2024 Kicks Off With Insane Number of Bomb Threats at State Capitols

Six states received bomb threats to their state capitols on Wednesday morning, forcing them to stall their newly opened legislative sessions and evacuate their capitol complexes.

Those states included Georgia, Kentucky, Michigan, Mississippi, Connecticut, and Montana. No evidence of dangerous items were immediately found, officials said.

“There have been multiple bomb threats to state capitols around the nation. So far Georgia, Kentucky, Michigan & Montana,” said Georgia’s Secretary of State Chief Operating Officer Gabriel Sterling in a statement on X. “Do not jump to conclusions as to who is responsible. There will be chaos agents sowing discord for 2024. They want to increase tensions. Don’t let them.”

While the mass threat against elected officials is certainly a shocking way to begin the year, it’s actually a part of a growing trend. Data reported by the University of Nebraska at Omaha’s National Counterterrorism Innovation, Technology, and Education, or NCITE, Center indicates that violent threats against public officials have been on the rise since they began collecting data in 2013.

In the last decade, 501 threats against public officials have resulted in federal charges, with 80 percent of those ending in convictions, according to NCITE.

“We have had an astounding number of threats against public servants for the last several years,” U.S. Attorney General Merrick Garland told a Republican-controlled congressional committee in September.

“When they are singled out, this can lead to threats of violence and actual violence,” Garland said, referring to the armed attacker who attempted to breach the FBI’s Cincinnati office shortly after the federal law enforcement agency seized documents at Trump’s Mar-a-Lago property.

“We must not allow that to happen in this country,” he added.

Several of Donald Trump’s biggest fans seem increasingly frantic about a forthcoming list divulging the names of those who traveled on Epstein’s plane and visited his various international estates.

In social media posts and public appearances, several MAGA talking heads have made it clear that Trump’s highly anticipated presence on such a list, which is expected to contain nearly 200 names, is at the front of their minds.

On Tuesday, the former president’s son turned fingers toward Bill Clinton, who has also been photographed alongside the serial rapist.

“Everyone knows Bill Clinton was on Jeffrey Epstein’s [planes] and island a lot. Literally no one is at all surprised that he’s all over the release,” Don Jr. posted on X. “What we want to know is ALL THE OTHER NAMES that the government has been hiding & running cover for. That will actually be revealing!”

InfoWars host and Trump sycophant Alex Jones also made some noise on the issue, apparently having a hard time rationalizing how the known womanizer could have been associated with Epstein.

“I will say this, if it turns out Trump ever went to Epstein Island, I will remove any support from him,” Jones said. “But I know Roger Stone very well, and I know people that know Trump well, a lot of people, I’ll leave it at that. I know women that have dated Trump, prominent women.”

“He gets devoted to one woman at a time, gets totally obsessed with them, totally nice to them,” Jones continued, apparently ignoring the fact that Trump is due for a criminal trial this year on the basis of paying hush money to a porn star with whom he reportedly had an affair.

Other conservatives seemed equally flabbergasted at the anticipated unveiling, attempting to frame a new conspiracy to avoid confronting the reality of Trump’s behavior.

“High chance that the Epstein filings will include Donald Trump’s name. Out of context, the legacy media and TDS sufferers will pretend this isn’t because he gave willing testimony against Epstein when queried and will make believe that it makes him a pervert,” posted X user @Styx666Official to much conspiratorial head-nodding.

That’s compared to the dozens of instances in which Trump was captured in photos and vidos partying alongside Epstein and Maxwell. In one video from 1992, he is seen laughing with Epstein and pointing to young women dancing at a party.* Trump also once described the pedophile peddler as a “terrific guy.”

Other MAGA headliners were so upset by the list that they ceased making any sense at all, including Tomi Lahren, who insinuated that the list includes Trump only as a diversionary tactic.

“So, what do you think they’re going to go after Trump for next to bury the Epstein document dump and all the pedophiles on it?” Lahren posted on X. “Every time they want to cover their tracks, they go after Trump.”

The list of Jane and John Does, which was formed nearly nine years ago after Virginia Giuffre filed a defamation claim against Epstein’s girlfriend and accomplice Ghislaine Maxwell, was originally set to be published on Tuesday but has since been postponed until after January 22, according to NewsNation.

Many of the names are expected to be publicly known Epstein associates, including employees of the financier. Other possible names to be unveiled could include Epstein’s victims as well as his clients and perpetrators. The latter will likely include some public figures who have already been explicitly tied to the sex trafficker, including British Prince Andrew and, of course, Donald Trump.

* This piece has been updated with a concrete example of Trump and Epstein being captured on camera together.

