A top Pentagon spokesperson joined the chorus of President Donald Trump administration officials offering childish responses to questions from journalists, according to a new report.
HuffPost reported on Monday that Pentagon chief spokesman Sean Parnell told a reporter, "your mom bought it" in response to a question about why Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth wore a Russian-colored tie to meet with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy last week.
"When HuffPost asked Hegseth’s aides if he was aware of the praise from Russia and if he had worn the tie previously, Pentagon chief spokesman Sean Parnell responded with the prepared statement: 'Your mom bought it for him — and it’s a patriotic American tie, moron,'" the report reads in part.
The comments come at a time when Trump is preparing for a second summit with Russian President Vladimir Putin in Budapest.
White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt and Communications chief Steven Cheung offered a similar response to questions about who chose Budapest as the location for the summit. Budapest is the capital city of Hungary, a country led by Putin ally Viktor Orban.
Lawfare's Anna Bower revealed on Monday that President Donald Trump's newly-appointed prosecutor in the Eastern District of Virginia, Lindsey Halligan, reached out to her on Signal and repeatedly melted down, accusing her of false reporting and bias without explaining anything she reported incorrectly — then demanded that it all be retroactively considered "off the record."
Halligan, a defense lawyer with no significant prosecutorial experience, was brought in to replace a seasoned U.S. attorney whom Trump wanted gone for failing to find the evidence to prosecute his political enemies. Since then, she has filed indictments against former FBI Director James Comey for false statements and obstruction, and New York Attorney General Letitia James for bank fraud — but these cases have been riddled with mistakes and are widely panned by legal experts as flimsy.
The particular analysis from Bower that Halligan took issue with was a pair of posts on X that examined New York Times reporting about how James used the real estate Halligan claims was improperly classified to commit mortgage fraud. Bower noted that this was "important exculpatory evidence," but Halligan disagreed.
“What am I getting wrong?” asked Bower, to which Halligan said, “Honestly, so much. I can’t tell you everything but your reporting in particular is just way off.” She accused Bower of jumping to “biased conclusions” instead of “truly looking into the evidence.” When Bower asked if the Times got something wrong, Halligan replied, “Yes they did but you went with it! Without even fact checking anything!!!!”
However, despite Bower repeatedly pressing her over the course of days, Halligan would not elaborate on any factual error from either her or the original Times reporting, while repeatedly saying she couldn't explain because of grand jury secrecy.
"Avoiding grand jury secrecy violations is one reason Justice Department officials so frequently offer 'no comment' on ongoing investigations or cases, preferring instead that the department 'speak through its court filings.' And that’s why my dialogue with Halligan struck me as so unusual," wrote Bower. "Reaching out to a reporter to complain about tweets concerning another publication’s coverage of grand jury testimony seemed uncharacteristically risky for a government lawyer."
Eventually, after a number of back and forths, Bower wrote, “What was the purpose of reaching out to me, if not to open a line of communication? Was it just to insult my reporting?” To which Halligan responded, “No, it was for you to correct it, which you refused to do.”
“I am more than happy to correct it, but you still haven’t told me what’s incorrect! What precisely is wrong with the tweet?” wrote Bower. Halligan didn't respond to this.
Rounding off the whole exchange, just after Bower spoke to the Justice Department asking for comment before she went live with all this, Halligan messaged her again, saying, “By the way — everything I ever sent you is off record. You’re not a journalist so it’s weird saying that but just letting you know.”
“I’m sorry, but that’s not how this works. You don’t get to say that in retrospect,” wrote Bower.
But despite making this point multiple times, Halligan persisted. “It’s obvious the whole convo is off record. There’s disappearing messages and it’s on signal. What is your story? You never told me about a story.”
Cattle ranchers pushed back on Monday against one of President Donald Trump's latest plans to try and lower domestic beef prices.
Trump announced last week that he is considering purchasing beef from Argentina to help lower the cost for American consumers. Data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics show that beef prices hit record-highs this year amid Trump's trade war with China and other countries.
"We would buy some beef from Argentina," Trump told reporters on Air Force One on Sunday. "If we do that, that will bring our beef prices down."
Cattle ranchers and industry experts pushed back against the plan.
“This plan only creates chaos at a critical time of the year for American cattle producers, while doing nothing to lower grocery store prices,” Colin Woodall, CEO of the National Cattlemen’s Beef Association, told NBC News on Monday.
“Argentina also has a history of foot-and-mouth disease,” Woodall added, “which if brought to the United States, could decimate our domestic livestock production.”
“At a time when we should be finding ways to help American farmers deal with this chaotic trade policy, it’s extremely disappointing to see us bailing out Argentina and Argentina farmers in the process,” Aaron Lehman, president of the Iowa Farmers Union and a soybean grower, told NBC News.
