Matthew Chapman

President Donald Trump has repeatedly and publicly demanded to be given a Nobel Peace Prize — and the government of Norway is starting to prepare for the risk he could exact revenge on their country if it doesn't happen.

According to The Guardian, "The Norwegian Nobel Committee pointedly said on Thursday that it had reached a decision about who would be named 2025 peace prize laureate on Monday," which would mean they did not take into consideration the ceasefire agreement from Israel and Hamas that, while still in tentative preliminary phases, Trump had a hand in brokering.

While Trump did also have varying degrees of involvement in other peace agreements around the world, often highly exaggerating his role in them, it is widely expected that the committee will not choose Trump, and that has politicians in Norway scrambling to plan for what he might do.

“Donald Trump is taking the US in an extreme direction, attacking freedom of speech, having masked secret police kidnapping people in broad daylight and cracking down on institutions and the courts. When the president is this volatile and authoritarian, of course we have to be prepared for anything,” said Kirsti Bergstø, who heads up the Socialist Left Party of Norway, a minor party in a power agreement with the Labor government. “The Nobel Committee is an independent body and the Norwegian government has no involvement in determining the prizes. But I’m not sure Trump knows that. We have to be prepared for anything from him.”

Among the risks newspaper columnist Harald Stranghelle warns Norway to prepare for is that Trump imposes new punitive tariffs on Norway, demands more contributions to the NATO defense budget, or even declares Norway to be an enemy of the United States.

“While [Trump] clearly deserves credit for his efforts to end the war in Gaza, it is still too early to tell whether the peace proposal will be implemented and lead to lasting peace,” Nina Græger of the Peace Research Institute Oslo told The Guardian, saying the most likely recipients of the Peace Prize this year are either Sudan’s Emergency Response Rooms, the Committee to Protect Journalists, or the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom.

Former federal prosecutor Elie Honig had much to say on CNN Thursday evening about President Donald Trump's latest loss in court over his use of the military to keep order in U.S. cities.

A federal district judge in Illinois, April Perry, put Trump's plans to send the National Guard to Chicago — long threatened as he has escalated his rhetoric against America's third-largest city — on hold for two weeks. And she did so while tearing into Trump's reasoning for the planned deployment in the first place.

"Not only did the judge say that that she didn't see a credible evidence of rebellion, she also said the Homeland Security Department's perception of events are unreliable, which is incredibly damaging," said anchor Anderson Cooper.

"Yeah, that's a stinging rebuke right there," agreed Honig, who frequently offers insight into Trump's legal controversies.

"So what this judge did is really dig in over the last several days and gather facts," he continued. "And the judge said the president's claim that it was necessary to deploy these troops in order to protect federal assets and federal resources was simply untrue, unverified and questionable. And the judge gave as one example. She said, the largest protest that we've had involved, 200 protesters, and there were 100 local cops. So you have a 2-to-1 ratio there. No one got hurt, no one got injured. So this judge has put a pause on what the president has done now."

"I do have to say, Anderson, all of this that's happening in Oregon, California, here in Illinois, it's brand new," Honig added. "We have no history on this. We have no prior case law because no president has ever tried to use this emergency law in this way. So we're learning history as we go."

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Rep. Ro Khanna (D-CA) posted a video on Thursday evening that landed him in fierce controversy.

The video, shared to X, showed Ian Carroll, an independent journalist with a long history of antisemitic conspiracy theories, praising Khanna for not taking money from the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, or AIPAC.

"93 out of 100 U.S. senators are taking money from a group that represents a foreign government, and foreign interests, in order to operate our government on behalf of someone else. And they all work here in this building. This is Representative Ro Khanna from California, and he does not take AIPAC money according to the website Track AIPAC." The video then cuts to Khanna saying, "It's too much, I mean, all these super PACs are too much. I don't take a dime of PAC money, lobbyist money, since I've been in Congress."

