Martin Pengelly

'It's just strange': GOP senator baffled by party's urge to jump off health-care cliff

WASHINGTON — Republican leaders’ refusal to consider extending Affordable Care Act subsidies set to expire at year’s end is weird, according to at least one senior GOP senator, after the issue erupted and fueled high drama in the House this week.

“It's just strange,” Sen. Mike Rounds (R-SD), who sits on the Banking, Housing and Urban Affairs Committee, told congressional reporters.

“We had the vote last week, and … now the House passed [its own measure], and we're going to have a vote, and of course, that’s not going to go anywhere.

“There could have been a one-year extension. Maybe there was a chance to have enough votes … we need 60 votes here. I want to vote on something that can actually pass, and I don't know why that's not our plan.”

No one really knows what Republicans’ plan is — other than to craft a plan.

While swing-state Republicans have been freaking out — especially the four endangered moderates who crossed Speaker Mike Johnson when they formally crossed party lines Wednesday — GOP leaders have, basically, shrugged off widespread fears of Obamacare subsidies expiring on New Years, leaving millions of Americans bracing for brutal rate hikes.

Most Republicans remain unmoved, even after Democrats have successfully raised alarm bells about the unaffordable rate hikes for months, including by using the issue as fuel for the longest government shutdown in history.

Just last week, the GOP-led Senate failed to pass dueling health-care bills. In response to a Democratic measure to extend COVID-era insurance subsidies another three years, rank-and-file Republicans cobbled together a last-minute measure aimed at promoting health savings accounts over Obamacare exchanges.

Both failed by a vote of 51-48 in the chamber where 60 votes are needed to pass most bills.

Then the four moderate House Republicans dramatically crossed the aisle, joining a Democratic-led discharge petition to force a vote on a Democratic measure that would extend subsidies for three years.

Reps. Brian Fitzpatrick (R-PA), Mike Lawler (R-NY) , Rob Bresnahan (R-PA) and Ryan Mackenzie (R-PA) were the members who chose to cross Speaker Johnson, underlining the Louisianan’s lack of control of his party ahead of next year’s midterm elections.

“We have worked for months to craft a two-party solution to address these expiring health-care credits,” Fitzpatrick said in a statement.

“Our only request was a floor vote on this compromise, so that the American People’s voice could be heard on this issue. That request was rejected ... Unfortunately, it is House leadership themselves that have forced this outcome.”

The Democratic proposal will now get a vote in the new year — but only after subsidies lapse.

Observers noted that in July, three of the four Republican rebels voted for the “One Big Beautiful Bill,” the GOP budget measure which contained massive cuts to spending on Medicaid, another key health-care resource for millions of Americans. Fitzpatrick said no then too.

This week, the picture grew more confusing still, as a separate House GOP health bill passed.

Seen as barely even a bandaid, as it doesn’t address the expiring subsidies, it has no chance of gaining 60 votes in the Senate, according to South Dakota Sen. Rounds.

‘24 million people’

Gridlock aside, it seems most everyone on Capitol Hill loves a bit of political drama — even at the end of a year of relentless chaos.

“This is huge,” Rep. Rashida Tlaib (D-MI) marveled to Raw Story after learning that a fourth Republican had signed off on the discharge petition.

“This is, like, huge for my district.”

The member of the progressive “Squad” of lawmakers was far from alone.

“I think it's a big victory, and it's a victory for the American people,” former House Majority Leader Rep. Steny Hoyer (D-MD) told Raw Story.

“We need to pass that, put it over in the Senate and see whether they have the courage to do what's right.”

Securing a House vote does nothing to dislodge Republicans on the other side of the Capitol, though.

And Senate Majority Leader John Thune is insulated from House rules, including on discharge petitions.

There are Senate Republicans who like their moderate House colleagues fear the electoral repercussions of failing to extend subsidies, but nowhere near enough to buck leaders and secure an extension.

Still, with the 2026 midterms just around the corner, Rep. Glenn Ivey (D-MD) and other Democrats are celebrating the four Republican moderates’ decision to buck Speaker Johnson and force a vote on extending health insurance subsidies.

Like Sen. Rounds, Ivey also marveled at the larger GOP’s continued opposition to helping so many Americans, however dire their need.

Despite “24 million people” facing a financial cliff when ACA subsidies expire, Ivey told Raw Story, “Republican leaders weren't listening to that.

“I don't know what they were listening to. I just don't understand what they're doing, and in the Senate they’re saying they’re not going to move something forward anyway.

“So I'm like, ‘Worst of all possible worlds, from a Republican standpoint.’

“We hit 218 so we got the votes to move [the discharge petition], but they don't want to bring it to the floor, and then the Senate Republicans want to block it. It's crazy.”

‘Poor babies’: Top Senate Republican mocks Dems fuming that Trump misled Congress

WASHINGTON — Even as Democrats accuse the Trump administration of misleading Congress in the wake of the president’s announcement of an oil tanker blockade on Venezuela, Republicans are dismissing Democrats’ — and some Republicans’ — fears.

At the Capitol on Wednesday, one senior GOP senator went so far as to mock Democrats for speaking up.

“Poor babies,” Sen. John Cornyn (R-TX) told Raw Story.

Asked if he had been surprised by Trump’s announcement on Tuesday night, as senior Democrats complain they were, Cornyn said: “Not really.

“I mean [Venezuelan oil] is the lifeline for Iran and to some extent, for China, and an outlet for Russia to continue to be able to sell oil and finance its war machine against Ukraine. So I think it's not a surprise from that standpoint.”

Cornyn is a member of the Senate Intelligence and Foreign Relations committees.

Raw Story said, “Your Democratic colleagues are saying they wish [Secretary of Defense Pete] Hegseth and [Secretary of State Marco] Rubio would have focused on this yesterday, and they kind of feel deceived or misled a little bit.”

Rubio and Hegseth briefed both chambers of Congress during the day on Tuesday about controversial U.S. strikes on boats alleged to be carrying drugs in the Caribbean Sea.

“Well,” Cornyn said. “I was in this briefing and [Democrats] were asking questions about the strikes. They weren't asking about” the blockade.

Raw Story suggested that was because the Democrats didn’t know the blockade was coming.

“Poor babies,” Cornyn said. “They just need to open their eyes.”

Most Democrats’ eyes have long been wide open to President Trump’s moves to secure regime change in Venezuela.

The administration has implemented boat strikes that have now killed nearly 100, while Trump’s regular statements on the matter have accompanied reports of both a major U.S. military buildup in the Caribbean and CIA covert action in Venezuela itself.

Most Democrats and some Republicans maintain Trump needs congressional approval for any action against the regime in Caracas, led by the left-wing authoritarian Nicolás Maduro.

On the House side of the Capitol on Wednesday, Rep. Gregory Meeks (D-NY), the ranking Democrat on the Foreign Affairs Committee, told Raw Story: “We heard it again from the Chief of Staff, who said that these bombings won't stop until Maduro is out” — a reference to remarks from White House Chief of Staff Susie Wiles in a bombshell Vanity Fair profile.

After Trump’s blockade announcement, Meeks said, it was clear Venezuela was “about oil. It's not about drugs. It's about taking oil.

“You know, I'm a former special narcotics prosecutor. If you really try to stop drugs, you don't take the little guy, kill them and then pardon the top guys and don't go after them at all.”

That was a reference to Trump’s recent pardon of a former Honduran president convicted of drug trafficking.

“You try to get the little guys to get you all the information that you can so that you can go after the big guys,” Meeks said, going on to condemn the “double tap killing” of two men on a boat hit by the U.S. on Sept. 2.

The two men survived the original strike but were killed with a second missile — by most observers’ standards, a war crime or plain murder.

Hegseth has vehemently denied the strike was illegal, while shifting responsibility to a senior military commander.

Meeks and other Democrats said they were not satisfied with Rubio and Hegseth’s briefings.

“That wasn’t a classified session,” Meeks said.

Rep. Mike Quigley (D-IL), a House Intelligence Committee member, said: “No one has gotten an intel briefing. So that's what we're owed.”

On the other side of the Capitol, Sen. Dick Durbin (D-IL) also lamented the absence of comprehensive briefings, telling Raw Story: “That just reflects the attitude [the Trump administration has] with Congress.

“If the Republican majority in Congress will allow it, they will continue to follow their agenda regardless.”

Among that Republican majority, not all opinions were as dismissive, or harsh, as Cornyn’s.

Sen. Rand Paul (R-KY) voiced his continuing concern about the “double tap” boat strike.

Two months after the Sept. 2 killing, Paul said, when U.S. forces “saw people in the water, they're like, ‘Oh, you know what? Maybe we shouldn't kill helpless people in the water.’ And they plucked them out. And did they prosecute them? No, they sent them back to their country.

