He suggested packing the Supreme Court and impeaching two sitting justices.

“We’re going to have to start treating the Supreme Court like the political action wing that it has become of conservatism,” Platner said Saturday during a Somerset County Democrats meeting in the central Maine town of Skowhegan. “It is not functioning as a constitutional body.”

“I’m a supporter of stacking the Court,” he continued. “I’m also a supporter of, I mean, the Senate can write its own rules. … I firmly believe if we held Supreme Court justices to the same standard that we hold other federal judges, there’s a compelling case for the impeachment and removal of at least two justices.”…

The remarks are Platner’s most aggressive to date when it comes to the High Court. Platner’s campaign site lists a number of left-wing policy priorities, but does not include a section on the Supreme Court. And while Platner has criticized the Court’s conservative justices on X, he has not called to expand the Court or impeach any of its members.

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Here’s audio of his comments on the court.

Even Bernie Sanders doesn’t support packing the Supreme Court (though his solution is arguably almost as bad). Platner is running to the left of Sanders and Sanders is a self-described socialist. So the idea that Platner is not a socialist doesn’t really hold up to any scrutiny at this point.

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The Dam Breaks on Thomas Crooks Social Media

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One of the enduring mysteries of the past year has been the person behind the name “Thomas Crooks.” 

I don’t mean that literally, quite, but rather just that we have a name, a few pictures, and a few basic facts about him, but nothing that gives us any insight into how a young man became an assassin. We know more in a day about most shooters than we have learned about Thomas Crooks in over a year. 

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Thanks to Miranda Devine at The New York Post and an investigator she has been working with, that is no longer true. 

It’s no surprise that Crooks was a disturbed young man, because assassins are almost always, by definition, disturbed. Sane people don’t go on suicide missions to kill political candidates. Still, it’s essential to understand how someone like Crooks becomes radicalized, especially in a case of such high profile, where the public has a strong and legitimate desire to know the facts. 

The FBI has been remarkably close-mouthed about Crooks. What little they did say suggested he was a radical right-winger who hated Jews and immigrants, suggesting that he was very right-wing. 

WE were also led to believe that he was not very active on social media. In fact, he had a not-insubstantial social media presence for much of his life, only dropping off the radar late in his short life. And that profile tells us a lot about Crooks, including that he started as a rabid supporter of Trump, and later soured on him late in his first term, eventually calling for terrorist attacks. 

Christopher Wray, then FBI Director, testified to Crooks’ nativism:

Then-FBI Director Chris Wray told Congress after the July 13, 2024, attack that the bureau had found nothing in Crooks’ online history that pointed to a motive or political ideology.

A week later, Wray’s deputy Paul Abbate told Congress that comments posted on one of Crooks’ social media accounts “appear to reflect antisemitic and anti-immigration themes to espouse political violence and are described as extreme in nature.”

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That was true, for a while, but hardly the entire story. In fact, he turned his hatred from these groups to President Trump before dropping off the social media radar. Crooks, like so many other killers, turns out to be a “known wolf,” which may explain why the details of his social media profile have been hidden. 

Thanks to an enterprising source who uncovered Crooks’ hidden digital footprint, we can see that Abbate misled Congress by omission, because he left out an entire section of Crooks’ online interactions from January to August 2020 when he did an ideological backflip and went from rabidly pro-Trump to rabidly anti-Trump and then went dark, never seeming to post again.

Among the 17 accounts uncovered by our source were ones on YouTube, Snapchat, Venmo, Zelle, GroupMe, Discord, Google Play, Quizlet, Chess.com and Quora.

The online interactions from when Crooks was ages 15 to 17 give us a better understanding of his evolution into an assassin, and invite more questions about what — or who — reversed his ideology.

“The danger Crooks posed was visible for years in public online spaces,” says the source. “His radicalization, violent rhetoric and obsession with political violence were all documented under his real name. The threat wasn’t hidden.”

People who interacted with Crooks on social media warned law enforcement about Crooks’ calls for violence, and while we don’t know whether or how they responded, there is no doubt that they had reason to have an eye on him. 

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Yet the source found reams of information that shows Crooks “was not simply some unknowable lone actor … He left a digital trail of violent threats, extremist ideology and admiration for mass violence. He spoke openly of political assassination, posted under his real name and was even flagged by other users who mentioned law enforcement in their replies. Despite this, his account remained active for more than five years — and was only removed the day after the shooting.

