Batshit idiot Trump lawyer Alina Habba tells the Washington Times she thinks her fat stupid client should testify in his own defense in both of his upcoming criminal trials, especially the federal one on charges he stole and hoarded classified documents from the White House, and that “he’s a fantastic advocate for himself because nobody can say it better than himself what he did and didn’t do.”

“I think that he’s very educated, very well-spoken, and he’s done nothing wrong. So when he’s done nothing wrong, you speak to that when you can and when it’s legally sound,” Habba said before hedging a bit and adding “That doesn’t mean that’s what’s best in a criminal case with a DOJ lead by Jack Smith. Every case for any lawyer is case by case, so we’d have to look at it. But am I ever concerned for Donald Trump per se? No. So when he’s done nothing wrong, you speak to that when you can and when it’s legally sound, but, again, it’s a strategy decision. It’s a legal strategy decision for the attorneys of record to decide at the moment.” There’s probably a reason Habba was outside of the Miami federal courthouse yelling with a megaphone to the crowd of Trump fans gathered rather than inside representing her client on the day he was arraigned earlier this month.

Tensions within the House Freedom Caucus have been skyrocketing lately, with at least two members approaching chairman insurrectionist Scott Perry to initiate an internal purge of those who haven’t lived up to the group’s extremist “principles,” namely Marjorie Taylor Greene, who has allied herself closely with titular Speaker of the House Kevin McCarthy, Politico reports.

“[Greene has] been critical of us for a long time,” said South Carolina MAGA Congressman Ralph Norman, not denying that the white nationalist Georgian is a problem within the group’s ranks. “There are frustrations,” said other dipshit Byron Donalds. The group is also getting sick of spandex-wearing grapple freak Jim Jordan’s allegiance to McCarthy, however as a co-founder of the Freedom Caucasians, he has a lot more internal political capital built up within the “caucus.”

Fox Business News reported on Wednesday that agents linked to Chinese company ZTE were spotted entering and exiting the site of the suspected spy base. Trump went out of his way to lift sanctions on ZTE in 2018. “President Xi of China, and I, are working together to give massive Chinese phone company, ZTE, a way to get back into business, fast. Too many jobs in China lost. Commerce Department has been instructed to get it done!” Trump tweeted at the time.

Republicans on the House Oversight Committee released testimony from two IRS former agents who claim the US Attorney for Delaware in charge of the Hunter Biden investigation lied when he testified he was ultimately responsible for the charges filed against the President’s son, the AP reports.

Greg Shapley, the only so-called “whistleblower” identified by name, stated David Weiss, the Trump-appointed US Attorney for Delaware who oversaw the investigation, told a meeting of DOJ, IRS and other investigators that he had to get any charges for Biden approved by his superiors.  That claim is directly contradicted by statements made over the course of the four-year investigation by Weiss, and more recently by Merrick Garland, the Attorney General.

Shapley and the unnamed former agent both claim officials were deferential to Biden because of his status as First Son, with the gist of their testimony being that they think Biden should have been strung up by his thumbs or some other harsher penalty than what amounts to a two-year probation-before-judgment.

Asked by horror show ringmaster and Nazi nostalgist Sebastian Gorka if he would return to Twitter now that Elon Musk owns it, multijurisdictional indictee Donald Trump continued his streak of never being honest about anything: “Well, they want me back a lot.  They want me back.  They really want me back.  The people at Twitter really want me back.  I just don’t know that I’ll do that.  Truth has become very successful.”

Already looking into a variety of misdeeds by the freshman Representative, the House Ethics Committee expanded its investigation into Republican New York Congressman George Santos to include potential unemployment insurance fraud, Roll Call reports.

In an unusual move, the Committee–comprised of an equal number of Republicans and Democrats–announced it will continue its investigation into Santos’s alleged crimes even as the Department of Justice prosecutes Santos for 13 counts related to financial fraud.  Typically, the Committee would suspend its investigations while a criminal investigation was ongoing; it did so for accusations that Florida Republican Congressman Matt Gaetz paid an underage girl for sex after trafficking her across state lines and that he showed inappropriate photos to House members in the Chamber, but it recently reopened those investigations.

One of the charges Santos faces in federal court is that he illegally collected more than $20,000 in unemployment benefits while he was collecting a salary from an investment firm his family runs.  Santos faces up to 20 years in prison if convicted of all federal charges; if the Ethics Committee finds Santos violated House rules, Kevin McCarthy will likely do nothing because IOKIYAR.

