The Mueller probe resulted in 37 facing charges, with seven ending up in jail so far.  After being secretly appointed by Trump Attorney General Bill Barr–Barr appointed the special counsel on October 19, 2020 but didn’t publicly disclose the appointment until December–Special Counsel John Durham’s bill has become due.

According to the Washington Post, taxpayers spent $6.5 million to finance Durham’s snipe hunt into corruption in the federal probe of Russian interference in the 2016 election, a probe Trumpians said was necessary to suss out corruption in the Justice Department.

The results:  one guilty plea for a crime not related to the Russia probe and two indicted individuals acquitted by juries of their peers.   The guilty plea was for a DOJ staff attorney changing the date on a FISA warrant renewal application on Carter Page, who was being investigated for lying to the FBI when he was not part of the Trump campaign, despite Trumpians claiming Page was a member of the Trump team.

Outgoing Republican Nevada Secretary of State Barbara Cegavske told the Nevada Independent in an interview that she declined a call from disgraced former President Trump – apparently while he was on board Air Force One – in the aftermath of the 2020 election. “I don’t remember much about it,” said Cegavske about smartly avoiding getting dragged into having to record an hour-long call with the Orange God Emperor like her counterpart in Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger.

We know there will be innumerable hearings into Hunter Biden’s alleged “laptop” when the Republicans take control of the House in January.  Every committee and subcommittee, from House Oversight to the House Subcommittee Work Group on Which Toilet Disinfectant to Use in Capitol’s Public Lavatories will hold hearings on the concocted “scandal” about Hunter Biden’s love life and business dealings in the coming Congressional session.

Democrats would be smart to ask one question every time a Republican brings up Hunter Biden’s laptop, and it will completely derail the GOP mud-throwing effort.  The question:  “Which unverified set of Hunter Biden’s laptop data are you referring to, Congressman?”

By asking that simple question–one which essentially asks the provenance of the premise of Republican outrage–Demorcrats will flummox GOP members for one reason:  they don’t know what they’re talking about… again.  How do we know?  Because there are at least five distinct sets of files being floated out there as “Hunter Biden’s laptop,” and only one of them is actually verified from a laptop that has yet to be confirmed to be Hunter Biden’s.

To switch from the awful new look for Disqus back to the old click on the menu next to your user name and hit “Classic Disqus,” an option we demanded and got from the Big D after they so dickishly added all those unnecessarily higher border radiuses to every element. What would’ve been better is if we could opt out from the admin panel so our commenters wouldn’t have to do this themselves – no doubt some folks are going to miss this PSA. That said, with it being a choice for users individually it does carry over to other sites. Switch it on here and you’ll see classic Disqus load for you at Mediaite, Breitbart, Raw Story and everywhere else.

The US House on Friday passed the $1.7 trillion omnibus spending package mostly along party lines, sending the bill to President Biden’s desk. Packed in along with the funding of government until September 30, 2023 is the Electoral Count Act reform and billions in military aid for Ukraine.

Sure looks like whatever “Real America’s Voice” fanboy is interviewing Donald on Friday is embarrassed for him, subconsciously motioning for his God-King to quiet down while the fat bastard brags he saved 100 million lives from the COVID-19 pandemic during his last year in office. Maybe it’s because it’s an outrageous claim and it will be mocked accordingly on sites like this one.

More likely it’s that, in the absolute most charitable reading of the boast there is a kernel of truth to it: That for all of his monumental failures to lead during the worst, earliest stages of the COVID pandemic Trump did understand that developing a vaccine as quickly as possible was really the only way out of it, and he did in fact authorize the government to backstop and contribute to the private sector’s efforts, which were successful. It’s not like President Hillary Clinton wouldn’t have done the same thing, but to deny Trump credit for blessing it both in politics and policy would be a lie. He did not get in the way of a vaccine like he got in the way of pretty much every other measure to combat the virus beforehand, causing the needless deaths of hundreds of thousands of Americans.

Anyway that “credit” is probably what has this dipshit host so nervous, with or without the complete bullshit exaggeration. To acknowledge how Trump did it would mean acknowledging to the MAGA freaks who watch this stupid show that Donald helped push the “deadly” and “experimental” vaccine on them, which is by far the largest political vulnerability he has with his base.

Global heroes Tomas and Hannah Mazetti, a British-Swedish couple currently residing in Sweden, have launched an online fundraiser to buy the rights to the insufferably awful 1984 Wham! song “Last Christmas” and remove it from the airwaves permanently, the Independent reports.

