A former senator reacted Tuesday to Attorney General Pam Bondi's combative and stumbling responses to questions about the Jeffrey Epstein files before a Senate Judiciary Committee hearing, warning that "juries see that pause."
Attorney and former Missouri Sen. Claire McCaskill (D) told MSNBC's Nicolle Wallace that eventually, more information would come out.
"When I was a courtroom prosecutor and I had a witness on the stand, and they looked the way she looked when he asked that question, what was flashing through her brain was her telling the FBI agents and Kash Patel to go through those records and flag Donald Trump's name," McCaskill said.
"That was what that was. And that was that pause you saw. And you know what? Juries see that pause. And the American people see that pause. And she can come back with yelling and snark and ugly all she wants. It doesn't change the fact that she lied about there not being a list of clients she's lying about," she added.
Bondi refused to answer questions about the Epstein case.
"There nothing being in that file that is important to the victims of these crimes," McCaskill said. "And I do think they're going to be found out. And by the way, you know, all the stuff they're doing right now, I mean, they're prosecuting Comey for lying in front of the Senate. I hope she tries that shirt on and likes how it fits."
A memo released this week reveals the Trump administration is considering denying retroactive pay for up to 750,000 federal workers furloughed as part of the federal shutdown. But it turns out this doesn't just violate federal law, it contradicts prior guidelines the Trump administration itself laid out in an earlier memo.
According to MSNBC analyst Sam Stein, "The [Office of Management and Budget] memo ... saying furloughed workers aren't necessarily allowed backpay seems to be in direct contradiction to the [Office of Personnel Management] shutdown guidance the administration issued LAST MONTH."
That particular guidance, screenshotted by Stein on his X post, read, "After the lapse in appropriations has ended, employees who were furloughed as the result of the lapse will receive retroactive pay for those furlough periods. (See 31 U.S.C. 1341(c)(2).) Retroactive pay will be provided on the earliest date possible after the lapse ends, regardless of scheduled pay dates. (See 31 U.S.C. 1341(c)(2).) If retroactive pay cannot be provided by the normal pay date for the given pay period, it will be provided as soon as possible thereafter. Retroactive pay is provided at the employee's 'standard rate of pay.'"
The guidance in this memo, noted congressional staffer Aaron Fritschner, comes from the Government Employee Fair Treatment Act, a bill passed by Congress in 2019 that requires back pay for any government employee put on leave during a shutdown.
OMB is run by Russ Vought, a hardline anti-government activist who helped draft the infamous "Project 2025" plan to restructure the entire government for permanent Republican Party rule. Trump denied any involvement with Project 2025 on the campaign trail last year, even though many of its architects were alumni of his previous administration.
The current shutdown comes as Democrats demand an extension of critical Affordable Care Act subsidies that keep insurance rates stable for millions of people as a condition of their votes to pass continued funding. President Donald Trump and GOP leadership have so far refused to negotiate on the matter, demanding the funding pass first.
Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA) made Republicans' effort to silence Democrats' demands in the federal shutdown much more difficult, Aaron Blake wrote for CNN on Tuesday.
On paper, it shouldn't be so. Greene is notoriously one of the most hard-right, pro-Trump lawmakers in Congress, and she has gone so far as to urge Senate Republicans to bypass the filibuster to ram through funding for the government and go over Democrats' heads.
But she also went out of her way to concede the very thing Democrats are demanding as a condition for reopening the government: that Affordable Care Act subsidies for millions of people should be extended to prevent massive spikes in insurance premiums.
“I’m carving my own lane. And I’m absolutely disgusted that health insurance premiums will DOUBLE if the tax credits expire this year,” Greene wrote on X, adding that she opposes Obamacare and the entire concept of health insurance in principle, but that it's still a huge problem that “not a single Republican in leadership talked to us about this or has given us a plan to help Americans deal with their health insurance premiums DOUBLING!!!”
