Long Island federal Magistrate Judge Anne Shields on Tuesday ordered the names of the three individuals who put up former Brazilian drag queen Congressman George Santos’s $500,000 bond after he was indicted on 13 federal felonies last month to be unsealed, but gave Santos until Friday to appeal the ruling, Politico’s Kyle Cheney reports. We’re still betting the suretors are Chinese right wingers allied with that Guo Wengui scumbag, but we’ll likely find out soon enough.

True to their brand, the Gateway Pundit didn’t let facts get in the way of their “blockbuster” Monday story claiming “HUGE: Postal Service Releases Final Report – Contract Driver Jesse Morgan Vindicated – Report CONFIRMS He Hauled Trailer of Ballots from NY to PA in Late October 2020,” about some dipshit truck driver – who moonlights as a ghost hunter and a convicted felon – claiming he had driven a truck full of fake ballots from Long Island to Pennsylvania before the 2020 election.

The MAGA media covered Morgan’s claims extensively back in 2020, with Morgan even appearing on Sean Hannity’s propaganda show, but like with so many other fan fiction stories from those fraught post-election days, the thread went cold. That is until the USPS Inspector General last week released a final report on their investigation into the matter, concluding “The above joint investigation could not corroborate [redacted’s] allegation of missing ballots. The investigation is complete and submitted for closure,” which for some fucking reason gets spun into “vindication” by the Gateway Pundit. Their site is hard to read and would be even if it didn’t have so many ads for miracle prostate cures and other such bullshit in between paragraphs of gibberish written by a demented weirdo who married a teenage male prostitute he picked up in the Philippines… meaning we didn’t bother trying to parse out what the “vindication” was supposed to be in the Gatewayverse.

Saudi-backed LIV Golf announced it’s merging with the stalwart Professional Golfers Association, ending two years of legal wrangling and protests against the upstart league and likely cutting off a stream of funds for embattled former president Donald Trump, whose family has been given billions of dollars from the Saudis since he lost the 2020 election.

ESPN reports that the deal also includes a third organization, DP World Tour, with the three groups entering into a partnership to merge “golf-related commercial businesses and rights” after the current season into one organization.  Three LIV events are scheduled for Trump properties this year which will put millions of dollars of Saudi money into the pocket of an announced 2024 Republican presidential nominee after the Saudis gave Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner $2 billion for a start-up investment fund; Kushner has never run an investment fund. The Saudi foreign influence on the Trump family is unsurprisingly overlooked by GOP critics slandering Biden family members for conducting legitimate business overseas.

“After two years of disruption and distraction, this is a historic day for the game we all know and love,” PGA Tour commissioner Jay Monahan said in a statement. “This transformational partnership recognizes the immeasurable strength of the PGA Tour’s history, legacy and pro-competitive model and combines with it the DP World Tour and LIV — including the team golf concept — to create an organization that will benefit golf’s players, commercial and charitable partners and fans.”

House Majority Leader Steve Scalise on Tuesday responded to a reporter’s question about batshit Florida MAGA Congresswoman Anna Paulina Luna’s claim that the “informant” who supposedly has dirt on the Bidens fears for their life, with Scalise pretending he doesn’t know anything about it, then mumbling about how the “whistleblowers” have faced “harassment” and what not.

Attorneys for former Brazilian drag queen turned fabulous Congressman George Santos on Tuesday told the House Ethics Committee investigators they won’t reveal the names of the three individuals who put up Santos’s $500,000 bond after he was indicted on 13 federal felonies last month, despite House Ethics asking for that specifically in a letter dated May 16th, adding to the shitshow over who’s supporting this scumbag, CBS News Congressional Correspondent Scott MacFarlane reports.

MacFarlane also reported that the lawyers claim Santos “would rather surrender to pretrial detainment than subject these suretors to what will inevitably come,” which is quite a bold statement considering he could simply remand the bond to them and go to jail at any time he wants.

