Rep. Marjoie Taylor Greene (R-GA) escalated her feud with her Republican colleagues on Wednesday night during an interview with Tucker Carlson on his eponymous media network.
Greene has been at odds with Republican leadership over the last couple of months over the Trump administration's handling of the Jeffrey Epstein files and the government shutdown. Greene has criticized her colleague for protecting sexual predators over their victims, and accused her party of hurting average Americans by allowing health care subsidies to expire.
Greene did not mince words during her interview with Carlson.
"These people are so fake," Greene said. "The only reason that they kiss up to Donald Trump, our president, the only reason they kiss up to him, is because they're terrified of a Truth Social post, because they're terrified of their own constituents that fully support MAGA, that fully support America First and fully support everything that Donald Trump has laid out now for years and years."
"Americans got to the point where electing Donald Trump was a referendum on the Republican Party," she added. "And I very much feel that because many times I hate my own party, and I blame Republicans for many of the problems that we have today."
"I blame them for being so America last to the point where they are literally slaves to all the big industries in Washington, the military industrial complex, big pharma, health insurance industries, you name it," Greene continued. "They are literally slaves to them, and they love foreign war so much."
A three-judge panel on the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals appeared skeptical of the Trump administration's justification for deploying troops to Los Angeles, according to a new report.
During oral arguments heard on Wednesday, Judge Eric Miller pushed back on several arguments made by Justice Department attorney Eric McArthur about whether President Donald Trump is justified in sending troops to the city, according to a report by NBC News. In May, Trump deployed thousands of federal troops to Los Angeles in response to growing protests against his immigration policies.
Miller asked McArthur why "disorderly conduct" at the protest was "comparable severity to an invasion or a rebellion," according to the report.
“Because violence is being used to thwart enforcement of federal law,” McArthur answered, adding that it went "well beyond the sort of everyday resistance that you see to federal law enforcement."
“But violence is used to thwart enforcement of federal law all the time. Right?" Miller asked. "I mean, like, the FBI goes to arrest somebody and he shoots at them or tries to run away, and that happens every day, right?"
The Trump administration faces a second case stemming from his attempt to deploy troops to Portland, Oregon, over the limits of presidential power to deploy federal troops domestically. A federal panel of judges ruled that Trump did have the power to deploy troops to the city.
A pair of Democrats bashed a GOP strategist on CNN on Tuesday night after the strategist defended President Donald Trump's ballroom renovation project at the White House, which they argued needed more oversight.
Rep. Sara Jacobs (D-CA) and Rep. Tom Suozzi (D-NY) joined CNN's "NewsNight with Abby Phillip" to discuss the government shutdown and Trump's decision to undertake a significant renovation project while Congress is out of session. The ballroom project was initially projected to cost $200 million, paid for by private funds, including Trump's, but reports indicate that estimate has swelled to more than $300 million.
Host Abby Phillip asked GOP strategist Tim Parrish whether Trump should be more forthcoming with the American people about who is funding the ballroom project. Parrish demurred, arguing that more information was needed.
"A big theme that we're going to talk about tonight, and about this administration, is that there is just no oversight," Suozzi said, adding that he would like to see the administration take a more normal "process" with the renovation.
Parrish argued that Trump shouldn't have to disclose the information because it's being paid for by private funds.
"So, there's no ethical conflict here?" Suozzi asked pointedly.
"There are ethical conflicts for everybody," Parrish said. "And to follow your line of thinking, we shouldn't assume they exist."
Parrish's comment caused Jacobs to erupt.
"That's not how ethics works!" she yelled at Parrish.
Speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA) slammed Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA) during an interview onCNN after she claimed that Republicans are hurting people by allowing health care subsidies to expire.
Greene has broken with Republican leadership in recent weeks over the government shutdown and President Donald Trump's handling of the Jeffrey Epstein files, which he promised to release while he was campaigning. For instance, Greene joined Reps. Thomas Massie (R-KY) and Ro Khanna (D-CA) at a press conference with Epstein's victims. She also criticized how Republicans have handled the shutdown on comedian Theo Von's podcast, "This Past Weekend."
On Wednesday, Greene called out Johnson in a post on X, saying, "he has ideas and pages of policy, but did not say a single policy plan" during the Republicans' weekly conference call.
"Republicans, it’s time to build the off-ramp off of Obamacare in a responsible way, deregulate healthcare and pharmaceuticals and demand price transparency across the board, and incentivize the market in such a way to open up competition which will drive down cost. Pick up your bat and ball and get in the game," Greene posted on X.
