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UFOs? Pizzagate!? Boebert Explains Why Clinton Inquest Went Off The Rails

UFOs? Pizzagate!? Boebert Explains Why Clinton Inquest Went Off The Rails

You may have wondered why the House Oversight Committee voted overwhelmingly to subpoena Hillary Clinton in its probe of the late pedophile financier Jeffrey Epstein, since the former secretary of state never met Epstein or had any contact with him.

But now that mystery at least is solved. While the committee chairman Rep. James Comer asked almost no questions – a lapse that Clinton mocked during their six-hour session – certain Republican members did have very urgent inquiries for her. (Several committee Democrats, who had voted to hold Clinton in contempt if she didn’t show up, didn’t bother to show up themselves.)

The Republicans were evidently eager to hear whatever Clinton could tell them about unidentified flying objects or UFOs, and the phony “Pizzagate” conspiracy promoted by the far right in 2015.

“It then got, at the end, quite unusual because I started being asked about UFOs and a series of questions about Pizzagate, one of the most vile bogus conspiracy theories that was propagated on the internet that was serving as the basis of a member’s questions to me,” said Clinton afterward.

Perhaps the best summation of the Chappaqua fiasco was delivered by MSNow's Joe Scarborough, who swore and cracked up as he admonished the Republicans who made the mistake of summoning Hillary.

Unsurprisingly, the member who raised the defamatory Pizzagate fable -- which ended with a near-tragic shooting at a pizza restaurant in Washington, D.C. -- was Colorado Rep. Lauren Boebert, the clown Congresswoman infamous for her bizarre antics with her ex-husband, boyfriends, and others. (Of course it was also Boebert who violated committee rules by leaking a photo of Clinton during the closed session to plagiarist-propagandist Benny Johnson.)

Later, when NewsNation’s Chris Cuomo wondered why committee Republicans would pester Clinton with such irrelevant garbage, Boebert replied with a smirk.

“Well, you know, those topics did come up and there are things within the Epstein file that leads to these questions. These files open up a whole mess, a whole trove of questions to go down,” she said. “This isn’t to highlight some big, vast conspiracy about a pizza parlor, but I think there needs to be questions, and I asked some questions on this topic that should be explained. There wasn’t an explanation given, of course, and then other members certainly asked about UFOs.”

Today the committee will turn its attention to former President Bill Clinton, who did know Epstein, albeit years before any hint of his heinous crimes were known. Any reputable news outlet that mentions Clinton’s connection with Epstein will note that there is no evidence linking the former president to those offenses or anything untoward.

Undoubtedly committee members will ask Clinton about his trips to Africa and Asia on Epstein’s jet – all in pursuit of humanitarian aims They will surely ask him as well about the contribution from Epstein to establish the Clinton Global Initiative (first disclosed in Man of the World, my 2016 book about the Clinton post-presidency). They will ask about the photos of Clinton in proximity to women on that Africa trip, one of whom has recalled that he was “a perfect gentleman.”

What the committee and investigators already knows is that no evidence exists to implicate Bill Clinton in Epstein’s horrific history. If there is anyone has been “exonerated” by the available evidence -- as Donald Trump has falsely claimed on his own behalf -- it is Clinton. Unlike Clinton, Trump and his minions are now plausibly implicated in crimes and coverup.

Which again raises the issue framed by Democrats in Chappaqua today: Why won’t the Republicans seek Trump’s testimony?

Joe Conason is founder and editor-in-chief of The National Memo. He is also editor-at-large of Type Investigations, a nonprofit investigative reporting organization formerly known as The Investigative Fund. His latest book is The Longest Con: How Grifters, Swindlers and Frauds Hijacked American Conservatism (St. Martin's Press, 2024). The paperback version, with a new Afterword, will be published in February 2026.

Reprinted with permission from Creators

No Justification: Trump Won't Explain His Feckless And Bellicose Iran Policy

No Justification: Trump Won't Explain His Feckless And Bellicose Iran Policy

Donald Trump’s interminably verbose State of the Union address delivered all the typical Trumpian tropes in an extended version, from his mendacious slurs against immigrants to his cosplay as super-patriotic commander in chief. He even riffed on his yearning to give himself a Congressional Medal of Honor, an award normally unavailable to draft-dodgers.

What the president did not do, even as a ballooning U.S. air and naval force surrounds Iran, was to justify such ostentatious preparations for war against an adversary he claimed to have disarmed only months ago. It is all well and good to hang medals on courageous service members; it is imperative to tell the American people – especially those in uniform and their loved ones – why they must again go in harm’s way.

Dwelling at length on stories of valor and pathos, Trump uttered only a few sentences about the military buildup that indicates preparation for an extended and bloody conflict. Unlike Venezuela or any of the other adversaries that his administration has targeted, the Islamic Republic maintains a formidable arsenal of weapons and nearly a million men under arms. Any attempt to overthrow that regime beyond the bombing campaigns already undertaken is liable to inflict mass casualties on our troops -- and even more damage on our reputation abroad.

Trump might at least have mentioned why he believes those risks are worthwhile. The rationale he offered last night made little sense. He claimed again to have “obliterated” the Iranian nuclear weapons program during last year’s bombing campaign – an assertion rejected by the International Atomic Energy Agency – which ought to mean that the regime is years away from making a bomb. He said that the Iranians have refused to foreswear any nuclear weapons ambitions, a falsehood contradicted eight hours before his address by Iran’s foreign minister, who posted on X that his country would "under no circumstances ever develop a nuclear weapon."

Trump also mentioned the Iranian regime’s killing of thousands of protesters, a horrible crime that he had vowed to prevent in one of his many hollow promises. While he is no doubt furious over that embarrassing dereliction, that would hardly vindicate a war killing thousands more innocent Iranians.

Led into a cul-de-sac by his own bellicose pronouncements, Trump finally is facing the consequences of the rash decision in his first term to abandon the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action negotiated by President Obama, which was backed by an international alliance that included France, Germany, the United Kingdom, Russia, and China. Personal animosity toward Obama was his only real reason for wrecking that painstakingly negotiated agreement. Among the many valuable aspects of that deal was its safeguards against Iran enriching uranium to weapons grade before 2030 – precisely the issue that has stalled the current negotiations. (It doesn’t help that Trump again dispatched Steve Witkoff, his befuddled real estate pal and crypto investment partner, to deal with the Iranians in this hour of crisis.)

If we brush aside all the flag-waving and jaw-thrusting in his State of the Union, it should be clear that Trump now faces a pair of bad choices – one worse for him, perhaps, and the other far worse for his country and the world. If he backs away from war without any major concessions from the Iranians, then “Trump Always Chickens Out” will echo louder than ever. If he plunges us into a forever war he always pledged to avoid, the costs could be incalculable and even catatrosphic.

Let us hope that the clueless Witkoff – or maybe Secretary of State Marco Rubio, who is smarter -- can somehow retrieve a deal from the ruins of the JCPOA before it is too late. But remember that we have only reached this perilous moment because of Trump’s dishonesty and egomania.

Dear MAHA Moms: Don’t Be Surprised When Bobby Sells You Out

Dear MAHA Moms: Don’t Be Surprised When Bobby Sells You Out

The fans and followers of Robert F. Kennedy Jr. are now learning what others have known for decades: You can rely on him to lie whenever it is expedient and profitable, and you can’t rely on him to uphold any principle except his own advancement.

That unpleasant jolt of awareness struck the devoted legions of Kennedy’s “Make America Healthy Again” movement when he dropped their priorities in obedience to the corrupt Trump White House. Across the country, stunned “MAHA Moms” and influencers watched their idol Bobby meekly endorse the president’s decision to rapidly increase production of glyphosate – a ubiquitous pesticide they consider deadly.

Back during the 2024 campaign, Trump promised he would empower Kennedy to “ensure that everybody will be protected from harmful chemicals, pollutants, pesticides,” a category that clearly included glyphosate, known commercially as Roundup. In a June 2024 social media post, Kennedy wrote that glyphosate is “one of the likely culprits in America’s chronic disease epidemic…Shockingly, much of our exposure comes from its use as a dessicant [drying agent] on wheat, not as an herbicide…My USDA will ban that practice.” He noted that across Europe, the use of glyphosate is sharply restricted or even banned.

Flash forward to February 18, 2026, when the president issued a directive that not only failed to reduce the use of glyphosate but will rapidly increase its production. Kennedy responded with a wag of his tail and a press release that echoed the usual Trumpian tropes about “America first” (and downplayed any specific mention of the pesticide’s name). Expanding the availability of the substance he had many times denounced as “poison,” he declared, would “protect American families.”

