Donald Trump on Friday accused Google of showing only "bad stories" about him and vowed to have the tech giant prosecuted if he gets back in the White House.
Trump provided no backing for his accusation in a post on his Truth Social platform, in which he added that the search engine displays only positive articles about his Democratic rival Vice President Kamala Harris.
"This is an ILLEGAL ACTIVITY, and hopefully the Justice Department will criminally prosecute them for this blatant Interference of Elections," he said in the post.
"If not, and subject to the Laws of our Country, I will request their prosecution, at the maximum levels, when I win the election."
The Trump post came after a conservative group reported on what it said it found when doing a search on "Donald Trump presidential race 2024."
"Both campaign websites consistently appear at the top of Search for relevant and common search queries," Google said in response to an AFP inquiry.
"This report looked at a single rare search term on a single day a few weeks ago, and even for that search, both candidates' websites ranked in the top results on Google."
Google has been adamant that it does not manipulate search results to favor any political candidate.
The company does not disclose the inner workings of the software that powers its ubiquitous search engine.
However, factors known to influence search results for news stories include the timeliness and popularity of topics.
Trump is at the center of numerous criminal and civil cases in which he faces accusations including sexual abuse, paying hush money to a porn star, interfering with the 2020 election and trying to thwart the peaceful transition of power after President Joe Biden defeated him.
Vice President Kamala Harris had a snappy retort to former President Donald Trump's rambling rant on his ability to draw and keep a crowd.
Minutes after Trump declared during a Walker, Michigan, campaign event that "nobody ever leaves" his rallies, Harris' campaign took to X with a rebuttal.
The message, posted at 4:20 p.m. ET, also includes a video in which Trump can be overheard in the background delivering the speech he gave in Michigan. The camera follows a line of people heading for the exit.
"Nobody ever leaves," Trump said about 4:05 p.m. And when they do, I finish up quick."
Trump then continued to explain his "stupid" campaign staff were to blame for pulling people away from the audience to pose for photographs with him after the event
"I couldn't take pictures at the beginning so I take them at the end sometimes if I'm late, the plane gets late, you get delayed, lots of things happen there's a little hurricane going on in Florida, as you know," said Trump. "I said, 'Don't do that!' because it looks like they're leaving."
It also looks like people are leaving Trump's event in the video shared by Harris, in which about a half dozen people walk through glass doors to leave the venue.
This is not the first time Harris has taunted Trump about his crowd sizes.
During the presidential debate on Sept. 10, Harris quipped, "People start leaving his rallies early out of exhaustion and boredom."
"Vice President Harris’ supporters have got to be pleased with her performance this evening,” said CNN's Jake Tapper. ”Over and over, baiting Donald Trump into talking about crowd sizes and court cases and Nancy Pelosi and Russiagate and grievances. And he took the bait almost every time!”
Iranian hackers who tried to infiltrate former President Donald Trump's campaign pretended to be Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas' wife Ginni, according to a new report.
Three hackers with links to the Iranian government impersonated the conservative activist when they targeted people close to the Republican presidential nominee, according to CNN's report based on court documents and law enforcement sources.
The trio — Masoud Jalili, Seyyed Ali Aghamiri and Yasar (Yaser) Balaghi — stand accused in Washington D.C. federal court of aggravated identity theft and wire fraud on behalf of Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, according to the report.
Ginni Thomas is not named in the indictment but it notes that hackers sent phishing emails to a former homeland security adviser and former U.S. president under the guise of a justice's spouse in April and May, CNN reported.
"The hackers had set up a fake email account in Ginni Thomas’ name in April 2020, according to the indictmentand law enforcement officials," CNN reported, "but it wasn’t until four years later that they used that account in their efforts."
The hacking operation aimed at Trump's campaign began in May and hackers also attempted to target the Biden-Harris campaign, according to CNN.
Iran has reportedly denied accusations that it tried to influence the 2024 presidential election.
Ginni Thomas frequently makes headlines for her attempts to influence conservative politics as her husband holds one of the most powerful positions within the judicial branch of the U.S. government.
Former President Donald Trump threw his campaign staff under the bus amid a rambling rant that touched on airplane delays, "little" Hurricane Helene, the importance of wealthy people and the size of his crowds.