"Greene has not said Republicans should relent and agree to extending the subsidies as part of the government shutdown debate, specifically. But it’s a remarkably off-message moment for Republicans. And it’s already impacting the debate on Capitol Hill," wrote Blake, noting even Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY) praised her for her remarks.
Greene's defiance of leadership ranks reveals just what a precarious spot Republicans are in, noted Blake.
"Using shutdowns for policy concessions almost never works, because Americans overwhelmingly say they shouldn’t be used as leverage," he wrote. "But Democrats’ demand here has proved an unusually popular one. A poll last week from KFF, a nonpartisan health policy research group, showed 78% of Americans and even 57% of MAGA-aligned Republicans supported extending the Obamacare subsidies. In that way, a MAGA Republican like Greene supporting them isn’t all that surprising."
It's still unclear how this will end, and not at all guaranteed Republicans will be the ones to blink, Blake concluded. However, "Greene’s comments effectively highlight a problem that already existed for Republicans — while casting it in terms they probably wish she hadn’t."
A top Republican in Congress pushed back on claims made by President Donald Trump about the government shutdown and a potential pardon for convicted sex trafficker Ghislaine Maxwell.
Rep. James Comer (R-KY) joined CNN's Jake Tapper on Tuesday to discuss the ongoing government shutdown and a few of Trump's latest threats. Earlier in the day, Trump threatened to withhold pay from furloughed government workers. The president has also not yet denied whether he will pardon Maxwell or not, a topic that was revisited during a Monday news conference when CNN's Kaitlan Collins asked Trump about the pardon.
Comer responded to Trump's claims during the interview.
"If you look at history, I've said [government shutdowns] never end well, because if you think you're going to save money, you're not, because you're going to have to go back and pay all these salaries," Comer said. "Republicans have traditionally shut the government down to try to save money, and that didn't work."
"Now we have a situation where, in my opinion, the Democrats are shutting the government down because they want to spend more money," he added. "But I think the employees will get paid."
Tapper also asked Comer whether Trump should pardon Maxwell, who worked with disgraced financier Jeffrey Epstein.
"I do not think he should. I've been very vocal about that," Comer said. "I've seen enough information thus far from the thousands of pages of documents that the Department of Justice has turned over, in addition to the documents that we subpoenaed from the estate, in addition to conversations that I've had with some of the victims of Epstein and Maxwell, that I can say with confidence, I would strongly discourage any type of pardon or commutation of Maxwell."
Former Watergate prosecutor Jill Wine-Banks spoke with political psychiatrist, Dr. Karin Tamerius, on her "Just the Facts" podcast on Tuesday, and the discussion walked through how one woman broke through far-right propaganda to have a conversation with a MAGA loyalist.
"So, I reached out to my angry uncle. Someone who listened to Rush Limbaugh, watched Fox News. Who was kind of living in a parallel universe from mine," said Dr. Tamerius.
"And we started talking, and I'll tell you in the beginning it was incredibly difficult ... I realized very quickly that if I wanted that conversation to go anywhere, I needed to listen. And by the time — so we had spent a few months conversing — I started to realize, you know, this is actually working," she continued.
Wine-Banks said that she and one of her pro-Trump friends debate frequently, but it became clear that her friend didn't even agree on the facts. Tamerius explained that there are steps to follow before addressing the facts.
"If you don't have somebody's trust, they aren't going to listen to you when you start presenting facts," the psychiatrist said. "And the key thing to understand is when we present facts, the reason we think they should be affected is that we think we're presenting them to an impartial judge. That we're presenting them to someone in a courtroom. But when we're talking to someone in a political conversation, they are already coming in with a bias. Very, very strong opinions."
She explained that humans are both conditioned and constructed to not be easily persuaded because it doesn't exactly help people adapt and evolve when they change their opinions willy-nilly.
"We need our beliefs to be fairly constant in order to function in the world," said Tamerius.