The reaction of Kennedy’s civilian cadre was swift and horrified. Zen Honeycutt of Moms Across America, a grassroots MAHA organization, accused Trump of placing “toxic farming and businesses” ahead of children’s health – and said he had betrayed “every voter who voted for him to [Make America Healty Again].” Kelly Ryerson, an influencer who goes by “Glyphosate Girl” on X, warned that she was seeing “the bottom drop out of MAHA,” a dire forecast for Republicans already pessimistic about their midterm prospects.

Perhaps the MAHA masses shouldn’t be quite so surprised that Bobby betrayed them, since this double-cross has been in the wind for months. When the Trump White House released its much-publicized interagency “MAHA report” last year, its hundreds of pages barely mentioned pesticides or toxic chemicals and equivocated on glyphosate, noting that human studies of its carcinogenic effects are “limited.”

Evidently the outraged MAHA moms weren’t listening to Bobby last year when he told a Senate committee that “we [the Trump administration] cannot take any step that will put a single farmer in this country out of business…One hundred percent of corn in this country relies on glyphosate. We are not going to do anything to jeopardize that business model.” (Farmers driven bankrupt by Trump’s tariffs may be excused for being skeptical.)

That is a complete reversal of Kennedy’s stance from the years when he was suing the makers and distributors of glyphosate on behalf of cancer victims and earning millions of dollars for himself from those successful lawsuits. He’s still collecting the proceeds, according to his most recent financial disclsoures, which show about $2.4 million in referral fees from a law firm handling lawsuits on behalf of individuals who got sick after glyphosate exposure.

The harsh truth behind his first year as health secretary is that Bobby has succeeded most with the least popular aspect of his agenda, the longstanding campaign against vaccines that first marked his turn toward the far right. Abusing his control of the Food and Drug Administration, the Centers for Disease Control, and the National Institutes of Health, he has inflicted grave damage on public health and vaccine research.

Kennedy has far less authority over environmental policy, including the use of toxic chemicals and pollutants such as mercury. Indeed, he has kept dishonorably silent while Lee Zeldin, the politician appointed by Trump to dismantle the Environmental Protection Agency, oversees ruinous deregulation schemes that insure the spread of mercury, “forever chemicals,” and sundry lethal toxins across the American biosphere.

MAHA was always a gauzy construct, serving less as a movement for change than as a handy instrument of deception by manipulative politicians like Trump and his acolyte Kennedy. When Bobby abandoned everything that his family had represented for half a century and pledged fealty to a crooked authoritarian, the eventual denouement should have been obvious: A man who sells out his family legacy is certain to sell out his followers.

He just got there even sooner than we expected.

Joe Conason is founder and editor-in-chief of The National Memo. He is also editor-at-large of Type Investigations, a nonprofit investigative reporting organization formerly known as The Investigative Fund. His latest book is The Longest Con: How Grifters, Swindlers and Frauds Hijacked American Conservatism (St. Martin's Press, 2024). The paperback version, with a new Afterword, will be published in February 2026.

Reprinted with permission from Creators

Bannon Epstein

Epstein's MAGA Enabler: Why Steve Bannon Needs A Mirror

There may be nobody — perhaps not even Donald Trump himself — who embodies the degeneracy of what used to be called conservatism like Stephen K. Bannon. That the "War Room" host still exerts influence over the American and international right as a media personality, political strategist and power broker indicates just how empty of moral character that movement truly is.

Like dear leader Trump, Bannon owes his prominence and prosperity to a pervasive atmosphere of impunity. Every day, in an era of burgeoning scandal on every front, both of them test its limits — and have yet to find any at all.

What the Epstein files have lately revealed about Bannon, however, as disclosed in hundreds of emails between him and the predatory financier, is so depraved as to be almost unbelievable. In the face of these damning documents, the former Trump campaign manager has offered mutterings and excuses that scarcely even amount to a denial.

Not only did Bannon begin to execute a costly "op" (as he called it) with Jeffrey Epstein to rehabilitate the latter's image — which ended only with his arrest by federal authorities in 2019 — but they conspired politically together on various schemes both in the U.S. and Europe. Desperate for Bannon's help, Epstein financed his travel and connected him with potentates and politicians around the world. He paid Bannon hundreds of thousands of dollars to tape a dozen or more hours of "documentary" interviews that were evidently meant as media training, in anticipation of Epstein's prosecution.

All absolutely damning when assessed in the context of Epstein's vile assaults on girls and women, as well as his apparent financial crimes. Yet what seems most appalling so far, and most illustrative of the enveloping corruption, was their joint plotting against Pope Francis, whose liberal gestures toward gays and lesbians, migrants, Muslims and the global poor had enraged the self-styled "traditionalists" of the Catholic Church.

Together Bannon and Epstein aimed to produce a documentary film exposing the culture of hypocrisy and concealment surrounding homosexuality in the church, based on a 2019 French book "In the Closet of the Vatican." Bannon met with the book's author several times in Paris, where he also met Epstein, who had an apartment there.

With Epstein as the executive producer, Bannon predicted that the movie would wreak cataclysmic damage on the papacy and his other political adversaries, from Beijing and Brussels to Chappaqua. "Will take down Francis. The Clintons, Xi, Francis, EU — come on brother," he wrote, encouraging Epstein (who would soon be dead).

Stop to ponder for a moment exactly what Bannon was attempting to engineer. He wanted to produce a movie, with the help of a monstrous pedophile who had victimized hundreds of children, that would destroy the reputation of the Holy Father and perhaps many others equally without blame. And aside from the political benefit to his hard-right allies, Bannon no doubt hoped to bank a substantial profit.

It isn't easy to imagine a more sinister project. By comparison, Bannon's swindling of the suckers who financed his "We Build the Wall" nonprofit and his phony indictment of the humanitarian Clinton Foundation look quaint.

Now a few of Bannon's longtime enemies in the MAGA movement — including Elon Musk and Roger Stone, dismal characters in their own right — have leaped to attack him over these reports. Presumably Musk would like to distract attention from his own cameo role in the Epstein files, including his solicitation of an invite to "the wildest party" on Epstein's Caribbean island. And the scorpion-like Stone is merely stinging a perceived rival, as he always does.

Yet there are many self-proclaimed Catholics and Christians in Trump's orbit, MAGA influencers and conservative pundits who should have something to say about these appalling revelations. Why have we not heard from JD Vance, vice president of the United States, a fairly recent Catholic convert and a MAGA nationalist like Bannon, who spends so much of his time blathering on social media? Why haven't we heard from Peter Thiel, the ultra-right gay billionaire and Epstein buddy who lectures about the "Antichrist" among "woke Democrats"?

Indeed, very few of our moral arbiters on the right have felt moved to speak up about Bannon — just as they remained silent when his coconspirators in the "wall" scam served prison terms, while he skated with a presidential pardon.

The most apt summation of this MAGA mountebank appears in a video recently released among the Epstein files, one of several shot for that aborted documentary.

Bannon asks Epstein, "Do you think you're the devil himself?"

"No," Epstein retorts. "But I do have a good mirror."

Joe Conason is founder and editor-in-chief of The National Memo. He is also editor-at-large of Type Investigations, a nonprofit investigative reporting organization formerly known as The Investigative Fund. His latest book is The Longest Con: How Grifters, Swindlers and Frauds Hijacked American Conservatism (St. Martin's Press, 2024). The paperback version, with a new Afterword, will be published in February 2026.

Reprinted with permission from Creators


As Patriotic Olympians Step Up To Defend Our Values, Trump's Attack Backfires

As Patriotic Olympians Step Up To Defend Our Values, Trump's Attack Backfires

With his petty attack on US Olympic freeskier Hunter Hess – and by implication all the American athletes who dissent from the authoritarian regime – Donald Trump opened up a dispute that he and his minions will inevitably lose. Not only is Trump on the wrong side of the nation’s values of free expression and individual rights, but he has exposed the rejection of his politics by the most talented members of a new generation.

Hess violated the dictatorial MAGA mandate when he forthrightly answered a reporter’s question about “wearing Team USA” at a Winter Games press conference. “It’s a little hard,” replied the 27 year-old Oregon native. “There’s obviously a lot going on that I’m not the biggest fan of.” In the next breath, he made it clear that he feels alienated from the Trump administration, not his beloved country.

"I think for me it's more I'm representing my friends and family back home and the people that represented before me and all the things that I believe are good about the U.S.,” he continued. "If it aligns with my moral values, I feel like I'm representing it. Just because I'm wearing the flag doesn’t mean I represent everything that’s going on in the U.S.”