Carroll, who has moderated a campaign event by now-Secretary of Health and Human Services Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and has gone on Joe Rogan's podcast, has previously claimed that “our country is controlled by an international criminal organization that grew out of the Jewish mob," and has claimed Holocaust denial is a false flag spread by Israel to discredit its critics.

Some commenters gave Khanna, a longtime progressive who has often carved out maverick views independent from his party, the benefit of the doubt that he didn't know this, but still criticized his poor judgment.

"This wasn’t your finest moment dude," wrote conservative analyst Jonah Goldberg.

"You just shared a Holocaust revisionist, conspiracy theorist, and a neo-Nazi, @RoKhanna. What are you even doing here?" wrote Nevada attorney and policy advocate Elliot Malin.

"I do not believe that Ro Khanna is an antisemite," wrote Last Word on Sports analyst and political commentator Yesh Ginsburg. "He is certainly the most reasonable progressive in Congress. This is an *excellent* example of how allowing unthinking anti-Israel sentiment to be a driving motivation makes it so easy to slip into antisemitism."

A librarian fired by county officials in Campbell County, Wyoming, for refusing to remove LGBTQ books from shelves got the last laugh with a $700,000 settlement.

According to The New York Times, "Terri Lesley, the former director of the Campbell County Public Library in Gillette, Wyo., filed a federal lawsuit in April for defamation and the violation of her civil rights against the county, its board of commissioners, the library board and individual members of both government boards. The lawsuit accused them of violating her First Amendment right to free speech, and of firing Ms. Lesley in a retaliatory and discriminatory way."

These kinds of battles are playing out all over the country, with Republican officials pushing for greater control over the content in libraries, and even sometimes private bookstores, with an eye for censoring LGBTQ content from younger people.

Lesley has been working in the public library system since 1996 and was director for over a decade.

The controversy initially began in June 2021, when the Gilette library highlighted LGBTQ themed books to honor Pride Month. Before long, activists filed challenges against 25 books, including Juno Dawson's “This Book is Gay,” Anna Fiske's “How Do You Make a Baby,” Nadya Okamoto's “Period Power,” Hannah Witton's “Doing It,” Corey Silverberg's “Sex is a Funny Word,” and Andrew Smiler's “Dating and Sex: A Guide for the 21st Century Teen Boy.”

Lesley fiercely resisted calls to remove the books or place them in the adult section, saying, “If you segregate these books, say, in the adult section, and you’re teenager, and you go to try to find something on a topic and that book isn’t there, you won’t discover it. That is a form of censorship.”

After months of disputes, the library board fired her — but despite Gillette being one of the most conservative areas of a state that backed President Donald Trump by almost 50 points, hundreds of people swarmed the library board meeting to support her.

“I don’t regret standing up for the First Amendment in any way,” Lesley said of the conclusion of her lawsuit in hindsight, “but it was kind of a brutal process to experience it, to have it be such a contentious issue, and for it to be across the country and be called things like a ‘pedophile’ or a ‘child groomer.’ Those things were all very hard to experience.”

New York Attorney General Letitia James put out a brief statement on X Thursday evening, after President Donald Trump's Justice Department secured a bank fraud indictment against her in a federal court in Northern Virginia.

"This is nothing more than a continuation of the president's desperate weaponization of our justice system. He is forcing federal law enforcement agencies to do his bidding, all because I did my job as the New York State Attorney General," said James, who has been a target of the president's wrath for years, further intensified after she secured a half-billion-dollar civil fraud judgment against his family business.

"These charges are baseless," she continued. "And the president's own public statements make clear that his only goal is political retribution at any cost. The president's actions are a grave violation of our constitutional order and have drawn sharp criticism from members of both parties. His decision to fire a United States attorney who refused to bring charges against me and replace them with someone who is blindly loyal not to the law, but to the president, is antithetical to the bedrock principles of our country."