“The Committee on the Judiciary is continuing to investigate the Federal Bureau of Investigation’s (FBI) unprecedented raid of President Trump’s residence at Mar-a-Lago on August 8, 2022. We previously requested information and documents related to the FBI’s raid on President Trump’s residence and its subsequent investigation.’ Because you have not provided this information, and in light of your appointment of Jack Smith as special counsel, we write to request an unredacted copy of the memorandum outlining the scope of Mr Smith’s probes regarding President Trump and any supporting documentation related to his appointment as special counsel.”

“Accordingly, please provide the Committee with an unredacted copy of the memorandum outlining the scope of Special Counsel Smith’s investigations pursuant to his appointment on November 18, 2022, and any other document describing, listing, or delineating the authority and jurisdiction of the special counsel as soon as possible, but no later than 5:00 pm on June 20, 2023. The Committee on the Judiciary has jurisdiction to oversee the activities of the Department of Justice and the Federal Bureau of Investigation pursuant to Rule X of the Rules of the House of Representatives,” writes spandex-wearing grapple freak Jim Jordan in a letter to Attorney General Merrick Garland.

Sounds awfully like Jordan is trying to tee up some bullshit contempt vote for Garland to go run parallel to his moronic buddy James Comer’s plan to do the same to FBI Director Chris Wray.

Turns out former Clinton and Bush Administration Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for Intelligence Chris Mellon was being awfully cute with his Saturday Politico op-ed claiming he’s referred at least four whistleblowers with knowledge of military studies of retrieved extraterrestrial spacecraft as on Monday one of them, former Army intel officer and Afghanistan combat vet David Charles Grusch came forward in a piece in the Debrief. On the byline are Leslie Kean and Ralph Blumenthal, two of the three authors credited on the famous December 2017 New York Times report first revealing a clandestine hybrid public-private program to investigate UFOs.

Taking advantage of new laws immunizing whistleblowers with information specific to the phenomena, Grusch has filed a complaint with the Intelligence Community Inspector General and provided Congress with what the Kean and Blumenthal describe as consisting of “extensive classified information about deeply covert programs that he says possess retrieved intact and partially intact craft of non-human origin,” which Grusch says is not “about prosaic origins or identities,” like ChiCom spy balloons or hobbyist balloons mistaken for ChiCom spy balloons.

We were looking forward to Mellon backing up his claims and sure enough he was definitely aware of this Debrief piece as he’s quoted in it extensively, which was real fucking cheeky of him to sandbag with that Politico piece. Grusch does not come across like a Bob Lazar or Phil Schneider-type scam artist given his credentials as a decorated combat vet who also served with the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency and the National Reconnaissance Office – and that the former Intel Community IG is willingly representing him. That said, people are still going to be disinclined to give any credit to his very much extraordinary claims which do not yet have any publicly available evidence to back them up. And it is a hell of a leap even to those among us otherwise very much open to the idea of alien craft regularly scouting our planet out.

Fat former President Trump called for violence on Truth Social again Tuesday morning amid reports he’s facing imminent federal indictment for stealing classified documents from the White House following his humiliating defeat in the 2020 election, first writing “The Marxists and Fascists in the DOJ & FBI are going after me at a level and speed never seen before in our Country, and I did nothing wrong. Joe Biden kept (keeps) thousand of documents, in many locations, some illegally taken from skiffs while he was a Senator, a big portion of which were classified. He didn’t want to give them back, and still doesn’t. Nothing happens to him, with same reasonable prosecutor who correctly exonerated Mike Pence. I have a much different prosecutor, a Trump hater!” Note the “skiffs” since this dumbass doesn’t know how to spell “SCIF” despite being president for four years.

Then, subsequent to the above post acting like the federal criminal investigations into Hunter Biden are some kind of feint, Trump wrote “They are also going after me as RETRIBUTION for the Republicans in Congress going after them. The difference is, they have created major crimes, I have created none!” whatever the fuck that means, and finally “ELECTION INTERFERENCE!!! Don’t let it happen,” once again not very subtly calling for violence against federal law enforcement.

Titular House Speaker Kevin McCarthy tells Punchbowl News a new aid package for Ukraine is “not going anywhere” after spending limits imposed by last week’s debt ceiling bill, saying it’ll have to come out of the Pentagon’s annual appropriations, setting up what’ll be an ugly fight with the Senate Republicans who actually give a shit about defending democracy abroad.