She cited a metaphor from Jonathan Haidt, an NYU social psychologist and author, who explained the mind as divided into parts, likening it to a person riding an elephant. There's the elephant, the rider and the path. The parts of our brains involve the rational and the emotional. The rider may have their own rational idea about where to go, but the elephant has its own ideas about where to go. The man might try to drag the elephant, but if they disagree, the elephant is more likely to win out.
"People don't want to be told what to think. People don't want to be judged. So, you want to go into a conversation first by letting people know, I'm not going to think any worse of you because you see things differently," Tamerius said. "I also don't think you're stupid."
Wine-Banks confessed she was still at a loss trying to figure out how to begin. So, Tamerius gave her a kind of opener.
Her specific situation is to approach someone by saying something to the effect of, "I notice you watch a lot of Fox News. That's really different from me. I tend to watch CNN. And I think you and I probably have some different ideas about politics, and my guess is that sometimes in the past, you may have felt really judged or even felt judged by other people. What I want you to know is I would love to talk about this in a way that is respectful to both of us. I want to learn where you're coming from. But I don't want to tell you what to believe."
Reporter Susan Berger used an anti-vaccine conversation as an example, but even her suggestion was "too confrontational," said Tamerius. The word that often puts people on guard is when you say "but."
"So you started with a briding statement, but you immediately undid it," she explained.
What she suggested folks do is to use something more like "yes, and" instead.
Evan Perez, CNN's senior justice correspondent, was visibly taken aback by Senate Democrats on Tuesday, who he said appeared "unprepared" for the performance Attorney General Pam Bondi gave before the Judiciary Committee.
Bondi was grilled by Democratic senators during a hearing on Tuesday about President Donald Trump's efforts to release the Epstein files and the administration's deployment of federal troops to Democratic-run states and cities. Bondi appeared combative and frequently yelled at Senators who asked questions that she found disrespectful.
"She came there with a mission, and a lot of it was in those binders that she had there," Perez said. "She had one-liners that seemed tailored for every specific Democratic senator. She knew what they were going to come after her for, and she took it and redirected it straight back at them."
"And you saw a lot of them seem completely unprepared for this, for what was coming, despite the fact that we saw a similar performance a couple of weeks ago from Kash Patel, the FBI director," he continued. "So, it's kind of remarkable to me to watch that hearing unfold and to see these Democratic senators not seem to know what the playbook."
Patel attended a hearing last month where Senators asked him similar questions. He at times seemed to forget pertinent FBI cases, like Dylan Roof's mass shooting of a Black church in Charleston, South Carolina, and became combative with lawmakers who questioned Trump's actions.
A former Republican strategist and staunch critic of President Donald Trump shredded Attorney General Pam Bondi's "venomous" appearance before the Senate Judiciary Committee on Tuesday in a new essay.
Rick Wilson, who co-founded The Lincoln Project, argued in a new Substack essay that Bondi displayed "performative outrage" during the hearing. She vociferously attacked Democratic Senators who asked questions about President Donald Trump's efforts to hide the Jeffrey Epstein files and deploy federal troops to Democratic-run states and cities.
"Today’s Senate Judiciary performance wasn’t testimony; it was crude, overacted scenery-chewing regional dinner theater for the Trump base, a MAGA striptease dance of performative outrage and imaginary grievance where facts went to die and the only rule is 'Never let the truth stand in the way of fellating Trump’s revenge fantasies and galactic ego,'" Wilson wrote.
Wilson added that Bondi's theatrical performance seemed to have an audience of one.
"Bondi strutted in, dialed the volume to eleven, and delivered the full martyrdom package: a sneering, venomous performance laced with sanctimony and shamelessness, larded with constant personal attacks against every Democratic Senator in the room, replete with wild accusations and wilder denials," Wilson wrote.
"MAGA will think she won today, but on the biggest question in Trump’s cobwebbed brain, she blew it," he continued. "On Jeffrey Epstein, she failed to exonerate Trump, defend the coverup with anything even vaguely logical, and made the stench of her ongoing coverup even more rancid."
