Sheinelle Jones and Jenna Bush Hager reveal how Nancy Guthrie’s abduction touched ‘Today’: ‘Bond we can’t even describe’
Source: New York Post · Bias: Right
Summary
"In any other matrix, it would've just been about us and the show," Sheinelle Jones said of launching a new show just before Savannah Guthrie's ordeal. "But we didn't have time for that."
Sheinelle Jones and Jenna Bush Hager reveal how Nancy Guthrie’s abduction touched ‘Today’: ‘Bond we can’t even describe’
Right
"In any other matrix, it would've just been about us and the show," Sheinelle Jones said of launching a new show just before Savannah Guthrie's ordeal. "But we didn't have time for that."
New York City's municipal bond prices continue to decline as Mayor Zohran Mamdani doubles down on his Marxist Third-Worldism, every minute of every day, it seems.
White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt's one-word answer was flagged Saturday as a clear sign of the damage Jeffrey Epstein has wreaked on MAGA.Asked whether President Donald Trump or his administration planned to intervene in the UK extradition case against Andrew and Tristan Tate, Leavitt replied flatly: "No." The i Paper columnist Sarah Baxter argued Saturday that the single syllable reveals how thoroughly Trump's ties to the late Jeffrey Epstein have depleted his political capital. The president, she wrote, can no longer afford to spend it defending a pair of accused sex abusers — despite them being major allies.Secretary of State Marco Rubio echoed the posture a day earlier from the Philippines. "There's no role for us to play at this moment or maybe ever in that regard," Rubio told reporters, according to Axios.The cold shoulder marks a striking reversal. In February 2025, the Financial Times reported that Trump officials pressured Romania to ease travel restrictions on the Tates, and days later the brothers boarded a private jet to Fort Lauderdale.The Tates, dual British-American citizens, were arrested by U.S. Marshals in Miami on July 18 after British prosecutors filed 38 new sex-crime charges, bringing their combined total to 59 counts. Andrew Tate faces 42 charges including rape, sex trafficking and offenses relating to indecent images of a child; Tristan Tate faces 17.Their lawyer, Joseph McBride, who previously represented January 6 defendants, has tried to press familiar buttons. He wrote on X that the brothers were being held as "political prisoners on American soil" in solitary confinement. Andrew Tate himself claimed he was locked in a unit next to "a cannibal who screams throughout the night."None of it has moved the administration.On Capitol Hill, Rep. Yassamin Ansari (D-AZ), a House Oversight Committee member, sent a letter to Chair James Comer this week requesting an investigation into "potential political interference" surrounding the Tates' case. Ansari also asked that Barron Trump be called to testify about any knowledge of the brothers' alleged crimes. A spokesperson for the Tates has previously called reports linking Barron to Andrew Tate fake news.
President Donald Trump has already made it clear he plans on rigging the 2026 midterm elections. From trying to implement a multitude of voter suppression measures (like purging voter roles, demanding voter ID, sending troops to the polls, seizing ballot boxes and interfering with mail-in voting) to refusing to give a whit about public opinion, Trump is obviously worried that if the American people have a say, they will put Democrats in control of one or both chambers of Congress.Yet he is not merely doing this to maintain his own personal hold on power. Trump is a man with a plan — the same plan, not coincidentally, that America’s rich and powerful have worked on for more than a century. To better understand this agenda, AlterNet had an in-depth interview with historian Thom Hartmann, whose new book Who Killed the American Dream?: The Greatest Political Crime Ever Told addresses these very topics. While he has plenty of rough words for Trump, Who Killed the American Dream? is far more than just another anti-MAGA book. In great detail, Hartmann lays out how the fascist plutocracy that Trump is trying to make into a literal dictatorship has its roots all the way back in the 19th century.This interview has been lightly edited for clarity and context.MATTHEW ROZSA: First, your book focuses on Santa Clara County v. Southern Pacific Railroad Company, and argues that from this case all the way through Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission, there has been an anti-democratic pattern of the Supreme Court acting like corporations have the same rights as people. Can you elaborate, in layperson's terms, why this jurisprudential assumption has been so toxic?THOM HARTMANN: Sure.For the first, basically, 100 years of the Republic, everybody understood that there were two kinds of persons: natural persons and artificial persons. Natural persons are you and me, human beings — we have protections in the Constitution, and we even have rights specified in the Constitution through the Bill of Rights and the 14th Amendment. Artificial persons were corporations and nonprofits and churches and other kinds of entities that were not human, but had to have some sort of personhood status in order to pay taxes, sign contracts, sue or be sued, open checking accounts, things like that. And that distinction was always quite clear. In 1886, the railroads tried to argue that they were being unfairly taxed between two different counties in California because the tax rates were different, and that this was not equal protection under the law, which is what the 14th Amendment says all persons are entitled to.The court did not rule in their favor, at least with regard to that argument in that case. But the clerk of the court and one of the Supreme Court justices conspired to assert