Daniel Hampton

A new report warns someone may have known the Iran ceasefire was coming before Donald Trump told the world, and profited off that knowledge.

That's the explosive implication of a new Associated Press report that revealed that at least 50 newly created accounts on the prediction market Polymarket placed massive, well-timed bets on a U.S.-Iran ceasefire on April 7 — hours before Trump announced the deal on Truth Social — netting hundreds of thousands of dollars in profit.

The bets came even as Trump was threatening to wipe out "a whole civilization" if Iran didn't comply with his demands. The public ostensibly had no indication that a deal was imminent.

One wallet, created the morning of the announcement, dropped roughly $72,000 in bets and walked away with $200,000 in profit. Another, created the day before, cleared $125,500. A third, created just 12 minutes before Trump's post, made nearly $50,000.

The pattern mirrors previous episodes, including mysterious bets placed before the January capture of Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro, that have repeatedly raised insider trading alarms in Congress.

Rep. Blake Moore (R-UT) didn't mince words: "It’s highly unlikely that these are good-faith trades; it’s much more likely that these are insiders with access to information ahead of the public. Without some kind of restrictions, there is nothing stopping government or military officials from profiting from their positions."

Democratic strategist Mike Nellis wrote on X, "Lock ‘em up."

David Clinch, co-founder of Media Growth Partners, wrote on X, "People need to go to jail for this."

Bill Speros, senior betting analyst for Bookies.com, wrote on X, "If I can trade on @Polymarket using a VPN from Florida, then anyone from anywhere in the US can do it. That is clear. These concerns will have to be addressed eventually before it fully launches in the US. The calls are coming from inside the house."

Ben Yelin, an attorney, wrote on X, "We should be far angrier about this s--- and we need hearings."

Donald Trump's judicial nominee for Montana has become the first pick of his second term to be declared "not qualified" by the American Bar Association, and the reason was straightforward: she simply hasn't been a lawyer long enough.

Katie Lane, nominated to serve as a federal judge in Montana, received a "not qualified" rating from a majority of the ABA's Standing Committee on the Federal Judiciary on Wednesday, according to Reuters. The committee cited her less than nine years of legal experience, well short of the 12 years the ABA typically requires, and her lack of substantial courtroom and trial experience.

The ABA was careful to note that Lane is well-regarded by her peers. Committee chair Pamela Roberts said roughly 200 members of the bench and bar were consulted, and Lane "is viewed as a talented lawyer, indeed at the top of her peer group."

But talent, the committee concluded, doesn't substitute for experience.

Lane, who is in her 30s, graduated from George Mason University's Antonin Scalia Law School in 2017. Her resume includes conservative clerkships, Jones Day, the Montana attorney general's office, the hard-right firm Consovoy McCarthy, a Ted Cruz Senate internship, and a stint at the Republican National Committee.

Trump's administration has already tried to sideline the ABA by restricting its ability to vet nominees. The bar association has continued publishing ratings anyway.

In Trump's first term, 10 nominees received "not qualified" ratings. Lane is the first of his second term.

Kristi Noem swore the $70 million luxury Boeing 737 she bought with taxpayer money was all about deporting immigrants, and now that she's been fired, the plane — complete with a queen bed, kitchenette and cream leather seats — will be used by Cabinet members and possibly the first lady.

A Department of Homeland Security spokesperson confirmed Wednesday to The Washington Post that the Boeing 737 Max 8, purchased by Immigration and Customs Enforcement before new DHS Secretary Markwayne Mullin was confirmed, will be "available to Cabinet members who need secure command and control and rapid long-range mobility."

The Wall Street Journal reported that White House officials rather than DHS will control who gets to fly on it, and that Melania Trump will be among those with access.

The plane became a flashpoint last month when Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse (D-RI) displayed photos of its interior during a congressional oversight hearing. Noem, visibly flustered, claimed she didn't recognize the bedroom and insisted it was being refurbished to remove it.

"It's mandated from Congress," Noem insisted at the time, arguing the purchase would save taxpayers "hundreds of millions of dollars."

Noem was ousted shortly after amid mounting scrutiny over her spending habits — including a staggering $200 million contract for ads featuring herself on horseback at Mount Rushmore.

She now holds a newly made-up title: "Special Envoy for the Shield of the Americas."

