You Can Listen To the Three Democratic Candidates For AG Here. Tom Byrne asks good questions.
Trump Never Gives Up: His DOJ is going after the judge in the Stormy Daniels case:
The U.S. attorney’s office in Chicago has spent the past year investigating a Democratic fund-raising firm once co-owned by the daughter of the judge in President Trump’s hush-money trial in New York, according to court filings and people familiar with the inquiry.
Last August, the U.S. attorney, Andrew S. Boutros of the Northern District of Illinois, directed Authentic Campaigns Inc. to turn over a broad range of internal communications with clients. They included former Vice President Kamala Harris, former President Joseph R. Biden Jr., Gov. Kathy Hochul of New York, Representative Hakeem Jeffries of New York, and the Democratic National Committee, according to a grand jury subpoena reviewed by The New York Times.
Loren Merchan, the daughter of Juan Merchan, a supreme court judge in Manhattan, was the firm’s vice president until late 2024 and was also on the list. The Merchan family has been a frequent target of Mr. Trump and his allies, who have made unsubstantiated claims that the judge was out to get him and that his daughter profited from accusations aired at the trial.
The trial ended with Mr. Trump’s conviction in 2024, in the midst of his campaign for a second term, on 34 felony counts stemming from his efforts to keep a porn star from publicizing her story of a liaison with him.
The firm’s legal team, which included Preet Bharara, the former top federal prosecutor in Manhattan, sought to limit the request. Prosecutors eventually modified the subpoena, narrowing it to focus on a $468 payment from Ms. Harris’s presidential campaign, and emails between Ms. Merchan and her father, according to people with knowledge of the inquiry who requested anonymity to discuss an ongoing legal matter.
The inquiry is the latest indication of the extent to which U.S. attorneys offices across the country, once largely removed from political machinations in Washington, have increasingly been drawn into the Mr. Trump’s effort to target his adversaries.
The Trump-Bibi Bromance Is…Over? Precious watercolor memories of the way we were:
This appears to be part of Trump’s deliberate move away from Israel and the closely related annoyance that Israel continues to complicate his other priorities, which are one part conventional geopolitics and one part corrupt deals with various Gulf States. But there’s another factor Axios points to which we’re familiar with from the U.S. endorsement game. Netanyahu’s polls look bad. And Trump doesn’t want to back a loser.
Underneath all this is growing skepticism of Netanyahu’s approach to managing relations with the United States. For generations, Israelis focused on maintaining strong bipartisan support for Israel in the U.S. Netanyahu had a different model, which was to build an alliance with the Republican Party. That became supercharged under Trump, where it became even more an alliance with Trump himself. That shift wasn’t out of the blue, certainly. The post-90s Republican party was simply more in line with the Israeli right. There was a lot of commonality of interest. But the shift, heavily driven by Netanyahu himself, both grew out of those changes and heavily accelerated them.
The Democrats don’t matter. We’ve got the GOP and we’ve got Trump, Netanyahu’s argument went. And it worked great for him until it didn’t. This came out into the open most clearly in 2014 and 2015 when Netanyahu openly lobbied against President Obama’s Iran nuclear deal (even as many in the Israeli security establishment thought it was helpful to Israel) and finally accepted an invitation from the Republican-controlled Congress to address lawmakers in opposition to the president’s signature foreign policy project.
In any case, that alliance has been central to Netanyahu’s politics. And it paid huge dividends until Trump began — as anyone familiar with Trump could have predicted — to turn on Israel and Netanyahu because the alliance was no longer convenient for him. Israel shifted from an alliance with the U.S. to an alliance with the GOP during a period in which Netanyahu was prime minister for all but a brief period lasting about one year in 2021 and 2022. Clearly the big driver of this shift on Trump’s part is that he’s pissed that Netanyahu helped get him into his disastrous war with Iran. But it’s not just that. Operationally, their close ties have greatly complicated Trump’s efforts to get out of that war, or manage its collateral damage — trying to cut deals with the Iranians, struggling to keep the Gulf states (who are both U.S. allies and Trump family corruption partners) in line as they deal with the blowback from the conflict.
A federal financial regulator has conditionally approved an application for a bank charter by an entity connected to World Liberty Financial, a crypto firm partially owned by President Donald Trump’s family.
The Office of the Comptroller of the Currency on Friday gave conditional approval to World Liberty Trust Co.’s application for a national trust bank, according to a letter posted on the OCC’s website. The trust company is sponsored by World Liberty Financial, which says on its website it is 38% owned by “an entity affiliated with Donald J. Trump and certain of his family members.”
The banking charter will enable World Liberty to issue stablecoins, a type of cryptocurrency that is backed by safe reserve assets such as U.S. Treasurys and is convertible one-to-one into U.S. dollars. World Liberty currently relies on a third party, BitGo, for some stablecoin services. Bringing those services in house could be lucrative.Sen. Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass., had previously urged the OCC not to approve World Liberty’s application unless the president divested of his interests in the company.
“President Trump is now the first President in history to approve, operate, and supervise his own bank,” Warren said in a statement after the OCC approval.
“This is the most brazen act of self-dealing our financial system has ever seen — and Congress cannot allow it to stand.”
Betcha they will ‘allow it to stand’.
What do you want to talk about?
