Apparently not afraid of being “exposed” at discovery, non-CIA agent Ray Epps is preparing a defamation lawsuit against Fox News for defamation after hours of programming falsely claiming he was responsible for “entrapping” fellow Trump fans on January 6th, the New York Times reports.

“We informed Fox in March that if they did not issue a formal on-air apology that we would pursue all available avenues to protect the Eppses’ rights,” said Epps’s lawyer Michael Teter. Since that never happened, Teter said they’re going to go ahead and file the suit in the near term.

Having been removed from the New York State financial fraud case and E. Jean Carroll’s ongoing defamation case, Alina Habba needed a way to stay on the Trump money train, and apparently Donald Trump thought she was sufficiently comely to keep around, so Habba will now be the “legal spokesperson” and counsel for the Save America PAC, the Independent reports.

“Alina has worked diligently and tirelessly on many of the witch-hunt cases that have been unfairly brought against President Trump,” the Trump 2024 campaign said in a statement.  “While the Habba Madaio Law firm will continue to assist the President in certain legal matters, Ms Habba will withdraw from the New York Attorney General’s case against the Trump Organization and President Trump and other cases, in order to devote her time to Save America and her duties as his media representative on legal matters.”

For her part, Habba looks forward to more camera time.  “It is an honor to be asked by such a leader as President Trump to help Save America. Being able to devote more time to addressing publicly his many legal matters is the privilege of a lifetime,” she said.

I propose a literal dick measuring contest 📏

— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) July 10, 2023

Claiming that the financial burden would financially damage the city–which is kinda the point–an Oklahoma judge threw out a lawsuit seeking reparations for the last three known survivors of the 1921 Tulsa mass murder of Black people by racist Oklahomans, the Washington Post reports.

Viola Fletcher, 108, Lessie Benningfield Randle, 107, and Hughes “Uncle Red” Van Ellis, 102, sought payment after surviving the attacks, which included bombings by aircraft, killing an estimated 300 people and displacing 10,000 from a prosperous Black neighborhood known as Black Wall Street.

Lawyers for the state argued it “cannot be held liable for civil disobedience, riot, insurrection or rebellion or the failure to provide, providing police, law enforcement or fire protection,” which is rather disingenuous given reports that police officers may have assisted the attacks, with on account saying the white attackers were deputized by police and told to “get a gun and get a n*****.”

An enlisted Marine is in custody and facing potential child trafficking charges after military police discovered a runaway 14-year-old girl with learning disabilities in his barracks, NBC 7 San Diego reports.  The unnamed girl was found June 28th, after having been reported missing from her grandmother’s house in a San Diego suburb.

“We can confirm that a Marine with Combat Logistics Battalion 5, 1^st Marine Logistics Group was taken into custody for questioning by Naval Criminal Investigative Services on June 28, 2023, as seen on social media July 2, 2023,” Captain Chuck Palmer of Camp Pendleton-based 1^st Marine Logistics Group told NBC 7. “The incident is under investigation, and we will continue to cooperate with NCIS and appropriate authorities.”

Local police and NCIS are working to determine how the Marine was able to get onto the base and stay in the barracks for two weeks with no one reporting her.

“Ladies and gentlemen… if you are opening a bottle of champagne, don’t do it as the players are about to serve,” Australian judge John Blom tells the crowd at Wimbledon.

The small-government, no-regulation Republicans in Utah, fresh off passing novel new regulations on social media companies that have little likelihood of enforcement, are planning to sue those platforms for harm done to children, says Republican Utah Governor Spencer Cox.

Politico reports Cox wants to hold the companies “accountable” for what he calls dangers to children “they’ve known about the dangers, some of this has been leaked out, Meta and others, very clear evidence that they knew the harms that their products were causing to kids, and that they intentionally tried to hide that information.”

Earlier this year, the Republican-dominated legislature passed legislation, signed into law by Cox, that would require social media companies to obtain a parent’s permission before a minor can sign up, to confirm a new account holder’s age, and to establish times when a minor can be on social media.  “I suspect that at some point, the Supreme Court will weigh in on this decision when it comes to restricting youth access,” Cox said Sunday.

A sidebar to our earlier report about US drones taking out an ISIS leader in Syria:  On the way to complete the mission, the trio of Reaper drones used was repeatedly harassed by Russian fighters on its route.  The Pentagon released footage showing the SU-34s and SU-35s making at least 18 passes of the Reapers, dropping flares and flying dangerously close to the remote-operated drones, causing them to make evasive manuevers.