His freestyle teammate Chris Lillis didn’t hesitate to stand up with Hess. “A lot of times, athletes are hesitant to talk about political views and how we feel about things. I feel heartbroken about what’s happening in the United States,” said Lillis in response to a reporter. “I’m pretty sure you’re referencing ICE and some of the protests and things like that. I think that as a country, we need to focus on respecting everybody’s rights and making sure that we’re treating our citizens as well as anybody, with love and respect.”

Hess later expanded his remarks on social media. “I love my country,” he wrote, using a flag emoji. “There is so much that is great about America, but there are always things that could be better. One of the many things that makes this country so amazing is that we have the right and the freedom to point that out.”

For Trump and his usual gang of media stooges, all that nuanced speech amounted to “borderline treason,” as one of them barked on Fox News. The president himself called Hess “a real loser” and said it is “hard to root for” any American athlete who who expresses even such mild dissent. They piled on, with Michael Knowles declaring that Hess “actually has no place on the Olympic team. Because the point of the Olympics is patriotism…This guy hates his country, he's clearly ashamed to be wearing the flag. “

Fortunately Knowles has no role in deciding who belongs on the US team or much else of importance – and his lie about Hess “hating his country” is rejected not just by one athlete but a growing chorus of the outstanding young (and veteran) athletes on Team USA.

Indeed, over the days since Trump’s ill-advised outburst, more and more Hess teammates have spoken up to defend his right to share his views and to affirm the values he expressed – without in any way diminishing their own love of country or pride in representing the United States at the Olympics.

Among the first to stand up against the MAGA onslaught was Amber Glenn, 26, the amazing figure skater who has already won a team gold medal -- and is well known as a “pansexual” advocate for LGBTQ rights.

Glenn told the New York Times of her pride in singing the national anthem at the games, her determination to defend her community against the Trump regime, and her hope that Americans will come together behind the Olympians even as they exercise their First Amendment rights. A barrage of death threats from Trump supporters ensued, which Glenn said didn’t affect her.

“People online attacking people for speaking their minds, which is their (First Amendment) right, is absolutely absurd,” she said. “So I just hope that going forward we can be positive and support our team athletes. I’m always going to speak my truth.”

It is worth noting that several top athletes on the US team are the children of immigrants who have given heart and soul to representing their country while listening to Stephen Miller, JD Vance and other Trump minions deny their right to live here as full citizens.

On Monday, after winning a silver medal – the fourth in her career – snowboarder Chloe Kim said, “We need to lead with love and compassion, and I’d love to see more of that." A 25 year-old Californian whose parents emigrated from South Korea more than 40 years ago, she added, “Obviously my parents being immigrants, this one hits pretty close to home.” Her teammate Bea Kim, likewise a child of Asian immigrants, told reporters that while she’s very proud to wear the Stars and Stripes, she feels just as strongly that “diversity is what makes us a very strong country and what makes us so special.”

Others spoke out just as firmly, rejecting Trump’s divisive and bigoted outburst, but perhaps the most eloquent rebuke was voiced by Mikaela Shiffrin, the downhill champion widely regarded as one of the greatest Alpine skiers of all time. Quoting Nelson Mandela, Shiffrin said:

“Peace is not just the absence of conflict. Peace is the creation of an environment where we can all flourish regardless of race, color, creed, religion, gender, class, caste or any other social markers of difference.”

At 30, Shiffrin is a few years older than most of her teammates, but with those words she expressed the hopes of a generation who will long outlive this president and who hugely outnumber his bullying crew. They are the hope of a nation that yearns to be rid of Trump and Trumpism.

James Comer

"Transparency"? Why Republican Comer Won't Let The Clintons Testify In Public

Under Republican control, the aims of the House Oversight Committee are to promote partisan narratives rather than to reveal facts and advance public understanding of national issues. Rep. James Comer (R-KY), its chairman, has displayed that routinely self-serving approach in the committee’s “investigation” of the Jeffrey Epstein scandal – and especially in his zeal to subpoena Bill and Hillary Clinton.

Comer was never among the tiny handful of Republicans who demanded that the Trump administration release the government’s files on the deceased sex predator. Instead, the plodding Comer dutifully followed Donald Trump’s lead in defecting public anger over the case. Focusing on the Clintons, who know little (Bill) or nothing (Hillary) about this matter, is exactly how Trump has handled his own troubling connections with Epstein for the past several years.

With tens of thousands of mentions of Trump in the released Epstein materials, that distraction is more urgent than ever. And the Clintons somehow remain enticing targets for politicians like Comer and even some of the Democrats on his committee.

But after resisting the subpoenas for months – until it became clear that a vote to hold them in contempt would pass the House – the Clintons have flipped Comer’s script. Rather than give depositions behind closed doors, as the Republicans evidently prefer, the former president and secretary of state have demanded that the committee question them in a public hearing.

On February 5, Hillary Clinton posted this challenge on X:

“For six months, we engaged Republicans on the Oversight Committee in good faith. We told them what we know, under oath,” she wrote. “They ignored all of it. They moved the goalposts and turned accountability into an exercise in distraction.”

In a follow-up post, she urged Comer to “stop the games.”

“If you want this fight, @RepJamesComer, let’s have it—in public. You love to talk about transparency. There’s nothing more transparent than a public hearing, cameras on. We will be there.”

Comer is not about to accept that challenge, which he ignored.

First, he knows how that worked out when Hillary Clinton showed up to testify about the Benghazi terror attack for 11 hours, at the behest of his predecessor, former Rep. Trey Gowdy (R-SC) – in short, not well for Gowdy and the Republicans, who made themselves look stupid as Clinton briskly schooled them. It’s not at all clear that Comer, a simpleton often mocked in whispers by his fellow Republicans, would fare better against both Clintons.

Second, Comer is obviously planning to pursue the devious strategy that proved more successful for Gowdy during the Benghazi farce – to record the depositions and then selectively leak snippets that create a misleading impression of the testimony. That is how Gowdy abused Sidney Blumenthal, the journalist and former Clinton White House aide called to testify privately for nine hours during that inquest in 2015.

I wrote extensively about that clown show – and the complicity that Gowdy enjoyed from the New York Times Washington bureau, which eagerly lapped up the leaks – in a series of posts. Gowdy and his stooges fabricated a tale about Blumenthal’s supposed “business interests” in Libya and how they had influenced Clinton’s policy. Having invented that diverting story, the Republicans could not afford to let the public see and hear Blumenthal’s testimony demolishing it.

So despite protests from Democrats, notably the late and highly esteemed Rep. Elijah Cummings (D-MD), a much sturdier figure than the current ranking Democrat, Blumenthal’s testimony was kept under wraps – where it remains a decade later. Neither Gowdy nor his fellow Republicans wanted the public to see how they had misused their power to spread falsehoods, pursue partisan grudges unrelated to Benghazi, and generally make fools of themselves.

Will House Democrats, the Epstein victims, and the media allow Comer to get away with the same game? For all their rhetoric about “transparency,” not to mention similar high-minded blather from the Republicans, why would they permit this nonsense?

This attempt to conceal and distort the Clintons’ testimony is the latest episode in the ongoing Trump coverup – and it would be shameful indeed to allow such a deception to proceed.

Joe Conason is founder and editor-in-chief of The National Memo. He is also editor-at-large of Type Investigations, a nonprofit investigative reporting organization formerly known as The Investigative Fund. His latest book is The Longest Con: How Grifters, Swindlers and Frauds Hijacked American Conservatism (St. Martin's Press, 2024). The paperback version, with a new Afterword, will be published in February 2026.

Reprinted with permission from Creators

Forcing Clintons To Testify About Epstein Won't Absolve Missing Witness Trump

Forcing Clintons To Testify About Epstein Won't Absolve Missing Witness Trump

If the House Oversight Committee’s Republican majority – or for that matter most of its Democratic members – felt a powerful motivation to uncover the truth about Jeffrey Epstein, there are many people with far more intimate knowledge of the pedophile financier and his crimes than Bill and Hillary Clinton.

But actual facts about this monumental scandal and real accountability for its perpetrators are of little concern to Rep. James Comer, the committee chairman who has singlemindedly abused his position to focus his "investigation" on the Clintons, or the House Republican leadership. Having failed to suppress the Epstein files as ordered by the White House, they have embarked on a renewed campaign of distraction and deflection.

Even the servile Comer realizes that the most notorious potential witness is Donald J. Trump, whose name appears more than a thousand times, including very troubling allegations, in the files released by the Justice Department. With three million additional files yet to be examined, Trump’s name may appear many more times. Despite his false claim that the voluminous files somehow “exonerate” him, evidence in the public record proves that they had a long and intimate relationship during years when Epstein was abusing hundreds of underage girls – including at least one, the late Virginia Giuffre, who had worked at Mar-a-Lago.