“And the crazies are taking over the world and, um, and y’know we’re not allowed to talk about it on Facebook and Google or Instagram or whatever,” an obviously completely capable contender for the Democratic nomination for president Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. says.  “It’s, ah– we’re in the apocalypse now.  This is like the dystopia that, y’know, I don’t think– I think all that’s happened was imagined for some time in the future.  If you’re like me and you read a lot of science fiction as a kid, y’know, you thought this might happen, but I thought this might happen four or five hundred years from now.”

“I’m suing Kari Lake. I’d hoped the defamation would stop after the election. I waited. I’d hoped it would stop after the first election trial. I waited. I’d hoped it would stop after the appeal. I waited. I’d hoped it would stop after the second trial. I waited. I’d hoped it would stop after she got a new job. I waited,” Maricopa County Recorder Stephen Richer posted on Twitter.  “But then I realized I AM the job. Defaming me is her path to campaign donations, speaking opportunities, and national trips.”

Per the Washington Post, Richter, a Republican, claims Lake continues to target him, blaming him personally for her loss and the election losses of other Republicans, saying that Richter rigged the vote tallies against them in her Trump-esque “there’s no possible way I lost the election I just lost” self-delusional bubble.  Lake has claimed Richter did a variety of things to engineer the Democratic wins, including, she claims, inserting 300,000 fake ballots to swing the election.  And of course, there were the bamboo ballots.

Australia’s eSafety commissioner, herself a former Twitter executive, informed her former employer that it faces daily fines of nearly half a million dollars (US) per day if it doesn’t rein in the hate speech and violent rhetoric on the platform, the Washington Post reports.

Julie Inman Grant cited Australia’s 2021 online safety law, a first in the world, in her notice to Twitter.  In a statement, She noted that it received more reports of hate speech and targeted attacks on Twitter than any other platform in the past 12 months, with the incidence of such attacks increasing significantly after Elon Musk took control.  Inman Grant also connected Twitter’s slashing of its workforce by 80% to the increase in hate speech on the platform, noting that two of the first departments decimated at the company were in the trust and safety teams.

And Hunter's plea deal too

They let everyone think those people were alive!

— Jack Poso 🇺🇸 (@JackPosobiec) June 22, 2023

Might as well be saying OceanGate CEO Stockton Rush purposely sacrificed his life and the lives of four others to distract from Hunter Biden’s plea deal and the “explosive” whatever the fuck it is now.

US Navy sources tell the Wall Street Journal that its top secret undersea microphone equipment detected the sound of the OceanGate Expeditions Titan submersible imploding shortly after communication was lost with the vessel while on its the way to the wreck of the Titanic.

Navy signals personnel had tuned in to the microphones pretty much immediately after learning that contact had been lost with the submersible. “The US Navy conducted an analysis of acoustic data and detected an anomaly consistent with an implosion or explosion in the general vicinity of where the Titan submersible was operating when communications were lost,” a senior US Navy official told the Journal in a statement. “While not definitive, this information was immediately shared with the Incident Commander to assist with the ongoing search and rescue mission.”

Our guess is the Navy are just trying to help fill in some of the gaps in the public’s understanding of what the hell happened which is fine, but what the fuck? They were fairly certain it had crumpled in on itself and kept quiet for days while stupid NewsNation had a goddamned “OXYGEN REMAINING” clock on its screen? If the whole point of keeping quiet was to protect their intel “sources and methods” we get it. So why the hell would they tell the Journal this now though?

Trump 2020 campaign “Deputy Election Day Operations Director” Gary Michael Brown, reportedly one of the quarterbacks of the MAGA Reich’s fake electoral college vote scam, testified Thursday to the federal grand jury impaneled by Justice Department special counsel Jack Smith to investigate the post-election coup plot and January 6th Capitol insurrection, NBC News reports.

Brown did not comment to media other than to say he was “starving” and needed to get a sandwich after emerging from the grand jury’s meeting room at the federal courthouse in DC.

Some of you remember Glenn Beck, the onetime CNN Headline News and Fox host famous for blackboards decorated with elaborate conspiracy theories (like this one explaining how Democrats are responsible for the Russian invasion of Ukraine) that have been widely mocked wonderfully by people like Jon Stewart.  But apparently walking up to the line of using the “n-word” in an ad for a gold purchase scam, a cry for attention from a one-time popular broadcaster banished to Podcastia:  “Call Goldline.  They’re waiting for your call at 866-GOLDLINE.  That’s 866-GOLDLINE, my n-word.”

