U.S. News

The co-hosts of "The View" began their Tuesday show addressing the right-wing outrage over the Barbie movie that broke records at the box office over the weekend.

After playing a few clips of a Republican brouhaha over the movie, Whoopi Goldberg said she couldn't understand why people are so outraged over a film about a doll.

MSNBC host Rachel Maddow dedicated a short moment on Monday to Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton, who is facing an impeachment trial before his GOP colleagues.

Paxton has a long history of corruption issues that began before he even took office. Up until recently, he's been able to push them off, even winning reelection in 2022. But even the Republican-led legislature has had enough and voted to impeach him.

Far-right activist Ammon Bundy was slapped with 8-figure damages by a jury on Monday, in a defamation trial brought by an Idaho hospital he harassed, reported The Daily Beast on Monday.

"In March of last year, Bundy was arrested for trespassing outside of St. Luke’s Meridian Medical Center, where 10-month-old 'Baby Cyrus' was being treated. The then-gubernatorial candidate organized a week-long protest, claiming Cyrus was 'medically kidnapped' over a 'missed non-emergency doctor’s appointment,'" reported Kate Briquelet. "Two months later, St. Luke’s hospital filed a defamation suit against Bundy and Diego Rodriguez, the child’s grandpa and an activist in Bundy’s far-right People’s Rights Network (PRN). The complaint also named their companies, including Rodriguez’s Freedom Man Press, which posted Baby Cyrus 'kidnapping videos.'"

Eric Trump threw a fit about the special counsel investigation into the Jan. 6 attack in a discussion with Rep. Matt Gaetz (R-FL) on Newsmax Monday evening.

"We saw it with Ukraine. We saw it with [Judge Brett] Kavanaugh. We saw it with every other hoax," said Trump. "Now we've seen it. You know, civilians ... we're seeing a criminality all over the country. They are doing anything they can to take down my father."

Republican Speaker Kevin McCarthy (R-CA) seems ready to impeach President Joe Biden based on the conspiracies addressed by the Republican-led House.

Chad Pergram cited McCarthy's Fox interview Monday in which he said, "This is rising to the level of an impeachment inquiry."

With months to go before the first primary is held, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis is in deep trouble — lagging the former president by 30 points in the polls, struggling to hold together his campaign operation, and miring himself in white-hot controversies like suggesting slavery gave Black Americans useful skills. His only theory of the case for his victory appears to be waiting for former President Donald Trump to be destroyed by his current and impending legal charges, allowing himself to step in and fill a void.

But that was always a pipe dream, argued former Rep. Adam Kinzinger (R-IL) on CNN Monday.

The special counsel’s office has interviewed former Deputy Attorney General Richard Donoghue, NBC News reports.

Donoghue briefly served as deputy attorney general in the final months of the Trump administration as the former president sought to overturn the results of the 2020 election.

Former President Donald Trump is facing likely imminent indictment in the January 6 investigation by special counsel Jack Smith, and the decision could come down in a matter of days. And one of the significant episodes that could legally implicate Trump in a deliberate plot to deprive people of their rights, said New York University law professor Ryan Goodman, is his move to fire cybersecurity official Chris Krebs after he vouched for the security of the 2020 election.

This comes on top of the context that Smith is investigating a meeting from early 2020 in which Trump privately praised election security measures, just months before calling those efforts fraudulent.

The Republican party has become nothing more than a money machine for the depressed political class that can't win elections, former Republican campaign aide Tim Miller argued in his Monday column for The Bulwark.

The comments came couched in a piece about two Republican primary elections happening simultaneously: the one happening on Earth 1 and an imaginary one happening on Earth 2.

A prominent legal expert said Monday that a second federal indictment against Donald Trump is all but a done deal.

Harry Litman, a former U.S. attorney and deputy assistant attorney general, said during an appearance on MSNBC’s “The ReidOut with Joy Reid” that “the table is set" for the indictment.

Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, already mired behind Trump by roughly 30 points, has faced a series of campaign disasters over the last several days, including doubling down on supporting a state education guideline that says slavery taught Black people useful skills, and is reportedly meeting with aides and donors to plot a campaign reset.

But even if DeSantis manages to turn things around and triumph, against all odds, to win the GOP nomination, noted former Biden White House communications chief Kate Bedingfield on CNN Monday, said he would have an entirely new problem: a furious Trump who will insist he stole the race.

The Department of Justice on Monday in a letter to Rep. Jim Jordan (R-Ohio) obtained by Politico urged the House Judiciary Chair to stick to the facts.

The DOJ was responding to Jordan’s July 21 letter expressing interest in the investigation of Hunter Biden led by David Weiss, a U.S. Attorney for the District of Delaware appointed by Donald Trump.

House Republicans have suffered yet another series of setbacks in their investigation of Hunter Biden, as a key witness they want to interview repeatedly reschedules and blows off their requests to testify, Newsweek reported on Monday.

"[House Oversight Chairman James] Comer [(R-KY)] confirmed to Fox News that Devon Archer, a former Burisma board member and business partner of Hunter Biden's, canceled the deposition he was scheduled to attend on Monday, marking the third appearance Archer has failed to show for," reported Katherine Fung. "A spokesperson for [the] congressman told Newsweek that Archer has been scheduled to sit down for a transcribed interview with the House Oversight on Monday, July 31. The original deadline for Archer's deposition was June 16."