Now Comer would surely insist that the sitting president cannot be required to testify in the House of Representatives. But historically the same has been true of former presidents, a customary stricture that Comer breezily waved aside for an opportunity to harangue Clinton and former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton – who never knew Epstein and can reveal nothing about him, but remains forever a tempting target for House Republicans with nothing better to do.

From past observation of Comer's antics, we know he is uninterested in facts and treats his chairmanship as a perch from which to smear partisan opponents. So we can be confident that he won’t subpoena Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick, Elon Musk, or Steve Bannon, all of whom have plainly lied about their chummy relationships with Epstein. He isn’t going to take public testimony from the Republican lawyers -- most notably former Trump Labor Secretary Alex Acosta -- who arranged the sweetheart plea deal that allowed Epstein to continue his depredations. (One of those Epstein attorneys was Clinton nemesis Kenneth Starr, who alas is deceased.)

The purpose of Comer's phony inquest isn’t uncovering truth. If that is the objective of anyone else on the Oversight Committee, however, those worthies should educate themselves about the basic facts concerning Clinton and Epstein. To date, members of both parties – including the committee’s ranking member Rep. Robert Garcia (D-CA) – have displayed little knowledge about the witness they threatened with a contempt citation. To assist in their edification, let’s review:

There is no evidence that Bill Clinton knew anything about Epstein’s crimes before he was indicted. Like many other wealthy supporters of the Clinton Foundation, Epstein provided the use of his personal aircraft for charitable trips abroad, including a long 2002 trip to Africa for HIV/AIDS relief. Epstein and members of his entourage accompanied Clinton for parts of that trip, along with many other staff, including a young woman later identified as an Epstein victim. She posed for a photo with Clinton and described him as a “perfect gentleman.”

There is no evidence that Bill Clinton’s relationship with Epstein continued after the sex-trafficker became a target of federal law enforcement -- unlike many well-known and powerful individuals, such as Musk and Lutnick, whose names have turned up in the files. In fact, Clinton’s connection with him ended years before Epstein’s crimes became public.

There is no evidence that Bill Clinton ever visited Epstein’s Caribbean island, the site of many of his crimes, although Trump habitually repeats that particular lie. Among those who have dispelled that claim are Epstein himself, in a disclosed email, and White House Chief of Staff Susie Wiles, who said Trump’s accusations about Clinton were “wrong.” That observation was confirmed by former Attorney General William Barr, who oversaw the 2019 prosecution of Epstein, told the committee that “in the case of Bill Clinton, so far as I was aware, there was no evidence that he visited the island. You know, the government did not obtain any such evidence.”

And Ghislaine Maxwell made the same declaration in her famous interview with Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche, at a moment when she was seeking clemency from Trump. Knowing that Trump and Blanche would want to hear the worst about Clinton, Maxwell nevertheless exonerated him fully.

“He never, absolutely never went” to Little St. James Island," she said. "And I can be sure of that because there's no way he would have gone. I don't believe there's any way that he would've gone to the island had I not been there. Because I don't believe he had an independent friendship, if you will, with Epstein,” Maxwell continued, noting that Clinton had no interest or relationship with him except as “a rich guy with the plane” to be used for “humanitarian” trips to Africa and Asia. That is assuredly what she would tell Comer if he ever calls her to testify.

As for Hillary Clinton, there is no evidence whatsoever that the former first lady and secretary of state ever had anything to do with Epstein, or that she could reveal anything about him beyond what she has read in the newspapers. At a time when dozens of significant witnesses have escaped without a summons from Comer, the subpoena her issued to her is the ultimate proof that this “investigation” is merely the latest Congressional Republican misadventure.

It’s another episode of bad faith and deception. Nobody with a functioning brain should fall for it.

Joe Conason is founder and editor-in-chief of The National Memo. He is also editor-at-large of Type Investigations, a nonprofit investigative reporting organization formerly known as The Investigative Fund. His latest book is The Longest Con: How Grifters, Swindlers and Frauds Hijacked American Conservatism (St. Martin's Press, 2024). The paperback version, with a new Afterword, will be published in February 2026.

Reprinted with permission from Creators

Trump's Sense Of Impunity Killed Renee Good And Alex Pretti -- And Will Kill Again

Trump's Sense Of Impunity Killed Renee Good And Alex Pretti -- And Will Kill Again

When top public officials and law enforcement authorities lie relentlessly to cover up misconduct, the lawless killing of innocent civilians is inevitable. That is why Alex Pretti and Renee Nicole Good – and others who have perished in the custody of the Department of Homeland Security – are dead today.

The sense of impunity that has defined Donald Trump’s life and regime is poisonous to the rule of law and encourages murder, just as he predicted when he famously proclaimed that he “could stand in the middle of Fifth Avenue and shoot somebody, and I wouldn’t lose any voters, OK?”

When he first uttered those words a decade ago, Trump was merely a candidate for president, and what he said about himself was taken as a “joke.” What that supposed jest reflected was the sense – inculcated in him by his corrupt and mendacious attorney Roy Cohn – that he could get away with anything. Extended to its maximal reach in his presidency, it has repeatedly proved lethal.

How far Trump would take his self-awarded license to kill began to emerge back then too, when he repeatedly urged supporters to “knock the hell out of hecklers at his rallies and promised to pay the legal expenses of anyone arrested for such an assault. His constant invocations of violence, up to and including killing, have long since become an expansive genre of Trump coverage. As Americans have seen in his unrestrained awarding of pardons to his most dangerously rabid and criminal supporters, the president believes that he and anyone who backs him ought to be immune from prosecution – or even criticism.

In the wake of the Minneapolis ICE killings, Trump’s appointees displayed their own sense that they would never be held accountable for anything that they say or do. Although these were scarcely the first instances when the president and his minions have prevaricated, misled, and brazenly lied, it was perhaps the most serious episode of untruthfulness in his second term.

Responding to the deaths of both Good and Pretti, the loudest voices in the White House and the Department of Homeland Security spread lies about the incidents and vicious slurs about the victims. White House Deputy Chief of Staff Stephen Miller, widely viewed as the enforcer of Trump’s anti-immigrant blitz, joined with the dumb and unqualified DHS Secretary Kristi Noem in defaming the dead as “domestic terrorists.” Gregory Bovino, the DHS official running ICE operations, told the press that Pretti, a licensed gun owner who had never drawn his weapon, had showed up to “massacre law enforcement.”

In their zeal to shape the public narrative even as they shut down and frustrated any actual investigation, the Trump regime invented versions of the deadly incidents that were clearly contradicted by video evidence. So unsustainable were their impulsive lies that Trump himself as well as Bovino and Noem were finally forced to backtrack, insisting that they now intend to unearth the truth.

Having rushed to false and fraudulent judgments, the administration can make no plausible claim to pursuing any impartial finding of fact in these alleged crimes. Attorney General Pam Bondi and FBI Director Kash Patel -- both devoid of professional qualifications for their jobs and politically tainted from the beginning -- have already offered pronouncements on these cases that befoul any probe they might oversee. They have allowed tampering at the crime scenes and behaved in ways that no honest law enforcement agency would permit in these circumstances.

Before the advent of Trump, America had started to develop a culture that prioritized lawfulness in law enforcement, that upheld accountability for police officers and others empowered to use lethal force. But we now live under a government that scorns the ethical and legal norms that most Americans cherish, even when they are imperfectly upheld. That scorn, embodied in the president himself, is a danger to all of us. Inculcated in the poorly trained, bullying ICE agents on the streets of American cities, the Trumpian sense of impunity is a public menace that will not abate until he is gone from office.

The best defenses are massive public protests demanding that the killers and their enablers be held accountable. If ICE is not abolished, then its budget must be cut and its recruitment and training practices drastically reformed. Stephen Miller should be fired, as should Gregory Bovino and most of the hierarchy of DHS, ICE, and the Border Patrol. Kristi Noem and her friend Corey Lewandowski ought to be dismissed as well – and if they are not, then Congress should move to impeach her.

Their lies kill -- and without swift action they will kill again.

Joe Conason is founder and editor-in-chief of The National Memo. He is also editor-at-large of Type Investigations, a nonprofit investigative reporting organization formerly known as The Investigative Fund. His latest book is The Longest Con: How Grifters, Swindlers and Frauds Hijacked American Conservatism (St. Martin's Press, 2024). The paperback version, with a new Afterword, will be published in February 2026.

Reprinted with permission from Creators

Why Congress Must Investigate Trump's Lies About The Hernandez Pardon

Why Congress Must Investigate Trump's Lies About The Hernandez Pardon

To ordinary MAGA voters in the American heartland — who may have witnessed the ravages of narcotics up close in their own families — the recent conduct of their favorite president must be troubling. While they may not know all the details, many have heard by now that President Donald Trump ordered deadly missile strikes against boats suspected of transporting drugs to the United States from Venezuela — and that he simultaneously pardoned Juan Orlando Hernandez, the former Honduran president serving 45 years in an American prison for trafficking tons of cocaine to our shores.