President Donald Trump's bid to gut the federal government as the shutdown rages took another turn Monday as a new court filing showed thousands more federal workers faced "imminent" firings.
The Trump administration has already fired thousands of federal workers as a strategy during the shutdown, wielding it as leverage to pressure Democrats in Congress to vote in favor of a stopgap funding measure that would reopen the government.
The Department of the Interior plans to "imminently" fire at least 2,000 employees, Notus reported Monday evening. That includes hundreds working at the National Park Service across the Northeast, Southwest, and Pacific West regions, which oversee Yosemite, Joshua Tree, Acadia, and Great Smoky Mountains national parks.
The report noted that layoff notices have already been sent to more than 3,000 federal workers since the shutdown kicked off.
Last week, a federal judge temporarily blocked the administration from firing workers represented by unions that have sued over the plans.
Monday's decision from a three-judge panel on the Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit, dominated by President Donald Trump's appointees, sent the appellate division into chaos and drama almost immediately.
The order overturns a block put on Trump, sending the National Guard to Immigration and Customs Facilities in Portland, Oregon, which was itself issued by a district court judge, Karin Immergut, who was appointed by Trump. It swiftly raised alarms from legal experts, who noted that Judge Immergut compellingly laid out how factually baseless Trump's claims were to justify a military response.
But it appears that the ruling also alarmed some judges on the Ninth Circuit itself.
According to Law Dork blogger Chris Geidner, "A Ninth Circuit judge has sua sponte — on their own — already called for a vote on whether there should be an en banc rehearing (which means all active judges will vote on whether the matter should be reheard). Briefing is called for on that question, due by mid-week."
The issue of whether Trump has a blank check to declare what constitutes an emergency for the purposes of calling up the National Guard to enforce law and order in cities has landed in a number of courts around the country, as Trump tries to make similar moves in Chicago.
So far, numerous district judges have put limits on this power, finding that Trump hasn't shown sufficient cause to do so.
President Donald Trump announced on Monday that contractors have broken ground on the "much-needed" White House Ballroom, a $200 million development that includes modernizing part of the East Wing.
"I am pleased to announce that ground has been broken on the White House grounds to build the new, big, beautiful White House Ballroom," Trump wrote on Truth Social. "Completely separate from the White House itself, the East Wing is being fully modernized as part of this process, and will be more beautiful than ever when it is complete!"
Trump announced plans to build the ballroom over the summer. Critics have bashed the project as a resurrection of America's Gilded Age.
"For more than 150 years, every President has dreamt about having a Ballroom at the White House to accommodate people for grand parties, State Visits, etc.," Trump wrote. "I am honored to be the first President to finally get this much-needed project underway — with zero cost to the American Taxpayer! The White House Ballroom is being privately funded by many generous Patriots, Great American Companies, and, yours truly. This Ballroom will be happily used for Generations to come!"
The nomination of one of President Donald Trump's most controversial allies for a key White House post appears to be imperilled after a key Senate Republican said Monday that he won't support the nominee.
Paul Ingrassia, a right-wing podcaster whom Trump nominated to lead the Office of the Special Counsel, has a lengthy history of making inflammatory statements. Politico published an exclusive report on Monday detailing text messages that Ingrassia sent, attacking civil rights icon Martin Luther King Jr. and saying he has a "Nazi streak" in him.
Sen. Ron Johnson (R-WI), one of Trump's closest allies in Congress, said on Monday that he cannot support Ingrassia's nomination.
“The administration ought to just pull that nomination," Ingrassia told HuffPost on Monday. "I hope that happens."
Lawmakers and legal analysts were taken aback as former Labor Secretary Alex Acosta stumbled facing a withering congressional spotlight as he defended a 2008 plea deal that allowed convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein to serve minimal jail time.
Acosta spoke to the House Oversight and Reform Committee, where he defended his "sweetheart plea deal" he offered to sex offender Jeffrey Epstein. Legal analyst Lisa Rubin pinpointed a specific exchange he had with Rep. Jasmine Crockett (D-TX), who hammered him about why he considered Epstein's victims unreliable.
Speaking to MSNBC on Monday, legal analyst Lisa Rubin and host Nicolle Wallace both took issue with Acosta's claim that "there were evidentiary issues" and problems with the witnesses in the Florida Epstein case, and that he couldn't win a prosecution.
Wallace described it as "the final slander of these women."
"The witnesses are victims of sexual assault from some of the most powerful men the planet has ever known," she noted.
Rubin described reading the transcript as like being in two different worlds.
