Ted Cruz’s Reelection Has an Unexpected Foe

Robert F. Kennedy Jr’s ballot drive in Texas may have unintended consequences for a Lone Star politician seeking re-election: Senator Ted Cruz.

While Kennedy is still working to get his name on the ballot for the presidential race, pollsters predict that his mere presence will summon more voters to the booth come November—voters who won’t necessarily join Cruz’s camp when they see his name elsewhere on the ballot. Instead, experts predict that voters who turn out for Kennedy will more likely support Democratic Representative Colin Allred, Cruz’s opponent in the November race.

“This is definitely not good for Cruz,” Mark P. Jones, a political science professor at Rice University, told The Hill. “Kennedy’s presence on the ballot could actually help Democrats.”

Kennedy’s campaign announced earlier this week that more than twice as many people as required—some 245,000 Texans—had provided signatures to get him onto the ballot.

“If you can get on in Texas you can get on everywhere,” Kennedy said at a campaign rally.

The demographic likely to turn out for the 70-year-old independent candidate includes both Democratic and Republican voters, meaning Kennedy is expected to pull support from President Joe Biden and Donald Trump. But Kennedy’s camp also, surprisingly, includes a swath of young voters that historically don’t participate in elections—but their presence this year could reshape Texas politics.

“RFK Jr. is likely to mobilize a group of voters to turn out and vote in the presidential race who, absent his presidency, would not have participated,” Jones told The Hill. “Once those voters are through casting a vote in the first race as president, they’re going to start to go down the ballot.”

On Thursday night, a House Oversight Committee hearing on whether to hold Attorney General Merrick Garland in contempt quickly went off the rails, thanks to Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene insulting Representative Jasmine Crockett’s appearance.

The hearing was taking place because Garland refused to turn over recordings between President Biden and special counsel Robert Hur. Representative Jamie Raskin, a Democrat and the committee’s ranking member, was making opening remarks, before being repeatedly interrupted by Greene. In one such interruption, Greene asked if any Democrats on the committee were employing the daughter of Judge Juan Merchan, who is presiding over Donald Trump’s hush-money trial.

“Please tell me what that has to do with Merrick Garland,” Crockett said, and Raskin remarked, “Is she a porn star?” to Greene’s question, referencing adult film actress Stormy Daniels at the center of Trump’s case.

“You know what we’re here for,” Greene said, and, speaking over Crockett, added, “I think your fake eyelashes are messing up what you’re reading,” to loud groans and protests in the room.

“That’s beneath even you, Ms. Greene,” Raskin said, as Committee Chair James Comer tried and failed to call for order. Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez quickly moved to have Greene’s words stricken from the congressional record.

“That is absolutely unacceptable,” Ocasio-Cortez said loudly. “How dare you attack the physical appearance of another person!”

“Are your feelings hurt?” Greene retorted, to which Ocasio-Cortez replied, “Baby girl, don’t even play.”

Greene refused to apologize for her insult to Crockett, and in response, Greene’s words were not taken down. Greene continued to argue with Ocasio-Cortez, asking to debate her, before insulting the New York congresswoman’s intelligence. But then, Crockett asked for a point of order.

“I’m just curious, just to better understand your ruling: If someone on this committee then starts talking about somebody’s bleach blonde, bad built, butch body, that would not be engaging in personalities, correct?” Crockett asked aloud, drawing audible laughs, a smirk from Raskin, and visible confusion from Comer, who did not understand what was going on.

Watch the whole sequence below:

In a tweet later in the evening, Crockett called out Greene for refusing to apologize, and Comer for allowing her remarks.

“This is what happens when mentally deficient people who can’t read and follow rules or just don’t give a damn… somehow end up in CONGRESS!” Crockett posted.

Procedural matters over interruptions would slow things down considerably, and at one point, Republican Representative Lauren Boebert, who has feuded with Greene, voted with Democrats against a motion to allow Greene to speak. The chaotic atmosphere even seemed to spill over just outside the hearing.