Even Fox News commentators have noticed a contradiction between Trump's wanton killing of alleged drug smugglers and his merciful beneficence toward the ex-boss of the biggest narco-state in the hemisphere. Yet Trump lapdogs in the right-wing media have tastefully refrained from examining exactly how this strange juxtaposition occurred, or the real reasons behind his actions.

So far, neither Trump himself nor Pete Hegseth, his self-styled secretary of war, have provided any evidence that the boats blown apart in the Caribbean and Eastern Pacific were transporting cocaine, fentanyl or any other narcotics — or that the people killed aboard them had committed any crimes at all. To label these attacks as "war crimes" when we have no declared hostilities with any state in the region is to elevate them above incidents of piracy and murder, which they in fact appear to be.

And while polls show that many Americans would like to see proof of White House assertions about the boat strikes, even including Congressional Republicans, too many Americans are content to see distant and foreign individuals' rights violated in the name of "fighting drugs."

Yet if Trump wants to fight drug smuggling, why did he pardon and release a convicted gangster like Hernandez, whose crimes range from election tampering and official corruption to trafficking and murder? Well, Trump and his minions — including the pardoned MAGA felon Roger Stone, who successfully advocated Hernandez's release — insist that he was a victim of "lawfare" by the Biden administration.

Indeed, Trump has repeatedly claimed that the Biden Justice Department treated Hernandez "very unfairly," without specifying how exactly he was wronged, and further explained that "many people" had urged him to issue the pardon because the prosecution was a "horrible witch hunt."

Trump's account, echoing Stone, reflects precisely none of the known facts concerning the felonious Hernandez. Not long before his indictment, his brother Juan Antonio (Tony) Hernandez, a former Honduran congressman, was convicted in a massive cocaine trafficking conspiracy. Among the charges against brother Tony, aside from assorted assassinations, was accepting a million-dollar bribe — on behalf of his presidential sibling — from kingpin Joaquin Guzman, better known as "El Chapo." Nobody has suggested pardoning Tony yet.

Perhaps that's because Tony's indictment was brought during the first Trump administration, with a prosecution team led by Emil Bove III, who represented Trump himself in private practice and was lately appointed to a lifetime position on the federal bench by his former client after serving several months in a top Justice Department position.

The enormous trove of evidence against both Juan Orlando Hernandez and his brother extended far beyond the testimony of the drug lords, killers and thugs who had sponsored their political careers. Verified exhibits included ledgers kept by the traffickers with entries of payoffs and drug transactions with "JOH," identified as Hernandez by his initials; taped phone calls and other data that discussed cash payments to him in exchange for his protection of drug routes; plus photo albums of Hernandez with cartel leaders at soccer games and other events.

To believe Trump's fantasy version is to discount all the evidence compiled by his trusted attorney Bove — and to assume that the Republican judges who oversaw the indictments and prosecutions were all somehow corrupted by former President Joe Biden. The hard truth is that Biden and the State Department in his administration coddled Hernandez, just as previous U.S. presidents had tolerated Honduran corruption for "geopolitical" reasons. There was no persecution or witch hunt.

So why did Trump pardon Hernandez? The right-wing narco boss had powerful friends close to the U.S. president, far more powerful than the loudmouthed gadfly Stone. Top industrial and tech leaders, including Peter Thiel and Marc Andreessen, and oil baron Kelcy Warren, all major Trump donors, have major interests in Honduras that benefit from Hernandez's National Party political machine.

It is a shadowy network that merits much deeper scrutiny — and possibly a congressional investigation when responsible and honest leadership returns to power.

Joe Conason is founder and editor-in-chief of The National Memo. He is also editor-at-large of Type Investigations, a nonprofit investigative reporting organization formerly known as The Investigative Fund. His latest book is The Longest Con: How Grifters, Swindlers and Frauds Hijacked American Conservatism (St. Martin's Press, 2024).

Reprinted with permission from Creators

What The Epstein Files Reveal About His 'Best Friend' And Top Republicans Who Enabled Him

What The Epstein Files Reveal About His 'Best Friend' And Top Republicans Who Enabled Him

By publicly commanding the Justice Department to investigate the “involvement and relationship” of deceased sex offender Jeffrey Epstein with former President Bill Clinton and various other Democrats, Donald Trump advertised his own consciousness of guilt. Instantly, with the zeal of a born lackey, Attorney General Pam Bondi passed Trump’s diktat down to Jay Clayton, the United States Attorney in the Southern District of New York, a reputedly honest lawyer who defiled the proud traditions of that office by echoing her unlawful orders without a peep of protest.

It was just another entry in the shameful docket that will should someday result in disbarments and perhaps worse for all involved (except Trump, who has been awarded blanket immunity by another gang of crooked Republican lawyers on the Supreme Court).

To be clear, there is no evidence at all implicating Clinton (or any of the Democrats named by Trump) in wrongdoing of any kind. There is no justification for Bondi’s farcical vow to investigate them “with integrity,” a concept and characteristic entirely unknown to her.

Indeed, the only “news” about Clinton emerged in two Epstein emails confirming again that the former president -- who once borrowed an Epstein jet for a humanitarian trip to Africa -- had “never ever ever” visited the predator’s private Caribbean island, as Trump and his flunkeys have repeatedly alleged. It’s just another big lie formulated to distract from the president’s own apparent culpability.

What we have seen in the “Trump” pages from the thousands of Epstein documents released so far is damning if not legally incriminating to him, however. “Of course he knew about the girls as he asked Ghislaine to stop,” wrote Epstein in a tantalizing 2019 email. In another the predator depicted Trump as “that dog that didn’t bark,” and noted that his “friend” had “spent hours” at Epstein’s house with one of the predator’s female victims, probably Virginia Giuffre, who killed herself last spring. In other messages, Epstein boasted more than once that he could “bring down” Trump.

What we have not seen yet is whatever has frightened the president into the madly panicked acts of falsification and abuse that he and his minions commit almost every day.

Beyond his manipulation of the Justice Department to frame his political enemies, Trump has misused his power to intimidate the handful of House Republicans who stepped forward to demand release of the Epstein files. And as in the Russia investigation, he is dangling a pardon to keep Ghislaine Maxwell quiet and supportive as the Bureau of Prisons lavishes her with special privileges in a minimum-security institution not meant for sex offenders like her.

Only Trump knows (assuming he remembers) exactly what he fears in those massive files documenting his long “involvement” with Epstein. But the disclosures to date should remind us of how deeply his partisan supporters – and top legal figures in the Republican Party – are implicated in Epstein’s long escape from justice.

Among the released emails are many messages between Epstein and his late friend Kenneth Starr whose saccharine tone induces a spasm of cringe. “Luv ya!” and "Hugs!" wrote the former Whitewater special counsel to his pal Jeffrey – in stark contrast to his dogged pursuit of the Clintons, which degenerated into a sex probe when he realized that they were innocent of any financial corruption.

As Epstein’s counsel, Starr played a pivotal role in the sweetheart plea deal, engineered by his longtime associate Alex Acosta, that enabled him to evade accountability for so long. Booted out of Baylor University for covering up a rape scandal, Starr went on to advise Trump during his first impeachment. (He also had a soft spot for other pedophiles if they shared his religion or political outlook.) Acosta was later elevated into Trump’s cabinet as labor secretary, until his gross behavior in the Justice Department as Epstein’s supine enabler forced him to resign. The names of many other Trump Republicans litter the files, notably including Steve Bannon, who advised Epstein on how to "rehabilitate" his ruined reputation.

Although it will never be investigated by Republicans like Rep. James Comer, who has subpoenaed (both!) Clintons to testify about Epstein, therein lies a matter due for investigation. How did the most notorious pedophile in recent history get away with his crimes for so long? Trump knew and did nothing – and so did his Republican mouthpieces and cronies.

Joe Conason is founder and editor-in-chief of The National Memo. He is also editor-at-large of Type Investigations, a nonprofit investigative reporting organization formerly known as The Investigative Fund. His latest book is The Longest Con: How Grifters, Swindlers and Frauds Hijacked American Conservatism (St. Martin's Press, 2024).

Democrats Are So Back! And Other Takeaways From Blue Blowout 2025

Democrats Are So Back! And Other Takeaways From Blue Blowout 2025

As Tuesday night’s blue wave crashed down on Donald Trump, he remained silent for hours, until he could restrain himself no longer.