Johnson discussed Greene's comment on CNN's "The Source" with Kaitlan Collins on Wednesday night.
"Bless her heart, that's an absurd statement," Johnson said. "These calls are obviously monitored by media, so we are not going to have actual strategy discussions on a line where you have hundreds of people listening in because it would be reported on the first page."
"Marjorie is not here in Washington; she is not on the committees of jurisdiction, and she's not in on those specific discussions, but she will be soon," he added.
Hollywood legend Robert De Niro, who has won two Academy Awards and a Golden Globe, is now just a "sad, broken old man," according to Stephen Miller, the White House deputy chief of staff for policy.
De Niro, 82, teed off on Miller this week during an appearance on MSNBC's "The Weekend," comparing Miller to Joseph Goebbels, a Nazi politician who served as Adolf Hitler’s chief propagandist and Reich Minister of Propaganda.
"We see it, we see it, we see it … all the time — he will not want to leave. He set it up with … I guess he’s the Goebbels of the cabinet, Stephen Miller. He’s a Nazi," De Niro said, in comments flagged by Newsweek.
"He is and [Miller’s] Jewish, and he should be ashamed of himself," De Niro said.
Miller has faced comparisons to Goebbels over his extreme rhetoric and political tactics that critics say echo fascist propaganda. Miller has used martyrdom during his speeches and smeared political foes as evil.
On Wednesday, the White House official melted down on Fox News and attacked De Niro in a lengthy rant.
"Robert De Niro is a sad, broken old man who is mostly enraged because he hasn't made anything worth watching in at least 30 years," railed Miller. "Probably the longest string of flops, failures, embarrassments — this man has been degrading himself on camera with one horrific film after another for my entire adult life, and he is not taken seriously by anybody. Not by his family, friends, not by his community."
Miller concluded, "He is a shell of a man and everybody disregards everything he says."
Miller: Robert De Niro is a sad, broken old man who is mostly enraged because he hasn't made anything worth watching in at least 30 years. Probably the longest string of flops, failures, embarrassments. This man has been degrading himself on camera with one horrific film after… pic.twitter.com/n5VDf1DEu7 — Acyn (@Acyn) October 23, 2025
A pair of Justice Department prosecutors who lost their jobs after working on special counsel Jack Smith's legal team investigating and charging President Donald Trump are back, having founded a new law firm to take on corruption, CBS News reported on Wednesday.
Smith's two legal cases against Trump, for election conspiracy over the 2020 coup plot and for illegally removing classified documents to his Mar-a-Lago residence, "were dropped when he won reelection in 2024, because under Justice Department policy, sitting presidents are not prosecuted," noted the report.
Soon after this happened, two prosecutors central to these cases, Molly Gaston and J.P. Cooney, "would lose their jobs once Mr. Trump took office in January. They were fired in a Trump administration purge of prosecutors associated with Smith and staff from the Justice Department's Public Integrity section, which has specialized in corruption cases in the 50 years since Watergate."
Gaston and Cooney, who were two of the most experienced public corruption prosecutors at the department, are now heading up a new project: an eponymous law firm that will seek to do much of the work they did in the government, from the outside.
This is seen as necessary, the report noted, because Trump's retribution purges have all but gutted the DOJ's public corruption unit.
"Justice Connection, an organization representing former agency employees, told CBS News it estimates the Justice Department's Public Integrity section has shrunk to just two full time attorneys, down from dozens in recent years," said the report. "Gaston and Cooney told CBS News they will also offer private legal services to clients who are the subject of investigations, including in congressional probes."
"Institutional relationships are crumbling right now," Gaston said to CBS. "It presents an opportunity and a need for the kind of services that we will provide to impartially and independently give advice and guidance."
The wrongly deported migrant, now being charged with gang activity by the Trump administration, is seeking a subpoena of Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche and several other Justice Department officials as part of his motion to dismiss the case for vindictive prosecution.
The news was reported on Wednesday evening by Politico's Kyle Cheney, who provided a link to the filing in opposition to Kilmar Abrego Garcia's motion by the Justice Department.
"Defendant’s motion to compel now asks this Court to authorize an open-ended fishing expedition into internal governmental documents and communications that would never be subject to discovery in the normal course," read the filing. "He seeks such extraordinary and intrusive discovery, moreover, in furtherance of a claim of vindictive and selective prosecution that is meritless on its face: the relevant prosecutorial decision-maker, the Acting U.S. Attorney, has explained on the record that this prosecution was not brought for vindictive or discriminatory reasons."