The fundraiser to purchase the insipid tune’s rights, currently owned by Warner Chappell Music UK and valued at between $15 million and $25 million, has a long way to go to its goal of the low end of that range, having only collected $62,100 as of Friday. Hannah was inspired by a past trauma in which she counted the song being played no less than 111 times during a single shift she worked at a cafe in Oxford, England. “Some people love to hear the song 500 times a day – and those people are our enemies,” Hannah said of the public reaction to the fundraiser which, if successful, will see the master recording for “Last Christmas” buried in a nuclear waste dump in Finland. Of course that symbolic end will not have nearly as much “wham” as the song’s concurrent permanent removal from all radio stations and streaming services, a true gift of joy and goodwill to all.

Disgraced former President Trump’s tax returns from 2015 through 2020 will be made fully public by the Democrats on the House Ways and Means Committee sometime next week in their raw form as opposed to the report on their contents published by the committee on Tuesday, Bloomberg reports.

Twitter owner Elon Musk interfered in the 2024 presidential election and helped rig it for Joe Biden on Thursday when his platform deleted a tweet by Donald Trump Jr depicting Hunter Biden naked next to Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky on the dais in the House of Representatives.

There’s literally no difference between this and the election interference by Twitter when they suppressed the story on Hunter Biden’s laptop in October 2020. It’s not up to Musk to decide whether the image is real or not. What if Hunter really did stand there naked next to the President of Ukraine, the Speaker of the House, and the Vice President? For all we know it happened quickly while the TV cameras cut away to the audience and everyone there pretended they didn’t see it.

But ultimately the question of its veracity is irrelevant. People need to make informed decisions about who they support and taking away that information amounts to no less than election interference, whether it’s a pic of Hunter Biden naked during a joint session of Congress or incriminating emails that came from a laptop dropped off at a repair shop owned by a legally blind Trump fan who changed his story several times due to memory lapses. Elon Musk was supposed to end this culture of corrupt Democrat censorship at Twitter, not continue it. Now here we are with the new boss the same as the old boss, a revolution for free speech quickly turning into a dictatorship.

National Zero will resume our regular coverage now that we’ve trolled our right wing readers with this disingenuous take on a real situation. We’re eagerly anticipating their flustered responses.

Mother Nature’s hateful campaign of Christmas terror against America will be especially brutal in Lake Erie, as the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration says the monster bomb cyclone will bring waves up to 20 feet high to second least great of the Great Lakes, NBC News reports.

The wind-driven waves won’t simply cease with the storm either, as the lake’s size and shape make it particularly susceptible to seiches, a fancier scientific term for sloshing back and forth in an enclosed body of water. The wave will go from Toledo, Ohio to Buffalo, New York to Toledo to Buffalo again and again until the energy finally dissipates probably early next week. Coupled with temperatures forecast to plunge by as much as 30 degrees in a few hours Friday morning into early afternoon in Western New York it makes for one hell of a Yuletide. Get it? Yule-tide? So clever, right?

Three people are dead and three are injured after a right wing terrorist opened fire Friday at a Kurdish migrant cultural center in Paris, the AP reports. The 69 year-old suspect, who cops say has a history of attacks on migrants, was shot and wounded before being arrested at the scene. It’s unclear at this point if the terrorist is a French white nationalist or a Turkish nationalist but either way the son of a bitch is a right winger. The attack comes just shy of a decade since a similar attack also left three activists dead at a Kurdish cultural center in the very same neighborhood. The shooter, Omer Güney, died of a head injury sustained in jail – himself quite possibly murdered – in December 2016. Güney had been suspected of links with Turkish intelligence services.

Disgraced former President Trump has been ranting since the House January 6th Select Committee released its report late Thursday night. Among the dumber things he said was “The FBI has just confirmed that it has paid MILLIONS OF DOLLARS to Twitter,” like that makes any fucking sense.

A Capitol rioter who wore a shirt bearing the words “Fags for Trump” and a rainbow flag to the insurrection was arrested Thursday in Sherman Oaks, California after an hours-long standoff with FBI agents and cops who had surrounded his home after identifying him nearly two years after the deadly insurrection wrought by assholes who couldn’t cope with Trump’s loss, NBC News reports.