“We have some members in the room who are drinking inside the hearing room ... who are not on this committee,” complained Representative Melanie Stansbury.

The hearing would eventually conclude, with the committee voting to hold Garland in contempt. For Greene, Thursday night’s events may have hurt standing with her fellow Republicans even further, as she has already drawn her colleagues’ ire for her failed attempt to oust Speaker Mike Johnson. For Republicans themselves, it’s the latest example of a party and caucus in poor health, ruled by chaos.

All rise for the honorable wife blamer: In cowardly fashion, Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito is blaming his wife for an upside-down American flag that flew outside the couple’s home in January 2021 ahead of Biden’s inauguration, a prominent symbol among the anti-government far-right and which experts say is a clear violation of ethics rules against bias.

In a story first reported by The New York Times on Thursday, the Alitos flew the inverted flag outside their home for “several days” in January 2021, with neighbors photographing it on January 17 and discussing its enduring presence on January 18. While the exact dates it was flown are unknown, the flag flew between the January 6 Capitol riot—where pro-Trump conspiracy theorists and far-right extremists waved that same flag—and the January 20 presidential inauguration of Joe Biden.

Long used as a naval distress symbol, the inverted flag has occasionally been used in anti-war and anti-fascist protests. Now, it most commonly appears among the anti-government far-right—a somewhat ironic choice for the home of a Supreme Court justice, whose work directly influences how the government operates. In January 2021, it was a prominent symbol during the “Stop the Steal” protests against the certification of the presidential election as Trump supporters violently stormed the Capitol.

Justice Alito said the flag was part of a passive-aggressive dispute between his wife, in dire need of a hobby, and their neighbors, who had placed an “anti-Trump sign with an expletive” on their lawn. But that fails to justify what judicial experts say is a clear violation of SCOTUS’s ethics rules, which prohibit even a whiff of bias.

“It might be his spouse or someone else living in his home, but he shouldn’t have it in his yard as his message to the world,” said Amanda Frost, a law professor at the University of Virginia, in an interview with the Times.

The conservative justice previously took an undisclosed luxury fishing trip in 2008 with a Republican billionaire donor who later presented cases to the Supreme Court, apparently in violation of federal law. The corruption-inclined Clarence Thomas and his election denialist wife must be so proud of their little protégés.

In the three years since the flag flew, the Alitos had plenty of time to come up with a better excuse. Claiming it was placed there by an outside agitator would be an easy fan favorite with conservatives. Or they could have claimed they just didn’t realize they put it upside-down because when they were affixing it to the pole a rabid squirrel jumped out of a bush and started attacking them and they were so they just put it up and ran away and were too afraid of the squirrel to leave their house for several days. Sky’s the limit when you’re a judge on the highest court in the land accountable to practically no one with a wife far too invested in wackadoo conspiracy theories.

Donald Trump basically did the prosecution’s work for them while ad libbing outside the courthouse of his New York hush-money trial, admitting that he did, actually, have an NDA with porn actress Stormy Daniels.

“Andrew McCarthy: NDAs are legal and common. Yet, Bragg alleges Trump’s was illegal,” Trump read off a sheet of paper Thursday, quoting Andrew McCarthy in the National Review before facetiously inserting a telling line: “I have the only illegal NDA.”

Trump then continued to react to lines from McCarthy’s online blog post.

“‘It seems that Trump’s crime by blue state lights was winning the election.’ That was my crime. I won an election that I wasn’t supposed to win against Hillary Clinton. And that’s not a crime,” Trump said.

Trump’s attorneys have attempted to argue that the funds to pay off Daniels came exclusively from his fixer, Michael Cohen, and that Trump had zero awareness of the actual payments. Cohen, for his part, has repeatedly outed Trump as a “micromanager” who was aware of his every move, telling the court on Monday that the pair spoke “every single day, and multiple times a day.” And, if they weren’t able to communicate one-on-one, Cohen said he would often communicate with Trump via one of his other close confidants, including his former assistant Rhona Graff, Trump Organization employee turned director of Oval Office operations Keith Schiller, Trump’s children, or Hope Hicks.