Donald Trump went after a decades-old U.S. military alliance on Wednesday in an all-caps Truth Social tirade, declaring NATO useless and taking a bizarre swipe at Greenland in the same breath.

NATO Secretary-General Mark Rutte reportedly met privately with Trump on Wednesday, with discussions expected to focus on reopening the Strait of Hormuz and smoothing over Trump's fury at the alliance for sitting out the Iran war, while the strait closure sent gas prices soaring. It wasn't immediately clear how the meeting went, but Trump didn't hold back his thoughts on social media.

"NATO WASN'T THERE WHEN WE NEEDED THEM, AND THEY WON'T BE THERE IF WE NEED THEM AGAIN," the president raged.

He then pivoted to Greenland, the autonomous Danish territory he has repeatedly tried to acquire: "REMEMBER GREENLAND, THAT BIG, POORLY RUN, PIECE OF ICE!!!"

The post offered no further context.

The outburst comes as Trump's Iran ceasefire hangs by a thread, with Iran already declaring three violations of the agreement before negotiations have even formally begun. European allies have been openly critical of the U.S.-Israeli war, with Spain's prime minister refusing to "applaud those who set the world on fire."

President Donald Trump has spent years championing American steel, slapping tariffs on foreign metals and promising to shield U.S. manufacturers from overseas competition. But a bombshell New York Times report reveals he may have traded a lucrative tariff break for tens of millions of dollars worth of donated foreign steel for his White House ballroom.

According to the Times, Luxembourg-based ArcelorMittal, the world's second-largest steel maker, donated steel valued at $37 million for Trump's $400 million ballroom project. The steel was produced in Europe.

Two days after Trump publicly praised the donation at a White House event for wealthy donors, his administration issued a proclamation cutting in half the tariffs on automotive steel exported from ArcelorMittal's Canadian plant.

“He said, ‘Sir, I’d like to donate the steel for your ballroom,’” Trump told the crowd at the time. “I said: ‘Whoa, that’s nice.’ And I found out — ‘How much is the steel?’ I called the contractor. ‘Sir, it’s down for $37 million.’ I said, ‘This is a nice donation, right?’”

"Mr. Trump described the metal as 'great steel as opposed to garbage steel, because they dump a lot of garbage around. You know, steel is like everything else, including human beings. Steel could be high quality, and it can be low quality. He wants to make sure it’s high quality,'" the report added.

The timing raised immediate red flags.

A White House official pushed back on any connection between the donation and the tariff cut, calling the link "tenuous." The official declined to be named because he was not authorized to speak publicly.

Trump has doubled steel tariffs to 50 percent, explicitly to block foreign metals and boost domestic producers.

The Steel Manufacturers' Association pointedly noted its members stood "ready to supply the high-quality, American-made steel" the president needed.

Pete Hegseth went out Wednesday to sell America on Donald Trump's Iran triumph — and ended up accidentally dismantling it, according to a new analysis.

The Defense Secretary insisted that Trump's threat to erase Iranian civilization is what brought Tehran back to the negotiating table.

"That type of threat is what brought them to the place where they effectively said, ‘We want to cut this deal,'" Hegseth told reporters, preening about American killing power with what New Republic analyst Greg Sargent called "unnerving relish and bloodlust."

But he noted Iran was already negotiating with Trump before the war started.

According to Sargent, citing a New York Times investigation, Trump sabotaged those pre-war talks himself — convinced by Benjamin Netanyahu that the war would be quick and glorious, and by his own team that nothing short of regime change would do. Iran had been prepared to make real concessions on nuclear development, and Trump walked away anyway.

"Trump’s approach to the talks made success impossible—deliberately," Sargent declared.

Iran's regime survived, radicalized, and now negotiates from a position of greater confidence, he said. The ceasefire terms appear more favorable to Tehran than the deal Trump could have had without firing a shot.

"The civilizational threat did not factor into the ceasefire," Center for International Policy senior fellow Sina Toossi told Sargent flatly.

Sargent concluded that despite the war showcasing "awesome technological prowess," it failed to deliver what Trump and Hegseth promised — that American military power and the threat of it could force anyone to do anything. They set out to prove otherwise, he wrote, "and at this, too, they failed miserably."

