Leavitt Goes on Wild Rant When Asked About Trump Cutting Off SNAP

White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt blamed Democrats and “an unhinged judge” Wednesday while making excuses for President Donald Trump’s concerted efforts to get out of paying SNAP benefits.

During a press briefing, one reporter asked Leavitt to make sense of her claim that the Democrats were to blame for SNAP recipients missing their benefits in November. The Trump administration has taken multiple steps to block a judge’s order that would require the government to disburse the full funding.

“So recipients missed their SNAP benefits because the Democrats shut the government down, and they forced the administration to tap into a contingency fund that did not even fund the full entirety of this program,” Leavitt said. “So then you had an unhinged judge who was trying to dictate from the bench what the executive branch has to pay for and where that money has to come from. That is judicial overreach at its finest, and so that’s why the administration pushed back on that.

“We can’t have the judicial branch telling the executive branch that we need to rob the children nutrition fund, which is what this judge was trying to do, to pay for SNAP benefits. That’s completely inappropriate and it’s unconstitutional,” Leavitt said. “And we’ve been proven right with that argument.”

This certainly isn’t the first time Leavitt has railed against a federal judge who ruled against Trump. And in reality, the Trump administration has gone out of its way to avoid funding SNAP benefits.

Earlier this month, the Trump administration started pushing the unprecedented claim that it couldn’t legally use the Department of Agriculture’s contingency funds to pay for SNAP benefits during a shutdown. The agency has claimed the fund only contains around $4.65 billion, or about half of what is required for November benefits, and the government has maintained that taking from it would siphon funds from other child nutrition programs. Meanwhile, Trump has managed to move money around to fund the military’s $5.3 billion payroll.

When federal judges ordered Trump to use the funds to pay at least some of the benefits, the president said it would be his “honor” to do so but later claimed that no one would see a penny until the government shutdown ended. His open expression of his “intent to defy” the judge’s order prompted District Chief Judge John J. McConnell Jr. to demand that Trump pay SNAP benefits in full.

Earlier this week, the Department of Justice asked the Supreme Court to step in to block McConnell’s order. On Tuesday, Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson signed an order extending her temporary stay on McConnell’s request, as the Senate has approved a measure that would resume appropriations and reopen the government.

Donald Trump is pleading with Republicans not to release the Epstein files.

The president called at least two of his congressional allies on Tuesday in an effort to get them to remove their names from a discharge petition that will force a vote on releasing details of the investigation into the pedophilic sex trafficker and his associates.

That included a “very early wakeup call” to Representative Lauren Boebert, and phone tag with Representative Nancy Mace, The New York Times’s Annie Karni reported Wednesday.

Trump has since met with Boebert, a White House official confirmed to CNN, though the meeting did not successfully sway her. Instead, the Colorado lawmaker “remains committed to keeping her name on the discharge petition,” according to Karni.

White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt failed Wednesday to address why Trump had probed MAGA acolytes on the vote, claiming instead that the president was displaying an incredible case of “transparency” by “briefing members of Congress whenever they please.”

“That’s a defining factor of transparency, having discussions with members of Congress about various issues,” Leavitt said.

For months, Boebert and Mace were two of just four Republicans that had penned their signatures on the discharge petition. They were joined by Representatives Thomas Massie and Marjorie Taylor Greene.

But earlier this month, concern swelled among Republican lawmakers that Trump’s relationship with Jeffrey Epstein was even cozier than previously understood: A few conservative representatives with ties to the FBI and the Justice Department spilled last week that the true details of the Epstein files are “worse” for Trump than previously reported.

Files released by House Democrats early Wednesday shed even more light on the Trump-Epstein connection, illustrating as late as 2011 that Epstein was grateful Trump had stayed quiet about abuse that had taken place at one of his residences. The “dog that hasn’t barked is Trump,” Epstein wrote to his longtime girlfriend and criminal associate, Ghislaine Maxwell, at the time.

When queried by Michael Wolff in 2019 about the extent of Trump’s knowledge of abductions of young girls, Epstein remarked: “Of course he knew about the girls he asked Ghislaine to stop.”

Representative-elect Adelita Grijalva, who won the special election in Arizona 50 days ago, has also vowed to sign the bipartisan petition, making her the last signature that the House needs to force a vote on the issue. Grijalva is scheduled to be sworn in on Wednesday, teeing up a vote on the Epstein files in the coming days.

In a desperate and misguided effort to exonerate Donald Trump, the White House is claiming that the trafficking victim mentioned in the Jeffrey Epstein emails released by House Democrats Wednesday is Virginia Giuffre.

One of the released emails, from Epstein to his accomplice Ghislaine Maxwell, stated that Trump spent “many hours at my house” with one of the victims, whose name was redacted in the Democrats’ release.