Trump delivered an hour-long speech during a campaign rally in Walker, Michigan, Friday afternoon during which he argued — despite taunts from Vice President Kamala Harris and multiplevideos and reports from outside his campaign events — that no one ever left early.
"The people that you see leaving?" Trump said. "Nobody ever leaves. And when they do, I finish up quick."
Trump demanded the crowd believe this contradictory statement and then attempted to explain what he felt was happening.
"I couldn't take pictures at the beginning so I take them at the end sometimes if I'm late, the plane gets late, you get delayed, lots of things happen there's a little hurricane going on in Florida, as you know," said Trump. "What they do is they say, 'Oh please come up now' at the end of my speech."
Trump was apparently referring to campaign staffers as his next comment had him barking orders and giving commands to the people asking attendees to line up at the end of his speeches.
"I said, 'Don't do that!' because it looks like they're leaving," Trump said. He then caught the eye of a person in the audience.
"Like your husband who owns this place," Trump said. "He's not leaving — he likes Trump very much — he made a lot of money because of Trump, right? Right?"
Trump waited for cheers then continued to explain.
"But these stupid people that are with me sometimes, they say, 'Come on back,'" Trump said. "Thirty people, they get up and they go back and they're all lined up waiting in the back, waiting for me to take a picture, because I couldn't do it before, because I didn't want to keep you waiting, because you're much more important than the wealthy people."
Former President Donald Trump threatened to prosecute Google because a conservative think tank didn't like the results of two search queries made on a single day.
Trump complained of "ILLEGAL ACTIVITY" on Truth Social Friday afternoon. His source appears to be a Fox News report complaining the search engine buried its content.
"It has been determined that Google has illegally used a system of only revealing and displaying bad stories about Donald J. Trump, some made up for this purpose while, at the same time, only revealing good stories about Comrade Kamala Harris," Trump wrote. "This is an ILLEGAL ACTIVITY, and hopefully the Justice Department will criminally prosecute them for this blatant Interference of Elections."
His post arrived two days after Fox's report on the conservative think tank Media Research Center's findings.
According to Fox, "MRC Free Speech America researchers analyzed the Sept. 6 search results of two separate searches: "Donald Trump presidential race 2024" and "Kamala Harris presidential race 2024."
The think tank then professed itself outraged that the top results came from "left-wing" media outlets such as the New York Times and the Washington Post.
"Google's search engine pushes left-wing media articles favoring Kamala Harris and slamming Donald Trump," founder Brent Bozell reportedly told Fox News Digital. "Don't trust Google searches."
A Google spokesperson dismissed the study in a statement to Fox News.
"Both campaign websites consistently appear at the top of Search for relevant and common search queries," the spokesperson reportedly said.
"This report looked at a single rare search term on a single day several weeks ago, and even for that search, both candidates’ websites ranked in the top results on Google."
The slim data set did not stop Trump from asserting Friday that, if reelected, he would take Google to court for not promoting content more complimentary to his campaign.
Wrote Trump, "I will request their prosecution, at the maximum levels, when I win the Election, and become President of the United States!"
Polls published by BBC News — a news outlet granted a 0 bias score from media analysis company Ad Fontes — showed Vice President Kamala Harris leading Trump by 3 points.
Special counsel Jack Smith slapped back at former President Donald Trump's attempt to keep new evidence in his criminal election interference case from reaching the public before Election Day.
Smith this week filed a nine-page argument to Washington D.C. federal Judge Tanya Chutkan in support of publishing a redacted copy of his 180-page case summary to the public docket.
"The public’s interest is fully vindicated by accessing the substantive material in the Government’s filing," Smith wrote.
"The unredacted substance of what a witness said is more important, for purposes of public access, than the redacted identity of the specific person who said it."
Smith's new argument hit the public docket just one day after he filed a massive sealed document containing previously unseen evidence, which could include grand jury interview transcripts and FBI notes from witnesses such as Vice President Mike Pence and Ivanka Trump.
Smith on Saturday asked Chutkan for permission to submit the oversized brief outlining allegations that the former president unlawfully attempted to overturn his loss to President Joe Biden in the 2020 election.
"The proposed approach is fundamentally unfair, as the Office would attempt to set a closed record for addressing unfiled defense motions...denying President Trump an opportunity to confront their witnesses, and preventing the defense from obtaining discovery," the argument reads."