“None of this online activity was referenced in the final congressional report released in December 2024, making this even more troubling,” the source said.

Crooks went from idolizing Trump and even calling for the murder of his political opponents to a hatred and fear of Trump that eventually resulted in his attempt to murder him. 

Crooks’ trajectory from pro- to anti-Trump is evident. He referred to Trump as “the literal definition of Patriotism” in a comment at 1:17 a.m. July 20, 2019.

He also issued several targeted threats against the Democratic congressional representatives in “the Squad.”

“I hope a quick painful death to all the deplorable immigrants and anti-trump congresswoman who don’t deserve anything this country [sic] has given them,” he wrote at 8:18 a.m. July 20, 2019.

“MURDER THE DEMOCRATS,” he wrote in all caps on Dec. 12, 2019.

But in early 2020, Crooks’ online behavior flipped 180 degrees and he became very critical of Trump, Fox News and Republican complaints about mail-in voting. …

Through the summer of 2020, Crooks’ online rhetoric became increasingly radical and violent.

On Aug. 5, 2020, Crooks wrote: “IMO the only way to fight the gov is with terrorism style attacks, sneak a bomb into an essential building and set it off before anyone sees you, track down any important people/politicians/military leaders etc and try to assassinate them.

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Crooks wasn’t hiding his identity. He wasn’t some anonymous figure who was impossible to track down. Law enforcement had been warned, albeit only (as far as we know right now) through replies tagging law enforcement on social media. But in an era where censorship organizations and the FBI were monitoring social media and tagging accounts for deletion and suppression, they had to have Crooks on the radar. 

That doesn’t mean they knew he was a ticking time bomb, exactly. People spout off all the time. But it’s hard to believe they didn’t have at least a cursory file on him in their vast databases. They probably had a profile of him within minutes of identifying him, and had all his social media accounts deactivated almost immediately. 

The former FBI agent who investigated the Las Vegas mass shooting confirms that Crooks had to be on the radar. 

When told of Crooks’ online threats, he said there was no way the FBI would not be aware of the teenager.

“No matter how ridiculous the allegation, no matter if it’s COVID or not, somebody is going to knock on somebody’s door,” Swanson said. “If they investigated that kid there’s a record of it and there’s an assessment that some leader made that this was not a threat or it rose to a level and they did something else.”

There could be many reasons why the FBI has downplayed its prior knowledge that Crooks was a potential danger, the most obvious being that it makes them look terrible. After all, since 9/11, there have been a ton of cases where “known wolves” turned out to be genuinely dangerous, and in retrospect, many of the incidents could have been prevented. It may be unfair to expect the FBI to prevent crimes, Minority Report style, done by people who have yet to break the law, so it is easier to hide the fact that the FBI could have stopped the crime if it had been more diligent. 

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Another reason why they may have hidden Crooks’ social media? He appears to have been, as many recent prominent political murderers, deeply involved in alphabet ideology. 

He described himself with the pronouns “they/them” on the platform DeviantArt, which is one of the biggest online hubs for “furry” art and the “furry” community. (A furry is someone who has an interest in anthropomorphized animal characters, often as a sexual fetish.)

Two accounts linked to Crooks’ primary email were found on DeviantArt, under usernames “epicmicrowave” and “theepicmicrowave.” The account suggests he had an obsession with scantily clad cartoon characters sporting muscle-bound male bodies and female heads.

The Biden administration, too, was a huge promoter of alphabet ideology, and the fact that a rash of recent attacks is associated with trans ideology was an inconvenient fact, especially since it muddied the “radical nativist” narrative they were suggesting motivated him. 

One of the people Crooks interacted with online was “Willy Tepes,” a member of Norwegian neo-Nazi group the Nordic Resistance Movement, which has since been designated a terrorist organization by the State Department.

Tepes encouraged violence and Crooks’ extremism, using a Maoist phrase, “Political power comes from the barrel of a gun,” which Crooks repeated several times.

In one comment on Oct. 5, 2025, more than a year after Butler, Tepes commented to another user that he had been contacted by both Russian and American intelligence.