A prominent political analyst warned Wednesday that President Donald Trump's stranglehold on the Republican Party is about to face one of its most consequential tests, and the outcome could ripple across his entire second term.

Writing in the Washington Post, Henry Olsen, a senior fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center, argued that Trump's decision to endorse primary challengers against five Indiana state senators who defied him could either cement his dominance over the GOP or crack it open ahead of a brutal midterm cycle.

"If Trump knocks off most of his targets, Republican officeholders across the country will see that they oppose the president at their peril. But they’ll note the opposite if he fails. That doesn’t mean that Republicans are going to suddenly rise in revolt. But it does mean that more of them, in more situations, will be more comfortable distancing themselves from Trump or even opposing him outright," wrote Olsen.

The senators crossed Trump in December when they voted to kill his push for a mid-cycle congressional gerrymander designed to send two additional Republicans to Congress. But a majority of Republican senators joined all 10 Democrats to hand Trump a humiliating defeat in a chamber his party dominates 40-10.

Trump responded by endorsing primary challengers against five of the defectors, with outside groups spending millions on attack ads. The primaries are May 5.

Olsen warned that the gambit is far from a sure thing. The incumbents have money, deep local ties and unimpeachable conservative records. None can credibly be dismissed as RINOs, an acronym for Republican in name only.

"This is a pure power play," Olsen wrote, noting that Trump has already seen his endorsed candidates struggle in Texas primaries.

The stakes, Olsen argued, couldn't be higher. If Trump loses in Indiana, Republicans across the country will quietly begin doing the math, and some will decide the emperor has no clothes.

A new report flagged the "curious excuse" used by ousted former Attorney General Pam Bondi to blow off a scheduled deposition over her handling of the Jeffrey Epstein files.

The former attorney general, fired last month, is now using her termination as justification to skip a scheduled April 14 deposition with the House Oversight Committee investigating the government's Epstein files.

The Justice Department told the panel Bondi no longer has to appear since she was subpoenaed "in her capacity as attorney general" — a claim HuffPost called a "curious excuse," noting that every recent former attorney general has cooperated with the same committee. Even Bill Barr sat for a transcribed interview, the report noted.

Bipartisan fury was immediate.

Rep. Nancy Mace (R-SC) minced no words: "Leaving office doesn’t mean you get to dodge accountability. Pam Bondi was subpoenaed by name, not by title, and because the DOJ stonewalled Congress and refused to follow the law, she needs to appear before the Oversight Committee and answer for it."

Mace threatened contempt proceedings if Bondi fails to show.

“She promised she would comply,” added Mace. “April 14 is her chance to prove it. Chairman Comer must make one thing clear: show up or face contempt.”

Bondi's series of Epstein-related failures put her on the hot seat, including her claim that a "client list" was sitting on her desk, a claim her own DOJ later flatly contradicted. Her Justice Department also missed statutory deadlines to release Epstein files, admitted to improper redactions, and withheld documents.

White House Faith Advisor Paula White-Cain's attempt to rehabilitate the president's religious image during a Fox News appearance backfired spectacularly Saturday night, triggering a wave of mockery after claiming he attended Saturday and Sunday school up to three times a week as a child.

White-Cain made the claim during a conversation with Laura Trump, telling Fox viewers that "many people don't know about the upbringing of President Trump" before adding that he "went to, sometimes, three times a week to, he said, depending on the teacher, to Saturday school, Sunday school, church."

"Church was a big part of his life," she insisted.

The internet immediately noticed the math didn't add up.

"That's because he couldn't [expletive] count," former MSNBC host Keith Olbermann chided on X.

Attorney Bradley P. Moss was equally unimpressed. "That math ain't mathin, freak case," he wrote.

Journalist Helen Kennedy offered a more cutting interpretation. "Because his parents couldn't stand having him home," she wrote.

Podcaster Hemant Mehta took a more sarcastic tack. "Was he also raised in a log cabin he built?" he asked.

The political commentating account Molly Ploofkins simply added, "I'm sorry, what?"

Trump has leaned heavily into religious imagery during his second term, frequently invoking God's blessing and surrounding himself with evangelical allies like White-Cain.

Renowned historian Timothy Snyder leveled two explosive accusations against President Donald Trump: that his proposed 50% defense budget increase could be a bribe to secure military loyalty for a coup attempt, and that a staged domestic terror attack is his best remaining path to nullifying elections.

