Republicans Not Too Worried Trump Wants to Fleece DOJ for Millions

President Trump is blatantly attempting to weasel his way into a $230 million payout from his own Justice Department. Unsurprisingly, the GOP couldn’t care less. 

“How comfortable are you with the president apparently seeking $230 million from the Department of Justice?” a reporter asked House Speaker Mike Johnson on Wednesday, a day after the news broke. Johnson, of course, reverted back to his favorite response: ignorance.

“I don’t know the details about that, I’ve just read it, I didn’t talk with him about that,” Johnson replied. “I know that he believes he’s owed that reimbursement. What I heard yesterday was if he receives it, he was gonna consider giving it to charity, he doesn’t need those proceeds.” 

How does Johnson know that Trump (known for being forced to shut down his own charity foundation after being caught using it for personal funds) might give the millions to charity if he just said seconds before that he didn’t know any details? 

“It’s absurd,” the speaker continued. “They attack him for everything he does.” He then quickly changed the subject to defend Trump’s bulldozing the White House’s East Wing to clear room for his upcoming ballroom.  

Trump is essentially demanding that the DOJ pay him hundreds of millions of dollars for investigating his 2016 campaign’s ties to Russia and his mishandling of classified documents after he left the presidency. This is an unprecedented, deeply questionable move. 

“What a travesty,” ethics professor Bennett L. Gershman, told The New York Times. “The ethical conflict is just so basic and fundamental, you don’t need a law professor to explain it.… And then to have people in the Justice Department decide whether his claim should be successful or not, and these are the people who serve him deciding whether he wins or loses. It’s bizarre and almost too outlandish to believe.”

This reimbursement, if successful, will likely have to be covered by the American taxpayer. 

At least one GOP member, Thom Tillis, had the courage to speak out.

“It’s terrible optics, particularly right now,” he told CNN’s Manu Raju. “We’re talking about a quarter of a billion dollars transferring, maybe to the president when we’re in a shutdown posture.” 

But the majority of Republicans seem to be staying quiet.

Zohran Mamdani’s preventative crime plan is so effective that criminals are fleeing New York City before he’s even mayor.

Disgraced ex–Long Island Representative George Santos revealed his plans to exit the Big Apple Tuesday, claiming that the New York Democratic mayoral candidate’s policies would make the city unsafe for him.

“Sadly it seems that my family and I will be departing the city I’ve called home my entire life. NYC will become a very dangerous place to live in if we elect mayor Mamdani and that is a risk I am unwilling to take now that I want to start growing my family,” Santos posted to X.

Of course, Santos was the danger. The reputed hustler was caught fabricating his entire résumé and lying about his relation to Holocaust survivors, his connection to the 2016 Orlando nightclub shooting, and the kidnapping of his niece, among many other things. He had victims across continents, having graduated from stealing wallets in Brazil to using political donations to his congressional campaign to bankroll his personal lifestyle—namely, his designer shoe addiction.

Santos pleaded guilty last year to wire fraud and aggravated identity theft, as well as credit card fraud and illegally receiving unemployment benefits. He was sentenced to seven years in prison—a detention commuted by President Donald Trump on Friday for no clear reason other than the prolific fraudster’s undying loyalty to the president.

“He lied like hell,” Trump said of his fellow Republican to Newsmax in August. “But he was 100 percent for Trump.”

Santos served just 84 days, while his victims described the presidential pardon as a knife to the gut.

But if the fabulist con man’s prior statements are to be believed, then Santos isn’t planning on staying stateside, either.

“Once I finish my obligations with the U.S. criminal justice system I will leave and never return,” Santos posted in May. “I rather take my chances in other countries than live in a country that has a weaponized justice system and is run by the industrial prison complex.”

But Santos may have another reason for trying to get as far from New York as possible: Although Trump commuted Santos’s sentence for federal crimes, his move does nothing about state-level charges. Nassau County District Attorney Anne T. Donnelly released a statement Tuesday regarding Santos’s newfound freedom.

“While the office cannot comment on ongoing investigations, suffice it to say that I remain focused on prosecuting political corruption wherever it exists regardless of political affiliation,” she said in the statement.

An Immigration and Customs Enforcement agent accidentally injured a deputy U.S. marshal while firing shots at a TikTok streamer known for documenting ICE raids.

The violent incident occurred during a traffic stop in South Los Angeles Tuesday, when agents attempted to detain Carlitos Ricardo Parias, known as Richard LA, who had previously received recognition for his work as a citizen journalist documenting ICE operations.

In a statement, Department of Homeland Security Assistant Secretary Tricia McLaughlin said the operation was “a targeted enforcement traffic stop,” and that the 44-year-old Mexican immigrant “had previously escaped from custody” and “attempted to evade arrest yet again.”

McLaughlin claimed that Parias was pulled over using “standard law enforcement procedure,” but acting U.S. Attorney Bill Essayli said that agents had “boxed him in,” which is not considered standard procedure for a traffic stop.

According to the affidavit, Parias ignored commands to exit his vehicle, hitting two law enforcement vehicles before “accelerating aggressively” with his car.