“TRUMP WASN’T ON THE BALLOT, AND SHUTDOWN, WERE THE TWO REASONS THAT REPUBLICANS LOST ELECTIONS TONIGHT, according to Pollsters,” the president blurted defensively on his Truth Social -- just as actually existing pollsters began to explain how very present he was on ballots across the nation even though his name did not appear.

Both Trump and his party suffered a resounding repudiation in every election on November 4, from the marquee contests in New York City, New Jersey and Virginia to statewide contests for judicial and utility commission posts in Pennsylvania and New Jersey to the massive landslide support for Democrats to redraw Congressional districts in California.

In Virginia, both Democratic Governor-elect Abigail Spanberger and her running mate Ghazala Hashmi – the first Muslim woman elected statewide anywhere -- won by landslide margins, but so did the party’s candidate for attorney general, Jay Jones, who ran under the burden of a texting scandal and beat an incumbent. Democrats in the Virginia legislature expanded their majority by more than a dozen seats, ensuring that the state’s Congressional maps will be redrawn.

We shall see in coming cycles whether this promising election, whose results were historic in many respects, was indeed a turning point in America’s struggle to preserve democracy and defeat an authoritarian threat. But while anticipating the future, we can point to significant developments right now.

  • 1. The Democratic Party is back –- and more to the point, was never as weak as suggested by its poor approval ratings in recent surveys. What became clear soon after Trump’s inauguration, contradicting those “Democrats in disarray” clichés, was that voters dissatisfied with the party would nevertheless vote for its candidates in election after election. We saw that in elections throughout 2025, notably in Wisconsin where a liberal judicial candidate crushed a radical rightist whose campaign got $20 million from Elon Musk. And we saw it last night across the country, where enthusiastic turnout and swinging “independent” votes drove astonishing margins across the board.
  • 2. The touted "Trump effect" on Black and Hispanic voters wasn’t a trend and probably nothing more than a blip. Tuesday’s exit polls showed 68 percent of Latino voters supporting Democratic gubernatorial nominee Mikie Sherrill in New Jersey and 67 percent voting for her counterpart (and former Congressional roommate!) Abigail Spanberger in Virginia. In California, 69 percent of Latino voters approved Proposition 50, Democratic Gov. Gavin Newsom’s plan to redraw the state’s Congressional districts to answer Republican gerrymandering in Texas and elsewhere, while 90 percent of Black voters supported it.
  • 3. More surprisingly, male voters, and in particular younger male voters, moved sharply back toward the Democratic side in nearly every election. In Virginia, 88 percent of Black men and 55 percent of Latino men voted for Spanberger, while in New Jersey 92 percent of Black men and 61 percent of Latino men voted for Sherrill. She won male voters between 18 and 44 by double-digit margins. Younger voters in both states strongly supported the Democrats, as did younger voters (by overwhelming margins) in New York City.
  • 4. The political analysts who predicted close elections in New Jersey and elsewhere, based on polling averages that include dishonest Republican-skewed polls, were proved embarrassingly wrong. Don’t hold your breath waiting for those windbags --who constantly predict Democratic doom, even when Democrats are winning -- to confess error or correct course. The rest of us, however, can stop shrieking like Chicken Little every time some such clown sounds off. Please.
  • 5. Focusing on economic issues that unite Americans is the path that leads to Democratic victories, whether in ultra-blue New York or purplish New Jersey and Virginia. But Democrats will also come out in enormous numbers to defend democracy and aren’t afraid to fight back, as they proved in California. As Gov. Newsom noted in his victory remarks, Trump’s chief ICE goon Greg Bovino showed up to intimidate voters in his state – and only motivated a record-breaking turnout.

Finally, encouraging as this 2025 blowout is, next year will be very challenging for Democrats, who must reject complacency. Younger white males must still be won over. As Ilyse Hogue of Speaking With American Men (SAM) observed, Trump’s absence from the ballot may indeed have helped Democrats a bit by discouraging the most hostile young males from voting at all.

“The online machine that backed him in 2024 was disillusioned and fragmented,” Hogue told me, as key influencers turned against Trump for various reasons and showed little interest in the off-year elections. “While this is obviously great news that [young men] are gettable – and misogyny is not an overwhelming driver in their decision making -- I don’t want Democrats to get too comfortable.”

Joe Conason is founder and editor-in-chief of The National Memo. He is also editor-at-large of Type Investigations, a nonprofit investigative reporting organization formerly known as The Investigative Fund. His latest book is The Longest Con: How Grifters, Swindlers and Frauds Hijacked American Conservatism (St. Martin's Press, 2024).

Behind Tucker Carlson And Nick Fuentes, Neo-Nazi Skeletons Haunt The MAGA Right

Behind Tucker Carlson And Nick Fuentes, Neo-Nazi Skeletons Haunt The MAGA Right

Only on the American right would anyone feign dismay when Tucker Carlson welcomed the frothing neo-Nazi Nick Fuentes last week for a cozy and caressing interview. Long before Carlson began to establish his own white nationalist credentials, he was clearly a product of America's trust-fund country-club reactionary class, where racism and antisemitism run deep.

Until recently, however, this scion of privilege had swathed his hostility toward Jews beneath layers of cable gabble. His old Fox News broadcast first popularized a mildly sanitized version of “The Great Replacement Theory,” concocted by neo-Nazis to blame Jewish leaders for nonwhite immigration – a conspiratorial myth that has incited murderous attacks on Jewish houses of worship as well as Black churches. Carlson has promoted and sanitized antisemites like Fuentes pal Kanye West in recent years, telltale evidence of his own nasty bigotry.

So this moment of reckoning with his Third Reich sympathies is long overdue, ss the right-wing chattering class assuredly knows. What seemed truly startling at first glance however, was the defense of Carlson mounted by Kevin Roberts, president of the Heritage Foundation.

Rather than issue a rebuke or even simply remain silent -- as conservatives often do when confronted with such an embarrassment – Roberts piped up on video to protest the “venomous coalition” that censured Carlson. Ever brimming with clichés, the Heritage boss scolded that “canceling Fuentes is not the answer” and delivered his judgment that “the American people expect us to be focusing on our political adversaries on the left, not attacking our friends on the right.”

Friends? Within hours of that disastrous declaration, Roberts started backpedaling with statements highlighting Heritage’s past statements of opposition to antisemitism and reshuffling staffers who had too quickly and publicly endorsed his own bonehead remarks. By then, prominent Heritage board members were angrily denouncing his video and distancing themselves from him.

Among the offended trustess was Princeton law professor Robert P. George, who wrote: “I will not — I cannot — accept the idea that we have ‘no enemies to the right. The white supremacists, the antisemites, the eugenicists, the bigots, must not be welcomed into our movement or treated as normal or acceptable.”

Laudable sentiments, to be sure, but was it George or Roberts who more fully reflected the history of Heritage and the Republican ultra-right that the powerful foundation has so long embodied? The true answer is less uplifting than Americans might wish. For those of us who have observed the decay of “conservatism” over this past half-century, these latest eruptions of hard-core racism, antisemitism and fascism are the poisonous fruit of old roots.

Those roots were laid in the years when Heritage first became a formidable force in Washington, just as Ronald Reagan was poised to win the presidency. The Heritage leadership welcomed and promoted Roger Pearson, -- a notorious neo-Nazi propagandist and “race science” theorist newly arrived from England -- onto the editorial board of its main publication, Policy Review. Even after the Washington Post exposed Pearson in 1978 for hosting an “anti-communist” conference that swarmed with European and South American fascists as well as American neo-Nazis, Heritage leaders maintained their ties with him (although Policy Journal quietly dropped him from its masthead).

Four years later, his firm connections with Washington's Republican establishment won Pearson a letter of endorsement from the president himself, which in turn became another scandal. Yet neither the White House nor the Heritage Foundation ever renounced Pearson, choosing instead to issue feeble denials of his racism.

Strains of the diseased ideology that Pearson represented can be traced throughout the history of the Republican far right, dating back to the passionate defense of Nazi war criminals by the late Senator Joe McCarthy and the former White House aide Patrick Buchanan, whose unwholesome careers prefigured the rise of Donald Trump. The scandalous presence of Nazi collaborators in the GOP's Eastern European "ethnic heritage" groups briefly embarrassed the first Bush administration. And long before all that, the original “America First,” whose name is so proudly worn by Trump’s MAGA outfit, erected a national front for Nazi spies and homegrown fascists. Those were the original white nationalists.

Today many Republicans are no doubt sincerely alarmed by the hideous and growing cancer in their party and amid what is still somehow known as “conservatism.” This deadly sickness did not suddenly appear from nowhere and it cannot be extirpated until its history is confronted with honesty.