Abrego, a Salvadoran immigrant living with his family in Maryland, was sent to the infamous CECOT megaprison in his birth country, despite a court order barring his deportation there. The Trump administration has repeatedly claimed he is affiliated with the transnational MS-13 criminal gang, which Abregon denies.
Initially, the administration sought to claim that it had no jurisdiction to force El Salvador to return Abrego to American soil, but after months of outcry over the case, it relented and moved to have him returned. Authorities then promptly charged him in a criminal case and vowed to deport him to a different country.
This month, the administration has tried to get a number of African countries with no connection to Abrego, including Uganda, Ghana, and Eswatini, to accept him, but so far, all have refused.
Michael Wolff plans to subpoena President Donald Trump, Melania Trump, and convicted child sex trafficker Ghislaine Maxwell in the lawsuit he filed against the first lady on Tuesday, the reporter and Trump biographer said.
A legal threat against him by Melania Trump last week represented “exactly … what a SLAPP suit is,” Wolff said, going on to define “strategic lawsuits against public participation,” or intimidation suits, as weapons wielded by wealthy people saying, “We're suing you so you shut up.”
“That's against the law in New York state, to use the law for such purposes,” Wolff told the former Clinton aide Sidney Blumenthal and Michael Popok, a lawyer and host of the Legal AF podcast, on Wednesday.
“So last night, we went, we sued. We sued in court in New York, asking for a declaratory judgment, a judgment that says, ‘You can't do this.’
“And this process will give us now the right to call witnesses, subpoena power, and those witnesses might very well, will very well include Melania Trump and Donald Trump, and therefore afford me the opportunity to really have an in-depth discussion with them, under oath before a court reporter, about their relationship with … Jeffrey Epstein.”
Melania Trump’s threat to sue Wolff arose from comments he made on his Daily Beast podcast, Inside Trump’s Head, about how the first lady met her husband.
Pictures showing both Trumps with Epstein, the late financier and sex offender whose crimes and ties to powerful men are the subject of renewed and fierce attention, have long been discussed.
Wolff has spoken widely about interviews he conducted with Epstein in which Epstein’s long friendship with Donald Trump and their acrimonious falling out were discussed in depth.
Wolff has said Epstein showed him pictures of Trump in potentially embarrassing poses with young women. He also said he presumes the FBI now possesses such photos.
Epstein died in prison in 2019, when Trump was first in the White House. Authorities said the death was a suicide.
Six years on, intense speculation over the so-called “Epstein files” continues, stoked by the emergence of documents prominently including a suggestive 50th birthday poem and drawing from Trump, and by the publication of the autobiography of Virginia Giuffre, an Epstein victim who killed herself earlier this year.
“Donald Trump and Jeffrey Epstein had this long, long, long friendship,” Wolff told Blumenthal and Popok. “Really a joined-by-the-hip friendship. So there will be a lot of questions” in court.
Blumenthal asked: “And there may be other witnesses called as well?”
Wolff said: “Yes … anyone who might have information about their relationship, Donald Trump's relationship with Jeffrey Epstein, Melania Trump's relationship with Jeffrey Epstein and his circle.”
Referring to Epstein’s long-time partner, Blumenthal said: “You could call Ghislaine Maxwell, couldn’t you?”
“Oh, we certainly could,” Wolff said.
Maxwell's involvement in Epstein's affairs and links to men such as Britain's Prince Andrew are a major focus of Giuffre's memoir.
Recently, Maxwell was moved to a relatively comfortable federal facility after a controversial jailhouse interview with Todd Blanche, the deputy attorney general who was previously Donald Trump’s lawyer.
Donald and Melania Trump vehemently deny wrongdoing in relation to Epstein. In August, the Beast withdrew a story about the Trumps and Epstein that was based on comments by Wolff.
“I'm very fond of The Daily Beast,” Wolff said, “… a young person in the office wrote an article based on the podcast that I did. And in fact incorrectly said that I said that Jeffrey Epstein introduced Melania to Donald Trump … I didn’t say it and I don’t know … that he made the direct introduction.”
A spokesman for the first lady, Nick Clemens, recently said: “First Lady Melania Trump’s attorneys are actively ensuring immediate retractions and apologies by those who spread malicious, defamatory falsehoods. The true account of how the First Lady met President Trump is in her best-selling book, ‘Melania.’”
