Explosive Testimony Exposes How Far Border Patrol Chief Will Go to Lie

Border Protection Commander Gregory Bovino made several wild attempts to dodge questions while testifying about his excessive use of force against protesters in Chicago.

In a 223-page injunction ruling last week, U.S. District Judge Sara Ellis slammed Bovino over his “evasive” testimony, claiming that he’d only responded to questions with “cute” answers or by “outright lying.” A look at the transcript of Bovino’s testimony, newly released on Monday, revealed just how bad things got during his deposition.

While discussing a video of him deploying chemical irritants on protesters in the Little Village neighborhood—which he admitted to having lied about—Bovino played dumb and became combative.

“Is C.S. gas commonly known as tear gas?” asked the interviewer.

“I don’t know, I—I don’t refer to it that way,” Bovino replied, though C.S. gas is one of the most commonly used tear gases in the world.

When asked whether he would admit to throwing a canister of tear gas on that particular day, in that particular location, Bovino said he would deny it.

“You said canister—I threw two. That’s plural,” Bovino replied. As the interviewer attempted to rephrase the question, Bovino continued to argue over the semantics.

Bovino had also previously claimed he had been hit in the head by a rock before deploying chemical irritants, but in his deposition said he’d been “mistaken.”

“The white rock was thrown at me, but that was after I deployed less lethal means in chemical munitions. I was mixed up with several other objects in a very chaotic environment. And I confused that white rock with other objects that were thrown at me,” he said.

Bovino repeatedly played dumb when asked about potential misconduct committed by federal agents under his command during “Operation Midway Blitz.”

When asked about the details of a video of the ICE processing center in Broadview, a suburb of Chicago, that he said he’d watched in preparation for the deposition, Bovino said: “I can’t recall the details of that video that I looked at.”

When further pressed, he confirmed that “there were figures in the video,” before again saying, “I can’t remember.”

Later, when the interviewer asked whether Bovino was “responsible for ensuring that [CBP agents] complied with the law,” the CBP chief replied, “I’m responsible for them to do what now?”

When asked about an incident where agents deployed tear gas in Irving Park as parents and children departed their homes for a Halloween parade, Bovino claimed that the actions of agents “were justified if that happened.” But he maintained that he did not review any video of the incident, speak with any agents involved, or recall reading any reports on the incident.

Republican Senator Jim Justice and his wife didn’t pay his taxes, and now have to pay the IRS $5 million. 

On Monday, the Justice Department filed a lawsuit against Justice and his wife, Cathy, seeking  $5,164,739.75 in unpaid federal income taxes as of August. The debt goes all the way back to 2009, and includes accrued interest and penalties. So Justice and his wife cut a deal to pay back the IRS.

Justice served two terms as West Virginia’s governor, being elected as a Democrat in 2016 before switching parties the next year. After serving two terms, he was elected U.S. senator for West Virginia in 2024. He made hundreds of millions of dollars in profits from the sale of coal mines in 2009, vaulting him to the Forbes list of billionaires, which he stayed on until 2021. 

But during that time, Justice was racking up debt in the form of personally guaranteed bank loans, court judgments, and environmental liabilities. In 2016, The Washington Post reported that he had unpaid bills and fines to coal regulators and suppliers, and by January of this year, Forbes magazine reported that his liabilities had exceeded his assets. 

Last month, the IRS filed a tax lien against Justice and his wife, saying they owed more than $8 million. Justice claimed at the time that the charges were politically motivated. Now it seems he has to admit defeat.  

The GOP is finally being honest about why it’s itching for military intervention in Venezuela. Shocker—it wasn’t about the drugs, it was always about the oil. 

“I would love to see a change in government,” Fox News host Larry Kudlow said to Republican Representative Maria Salazar on Monday. “My wife’s from Nicaragua.… The dictators there rely on Venezuelan oil. But at the same time, a lot of Americans don’t want actual U.S. participation in regime change in Venezuela. They would much prefer the Venezuelans to do it on their own. Do you think the pressure that [Venezuelan President Nicolás] Maduro has received will force him to leave on his own?”

“Maduro is not Fidel Castro, Maduro is not a brave boy.… He is on that very nefarious list of the terrorist organization, that the airspace above Venezuela has been closed off and the commercial airlines from the United States are not flying. He’s understanding that we’re about to go in,” Salazar replied.

She then went on to outline the top three reasons for more U.S. intervention in the Latin American country. Reason number one? Oil. 

“Venezuela—for the American oil companies—will be a field day. Because it will be more than a trillion dollars in economic activity. American companies can go in and fix the whole oil rigs,”  she said.

Salazar continued. 

“We’re gonna be doing a favor to us, to our children, to our economy, to our oil companies, and to the Venezuelans.” 