"Because you had Alex Acosta on one hand, who was sort of representative of the old guard and the way people used to see sexual assault. And yet he was facing an onslaught of questions from women who came to Congress, having had very different life experiences and representative of a new generation," said Rubin.
Specifically, the questions from Crockett sent Acosta stumbling.
"Crockett, for example, who really wanted to drill down on, I'm sorry, what exactly were the credibility problems with these women? Why did you not find them credible? Why did you think you couldn't rehabilitate them in front of a jury? He sort of sputtered, and he also insisted at one point during the transcript that it wasn't a sweetheart deal after all. And his reasoning for saying that is because on his recommendation, the original non-prosecution agreement would have had Jeffrey Epstein do two years in jail, which he said was the sentence Jeffrey Epstein would have received had the state not been so crooked," Rubin said.
That ignores that a prosecutor under his supervision had written an 80-page memo saying that they could easily bring 50 to 60 counts against Epstein rather than a single state charge.
"So, I found the whole thing sort of galling as well as it was galling and useless, because, as you and I have discussed before, Alex Acosta was interviewed by the Department of Justice as part of an investigation they did into the professional misconduct of lawyers associated with the Epstein case," Rubin recalled.
Acosta "relied on that throughout his interview," Rubin continued. "He hugged it to him like a child has a stuffed animal, and he just kept going back to it. I don't have an independent recollection of this, but here's what the report says, and like quoting it chapter and verse as if it were his defense manual, as opposed to sort of having organic recollections of what had transpired. The whole thing to me was both disappointing, upsetting, and yet, not surprisingly, so."
The late Virginia Giuffre, one of Epstein's victims, killed herself after a long fight for some accountability for what happened to her and other Epstein accusers. Giuffre left behind a book to be published after her death that details specifics about the abuse she and others were subject to. The book is set to be released on Tuesday.
Tara Palmari, who worked with Giuffre to produce the "Broken" podcast, recalled visiting Epstein's housekeeper, who was tasked with setting up the massage tables and cleaning sex toys. She recalled that Giuffre felt relieved to have some of Epstein's staff willing to confirm her account. He testified in the Ghislaine Maxwell case.
President Donald Trump's administration is grappling with an embarrassing setback in their plans for a recruitment surge of deportation officers, reported The Atlantic on Monday: tons of the people applying can't do the basic fitness test.
"More than a third have failed so far, four officials told me, impeding the agency’s plan to hire, train, and deploy 10,000 deportation officers by January. To pass, recruits must do 15 push-ups and 32 sit-ups, and run 1.5 miles in 14 minutes," reported Nick Miroff. "'It’s pathetic,' one career [Immigration and Customs Enforcement] official told me, adding that before now, a typical class of 40 recruits had only a couple of candidates fail, because the screening process was more rigorous."
Now, because Trump officials have signficantly eased the hiring process, many people who cannot do even light exercise are getting job offers that may have to be revoked or altered once they get to the training facility, said the report: "An email from ICE headquarters to the agency’s top officials on October 5 lamented that 'a considerable amount of athletically allergic candidates' had been showing up to the academy; they had 'misrepresented' their physical condition on application forms. The email directed leaders at ICE’s field offices to conduct preliminary fitness exams with new recruits before sending them to the academy."
The big problem, the report noted, is that the people failing these tests have already gotten job offers.
"ICE’s field-office directors can try to rotate those candidates to an administrative job or another position with lower fitness standards. But with so many candidates failing, the directors have had to seek guidance from ICE’s legal department as to whether to revoke job offers. The attorneys told them to cut loose new hires who fail if they aren’t fit for other openings at ICE. But they have to assign them administrative tasks to perform while waiting for ICE’s human resources to issue termination letters. 'It’s a disaster,' one senior ICE official told me."
This comes a week after it was reported that the Pentagon's new height and weight requirements led to Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth sending National Guardsmen Trump deployed from Texas to Chicago back home because they were too fat.
An expert warned Monday that the White House demolition exposed President Donald Trump's real goal behind the ballroom — saying "he will not leave."
Journalist Brian Karem told fellow journalists Jim Acosta and April Ryan on "The Jim Acosta Show" podcast that the images were striking and revealed much more than just the president's desire to build a ballroom.
"This is for Donald Trump's ego. That's right. And his legacy," Karem said. "Donald Trump does not want to leave the White House until they roll him out in the coffin and put him in state in that ballroom and charge you $1,000 a head to view him for a week. That's Donald Trump's goal. He will not leave the White House. He'll find a way to try and run in 2028. This is all a monument to his ego. He came out over the weekend and said, 'I'm not a king.' And then what did he immediately do?"
Acosta asked Karem, "And since when is it OK for the president of the United States to unilaterally just start tearing the building apart?"
"Never," Karem responded.