“There's so much that's inconsistent and wrong about this. With the video, every American should be able to see it. We should continue talking about it.”

Raw Story asked Paul for his view on Trump’s surprise announcement of an oil blockade.

“I’m opposed to it,” Paul said, bluntly.

'Trump tells the truth': House Republicans back racist attacks on Somalia, Omar and more

WASHINGTON — President Donald Trump spoke the “unvarnished truth” when he openly complained about immigrants from “sh–hole” countries, one senior U.S. House Republican told Raw Story, amid outcry over the president’s spate of racist remarks.

“Trump tells the truth,” Rep. Ralph Norman (R-SC) said at the Capitol. “He tells unvarnished truth. I have no problem with what he's saying. He rallies the troops like no other.”

Asked what he thought about Trump being accused of being racist, Norman, 72, was unabashed: “People say what they want. This man has brought this country back in less than 11-and-a-half months.”

In a cabinet meeting last week, Trump, 79, attacked Somalian Americans in virulent terms, including calling Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-MN), a leading progressive, “garbage.”

This week, in a speech in Pennsylvania, Trump attacked Omar again. He also said he had “announced a permanent pause on third-world migration, including from hellholes like Afghanistan, Haiti, Somalia, and many other countries.”

Answering a supporter’s shout of “sh–hole”, the president said: “I didn't say sh–hole, you did.”

But referring to a scandal from 2018, in his first term, he admitted it: “Remember I said that to the senators, they came in, the Democrats, they wanted to be bipartisan.

“So they came in and they said, ‘This is totally off the record. Nothing mentioned here. We want to be honest.’ Because our country was going to hell.

“And we had a meeting. And I said, ‘Why is it we only take people from sh–hole countries?’ Right? Why can't we have some people from Norway? Sweet and just a few. Let us have a few from Denmark, ‘Do you mind sending us a few people? Send us some nice people. Do you mind?’

“But we always take people from Somalia, places that are a disaster, right? Filthy, dirty, disgusting, ridden with crime. The only thing they're good at is going after ships.”

Rep. Derrick van Orden (R-WI) knows a thing or two about ships, having been a Navy Seal. Telling Raw Story he had lived in Africa, specifically Djibouti, he backed Trump too.

Asked to respond to Trump’s “sh––hole countries” remarks, Van Orden said: “Listen.

“The President of the United States is in charge of foreign policy. And the President of the United States has affected more positive changes in foreign policy than any president in my lifetime, with maybe the exception of Reagan…

“So I have the utmost confidence in the President of the United States and [Secretary of State] Marco Rubio getting foreign policy in a way when it's a benefit to America.”

It fell to Rep. Michael McCaul (R-TX), a former House Foreign Affairs Committee chair, to provide a more conventional GOP take on Trump’s “sh–hole countries” remarks.

“It's not a good message,” McCaul said, adding that “there are some who argue, ‘Hey, we did away with all of our soft diplomatic power’” thanks to Trump’s cost-cutting as well as his frequent racist invective.

McCaul said he was “briefed by Rubio's chief of staff yesterday about things we are doing to deal with soft power in a different model paradigm.”

“Is that hard when the president’s calling them ‘sh–hole nations’?” Raw Story pressed.

“He said that in the first term,” McCaul answered.

“But they denied it then and now he said it publicly,” Raw Story pressed again.

Choosing not to engage, McCaul continued to talk about ways to advance U.S. soft power despite crippling cuts to foreign aid via Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency, or DOGE.

‘Ignorance, racism, xenophobia’

Among Democrats, Rep. Omar lamented rising “ignorance, racism, xenophobia” and said Trump was more open in his second term about his use of racial invective because “he feels more comfortable being a racist.

“His base [is] basically raising money for a woman who gets fired for calling people the N word. What is there more to be surprised” about?

Rep. Ilhan Omar speaking in Las Vegas, Nevada. (Photo credit: Gage Skidmore / Flickr)

Omar was referring to a high-profile story from Wisconsin, in which a woman employed by Cinnabon was filmed subjecting a Somali couple to brutal racist abuse.

Crystal Wilsey, 43, was fired but has since benefited from crowd-funding efforts.

Rep. Bennie Thompson (D-MS) is one of the longest-serving Black members of Congress. That means that when it comes to Trump deploying racist language, he’s seen it all before.

“It's par for the course,” Thompson, 77, told Raw Story when asked about Trump’s “sh–hole countries” remark. “He lies on the regular.

“He has some kind of tendency to talk about countries and people of color … and he makes no bones about it. When he apologizes for insensitive statements, he comes right back and repeats.”

Raw Story cited a recent National Parks Service decision to drop free admission on holidays dedicated to Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and Juneteenth, but to provide it on Trump’s birthday.

“Why are you trying to erase things that people of color have contributed to just because you disagree with them?” Thompson asked, rhetorically.

‘It’s very frightening’

Unlike Thompson, first elected in 1993, Rep. Adelita Grijalva (D-AZ) is new to Congress, sworn in just last month.

“This can't be the new normal,” she said of Trump’s remarks. “That's what we're here for, fighting against it…

“I see it every day now, where people are openly discriminated against, people threatening their neighbors because they don’t like something that they're doing. It's very frightening.”

Proudly announcing herself as a “wife, daughter and sister of librarians,” Grijalva lamented “the dismantling of public education” through Republican attempts to ban books and change school courses to reflect a conservative view of U.S. history, particularly on grounds of race.

“Generations won't hear history,” Grijalva said, “because this administration is deciding that it hurts their feelings to talk about how oppressive they [white people] were and what we did too, right? Native American, indigenous people, I mean. We have to talk about that stuff.

“I'm very afraid, and I'm a mom with three kids. So [does] this country look like the one we grew up in? Right now it doesn't.”

Trump stories involving Melania and the Mob were caught and killed: Ex-Trump lawyer

The New Yorker reporter Ronan Farrow was correct when he said Donald Trump was involved in as many as 60 “catch and kill” operations during the 2016 presidential election in which Trump first won power, former Trump lawyer and fixer Michael Cohen said.

“I never actually added them up, but I wouldn't dispute what Ronan is saying,” Cohen told the Court of History podcast. “Every day, there was another story.”

Cohen said some stories that never saw the light of day concerned Trump and his third wife, Melania, while others concerned schemes such as Trump University or alleged connections to organized crime.

Trump entered the White House in 2017. In December 2018, Cohen was sentenced to three years in prison for tax evasion, making false statements to a federally insured bank, and campaign finance violations. He also pled guilty to making false statements to Congress.

Cohen’s convictions arose from his role in paying the adult film star Stormy Daniels ($130,000) and Playboy model Karen McDougal ($150,000) “to ensure that they did not publicly disclose their alleged affairs with [Trump] in advance of the election”.

In 2019, Farrow published Catch and Kill: Lies, Spies, and a Conspiracy to Protect Predators.

The book concerns the tabloid newspaper practice of paying for then killing stories alleging sexual misconduct by powerful men, prominently including the now disgraced Hollywood mogul Harvey Weinstein.

Speaking to Late Show host Stephen Colbert, Farrow said he saw, for the first time "any journalist has seen it, a master list of all the historical dirt that was about Trump” in the archives of AMI, the National Enquirer publisher at the heart of the scandal.

Saying the list contained “about 60” stories, Farrow added: "Really the story here is that they made this list, that they were working with Trump, and that right before the election they actually shred a bunch of stuff on it. There's a shredding party.”

Trump vehemently denied (and denies) all wrongdoing, and has repeatedly called Cohen a “rat” and a “serial liar.”

In 2024 Trump was convicted in New York on 34 criminal counts arising from the payments to Daniels and McDougal.

The convictions did not stop him winning re-election, and he was subsequently sentenced to an unconditional discharge.

Having served his own sentence, Cohen became a prominent Trump critic, author and podcaster.

In an interview released late Friday, he appeared on the Court of History, hosted by the Clinton aide turned Lincoln biographer Sidney Blumenthal and the Princeton historian Sean Wilentz.

Asked if Farrow’s claim of “about 60” stories concerning Trump being subjected to “catch and kill” operations, Cohen said: “You know, I never actually added them up, but I wouldn't dispute what Ronan is saying. Every day, there was another story.

“In fact, sometimes the stories and the leaks were coming from people on the inside. I had never in my life seen more infighting, more backstabbing than what was going on during the … 2016 election.”

According to Cohen, campaign manager Corey Lewandowski was a major source of such leaks, ending up having to be “sh––canned” by Cohen and Donald Trump Jr “because [Donald] Trump wouldn’t do it.