Snyder, a Yale historian recognized as one of America's foremost scholars of authoritarianism, made both cases in a Saturday Substack post laying out five historical scenarios through which Trump could exploit the ongoing U.S.-Iran war to nullify the 2026 midterms and seize permanent power.

On the defense budget, Snyder was unambiguous.

"The war has not been run in a way that brings military commanders to trust the president. Again, one has to see Trump’s proposal to increase the defense budget by nearly 50% as a kind of desperate bribe. There are sound strategic reasons why it is a terrible idea, but there is also a political one," he wrote.

Snyder argued the proposed increase is "meant as a payoff for officers, soldiers, and sailors -- people he has openly disrespected his entire life, people whose funerals he treats as an opportunity to sell his own branded merchandise -- to assist him in a coup against Americans."

On the false flag scenario, Snyder drew a direct line to Vladimir Putin's 1999 apartment bombings, which were staged attacks that helped launch Putin's march toward dictatorship. He called Trump "Putin's client in the White House."

"Some variant of terrorism is Trump’s best bet. And so one should be (preemptively, now) skeptical of Trump’s account of any future terrorist attack; we can be sure that, whatever its true origins and character, Trump will provide a self-serving account meant to serve a coup and a dictatorship," Snyder wrote.

He warned Trump would exploit any such event to "discredit or undo elections."

Snyder argued Trump's position is ultimately weak, but only if Americans actively resist.

"He can only carry out a coup if we decide to obey in advance: to pretend that wartime pretexts for coups are never used, although history instructs us that they are; and then to offer our surprise to Trump as the unique political resource that can transform his weak position into a strong one," he noted.

Second Lady Usha Vance triggered a flood of mockery Saturday after she told Fox Viewers there is a litany of misconceptions about her husband, who has repeatedly found himself on the wrong side of ridicule and memes.

Vice President JD Vance has faced backlash from social media commenters in recent years after agreeing to become Trump's running mate, particularly over Trump's awkward 2028 snub, a joke that didn’t land at a firefighters' event, and a widely mocked WWII history mistake.

This week, however, it was his wife who found herself buried by online critics.

"What do you want America to know about your husband," Usha Vance was asked on "Saturday in America with Kayleigh McEnany."

"I know it's been asked in reverse, but what's something we don't know that you want America to know?" asked McEnany.

The second lady cracked a wide grin as she prepped her answer.

"It's hard because he's written a book, he's given a lot of speeches," she began. "Um, there's so many misconceptions about him. He is just the nicest funniest guy. He makes everything an adventure. He's really just a wonderful person to be around. Our family has so much more joy because he is a part of it. I wish that people saw more of that."

But his past remarks, including a racist lie that Haitian immigrants were eating peoples' pets, didn't go unnoticed on the internet.

Podcaster and "Jeopardy!" champion Hemant Mehta shot back on X, "Remember when Vance spread false claims about Haitian migrants eating pets, leading to the harassment of an entire innocent community for months on end? Hahaha hilarious."

Cody Johnston, host of the Some More News podcast, wrote on X, "Hilarious answer. "Contrary to popular belief, my husband is not, in fact, a boring piece of [expletive].'"

Conservative attorney George Conway, who is running for Congress as a Democrat, wrote on X, "It is true that we, the American public, have seen no indication that J.D. Vance is the nicest, funniest guy. On this there can be no disagreement."

Lawyer Adam Cohen wrote on X, "Oh, yeah. That bit about Haitians eating people’s pets was friggin hilarious."

The progressive commentator account evan loves worf wrote on X, "She knows everyone hates his guts lmao."

Journalist John Harwood wrote on X, "actually he's a bad person."

Republican strategist Steve Schmidt couldn't hide his disbelief Saturday after learning that a senior FEMA official claimed he was transported to a Waffle House in Rome, Georgia, by the hand of God.

Gregg Phillips, who leads FEMA's Office of Response and Recovery, the agency's top disaster response position, made the teleportation claim seriously enough that the New York Times dispatched reporters to interview roughly two dozen workers and regulars at Rome's three Waffle House locations to investigate.

None of them, the Times found, could confirm anyone had arrived by paranormal means.