"The hypocrisy of this proposed approach is demonstrated by the Office’s earlier arguments—in this case and in Florida—that using discovery materials in public filings could taint the jury pool and bias potential witnesses," the filing states.
The Washington D.C. federal court judge has since set two October deadlines for Trump's lawyers to challenge Smith's proposed redactions to sensitive materials — suggesting a redacted filing could reach the public that same month, and before Election Day.
Legal experts on Friday applauded Chutkan's judgement and her haste.
"Chutkan is not wasting any time," said MSNBC analyst Katie Phang. "She is moving as quickly as she can, with full consideration of fairness and due process for both sides."
According to a report from Politico's Declan Harty, investment advisers are cautioning their clients that the stock could equally be headed for boom or bust, with one telling Politico everyone involved is "gambling on the election."
As Harty explained, Trump has already told reporters he has no plan to sell off his majority stake, currently valued at approximately $1.6 billion but, as Interactive Brokers Chief Strategist Steve Sosnick dryly explained, "He’s, shall we say, a mercurial person,” before adding, "So it’s not 100 percent clear that he won’t change his mind — or hasn’t changed his mind.”
Aside from that, there is the election just weeks away.
“The calculus that investors are asking themselves is: Is he going to be reelected or not? And right now, it’s a coin toss,” stated Gene Munster of Deepwater Asset Management before elaborating, "This is binary — there’s no middle ground in this kind of investment. It’s even hard to call it investing. This comes out to basically gambling on the election.”
“If you’re an investor and you’re looking at what’s ahead, there is this massive unknown. Even if you say you’ve got a 50 percent chance of being up 100 percent and a 50 percent chance of being down 100 percent, that’s just a bet that most investors probably don’t want to take," Munster continued.
Tuttle Capital Management CEO Matthew Tuttle warned Truth Social without Trump is not a good bet.
“Even without Elon Musk, Tesla’s got something, Without Trump, this stock has nothing," Tuttle bluntly stated.
A Republican lawmaker fighting to hold onto his competitive Texas seat said Thursday he'd force a daughter to have her baby if she'd been impregnated by rape.
Texas House Rep. John Lujan made this claim on Texas Public Radio during a lengthy interview about key campaign issues in his race against Democratic candidate Kristian Carranza.
“If I had a daughter, and that would have been, you know, it would have been a rape," Lujan said. "I would say no, we're going to have the baby.”
Lujan represents south Bexar County Texas House District 118, once a reliable win for Democrats until he won a 2021 special election and the 2022 midterms by 52 percent, according to TPR.
The former firefighter, 62, now faces a challenge from Carranza, a 33-year-old political organizer who has worked as a regional director for the Democratic National Committee and on both Hillary Clinton's presidential campaigns.
On Friday, Carranza condemned Lujan's comment about the hypothetical daughter he said he would not allow to abort a rapist's fetus.
“Texas women are dying, fleeing the state and being forced to carry rape and incest related pregnancies because of extreme politicians like John Lujan," said Carranza.
"This glimpse into Lujan’s lack of awareness into this nightmare facing everyday Texans is exactly why we’re going to defeat him in November.”
Texas enacted a total abortion ban in 2022 and has since seen 26,000 pregnancies from rape and incest, according to the San Antonio Current.
The year before, the Texas Legislature banned abortion care as early as five weeks into pregnancy and saw a dramatic rise in deaths among pregnant women, according to NBC News.
Abortion has become a key issue in the 2024 presidential election as voters decide between Donald Trump, the former president whose Supreme Court justice appointees overturned Roe v. Wade, and Vice President Kamala Harris, who has vowed to pass legislation protecting abortion on the national level.
Mother Jones reporter Sophie Hurwitz recently spoke with some defense experts about this proposal and they were uniform in saying that it made absolutely no sense whatsoever.
In fact, Hurwitz goes so far as to label it Trump's "most ridiculous idea yet."
A missile shield works for Israel because it is a geographically small nation that faces constant missile attacks from terrorist organizations such as Hamas and Hezbollah.
Such a system would be vastly more costly to deploy in the United States, which is many times the size of Israel and, furthermore, has historically good relations with neighboring nations Canada and Mexico.
In all, national security analyst Joseph Cirincione tells Hurwitz that the shield would cost around $2.5 trillion, which is more than triple the United States' entire defense budget.