"This is the time for leaders on both sides of the aisle to speak out against this blatant perversion of our system of justice," James said. "I stand strongly behind my office's litigation against the Trump Organization. We conducted a two-year investigation based on the facts and evidence, not politics. Judges have upheld the trial court's finding that Donald Trump, his company, and his two sons are liable for fraud."

"I'm a proud woman of faith, and I know that faith and fear cannot share the same space," she added. "And so today, I'm not fearful. I'm fearless. And as my faith teaches me, no weapon formed against me shall prosper. We will fight these baseless charges aggressively, and my office will continue to fiercely protect New Yorkers and their rights."

Following the indictment of New York Attorney General Letitia James, Washington Post investigative reporter Carol Leonnig flagged a curious anomaly about the grand jury process that was used by President Donald Trump's chosen prosecutor to secure the charge.

"A few minutes ago, we confirmed that she was indicted by a grand jury in Alexandria on at least one count of bank fraud, Nicole," said Leonnig. "And the return was rather speedy. Four o'clock was when the grand jury was supposed to come back out and present their information to [acting U.S. Attorney Lindsey] Halligan. There was a four person in, in the courtroom, along with Halligan, and they released their decision."

"I will tell you, there's one other really interesting element to this that I'm hearing from sources, which is that this grand jury made its decision and listened to the presentation on its very first day in the box," she continued. "In other words, grand juries sit sometimes for weeks and weeks. This grand jury was impaneled today, and this was their first case and their first decision."

Already, the indictment process, which follows months of politically-charged attacks by Trump on James, has been panned by legal experts as lacking any apparent merit.

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New York Attorney General Letitia James has been indicted by a federal grand jury, as part of President Donald Trump's push to bring legal charges against his political opponents, CNN reported on Thursday.

This follows charges being brought against former FBI Director James Comey under similar circumstances, with Trump having to oust the U.S. Attorney for the Eastern District of Virginia and replace him with his former defense lawyer to bring that case.

Sam Levine of The Guardian reported that the grand jury indicted James on a count of bank fraud, citing a person familiar with the matter.

This follows a monthslong effort by Trump loyalists, led by Federal Housing Finance Agency director Bill Pulte, to investigate James on allegations that she lied on mortgage documents to obtain improper benefits from lenders.

James has denied any wrongdoing, and experts have noted that she, in fact, disclosed to mortgage lenders that a property listed in one document as a "primary residence" was not a primary residence and was intended for her niece, making it likely that the document was an error and not an attempt to defraud.

James, as the top law enforcement official of New York State, famously won a half-billion-dollar civil fraud judgment against Trump's business for systematically undervaluing their properties and keeping two sets of books to cheat lenders and tax agencies. That judgment is currently being litigated in state court.

President Donald Trump casually suggested that Spain should be thrown out of the NATO alliance while speaking with the President of Finland at the White House on Thursday.

The remark came while Trump was boasting about how he made most other NATO member states commit to paying 5 percent of their gross domestic product on defense, with Spain being an exception.

"I requested that they pay 5 percent, not 2 percent," said Trump. "And most people thought that was not going to happen, and it happened virtually unanimously. We had one laggard. It was Spain. Spain, you have to call them and find why are they a laggard. And they're doing well too, you know, I think, because of the things we've done. They're doing fine."

"They have no excuse not to do this, but that's all right. Maybe you should throw them out of NATO, frankly," he added.

Trump has long been obsessed with the idea that the 5 percent contribution to defense is a "fee" for membership in NATO that various states have been skipping out on, leaving the United States to pick up the tab.

The United States contributes a larger share of funds to defense than any other NATO member state, and is the only state to ever invoke Article V protection where other states come to its aid, which happened in the wake of the Sept. 11 attacks.

Finland is one of the newest member states of NATO, having joined alongside Sweden in response to Russia's invasion of Ukraine.

A notorious far-right youth organization is planning to host its own "Super Bowl halftime show" in protest of the real one being given to Puerto Rican singer/rapper Bad Bunny.