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Of course, one has to wonder why all this information has been so closely held by the FBI, even under Kash Patel. Bureaucratic butt-covering is hardly a surprise, but Patel is a new face and can easily distance himself from failures under a different director whom he has criticized mercilessly on other matters. 

Johnson had to issue a subpoena in July on the first anniversary of the Butler attack and complained that he had been “stonewalled” by the FBI and the Secret Service in his efforts to request security camera footage, forensic reports and other documents related to the Crooks case.

Trump and those close to him are skeptical about the official story and question how the impoverished parents of Crooks, who had to ask for money from neighbors to pay for their son’s funeral, could afford to hire a white-shoe law firm, Quinn Logue out of Pittsburgh.

It is hard to believe the FBI and/or Secret Service missed Crooks. The question is, what did they do about him?

The absence of information from a source that clearly has it doesn’t tamp down questions; it makes you even more curious. What are they hiding? Why are they hiding it? Without clear answers, the only resort is to speculate, and often the speculations are worse than the truth. 

But also, often not. 

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Chile Breaks Right

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Chile Breaks Right 14

The end of October brought some breathtaking news out of Bolivia – twenty years of socialist/Marxist rule had been overturned in favor of a fellow whose slogan was Capitalism for All. It was an election that saw the United States Secretary of State beaming alongside the president-elect, Rodrigo Paz, with both pledging that a new era of cooperation was beginning.

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And, with his inauguration, Rodrigo Paz ordered all symbols of the failed Marxist dogma stripped from his country’s national symbols.

We are, he said, going to bring Bolivia into the world and bring the world back to Bolivia.

…Capitalism for everyone, capitalism to produce, capitalism to have resources…”

Whatever it was that had to be in the water in the continent over these past decades of peasant and student revolutions with socialist governments promising Communist paradises must finally be clearing from the system. It’s turning out to be a miracle of nature healing itself.

There was the Javier Milei shock in Argentina, which has turned out to be far more successful and enduring than anyone gave it any chance of. The predicted implosion of his ‘unpopular’ government had vaporized as soon as the mid-term election results came in a few weeks ago.

Argentine President Javier Milei’s party cruised to victory in midterm legislative elections as voters handed him a mandate to keep pushing through his radical overhaul of the economy despite widespread discontent with his deep austerity measures.

A relief to Milei, whose poll numbers had sagged in recent weeks, the results are also likely to please US President Donald Trump, whose administration had faced criticism after providing Argentina with a hefty financial bailout.

Analysts said the stronger-than-expected showing could reflect fear of renewed economic turmoil if the country abandoned Milei’s austerity policies which, while slashing subsidies long relied on by many Argentines, have succeeded in drastically slowing inflation.

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Then Bolivia decided to jettison decades of socialist decline, and last night?

In the national elections, the Left in Chile suffered its worst showing in the 90 years of the country’s democracy, and the Right has taken control of the National Chamber of Deputies (the lower house of their bicameral National Congress) for the first time in its history.

…The right achieves a majority in the Chamber of Deputies of Chile for the first time in the entire democratic history.  

Right: 79 deputies (51%) 

Left: 62 deputies (40%) 

Center: 14 deputies (9%)

The Right also took the upper house, the Chamber of Senators.

Senators:  

Right 27 

Left 22 

Where the communist (far-left) candidate, also dubbed ‘the official’ candidate, was expected to triumph in the first round, there were hopes enough voters would go for the Republican or Libertarian liberal, that she would be forced into a run-off.

This is a sample of her deep philosophical reasoning skills and transparent public dialogue.

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…Is Cuba a dictatorship? 

Jara responds, the left-wing presidential candidate in Chile: “Well, there are many problems there because there are many hurricanes.”

That was the state’s ‘official candidate’ and predicted to be the next president of Chile.

Those predictions were blown out of the water when a gobsmacking 70% of the electorate voted for right or center-right candidates, and the crafty lefty lady pulled less than 27%.

The top two leaders in the vote count, Leftist Jeannette Jara and the Republican challenger José Antonio Kast, will now head to a run-off to determine who will be the country’s president.

In an election marked by high voter turnout and a climate of profound disillusionment with Gabriel Boric ‘s administration , Chile took a decisive turn to the right . 70.2% of the electorate voted for opposition candidates , while the left failed to surpass 30% of the vote , confirming the crisis within the ruling coalition and the consolidation of conservative leadership.