Other witnesses in the criminal trial have also pointed to Trump as the obvious and understood originator of the hush-money payments, even if it wasn’t explicitly mentioned to them at the time.

The Republican presidential nominee faces 34 felony charges in this case for allegedly falsifying business records with the intent to further an underlying crime. Trump has pleaded not guilty on all counts.

Joe Biden’s support for Israel’s brutal war on Gaza has drawn protests across the country, from college campuses to public streets, and has even led to the president minimizing events that could potentially be interrupted by protesters.

To his top donors, though, Biden’s stance has largely been music to their ears, according to a new report from the Quincy Institute’s Responsible Statecraft. The publication reviewed campaign contributions, philanthropy, and public statements from people who gave more than $900,000 to the Biden Victory Fund, and found heavy sympathy for Israel sometimes coupled with bigotry against Muslims and Palestinians.

For example, longtime Democratic donor Haim Saban, who contributed $929,599 to the Victory Fund, also serves on the board of Friends of the Israel Defense Forces. The billionaire has also donated $1 million to the United Democracy Project, an independent arm of the American Israel Public Affairs Committee. After Biden briefly paused a weapons shipment to Israel last week, Saban sent an email to Biden aides saying, “Let’s not forget there are more Jewish voters who care about Israel than Muslim voters who care about Hamas.”

Compare that to a recent New York Times poll that found that 13 percent of 2020 Biden voters who planned to defect from him in 2024 cited his foreign policy and stance on Israel’s war in Gaza as the reason. But Biden isn’t likely to hear about those concerns at his big fundraising events.

The article names several other top Biden donors who support Israel’s military actions, described by many as war crimes, and attack Palestinians and the protesters who support them. These include pundit George Conway, mobile gaming magnate Mark Pincus, and LinkedIn co-founder Reid Hoffman.

Another separate report Thursday revealed the extent to which billionaires are affecting U.S. policy on Israel. The Washington Post exposed a WhatsApp chat group set up in late April by business titans and wealthy individuals who pressured New York City Mayor Eric Adams to use police force to shut down Columbia University’s Gaza Solidarity Encampment. These billionaires included Kind snack company founder Daniel Lubetzky, former Starbucks CEO Howard Schultz, Dell founder and CEO Michael Dell, and hedge fund manager Bill Ackman.

The fact that wealthy donors seem to have more influence than public opinion over a city mayor, let alone a sitting president, is a travesty. Israel’s war on Gaza has killed over 35,000 people, including more than 15,000 children, much of it thanks to U.S. military aid and weapons. Calls for the Biden administration to end its support for the war and halt weapons shipments to Israel seem to fall on deaf ears. While this might make his donors happy, perhaps Biden should be more concerned about voters and a growing humanitarian crisis.

Michael Cohen’s latest testimony just added another dent to Donald Trump’s crumbling legal defense in his hush-money case.

While on the stand Thursday, Cohen revealed that he didn’t do anything without Trump’s knowledge and his send-off, even if the excessive measures infuriated his campaign. That extra insurance was largely out of fear of any repercussions for doing or saying something on Trump’s behalf that the testy former reality TV star might not approve of.

During a string of questions probing Cohen’s relationship with the press, Trump attorney Todd Blanche asked if Cohen had ever answered a question without first checking in with Trump.

“It was my routine to ask him,” Cohen said, noting that Trump would “blow up” at him if Cohen got something incorrect, potentially costing him his job.

“So over the course of nine and a half years, you never commented on a story on your own?” continued Blanche.

Cohen testified that, for an initial comment on the story, he would “always get a comment to something” from Trump. But after that, he would effectively copy and paste the response to subsequent outlets running similar stories.

