Vance Claims Everyone Is “Pearl Clutching” Over Racist GOP Group Chat

Vice President JD Vance late Tuesday decried “pearl clutching” over a Politico story unearthing a private group chat in which prominent members of Young Republicans chapters called Black people monkeys, spoke approvingly of rape and slavery, and wrote other odious remarks, such as “I love Hitler” and messages containing racial and homophobic slurs.

Opting for whataboutism, Vance highlighted unearthed messages by Jay Jones, a Democratic nominee for attorney general in Virginia, who recently apologized for leaked private messages from August 2022, in which he joked about shooting then-state House Speaker Speaker Todd Gilbert. Jones also said Gilbert would not take action on gun safety unless his children were endangered, writing, “Only when people feel pain personally do they move on policy.”

Vance posted a screenshot of the latter comment on X, with the caption: “This is far worse than anything said in a college group chat, and the guy who said it could become the AG of Virginia. I refuse to join the pearl clutching when powerful people call for political violence.”

For one, it’s not a matter of fact that Jones’s messages are worse than those of the Young Republicans, who spoke about having their political opponents raped and sent to gas chambers.

Vance is also trying to downplay the importance of the messages by claiming they were shared in a “college group chat.”

But Young Republicans groups include those between 18 and 40 years old, with members of the reported group chat well into adulthood. The man Politico identifies as “the most prominent voice in the chat spreading racist messages,” for instance, is 31. The members held notable positions in Republican politics, with several leading state affiliates of the GOP’s youth arm. Some worked in state politics, and at least one serves as a state senator.

Vance’s tweet exemplifies his time-tested willingness to excuse vitriol in his own ranks, embracing a “no-enemies-to-the-right” stance that is seemingly limitless.

Former Justice Department special counsel Jack Smith—who has been tormented by MAGA for years over his dual criminal investigations into President Trump for illegal possession of classified documents and his role in January 6—is pulling out receipts.

“One of the major differences between the [Biden and Trump] cases is the obstructive conduct in the case that I investigated.… To prove illegal possession of classified documents, you need to show that the defendant possesses the documents willfully. That means [Trump] knew what he was doing was wrong,” Smith said in a sit-down interview at the University College London Centre for Global Constitutional Democracy, made available Tuesday. “We had tons of evidence of willfulness.”

The case Smith is referring to, in which Trump was charged with keeping classified documents in Mar-a-Lago after leaving the White House, resulted in a 40-felony-count indictment against the president in 2023. The case was eventually dropped after Trump won the election in 2024.

“The government even tried to get them back before there was a criminal investigation, and then after the investigation started, [Trump] still [refused] to give them back, and then [tried] to obstruct the investigation,” Smith continued.

Even with this knowledge, it’s virtually impossible that Trump will receive any kind of consequence for these crimes, as he continues to harangue Smith—calling him a “sleazebag”—and anyone else who dared to investigate him, like New York Attorney General Letitia James and former FBI Director James Comey.

President Donald Trump’s administration forced out yet another U.S. attorney for not going along with their flimsy case, The New York Times reported.

Todd Gilbert, the U.S. attorney in the Western District of Virginia, was forced to resign in August after he refused to sideline a high-ranking prosecutor who said there wasn’t sufficient evidence of criminal misconduct during the FBI’s investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 election.

After being appointed in July, Gilbert was ordered to open a grand jury investigation into whether anyone at the FBI had criminally mishandled documents relating to the decade-old Russia investigation—still a sore spot for the grievance-addled president. When Gilbert told his superiors that the evidence he’d reviewed was flimsy, they blamed his deputy, Zachary Lee, for swaying Gilbert’s opinion with his decades of experience, people familiar with the matter told the Times in the Tuesday story.

DOJ officials viewed Lee, a veteran prosecutor, as a holdover from the Biden administration, even though he’d been hired during the Bush administration, the people added.

Gilbert was instructed to replace Lee with Robert Tracci, which he did, but his superiors still suspected he was consulting with Lee, people familiar told the Times. When his bosses pressed him to remove Lee, Gilbert refused—and was reportedly threatened with termination. So he resigned, posting an Anchorman meme on X to mark his departure.

“Well, that escalated quickly,” the meme said, with a photo of Gilbert being sworn in only a month before.

Now he has been replaced by Tracci.

In Virginia’s Eastern District, Trump recently installed his (apparently incompetent) former lawyer Lindsey Halligan to replace U.S. Attorney Eric Siebert, whom Trump officials had pressured to seek an indictment for mortgage fraud charges against New York Attorney General Letitia James. In doing so, Trump has also sidelined Maggie Cleary, who was briefly named acting head of the U.S. Court for the Eastern District of Virginia.