As the polls predicted—although with a less narrow margin than expected—the official candidate Jeannette Jara (26.58%) and the Republican leader José Antonio Kast (24.32%) emerged as the two leading candidates , advancing to the runoff election   that will determine the presidency on December 14 .

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It was obvious Chileans were ready for a change. They came out in droves to cast their votes.

…By 8:00 PM, with 52% of the polling stations reporting , the preliminary results already showed the irreversible trend. More than 14 million Chileans participated in the process, which proceeded normally except for some long lines and isolated disputes at polling stations in Santiago , where many poll workers were serving for the first time.

It’s also apparent that the Right is looking at this as a momentous one for the country, and the candidates who came in behind the two front-runners – all right and centrists – are almost unanimously coalescing to throw their combined support behind Kast.

Johannes Kaiser, the Libertarian who came in fourth, announced his support. 

The right began to unite in Chile for the second round and Johannes Kaiser announces his support for José Antonio Kast. Out, miserable left of Latin America!

Evelyn Mattei swung to Kast in her concession speech and went to Kast’s campaign headquarters last night to personally congratulate him.

…Evelyn Matthei , the standard-bearer for Chile Vamos and a symbol of the traditional right, finished in an unexpected fifth place with 13.25%, despite having led in the polls for months.  Matthei   was the first to concede defeat and, in a decisive political move, immediately announced her support for Kast: “Others have been chosen to advance in the presidential race; I congratulate them ,” she stated before personally going to the Republican campaign headquarters to offer her congratulations.

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A big day with a lot of promise if Kast takes the whole thing.

Thank you very much Chile !!   

Today we have taken a big step so that change reaches Chile!! 

Let’s work with everything! We’re going to win!!

There is an overwhelming sense of purpose to change the country’s path, and it very much looks as if like-minded Chileans are determined to see this finished.

…Congratulations to Chile 

The right wins the majority in the chamber of senators and deputies José Antonio Kast advances to the second round and the entire right and center-right will arrive united 

The left achieved its worst result in 90 years 

Latin America increasingly free from communism

Just imagine that in our lifetime – a Latin America ‘increasingly free from communism.’ And getting to watch those dominoes fall.

And then, being here to watch them start to make their way back and do it well.

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The great story of today in Chile is the triumph of the right in votes added up for the first time in nearly a century. And the crushing defeat of the left. The country has changed culturally, the mentality is different, the battle of ideas has been won and that is the most important thing.

Man. I wonder if the communists have noticed their shrinking empire of influence, failure, and destruction?

If you put together a photo with all the current communist presidents in Latin America including Spain, what they have in common is that they’re about to get kicked out in the next elections, none of them will be left.

I hope they’re worried.

That exclusive little club is getting awfully…exclusive.

I can’t wait until they have to close the doors.

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TIME Mag: Schumer’s Not Going Anywhere … And Here Are His Replacements

TIME Mag: Schumer's Not Going Anywhere ... And Here Are His Replacements 15

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TIME Mag: Schumer's Not Going Anywhere ... And Here Are His Replacements 16

Are Shutdown Chuck’s days numbered in Senate leadership? Color me skeptical — but not because Chuck Schumer can claim sterling strategic acumen or a list of any significant accomplishments. It’s more of an après moi, le deluge issue. 

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Rep. Ro Khanna, infuriated over the predictable collapse of the Schumer Shutdown, kept the Chuck You ball rolling this weekend. Yesterday, he told Kristin Welker on NBC’s Meet the Press that he had lost confidence in Schumer’s leadership, even though Schumer runs the Democrat caucus in the other chamber of Congress. Khanna makes it clear that the shutdown isn’t the only issue that has undermined “confidence” in Schumer, and that he wants someone who will push the party toward a more radical direction (transcript via NBC and Andrew Malcolm):

WELKER: Why do you think Leader Schumer is to blame, given that Republicans have control, as Jeanne Shaheen is saying, of the White House and both chambers of Congress?

KHANNA: Well, there`s something that I agree with both of these senators. Senator Kaine said that Senator Schumer was terrific under President Biden. And he was. I worked with him on the CHIPS and Science Act. That would not have passed if it weren`t for Senator Schumer`s leadership. Same with the infrastructure bill and IRA. 

