U.S. News

At the top of her Monday show, MSNBC host Rachel Maddow noted a strange comment from right-wing personality Steve Bannon about outgoing Bazilian President Jair Bolsonaro. According to Bannon, Bolsonaro shouldn't accept the results of the election, just as Donald Trump refused in 2020. Bolsonaro said previously that he would stage a coup if he lost.

"Why do you care, Steve Bannon? This is the part that's about us, that's about us and our country and our election next week," said Maddow. "Why do you think it is that this top White House adviser to former president Donald trump, why do you think it is that he's telling this guy in Brazil, this Trump-like far-right, buffoonish, unpopular Brazilian president who has been voted out of office?"

On Monday, former President Donald Trump filed an emergency request with the Supreme Court, asking that they block the Internal Revenue Service from turning over his tax returns to congressional investigators. It comes following last week's ruling by the Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit that cleared the way for the documents to be transmitted to the House Ways and Means Committee. Meanwhile, Trump faces a civil suit from New York State, alleging that his family business kept two sets of books to avoid paying taxes while fraudulently inflating assets to banks and insurers.

But even though the Supreme Court has six justices sympathetic to right wing causes, including three justices personally appointed by Trump, former impeachment counsel Norm Eisen told CNN's Kate Bolduan that the former president is unlikely to prevail in this gambit.

New York Times reporters, including so-called Trump whisperer Maggie Haberman, wrote on Monday that no case is as "vexing" to Donald Trump as the one happening now in Manhattan involving free perks given to CFO Allen Weisselberg.

"Of all the legal challenges that Mr. Trump is facing — including several criminal investigations related to his final days in the White House — none has been as vexing for him as the investigation into his family business. And no other provides such a window into a world he has tried to keep out of the public eye," the piece explained.

San Francisco District Attorney Brooke Jenkins announced additional charges against David Wayne DePape, the attacker of Paul Pelosi, spouse to House Speaker Nancy Pelosi.

The politically motivated attack will garner charges including "attempted murder, residential burglary, assault with a deadly weapon, elder abuse, false imprisonment of an elder, as well as threats to a public official and their family."

On Monday, the Jewish Telegraphic Agency reported that Johnny Teague, the Republican running for Texas' 7th Congressional District, wrote a novel in which he imagines that Anne Frank converted to Christianity and accepted Jesus Christ as her lord and savior in her final days.

Frank, a young Jewish girl whose diary detailed her attempts to hide from Nazi persecution in the run-up to the Holocaust, died in a German death camp in 1945.

The "Fire Pelosi" campaign has been going on since tea party election of 2010. That then shifted into the MAGA movement, but even the Republican Party organizer behind the "Fire Pelosi" effort agrees that it's gone way too far.

Writing in the Washington Post, Doug Heye, a former communications director for the Republican National Committee, recalled setting up the fundraising website of Pelosi surrounded by flames for the "fire Pelosi" theme. They raised $1 million and then did a bus tour all over the lower 48 states telling people to fire Pelosi. He still has the banner today.

It was something that both former Donald Trump lawyer Michael Cohen and Trump biographer Tim O'Brien predicted: lawyers for the Trump family threw Allen Weisselberg under the bus in court on Monday, reported Mother Jones.

"I think they're going to be worried about Allen Weissberg because Allen was Fred Trump's accountant before he was Donald Trump's CFO, and he knows where all the financial bodies are buried, and I think they're worried about his testimony to the point that they've already signaled they're going to accuse him of lying," said Trump biographer Tim O'Brien, who has been sued by Trump.

The attacker of House Speaker Nancy Pelosi's (D-CA) husband Paul has given his Mirandized interview to police and revealed that he intended to take a hammer to the kneecaps of the woman third in line to the presidency.

According to the court documents filed by the Justice Department, David DePape said that the reason he specifically wanted to break her knees was so "she would then have to be wheeled into Congress, which would show other Members of Congress there were consequences to actions."

Two major sources of the political rankings include RealClearPolitics and FiveThirtyEight, both of whom average out public polls done for campaigns.

According to Democratic political expert Simon Rosenberg, the polls they're pulling in to generate those averages are leaning more Republican, lending the averages to be skewed more conservative.

Republicans are desperately trying to shout down violence against Democrats not by denouncing the violence but by claiming that Democrats are committing the same kind of violence. It's a narrative that conservative Washington Post columnist Max Boot calls absurd.

After another politically motivated attack, this time on Speaker Nancy Pelosi's husband Paul, happened last week, Republicans have belittled it as just another example of everyday crime. The attacker was demanding to know where Nancy Pelosi was and is reportedly radicalized due to the Jan. 6 attacks on Congress.

It was reported on Sunday that David Raskin, one of the top prosecutors in the country when it comes to stolen government documents, joined the Justice Department team investigating Donald Trump's documents he took from the White House to Mar-a-Lago. As the Washington Post explained, it shows that the DOJ is very serious and they're moving toward prosecuting the former president.

"They are now focusing on the confidential documents that were kept at Mar-a-Lago, endangering our national security. That's why you are bringing in someone who is a specialist in national security," said former Watergate prosecutor Jill Wine-Banks. "The recent reporting about documents coming from that pile that involved Iran and China are really scary and threaten our security. It's a very smart thing to focus on that. It makes it very hard for the Department of Justice not to pursue this to an indictment."

The Justice Department has brought on one of the top national security prosecutors to help the team overseeing the investigation into Donald Trump, the Washington Post reported Sunday.

"National security law experts interviewed ... appear to have amassed evidence in the case that would meet some of the criteria for bringing charges against the former president — an unprecedented action that they said probably would only happen if the Justice Department believes it has an extremely strong case," said the report.