Joe Conason is founder and editor-in-chief of The National Memo. He is also editor-at-large of Type Investigations, a nonprofit investigative reporting organization formerly known as The Investigative Fund. His latest book is The Longest Con: How Grifters, Swindlers and Frauds Hijacked American Conservatism (St. Martin's Press, 2024).

Terrorists? Drug Smugglers? How Trump's Corrupt Pardon Promotes Criminal Networks

Terrorists? Drug Smugglers? How Trump's Corrupt Pardon Promotes Criminal Networks

When Donald Trump delivered a full pardon to cryptocurrency billionaire Changpeng Zhao last week, the president didn’t mention the enormous financial favor that Zhao bestowed on the Trump family last July – an investment of $2 billion in World Liberty Financial, the First Family’s big crypto venure.

Instead, when a reporter asked about the pardon of “CZ,” as the crypto mogul is known, Trump portrayed him as a wholly innocent victim of the Biden Justice Department, those “corrupt” and “far left” prosecutors who had targeted the president himself.

“I don't believe I ever met him,” Trump said of his crypto benefactor. “But I've been told, a lot of support, he had a lot of support, and they said that what he did is not even a crime, it wasn't a crime, that he was persecuted by the Biden administration and so I gave him a pardon at the request of a lot of good people.”

One of those good people was of course CZ himself, who commenced his pardon campaign shortly after funneling that multi-billion-dollar investment, financed by Trump’s other friends in the United Arab Emirates, into World Liberty. But the Binance boss was hardly the fall guy in a government witch hunt, to use a Trumpian trope. In fact, he committed serious crimes -- which we know because rather than mount a vigorous defense in court, with all the enormous resources at his disposal, both Zhao and his company negotiated plea deals that resulted in guilty pleas.

The Justice Department generously permitted CZ to plead to a single count of facilitating money laundering, an offense that Binance actually had committed countless times and that formed the basis of its business model. The Binance trading operation, launched in 2017, had grown within four years to become the largest crypto platform in the world by willfully ignoring and evading US anti-money laundering laws.

Zhang’s business model vindicated the warnings of blockchain critics from the very beginning: that crypto’s only obvious uses are to evade taxation and regulation -- and to facilitate crime both here and abroad. Law enforcement officials estimated that “hundreds of millions of dollars in illicit proceeds from ransomware variants, darknet transactions, and various internet-related scams” were routed through Binance to escape detection by US and international authorities.

“For years, Binance allowed users to open accounts and trade without submitting any identifying information beyond an email address,” as the Justice Department explained when it announced Zhao’s plea deal. What this meant in practice was explained in a gloating text message from one Binance executive to another: “we need a banner ‘is washing drug money too hard these days - come to binance, we got cake for you.’”

Indeed, the charging documents in the Binance case recite a litany of international malefactors who routinely exploited its services to carry out their atrocities, from child trafficking and sexual abuse of minors to narcotics smuggling and murderous terrorism. Crypto provided an easy and convenient channel for weapons dealers, espionage agents and terror organizations to evade sanctions on the outlaw regimes in countries like Iran and North Korea that support them.

The most notorious cases involved Hamas, whose leaders employed crypto accounts on Binance to covertly raise millions of dollars between 2019 and 2023 to fund its armed wing, the Izz al Din al Qassam Brigades. Not incidentally, the prosecution and seizure of scores of terrorist crypto accounts – used by Al Qaeda and ISIS as well as Hamas – occurred under the first Trump administration, overseen by former FBI director Christopher Wray and and former Attorney General William Barr.

Unlike that Trump administration, the current version encourages and excuses criminal activity, not only by clearing Changpeng Zhao but by pardoning Ross Ulbricht, whose “Silk Road” dark web entity sold millions of dollars of illicit drugs, and its regulatory leniency toward Justin Sun, another major crypto manipulator who channeled many millions into Trump family enterprises.

Trump is a crony of crypto whose only purpose is to amass billions of dollars for himself, his family and his friends. He has no interest in preventing the abuses – financing terror, abusing children, marketing narcotics – that were so crucial to the founding of a crypto economy. Remember that when you hear him and his minions smearing his critics as “domestic terrorists” or when his “war department” blows a fishing boat out of the Caribbean ocean.

Sadly, those Venezuelan fishermen didn’t figure out a way to pay off the Trumps before they went to sea. They might still be in business, like Changpeng Zhao.

Joe Conason is founder and editor-in-chief of The National Memo. He is also editor-at-large of Type Investigations, a nonprofit investigative reporting organization formerly known as The Investigative Fund. His latest book is The Longest Con: How Grifters, Swindlers and Frauds Hijacked American Conservatism (St. Martin's Press, 2024).

Let's Stop Pretending To Be Shocked That Young Republicans 'Love Hitler'

Let's Stop Pretending To Be Shocked That Young Republicans 'Love Hitler'

Insert LinkInsert LinkPretending to be “shocked” by junior Republicans revealing their inner Klansmen must be a challenge, at this late date, for anyone who has been paying attention. Perhaps some of the GOP officials proclaiming their disgust over the disclosure of thousands of racist, antisemitic, homophobic, misogynist and yes, Hitlerian texts exchanged by leaders of the National Young Republicans organization are sincere – but are they truly surprised?

Replete with primitive bigotry and fantasies of horrific violence, the messages unearthed by Politico capture the essential character of Trumpism and those attracted to it. Given what we already know about the Young Republicans, the MAGA movement, and the direction of the Republican Party in the Trump years, this latest scandal is no surprise at all.

It is not at all astonishing to learn that leading figures among Donald Trump’s political heirs profess their “love” of Hitler and their hatred for almost everyone else. The infestation of the Republican Party by neo-Nazis and their fellow travelers is a sickening and rapidly growing phenomenon that has only gotten more pronounced in recent years as party leaders averted their gaze.

Indeed, the angry protest heard from responsible Republicans in 2017, when Trump praised the “good people on both sides” after the Charlottesville neo-Nazi riot, has faded into distant memory. The outrages have grown more frequent and blatant, but Republican leaders simply ignore them – and meanwhile the neo-Nazi infiltration proceeds rapidly. Just ask Nick Fuentes, the goose-stepping Gen Z YouTuber who got his first taste of fame when he dined with Trump and Kanye West, another Hitler admirer, at Mar-a-Lago.

Remember that little scandal? Unbelievably, Trump later claimed not to know what West had said or who Fuentes is, but the unsavory pair somehow got into his private club for an intimate meeting. And although the then-former president issued a social media blast at West over his effrontery in planning to run for president, Trump never said a critical word about Fuentes.

That little hate entrepreneur – who along with most of the Young Republican Nazi sympathizers bears no resemblance whatsoever to the Aryan “master race” – has consorted with many prominent Republicans, including Georgia Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, who spoke at his white nationalist “American First Political Action Committee” conference and has hired various neo-Nazis to work on her campaigns and in her office. In that regard, Greene is hardly a MAGA outlier. Her colleague Rep. Paul Gosar (R-AZ), infamous for his fantasy animations of deadly violence against Democrats, also runs a ultra-right hiring hall on Capitol Hill.Not to be overlooked is Gosar’s fellow Arizona Republican, State Sen. Wendy Rogers, the kind of aging fangirl who shares Nazi song lyrics on X.

The notorious Fuentes visit wasn’t the last time that white nationalists or actual Nazis were welcomed onto Trump property. Candace Owens, the raving anti-Semitic podcaster recently barred from Australia, has headlined a campaign fundraiser with Donald Trump Jr. Both Don Jr. and brother Eric have appeared at the Trump Doral’s “Reawaken America” events that also featured outspoken anti-Semites and neo-Nazis. Jack Posobiec, the far-right operative who is frequently seen at Mar-a-Lago and enjoys presidential patrongage, has a long history of promoting neo-Nazis and sharing anti-Semitic propaganda on social media. Tucker Carlson, the former Fox News host and Trump confidant, another longtime fan favorite on the ultra-right, has taken to promoting Holocaust revisionism.

As for the Young Republicans -- and especially the New York state chapter -- their vile ravings in private chats were not exactly astounding either. The Manhattan Young Republicans, whose leader Gavin Wax has been blamed for this week’s chat leak due to an internecine feud, repeatedly hosted ultra-right extremists like Proud Boys founder Gavin McInnes. The club’s 2024 gala attracted such honored guests as the Berlin youth chair of Germany’s Alternative für Deutschland Party, an outfit founded and heavily laden with real live Nazis.