And Senator Shaheen is right that the biggest culprit is Donald Trump and Mike Johnson. The question is what is the future of Democratic leadership — who is going to be effective? And most Democrats around the country just  don`t think that person is Chuck Schumer. I mean, he doesn`t inspire confidence. He`s not bold. He`s out of touch with the grassroots. He`s someone who cheer-led us into the war in Iraq. He doesn`t have the moral clarity on Gaza. He couldn`t say Mamdani`s name. And this was the final straw where he was not strong on fighting for health care.

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Khanna then offered up his roster of potential replacements:

WELKER: So, who is the person who you think should lead Democrats into the future in the Senate? Who`s at the top of that list for you, Congressman?

KHANNA: Well, Senator Kaine`s already given me a hard time for just saying that the minority leader should be someone different. I think if I endorsed someone it would probably hurt them more than help them. But we have dynamic young, new leaders — 

WELKER: Who are some of the top names — 

KHANNA: Chris Murphy is a top leader. Cory Booker is a dynamic leader. Brian Schatz is a dynamic leader. I mean, Elizabeth Warren is someone whose ideology I appreciate. There are a lot of great talent — and really, is Chuck Schumer — when you think about it, just from a common-sense test, do you think Democrats around the country think that Chuck Schumer should be the face of the future of the Democratic Party? Of course not.

“Elizabeth Warren is someone whose ideology I appreciate” may be the most self-disqualifying statement for a politician arguing for a claim to the mainstream I’ve ever heard. Including the 76-year-old crank in a roster of “dynamic, young, new leaders” might qualify for the silver medal. 

All of this is just whistling in the wind, TIME Magazine’ Philip Elliott informs his readers in their DC Brief. Sure, Khanna and other Democrats are taking shots at Shutdown Chuck, but it’s mainly performative. Schumer won’t get pushed out of leadership, and largely because Democrats got a ringside seat to that kind of debacle when House Republicans tried it:

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For his part, Schumer has professed indifference to the discontent and he had pretty good reasoning: no one who wants him gone has the power to make it happen, and no one who could do it is publicly calling for him to go. Even privately, there is little sign that Senate Democrats expect to replace Schumer before the midterm elections, according to just about every Capitol insider with a grudge and an insight. It’s pretty easy to hold onto a job when no one else is ready to step into it.

Thus is the life of a Minority Leader: all stumbles and fumbles and bumbles are of his making, all victories the work of others. The job is thankless even under the best conditions, and these are far from those. And it’s why those who are positioning themselves to potentially follow in Schumer’s shoes aren’t pressing for the position at this very moment when he seems so vulnerable. Much like House Republicans struggled in the recent past to nominate a Speaker not named Kevin McCarthy, being frustrated with the top dog is not sufficient for putting him down until there’s a new Alpha.  

Of course, Elliott then runs down the roster of replacements, which turns out to mostly duplicate Khanna’s. One notable exception is Catherine Cortez Masto, who is notably even further from Khanna than Schumer. She voted all along to end the filibuster and helped arrange the Kabuki-theater collapse of the shutdown. There seems almost no chance that the Democrats would dump Schumer to hand the reins to (a) someone who torpedoed the shutdown, and (b) has to keep her seat in a purple-to-red state. Khanna wants more Mamdanis, not more Fettermans. 

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Elliott hits the mark better in the earlier excerpt. Pushing Schumer out only forces the brewing internecine war on the Left to become fully acute. Don’t forget that the faction Khanna represents pushed Schumer into this shutdown strategy after intimidating him in March when he eschewed it as pointless. Schumer might have the strategic thinking of a 4th-grader playing checkers, but he wasn’t entirely responsible for this fiasco. Even the sympathy some ‘moderates’ might have for Schumer is secondary to the unease some will feel at letting the inmates fully run the asylum, and certainly at the fight it would create just as the party is heading into the midterms. 

Schumer’s not going anywhere until 2028. The idea that he’d step aside for AOC or anyone else at that point seems mainly speculative, too. He’s actually a year younger than Warren, and turns 75 next week — practically middle aged for the Senate. Patty Murray — on Elliott’s list, if not Khanna’s — also just turned 75 during the shutdown. Schumer doesn’t have any place to go after three decades in Congress, and AOC has plenty of time to get into the AARP Club on Capitol Hill. 