“It’s dramatically unclear to me what any of this means, other than just treating it like the insane ramblings of a senile old person," he said. "Is Trump saying the system in Alaska doesn’t work? Is Trump saying that Canada is going to develop artillery rockets to use against North Dakota?"
A grand jury has indicted multiple Iranian nationals on charges related to the the hacking of Donald Trump's presidential campaign.
The Department of Justice announced the indictment Friday of three suspects accused of taking part in an Iranian operation that allegedly stole internal campaign materials this summer, reported CBS News.
The stolen material was later sent to journalists and individuals associated with President Joe Biden's campaign before he dropped out of the race, although media outlets have largely declined to report on the contents.
The specific charges and the names of the suspects were not immediately released.
The FBI has been investigating attempted phishing schemes targeting people associated with the Trump and Biden campaigns this summer, and law enforcement officials said last week that "Iranian malicious cyber actors" were responsible for that activity.
"Iranian malicious cyber actors in late June and early July sent unsolicited emails to individuals then associated with President Biden’s campaign that contained an excerpt taken from stolen, non-public material associated with former President Trump's campaign to U.S. media organizations," the FBI said at the time. "Foreign actors are increasing their election influence activities as we approach November."
Iran's United Nations mission previously denied it had plans to interfere or launch cyberattacks in the U.S. presidential election, telling CBS News in a statement last week that "the Islamic Republic of Iran does not engage in the internal uproars or electoral controversies of the United States," adding that "Iran neither has any motive nor intent to interfere in the U.S. election; and, it therefore categorically repudiates such accusations."
Rep. Adam Schiff (D-CA) is introducing legislation that would prevent Donald Trump from ending his criminal prosecutions if re-elected to another term as president.
The new bill was shared exclusively with Time Magazine, which reported that Schiff's legislation would prohibit presidents from quashing a criminal case against them, although Trump is the first former president to face criminal charges and would be the first sitting president to be prosecuted.
“This is about protecting our democracy and ensuring a president can’t place themselves above the law,” Schiff said “There is every indication that Donald Trump will use the Justice Department to do away with any effort to hold him accountable.”
“The need for swift passage of this bill could become even more pressing,” Schiff added, “depending on the outcome of the election.”
Schiff's bill would require a sworn statement from the attorney general whether a dismissal was ordered by the president or anyone acting on their behalf, and any request for dismissal would be evaluated by a three-judge panel to ensure the decision was not made unilaterally.
The panel could impose sanctions if a motion to dismiss was found lacking in good cause, and any finding that a dismissal was requested by the president would be reported to Congress by the Department of Justice's inspector general.
The bill, called the Investigative Integrity Protection Act, has the backing of seven other Democratic lawmakers but would almost certainly stall in the Republican-led House.
“The rule of law is a core foundation of our nation,” Schiff said. “No one, not even the President, is above it.”
In interviews with AzCentral's Laurie Roberts, Republican Party campaign consultants in the state not only see former TV personality Kari Lake on the verge of suffering a humiliating defeat in November as she runs for a Senate seat, but also the end of any future in politics.
In her column, Roberts noted that Lake's unfavorable numbers have been increasing at an alarming rate to the point that a stunning number of conservatives who plan to vote for Donald Trump have indicated they have no desire to cast their vote for one of his most avid followers.
With a Marist poll showing former president Donald Trump holding a slim lead over Vice President Kamala Harris, that same poll shows the controversial Lake is ten points behind progressive Rep. Ruben Gallego (D-AZ).
As columnist Roberts wrote, "Another day, another heaping helping of disaster for Arizona’s reigning queen of the Make America Great Again movement. When this election is over, Republicans really should begin asking themselves when and if they ever want to win again — because if it wasn’t clear after already losing two Senate seats and every key statewide office, it’s about to become undeniably clear to all but the fiercest MAGA diehards."
That led GOP campaign consultant Chuck Coughlin to tell Roberts, "As Al McCoy would have said, ‘You can put that one in the deep freeze,’" with GOP colleague Barrett Marson adding, "She is probably beyond help by now."
Republican consultant Tyler Montague painted a darker picture of Lake's future, telling Roberts, "I don’t think there’s enough money and time for Lake to rehabilitate her image."
