Trump Corruption

The Washington Post reports: The White House budget office on Wednesday rescinded an order freezing federal grants, according to a copy of a new memo obtained by The Washington Post, after the administration’s move to halt spending earlier this week provoked a backlash. In a memo dated Wednesday and distributed to federal agencies, Matthew J. Vaeth, acting director of the …

CNN reports: President Donald Trump’s administration is ending the case against his former co-defendants in the classified documents investigation brought by former special counsel Jack Smith.The Justice Department has stopped pursuing an appeal brought by Smith to revive the criminal charges against Trump’s employees. The appeal had also sought to defend the attorney general’s ability to appoint special prosecutors — …

Politico reports: President Donald Trump has hired the elite white-shoe law firm Sullivan & Cromwell to appeal his criminal conviction in the Manhattan hush money case, according to two people familiar with the matter. The most prominent member of Trump’s new legal team is Robert Giuffra, the firm’s co-chair. Also working on the case will be four other Sullivan & …

The Daily Beast reports: German Chancellor Olaf Scholz has again criticised billionaire Elon Musk, calling the tech mogul’s latest show of support for the German far right “disgusting.” Speaking to CNN Tuesday, Scholz slammed Musk’s involvement in Germany’s upcoming February election and weighed in on the billionaire’s plea for Germans to “move beyond” the guilt of the Holocaust during a …

Politico reports: Donald Trump’s attorney general nominee Pam Bondi, who represented the president during his first impeachment trial, was voted out of the Senate Judiciary Committee Wednesday morning in a party-line, 12-10 vote. “Her record and her testimony showed the American people that she will follow through and enforce the law fairly, without fear or favor,” Senate Judiciary Chair Chuck …

The Washington Post reports: President Donald Trump threatened to punish Colombia with tariffs, a travel ban and other sanctions to compel it to accept deportation flights carrying “Illegal Criminals.” But Colombian officials said there were no criminals among the two planeloads of migrants the U.S. government sent over Tuesday. Among the more than 200 deportees were two pregnant women and …

NBC News reports: A pair of Trump-endorsed Republicans easily won a pair of special House primaries Tuesday in Florida, setting them up to fill two vacant, deep-red seats and pad the party’s slim House majority. The Associated Press projected the primary in Florida’s 6th District for state Sen. Randy Fine [photo] shortly after polls closed in the district at 7 …

“The president has no authority to make that offer. There’s no budget line item to pay people who are not showing up for work. This is a guy who made this promise to contractors again and again and again when he was a private business guy. ‘Oh, come work for me on my casino.’ ‘Come work for me in a …

The Daily Beast reports: Elon Musk is considering suing media outlets that called his gesture onstage at a post-inauguration rally a “Nazi” salute. His mother is egging him on. On Tuesday, the Tesla CEO radically escalated his pushback against the criticism, musing in a tweet that it would be a “good idea” to sue Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz and MSNBC …

CNN reports: In a post on the social media platform X, SpaceX CEO Elon Musk claimed Tuesday that the Biden Administration left two astronauts “stranded” and said President Donald Trump has asked SpaceX to step in to rescue them. But NASA already put such a plan in place months ago when it asked SpaceX to return astronauts Suni Williams and …

The Guardian reports: “Doge and OMB also found that there was about to be $50 million taxpayer dollars that went out the door to fund condoms in Gaza,” Leavitt claimed. “That is a preposterous waste of taxpayer money. So that’s what this pause is focused on: being good stewards of tax dollars.” While Leavitt did not offer any evidence to …

The Associated Press reports: Just minutes after a federal judge in Washington blocked the funding freeze, Democratic state attorneys generals brought their own lawsuit against the Trump administration. The lawsuit, filed by 22 states and the District of Columbia in federal court in Rhode Island, criticized the administration for implementing the freeze before it was to take effect at 5 …

Stephen Miller: “The president’s authority to fire any federal worker is plenary. There’s no lawful constraints that can be placed on the president to terminate a worker in the federal government. It’s a discretionary policy. That’s the basis of Article II in the Constitution and the idea of a single executive. When you have anyone in the federal government who …

Axios reports: The White House will issue a memo Tuesday offering to pay federal workers who don’t want to return to the office through Sept. 30, as long as they resign by Feb. 6, an administration official tells Axios. It’s an acceleration in President Trump’s already unprecedented purge of the federal workforce. The White House expects 5% to 10% of …

The New York Times reports: Starting last summer, former Representative Tulsi Gabbard publicly berated the Biden administration, claiming that she was placed on what she called “a domestic terror watch list” as punishment for critical comments she had made about Vice President Kamala Harris. The reality was more complicated. The additional security measures were triggered by an event she attended …

Mediaite reports: While Governor Gavin Newsom (D) has insisted these claims were false, Trump insisted via social media that the “United States Military just entered the Great State of California and, under Emergency Powers, TURNED ON THE WATER,” in a late Monday Truth Social post. Enter the highly-esteemed Pentagon reporter Jennifer Griffin — who cited US Defense Officials concurring with …

CBS News reports: A wide range of organizations and agencies that depend on federal health department funds say they have been locked out of the online system responsible for tracking and depositing their money, in the wake of the White House’s move to freeze funding across the Trump administration. These include state Medicaid programs which have been unable to log …

The Virginia Mercury reports: A separate memo from OMB lists off the programs that will be paused temporarily while it reviews which federal spending it deems appropriate. The list includes the Department of Agriculture’s tribal food sovereignty program, Head Start, the Veterans’ Affairs Department’s suicide prevention and legal services grants, the Low-Income Home Energy Assistance, or LIHEAP, program, and numerous …

PBS NewsHour reports: The White House is pausing federal grants and loans starting on Tuesday as President Donald Trump’s administration begins an across-the-board ideological review of its spending. White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt is scheduled to hold a news briefing at 1 p.m. ET. “We’ve never seen anything like this,” said Marcia Howard, executive director of Federal Funds Information …

The Huffington Post reports: The Donald Trump administration’s Monday night announcement that it would pause all federal grants has caused concern among nonprofit organizations that administer senior nutrition programs like Meals on Wheels. The order from the Office of Management and Budget said federal agencies should pause federal “financial assistance” grants and review whether they further things like “woke gender …