Editor’s Note: After more than 40 days of screwing Americans, a few Dems have finally caved. The Schumer Shutdown was never about principle—just inflicting pain for political points. They own this.

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Shut Up, Michelle

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Shut Up, Michelle 18

I’ve never understood the mystique of Michelle Obama.  

Sure, a lot of people fell in love with Barack, and Michelle was part of the deal, I suppose. 

But really, only a few First Ladies have had outsized enough personalities to merit much attention beyond the fashion pages, if they even belong there. Hillary Clinton, of course, was a notable figure in her own right, as was Eleanor Roosevelt. Nancy Reagan was famously influential with Ronald, but she was mostly interesting because she was already part of the glitterati. 

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Conservatives pretend to care about Melania, but aside from being a former model and still a beautiful woman, nobody is particularly interested in what she thinks, and she is more seen than heard. 

Michelle, though, gets an enormous amount of attention despite being uninteresting, rather sour, of middling looks (no, she is not a man), and…quite the whiner. 

Michelle Obama keeps popping up as a potential presidential candidate, yet every time she speaks, she alternates between being an absolute bore and really off-putting. 

In her podcast, she has, in the most boring and off-putting way possible, trashed her husband quite a bit. We get the fact that she really isn’t that fond of him, but we don’t even get the satisfaction of tell-all stories that would pique our interest even a little bit. 

And now she is complaining that she is forced to straighten her hair because of white beauty standards. 

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It’s not clear why she has no autonomy in such matters. There is nobody to force her to straighten her hair as far as I know. 

America is apparently not mature enough for Michelle Obama. Perhaps she, like Stacey Abrams, is waiting for the position of President of Earth to open up. By then, we may be ready for her kinky hair. 

Now some wag—not me, surely—might suggest that concerns about what people will think about curly hair being so mentally disturbing that it shapes one’s worldview is not a sign of maturity. It might even suggest an inability to make bold decisions that some people might dislike, which happens to be a job requirement for the presidency. 

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Donald Trump famously pays close attention to what people say about his hair and his looks, and is clearly paralyzed by the idea that some people think his hair is bizarre and his bronzer is a bit too much, so I shouldn’t complain that Michelle Obama finds her fantasy boogiemen itching to bitch about her oppressive. 

It really is amazing how the intersectional oppression olympics works. In any rational universe, Michelle Obama would be considered one of the most privileged people who ever lived on earth. She is very wealthy, powerful, feted wherever she goes, is constantly talked about as if she were a demigod, and yet she is, in her own and her followers’ eyes, horrifically oppressed because she must coexist with white people. 

White people who live much less privileged lives. 

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The horror of having tailored clothes! Of having to get on every major magazine cover. Of having Netflix throw $50 million at you for…apparently next to nothing. 

Sorry, I don’t want to hear it. I don’t want to hear it from her, her followers, the media, or anybody else. 

I’m sure her life has been imperfect, and that she has paid a price for what she has acquired. 

Newsflash: this is true of literally EVERYBODY. 

Shut up, Michelle. And go away. 

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Trump to GOP: Release the Epstein Files ASAP

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Trump to GOP: Release the Epstein Files ASAP 20

Good strategy. Time to end the fiasco that Donald Trump’s own Department of Justice created. 

At the beginning of Trump’s new term, Attorney General Pam Bondi made the Jeffrey Epstein files a personal project. She insisted that the files had been covered up by the previous administration, promised to expose them, and even staged a White House event with “influencers” complete with binders to claim that she’d released everything. 

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As it turned out, Bondi had only released documents already made public, and then Democrats and the Protection Racket Media (sorry for the redundancy) pounced. House Democrats demanded the release of all documents while Trump angrily scolded his own team for continuing to talk about it. Matters reached a boil during and immediately after the shutdown, and House Democrats successfully filed a discharge petition for a floor vote this week — while some leaked misleading documents attempting to paint Trump as part of Epstein’s depravities.