“The speaker will never convince me that 2% below actual inflation is fully funding the Defense Department… That cannot be the position of the Republican Party without some contest here. We’re playing a dangerous game with our national security. The bill [McCarthy] produced is inadequate to the threats we face. If the Republican speaker takes the position that we’re going to be tough on China… I don’t see how we do that with a declining Navy,” said Lindsey Graham.

A Wisconsin judge on Monday refused to dismiss an ongoing lawsuit over a failed “review” of the 2020 election in the state that was shuttered last year when its main “investigator,” MAGA former state Supreme Court Justice Michael Gableman was fired by Republican Assembly Speaker Robin Vos for backing some Trump-endorsed asshole, the Associated Press reports.

Dane County Circuit Judge Jacob Frost’s ruling in the lawsuit, one of several filed still ongoing even though Gableman’s “investigation” has been shut down since August, ensures that the records cannot be destroyed while the plaintiff – liberal watchdog group American Oversight – fights to have the records come out in accordance with Wisconsin’s public records retention law. That Gableman is still fighting this probably does not bode well for him given the numerous allegations of misconduct, frivolous spending, and gross incompetence in his ultimately fruitless crusade to overturn fat former President Trump’s circa 20,000 vote loss in the state in the 2020 election.

Ukrainian officials have accused Russian forces with destroying the Kakhovka Hydroelectric Power Plant, a dam in the Kherson Oblast that provides more than 1.4 terawatt hours of power.  The destruction of the dam unleashed a torrent of water downstream, endangering dozens of Ukrainian towns and villages. The dam was also a key rail and road line over the Kakhovka Reservoir.

The Austrian Social Democrats said Monday the candidate it declared the winner of an intraparty election over the weekend didn’t actually win, and named the previously announced second-place candidate as the new head of the Party, Politico reported.

Hans Peter Doskozil, a populist governor of an eastern state, was initially named the winner of a special election held Saturday to determine the leader of the Party with 53% of the ballots, but on Monday, the Party said a data inputting error on an Excel spreadsheet incorrectly allocated votes, making progressive Traiskirchen mayor Andreas Babler the winner with 53% of the 600 votes cast. It’s unclear if Smartmatic or Dominion Voting Systems were used in the tally.

The Republican-run state school board of Oklahoma approved a plan that would fund a Catholic charter school, the first time a state charter school program approved an overtly-religious educational institution, PBS reports.

By a 3-2 vote, the Catholic Archdiocese of Oklahoma will receive state funding for the St. Isodore of Seville Virtual Charter School, which will serve students in kindergarten through high school.  Prior to the vote, Oklahoma Attorney General Gentner Drummond told the board the move would violate the state’s constitution against endorsing a religion.

Merrick Garland is the most partisan Attorney General in American history.

He has corrupted the DOJ, the FBI, and the machinery of government.

And now, out of nothing but a sense of hatred and political retribution, Garland is trying to indict Trump. pic.twitter.com/uHh6UI1bF7

— Senator Ted Cruz (@SenTedCruz) June 6, 2023

A new Yahoo News/YouGov survey finds only 23 percent of all respondents saying disgraced former President Trump should be permitted to serve again if convicted of a “serious crime” versus 62 percent who say no, he should not be. As to what “serious crime” means, 52 percent agreed “falsifying business records to conceal hush money payments to a porn star” constituted a serious offense, while 66 percent said “conspiring to overturn the results of a presidential election” and 63 percent agreed “taking highly classified documents from the White House and obstructing efforts to retrieve them” rose to that level. “In each instance, these numbers are a few percentage points higher among registered voters,” Yahoo News notes in their write-up of the poll.

Trump still leads the pack of Republican 2024 primary candidates at 52 percent versus “someone else” at 36 percent, underscoring the conundrum facing the party going into the election year.

At least two Republican members of Congress on Monday said that the “informant” who has some explosive evidence that Joe Biden took a $5 million bribe from Romania and something something is now in hiding in fear for his or her life from the kingpin of the “Biden Crime Family,” a senile old man who puts his pants on backwards on some days of the week and is a ruthless political warlord who regularly orders American citizens who threaten his regime assassinated on others.