It’s been more than three weeks since Representative-elect Adelita Grijalva won the special election in Arizona, and the state has had enough of Congress’s delays.

Republican leadership has refused to swear in Grijalva until Congress returns to its regular session, breaking precedent set in April when party members swore in a pair of Florida Republicans during a pro forma session, the day after they won their special elections.

Arizona Attorney General Kris Mayes told CNN Tuesday that Speaker Mike Johnson had left Arizonans with one option to acquire their constitutionally mandated representation: taking him to court.

“I really think that we are going to have no other choice, Laura, except to take Speaker Johnson to court,” Mayes told host Laura Coates, emphasizing the recent flooding that has occurred in Grijalva’s district and her constituents’ need to access Congress.

Grijalva became the first Latina the Grand Canyon State has sent to Congress when she won an election to determine the replacement for her father, Raul Grijalva. She’s also the last signature that the House needs on a petition to force a vote on releasing government documents related to the investigation of deceased pedophilic sex-trafficker Jeffrey Epstein.

“If I have to, I’ll take him to court,” Mayes continued. “Again, there’s no legitimate reason for him to refuse to swear her in right now. No other reason that I can think of except that perhaps she is the final vote to discharge the Epstein files.

“And it’s not fair for Mike Johnson to be holding the state of Arizona hostage because he doesn’t want to release the Epstein files,” Mayes added.

Grijalva’s swearing in appears to be background noise for Republican House leadership, which is floundering to muster solutions to a gridlock over continuous funding for Donald Trump’s “big, beautiful” budget and its seismic cuts to Obamacare subsidies and Medicaid.

But there’s plenty of precedent for Grijalva to be sworn in, even in such complicated circumstances. For instance, the entire House was sworn in during a shutdown in 2019, during Trump’s first term.

Grijalva has already vowed to sign the bipartisan petition advancing the immediate release of the Epstein files. Just four Republicans have penned their signatures on the petition, demanding more transparency from the Trump administration regarding the investigation into Epstein and his potential associates. Those conservative lawmakers include Representatives Thomas Massie, Marjorie Taylor Greene, Nancy Mace, and Lauren Boebert.

Federal immigration enforcement agents allegedly interfered with—and even threatened to “shoot and arrest”—emergency personnel rescuing an injured protester last week in south Portland, as first reported Monday in Willamette Week.

Citing public dispatch records and two confidential internal reports filed by the ambulance workers, Willamette Week reported that agents blocked an ambulance on the evening of October 5 as it tried to exit an ICE facility with a protester who had suffered a collarbone injury.

Federal agents allegedly delayed the emergency workers operating the vehicle for several minutes, repeatedly requesting to ride in the ambulance to the hospital—even after having agreed, due to their lack of arrest paperwork, to simply follow along in their own vehicle instead.

After some delay, the driver began moving the vehicle toward the garage’s exit, when a plainclothes man with a partial face covering reportedly stepped in its path, urging the driver to stop so as not to hit a group of officers in riot gear standing about 15 feet away.

Eventually, seeing the group of officers line up in apparent “preparation for the gate to open so they could escort the ambulance” off, the driver reported having inched forward a bit further. But the delay stretched on, as federal agents stood “incredibly close” to the vehicle and behaved aggressively, the driver recounted. One of the crew members decided to get out to “calm and deescalate the situation,” they later wrote.

Deciding to join them, the driver, according to their report, put the emergency vehicle in park, which caused it to lurch forward slightly. An agent evidently interpreted the vehicle’s forward movement as deliberate, and is said to have begun threatening the driver.

The agent “pointed his finger at me in a threatening manner,” the driver recalled, “and began viciously yelling in my face, stating, ‘DON’T YOU EVER DO THAT AGAIN, I WILL SHOOT YOU, I WILL ARREST YOU RIGHT NOW.’”

“I was still in such shock,” the driver said, “that they were not only accusing me of such a thing, but crowding and cornering me in the seat, pointing and screaming at me, threatening to shoot and arrest me, and not allowing the ambulance to leave the scene. This was no longer a safe scene, and in that moment, I realized that the scene had not actually been safe the entire time that they were blocking us from exiting, and that we were essentially trapped.”

After the driver’s crew member explained the situation—that the vehicle had not been driven forward, but rolled slightly as it was being parked—another agent replied “that this was not the first time this had happened,” wrote Willamette Week.