According to Axios, Turning Point USA's event "capitalizes on MAGA outrage over the NFL's selection," as Bad Bunny is critical of President Donald Trump and has skipped certain shows in response to Immigration and Customs Enforcement raids. In addition to uproar from Trump voters, Republican lawmakers have jumped in to complain as well, with Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA) calling the performer "demonic" and complaining that the performance will be in Spanish.

More broadly, the territory of Puerto Rico's status has been a decades-long debate, and while a number of people in both parties have advocated for statehood, Trump and his supporters have often disparaged the island, with a comedian at Trump's Madison Square Garden campaign event last year referring to it as a "floating island of garbage."

For the Turning Point USA "All American Halftime Show," which is advertised as a tribute to "faith, family and freedom" on February 8, a form has been launched online "for people to express interest in music genres, with one of the choices being 'anything in English.' The other options included Americana, classic rock, country, hip hop, pop and worship."

Turning Point USA is the brainchild of activist Charlie Kirk, the controversial youth organizer who was assassinated in September, kicking off a political firestorm across the country.

The group has long faced accusations of racism, and while it began as a mostly secular movement, it has more recently forged ties with Christian nationalism, an extremist movement that believes a generally right-wing interpretation of Biblical law should rule supreme over the U.S. government, culture, and national identity.

President Donald Trump's team of prosecutors in the case against former FBI Director James Comey is so slapdash that the line attorneys hastily recruited from another district don't even understand the details of it yet, legal expert Lisa Rubin told MSNBC's "The Weeknight" hosts on Wednesday evening.

Comey, a longtime target of Trump's wrath, is being charged with false statements and obstruction of justice, based on testimony he gave to the Senate years ago that the indictment doesn't even quote correctly. The case, which required Trump to force out the U.S. Attorney for Eastern Virginia and install one of his former defense lawyers in his place, has come under widespread criticism from experts for a variety of defects, and some speculate that Comey could have the whole thing thrown out before it even gets to trial.

Today's proceedings didn't make things look much better, said Rubin.

"I will tell you, being in the courtroom today felt like being in the upside-down," she said. "Why? Because sitting at the center of the defense table is a person who put away criminals and criminals for years and years and years."

"I just want to remind you and our viewers, Jim Comey's best known to us in recent memory as a former FBI director, right? But before then, he was a longtime federal prosecutor," Rubin said. "He was the U.S. attorney for the Southern District of New York. He was the deputy attorney general, a position now held by Todd Blanche, somewhat infamously, because we talk about Todd Blanche and Pam Bondi on this network all the time."

In fact, Rubin went on, "Jim Comey served for five years as the assistant U.S. attorney in charge of the Richmond office, of the very same office that's prosecuting him now, the office that couldn't find a single line assistant to either sign the indictment or show up in court today, which is why [acting U.S. Attorney] Lindsey Halligan, while she was there, was silent as two people she recruited from the Eastern District of North Carolina stood up in court today and said, essentially, we'll agree to the trial date that Jim Comey's lawyers want. Why? Because all we're trying to give the defendant all the time, he needs to prepare for trial. But also there's a substantial amount of discovery in this case, your honor, including classified materials."

"That's a very, very nice, thinly disguised way of saying, we're brand new to this and we got to get our arms around it, too, because guess what? We're not the ones who investigated this case. We're not the ones who charged this case," Rubin added. "And we got to learn what it is that we're supposed to do here by some point in January."

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A newly-revealed voice clip of Virginia Lt. Gov. Winsome Earle-Sears, currently running for governor, appears to depict her delivering a dark message to supporters of abortion rights.

The clip, posted to X on Wednesday by the liberal network Meidas Touch, came from a 2022 interview between Earle-Sears and John Reid, then a talk radio host. Reid is now himself the GOP's candidate for lieutenant governor, whose own campaign spent much of the summer in turmoil.