Regardless of your issues with Maduro (and there are many), Salazar’s language here is undeniably imperialistic. It feels like it’s ripped straight from the banana republic era of Latin America, or the Bush era before the invasion of Iraq. Republicans and the Trump administration have made such a big show of bombing drug boats to save “thousands” of American lives, when they really just wanted an excuse to enact the intervention Salazar refers to. But now they’ve gone fully mask-off. 

“Wow, at least with Iraq they had the decency to try and convince the American public about weapons of mass destruction,” one X user wrote. “Now they are just straight up telling us what they really want and no one can stop them.”

A regime change would not be some chill, bloodless agreement that sees Maduro willfully stepping aside and handing over all of his country’s most valuable resource. It would most likely be met with violence that would hurt the Venezuelans more than anyone else. 

“U.S. military action could trigger a crisis on the same order as happened in Iraq after the U.S. regime change effort there,” Caracas-based International Crisis Group senior analyst Phil Gunson told The New Republic. “If the U.S. does decapitate the government, the multiple armed actors could bring about a degree of anarchy. None of these different groups have any incentive to just lay down their arms. There have been several decades of accumulated resentments on various sides, and it’s not fanciful to imagine that there could be lynchings. There could be bombings or selective assassinations.”

Salazar saying  “us,” “our children,” and “our economy,” before she even mentions the citizens of the country she wants to invade so badly tells you everything you need to know about where U.S. priorities are. 

Republican Representative Elise Stefanik is scrambling to recover her gubernatorial campaign’s messaging after President Donald Trump had a cozy meeting with her political foil, New York City Mayor-elect Zohran Mamdani.

Stefanik’s already botched bid to become governor of New York was thrown into flux Friday after a googly-eyed Trump shut down her wildly racist claim that Mamdani was a “jihadist.” Instead, he called the mayor-elect a “very rational person” and said he would feel safe living in New York City during Mamdani’s tenure.

In an interview with News12 Monday, Stefanik doubled down anyway, saying that she and Trump would have to “agree to disagree.”

“I stand by my statement. He is a jihadist,” Stefanik said of Mamdani. “This is an area where President Trump and I disagree. But what we all want to work toward is making New York more affordable and safe, and that’s where I have a very strong record and working relationship with the administration.”

Amid a massive meltdown over the meeting, Laura Loomer, the self-described “proud Islamaphobe” with the president’s ear, noted that Trump had put Stefanik in a bad position. “Dems just need to run clips of the presser today to defeat Elise,” Loomer wrote on X Friday.

Within a matter of minutes into the joint press conference with Mamdani, Trump managed to blow up Republicans’ talking points about the incoming mayor, which might have given them a leg up in the upcoming midterm elections in 2026.

Donald Trump is on a legal losing streak.

The president’s defamation lawsuit against The Guardian fell apart Monday when a Florida judge granted motions to dismiss, crushing his latest attempt to peel money out of a media institution.

The case was brought in 2023 by Trump Media & Technology Group, or TMTG, the corporate owner of Trump’s social media platform Truth Social. It sued the British newspaper for defamation, arguing that it—as well as a local Florida daily that picked up the story—had published false statements about the financial machinations of the company.

In a March 2023 article, The Guardian reported that TMTG had accepted “$8 million” in emergency loans from shadowy entities. That included a $2 million loan from Paxum Bank, as well as $6 million from a group known as E.S. Family Trust. The paper also noted at the time that one of the trustees of E.S. Family allegedly had ties to Russian President Vladimir Putin.

At the time, prosecutors with the Southern District of New York were investigating whether the loans violated federal money-laundering laws.

“According to that report, one of the executives of TMTG floated the idea of returning the money given the lack of details and transparency about who was providing the loans. TMTG co-founder Will Wilkerson—who eventually became a whistleblower in the federal investigation—told SDNY that Chief Financial Officer Phillip Juhan was uncomfortable about the murky nature of the two entities,” reported Alternet.

But merely reporting information is not enough to fulfill the legal prerequisite in a defamation case of “actual malice” against a public figure.

Judge Hunter W. Carroll of Florida’s Twelfth Judicial Circuit granted an anti-SLAPP motion to The Guardian, a sign that the court interpreted the suit as a meritless attempt to silence criticism.

Instead, The Guardian’s reporting “was based on multiple sources familiar with the investigation, review of internal TMTG communications, investigation of the entities who made the loans, and fruitless requests for further information from the Department of Justice, the investigators’ office, and outside counsel for TMTG,” Carroll wrote in his ruling.

It was the third courtroom loss for Trump in just a handful of hours, following another decision in which a federal judge dropped the criminal indictments against former FBI Director James Comey (and by extension New York Attorney General Letitia James), deciding that the prosecutor who brought the charges in both cases—Lindsey Halligan—was not lawfully appointed.