In that book, Melania Trump says she met Donald Trump at the Kit Kat Club in New York City in September 1998. Trump was with another woman but asked Melania out anyway, she writes.
On the Legal AF podcast, Blumenthal quoted recent remarks in which Donald Trump appeared to say he was behind his wife’s legal threats, saying he said he had “done pretty well on these lawsuits lately” and had told Melania to “go forward” because “Jeffrey Epstein has nothing to do with Melania and I introducing but they do that. They make up stories.”
Wolff said suing Melania was “not about defamation. This is about the effort, on the part of the Trumps, to shut people up. And it's an extraordinary effort.
“I don't know of any instance in the modern age where the President of the United States or the First Lady, in this instance basically they are one and the same, have sued the media … and they have done it now repeatedly, over and over and over again and … it has worked. It has chilled everybody's sense of safety in our business.
“… This is the White House in all its power, acting against the media and me … I'm hardly the media. I'm just a single writer.”
Though Wolff said “frankly, it is frightening” to take on the Trumps, he said he felt he did not have any alternative.
“Thinking this through, ‘How do I get this to go away,’ I just couldn't figure out a way, and also, I felt, well, you know, damn it. You know, there's a responsibility here. You got to do it now.”
Faced with the expense of mounting the suit, Wolff said he would probably ask for financial support from the public.
Wolff also noted that in 2018, Donald Trump tried to stop the publication of Fire and Fury, the first of Wolff’s four books on the president. When the publisher refused to blink, Wolff noted, Trump backed down.
President Donald Trump appears to be holding his vice president back from achieving his most "dangerous" goals, according to a former Republican analyst.
Ex-Republican analyst Tim Miller, host of "The Bulwark Podcast," said during a new podcast episode on Wednesday that President Donald Trump's lack of apparent ideology seems to be thwarting the culture war aims of Vance and other administration members like Russ Vought and Stephen Miller.
"Trump is the scariest because you do need a cult leader to successfully do a full toppling of democracy," Miller said. "But, just purely on an ideological standpoint, Trump tamps down what a lot of these guys want to do in various ways."
Reports indicate that Miller has been guiding the administration's immigration enforcement policies, which have become increasingly unpopular, according to public polls. Vought has also sought to implement a more conservative bent in the mainstream media by threatening the licenses of networks with shows that have criticized the president.
Miller's guest, Jon Favreau, co-host of "Pod Save America," noted that Trump's administration has "a bunch of f------ lunatics" like Vought and Miller, both of whom share an ideology with Vance that is "more dangerous" than Trump's.
"They're all f------ nerds, but they're very dangerous, and the ideology is much more dangerous than Trump's ideology, who you could say doesn't have an ideology," Favreau said.
Curtis Sliwa, the activist and Republican nominee for New York City mayor known for donning a red beret, quit his radio talk show on Wednesday after getting heated amid calls from the owner for him to drop out.
Sliwa, who founded the nonprofit Guardian Angels crime prevention organization, has hosted radio programs for more than three decades and became a prominent conservative in the state. He was the Republican nominee for mayor in 2021 and 2025.
But pressure has mounted for Sliwa, 71, to drop out from MAGA fans. And it came to a head when WABC station owner John Catsimatidis and other colleagues urged him to end his mayoral campaign to help embattled former Gov. Andrew Cuomo.
“Curtis would make the best mayor of all the candidates … but Curtis has to realize that he should love New York more than anything else,” Catsimatidis told Sid Rosenberg on WABC radio Monday, according to the New York Post.
“It certainly looks like Curtis should pull out right now," he added, claiming the city's can't "take a chance" that surprise Democratic nominee Zohran Mamdani will win.
On Wednesday, hours ahead of a high-profile debate, Sliwa lashed out.
"He raged on the station’s airwaves 'you will never see me at the studios of WABC again' as he accused colleagues of betraying him and complained to host Sid Rosenberg that the station was giving preferable treatment to independent candidate, former Gov. Andrew Cuomo," the Post reported, calling it a "fiery on-air showdown."
"Let me just say Sid, I am directing my comments to everybody at WABC," Sliwa said. “They have said I’m selfish. Selfish? Are you out of your mind?”