A group of plaintiffs in Chicago, including reporters, press associations, nonprofits, and unions, has filed a lawsuit against the Trump administration, alleging that federal agents have used "extreme brutality" trying to silence journalists and protesters in the city, reported Politico on Tuesday.
"The organizations — who were also joined in the suit by individual protesters — allege in the 52-page suit that federal agents acted to 'intimidate and silence' civilians and members of the media who did not pose an imminent threat to law enforcement at protests outside a local Immigration and Customs Enforcement processing facility — posing a violation to protesters’ and journalists’ First Amendment rights," the report continued.
This comes as Trump has ordered the National Guard into Portland, Oregon, shortly after protests cropped up outside an ICE facility there. A federal judge appointed by Trump put that order on hold.
In the lawsuit, plaintiffs urge a federal court to “observe, record, and report on the federal agents’ activities and the public’s demonstrations against them," saying that the government has, on an unprecedented scale, “undermined bedrock constitutional protections on this scale or usurped states’ police power by directing federal agents to carry out an illegal mission against the people for the government’s own benefit.”
The president has repeatedly threatened to conduct a National Guard occupation of Chicago as well, following similar operations in Los Angeles and Washington, D.C., and is ramping up immigration enforcement presence there. In many of these interventions, he has not explicitly cited resistance to immigration enforcement, but claimed these cities need order restored from general crime.
Illinois officials have pushed back hard on Trump's threats, with Gov. J.B. Pritzker (D) telling the president, "Your remarks about this effort over the last several weeks have betrayed a continuing slip in your mental faculties, and are not fit for the auspicious office that you occupy."
Sen. Chris Coons (D-DE) shredded President Donald Trump's latest threat to government workers during an appearance on CNN on Tuesday.
Coons joined CNN's Kasie Hunt on "The Arena" to discuss Trump's threat to not pay furloughed government workers back pay once the government reopens. Coons's comments come hours after the president told reporters that some government workers "don't deserve" to be paid once the shutdown ends.
"First, it is just illegal for President Trump to threaten not to pay furloughed federal workers," Coons said. "That's because of a statute, a law that President Trump himself signed in his first term, so he can threaten that, but it's not legal. Federal workers furloughed under a shutdown will be paid when the government reopens."
"Second, between the Republican majority in the Senate in the House and the Republican in the White House,they control whether or not thisgovernment is open or closed,what threats they're making, theways they're trying to impose asmuch pain as possible," Coons said. "This is a Republican shutdown."
Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA) complained about "unbelievable blowback and pressure from the White House" on releasing files about Jeffrey Epstein, despite her support for President Donald Trump on controversial topics, such as the Jan. 6 riots.
"I've always been an unapologetic Trump supporter," Greene told Real America's Voice host Eric Bolling on Tuesday. "Spent millions of dollars out of my own campaign to do that."
"I'm not a slave and I am independent-minded," she continued. "And at times, I disagree with the Trump administration. And guess what, Eric? I'm allowed to do that. I'm an American. I'm allowed to have my own opinion."
Bolling agreed that "Trump's a better president with conservative people who back him, who say maybe not this one, Mr. President."
"On the Epstein files, I've unapologetically stood with women and victims of rape, especially these women," Greene pointed out. "And I received unbelievable blowback and pressure from the White House pushing me to get off [Republican Rep.] Thomas Massie's discharge petition, which I absolutely refuse to do."
"And, you know, that has been shocking to me, and I've seen it as completely unnecessary, and I won't tolerate it," the lawmaker insisted. "There is no amount of pressure they can put on me to force me to step in line on that, so to speak."
Greene said she also received pressure after demanding that Republicans come up with a solution for rising health insurance premiums, which have been at the center of an ongoing government shutdown.
"And I want Republicans to have a solution, and I'm demanding it," she remarked. "I don't think Democrats should be the ones owning this issue because they want socialized health care, and we're $37 trillion in debt, and we can't afford that. However, the reality is many Americans, our families especially, are paying $2,000 a month for health insurance premiums with high deductibles."