It’s just another instance in which Cohen has undercut Trump’s legal defense, which has attempted to frame Trump as a boss totally unaware of the hush-money payments and that the funds for the payments came from Cohen alone. Instead, Cohen has repeatedly outed Trump as a “micromanager” who was aware of his every move, telling the court on Monday that the pair spoke “every single day, and multiple times a day.” And, if they weren’t able to communicate one-on-one, Cohen said he would often communicate with Trump via one of his other close confidants, including his former assistant Rhona Graff, Trump Organization employee turned director of Oval Office operations Keith Schiller, Trump’s children, or Hope Hicks.

Other witnesses in the criminal trial have also testified that Trump was the originator of the hush-money payments, including Daniels’s former attorney Keith Davidson, who said that he understood at the time the agreement was drawn up that the ultimate source of the money was Trump.

The Republican presidential nominee faces 34 felony charges in this case for allegedly falsifying business records with the intent to further an underlying crime. Trump has pleaded not guilty on all counts.

On Thursday, Texas Governor Greg Abbott approved a full pardon for Daniel Perry, an Uber driver who shot and killed anti–police brutality protester Garrett Foster in 2020. Perry was sentenced to 25 years in prison by a Texas state district court judge in May 2023.

But that’s not all that came with the pardon. In a disturbing move, Abbott also restored Perry’s firearm rights.

“Texas has one of the strongest ‘Stand Your Ground’ laws of self-defense that cannot be nullified by a jury or a progressive District Attorney,” Abbott said in a statement announcing the pardon.

Abbott, a far-right governor who has openly feuded with the federal government about migrants and LGBTQ+ rights—and sent swarms of state troopers to violently clear college Gaza solidarity encampments—has sought to pardon Perry since he was convicted.

Stand Your Ground laws were popularized and brought into law by conservative legislators following the vigilante murder of 17-year-old Trayvon Martin in 2012. The laws serve to negate “duty to retreat,” which are contrasting sets of laws prohibiting the use of deadly force in situations where a person could reasonably flee to safety.

In 2020, at the height of the Black Lives Matter protests that year, Perry encountered a protest while driving for Uber in Austin, Texas. According to Austin police, Perry stopped his car, honking at the protesters, before driving his car into the march. Perry then shot Garrett Foster, who was legally open-carrying an AK-47 while pushing his fiancée’s wheelchair. Perry’s attorneys argued Foster raised his rifle at Perry and he acted in self-defense, but witness testimony and video from the march disputed these claims. After his murder conviction, messages and posts by Perry self-identifying as “a racist” and wanting to “go to Dallas to shoot looters” were released to the public.

Abbott pushed to secure a pardon for Perry immediately after he was sentenced, directing the parole board to review the case the day after the 2023 verdict. Abbott’s pardon was announced almost immediately after the Texas Board of Pardons and Paroles recommended it, The Texas Tribune reported Thursday.

At Donald Trump’s hush-money trial Thursday, his former lawyer and fixer Michael Cohen had a legal lesson for Trump’s counsel.

Cohen, a witness for the prosecution, was being cross-examined by Trump’s attorney Todd Blanche, who asked Cohen about conversations that the former Trump employee had secretly recorded. 

Blanche, in a stern tone, asked Cohen if he ever told anyone that he was recording them, and reportedly seemed surprised when Cohen said no.

Cohen calmly told Blanche, “It’s not illegal in New York.” Blanche seemed offended at this answer.

“Mr. Cohen, I did not ask you if you were breaking the law,” Blanche replied.

In the state of New York, for a recording to be made legally, one-party consent is required. This means that one party to the recorded conversation has to give their permission to be in accordance with the law, and Cohen, as the one making the recordings, had that consent from himself.

Earlier, Blanche pressed Cohen about recorded conversations that were privileged, like those between attorney and client, but then probably wished he hadn’t.

“You understand that it is not ethical to record a conversation with your client, there’s lots of New York bar opinions on this. But you are not supposed to record your client,” Blanche said.

“Well, there’s the crime-fraud exception rule,” Cohen replied, alluding to the case in question.