"Let's not talk about what's happening with Ukraine," said Earle-Sears in the clip. "When you are willing to kill a child up until the day that the baby could be born, go get thee a mirror and ask yourself if you're okay with this kind of thing. I don't care whether you're Libertarian, Democrat, Reform Party, Green. I don't care who you are. Murder is murder. And one day, it's going to be your turn."

The comment from Sears, who has been struggling to overcome a polling deficit against her Democratic rival, former Congresswoman Abigail Spanberger, was immediately promoted by the Virginia Democratic Party.

All of this comes amid a number of other last-minute shakeups in the Virginia elections, where early voting is already underway.

Earlier in the month, the race was also rocked by revelations that in 2022, Democratic attorney general nominee Jay Jones fantasized in private text messages about former Republican state House Speaker Todd Gilbert getting "two bullets to the head" — a comment for which he immediately issued an apology both to the public and to Gilbert's family.

Virginia is broadly seen by both parties as a critical testing ground for public anger against the Trump administration, as a Democratic-leaning but sometimes competitive state dominated by the suburbs of Washington, D.C., where Trump administration cuts and mass purges of the civil service have hit the community particularly hard.

The Trump administration is clashing with the Pentagon Press Association over rules they are demanding as a guarantee for journalistic access to the Department of Defense.

The rules, among other things, demand that reporters refrain from gathering any information they are not given explicit permission to access — effectively barring them from publishing anything they learn from leaks or anonymous whistleblowers. Failure to agree to the rules could bar reporters from receiving full press credentials to access the Pentagon.

The terms have been met with widespread protest, and the Pentagon Press Association is reportedly refusing to sign them. Sean Parnell, the chief spokesman for the agency, hit back on X with a lengthy post.

"The Department of War has engaged in good-faith negotiations with the Pentagon Press Association, maintaining open dialogue with its members and accepting many of their suggested edits," he wrote, using the unofficial name rebrand Trump declared by executive order earlier this year. "Even the New York Times has recognized the Department’s accommodating approach. Congress has made clear that unauthorized release of sensitive information by DOW personnel is a crime. Our policy is also clear: soliciting DOW service members and civilians to commit crimes is strictly prohibited."

He also disputed the idea that the new rules were a significant burden to reporters.

"Despite many statements to the contrary, journalists are not required to clear stories with us, they retain robust access to our public affairs offices, the briefing room, and the ability to ask questions, which we continue to answer thoroughly," Parnell continued. "They can also move freely throughout the building. In sensitive areas where they can’t, they’ll simply need an escort."

This explanation did not sit well with Washington Post correspondent Tara Copp, who had a ready response.

"@SeanParnellASW I never thought I’d need to remind an American public affairs official of the very thing we at the @PressClubDC remind governments like Myanmar: Journalism is not a crime," wrote Copp. "Your statement below — 'Beyond their displeasure at no longer being permitted to solicit criminal acts…' is irresponsible, false and dangerous."

Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA) has been increasingly critical of her own party, breaking with them at key moments and even chastising them this month for having no plan to extend health care subsidies for millions of people. It turns out there might be a personal grudge driving at least part of all this, reported NBC News on Wednesday.

"While Greene has been a solo operator in the past, her recent behavior has surprised even some people who are close to her," reported Melanie Zanona, Ryan Nobles, and Kyle Stewart. "She tried on the role of 'team player' for a while, especially when former Speaker Kevin McCarthy, R-Calif., was in charge. But she has grown increasingly disillusioned with politics and her own party, and she felt especially burned after the White House talked her out of running for the Senate, according to four Republican sources familiar with the matter."

This reporting comes as Greene, infamous for pushing QAnon-linked conspiracy theories about Jewish space lasers before her election, faces outrage from far-right activists, like Trump confidante Laura Loomer, over her recent unreliability in backing MAGA on certain issues.