ABC News reports it was the third consecutive day that Russian jets have impeded the routes of US drones in Syria, where US forces continue to pursue ISIS fighters in the eastern half of the country and Russians fly over the western portion in support of embattled Syrian President Bashar al-Assad’s regime.

OMG LOL🔥🔥🔥 pic.twitter.com/lyvkT87bC5

— Donald Trump Jr. (@DonaldJTrumpJr) July 9, 2023

Don Jr say Elon joke make him smile big and laugh loud! He write it in tweet! Big funny from Elon with flame picture things in text! Elon smart and funny! Don Jr like Elon tweet a lot!

In a rare instance of a Republican showing a modicum of ethics, the Republican Speaker of the Ohio state house asked a GOP legislator to resign his seat after his arrest on two counts of domestic abuse from an incident that happened hours after the legislator and Speaker appeared at a joint fundraiser, the Akron Beacon Journal reports.

State Rep. Bob Young and his wife hosted Ohio Speaker Jason Stephens and others after the fundraiser in Summit County.  At around 1 a.m., after Stephens reportedly left the soiree, Young slapped one of his guests and then when a woman who witnessed the attack attempted to call police, he took the woman’s phone and threw it in the pool, leading to a felony charge of disrupting emergency service.

That wasn’t the end:  Young fled the house before police arrived and ended up at a relative’s house at 9 a.m. Friday, causing further disruption before someone called police, who arrived after Young fled again. 

Comedian Sarah Silverman joined novelists Christopher Golden and Richard Kadrey in a lawsuit against the creator of ChatGPT claiming the creator of the artificial intelligence platform improperly violated copyrights and intellectual property rights they hold by incorporating their works into the text generators.

This is the latest legal question surrounding the recent surge in new AI content generators that utilize available performances, art, and literature to create original works that rely heavily on the styles, words and talents of others.  Artists, like the three in this lawsuit, claim the proprietary AI systems have sampled their works to create on-demand pieces.

Heels-wearing Florida Governor Ron DeSantis told a screechy Maria Bartiromo on Sunday that it was “Donald Trump’s own agencies that were colluding with Big Tech” on the “Hunter Biden censorship” and that the angry little bastard “would never allow that to happen” if he were president.

Underneath all the bullshit and hypocrisy about the “censorship” or the oversimplification of the situation, Tiny D sort of has a point: If Trump had just ordered his minions to ask around about why Twitter and Facebook throttled the story back in October 2020, he might’ve found out that the FBI had been talking to the tech companies about it. He’s not wrong to hint that Donald was too fucking lazy and stupid to put the work in on things that would’ve served his own political interests.

Well actually he is wrong to hint at it. DeSantis should just come out and hammer it hard instead of pushing these narrow, lawyerly arguments about why Trump sucked so badly. It’s just another example of why Mickey Maoist has virtually no chance to take Trump down on his own and has to simply pray that outside factors like Donald’s legal troubles end him before the primaries.

Coming off his “retirement” from the profession, now-former MAGA lawyer Lin Wood told The Messenger he’s “probably the second most persecuted person in America,” after you already guessed it’s his God, fat former President Trump. He also seems kind of suicidal, saying “I’ve long since lost any interest in living in this world. That’s not a death wish… I have an eye on my eternity.”

US Central Command press release: “On July 7, U.S. Central Command conducted a strike in Syria that resulted in the death of Usamah al-Muhajir, an ISIS leader in eastern Syria. ‘We have made it clear that we remain committed to the defeat of ISIS throughout the region,’ said General Michael ‘Erik’ Kurilla, commander of US Central Command. ‘ISIS remains a threat, not only to the region but well beyond.’ There are no indications that any civilians were killed in this strike, and the coalition is assessing reports of a civilian injury. This will disrupt and degrade ISIS’s ability to plan and conduct terror attacks. However, CENTCOM’s operations against ISIS, alongside partner forces in Iraq and Syria, will continue in order to achieve the group’s enduring defeat. The strike on Friday was conducted by the same MQ-9s that had, earlier in the day, been harassed by Russian aircraft in an encounter that had lasted almost two hours.”