It seems that Israel is finally opening up to the idea of a two-state solution to its conflict with Palestine—so long as the second state is on a completely different continent.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s far-right coalition has been secretly speaking with the Democratic Republic of Congo about resettling thousands of Palestinians in the African nation, the Israeli outlet Zman Israel reported Wednesday.

“Congo will be willing to take in migrants, and we’re in talks with others,” a senior source in the security Cabinet, speaking anonymously, said.

Netanyahu and his allies floated the idea of sending Palestinians elsewhere last week, but the idea has been vehemently rejected by the international community. Moreover, Congo is unlikely to have the resources necessary to take care of such a massive influx of displaced people. More than half of the country’s population lives below the poverty line, according to the World Food Programme.

Israeli officials have made it increasingly clear in recent days that their plan is to completely eliminate Palestine. Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich said Monday that a way to solve the war was to “encourage the voluntary migration of Gaza’s residents to countries that will agree to take in the refugees.”

Separately, National Security Minister Itamar Ben Gvir told reporters Monday that the war was an “opportunity to concentrate on encouraging the migration of the residents of Gaza.”

The U.S. State Department slammed the officials’ comments as “inflammatory” and “irresponsible.”

“We have been told repeatedly and consistently by the Government of Israel, including by the Prime Minister, that such statements do not reflect the policy of the Israeli government. They should stop immediately,” department spokesman Matthew Miller said in a statement.

But it seems that Smotrich and Ben Gvir’s statements do reflect the policy of the Israeli government. Nearly all of the 2.3 million people living in the Gaza Strip have been displaced due to Israel’s unrelenting bombardment of the region. Palestinians were forced to flee to designated “safe zones,” only for Israel to bomb those areas, as well.

South Africa asked the International Court of Justice on December 29 for an urgent order declaring that Israel is committing genocide against Palestinians in its nearly three-month assault on the Gaza Strip. More than 22,000 Palestinians have been killed, the majority women and children. Some organizations, such as the nonprofit Euro-Med Human Rights Monitor, put the death toll at nearly 30,000.

Michigan’s state Republican Party is falling into complete disarray as the Michigan GOP state committee tries to remove its party chair, who claims that such a move is unlawful.

The committee has scheduled a special meeting for Saturday to vote on whether to remove Chair Kristina Karamo. But Karamo argued Tuesday that the meeting has not been lawfully scheduled, and threatened not to abide by the result of the vote.

Karamo has served less than one year of her two-year term. A 2020 election denier and ardent Donald Trump supporter, she ran unsuccessfully for secretary of state in 2022. A few months later, she was elected as the Republican Party’s chairperson.

Her short tenure has been plagued with problems. Her fellow party members have accused her of a lack of transparency and organization, autocratic rule, and even interference with county party business.

In October, Karamo revealed the party was nearly $500,000 in debt. Her opponents slammed her for seemingly failing to do anything to improve the party’s finances.

In a sign of how little support she has from her own Republicans, eight of the 13 district chairs and her own party co-chair signed a letter calling for Karamo’s ousting.

“You were chosen as chairwoman because the majority of the Republican delegates strongly respected your commitment to a new era of transparency, honesty and meaningful involvement on the part of the State Committee,” the letter said. “Regrettably, these policies no longer seem to be a priority in your administration and the Party’s financial stability is quickly deteriorating.”

Karamo pushed back, claiming Tuesday that the meeting had not been called according to party rules. She told the Detroit Free Press that the people who called the meeting “have zero legal authority to conduct business regarding the Michigan Republican Party or its State Committee.”

Under party bylaws, 75 percent of the party must vote against Karamo to remove her. If Karamo refuses to recognize the meeting and its result, it could spark a legal battle over party leadership.

Fox News host Sean Hannity has moved to Florida from New York, citing a desire to be in a state with representatives that share his ideologies.

The far-right anchor announced Tuesday that he was already settled in his new home. He had previously recorded his shows out of his home in Long Island and would go to Fox News’s Manhattan headquarters for live shows.

“I’ve been threatening now to do this for quite a while, but we are now beginning our first broadcast from my new home, and that is in the free state of Florida,” Hannity said on his radio show. “I am out. I am done. I am finished.”

“Finally, for the first time that I can think of in my adult life, I actually have representatives in the state that I’m living in that share my values.”

Florida’s Republican Party controls the state legislature and the governor’s office. This overwhelming amount of power has allowed Governor Ron DeSantis to push through multiple extreme culture-war laws.

Hannity bragged that his new home has “warmer weather, law and order, better education, more freedom, [and] better quality of life.”

The state also has incredibly high insurance premiums as climate change batters the coastline. It has rules restricting everything from what people can wear in public to what books they can read and what bathroom they can use. It has an education system that tries to argue slavery was just a job training program. And DeSantis has antagonized Disney, one of the biggest job creators in the state, setting off a bizarre legal battle.