Jacob “QAnon Shaman” Chansley tells the Arizona Mirror the federal government confiscated the iconic animal fur and horn hat he wore during the January 6th, 2021 MAGA insurrection at the US Capitol and hasn’t given it back yet. It’s not clear why they took it, seeing as how Chansley wasn’t arrested at the scene of the riot in DC but three days later after he’d already traveled back home to Arizona. So either he was still wearing it when the FBI cuffed him or they took it as evidence.

Chansley is instead shown in the Mirror profile wearing a Southwestern Native American chief-style headdress with feathers dyed red, white, and blue, but he isn’t exactly happy with it. “[Chansley] can’t find another hat like it of equal quality,” the Mirror writes in the caption.

Spandex-wearing grapple freak Congressman Jim Jordan’s “Select Subcommittee on the Weaponization of the Federal Government,” once billed as the MAGA answer to the House January 6th Select Committee investigation as an absolute fucking war machine against the FBI, the Deep State, Democrats, Soros, Big Tech, anyone other entity who thinks rules apply to the most holy and righteous America First movement and its God-like leader, former President Trump, has now been reduced to serving as a campaign stop for demented “Democrat” presidential candidate Robert F Kennedy Jr, as the anti-vax freak will testify publicly on “censorship” on July 20, Breitbart reports.

It’s not like Jim Jordan isn’t rooting for RFK Jr to run a third party campaign to help get his Lord and Savior Donald Trump back into the White House, he almost definitely is. But to allow his marquee subcommittee investigation to be used to further that effort is just such utter degradation and cuckery. We never “respected” Jim Jordan, though there was a misguided perception that he possessed at least a small fraction of the formidability of a Mitch McConnell or John Cornyn. You don’t have to like those guys to recognize they’re often effective and ruthless. Jim Jordan has been so thoroughly diminished these last six months and opening the door to fucking RFK Jr to complain publicly on how his video about some chemical in drinking water turning kids trans got deleted from YouTube is the spectacularly humiliating capper to Jordan’s implosion. What a fucking loser, lol.

US Coast Guard officials tell CNN they’ve determined that the debris found by a remotely operated vehicle on the sea bed about 500 meters from the wreck of the Titanic was indeed from the OceanGate Expeditions Titan submersible, meaning it’s likely that the five men on board, including OceanGate CEO Stockton Rush, were killed instantaneously in a catastrophic implosion.

We were might’ve ran with a joke about the Titanic claiming five more First-Class passengers, however that one of them was a 19 year-old kid, Suleman Dawood, is definitely on the outer edge of what we think is tasteful. Yeah, he was legally an adult, but just barely so and that his father plainly didn’t do his homework before writing a $500,000 check to send them both to their doom is a tragedy. Shahzada Dawood and the other three, especially Rush, kind of had it coming.

Good lord this was absolutely savage. Years of lionizing John Durham and Jim Jordan on the right and now two of their top influencers, Steve Bannon and Kash Patel, plus that fucking loser Jeffrey Clark, just demolishing them for failing to meet their deeply unrealistic expectations.

A second bald southern Republican Senator with the surname Scott could be jumping into the 2024 GOP presidential primary as the New York Times reports white collar criminal and utterly failed 2022 national Senate campaign chief Rick Scott is thinking about losing miserably to Trump too.

A DC federal court on Thursday set a July 27 plea hearing for failed Republican Michigan gubernatorial candidate Ryan Kelley on several misdemeanor charges over his participation in the January 6th, 2021 MAGA insurrection at the US Capitol, CBS News’s Scott MacFarlane reports.

Kelley, who was not one of the five candidates who were disqualified in the 2022 ballot petition forgery scam, had briefly led in the polls of the primary field – even after the arrest, but came in fourth against former B-movie actress Tudor Dixon after fat former President Trump endorsed her. Dixon was then crushed by 10 points against incumbent Dem Governor Gretchen Whitmer in November, so it’s hard to see how Kelley would’ve done much better while facing the charges.

Getting out ahead of their names being unsealed by a federal court, lying piece of shit Long Island Republican Congressman George Santos on Thursday told ABC News’s Rachel Scott the suretors who put $500,000 worth of collateral up to secure his bond are his dad Gercino dos Santos Jr and aunt Elma Santos Preven. An image of their signatures seems to kind of resemble their names.

Well it would seem that incredibly, besides that he claimed he would rather go to jail than have their names made public, Santos was telling the truth in this whole mini-saga and the suretors really were his family members. Look at him learning the value of honesty far too late to prevent him from eventually losing his seat and almost certainly spending years in federal prison.