Greene seriously entertained the idea of challenging Democratic Sen. Jon Ossoff, but President Donald Trump's inner circle dissuaded her from it with polling that showed she would lose catastrophically. Shortly after, she proclaimed she wouldn't be running because the Senate is too dysfunctional for her to make any difference there.

For her part, Greene vehemently denied that her recent voting pattern has anything to do with a vendetta over the Senate debacle, insisting that the choice not to run for Senate was hers and hers alone.

“I don’t want to serve in that institution. Look at them. They’re literally the reason why the government is shut down right now,” said Greene. “I think all good things go to die in the Senate, and I certainly don’t want to go there. But I think those are just attacks to try to marginalize me or try to sweep me off, so to speak. And I really don’t care.”

Vice President JD Vance is once again taking a trip to Indiana to push President Donald Trump's mid-decade redistricting pleas to a GOP-controlled state legislature that has been reluctant to follow through.

According to Politico, one source close to the process in the Hoosier State said "Indiana GOP Senate President Pro Tempore Rodric Bray 'has been doing nothing to help the effort along or encourage his members, but has been really sort of hiding behind them, and maybe even subtly or not so subtly pouring cold water on the idea so that he can say he doesn’t have the votes.'"

Vance visited Indiana earlier this year to talk with Gov. Mike Braun about redrawing the congressional map to add extra Republican seats. At that gathering, he faced boos from locals.

Braun appeared on board, and the GOP congressional delegation from Indiana broadly endorses the plan as well, with Sen. Jim Banks even suggesting it would be payback for the assassination of right-wing influencer Charlie Kirk.

Nonetheless, there is broader reluctance within the legislature that doesn't seem to have faded.

As the report noted, "The White House’s renewed pressure campaign comes as Republicans look to keep up their momentum in their national redistricting fight — building on new maps they passed in Texas and Missouri that could net them up to six House seats in next year’s pivotal midterms. Remapping Indiana’s congressional lines could help the GOP secure two more."

However, outside Ohio, where a mid-decade redistricting is legally required, their efforts in other states appear to be less successful, and could partially be offset by California Democrats' retaliatory vote for a map redraw of their own.

Rep. Lauren Boebert (R-CO) agreed with a far-right influencer that Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-MN) should be imprisoned or deported to Somalia, based in part on a conspiracy theory about her former marriage.

"I have heard from top sources at the Department of Homeland Security that there is demonstrable evidence of Ilhan Omar marrying her brother for U.S. citizenship," wrote Benny Johnson on X, posting a video of him speaking to Boebert. "I asked Rep. Lauren Boebert about this and she says Omar should be immediately investigated, thrown in jail, or deported back to Somalia not only for these allegations, but for defying the Congressional Code of Ethics: 'This is someone who should be investigated and I think she should be sitting in prison or at least sent back to Somalia.'"

Omar, one of the first Muslim women ever elected to Congress, came to the United States as a Somali refugee as a child.

Rumors that Omar's ex-husband Ahmed Nur Said Elmi is secretly her brother, and married her to illegally gain residency in the United States, have circulated since 2016 during her run for Minnesota state legislature, when a right-wing website briefly posted, then deleted, what was purported to be an Instagram screenshot that showed Elmi with Omar's children by a previous marriage, and calling them "nieces."

There is no evidence for the claim other than this now-deleted, unsubstantiated screenshot. Omar has categorically denied this, calling it "disgusting lies," and the theory also doesn't make a lot of sense because if Elmi really were Omar's brother, he could apply for a U.S. visa as Omar's brother, rather than as her husband.

Nevertheless, a number of right-wingers have circulated the claim, including President Donald Trump himself. Boebert, meanwhile, who is best known for running a gun-filled restaurant before being elected to Congress and being ejected from a "Beetlejuice" performance for groping her date in front of children, has repeatedly pushed religiously-motivated attacks on Omar, calling her part of the "Jihad Squad."