The move also puts Hannity much closer to Donald Trump. Despite purporting to be a journalist, Hannity appears to be a close adviser and ally to the former president. Hannity appeared onstage at a Trump rally in 2018. Two years later, Hannity helped write one of Trump’s 2020 campaign ads.

One of Donald Trump’s lawyers appeared to accidentally admit that the former president may have engaged in insurrection.

Christina Bobb, a vocal 2020 election denier, tried to argue Tuesday night that voters should be able to elect anyone they want for president.

“The president is elected by the entire nation, and it should be the entire nation who determines who they want for president, whether they are guilty of insurrection or not,” Bobb said during an interview on Real America’s Voice. “It’s up to the people.”

Bobb seems to be arguing that even an insurrectionist should be allowed to run the country, which could be seen as an admission of guilt.

Trump was recently disqualified from the primary ballots in Colorado and Maine, after the Colorado Supreme Court and Maine secretary of state determined that he had engaged in insurrection and was therefore constitutionally ineligible to run for president.

The issue of his eligibility is likely headed to the Supreme Court. Trump appealed the Maine decision Tuesday, and the Colorado Republican Party has asked the nation’s high court to review their state’s decision.

Bobb’s blunder is not the first time that one of Trump’s lawyers, or even Bobb herself, has undermined one of his lawsuits. Bobb signed a sworn statement to the Justice Department in spring 2022 attesting that Trump’s legal team had carried out a “diligent search” of Mar-a-Lago and found only a few files that needed to be returned to the government.

That, of course, proved to be completely false. Bobb came under intense Justice Department scrutiny and ultimately testified in front of the grand jury in the investigation into Trump’s mishandling of classified documents.

In August, two of Trump’s other lawyers also undermined his case. Trump was arraigned in Washington on August 3 for allegedly attempting to overthrow the 2020 election. His defense stems from his claim that he genuinely believed he had won.

But outside the courthouse, attorney Alina Habba confidently stated, “I think that everybody was made aware that he lost the election.”

And just two days earlier, Trump’s lawyer John Lauro decided the best defense is just to admit to everything. Lauro bluntly confirmed that Trump had pressured Mike Pence to delay certifying the votes (which is against the law) and had tried to use fake electors (also illegal).

Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene pulled the old “I’m holding it for a friend” excuse when prompted to explain why she was listed among members of Congress with suspiciously high-performing stock portfolios.

On Tuesday, the market analysis watchdog Unusual Whales dropped its annual review of the biggest market traders on Capitol Hill. Democrat lawmakers’ outpaced Republicans’ gains in no small part due to Representative Brian Higgins’s portfolio, which outperformed the S&P 500 Index by nearly 10 times. But quite a few Republicans also made it to the list, including none other than Taylor Greene.

When questioned about appearing on the list, however, Greene pointed a finger at her son.

“I asked my team about that today, about why my name was on the list because I don’t even own any stocks, and I haven’t all of 2023,” Greene said on Fox News’s Jesse Waters Primetime.

“As a matter of fact we have to report everything, including children who are dependents of ours, and I think what was reported was actually related to my son’s account that his father and I had set up for him years ago,” Greene added.

To Greene’s credit, Unusual Whales doesn’t list any new transactions out of Greene’s portfolio for the duration of 2023, though the MAGA politician has made more than a handful of purchases since she took office in 2021 and doesn’t seem to have sold them. That probably explains why she’s ranked on the list, which measures overall returns for the year—not transactions.

But all these gross expenditures and unusually timed trades begs the question: How are our politicians making such informed choices?

Technically, it’s illegal for lawmakers to buy and sell stock based on nonpublic information. In 2012, President Barack Obama signed the STOCK Act, preventing members of Congress from trading based on details obtained through their work, like committee work or entertaining lobbyists.

But as long as a trade is reported in 45 days, U.S. legislators are free to trade however they want, even if the bills they pass or reject could influence a company’s performance and help them line their own pockets.

Pennsylvania Representative Scott Perry could be next on the chopping block, thanks to a new lawsuit by a local Pennsylvania activist.

Gene Stilp, who ran for the state House of Representatives in 2014, claims that Perry’s efforts to overturn the 2020 election results and his connections to the events of January 6 are enough to warrant a revocation of his candidacy in the state election, on the basis of the U.S. Constitution’s Fourteenth Amendment.

“Scott Perry’s own actions and efforts have awakened the application of the Fourteenth Amendment, Section Three, of the United States Constitution, which stops those who participate in insurrectionist activities from serving in certain capacities in the government of the United States,” Stilp told Penn Live.