“So my job, along with some other people as well, but mostly on me, was catching and killing these stories,” Cohen said.

Asked what such stories concerned, Cohen said: “They were all over the board. I mean, they … had to deal with him [Trump] and Melania, they dealt with him and [the fraudulent] Trump University, they dealt with him and Stormy, him and Karen McDougal, him and the Mob, him and Ivana [Trump’s late first wife].

“I mean, you name it. It’s the same way today. There is no one singular story that you could point to and say that's really bad for Trump. They're all bad for him.”

Cohen said the only stories he was involved with that involved payments to sources were those concerning Daniels and McDougal.

A story about a Trump Tower doorman being paid off because Trump had a child with his wife was not true, Cohen said, though AMI boss David Pecker nonetheless paid to catch and kill it.

“That was the problem, too,” Cohen said. “You were dealing with so many fake stories, which is, again, all it does is enhance Trump's accuracy. [He] keep[s] saying, ‘Fake news. They're out to get me. They're out to get me.’”

Cohen also said he read Farrow’s book in prison, because “that's the one nice thing about prison. You have a lot of free time. So, you know, somebody who's an avid reader … I got a chance to read 97 books, you know, in my 13 months there, you know, while learning how to weld and do other sort of manual labor things.”

Texas GOP senators dodge questions over ethics of Trump pardon for 'Blue Dog' bribery Dem

WASHINGTON — President Donald Trump pardoned Rep. Henry Cuellar (D-TX), a conservative Democratic congressman facing bribery, money laundering and conspiracy charges, out of disinterested concern for the politicization of the Department of Justice under Joe Biden, Republican senator Ted Cruz claimed on Wednesday.

“The Constitution gives the pardon power exclusively to the President,” Cruz told Raw Story at the Capitol, when asked about the Cuellar pardon, which Trump announced on social media. “It's his decision how to exercise it.”

Raw Story asked if Cruz was worried, given the seriousness of the charges against Cuellar, that the Trump White House was nonetheless setting “a bad example for politicians writ large?”

“The Biden Department of Justice, sadly, was weaponized and politicized,” Cruz said. “And I think President Trump is rightly concerned about the politicization of the Department of Justice.”

Trump made the same claim in his statement announcing the Cuellar pardon.

In reality, Trump has been widely criticized for politicizing the Department of Justice himself, not least through direct public orders to Attorney General Pam Bondi to indict political enemies such as former FBI Director James Comey and New York Attorney General Letitia James.

Trump's use of the pardon power has also been widely criticized, from issuing pardons and other acts of clemency to more than 1,500 people charged in relation to the Jan. 6, 2021 attack on Congress to rewarding domestic and international allies — this week including a former president of Honduras convicted of drug trafficking, which Trump also claimed was a case of victimization under Joe Biden.

Cuellar has been in Congress since 2005. He was indicted by a federal grand jury in Houston in May 2024, when Joe Biden was president.

According to the DoJ, Cuellar and his wife Imelda Cuellar “allegedly accepted approximately $600,000 in bribes from two foreign entities: an oil and gas company wholly owned and controlled by the Government of Azerbaijan, and a bank headquartered in Mexico City.”

The DoJ alleged that the bribes were “laundered, pursuant to sham consulting contracts, through a series of front companies and middlemen into shell companies owned by Imelda Cuellar,” while “Congressman Cuellar allegedly agreed to use his office to influence U.S. foreign policy in favor of Azerbaijan …and to advise and pressure high-ranking U.S. Executive Branch officials regarding measures beneficial to the bank.”

The Cuellars denied wrongdoing.

Earlier this year it was widely reported that the DoJ had decided to move forward with the case, despite Trump indicating support for the Cuellars.

On Wednesday, announcing the pardon on Truth Social, Trump said he pardoned Cuellar because he had been victimized for “bravely [speaking] out against” the Biden administration on immigration policy.

After a rambling complaint about supposed Democratic bias at the Department of Justice during the Biden administration, Trump said: “Henry, I don’t know you, but you can sleep well tonight — Your nightmare is finally over!”

Before the Cuellar pardon became public, Michael Wolff, a leading Trump biographer, described how even the disgraced financier and sex offender Jeffrey Epstein worried about how Trump would use the pardon power.

"Jeffrey Epstein had a kind of riff about this,” Wolff told the Daily Beast, “because even before Trump became president, [Epstein] would talk about, 'If Donald became president and he had the pardon power ... Trump … often … talked about this in a kind of wide-eyed incredulity. 'I can pardon anyone. No one can do anything about it. If I pardon them. I have absolute power.'

"Epstein had focused on this and said … he loves showing the power that he has, and he said he would do it in a childlike way.”

Trump's relationship with Epstein remains the subject of a broiling Capitol Hill scandal, concerning the release of files related to Epstein's arrest and death in 2019.

At the Capitol on Wednesday, Raw Story also caught up with Sen. John Cornyn (R-TX).

“What do you make of this full unconditional pardon of your colleague, Mr. Cuellar?” Raw Story asked.

“It's entirely within the President's prerogative and Congress doesn't have a role,” Cornyn said.

All presidential pardons are political.

Cornyn pointed to political realities, saying: “I've known Henry a long time and had a very productive working relationship. He's I guess one of the last of the 'Blue Dogs' that are quickly becoming extinct, Democrats that actually will work with Republicans.”

“What do you make of the charges against him?” Raw Story asked, listing bribery, money laundering and conspiracy.

“That's the Department of Justice,” Cornyn said. “I don't have anything to do with that.”

‘Why people hate politicians’: Senior Dem slams GOP senators for J6 payout bid

WASHINGTON — A move by Senate Republicans to allow members of their caucus whose phone records were swept up in the Jan. 6, 2021 investigation to sue the government they are a part of “stinks like sh––”, a prominent Democrat told Raw Story.

Sen. Ben Ray Luján (D-NM) and a bipartisan group of lawmakers are appalled and vow to follow the House and swiftly nix the measure.

The controversial provision directed by Senate Majority Leader Sen. John Thune (R-SD) was included in the bill to reopen the government after the recent record-breaking shutdown.

“It stinks like sh––. It's just stinky,” Sen. Luján told Raw Story: “It's why people across the country hate politicians.

“Because, you know, under the guise of opening up the government and [with] Republicans saying they would not allow food programs to go forward … they sneak in more than a $500,000 payoff.”

Under the Senate measure passed on Nov. 10, senators who had their phone records collected during Special Counsel Jack Smith’s investigation of the Jan. 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol could qualify for hundreds of thousands of dollars in compensation.

At the time, Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX), one of the senators investigated over his links to Donald Trump’s attempt to overturn his 2020 defeat by Joe Biden, said: “Leader Thune inserted that in the bill to provide real teeth to the prohibition on the Department of Justice targeting senators.”

Cruz also bemoaned what he called “the abuse of power from the Biden Justice Department … the worst single instance of politicization our country has ever seen,” telling Politico: “I think it is Joe Biden’s Watergate, and the statutory prohibition needs to have real teeth and real consequences.”

But the move caused widespread outcry. Last week, the House, which is controlled by Republicans, voted unanimously to repeal the provision.

“It's $500,000 per instance, so it's arguably millions of dollars for arguably eight senators,” Sen. Lujan told Raw Story at the Capitol, ahead of lawmakers’ Thanksgiving recess.

“It's stinky. There's a reason why the House Republicans said this was garbage and they acted so quickly. So kudos to them for moving so quickly, and kudos to Sen. [Martin] Heinrich (D-NM) for offering a piece of legislation that says, ‘Take it out.’”

Sen. Tim Kaine (D-VA) was among other Democrats who told Raw Story they expected the Senate to remove the compensation measure, “probably in one of the one of the must-passes [budgetary bills] at the end of the year.”

‘What the hell are they up to?’

Lujan did accept Republican concerns about senators’ phone records being obtained by Smith and his team.

“Whether it's Democrats or Republicans, I mean, what the hell are they up to?” Lujan asked. “Why are they doing it? Arguably, it's against the law.”

But he also demanded to know why Republican senators needed a “payout” on the issue when they “left out” of their legislation “my Republican colleague out of Pennsylvania that was also in the damn report” — a reference to either Mike Kelly or Scott Perry, the only two Key Stone State lawmakers mentioned.

“It's stupid, and it's broken all around,” Lujan said.

‘We’ll talk about it’

Republican senators are reportedly split over how to amend their measure after its rejection by the House.

At the Capitol, Sen. Cruz dodged Raw Story’s question, saying he had a call to attend to.

Sen. Shelley Moore Capito (R-WV) said her party would be “discussing it.”