that it had. And that assertion, which was in the headnote of the 1886 decision, kind of lay around like a hand grenade until it was picked up by Lewis Powell in 1978 with the Bellotti v. Baird decision, and then really set off with the Reagan Revolution — John Roberts, the Reagan Justice Department, and then the Supreme Court. I think Citizens United in 2010 is probably the most classic example of it. Now, to more directly answer your question: the reason a corporation can pour money into a politician or a political campaign to get a politician elected who will do their bidding is because the Supreme Court has since ruled that corporations have rights under the First Amendment, and those rights include the right to free speech.But because a corporation doesn't have a mouth, they did this workaround, saying, "Well, its money is the same thing as its mouth, so it can speak with its money." There's another example, under the Fourth Amendment. The Fourth Amendment says the government cannot invade your privacy unless somebody swears before a judge that there's reason to believe you committed a crime. Well, Dow Chemical was illegally venting benzene into the air over one of their chemical factories, and the EPA found out about it and flew an airplane over the factory to photograph it and use it as evidence to stop them. Dow Chemical sued and took it all the way to the Supreme Court, and the court ruled that under the Fourth Amendment, Dow Chemical has privacy rights. So now it's almost impossible for the federal government, or state governments for that matter, to do surprise inspections of factories and polluting facilities, et cetera.Corporations have also claimed rights under the Fifth Amendment, which says you cannot be forced to testify against yourself and that the government can't take your assets without due process of law — that they don't have to admit to crimes in court, they don't have to testify in ways that could hurt them, and that the government can't take their property if they commit crimes.
A letter from former special counsel Jack Smith's lawyers went public Friday, exposing Rep. Jim Jordan's (R-OH) criminal referral as a bad-faith attack on a "nonpartisan public servant."Covington attorneys Lanny Breuer and Peter Koski wrote the letter July 22 to Jordan and Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche, calling the referral "spurious."Legal journalist Roger Parloff posted a downloadable version Friday, calling it a "succinct demolition of Jim Jordan's bad-faith accusations."Jordan referred Smith to the Justice Department last week, claiming Smith made false statements during his December 2025 deposition before the House Judiciary Committee. Smith had testified that his team sought only toll records from lawmakers — call logs showing who called whom, with no message content.Jordan says Smith should have volunteered that his team separately obtained texts from 44 members of Congress through a National Archives request for White House phones. He referred Smith under the federal false-statements law.Smith's legal team carefully dissected Jordan's logic in the July 22 letter."During his testimony, Mr. Smith provided truthful, responsive answers and candidly discussed his work as Special Counsel," Breuer and Koski wrote. "Those answers are unimpeachably truthful. Notably, the referral letter does not contest the truthfulness of Mr. Smith's answers."Jordan's fallback, the letter said, was an "unprecedented theory" — that Smith committed perjury "not because of what he said, but because of what he did not say.""This dangerous theory of criminal liability has no limiting principle and risks ensnaring every witness who testifies before a congressional committee who does not proactively disclose information that is not responsive to a question asked," Breuer and Koski wrote.The D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals already rejected that theory, the letter noted, citing a ruling that held witnesses are not required to volunteer answers to questions they were never asked.Former federal prosecutors have repeatedly criticized the legal theory put forth by Jordan."This referral letter is an embarrassment," CBS News quoted former federal prosecutor Kyle Freeny as saying."If they have bad questions, they do not get the answers that they want. It's almost like deposition 101," Freeny added.Former prosecutor Gregory Rosen called the referral "legally untenable, if not ridiculous.""If Congress wanted different answers, they should have asked different questions," Rosen said.Jordan also argued the texts violated the Constitution's Speech or Debate Clause, which protects lawmakers' official acts from scrutiny. But the letter from Smith's lawyers dismantled that too, noting the messages were voluntarily sent by members of Congress to White House officials and did not involve any intrusion into legislative business.Blanche, Trump's former personal defense attorney in both of Smith's federal cases against him, would have received the congressional texts as part of that discovery process — yet never challenged their legality in court, the letter noted."If President Trump's attorneys thought that Mr. Smith and his team had done something unlawful or improper in obtaining these text messages, they could have filed a motion to that effect," Breuer and Koski wrote. "Notably, they did not.""President Trump has repeatedly ordered that Mr. Smith be prosecuted and jailed," Breuer and Koski wrote. "That is not the rule of law."
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention this week revealed that the measles rates so far this year have already exceeded figures from 2025, marking a 35-year high. The United States logged 2,318 measles cases in the first seven months of this year, up from the total of 2,289 last year, according to the CDC. The […]