Stilp wants Pennsylvania’s Secretary of State Al Schmidt to decide whether the unopposed Republican can stay on the ballot.

The effort comes on the heels of two historic decisions by the Colorado Supreme Court and Maine’s secretary of state to boot Donald Trump off their respective GOP primary ballots in February, a groundbreaking reversal that left some top Senate Republicans nonplussed.

Stilp filed another lawsuit against Trump last year in an effort to keep the GOP front-runner off the battleground state’s Republican primary.

Perry, who serves as the chair of the House Freedom Caucus, was “central to the planning of January 6,” according to former White House aide Cassidy Hutchinson. A major 154-page report by the January 6 committee also alleged that Perry had “material facts” regarding Trump’s efforts to overturn the 2020 election.

Since January 6, Perry has been embroiled in a three-year legal battle to keep his cell phone records out of the hands of federal prosecutors. Perry’s phone was seized by federal officials in the aftermath of the insurrection. Last month, some of the messages gleaned from Perry’s device were unsealed in a court document, then mysteriously resealed in a move the court has yet to explain, reported the Associated Press.

While Perry has not been charged with a crime related to the insurrection, several of his colleagues similarly involved in the scheme have been, with 18 of them, including Trump, facing charges related to overturning the 2020 election through voter fraud cases and the certification of votes on January 6.

New Jersey Senator Bob Menendez is on the hook again—this time for taking bribes from Qatar.

A superseding indictment, filed in a New York district court on Tuesday, accuses Menendez of waxing poetic about Qatar in an attempt to help a New Jersey real estate tycoon, Fred Daibes, secure a multimillion-dollar investment from an investment company tied to the Middle Eastern country, collecting lavish gifts in exchange for his handiwork. The charging documents include screenshots of messages between Menendez and Daibes, sending links to watches valued between $9,990 and $23,990 to the New Jersey politician along with the message, “How about one of these?”

After the politician returned from one of his trips to Qatar, Menendez googled, “How much is one kilo of gold worth,” according to the indictment.

It’s the third time the Senate Foreign Relations Committee member has been charged with corruption in the last decade.

Menendez was previously indicted in September on corruption-related offenses, in which he was accused of taking $480,000 in cash, numerous gold bars, and “luxury vehicles” from Egyptian officials in exchange for favors that included sending aid to the Egyptian military and pressuring the Department of Agriculture to protect a business monopoly in the country.

“Over $480,000 in cash—much of it stuffed into envelopes and hidden in clothing, closets and a safe—was discovered in the home,” according to the September indictment.

In 2017, Menendez was investigated after he was accused of taking campaign donations and lavish trips from a south Florida ophthalmologist. That case ultimately ended in a mistrial after the jury voted 10-2 to acquit the New Jersey congressman.

A former adviser to Donald Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign was indicted Tuesday for failing to register as a foreign agent.

Barry Bennett, who worked as an unpaid adviser to the Trump 2016 campaign, and his associate Douglas Watts were charged with violating the Foreign Agents Registration Act, or FARA. FARA requires people or entities working on behalf of a foreign government to register with the Department of Justice and report their relationships, activities, and financial compensation.

Federal prosecutors began investigating Bennett in 2021. They alleged Tuesday in court documents that Bennett “did knowingly and willfully falsify, conceal, and cover up” information in order to block the FARA investigators’ probe into his business. He and Watts are both accused of lying to investigators.

Prosecutors also accuse Bennett’s lobbying firm Avenue Strategies of submitting false information to the investigators.

Bennett founded Avenue Strategies shortly after Trump was elected. The court documents do not say what country he was working for, but Avenue’s federal lobbying disclosure records show he agreed to represent Qatar a few months after starting his firm.

The Wall Street Journal first reported in 2021 that the Embassy of Qatar paid Avenue about $3 million between July 2017 and July 2018 for work, including developing a “long-term plan to create closer ties between the United states and the State of Qatar.”

Bennett also started a group called Yemen Crisis Watch, according to the Journal. The group’s main goal was to publish ads and editorials criticizing or embarrassing Qatar’s rivals Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates. At the time of payment, Saudi Arabia and the UAE were launching air strikes and providing military support to the government of Yemen, which was engaged in a civil war against the Qatari-backed Houthis.

In October 2017, Qatar gave Avenue Strategies $250,000 specifically for “use in supporting the relief of humanitarian suffering in Yemen.” Bennett did not register Yemen Crisis Watch with the Justice Department.

This is not the first time a former Trump ally has come under scrutiny for shady ties to a foreign government. Former Trump fundraiser Tom Barrack was accused of acting on behalf of the Emirati government and then obstructing justice and making false statements to FBI investigators looking into his relationship with Emirati officials. Barrack was acquitted in November 2022.