She also said she had not known about Thune’s provision when the government funding bill passed.

“I think the leaders even said, you know, maybe the process of doing it was not the best,” Capito said. “The substance of it, I don't argue with, being able to keep the separation of powers, but we'll talk about it next week.”

Democrats want to make it as uncomfortable as possible.

“It's outrageous that people would put into the bill essentially a check for themselves for up to $500,000,” Sen. Chris Van Hollen (D-MD) told Raw Story.

“Are you guys pressuring?” Raw Story asked.

“Oh, we're working very hard to overturn it,” Van Hollen promised.

‘Revenge actions’: Dem cries foul on House censures after GOP firebrand Mace files two

WASHINGTON — A rash of censure votes in the U.S. House of Representatives “has to stop,” a prominent California Democrat told Raw Story, recommending a bipartisan effort to make such moves rarer and thereby cool an increasingly heated tit-for-tat exchange.

“It has to stop because all it is is inviting revenge actions, one upon the other,” Rep. Judy Chu (D-CA) said, walking in the Capitol prior to the Thanksgiving recess, after a recent run of such votes.

“We could all find behaviors that we find objectionable in people on the other side,” Chu said.

“So there has to be a higher threshold. I totally agree with this bipartisan attempt to increase the threshold.”

'Broad power'

“The censure process in the House is broken – all of us know it,” Reps. Don Beyer (D-VA) and Don Bacon (R-NE) said, while introducing their measure last week.

“These cycles of censure and punishment impair our ability to work together for the American people, pull our focus away from problems besetting the country, and inflict lasting damage on this institution.”

The chamber has “broad power to discipline its members for acts that range from criminal misconduct to violations of internal House rules, as defined by the House itself.

“Over the decades, several forms of discipline have evolved in the House. The most severe type of punishment by the House is expulsion, which is followed by censure, and finally reprimand.”

The same source defines censure as a way to “register the House’s deep disapproval of member misconduct that, nevertheless, does not meet the threshold for expulsion.

“Once the House approves the sanction by majority vote, the censured member must stand in the well of the House … while the Speaker or presiding officer reads aloud the censure resolution and its preamble as a form of public rebuke.”

Until recently, such rebukes were extremely rare.

Between 1832 and 2021 there were just 23, with none at all between 1983 (when a Republican and a Democrat were censured for “sexual misconduct with a House page”) and December 2010, when the Democrat Charles Rangel was censured for a range of corrupt actions.

There followed another 11-year run without a successful censure.

But since 2021, in the age of Donald Trump’s Republican Party and ever-spiralling partisan warfare, there have been five successful censures and numerous unsuccessful attempts.

One Republican, Rep. Paul Gosar (R-AZ), and four Democrats — Reps. Rashida Tlaib (D-MI), Al Green (D-TX), Adam Schiff (D-CA) and Jamaal Bowman (D-NY), the latter two having moved on, Schiff to the Senate, Bowman defeated at the polls — have been formally censured.

This month, Chu voted no on a move to censure the controversial Rep. Cory Mills (R-FL) and remove him from the Armed Services Committee, a matter that was then referred to the House Ethics panel — the traditional venue for allegations about members’ conduct.

The Mills censure was proposed by a member of his own party, Rep. Nancy Mace (R-SC).

Other recent censure efforts have been traditionally, and typically, partisan.

On Nov. 18, Del. Stacey Plaskett (D-VI) beat a censure vote brought by Republicans, regarding her revealed email contact with the late sex offender Jeffrey Epstein, who was her constituent.

Chu voted no.

Also on Nov. 18, the House voted to disapprove (short of censure) the conduct of Rep. Chuy García (D-IL), after he announced his retirement in a manner that cleared the way for his chief of staff to succeed him without having to endure a Democratic primary in his Chicago seat.

Chu voted no, though 23 Democrats joined Republicans in voting yes.

On Sept. 17, before the long House recess during the government shutdown, Chu voted with all other Democrats and several Republicans to defeat an attempt to censure Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-MN), a leading progressive voice.

That motion, also brought by Mace, concerned Omar’s reaction to the assassination of conservative activist Charlie Kirk.

‘Not normal at all’

Speaking to Chu, Raw Story said: “You've been here longer than many of your colleagues — this [rash of censure votes] is not normal.”

“No,” Chu said, “not normal at all. The censures that I remember were few and far between. I remember Charlie Rangel. But yeah, to do it all day, almost every hour?”

“Are all these members just crying wolf and fundraising off these attacks?” Raw Story asked.

“Some could be trying to gain national attention,” Chu said — a description that would certainly fit Mace, a notably publicity hungry Republican now running to be governor of South Carolina.

“But I also think there is a revenge motive, because if one side of the aisle is going to do it, then the other side of the aisle is going to do it.”

'Never seen one!' James Comer makes bizarre swastika claim as agency says not hate symbol

WASHINGTON — Swastikas became the talk of Capitol Hill Thursday, to the surprise of, seemingly, everyone.

As news trickled out of a Washington Post report that the U.S. Coast Guard will no longer consider swastikas a hate symbol, Republicans were overcome with disbelief while Democrats were shocked, appalled or personally pained.

“How come you don’t tell me stuff?” Rep. Rashida Tlaib (D-MI) demanded of staffers after Raw Story showed her the report on our phone, which made her gasp in surprise.

The Coast Guard will re-classify “the Nazi-era insignia as ‘potentially divisive’ under … new guidelines,” according to the Post.

Citing documents reviewed, the Post said the new policy set to take effect on Dec. 15 “similarly downgrades the definition of nooses and the Confederate flag, though display of the latter remains banned, according to documents reviewed.”

As her surprise morphed into dread, Tlaib voiced long-held concerns about “white supremacist groups actively recruiting white supremacists to get into law enforcement.”

Other senior Democrats were similarly dismayed.

“It’s not a good thing,” former Jan. 6 Committee member Rep. Zoe Lofgren (D-CA) told Raw Story. “You can’t undo history.”

The usually staid Rep. Joe Courtney (D-CT) was more vocal, maybe because he represents New London, home of the Coast Guard Academy — which he oversees on its board of visitors.

Courtney’s also a senior member of the House Armed Services Committee, where he’s the top Democrat on the Subcommittee on Seapower and Projection Forces.

“This is just a terrible message in terms of just saying, it's not hate, but potentially divisive,” Courtney told Raw Story, before pointing to a released statement.

"In 2007,” that statement said, “two hangman nooses were found at the Coast Guard Academy: one in a Black cadet's bag and another in a race relations trainer's office.

“In response, then-Commandant Thad Allen personally flew up to the Academy campus in New London to emphatically tell cadets that this hate behavior has no place in the Coast Guard.”

Speaking to Raw Story, Courtney added that the late Maryland Democratic congressman Elijah Cummings flew north with Commandant Allen, to “read the riot act.”

“Much work was done to make the Coast Guard safe and inclusive for its highly talented personnel,” Courtney’s statement continued.

“It is appalling that the Coast Guard is taking this gigantic step backwards and reclassifying nooses and swastikas as ‘potentially divisive’, as opposed to what they are: hate symbols.

“It is deeply troubling that this decision was even considered and [it] should be immediately reversed."

Courtney was far from alone.

Sen. Jacky Rosen (D-NV), a member of the Senate Committee on Commerce, Science, and Transportation, told the Post: “At a time when antisemitism is rising in the United States and around the world, relaxing policies aimed at fighting hate crimes not only sends the wrong message to the men and women of our Coast Guard, but it puts their safety at risk.”

‘Fake crap’

Democrats have voiced rising concerns about the hard-right turn of the Departments of Defense and Homeland Security under Secretaries Pete Hegseth and Kristi Noem, loyal lieutenants to Donald Trump.

The Coast Guard is part of DHS in peacetime but can transfer to the Pentagon in times of war.

The Trump administration aggressively rejected the Post report.

“This is an absolute ludicrous lie and unequivocally false,” Tricia McLaughlin, assistant DHS secretary, posted on social media.

“The Washington Post should be embarrassed it published this fake crap.“

But the Post quoted an unnamed Coast Guard official as saying they had seen the new policy wording, which they called “chilling.”

“We don’t deserve the trust of the nation if we’re unclear about the divisiveness of swastikas,” the official said, speaking anonymously “due to a fear of reprisal.”

The new policy, according to the Post, sets a 45-day limit for displays of swastikas to be reported, where previously no time limit was set.

The anonymous official was quoted as saying: “If you are at sea, and your shipmate has a swastika in their rack, and you are a Black person or Jew, and you are going to be stuck at sea with them for the next 60 days, are you going to feel safe reporting that up your chain of command?”