To counter the recent Supreme Court decision banning race-based criteria in admission decisions, one of the parties in the case, the University of North Carolina will waive tuition for in-state students from families with a household income under $80,000, ABC News reports.

“Our responsibility to comply with the law does not mean we will abandon our fundamental values as a university. We are and will remain passionately public, and we will ensure that every student who earns admission to Carolina can come here and thrive. Our University’s commitment to access and affordability and supporting a culture of belonging for everyone does not change with last week’s ruling,” UNC Chancellor Kevin Guskiewicz said in a statement.

With his alleged emergency coke supply confiscated by the White House Police, poor Junior seems to have his fuel at zero as he interviews annoying habitual liar Ronny Jackson, the delusional, drug pushing former White House physician who now represents a desolate part of Texas in the House.

The Clare County (Michigan) GOP is in even more disarray than the national Party:  Police had to be called to the Saturday meeting of the state committee at the local Doherty Hotel after a physical confrontation between two of the members turned comical, according to the Detroit News.

After being told that they would be excluded from the committee members-only meeting, a group of Party members gathered in the hallway outside the meeting room, trying to eavesdrop on the meeting.  When one of them tried the doorknob to check if the door was locked, Mark DeYoung, the county chairman, went to the door to see who was trying to get in.  As he approached the door, someone on the outside flashed The Finger to him. But things escalated when DeYoung opened the door.

“He kicked me in my balls as soon as I opened the door,” DeYoung said of James Chapman, a Republican from Wayne County who had been in the hall.  Chapman then ran at DeYoung, DeYoung claims, slamming him into chairs set up in the meeting room.  Chapman claims DeYoung yelled, “I’m going to kick your ass!”  Both men deny starting the fight that led someone to call police.

Adam Frisch, the Democrat who came within 546 votes of unseating Republican wannabe social media influencer Lauren Boebert, raised more than $2.6 million in the second quarter, a record amount for a challenger to a House incumbent, Colorado Politics reports.

“Boebert continues to vote against the interests of her constituents while devoting her time to ‘angertainment’ antics that do nothing to help CO-3,” Frisch said in a statement. “We can do better than Boebert, and thanks to our generous supporters, we will defeat her in 2024.”

In the first quarter, Frisch outraised Boebert by $1 million, $1.75 million t0 Boebert’s $763,000 in a district that was considered a solid Red in 2022 but has been listed by both Democratic and Republican House Campaign Committees as a seat vulnerable for flipping.

Nevermind the fact that the US Attorney assigned to the case is a Donald Trump appointee who had complete control over the investigation and charging decisions.  Nevermind the fact that the investigation extends back five years into the Trump administration.  And nevermind that the charges in the plea deal are so rarely filed, it looks like prosecutor crafted the deal to ensure the son of the President was charged with something.

According to the Associated Press, the Three Stooges of House committee chairs–Jim Jordan (Judiciary), James Comer (Oversight) and Jason Smith (Ways & Means)–continue the weaponization of government by launching yet another investigation into investigators in an obvious attempt at intimidating government officials to bow to their political pressure.  Despite multiple reassurances and sworn testimony by Attorney General Merrick Garland and Trump-appointed US Attorney for Delaware David Weiss that there was no political pressure put on Weiss by the Administration, the trio intend to call for testimony from officials from the Justice Department, Internal Revenue Service and the FBI.

“Ron DeSanctimonious is desperately trying to get out of the Presidential race, while at the same time saving face for 2028, where he has been greatly damaged. Jeff Roe, Ron’s boss despite having a terrible record of winning, is spending money like a wild man gone bad. Much of the money being used was raised for his Gubernatorial race, and transferred over (illegally?) because his Presidential donors have largely fled do [sic] to his terrible, and still falling, poll numbers. Ron is just wasting time!

“Steve Cortes, the Ron DeSanctimonious top political strategist, thinks that Ron should get out NOW, while the getting is still good. He also said (thank you Steve!) that Donald J. Trump is the best Presidential debater ever, and can’t be beaten at the debate game. Well, based on that, maybe I should enter the debates – But, then again, when you have a 40 to 50 point lead over the field, maybe I shouldn’t???”

It should be noted that Cortes’s compliments for Trump that Trump notes came while Cortes worked on Trump’s 2016 and 2020 campaigns, when he was paid to puff up Trump’s fragile ego, before Cortes joined the DeSantis 2024 campaign.