Cohen has been testifying all this week on his role in Trump’s scheme to cover up an affair with adult film actress Stormy Daniels before the 2016 election by paying her off with Cohen’s help. The Republican presidential nominee faces 34 felony charges for allegedly falsifying business records with the intent to further an underlying crime. Trump has pleaded not guilty on all counts.

Jared Kushner secured a massive $500 million contract with the state of Serbia to build a hotel on the memorialized ruins of a former military base in Belgrade, The New York Times reported Thursday.

The announcement of the contract reportedly provoked protests in Belgrade against the deal, which is being bankrolled by Kushner’s Saudi-backed investment company, Affinity Partners. In defense of the contract, a Serbian government official described Kushner’s company primarily funded by foreign interests as a “reputable American company.”

“The government of Serbia has chosen a reputable American company as a partner in this venture, which will invest in the revitalization of the former Federal Secretariat for National Defense complex,” the statement read. The deal with Kushner’s company inked by Serbian officials includes a 99-year lease to convert the site into a luxury hotel, commercial space, and over 1,500 residential units.

This is one of the biggest investment deals Kushner has landed while his father-in-law, Donald Trump, runs for president.

Prior to approval of the contract, public officials in Serbia heavily opposed the deal for its insensitivity and potential for political manipulation. Serbian politician Borko Stefanovic described the location as “one of the pearls of pre-war architecture” to The Daily Beast, noting, “Most Serbs believe this site should not be desecrated in any way.”

A petition was launched in Serbia against the contract with Kushner in late March that generated 10,000 signatures in a matter of hours and over 25,000 within days, according to The Daily Beast. The location has long been sought after by Trump and his acolytes: In 2013, Trump expressed interest in turning the site into a hotel. In 2020, while serving as a diplomat for Trump, Richard Grenell—who joins Kushner on this contract—suggested “repairing” the complex.

The Yugoslav Ministry of Defense military complex was bombed by NATO forces in 1999 during a U.S.-backed campaign that killed an estimated 2,000 civilians and lasted until the Yugoslav Army retreated from Kosovo during the Kosovo War. The prospect of a U.S. company building anything on the site was described by Politico as “if the Taliban wanted to build a luxury apartment compound on the site of New York’s Twin Towers.”

Kansas City Chiefs Harrison Butker upset more than just a few women online with the misogynistic commencement speech he gave at Benedictine College over the weekend. As of Thursday, more than 120,000 people had signed an online petition calling on the NFL team to give the kicker the boot.

“We demand accountability from our sports figures who should be role models promoting respect for all people regardless of their race, gender identity or sexual orientation,” the petition reads. “We call upon the Kansas City Chiefs management to dismiss Harrison Butker immediately for his inappropriate conduct.”

In the span of just a few minutes, Butker managed to rail against abortion, IVF, surrogacy, euthanasia, the LGBTQ community, and the “tyranny of diversity, equity, and inclusion” programs. He also encouraged the women in the crowd at the private Catholic college to forget the “diabolical lies” sold to them and to return to the “vocation” of bearing children and cooking in the kitchen instead of beginning careers related to their degrees. The strangest part is that Butker holds these beliefs in spite of the fact that his own success is in part due to his mother’s career as a medical physicist at the Emory University Department of Radiation Oncology.

But the growing chorus of people calling for Butker to face consequences for the remarks hasn’t translated into action by the NFL. Instead, the football league issued a lukewarm response, scarcely acknowledging Butker’s disturbing views.

“Harrison Butker gave a speech in his personal capacity,” Jonathan Beane, the NFL’s senior vice president and chief diversity and inclusion officer, told People. “His views are not those of the NFL as an organization. The NFL is steadfast in our commitment to inclusion, which only makes our league stronger.”

Still, the chauvinistic messaging could stir up problems for another Chiefs player, team captain Travis Kelce, whose relationship with pop superstar—and self-described feminist—Taylor Swift has launched him and the football team into national celebrity status. Especially since Butker specifically called Swift out in his speech, quoting a line from her song “Bejeweled” that “familiarity breeds contempt.”