"And it's unforgivable. And to allow Democrats to have some sort of moral high ground on this issue because they're only one, the only ones talking about it, I think, is a major failure from the Republican Party," Greene added. "And I'm not going to stand there and just keep talking the talking points when my own adult children can hardly afford health insurance premiums. When everyone in my district, it's the number one issue that I hear about day in and day out, not just people on the ACA, but people that have private insurance as well."
Bolling encouraged Greene to stand firm.
"Instead of other people, you know, you see them kind of flailing around trying to contort themselves into a, and I agree with everything that the president says when, you know, you can't just agree with everything," the host argued. "It's a fool's game to agree with everything as brilliant as he's been and as great as he's done for the country. You just don't have to, especially people who represent literally millions of people like you do yourself."
MSNBC's Nicolle Wallace couldn't help but notice that Attorney General Pam Bondi had a large binder of answers and personal attacks to lodge against Democrats.
While a Reuters reporter managed to capture a shot of some of Bondi's binder notes, Wallace noticed just how thick it was and how overtly partisan her talking points were.
Wallace began with a clip of Bondi flipping through her binder to read aloud Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche's statement on the matter. Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse (D-RI) pointed out that it didn't answer his question.
"Another exhausting non-answer seemingly read from some sort of opposition research book that didn't meet the caliber of something on a congressional campaign from a sitting attorney general today, who was far more concerned with launching those ad hominem attacks on Democratic lawmakers, exclusively the ones asking the tough questions," Wallace said.
"Claire, let's start with you, because I think you're the only person here who may have recognized her attacks as just run-of-the-mill sort of flunky, campaign-level, although that was in her binder, along with a bunch of prepared statements," Wallace said to former Missouri Democratic Sen. Claire McCaskill. "I've never seen that before, have you?"
At another point in the discussion, Wallace noted the political nature of Bondi's attacks and wondered who had compiled the binder, as it would likely fall under a Hatch Act violation.
"Are you able to find out through your sources or through the press office who created the opposition research book that Pam Bondi was reading from?" Wallace asked justice and intelligence reporter Ken Dilanian. "And I asked that because I'm probably the only one who has sullied herself in the dark underbelly of politics by both working on the creation of opposition research in my years on campaigns and sort of arming policymakers with it."
She said that creating a document like that as a taxpayer-funded staffer would be illegal.
"And so I wonder if the Department of Justice would answer a call from you today about who created that book she was reading from with attacks on [Sen. Sheldon] Whitehouse on his wife's company. I mean, that is opposition research straight up. And it is a clear violation of the Hatch Act to be created by a government employee."
Dilanian explained that he could try, but that under the Trump administration, "the Hatch Act doesn't seem to be operational anymore."
Wallace then made a call for anyone at the Justice Department willing to blow the whistle to contact her. "The lines are open, as they say."
An American farmer made a dire plea to President Donald Trump on Tuesday, saying "hope he's listening," as America's "backbone" risks collapse.
Arkansas farmer Scott Brown told CNN it's unclear how he or other agriculture producers will survive Trump's ongoing tariff war, especially as the fall harvest begins.
"I hope to break even, but I mean, we don't know," Brown said. "We're not cutting soybeans yet, and I don't know what the yield is. We're just finishing up corn. I'm a pretty low-debt-load farmer. I farm 800 acres. My equipment's all paid for. I do it all by myself. I'm a first-generation farmer, so I don't have as big of problems as a lot of the guys do. But, I mean, I have friends that farm thousands of acres, 5,000, 10,000, 11,000 acres. They've got worlds of problems. I mean, I don't know that there's any way to yield yourself out of this."
For his friends, the tariff fallout could mean losing everything.
"I don't think that the average American understands when you go down to the bank and get a crop loan, you put all your equipment up, all your equity in your ground, you put your home up, your pickup truck, everything up," he said. "And if they can't pay out and if they've rolled over any debt from last year, they're going to call the auctioneer and they're going to line everything up and they're going to sell it."
Trump is reportedly considering a potential bailout for farmers, a key Republican voting bloc. But that's not enough, Scott said.