Democratic nominee Kamala Harris hammered former President Donald Trump's manufacturing record ahead of his visit to the battleground state of Michigan on Friday, pointing out that offshoring of U.S. jobs increased during the Republican nominee's first White House term despite his grand promises to revitalize the nation's industrial base.
"Donald Trump is one of the biggest losers of manufacturing in American history," Harris, who outlined her own domestic manufacturing priorities earlier this week, said in a statement Thursday. "He makes empty promise after empty promise to American workers, but never delivers. As president, he cut taxes for corporations, encouraged outsourcing, and lost nearly 200,000 manufacturing jobs, including auto jobs. He has joked about firing workers, supported state anti-union laws, and suggested companies move jobs out of Michigan."
"Yet it was Trump's trade deal that made it far too easy for a major auto company like Stellantis to break their word to workers by outsourcing American jobs," Harris continued, pointing to the United States-Mexico-Canada Agreement (USMCA). "As one of only 10 senators to vote against USMCA, I knew it was not sufficient to protect our country and its workers. Many who voted for this deal conditioned their support on a review process, which as president I will use."
"On his watch, a Warren car plant closed and the auto industry bled thousands of jobs."
Trump has two campaign events scheduled in Michigan on Friday as recent polling shows him narrowly behind Harris in the key state, which President Joe Biden won in 2020.
Despite his starkly anti-worker record, Trump has sought to appeal to members of the United Auto Workers (UAW)—which has endorsed Harris—and other unions in Michigan and elsewhere during his bid for another term, issuing sweeping promises and dire warnings about the future of U.S. manufacturing if he loses in November.
If he doesn't prevail, Trump said during a town hall in Flint, Michigan last week, "there will be zero car jobs, manufacturing jobs."
"It will all be out of here," he added.
Democrats have countered such claims by pointing to the fact that offshoring accelerated under Trump, particularly due to the passage of the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act—a law that delivered massive tax breaks to the rich and incentivized corporate offshoring.
A Public Citizenanalysis published in the final months of Trump's presidency found that the Republican nominee's administration "awarded more than $425 billion in federal contracts to corporations listed among those responsible for offshoring 200,000 American jobs" during his first term.
One of those factories was a General Motors plant in Warren, Michigan—a closure that the Democratic National Committee (DNC) highlighted with a billboard display in the city ahead of Trump's visit Friday.
“Donald Trump broke his promises to Michigan's working families," said Stephanie Justice, a DNC spokesperson. "On his watch, a Warren car plant closed and the auto industry bled thousands of jobs."
In a video released earlier this week as part of its 2024 election efforts, UAW president Shawn Fain called Trump a "con man" who is merely posturing as an ally of the working class while pushing policy changes that would primarily benefit those of his own class, the ultra-wealthy.
"We can't get fooled or distracted by a con man like Donald Trump. That's why I'm voting for Kamala Harris," said Fain. "That's why our union has endorsed Kamala Harris, and that's why our country needs Kamala Harris as our next president."
Throughout the 2024 campaign, Trump has proposed aggressive tariffs to help protect and restore U.S. manufacturing. Earlier this week, the former president singled out John Deere, a federal contractor that has announced plans to lay off roughly 2,000 workers and shift some of its production to Mexico.
"I am just notifying John Deere right now that if you do that, we are putting a 200% tariff on everything that you want to sell into the United States," Trump said during a campaign event in Pennsylvania earlier this week.
In an op-ed for Common Dreams on Thursday, Labor Institute executive director Les Leopold implored the Harris campaign and the Democratic Party more broadly to do more to counter Trump's messaging, specifically by calling out and moving to penalize companies that carry out mass layoffs while rewarding their rich investors with stock buybacks and dividends.
"Because Trump has difficulty focusing on a coherent message, the field is still open for the Democrats to put forth a new policy that directly affects the jobs of millions of workers," wrote Leopold. "Harris should give a primetime talk and focus on the $700 billion in taxpayer money that now goes to private corporations for goods, services, and subsidies."
"Here's the line she should stress: No taxpayer money shall go to corporations that lay off taxpayers or conduct stock buybacks," he continued. "The Democrats must decide, and soon, whether they really are the party of the working class. If they are, then they must fight hard to save worker jobs from unabated corporate greed."