‘I’ve never seen one in person’

Despite widespread revulsion over the Post report, one senior Republican confronted by Raw Story seemed reluctant to take the story seriously.

Shown the report, Rep. James Comer (R-KY), chair of the powerful House Oversight Committee, offered an unusual reaction.

“Where are you on swastikas?” Raw Story asked.

“On what?” Comer said.

“Swastikas,” Raw Story said, sharing a screengrab of the Post story. “You seen this reporting?”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” Comer said.

Raw Story also mentioned reports of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents — like the Coast Guard, part of DHS — sporting white supremacist symbols as tattoos.

The senior Republican said he wasn’t too familiar with swastikas.

“I’ve never seen one in person,” Comer said. “Not in a tattoo. I’ve seen ‘em in movies [and] Sons of Anarchy” on TV.

Biographer drops explosive claim Epstein terrified of Trump but was ready to expose him

Jeffrey Epstein was “very much afraid of Donald Trump” but was “starting to get to this point that he might publicly talk about this relationship” when “he was arrested and died” in 2019, Trump biographer Michael Wolff said.

Appearing on the Court of History podcast on Thursday, Wolff was discussing emails released by Congress this week, in which the financier and sex offender frequently mentioned Trump and also discussed with Wolff ways to deal with, and potentially benefit from, his formerly close relationship with the U.S. president.

Epstein died in prison in 2019. On Wednesday, a huge cache of his emails was released by the House Oversight Committee. Alongside Speaker Mike Johnson finally saying he would hold a vote on releasing Epstein materials held by the U.S. government, the release produced sensational details and headlines.

A day later, in what was billed as Wolff’s only interview about his presence in the Epstein emails — though he is himself a co-host of a Daily Beast podcast, Inside Trump's Head — the writer was quizzed by Court of History co-hosts Sidney Blumenthal, a former adviser to Bill and Hillary Clinton, and Sean Wilentz, a Princeton history professor.

Wolff has often discussed his relationship with Epstein, including extensive interviews about Trump that Wolff conducted as he wrote books on the property magnate turned two-term Republican president.

Blumenthal cited an email “from December 2015 and Trump has announced he's running for president in 2016 and you explained to Jeffrey Epstein that CNN is likely to ask Trump about his relationship with him”, which was long close, until the two men fell out.

“And Epstein asks you what you thought Trump would answer, and you reply, and I'm going to quote you, ‘I think you should let him hang himself. If he says he hasn't been on the plane or to the house, you can hang him in a way that potentially generates a positive benefit for you, or if it looks like he could win you could save him, generating a debt.”

Asked why he wrote that email, Wolff said that in late 2015, he, “among many people, was increasingly alarmed about” Trump’s candidacy “and understood that the one person who had the potential to damage this candidacy was Jeffrey Epstein.

“I'm not the only person who understood that … when I was with [Trump ally and adviser] Steve Bannon, when he met Jeffrey Epstein in 2017 the first thing that Bannon said to Epstein was, ‘You were the only person I was afraid of during the campaign.’”

Wolff added that in advising Epstein, he had been “trying to encourage Epstein to use what information he had to get Trump, and in this instance, that would have been an interesting way to approach this: let Trump publicly tell a lie, then expose the lie.

“Now, Epstein … he would go back and forth, and I think he would suddenly entertain this possibility that he could do this. But at the same time, Epstein was, without a doubt, very much afraid of Donald Trump. So in the end … I think that he was starting to get to this point that he might publicly talk about this relationship. But then he was arrested and died.”

First convicted and sentenced in 2008 — on Florida state charges of solicitation of prostitution and of solicitation of prostitution with a minor under the age of 18 — Epstein was freed in 2009 but arrested again in July 2019, when Trump was two years into his first White House term.

Charged with sex trafficking of minors and conspiracy to commit sex trafficking of minors, Epstein was found dead in his prison cell in New York in August.

Five years later, in 2024, Trump campaigned for president on a promise to release Epstein materials held by the federal government, and thereby expose his links to powerful men. Once in office, Trump reneged, to the fury of many of his own supporters.

Deferential and favorable Department of Justice treatment of Ghislaine Maxwell, Epstein’s former partner who was jailed on sex trafficking charges in 2022, has also fueled suspicions about Trump’s Epstein links and the content of the so-called Epstein files.

The emails released this week also contained a bombshell reference to Trump having spent “hours” at Epstein’s house with an Epstein victim whose name was redacted but who the White House said was Virginia Giuffre.

Giuffre killed herself earlier this year. Last month, the publication of a posthumous memoir re-surfaced scandalous claims about Prince Andrew and other men. Giuffre did not accuse Trump of wrongdoing. Though widely accused of sexual misconduct, and found liable for sexual abuse in a New York civil case in 2023, Trump vehemently denies all allegations of improper conduct, linked to Epstein or not.

In the released emails, Epstein hinted that Trump knew a lot about his exploitation of young girls but stayed quiet, making Trump the “dog that hasn't barked.”

Another email, written by Epstein to himself on Feb. 1, 2019, said, “Trump knew of it, and came to my house many times during that period. He never got a massage.”

In another email, Epstein wrote, “of course he [Trump] knew about the girls as he asked Ghislaine to stop.”

Wolff told the Court of History that was a reference to a court case.

“At that point, Ghislaine is pursuing a lawsuit, stupidly … with Virginia Giuffre. And … that had not worked out well for Ghislaine, because … as I recall, Virginia Giuffre counter-sued, and there's lots of depositions and Ghislaine will have to testify, and that will mean that she will have to testify about all of this, including quite possibly about Trump. So that's what that's about.”

Wolff himself recently sued Melania Trump, the first lady, after she tried to silence him in relation to her own Epstein links. He told Blumenthal and Wilentz that crowdsourcing to pay for the suit was going well.

“As for [Trump] knowing about the girls,” Wolff said, “that's a direct reference to what Trump knew about what was going on at Jeffrey Epstein's house. And it goes back to a couple of things.

“I've talked here before about the photographs that I've seen of Trump around Epstein's pool with a set of the girls who were often at Epstein's house.”

Wolff has repeatedly said Epstein showed him photos of Trump with young girls and a stain on the crotch of his trousers, photos Wolff believes likely to have been taken by the FBI when Epstein was finally arrested.

He continued: “But then it was also Epstein's view that it was Trump who first alerted the police to what was going on … at Epstein's house. So this was always a thing, and this was a thing that I prodded Epstein on because I thought it was a smoking gun.

“Did [Trump] know what was going on at Epstein's house? If so, why did he keep quiet about it? And if he knew, what was the nature of how he knew, etc, etc.

“And you know, throughout my discussions with Epstein about Trump, it was always, ‘You have the goods here. You have the power to cause Trump an enormous amount of trouble, and possibly to bring him down.

“Actually, jumping six years later, that may, in fact, be what is happening now.”

'He can insult me all he wants': ABC's Jonathan Karl spills on covering the Trump Show

Jonathan Karl, chief Washington correspondent and co-anchor of This Week for ABC News, is also the author of four books on Donald Trump and his seismic impact on American politics.

First, Front Row at the Trump Show covered the first Trump presidency from a viewpoint built on Karl’s experience of reporting on Trump before he entered politics, in his years as a New York businessman and gossip column staple.

Next, Betrayal and Tired of Winning dealt with Trump’s defeat in 2020, his incitement of the January 6 insurrection, and criminal and civil court cases which seemed set to knock him out of public life, even send him to prison.

Karl’s fourth book, Retribution: Donald Trump and the Campaign that Changed America, was published late last month. Raw Story caught up with Karl to discuss the book, which not only follows Trump through two assassination attempts to victory and into the chaos of his second term, but also covers Democrats’ own wild 2024 campaign, which saw Joe Biden’s historic withdrawal and replacement by Kamala Harris.

The conversation has been edited for clarity and length.

This is your fourth Trump book. Would you have written it if Trump had lost?

Yeah. I decided to write the book right after Biden dropped out. I just knew this was going to be a campaign for the ages, and I wanted to write that story. So I signed the contract and began thinking and compiling material over summer 2024. I definitely would have done it, win or lose.

I don't think I would have called it Retribution if Trump had lost, but as soon as he won, I just knew that was the chief motivating factor of his campaign.

In a previous book, you noted Trump ally Steve Bannon’s loaded use of ‘Come Retribution’ — a Confederate phrase linked to plans to kill Abraham Lincoln that now seems incredibly loaded.

Yeah, I think that chapter in Tired of Winning is, in all my books, maybe the best chapter. It really set the groundwork for what was to come. It feels pretty pressing, looking back.

