Anthony Mantha made his career year count. The 31-year-old forward signed a two-year, $9.5 million contract with the Devils, the team announced on Wednesday. The forward will make $5.4 million next season and $4.1 million in 2027-28 with an average annual value of $4.75 million. Pittsburgh Penguins’ Anthony Mantha (39) moves the puck against the...
Sen. Bill Cassidy (R-La.), chair of the Senate Health Committee, grew angry with President Trump’s nominee to lead the Administration for Strategic Preparedness and Response (ASPR) during his confirmation hearing on Wednesday over a misleading social media post about the hepatitis B vaccine. Sean Kaufman, Trump’s nominee to lead ASPR, appeared before the Senate Committee…
US forces hit Iran early this morning for the fifth consecutive day since the memorandum of understanding and ceasefire collapsed last week. The strikes began at 6 am ET and are meant to "further degrade military capabilities Iranian forces have used to attack commercial shipping in the Strait of Hormuz," CENTCOM said.
The post (VIDEO) US Central Command Announces Morning Round of Strikes in Iran, Two Vessels Intercepted in Naval Blockade appeared first on The Gateway Pundit.
Move comes after Trump rebuked his own homeland security department and insisted ICE maintain policyThe White House overturned a one-day old homeland security department (DHS) memo that said they would be halting traffic stops in the wake of recent stops that left two men killed in the space of a week on Wednesday morning, hours after Donald Trump insisted ICE keep making them.Federal officers across the US had been told to temporarily stop pulling drivers over on Tuesday. That directive came after ICE agents fatally shot Lorenzo Salgado Araujo in Houston on 7 July and Joan Sebastián Durán Guerrero in Maine on Monday. Both men were unarmed, neither was the intended target of the operation that killed him, and in both cases the agents involved wore no body camera to record what happened. Continue reading...
President Donald Trump's reaction to the death of Sen. Lindsey Graham has exposed a lot about how his mind operates, including his cynical use of conspiracy theories that forward his plans over all others, per a new analysis from MS NOW.In the wake of the South Carolina Republican's abrupt passing, many eyebrows were raised by a statement from FBI Director Kash Patel that the bureau would be assisting local officials in investigating the case. This led many to speculate about why such high-level law enforcement would even be necessary for a case where, as far as anyone could tell, an elderly man died from a heart issue. In turn, this also led to conspiracy theories about there being more to Graham's death, including the possibility that he was poisoned by Russia during his recent Ukraine trip.Trump, meanwhile, seemed uninterested in all of that when pressed about the FBI's involvement during an Oval Office meeting, calling it a "waste of their time.""I don't know why because I think he had a problem," Trump said. "I don't see a lot of evil there. I know there's all sorts of conspiracy theories going around. I think the FBI is wasting their time."Writing about the remark for MS NOW on Wednesday, longtime producer and contributor Steve Benen suggested that the president's comment would soon lead the FBI to abandon its involvement in the Graham case, and also called out the irony of Trump wanting the bureau to stay focused on his preferred conspiracy theories."If recent history is any guide, the president’s comments are likely to cause the Trump loyalist [Patel] to reverse course and abandon the bureau’s involvement," Benen wrote. "What Trump did not say, however, is that he wants the FBI to continue to waste its time on his own conspiracy theories, which are unrelated to Graham’s death."Benen included a link to another MS NOW piece from earlier this month, digging into the ways in which Trump's long-debunked conspiracy theories about the 2020 election being stolen from him have permeated his second term."A willingness to entertain or outright embrace 2020-style election fraud conspiracy theories has become a litmus test for entry into the Trump administration’s upper ranks — and once there, is just as often the surest way to survive," the report detailed. "When an official’s standing starts to slip — a bad news cycle, a sidelining, a looming firing, a confirmation fight — one of the few levers left is to be seen vindicating the president’s conviction that American elections are being stolen whenever he or his party lose."
On Tuesday, a federal judge issued a ruling on President Donald Trump’s controversial IRS “slush fund” settlement that attorney and legal analyst Jay Kuo calls a “masterclass in legal analysis and logic.” As a result, Trump’s effort to reward his loyalists has been seriously hindered. According to Kuo, “U.S. District Judge Kathleen M. Williams, an Obama appointee sitting in Miami, handed down a 56-page order in Trump v. Internal Revenue Service, voiding the ‘settlement’ between President Trump and his own Justice Department and referring two of his lawyers for possible discipline. The fact pattern she tackled — a sitting president suing an agency he controls, then ‘settling’ with himself to secure a windfall benefiting his political allies — was straight out of a law professor’s box of exam tricks. But it was no match for Judge Williams. She not only dismantled the government’s claims, but also identified new novel concerns.”Kuo says that it was clear where the decision was headed when the judge wrote in its first pages that she declined to accept “the credulous exercise of divorcing President Trump’s current job title from an understanding of what happened here.” In other words, she was making clear the “conflict of interest” that arose from the president overseeing settlements with himself. Furthermore, the legal precedent had already been set that courts “do not engage in the academic pastime of rendering judgments in favor of persons against themselves.” In other words, Trump can’t be on “both sides of his own case,” which was precisely what Judge Williams found, concluding that the “Lead Plaintiff and the Government are one, a fully realized unitary interest,” and that it was “risible” to suggest “that there was ever adverseness between the Parties.” So essentially, notes Kuo, the judge was agreeing with Trump’s own assessment offered months ago when he declared, “I’m suing myself.” It turns out that’s illegal. What’s more, Trump’s attorneys had already argued successfully to the Supreme Court that no one in the Executive Branch can be legally “adverse” to the Chief Executive. But now they were arguing the opposite: that the IRS and Treasury were “independent adversaries” of Trump. The judge noted this contradiction. At this point, says Kuo, the case was essentially over, but the judge went on to support her opinion with a number of other factors. For example, Attorney General Todd Blanche had ordered that the IRS be barred from auditing Trump, but federal statute expressly makes it a crime “for any ‘applicable person,’ including the president and specified White House officials, to ‘request, directly or indirectly’ that the IRS start or stop an audit of a specific taxpayer. Williams wrote that the audit-immunity provision ‘directly contravenes’ the statute.” She also raised questions as to whether Trump was following constitutional requirements that he “faithfully execute” the laws rather than suspend them for his own benefit. Then there was the constitutional question of “emoluments” beyond the president’s fixed salary, and the judge suggested Trump’s settlement may qualify as illegal compensation. Beyond that she cited a number of ethics codes, but according to Kuo, the whole opinion can be boiled down to five “uncontroverted facts: 1. Donald Trump is President. 2. President Trump controls the actions of the Secretary of the Treasury Department, the IRS Commissioner and all Executive Branch actors. 3. President Trump, through Executive Order 14215, also controls the litigation strategy and interpretation of the laws guiding the Department of Justice. 4. For the 109 days that this case was pending, no attorney representing the United States filed a notice of appearance or any document indicating the government’s position, interest or awareness of the matter. 5. Defendants’ actions are consonant with the dictates of Executive Order 14215.”“Because there was never a proper case before the Court,” she therefore concluded, “there was nothing to settle.” She ended her opinion by quoting John Adams, noting, “facts are stubborn things.” Whatever the parties wished, whatever they’d already agreed among themselves before ever walking into a courtroom, she wrote, they “cannot alter the state of the facts or evade the rule of law.”
