Trump DOJ slammed for ‘spying on lawmakers’; Kimberly Guilfoyle tapped for job: Live

Republican Representative Mike Turner, who chairs the House Intelligence Committee, said the Department of Justice (DOJ) under the first Trump administration committed a “grave constitutional violation” when it secretly obtained phone records and emails belonging to Congressional members and staffers.

Turner attacked Trump’s DOJ for collecting communication logs from 43 congressional staffers and two House Democrats , which was revealed in a report from Inspector General Michael Horowitz.

“This report lays out outrageous behavior by the Department of Justice,” Turner told CNN on Tuesday.

“This is a grave constitutional violation.”

Between 2017 and 2018, prosecutors utilized subpoenas to demand that Apple and Google collect and hand over data, without approval from a court or from then-attorney general Bill Barr.

They then issued gag orders to prevent the companies from informing those targeted.

Federal investigators targeted two unnamed House members, congressional staffers and journalists as part of its investigation into the source of leaked sensitive information.

The president said yesterday he is bequeathing President-elect Donald Trump what he described as “the strongest economy in modern history” and “the envy of the world” while warning that efforts by the next administration to roll back his economic policies would result in great harm to Americans’ pocketbooks.

Speaking at the Brookings Institution think-tank at what was billed as a major address on the economic legacy he is leaving behind after just a single four-year term, Biden recounted how he had come into office with a “fundamentally different theory” from the “trickle-down” beliefs that have dominated economic policy since the rise of Ronald Reagan and modern conservatism in the 1980s.

Using a playbook of working to grow the US economy “from the middle out and the bottom up, not the top down,” Biden explained how he had pushed Congress to enact the American Rescue Plan Act shortly after he took office, along with the bipartisan infrastructure law he signed, the CHIPS and Science Act and the Inflation Reduction Act clean energy and climate spending package that capped his first two years in the White House.

Those record investments, he said, have resulted in a record number of applications to start new small businesses, record-low unemployment and a “soft landing” for the economy that has seen inflation retreat to pre-pandemic levels at or below two percent.

There was plenty of Trump-bashing in amongst it.

Here’s a full report from Andrew Feinberg.

Trump’s embattled nominee for defense secretary is expected to meet with more Republican senators today as he works to earn their support ahead of confirmation hearings, CNN reports.

Those senators include Idaho Senator Mike Crapo and Montana Senator-elect Tim Sheehy, with also reportedly making courtesy calls to Maine Senator Susan Collins, Louisiana Senator Bill Cassidy and Indiana Senator Todd Young.

On conservative media, you can get away from Republicans falling over themselves to absolve him of his alleged sins.

The president-elect’s health czar is pushing for his former campaign manager and daughter-in-law Amaryllis Fox Kennedy to be the next deputy director of the CIA under John Ratcliffe, according to Axios.

RFK Jr has reportedly been putting in calls on her behalf for the position in the agency she spent a decade working in and wrote a memoir about, entitled Life Undercover (2019).

The role does not require Senate confirmation.

Tom Homan attended a Christmas party hosted by the Law and Order PAC and the Northwest Side GOP Club in Chicago on Monday and told his audience the mass deportation of illegal immigrants would begin in the Windy City, according to CBS.

“Chicago’s in trouble because your mayor sucks and your governor sucks,” he said, deriding Mayor Brandon Johnson and Illinois Governor JB Pritzker.

“We’re going to start right here in Chicago, Illinois. If your Chicago mayor doesn’t want to help, he can step aside,” the ever-macho Homan continued.

“But if he impedes us – if he knowingly harbors or conceals an illegal alien – I will prosecute him.

“January 21st, you’re going to look for a lot of ICE agents in your city looking for criminals and gang members. Count on it. It will happen.”

Homan was also speaking to Dr Phil McGraw last night and told him he had plans in place for the more than 1,400 acres of Texas land in Starr County that the Lone Star State gifted the federal government last month.

“I’m writing the plan as we speak,” he told the doc. “I was working on it last night as a matter of fact.”

He went to thank Texas Governor Greg Abbott for the gesture and said he planned to use the land as a holding area for migrants before they could be put on deportation flights, according to The Daily Mail.

“The 1,400 acres of land, that saves us from acquiring the land,” Homan said.

“The government never buys things fast and when we do, we overpay for it, so having this from the state of Texas is great.”

New York City prosecutors are urging the judge overseeing Trump’s hush money trial to preserve the jury’s 34-count guilty verdict, even if it means postponing any sentencing until after his presidency comes to an end in 2029.

But Trump can’t be shielded from criminal prosecution as “president-elect,” because “president-elect immunity does not exist,” they wrote in a lengthy filing made public on Tuesday.

Even after his inauguration, Trump’s “temporary immunity” as the sitting president “will still not justify the extreme remedy of discarding the jury’s unanimous guilty verdict and wiping out the already-completed phases of this criminal proceeding,” lawyers for Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg told New York Judge Juan Merchan.

Prosecutors’ 82-page filing in response to Trump’s attempt to toss the case altogether after his election victory suggested that “at most” the judge could grant “temporary accommodations” to avoid interfering with the presidency.

But prosecutors shot down a long list of arguments from Trump’s attorneys, including their “false claims of misconduct” that have already been “examined and rejected by this and many other courts.”

The president-elect announced another slew of new appointments to his administration on Tuesday night:

• Tom Barrack, an investor and major Trump donor, was nominated to serve as Ambassador to Turkey.
• Dan Bishop, a representative from North Carolina, has been nominated for Deputy Director for Budget at the Office of Management and Budget.
• Andrew N Ferguson, the commissioner of the Federal Trade Commission, was tapped to serve as Chair of the Federal Trade Commission.
• Jacob Helberg, an author, was tapped as Under Secretary of State for Economic Growth, Energy and the Environment.
• Ronald Johnson, the former ambassador to El Salvador in Trump’s fist administration and a veteran of the US military and CIA, was named as the president-elect’s pick to be the new Ambassador to Mexico.
• Ed Martin, author of the 2016 book The Conservative Case for Trump, has been nominated for Chief of Staff at the Office of Management and Budget.
• Mark R Meador, a former fellow at The Heritage Foundation, has been nominated Commissioner on the Federal Trade Commission.

The president-elect said on Truth Social yesterday that any person or company who invests at least $1 billion into the United States will receive “fully expedited” approvals and permits – including those related to environmental approvals.

“Any person or company investing ONE BILLION DOLLARS, OR MORE, in the United States of America, will receive fully expedited approvals and permits, including, but in no way limited to, all Environmental approvals. GET READY TO ROCK!!!” Trump wrote.

Trump largely campaigned on bringing back American manufacturing – something he believes will be elevated by imposing tariffs on foreign imports.

His latest pitch is an incentivization for companies to build more in the US.

However, it is unclear how “expedited” Trump can actually make approvals, given many go through federal agencies that monitor their respective sectors.

The late-night host was putting two and two together during his opening monologue last night.

The Kimberly Guilfoyle development comes amid rumors that she and the president-elect’s eldest Donald Trump Jr have split up, after he was pictured with Florida socialite Bettina Anderson.

The couple have not yet commented on the speculation, which, if true, would mean the end of a six-year relationship and four-year engagement.

Here’s a little more on the gossip from Olivia Herbert.