You finish Retribution with the February Oval Office meeting when Trump and JD Vance brutally bullied Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky. You quote Trump saying, ‘This is going to be great television.’ Does the ‘Trump Show’ concept from your first book, that he governs like a reality TV host, hold true?

Totally. I talk about it in the conclusion of this book. What I said in Front Row… was, “He's the star, the executive producer, the publicist, He's everything in the Trump Show.” And he's still programming. But I think a lot is different in his approach to the presidency now, because he's actually trying to change the world. It didn't always feel that way in the first term.

Retribution, by Jonathan Karl.

In another key passage in Retribution, you write about those who say Trump threatens democracy. You write, ‘I have long believed — and still hope — that those fears are overblown.’ Why?

I think the key word in that is “hope.” I don't think that Trump's major motivating force is that he wants to become a dictator or a king or the supreme leader. I think he likes to play that sometimes on television. I think he is very focused on going down in history as the greatest president ever, with the possible exception of George Washington. He cares about that stuff now, but he never really seemed to care about much before. It's the obsession with the Nobel Peace Prize and all that.

But my point in saying that is this: he has provided a roadmap for how you can destroy American democracy. I’ve known the guy for a long, long time. I don't think he actually wants that. But who knows? It's amazing even to have the conversation.

You’ve had a back-and-forth with Trump since your days at the New York Post, and call him regularly. But his most recent insult, when he said maybe his attorney general should investigate you for supposed “hate speech”, seemed particularly harsh. How did that feel?

I've been so used to it over the last 10 years that I don't let it bother me or affect how I deal with [the White House]. I don't think I should ever be in a situation where I'm in a back and forth with the President, except about the facts and the reporting and the questions. So he can insult me all he wants. He can praise me all he wants. It's irrelevant to my work, is the way I look at it.

Controversially, ABC agreed to pay Trump $15 million over remarks about one of his court cases. Has that affected your reporting?

It hasn't because I've just charged ahead and I haven't felt in any way restrained. I basically do what I've always been doing.

In terms of character studies in Retribution, Vance comes across to me as rather hapless. Is that fair?

I wouldn't use that word. I describe kind of vividly his coming on the scene as Trump's choice for running mate, and it was a pretty rough rollout, which I think Vance would probably acknowledge. But I think now, if you talk to people in Trumpworld, most would say he's the most likely heir. Not all of them, for sure. Steve Bannon would not say that.

What would Bannon say?

Bannon is saying publicly it would be Trump. Trump will stay. Maybe Steve ultimately wants it to be Steve, but certainly not JD, and probably not [Secretary of State] Marco Rubio either.

Do you think Trump will try to stay after 2028?

I think it's highly unlikely. I think Trump, as of this moment, does not actually have any intention of trying to stay in office past 2028. But it's a long way away. And given what happened at the end of 2020 and the beginning of 2021, I don't think I'd rule anything out.

Retribution is not just a Trump book. Do you think Kamala Harris could run again?

I think you can't rule anything out: whenever somebody seems like they're done, they may not be. We saw that with Richard Nixon. We saw that with Ronald Reagan. We saw it more than anybody with Donald Trump. So who knows?

The Harris campaign had massive highs and very low lows, I think she electrified Democrats in a way that really nobody besides Barack Obama in 2008 has done, and then she ran out of gas.

There were deep, deep, deep flaws to that campaign and they were up against a political environment that was going to be impossible: the deep unpopularity of Biden, high inflation, all that anguish and anger at the state of immigration.

But let's not forget, when she took that nomination, her first few weeks were absolutely electrifying to Democrats. The convention might be the best Democratic convention I ever saw. And in her performance in that one and only debate with Trump, she looked like somebody that could and maybe even would win. And then she ran out of gas. And I think there are detailed reasons in the book.

The narrative of Biden’s downfall is still contested. Was that a challenge to report?

Yeah. I'm very proud of the sections on Biden in this book, because I really felt this was an historic series of events and although they won't get the attention right now, because all the things that Trump is doing will be studied for years and years and years, I spent an enormous amount of time trying to get kind of a blow by blow, day by day account of what was happening with Biden. And I think it's a very clear and accurate and thorough picture of what was happening as he made that extraordinary decision to drop out of the race.

Donald Trump with eyes closed Donald Trump during an event in the Oval Office last week. REUTERS/Jonathan Ernst

What do you make of complaints that the mainstream media fails to cover Trump's age and fitness for office as it covered Biden?

I'm never a big fan of hand-wringing about the so-called mainstream media, as it’s so diverse in this country, so fragmented. I think you report the facts and let people make up their minds. As a reporter, your job isn't to go out and say somebody's old and feeble — you just report the facts, what you can glean. And by the way, people have been saying that stuff about Trump for 10 years. At some point it'll be true, but I don't know when.

Have you got a fifth Trump book in you?

I'm sure I'll do one more, depending on how everything turns out but it’ll be a retrospective, not in the midst of it.

I've read a lot of Trump books. I'm not saying this because you're on the phone: I usually recommend yours and Maggie Haberman’s, largely because of the mixture of real-time reporting and knowledge of New York, where Trump came from. I wonder, therefore, what your favourite Trump books are.

Certainly, Maggie's book [Confidence Man] is fantastic. Her descriptions of early Trump in New York are just fantastic, and she's a great reporter. Bob Woodward has written some really important books on Trump. And, you know, he's Bob Woodward. And certainly I would put Peter Baker and Susan Glasser [The Divider] up there too. But there are a lot of good books out there.

Retribution is out now

‘Very savage time of cruelty’: Whispers of deal as Dems keep shutdown spotlight on Trump

WASHINGTON — Happy Groundhog Day. Again.

With the US federal government shutdown entering its fifth week and a growing number of Americans feeling deepening economic pain, there are whispers of a thaw on Capitol Hill. At the very least, some more middle-of-the-road Democratic and Republican senators are talking to each other.

Such signs of bipartisanship seemed to have spooked President Donald Trump, who took to Truth Social late last week to demand GOP leaders “INITIATE THE ‘NUCLEAR OPTION’” and get rid of the filibuster, so Republicans can more easily ram Trump-approved policies through Congress.

Democrats are dubious about anything Trump might say.

“I’m not sure if you can really trust the president,” Sen. Jacky Rosen (D-NM) told Raw Story mere hours before Trump called for nuking Senate norms.

“You're going to have to maybe take a leap of faith at some point, but you better come out and do something. This is his shutdown. He owns the White House, the House and the Senate. It's up to him to be a leader and bring us together to be sure people have the dignity of health care.”

Health care, specifically the soon-to-spiral cost of insurance under the Affordable Care Act — aka, Obamacare — is the issue that drove the Democrats to trigger a shutdown now rocketing towards the record for the longest such closure.

That mark sits at 35 dismal days, set during Trump’s first administration.

After that shutdown, the Congressional Budget Office estimated the cost to the U.S. economy at $11 billion.

Then, as now, Republicans controlled the White House and both chambers of Congress.

Democrats say that means the onus is on the GOP to come up with a deal to get government workers paid and food stamp recipients fed, and to shame vacationing House members into returning to Washington for the first time in more than a month.

“This is a president and a Republican Party that is taking a battle ax to bedrock that American families rely on,” Sen. Cory Booker (D-NJ) told Raw Story.

“They've already cut a billion out of SNAP [food stamps]. Now they're putting in health-care work requirements that even Republican states like West Virginia have said don't work and actually cause people who are eligible to lose their coverage that was intended by Congress.

“So this is just a very, very savage time of cruelty where you're going to see millions of Americans suffering because of the things that they're doing to bedrock programs and providing health care and food programs.”

On Friday, a federal judge in Rhode Island blocked the Trump administration from suspending Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) benefits, as was due on Saturday.

Speaking before that ruling, Sen. Raphael Warnock (D-GA) told Raw Story. “SNAP beneficiaries are not a part of this fight.

“Whatever you think about the fight, they're not in it. They're being dragged into it by the administration. They've got $5 billion in a contingency fund and they ought to use it.”

‘They’ll get some votes’

Republican senators, publicly at least, remain resolute: if Democrats back down and re-open the government, GOP leaders are promising to hold votes on whether to extend Obamacare subsidies without which insurance costs will soar.

“They'll get some votes, and you can't assure an outcome on a particular vote,” Sen. Mike Rounds (R-SD) told reporters. “You can provide them with a chance.”

But Rounds also indicated resolute Republican opposition to extending subsidies.

“You have to recognize that the marketplace does not support what we're trying to do with the product in the first place,” he said, “and it's exactly what has been said by Republicans for 15 years,” going back to passage of the ACA in 2010.