President Donald Trump is trying to destroy everything about the government that functions for the people in order to reshape it in his image, former White House ethics expert turned States United Democracy Center chief Norm Eisen told MSNBC's "The Weeknight" in a highly animated tirade.
This comes as Trump moves to bulldoze the East Wing of the White House to make room for his massive, corporate-funded ballroom project, all in the middle of a federal government shutdown being waged over whether people will continue to have funding for health care.
"I think, in a very real way, that he doesn't care about the food lines that are happening," said anchor and former Republican National Committee chairman Michael Steele. "The lines are happening at food banks around the country. He doesn't care about the impact that's coming because of the shutdown. We haven't even talked about what people are going to see when they get to Thanksgiving and going to the Christmas holidays. How does this translate, do you think, for the American people when they see the symbolism of the East Wing being torn down ... What do you think people are hearing and seeing out there?"
"I think the totality of it does penetrate," said Eisen. "We've seen poll after poll lately where Donald Trump is at historic approval ratings, down as low as 37 percent."
"When I worked in the White House — which I view as holy ground because of the lives that have been sacrificed for the American idea that that building represents — when I would walk in that East Wing that is so cruelly torn down, I would get chills at the history of what had happened in that building," he said, growing louder and more agitated. I do think the American people get the totality, and the thing that Donald Trump is doing, he's tearing down that building, but he's tearing down the human infrastructure. He's attacking the government employees in this shutdown."
This, he said, "is why we at the Democracy Defender Fund have gone to court. We've, with our partners, with the federal employee labor unions and other wonderful partners, we've gotten three trials. We got the latest one today to say you can't tear down the human infrastructure, you can't fire people. There's no legal basis to do it in a shutdown. He wants to inflict that same, same pain. That's not what America is about."
"So I do think you're seeing a public repudiation of Trump," he added. "And of course, we're going to have a referendum on him. New Jersey, Virginia, Pennsylvania Supreme Court retention races. And I think you're going to see powerful repudiation."
Rep. Eric Swalwell (D-CA) accused President Donald Trump's Department of Justice of ignoring death threats against him, despite their pledge to actively pursue threats against elected officials, during an interview with progressive YouTuber Brian Tyler Cohen on Wednesday.
Swalwell said he has referred multiple people to the DOJ for threatening his life and the lives of his family members. He added that the DOJ sent him a letter saying they were not going to prosecute the cases.
"A couple of weeks ago, after the assassination of Charlie Kirk, the attorney general had put out on her social media that the administration will aggressively pursue any threats against elected officials, and I responded essentially saying that's not the case," Swalwell said. "We have a number of direct specific threats to me and my kids that have not been prosecuted, and we were sent letters saying they would not be prosecuted."
Swalwell's comments come at a time when multiple Trump critics have been criminally indicted. For instance, former FBI Director James Comey was indicted on two charges of obstruction of justice and lying to Congress. New York Attorney General Letitia James was also indicted for allegedly committing mortgage fraud. Both Comey and James have denied the charges against them.
Swalwell added that Attorney General Pam Bondi has reached out and asked to "look at" the cases he submitted.
"I don't want to be treated any better or worse than anyone else, but my fear at this point is that because I have been a critic, and I am someone who holds the president accountable, is that the DOJ is simply not going after people who threaten me," Swalwell said.
The recent group chat scandals that rocked the Republican Party revealed the "hubris" living at the core of the party's communications, according to a new column.
David A. Graham argued in a new column for The Atlantic that the racist and xenophobic group text messages unearthed in recent reporting show that some Republicans pose "a serious security risk for the country" because they opt to communicate in unreliable systems like text messages or on the encrypted messaging app Signal.
"When you’re texting about your admiration for Hitler, the danger is less about national security and more about job security," Graham wrote. "There’s no good place to call yourself a Nazi, but there are less risky ones. If you’re doing it in person with your edgelord friends, at least you’re not leaving a paper trail."
"Doing it where someone can easily screenshot your messages and send them to a reporter (two members of the Young Republican chat blamed internal rivalries for the leak) is much dumber," he added.
Even though the texts may generate backlash, Graham notes that few, if any, Republican officials will punish the people who wrote them.
"Republican figures are texting as though they have impunity because by many measures, they do," he argued. "Perversely, these stories may simply reinforce for some of them that everyone is texting the same things they are, and that they won’t face major consequences for doing so."
"If they get caught, they don’t need to apologize or change careers," he continued. "They can just tap out a simple 'lol, oops' and then return to what they were doing."