Schmidt, a founding partner of the anti-Trump group The Lincoln Project and one of the most prominent Republican critics of the president, reacted to the revelation with barely contained sarcasm in his Substack newsletter Saturday.

"I wonder if Pete Hegseth plans to deploy him in Iran as a secret weapon," Schmidt wrote.

The joke comes as the U.S. engages in ongoing military strikes against Iran, and an American pilot remains missing.

Schmidt used the episode as a launching pad for a broader indictment of the Trump administration, rattling off a roster of officials he described as "corrupt whack jobs" running the federal government.

"It seems the most powerful government in world history has fallen to the audience of midnight AM conspiracy radio," he wrote.

Phillips has not publicly responded to the Times investigation.

The White House was forced onto the defensive Saturday after social media speculation that President Donald Trump had been hospitalized at Walter Reed Medical Center sent the administration scrambling to tamp down the rumors.

The unfounded whispers spread after Trump went roughly 12 hours without speaking to the press, prompting the White House's Rapid Response account to hit back on X, The Daily Beast reported.

“Deranged liberals cook up insane conspiracy theories when @POTUS goes 12 hours without speaking to press,” the White House’s Rapid Response account fumed on X. “(They said nothing when Biden routinely went 12 days without speaking to press) Fear not! President Trump literally never stops working."

White House communications director Steven Cheung also weighed in, though without directly addressing the hospitalization rumors.

"There has never been a President who has worked harder for the American people than President Trump," Cheung wrote on X. "On this Easter weekend, he has been working nonstop in the White House and Oval Office."

There is no evidence Trump was hospitalized. The firestorm of speculation comes as the 79-year-old president has faced persistent public scrutiny over his health since returning to office.

Wisconsin Republicans admitted their own state Supreme Court candidate has failed to give conservative voters a reason to turn out in a high-stakes election Tuesday, as liberals prepare to expand their majority on the state's highest court.

"If you’re a Republican voter, what reason has Maria Lazar’s campaign given you to, like, show up and go to a poll on Tuesday?" a Wisconsin Republican operative who has run statewide races told The Hill in an article published Saturday.

The blunt critique cuts to the heart of why conservatives are bracing for what many expect to be a landslide defeat in the race to fill a seat being vacated by retiring conservative Justice Rebecca Bradley.

Democratic-backed candidate Chris Taylor has outraised Lazar nearly 5-to-1, pulling in roughly $6.2 million to Lazar's $1.2 million. The state party gap is even starker as Wisconsin Democrats spent nearly $750,000 on Taylor's behalf between January and late March, while state Republicans spent just $96,000 supporting Lazar.

The Lazar campaign tried to push back, with spokesperson Nathan Conrad pointing to a Thursday debate as evidence that she made a direct case to conservative voters.

A Taylor win would expand the liberal bloc on the Wisconsin Supreme Court from a narrow 4-3 majority to a 5-2 supermajority, making a conservative path back to control significantly harder.

President Donald Trump's closest allies in the Middle East are privately sounding the alarm as Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth pushes the president to escalate the Iran war by targeting civilian infrastructure — including power plants and desalination facilities that millions of people depend on to survive, the Wall Street Journal reported Saturday.

Hegseth has personally briefed Trump on a legal rationale for striking Iran's bridges and roads, arguing that Iran's military could theoretically use them to move missiles and drone materials, the Journal reported. A White House official added that destroying power plants could "foment civil unrest," potentially complicating Tehran's path to a nuclear device.

But current and former military lawyers warn that it breaches the laws of armed conflict.

"I could write a memo that says the entire energy infrastructure of Iran is a legal target — but that would be overbroad," said Geoffrey Corn, a former Army lawyer who now directs the Center for Military Law and Policy at Texas Tech. He added, "and for those people who say if you attack civilian infrastructure you’re committing a war crime, well that’s equally overbroad.”

Gulf state partners have directly expressed alarm to Trump administration officials, fearing retaliatory strikes on their own facilities. When Israel struck an Iranian gas field, Iran responded by hitting a major Qatari gas field. Kuwait accused Iran of attacking a major desalination plant just this week.

Secretary of State Marco Rubio has acknowledged Iran isn't currently enriching uranium, raising pointed questions about what exactly Trump's goal is for the war.

"The bombing will continue to degrade not just the regime, but the nation," one Iran analyst warned, "until Iran itself starts to come apart."