Extending subsidies has found support among remaining Republican moderates, but their ranks have dwindled since the MAGA era kicked off in 2016. Most in the party seem opposed to continuing the subsidies.

“The Democrats voted for this identical spending level in December of last year, and [now] they're voting against the spending levels that they instituted,” Sen. Rand Paul (R-KY) said.

“So to me, it seems to be an untenable position. Continue to oppose spending levels they've already stated support for, and their rationale for doing it is they want to preserve Obamacare subsidies for somebody making $200,000 a year.

“I think most people out there think it'd be kind of crazy to close down the government to keep a subsidy of $1,500 a year. So I'm surprised that they've gone this long with us.”

Democrats have refused to budge.

Political watchers are sensing change in the air now the country is starting to lose patience — though polling shows majorities blame the GOP.

Republicans remain bullish.

Saying he had “no issues” with the Trump administration using a $130 million private donation to pay the military during the shutdown, despite concerns about possible corruption, Sen. Markwayne Mullin (R-OK) told reporters he thought the shutdown would end this week, after high-profile state and city elections in Virginia, New Jersey and New York.

“I would assume [after Democratic] victories on Wednesday, even though it's blue states and they elect a communist in New York City [Democratic Socialist Zohran Mamdani, favorite to be elected mayor], they're going to consider that a victory,” Mullin said.

“And then they're going to go out there and say they fought hard and it's time to open the government.”

‘People will be hungry’

The more progressive wing of the Democratic Party begs to differ, as members continue trying to focus the conversation on the deepening human cost of the shutdown.

Politics aside, the cost of the government shutdown to federal workers, contractors and those dependent on federal programs is undeniable — and increasing by the day.

“People will be hungry, people will not be paid,” Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) said, starkly.

“And people are going to have to pay so much more for their health insurance that there are people making the decision this weekend to drop their insurance because it's the only way they can still afford rent.”

Dems demand probe as Trump's favorite Biden attack gets turned on him

WASHINGTON — If Republicans want to debate allegedly illegal pardons, Democrats are all in.

After House Oversight Committee Chair James Comer (R-KY) dropped a new report that claims President Joe Biden’s end-of-term pardons should be deemed “void” because they were signed by an autopen, Democrats questioned the get out of jail free cards President Donald Trump doled out to some 1,500 Jan. 6, 2021 rioters after his inauguration this year.

“I hope [the report] will be an analysis by Republicans of Trump's pardon of 1,550 people,” Sen. Adam Schiff (D-CA) — who received a Biden pardon arising from his work on the House Select Committee on January 6th — told Raw Story.

“He must have a very fast hand to have signed all those, so I look forward to Comer announcing that investigation.”

While Comer and company are looking back to Biden, Schiff and other Democrats say America’s overdue for a discussion about Trump’s own pardon practices.

“Are they gonna go examine all the pardons that Trump did of the January 6 rioters?” Sen. Chris Coons (D-DE) told Raw Story.

“I mean, do you think he actually sat down and he signed every single one of those? I'd be happy to have them review those.”

Republicans aren’t investigating Trump — they’re hungry for retribution instead.

‘Signed and settled’

Throughout U.S. history, presidents of both parties have leaned on autopens to help them sign the stacks of official and unofficial documents that demand their attention daily.

While the Supreme Court has never weighed in on autopens, a 2005 Department of Justice memo went so far as to okay presidential underlings signing official documents on a president’s behalf.

“The President need not personally perform the physical act of affixing his signature to a bill he approves and decides to sign in order for the bill to become law,” the memo reads.

“Rather, the President may sign a bill within the meaning of Article I, Section 7 [of the Constitution] by directing a subordinate to affix the President’s signature to such a bill, for example by autopen.”

That’s partly why Democratic senators Raw Story spoke to Wednesday dismissed the Comer report as partisan and legally flawed.

“Look, executives use autopens, with appropriate processes and authorization, all the time,” said Sen. Coons — who fills the seat Biden vacated when he became vice president to Barack Obama in 2009.

“The question isn't, ‘Did Joe Biden actually effectively illegally pardon?’ The question is, ‘Did he follow appropriate procedures for making the decisions, individually documenting them and then authorizing the appropriate person to audit.’”

“How dangerous is it having the party in power trying to negate [past pardons]?” Raw Story asked.

“They're doing a lot to negate things that were signed and settled into law,” Coons said, before using this week’s deadly Caribbean storm as an example.

“A hurricane just roared over Jamaica, and we had appropriated money for disaster assistance and for humanitarian relief, and they shut down USAID, laid off some of the world's most experienced and capable disaster response people, and today our neighbors in Jamaica are waking up without a well-coordinated and robust American response because of it.”

‘A legitimate issue’

Ignoring growing questions about Trump’s fitness for office, Republicans are welcoming Comer’s report.

“I think [Biden’s autopen use is] a legitimate issue the American public cares about,” Sen. Rick Scott (R-FL) told Raw Story.

“I would ask about whether, you know, all the autopen is legal or not. So I think there ought to be an investigation, and we can make a good decision.”

Sen. Ron Johnson (R-WI) is conducting an investigation of his own.

“It all speaks to the question, ‘Who was in charge?’” he said.

“That's a serious question, and what we're doing in my committee is we're interviewing the constitutional officers — ‘What did you know? What did you see?’ — for the historical record.

“Because if this happens in the future, they've got to realize they have a responsibility to the Constitution. You can't allow somebody who's not capable of fulfilling the awesome duties of President to do this and let somebody else completely unelected, unknown to the American public, run the show.”

Should the American people expect prosecutions?

“Depends on what crimes may have been committed,” Johnson said. “That's all hypothetical about something in the future, but now we should get to the bottom of this. People need to come forward … I always have way more questions than we ever get answers for.”

Sen. Tommy Tuberville (R-AL), one of President Trump’s most ardent supporters, was happy to call for investigations and perhaps prosecutions.

Last-minute Biden pardons “should be voided,” Tuberville said. “If they were done by an autopen, I mean, this doesn't seem very constitutional to do it that way.”

Sen. Adam Schiff (D-CA) speaks with reporters. REUTERS/Jonathan Ernst

“I'm sure they probably are, yeah,” Tuberville said when asked if pardon recipients, such as his colleague Sen. Schiff, should be investigated by the DOJ.

“That's a huge part of breaking the law, to me, if you're going to do something that notorious, on such an important topic.”

‘Really disturbing’

Crocodile tears are all the GOP’s offering, Senate Democrats said.

“Considering that this President uses pardons to extort from people, I would hope that the Republicans would be more concerned about the use of pardon powers in that way,” Sen. Mazie Hirono (D-HI) told Raw Story, nodding to controversial Trump pardons of powerful financial figures like Changpeng Zhao, the founder of crypto company Binance.

Comer released his report while the federal government is shut down and the U.S. House of Representatives is closed for business.

“[Conspiracies have] already been debunked,” Sen. Alex Padilla (D-CA) told Raw Story. “And they should wish they were equally passionate about trying to re-open [the] government and avoid impact to people who rely on nutrition assistance programs.”

Other Democrats are even more blunt when asked about congressional Republicans feeding a sympathetic DOJ fodder to go after the President’s personal, if perceived, enemies.

“I find that really disturbing,” Sen. Cory Booker (D-NJ) told Raw Story.

Biographer plans to subpoena Trump, Melania and Maxwell about Epstein ties in new lawsuit

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.

An edited transcript was released.

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.

'Where are those tapes?' Epstein victim Giuffre begs for files release in posthumous book

WASHINGTON – In a posthumously published memoir, the Jeffrey Epstein victim Virginia Roberts Giuffre makes an impassioned plea for the release of all files and records related to the late financier and sex offender who abused young girls and facilitated abuse by powerful men.

“I hope for a world in which predators are punished, not protected; victims are treated with compassion, not shamed; and powerful people face the same consequences as anyone else,” Roberts Giuffre writes.

“I yearn, too, for a world in which perpetrators face more shame than their victims do and where anyone who's been trafficked can confront their abusers when they are ready, no matter how much time has passed.

“We don't live in this world yet – I mean, seriously: Where are those videotapes the FBI confiscated from Epstein's houses? And why haven't they led to the prosecution of any more abusers? – but I believe we could someday.”

Roberts Giuffre killed herself in April. She was 41.

Her book — Nobody’s Girl: A Memoir of Surviving Abuse and Fighting for Justice — will be published next Tuesday. Raw Story obtained a copy.

Excerpts published by Vanity Fair and the Guardian have concerned how Roberts Giuffre met Epstein and his partner, Ghislaine Maxwell, and was sexually abused by them and other powerful figures.

Roberts Giuffre’s descriptions of sex with Prince Andrew have generated headlines in the U.K.