"Well, the stopgap needs to come because they've kind of painted the farmer in a corner," he added. "I mean, I want trade, not aid. I need a market. I need a place to sell this stuff. I can work hard enough and make a product. If you give me someplace to sell it, I'll take care of myself, but they've painted us in a corner with this China deal and China buying soybeans. I mean, they've torn a market in half."
China — the biggest buyer — has made zero soybean orders this year. Instead, they've pivoted to purchasing soybeans from South American countries, including Argentina, Paraguay, and Bolivia. These countries plan to expand planting acreage for their crops and focus on planting soon for the 2025 and 2026 crops in the Southern Hemisphere.
The price per bushel of soybeans has also dropped, he added.
"The farmer can't continue to produce a crop below the cost of production. And that's where we're at. And we don't have anywhere to sell it. We're in a tariff war with China. We're in a tariff war with everybody else. I mean, where do they want me to market this stuff?" Scott asked.
This uncertainty also makes it hard to plan for 2026.
"Farming is done in a Russian roulette fashion to say a better set of words," Scott said. "If you pay out, then you get to go again. If you've got enough equity and you don't pay out, you can roll over debt. There's lots of guys farming that have between $400 and $700,000 worth of rollover debt. You know, and then and then you compound the problem with the tariffs. Look at this. When we had USAID, we provided 40% of the humanitarian food for the world. That's all grain and food bought from farmers, from vegetable farmers in the United States. The row crop farmers and grain and everything. So we abandoned that deal. And China accelerates theirs. So now I've got a tariff war that's killing my market."
He also wants the president to hear his message.
"I hope he's listening because, you know, agriculture is the backbone of rural America," Scott said. "For every dollar in agriculture, you get $8 in your rural community. I mean, we help pay taxes on schools, roads. We're the guys that keep the park store open, we're the guy that keeps the local co-op open, that 20 guys work at, and the little town I live in, we have a chicken plant, about 600 chicken houses, except for the school and the hospital. Almost our entire town of 7,000."
Agriculture is tied to everything in rural America, he explained.
"People's economy revolves around agriculture," Scott said. "I mean, I think he needs to listen. It's bigger than the farmer. It's all my friends. Whether they work in town or anything else. I mean, rural America depends on agriculture. And it doesn't matter if you're in Nebraska or you're in Arkansas."
As the federal government shutdown rages on, Republicans in Congress have a new headache to worry about as House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA) clashes with Senate Majority Leader John Thune (R-SD) about whether to convene to pass an emergency extension of pay for troops.
The shutdown has no end in sight, with Democrats demanding an extension of Affordable Care Act subsidies that stabilize millions of people's insurance premiums as a condition of their votes, and Republicans refusing to negotiate on this matter until the government reopens.
According to Politico, "the unusual tactical disagreement between the two top congressional leaders played out in front of cameras Tuesday on Capitol Hill as the shutdown heads into its second week."
Johnson, who has not convened the House in days, told reporters this week, “I’m certainly open to that. We’ve done it in the past. We want to make sure that our troops are paid.”
Thune, however, disagreed, saying, “Honestly, you don’t need that.”
“Obviously, there are certain constituencies — many of them are going to be impacted in a very negative way by what’s happened here. But the simplest way to end it is not try to exempt this group or that one or that group. It’s to get the government open," he added.
In Thune's view, Republicans should hold firm and not even call the House back until Democrats in the Senate agree to pass the funding bill the House already passed.
Further complicating the issue is that House Republicans have avoided swearing in Rep.-elect Adelita Grijalva (D-AZ). Grijalva is the final vote needed for a Trump-opposed bipartisan discharge petition for the House to compel the Trump administration to release the Jeffrey Epstein sex trafficking case files.
But as a consequence of the House's inaction, noted policy analyst Matthew Yglesias, this inaction is also to the GOP's detriment, as with the House gone, they are incapable of forcing messaging votes to try to shift blame for the shutdown onto Democrats.