Only three years ago their prospective candidate for governor, upstate New York Rep Elise Stefanik, backed a foul-mouthed bigot named Carl Paladino in a Congressional primary -- an endorsement she did not withdraw even after Media Matters resurfaced an interview where the Buffalo developer described Hitler as "the kind of leader we need today." Somehow Stefanik excused his remarks as "taken out of context," but he lost the primary anyway. The point is that even Paladino, having uttered many such slurs during his public career, wasn't too extreme for the Republican who rose to the third-highest position in the GOP House conference.

So when "conservative" Republicans put on their horrified faces-- and even fire a bozo like the New York state YR chairman Peter Giunta -- it is appropriate to be skeptical or even cynical. The authentic MAGA reaction to their vile babble was voiced instantly by Vice President JD Vance, who reacted by citing a string of awful texts sent by Virginia Democrat Jay Jones, the nominee for attorney general, in which he fantasized about lethal violence against Republicans. Horrifying as Jones’s texts were, they displayed only his own immaturity and stupidity. Yet Vance seized on them to excuse the “kids” in the Young Republican chat group, most of whom are well into adulthood, with several holding jobs in the Trump administration or even elected office.

Just as there is no such organization as “Antifa,” despite the wild ravings and accusations of the Trump White House, so there is no equivalent among Democrats to the political sewer inhabited by the Young Republicans. Every Republican politician who professes to be appalled must know better by now. The filth runs too deep and too wide to be cleansed by hosing a few hapless morons.

Joe Conason is founder and editor-in-chief of The National Memo. He is also editor-at-large of Type Investigations, a nonprofit investigative reporting organization formerly known as The Investigative Fund. His latest book is The Longest Con: How Grifters, Swindlers and Frauds Hijacked American Conservatism (St. Martin's Press, 2024).

Trump Forged Gaza Deal By Dropping His Rejection Of A Palestinian State

Trump Forged Gaza Deal By Dropping His Rejection Of A Palestinian State

Donald Trump deserves ample credit for brokering the ceasefire in Gaza, the return of Israel’s hostages, and the surge of humanitarian aid that may prevent a worse catastrophe for the suffering Palestinians. Should he feel that he has not received enough praise, he will laud himself until nobody can bear to hear another word.

But among the many ironies surrounding this moment, one fact seems central: There would be no deal if Trump and his negotiating team had not abandoned their longstanding opposition to a Palestinian state – and forced the Israeli government led by Benjamin Netanyahu to accept that change against their will.

Only weeks ago, Trump denounced the European recognition of Palestine as a “reward” to Hamas for the “horrible atrocities” perpetrated on October 7, 2023. He mocked France in particular, saying that its official support of a Palestinian state “doesn’t matter” and didn’t “carry any weight.”

Yet in hindsight, the Europeans were clearly correct to insist that only the revival of a two-state solution, much mocked in the United States, would create conditions for a ceasefire and a serious peace plan. Trump undoubtedly learned as much in his consultations with his friends (and business partners) in the Gulf states and Saudi Arabia – who could not have brought sufficient pressure on Hamas to agree to the deal’s terms, including its own disarmament and sidelining, without that fundamental concession. To be acceptable to those regimes, from Riyadh to Abu Dhabi to Doha to Ankara, any resolution had to include a Palestinian state.

That is among the reasons why the 20-point agreement that undergirds this ceasefire, and today’s joyous release of hostages and prisoners on both sides, is worth reading in full. It outlines a process for rebuilding and restoring Gaza that junks Trump’s earlier schemes to throw all the Gazans out of their homes for a gold-plated Mediterranean Las Vegas.

Instead, the deal envisions a transitional period that will conclude with a “reformed” Palestinian Authority resuming governance of the strip, and pledges, in clause 12, that “No one will be forced to leave Gaza, and those who wish to leave will be free to do so and free to return. We will encourage people to stay and offer them the opportunity to build a better Gaza.”

The framework for rebuilding “a better Gaza” includes various ideas that must have appealed to Trump, including a special board of world leaders including former British Prime Minister Tony Blair that the US president will chair. Whether those details can be sustained will be seen as the region’s future unfolds.

For reasons best known to the negotiators, however, the most important clauses were reserved for last – perhaps because they depend on the implementation of the prior clauses, perhaps because they were resisted by Israel until the very end. Set down in print, they make an indisputable departure from the hard-right positions of the Trump administration and the Netanyahu government.

The existence of a Palestinian state has long been anathema not just to Trump and Netanyahu but to the Republican right in Washington. Last month, Republican members of Congress sent a mesage to our allies in Europe and Canada scolding them for recognizing a nascent Palestine. Like Trump, who deleted the GOP's traditional platform plank supporting a two-state solution, they were content to undercut the Palestinians and allow Israel free reign everywhere from Jerusalem and the West Bank to the Golan Heights.

The stark difference between then and now is stated firmly in clauses 19 and 20 of the Trump deal, which make a promise that the world will have to redeem:

“19. While Gaza re-development advances and when the PA reform program is faithfully carried out, the conditions may finally be in place for a credible pathway to Palestinian self-determination and statehood, which we recognise as the aspiration of the Palestinian people.

“20. The United States will establish a dialogue between Israel and the Palestinians to agree on a political horizon for peaceful and prosperous co-existence.”

All the parties to this deal face a long and demanding path toward those worthy goals, and their sincerity will be tested repeatedly along the way. There can be little doubt that Netanyahu and perhaps Trump too will attempt to stall and undo those historic changes. But if the American president deserves the acclaim he is receiving today, it is largely owed to his public renunciation of the hardliners in his own party and the Israeli right.

Joe Conason is founder and editor-in-chief of The National Memo. He is also editor-at-large of Type Investigations, a nonprofit investigative reporting organization formerly known as The Investigative Fund. His latest book is The Longest Con: How Grifters, Swindlers and Frauds Hijacked American Conservatism (St. Martin's Press, 2024).

Breaking With GOP, Greene Demands Extension Of Obamacare Subsidies

Breaking With GOP, Greene Demands Extension Of Obamacare Subsidies

Suddenly Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA) is displaying a strange new tendency to break with the Trump party line of her Republican Congressional colleagues --and tell the truth.

Of course Greene mostly remains the same old conspiracy monger, bigot and extremist. But as the government shutdown drags on, the far-right Congresswoman is speaking out against her own party leadership on the Affordable Care Act subsidies that Democrats are trying to save. Her apostasy may be a sign of doubt in the Republican caucus, whose constituents will suffer when the Trump budget explodes health care costs.

“Let’s just say as nicely as possible, I’m not a fan [of Obamacare]," she wrote in a lengthy post on X. “But I’m going to go against everyone on this issue because when the tax credits expire this year my own adult children’s insurance premiums for 2026 are going to DOUBLE, along with all the wonderful families and hard-working people in my district.”

Being Greene, she added her own nutso spin, noting that she considers "health and all insurance" to be a "scam," whatever that means. She echoed the Republican leadership's lie that Democrats are seeking to provide Medicaid to undocumented immigrants. “No I’m not towing the party line on this, or playing loyalty games," she wrote. "I’m a Republican and won’t vote for illegals to have any tax payer funded healthcare or benefits. I’m AMERICA ONLY!!!" To repeat the obvious, federal law prohibits the provision of Medicaid, Medicare or other government healthcare benefits to the undocumented except in a tiny sliver of emergency cases.

Why would Greene switch sides on Obamacare funding in this partisan confrontation?

Asked about her position, Greene told NBC News, “It’s important to know that I am fighting this issue because all health insurance premiums are already extremely expensive and increasing health insurance premiums is going to crush people.” Perhaps -- or maybe, as when she joined a few other dissident Republicans to demand that the White House release the "Epstein files," she prefers to be on the popular side of a divisive issue.

“It’s one of the top issues I hear about in my district,” she told NBC News on Monday. “I’m conservative and obviously want to do everything I can to reduce spending and the overall national debt... However, I am unapologetically America-first to the point of being America-only and would rather spend money on Americans, helping Americans, rather than fund foreign wars and foreign countries.” (She still wants to abandon Ukraine to the Russians -- and she has also become an implacable critic of U.S. aid to Israel's war in Gaza, another issue where public opinion is rapidly shifting.)

Whatever Greene's intentions, as a candidate for re-election or a rumored 2028 presidential hopeful, her complaint about her own party's betrayal of its populist promises sounds like a door slamming:

"Not a single Republican in leadership talked to us about this or has given us a plan to help Americans deal with their health insurance premiums DOUBLING!!!"

She couldn't have delivered a better quote for Democratic midterm advertising in 2026.

Joe Conason is founder and editor-in-chief of The National Memo. He is also editor-at-large of Type Investigations, a nonprofit investigative reporting organization formerly known as The Investigative Fund. His latest book is The Longest Con: How Grifters, Swindlers and Frauds Hijacked American Conservatism (St. Martin's Press, 2024).