It's significant because previous White House renovations have required Congressional approval, he added.
"Remember when it was renovated, there was a renovation, what was it, during the Roosevelt years, I believe, and that had to go through Congress, and there was funds appointed to do it, and there was a lot of concern during the Truman restoration," Karem said. "That's when it was. And then at the same time, not only did they have to have Congress approve of it and give them money for it... there was a real consternation over the Lincoln ball bedroom and all this stuff that was going to be destroyed. And they just rebuilt it back inside the facade."
But the difference this time is stark.
"This guy [Trump] doesn't even care about the facade. He doesn't care about Congress. He cares about a monument to his own failing health and ego. And that's what it is," Karem argues.
Harry Sisson talks about being targeted in Trump's AI video, plus April Ryan and Brian Karem on Trump tearing up the White House. And Tommy Christopher talks about his Hunter Biden interview. by Jim Acosta
Authorities arrested a 49-year-old man on Monday who was planning a large-scale attack at Hartsfield-Jackson Atlanta International Airport, according to a new report.
Billy Cagle was arrested at the airport with an AR-15-style rifle and 27 rounds of ammunition inside the Chevrolet flatbed pickup truck, The New York Times reported on Monday. Cagle's family told officials that he planned to "shoot it up," referring to the airport.
The arrest was made at 9:40 a.m., authorities said. However, Atlanta's police chief suggested that Cagle's plan seemed to catch authorities off guard.
“What we didn’t know is that Mr. Cagle had already arrived at the airport,” Atlanta Police Department Chief Darin Schierbaum told the outlet.
Washington Post columnist Max Boot accused President Donald Trump of having a "Charlie Brown-like awareness" of what it will take to end Russia's war in Ukraine, according to a new column.
Trump claimed during the campaign trail that he would end the war in Ukraine within 24 hours of taking office. However, more than a year later, the war continues. Meanwhile, there have been multiple instances where Trump had adversarial meetings with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy in the White House.
Boot argued in a new column that Trump appears to have a "Charlie Brown-like awareness that his quest" to end the war "may be futile," referring to the "Peanuts" cartoon by illustrator Charles Schulz.
"Trump’s infinite gullibility in dealing with Putin makes it impossible for him to achieve his cherished dream of ending the war in Ukraine — and winning a Nobel Peace Prize for his efforts," Boot wrote. "His failure to apply more pressure on Russia is all the more frustrating because Ukraine is making good progress in applying pressure on its own."
Boot compared Putin to Lucy van Pelt, who iconically yanked the football away from Charlie Brown whenever he tried to kick it.
His comments come at a time when Trump and Putin are scheduled to meet in Budapest for a second summit. Analysts bashed the first summit, arguing that Putin "got everything he wanted" from Trump.
"But every time it looks like Trump is starting to get it, he allows himself to be sweet-talked by the former KGB agent in the Kremlin. Trump clearly knows, at some level, that Putin is “tapping” him along — and yet he falls for it every time," Boot wrote. "Charlie Brown can relate."
The federal appeals court panel that just allowed President Donald Trump to deploy the National Guard to the Immigration and Customs Enforcement facility in Portland, Oregon, essentially disregarded the plain facts the lower court found, criminal defense attorney Joey Jackson told CNN on Monday.
"It's concerning," said Jackson. "The reason it's concerning is because [the district judge] had a hearing. And at that hearing, there were facts, right? Hearing is about facts and evidence with respect to whether or not the deployment was lawful. And lawful deployment means, if you're going to allege, as the president certainly has the authority to send troops if federal properties are at issue to enforce constitutional rights, etcetera. So, yes, you have the authority, but they have to be facts that would substantiate your ability to send the troops."
"The judge concluded that factually, the assessment was that the Trump administration's facts were not comporting with the reality. In fact, I will quote her, she said, 'untethered from reality.'"
This new three-judge panel dominated by other Trump appointees, Jackson continued, "says that the district court should not substitute its judgment as to the president and that the president is afforded and should be afforded great deference, and the only way the president could be overruled is if he's patently wrong. Well, I think the district court judge, in having a hearing, made that assessment that the president was patently wrong with regard to a rebellion or anything else."
This case will have implications that spread beyond Portland, Jackson added.
"Remember that this National Guard issue is notlimited there. It's all overwhere the president isseemingly sending them. So theissue then becomes, does itembolden the administrationthen to send troops everywhereand anywhere? Because remember,you have to, according to thisappellate ruling, afford greatdeference to the president. Andunless the president's patentlywrong, the court can'tsubstitute its judgment. Butagain, the court wasn't substituting, in my view, its judgment. It was giving a conclusion after having a hearing with regard to what was happening. So it's concerning, I would say."