It’s not clear yet what Eric Christie, who carried what appeared to be a hammer to the attack, was charged with, though it may’ve been a felony given that he had something on him. NBC’s report indicates he’s a pal of right wing Beverly Hills eyelash salon owner Gina Bisignano, MAGA famous for her defiance of COVID lockdowns who was also hit with Capitol riot charges, as well as DJ Rodriguez, they guy who tasered DC cop Mike Fanone.

Reviewing the January 6th Committee report, a CNN host notes a particular passage [p. 608] recounting Rudy Giuliani’s calls to a number of Senators and Congressman Jim Jordan after he finally reached Donald Trump, talking to the president for 12 minutes before calling around Congress to stop the certification.  And folks, this is after the attack on the Capitol by the Republican-led mob of domestic terrorists.  They were still trying to undermine the Constitution after the mob was dispersed.

In a deposition for the $1.8 billion lawsuit against his network, Trump advisor and Fox host Sean Hannity testified, “I did not believe it for one second” when he was asked if he believed the claims made by guests on his program, the New York Times reports.

Hannity’s testimony matches that of other hosts, producers and executives with the network:  they knew the conspiracy theories about voting machines pitched on their programs by people like Rudy Giuliani and Sidney Powell were nonsensical but Fox aired them anyway without attempting to verify the claims.

Others who stated, under oath, that they did not believe the Dominion conspiracy theories:  white nationalist cheerleader Tucker Carlson and Fox puppetmaster Meade Cooper, who oversees prime-time programming and presumably has some control over content.

The House January 6th Select Committee on Thursday released its long-anticipated final report to the public, all 845 pages of it. Stand by as we run string queries to find the most damning parts.

In not so many words Tucker Carlson asserted Senator Lindsey Graham’s all-but-confirmed homosexuality makes him support a “dictator” like Volodymyr Zelensky. “You don’t want wonder about what emptiness at the core of Lindsey Graham’s personal life causes him to identify so strongly with a country he’s not a citizen of. Something is going in there,” said Tucker on the second night of an ongoing tantrum over Zelensky’s address to a joint session of Congress. Yeah he called Zelensky a “dictator.” That’s a different clip . He also whined over Zelensky’s attire, spread that bullshit lie about the Ukrainian Church, bitched about Kamala Harris and Nancy Pelosi draping a Ukrainian flag on the dais. All this like Tucker doesn’t worship the ground Viktor Orban walks on.

Nearly 5% of the 238 criminals to whom Donald Trump granted clemency during his single term in office have already fallen afoul of the law again, a review by ABC News found.  While it’s not an unprecedented rate of recidivism, it’s unusual that so many have (allegedly) crimed again so soon.

Among those who have had run-ins with Officer Friendly:  Ron Paul’s grandson-in-law Jesse Benton, pardoned of the crime of filing false FEC reports; Benton had worked on campaigns for both Ron and Rand Paul as well as Mitch McConnell.  In November, he was convicted of illegally funneling Russian money to the Trump campaign.

Trump’s last, hectic days in office included issuing clemency orders to family and political friends.  Famously, Trump avoided the traditional vetting of clemency candidates done by the Department of Justice’s Office of Pardon Attorney and frequently issued pardons based on entreaties from celebrities, friends and athletes.

Hundreds of thousands of people intending to travel to family or friends for the holidays have had their plans disrupted as airlines canceled nearly 4,000 flights in advance of a major winter storm hitting most of the United States, Reuters reports.

Amtrak canceled routes from New York to Chicago and various trains that run through the midwest.  In a rare event, 20-foot waves are forecast for each of the five Great Lakes, likely disrupting shipping.

Nearly 2,200 flights were canceled for Thursday and another 1,600 have already been canceled for Friday as the Christmas holiday comes up on Sunday.  The storm is expected to disrupt travel through key airports in Chicago, Detroit and Minneapolis.

The Wagner Group, a private military force some describe as mercenaries and others as Vladimir Putin’s personal private army, increases its control on military operations in eastern Ukraine, taking over for Russian military units along the front line, Politico reports.

Owned by Russian oligarch and F.O.V. Yevgeniy Prigozhin and made up of professional military contractors commanding the brute force of tens of thousands of Russian ex-convicts released to fight in battle, the Wagner Group has operated in Syria, Libya and the Central African Republic as a defacto Russian military force under the command of Putin.

US intelligence officials say shipments of weapons and munitions from North Korea are going directly to Wagner forces in Ukraine and are being paid for directly by the Wagner Group, not Russian government accounts.  The US government designated the Wagner Group as a “military end user,” a classification that bars it from obtaining US technology, and has issued sanctions against the company and its owner.