But maybe even dumber here is the lack of imagination on the part of the fanboys pushing this line of bullshit. If such a whistleblower actually exists why can’t Boebert and the rest of these assholes just put out a call to their legions of violent MAGA terrorists to put up a hundreds-strong 24/7 armed volunteer cordon around a safe house to protect them from the malign forces of the Deep State? If their life is in danger then wouldn’t the Proud Boys, Oath Keepers, 3 Percenters and the rest of those scumbags be more than happy to make sure they were safe?

Lawyers for lying piece of shit Long Island Congressman George Santos on Monday begged a federal judge to keep sealed the identities of the mysterious benefactors who securd the former Brazilian drag queen’s $500,000 bond after he was indicted on 13 felonies last month, writing the parties “are likely to suffer great distress, may lose their jobs, and God forbid, may suffer physical injury” if their names are made public, CBS News workaholic Scott MacFarlane reports

Our guess is the bond was paid by pals of Steve Bannon’s sugar daddy Guo Wengui, himself facing a shit ton of time in federal prison after getting arrested on various felonies in March. Santos and Bannon attended an event protesting Guo’s arrest on Sunday – which was held at some mansion.

Bexar County, Texas Sheriff Javier Salazar on Monday told the Miami Herald that he’s recommended heels-wearing Florida Governor Ron DeSantis face criminal charges for suckering nearly 50 Venezuelan migrants onto a flight from San Antonio to Martha’s Vineyard last August.

“The case filed includes both felony and misdemeanor charges of Unlawful Restraint. At this time, the case is being reviewed by the DA’s office. Once an update is available, it will be provided to the public,” said Salazar in a statement. It’s not clear how likely it is the little bastard will actually get indicted over this, but damn that would be some funny shit if both he and Trump were in the barrel.

We love a good “Trump is so fucked” story as much as the next center-left news aggregator, but seriously this CNN story “Mar-a-Lago pool flood raises suspicions among prosecutors in Trump classified documents case,” published on Monday kind of sucks and for various reasons simply doesn’t hit the spot as funny, damning, and/or interesting enough for us to pick up as it is.

Yeah this is more than a little weasely of us to non-report it by deriding it. Guilty. In October 2022, two months after the FBI raid on Mar-a-Lago, an employee – one who was interviewed by federal prosecutors and admitted to helping move boxes containing classified documents to hide them from NARA and the Justice Department – was draining the pool and accidentally flooded a room containing the servers on which the security camera footage for Donald’s Floridian redoubt is stored, footage sought by prosecutors. The prosecutors weren’t exactly buying it as “accidental,” but reportedly none of the servers were damaged when the skanky piss water poured in.

And that’s the story we wanted to skip. It’s on par with The Hill’s “Trump Jr and Mueller pass each other at airport and don’t notice” on July 27th, 2018 or “Russian pop star linked to Trump Tower meeting cancels US tour,” on January 21, 2019 as just filler that does absolutely nothing to move the ball down the field with the story or even merely entertain those antsy with the lack of action.

So maybe this dumb Mar-a-Lago pool story is useful to give us some perspective on how far we’ve come since “Mueller Time,” back when we were simply desperate for a deliverance that never came until we the American voters removed the Orange God Emperor ourselves. Now every goddamned day it seems we’re getting materially closer to the REAL reckoning for his crimes (after having already been treated to a mini-reckoning in Manhattan just two months ago). We can laugh at the pointlessness of this story because it comes just hours after Trump all but confirmed in caps lock that his lawyers told him he’s about to be hit with major federal felonies for which he will die in prison if all goes right – with two more major cases over his 2020 coup attempt still likely pending.

The long-anticipated Ukrainian counteroffensive to retake territory occupied by Russian dictator Vladimir Putin’s regime may be underway, as the Daily Beast reports a shit ton of action is occurring on the eastern front. The Kremlin claimed to have fought off a “large-scale offensive in South Donetsk direction” on Monday but other, more reliable, details were scarce. A previous push by Kyiv last fall saw thousands of square miles of territory taken by Putin at the start of the invasion falling back into Ukrainian hands, culminating with the Russian withdrawal from Kherson.