In 2022, Roberts Giuffre reached a settlement with Andrew, reportedly worth millions of dollars. The prince did not admit wrongdoing.

The same year, Maxwell was sentenced to 20 years in jail on sex-trafficking charges.

The so-called Epstein files — records seized after his second arrest and death in prison in 2019 — remain the subject of fascination.

Epstein’s relationship with Donald Trump, with whom he was long close, generates intense speculation.

The president campaigned on a promise to release the Epstein files but reversed course in office. Revelations have included a sexually suggestive poem Trump contributed to Epstein’s 50th-birthday book, and reports Trump’s name appears many times in the Epstein files.

In July, Maxwell gave an unprecedented jailhouse interview to Todd Blanche, the deputy attorney general who was previously Trump’s own lawyer. Maxwell was moved to a more comfortable prison.

Now, as House Republicans exploit the government shutdown to hold up a motion to force release of the Epstein files, many detect an attempt to shield Trump.

The author Michael Wolff, who has written four books on Trump and claims to have hours of interviews with Epstein, has said Epstein showed him a picture of Trump in a compromising position with young girls.

Wolff has said he presumes the FBI has the picture.

Trump vehemently denies wrongdoing.

Roberts Giuffre writes about Trump but does not implicate him in improper behavior.

The writer who worked on Nobody’s Girl, Amy Wallace, this week told the Washington Post Roberts Giuffre “was a huge Trump fan … she was a Trump supporter.

“There were two reasons for it: One, she’d met him. She worked at Mar-a-Lago. Her dad worked at Mar-a-Lago. She met Trump several times, and he was always very kind to her. So she had personal memories. She thought the place was beautiful. She loved working there.

“And secondly, he said he was going to release the Epstein files. He was on her side. That’s how she felt.”

Nobody’s Girl most often opts not to name men Roberts Giuffre says she was forced to have sex with. Exceptions include Prince Andrew and individuals now dead.

She writes: “You may notice that while I've named some men in this book, I have not named all the men I was trafficked to.

“Partly that is because I still don't know some of their names. Partly, too, that is because there are certain men who I fear naming.

“The man who brutally raped me toward the end of my time with Epstein and Maxwell, for example — the man whom I've called ‘the former Prime Minister’ in court documents — I know his name, and he knows what he did to me, even though when others have sought comment from him about my allegations, he has denied them.

“I fear that this man will seek to hurt me if I say his name here.

“There are other men whom I was trafficked to who have threatened me in another way: by asserting that they will use litigation to bankrupt me.

“One of those men's names has come up repeatedly in various court filings, and in response, he has told my lawyers that if I talk about him publicly, he will employ his vast resources to keep me in court for the rest of my life.

“While I have named him in sworn depositions and identified him to the FBI, I fear that if I do so again here, my family will bear the emotional and financial brunt of that decision.

“I have the same fears about another man whom I was forced to have sex with many times — a man whom I also saw having sexual contact with Epstein himself. I would love to identify him here. But this man is very wealthy and very powerful, and I fear that he, too, might engage me in expensive, life-ruining litigation.”

Roberts Giuffre acknowledges that “some readers will question my reluctance to name many of my abusers. If I am, indeed, a fighter for justice, why have I not called them out?

“My answer is simple: Because while I have been a daughter, a prisoner, a survivor, and a warrior, my most important role is that of a mother … I won't put my family at risk if I can help it. Maybe in the future I will be ready to talk about these men. But not now.”

Elsewhere, Wallace writes that Roberts Giuffre wanted the book published in the event of her death.

'If the KKK shot a Black man': GOP rep's hair-raising hypothetical on Jimmy Kimmel affair

WASHINGTON — ABC and Disney were right to suspend Jimmy Kimmel over his remarks about the killing of Charlie Kirk, a leading far-right U.S. House Republican told Raw Story — only to bizarrely equate the national flashpoint with a hypothetical instance in which the late-night TV host might have made similar remarks about “the KKK [shooting] a Black man.”

Kimmel’s suspension last week was an instance of a “private company making a choice [regarding] somebody who took the side of the shot that's heard around the world,” Rep. Ralph Norman (R-SC) told Raw Story at the Capitol.

“Let him do it and face the consequences. I could … if the KKK had shot a Black man, what would the result be? Wouldn't be close.”

Norman, who has served in the House since 2017, appeared to be suggesting that Kimmel would have been suspended without outcry from Democrats and the press, if he had made remarks about that hypothetical racist murder.

In fact, Kimmel was suspended over remarks about the search for a motive in the killing of Kirk, who was shot on 10 Sept., during an appearance on a college campus in Utah.

A 22-year-old suspect, Trent Robinson, has been charged.

Kimmel first condemned the killing and stated his sympathy for Kirk’s family.

Then, on air last Monday, Kimmel said: “We hit some new lows over the weekend with the MAGA gang desperately trying to characterize this kid who murdered Charlie Kirk as anything other than one of them, and doing everything they can to score political points from it.”

He then joked about Donald Trump’s response to questions from reporters who asked him about Kirk’s death and how he was coping, which was to boast about his project to build a new White House ballroom.

“Yes, he’s at the fourth stage of grief: construction,” Kimmel said. “Demolition, construction. This is not how an adult grieves the murder of someone he called a friend. This is how a 4-year-old mourns a goldfish.”

Kimmel was suspended indefinitely after Federal Communications Commission chair Brendan Carr discussed his remarks and rising rightwing anger about them on a far-right podcast, suggesting Kimmel’s employers could “do this the easy way or the hard way.”

It also emerged that two companies that control TV networks that carry ABC content, Nexstar and Tegna, were close to a merger and that Nexstar wanted action against Kimmel.

Kimmel had also long been a target of Trump. In July, the president celebrated CBS’s cancellation of Stephen Colbert’s late-night show by saying Kimmel would be next.

Republicans who spoke to Raw Story at the Capitol as the drama unfolded had zero sympathy for Kimmel.

Some also hit out at media coverage of the affair, particularly charges that Trump and his administration were attacking free speech rights under the first amendment to the U.S. Constitution.

Another South Carolina far-right firebrand, Rep. Nancy Mace, told Raw Story: “It wasn't the FCC or Trump, it was ABC themselves” who chose to suspend Kimmel.

“So it's just a media lie to say Trump did this, or that the FCC did this. They didn't. ABC News made the call themselves. Trump didn't call them, the FCC didn't call them. So they did it on their own because of the blowback. It's a free market.”

Kimmel’s suspension was not ordered by ABC News but by Disney, parent company of all ABC divisions.

Legal observers agree that private companies can fire people over speech. Many, however, say a president cannot lean on companies to fire individuals on such grounds.

The issue may now be moot — or at least will remain so until Kimmel next crosses Trump and his supporters. On Monday, Disney said Kimmel would return Tuesday night.

“Last Wednesday, we made the decision to suspend production on the show to avoid further inflaming a tense situation at an emotional moment for our country,” a statement said.

“It is a decision we made because we felt some of the comments were ill-timed and thus insensitive. We have spent the last days having thoughtful conversations with Jimmy, and after those conversations, we reached the decision to return the show on Tuesday.”

‘Payback for cancel culture’

Needless to say, Democrats see the affair differently to Norman, Mace and their allies.

“You can't even say a good joke in public anymore,” Rep. Lou Correa (D-CA) laughed ruefully, before predicting: “Based on what I've seen so far, you’ll probably have more attempts at censorship.”

Correa was under no doubt as to who was really responsible for Kimmel’s suspension.

“He [Trump] essentially controls the FCC, controls Congress, controls the Senate, very strong influence on the Supreme Court,” Correa said.

Rep. Joaquin Castro (D-Tex) said the president was guilty of “an abuse of power,” adding: “Without the pressure of Donald Trump and the federal government, I doubt Disney or Nexstar would have done what they did.

“Nexstar has a multi-billion-dollar merger pending. That very much played into their decision.”

Like Correa, who wondered “if the voters speak loudly next year” on free speech, Castro signaled Democrats will look to use Kimmel’s suspension on the campaign trail, going into the crucial midterms next year.

“Donald Trump is spending way too much time looking after late-night comedians and not enough time working on improving the economy for the American people,” Castro said.

To Rep. Joe Courtney (D-CT), Kimmel’s plight was in large part an instance of Republican “payback for all the cancel culture” – instances of public figures being called out, mostly by liberals and progressives, for remarks deemed inappropriate or offensive.

But, Courtney said, “This is different because it's the arm of the government that's now involved, and that’s different than having, you know, people tweet at you and complain about nasty things you said.

“Having the government weighing in … obviously … that puts this in a much different place.”