Trump had enough this weekend. “House Republicans should vote to release the Epstein files,” Trump wrote on Truth Social, because we’ve all wasted enough time on them:

As I said on Friday night aboard Air Force One to the Fake News Media, House Republicans should vote to release the Epstein files, because we have nothing to hide, and it’s time to move on from this Democrat Hoax perpetrated by Radical Left Lunatics in order to deflect from the Great Success of the Republican Party, including our recent Victory on the Democrat “Shutdown.” The Department of Justice has already turned over tens of thousands of pages to the Public on “Epstein,” are looking at various Democrat operatives (Bill Clinton, Reid Hoffman, Larry Summers, etc.) and their relationship to Epstein, and the House Oversight Committee can have whatever they are legally entitled to, I DON’T CARE! All I do care about is that Republicans get BACK ON POINT, which is the Economy, “Affordability” (where we are winning BIG!), our Victory on reducing Inflation from the highest level in History to practically nothing, bringing down prices for the American People, delivering Historic Tax Cuts, gaining Trillions of Dollars of Investment into America (A RECORD!), the rebuilding of our Military, securing our Border, deporting Criminal Illegal Aliens, ending Men in Women’s Sports, stopping Transgender for Everyone, and so much more! Nobody cared about Jeffrey Epstein when he was alive and, if the Democrats had anything, they would have released it before our Landslide Election Victory. Some “members” of the Republican Party are being “used,” and we can’t let that happen. Let’s start talking about the Republican Party’s Record Setting Achievements, and not fall into the Epstein “TRAP,” which is actually a curse on the Democrats, not us. MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN!

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Trump offered his response to the speculation about his desire to suppress the files:

This is clearly obvious to everyone involved, including House Democrats who manipulated redactions and leaks to target Trump. Joe Biden’s DoJ had access to the Epstein files for four years. They and other Democrats conducted a no-holds-barred lawfare campaign against Trump to derail any hopes for another run at the presidency. Alvin Bragg even got DoJ assistance to concoct an absurd claim of 34 felony acts around ledger entries dealing with NDA payments to Stormy Daniels. Jack Smith ran two different federal prosecutions against Trump, neither of which ended up going anywhere.

Does anyone really think that the Biden regency and its allies in New York and Georgia would have bothered with that if they had Epstein dirt on Trump? Come on, man.

The problem for Trump, though, is that it was his own administration that promised to release all of the Epstein material in the first place. The discharge petition now forces House Republicans to go on the record about that release, and the Associated Press makes it pretty clear that most of them are not interested in fighting the issue when it comes to a floor vote:

“There could be 100 or more” votes from Republicans, said Rep. Thomas Massie, R-Ky., among the lawmakers discussing the legislation on Sunday news show appearances. “I’m hoping to get a veto-proof majority on this legislation when it comes up for a vote.”

Massie and Rep. Ro Khanna, D-Calif., introduced a discharge petition in July to force a vote on their bill. That is a rarely successful tool that allows a majority of members to bypass House leadership and force a floor vote.

Speaker Mike Johnson, R-La., had panned the discharge petition effort and sent members home for their August recess when the GOP’s legislative agenda was upended in the clamoring for an Epstein vote. Democrats also contend the seating of Rep. Adelita Grijalva, D-Ariz., was stalled to delay her becoming the 218th member to sign the petition and gain the threshold needed to force a vote. She became the 218th signature moments after taking the oath of office last week.

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Johnson seems to expect the House will decisively back the Epstein bill.

“We’ll just get this done and move it on. There’s nothing to hide,” adding that the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee has been releasing “far more information than the discharge petition, their little gambit.”

That’s the best way out of a months-long mess that Bondi created. Time to release it all, with full and unredacted disclosures, so that the actual truth can finally be seen … and we can move onto other, more pressing matters.

For a pretty good breakdown about the emails leaked so far, Nate the Lawyer lays out what they actually mean. There’s a reason Sunny Hostin warned The View that these help Trump more than they hurt them. Speaking of Nate, however, pray for him — he had to undergo emergency surgery this weekend for a brain tumor. Drop by his channel and wish him the best. 

Editor’s Note: The mainstream media isn’t interested in the facts; they’re only interested in attacking the president. Help us continue to get to the bottom of stories like the Jeffrey Epstein files by supporting our truth-seeking journalism today. 

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Posted in Republican News