The affidavit claimed that the spinning wheels of Parias’s Toyota Camry produced smoke and debris, and Essayli shared an image of the arrest on X that showed a plume of white smoke beside the car. However, an eyewitness claimed that officers had fired tear gas during the arrest, which could also explain the cloud of smoke.

McLaughlin claimed that officers “followed their training and fired defensive shots” when Parias “weaponized his vehicle and began ramming the law enforcement vehicle in an attempt to flee.”

CNN reported that an ICE officer confronted Parias and used his weapon to smash Parias’s window, according to a law enforcement source who spoke to the outlet. Authorities believe the agent’s weapon fired while he was attempting to grab Parias, striking Parias and a deputy marshal. McLaughlin made no mention of this interaction in her statement.

Parias was struck in the elbow, and a ricocheted bullet hit one deputy marshal in the hand. Both are expected to recover.

Parias has been charged with assault of a federal officer. His lawyer Carlos Jurado told CNN affiliate KCAL/KCBS that his client was “a very pacifist man. He’s very calm. A lot of the police officers here know him. They know that he’s very respectful.”

This is not the first time ICE has opened fire during an attempted arrest. Earlier this month, a Border Patrol agent in Chicago shot a woman five times during a traffic stop. DHS claimed that the woman had attempted to ram law enforcement vehicles, but her lawyer claimed it was the other way around.

Republican Representative Brandon Gill threw a fit over a clip posted on X of journalist Mehdi Hasan pointing out America’s freedom of religion clause applies to all religions—and then doubled down on his own bigotry.

On Tuesday afternoon, Gill quoted a post from far-right account End Wokeness showing a video clip of Hasan pointing out that American Muslims have a right to play their call to prayer from mosque loudspeakers, just like Christians do to ring church bells. The Texas representative then accused Muslims of moving to the U.S. “en masse” to “fundamentally transform the landscape of American public life.”

Hasan responded by pointing out that Gill’s xenophobia doesn’t seem to extend to his own wife, the daughter of Indian immigrant and right-wing writer Dinesh D’Souza. Gill didn’t take kindly to that, making it clear that he is prejudiced against Muslims. Hasan seems to have gotten the last word, though.

Gill has a long history of bigotry and Islamophobia. In February, he called for his Muslim congressional colleague, Representative Ilhan Omar, to be deported, falsely claiming that she told undocumented immigrants how to break the law. He also joined fellow conservatives’ hysteria over a video clip of New York City mayoral candidate Zohran Mamdani, also a Muslim, eating with his hands.

Freedom of religion is explicitly granted in the First Amendment of the Constitution, so perhaps Gill needs a lesson on actual American values. His congressional district in the Dallas-Fort Worth suburbs includes at least one mosque, the Islamic Society of Denton. Maybe he ought to show more respect to religious diversity in the U.S. and his own backyard, if only for political reasons.

Republican rage over Jack Smith’s investigation was apparently all for naught.

Conservative lawmakers accused the former special prosecutor earlier this month of spying on them during his investigation of Donald Trump by tapping their phone lines and monitoring their phone calls. Iowa Senator Chuck Grassley dubbed the right-wing scandal “worse than Watergate.”

But none of those allegations have held up, especially not in light of a letter Smith’s legal team issued Tuesday that reveals just how legal—and common—the log request was.

“Although you have not reached out to us to discuss this matter, we are compelled to correct inaccurate assertions made by you and others concerning the issuance of a grand jury subpoena for the toll records of eight Senators and one Member of the House of Representatives,” attorneys Lanny Breuer and Peter Koski wrote.

“It is well established that obtaining telephone toll records pursuant to a subpoena is a routine and lawful investigative step that does not violate an individual’s expectation of privacy,” they continued, underscoring that phone toll records don’t contain the content of the calls—only the incoming and outgoing phone numbers, as well as the calls’ duration.

The practice was so ordinary, per Smith’s team, that another special counsel investigator requested the same information during his investigation of President Joe Biden.

“Indeed, Special Counsel Robert Hur subpoenaed toll records in his investigation of President Biden,” the letter reads.

“During the current Trump administration, the Department of Justice has routinely relied upon subpoenaed toll records in numerous criminal prosecutions. During Trump’s first term, the Justice Department purportedly obtained communications records of two Democratic Members of Congress—Rep. Eric Swalwell and then-Rep. Adam Schiff—and forty-three congressional staffers in connection with an investigation into media leaks. More recently, the Department of Justice used toll records in the prosecution of Senator Menendez,” Breuer and Koski continued.

Smith conducted two parallel investigations into Trump, both of which resulted in indictments. They centered on allegations that Trump mishandled and retained classified records after the end of his first presidential term, and his alleged efforts to subvert the 2020 presidential election. Trump pleaded not guilty on all charges before the charges were dropped altogether after the 2024 election due to Justice Department policy that prevents the prosecution of a sitting president.

Senior Trump officials have since deemed Smith an enemy of the administration, arguing that his investigation was tantamount to the political weaponization of the Justice Department.

In a historic turn of events revealed Tuesday, Trump has apparently demanded reparations for the legal comeuppance, expecting the DOJ to pay him millions because the agency investigated him.