In response, Republicans on the House Oversight Committee posted on X that the redacted name was Virginia Giuffre, which was retweeted by the president’s “Rapid Response 47” account.

It’s telling that the Trump administration is confirming that the emails are accurate rather than issuing a blanket denial—and identifying a deceased Epstein victim, as well. Giuffre denied seeing Trump commit any wrongdoing prior to her death, so the president and his advisers probably think this lets him off the hook.

However, in another one of the emails, from Epstein to author Michael Wolff, he says point-blank that Trump “knew about the girls.” And what plausible, noncriminal explanation is there for Trump spending hours with Giuffre at Epstein’s house? Trump hasn’t personally said anything yet, but Maxwell has already been caught in a lie based on what she reportedly told Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche during their July interview.

Maxwell told Blanche that she didn’t “recall ever seeing [Trump] in [Epstein’s] house” at the time, which these emails have now proven false. With Democrats promising the release of more documents soon, will more lies be exposed, and how will Trump and the GOP try to spin them?

Emails obtained by the House Oversight Committee Democrats have shed new light on disgraced pedophile Jeffrey Epstein’s relationship with President Donald Trump. Now top Democrats are promising that more bombshells are on the way.

Ranking member of the House Oversight Committee Robert Garcia appeared on MSNBC Tuesday morning to detail his party’s plans after the release of the Epstein email exchanges, in which Epstein wrote that Trump “knew about the girls” and that one of Epstein’s victims “spent hours at my house with [Trump].”

“There’s a total of about 23,000 documents.… We obviously released some today, we’ll be releasing additional documents likely later today,” Garcia said. “The important thing here is that we know, and we’ve been demanding that Donald Trump and the DOJ release the full Epstein files.”

Garcia continued, “In what’s been released today—which obviously is quite serious—I think connections between what Donald Trump may have known; there’s communication between Jeffrey Epstein and Ghislaine Maxwell, obviously making some claims about Donald Trump spending significant time, hours, with possibly one of the victims. There’s also disturbing emails there about Trump and Jeffrey Epstein that people can read for themselves. What’s important right now is, we want to know why Donald Trump has spent the entire campaign saying that he would release the files, and now that he’s in the White House there is a massive cover-up going on. The survivors deserve the truth.”

Trump has yet to say anything about this massive new development, although it’s highly likely that an unhinged Truth Social rant is pending. His GOP lapdogs, however, have gone right into cover-up mode like Garcia said.

“Another publicity stunt by the Democrats. They’re trying to mislead people,” House Speaker Mike Johnson told Punchbowl’s Max Cohen. “I’ll refer you to the Oversight Committee’s response by the Republicans.”

The Oversight Committee Republicans, of course, have called the whole thing “clickbait.”

Can Portland, Oregon, sue Fox News for defamation?

A new report from ProPublica Wednesday found that for months preceding President Donald Trump’s federal takeover of Portland, Fox News manufactured raging riots fit for air—and one so convincing that it apparently prompted Trump to send federal forces to the Pacific Northwest.

ProPublica confirmed that Fox News claimed old footage from protests following the murder of George Floyd in 2020 had just been shot in Portland, while reporting on resistance to the Trump administration’s immigration crackdown.

On September 4, the day before Trump announced that he would send federal forces to Oregon, Fox News aired a segment about a protest outside an ICE detainment facility in June. But the network used multiple clips from July 2020 showing law enforcement clashing with protesters outside a federal courthouse.

The segment also included footage of a protester burning an American flag, which was originally posted to social media in July 2020. At the time of broadcast, none of this footage was labeled with the correct year, implying that it happened this year and in a completely different place. Two weeks later, Fox News added an editor’s note to its website clarifying that the report used footage from 2020 and 2025.

In another segment, a Fox News correspondent suggested that there was a link between the 2020 protests and the recent ones. “The protest chaos, which began with riots aimed at social justice in 2020, has severely damaged Portland’s reputation,” the correspondent said, over footage of fires being set in the streets in 2020.

Besides blatantly misattributing footage, Fox News spent months making mountains out of molehills and violent riots out of peaceful demonstrations, ProPublica reported.

The week of Trump’s announcement, Fox News chyrons warned of “violent demonstrators” and “war-like protests.” During a broadcast on September 2, Fox News showed footage of so-called “riots raging” the day before, but the video provided showed protesters just standing around on the street. An internal Portland police report stated that the protest had “little to no energy.”

Also on September 2, Lawrence B. Jones, a host on Fox & Friends, even claimed that protesters were attacking federal officers. In reality, the opposite was true, as federal officers moved in forcefully on protesters who in most cases have not received any criminal charges.

It seems that this coverage worked its way to Trump.

“What they’ve done to that place, it’s like living in hell,” Trump said on September 5, referring to something he saw on TV.

“I didn’t know that was still going on,” he said. “This has been going on for years.”