I spoke to Sam Nunberg, Republican consultant and former Trump campaign staffer, about Trump and Mark Meadows, whose aide Cassidy Hutchinson delivered the most damning testimony yet in the January 6th hearings.
Ghislaine Maxwell is set to learn her fate this morning. If everything goes according to plan (see my coverage from yesterday about why it might not), she will be sentenced on three of the counts on which she was found guilty: sex trafficking, conspiracy, and transportation of a minor with the intent to engage in illegal sexual activity. The government has asked for a sentence of no less than 30 years. If Judge Nathan chooses to grant that, it will mean Maxwell will likely spend the rest of her natural life in jail.
Once sentenced, Maxwell will be the only person formally held to account for the crimes perpetuated—yes by her, but also by Jeffrey Epstein.
But I ask: Where are the men who should be held to account?
In a case that’s already been a rollercoaster, we encounter yet another: Today should be the eve of Ghislaine Maxwell’s sentencing, but we’re now not certain it will go forward. After Maxwell was placed on suicide watch in prison over the weekend, her lawyers have asked to delay the sentencing.
While we’re waiting to hear, I checked in with David Weinstein, former AUSA for the Southern District of Florida-turned-litigator, about what happens next, including how Friday’s overturning of Roe v. Wade might have an impact on the Maxwell sentence.
In her taped interview with the House committee, Ivanka Trump was asked about her reaction to Bill Barr’s comments on December 1, 2020 about there being no widespread election fraud.
“It affected my perspective,” Ivanka testified. “I respect Attorney General Barr so I accepted what he said.”
However, what has since surfaced is a video shot nine days after Bill Barr’s statement in which Ivanka tells a very different story.
I’ve spoken periodically to Russian model Kira Dikhtyar over the last few months to get her take on what life is like in Moscow at the moment. Hers is a perspective that is all too often missing from U.S. media coverage—that of Russian citizens.
The moment I even began to frame my first question—about what it has been like in Moscow during the war—Dikhtyar immediately stopped me. “I am right now under Russian law,” she reminded me. “We’re not allowed to call it ‘war.’ So let’s call it ‘special military operation.’”
I went back to former Trump campaign manager Sam Nunberg for thoughts from Republican World regarding what today’s Jan. 6th hearings do for the political ambitions of former Vice President Mike Pence, whose natural constituents are on the evangelical right.
Listen to our full conversation at “Vicky Ward Investigates.”
Day 2 of the January 6 hearings ushered in a veritable parade of former Trump loyalists who, in quick succession, threw their former boss under the bus. There was a chorus of voices echoing the same refrain: Not only did they not believe claims of election fraud, but they told Trump so.
To get the inside view from Trumpworld on today’s testimony, I asked former Trump adviser and GOP consultant Sam Nunberg for his 30,000-foot view.
I still really wonder why people, including Congress, give Jared Kushner a pass. Even now, I notice that there’s little outrage in the media about his testimony to Congress, aired on Thursday night, that he thought White House counsel Pat Cipollone was “whining” when he threatened to resign in light of Trump’s continued claims of a rigged election and plans for a rally on January 6. Oh, and yes—it seems likely that Kushner knew all about the serious issues at stake (after all, Cipollone was “whining” about something), but Kushner says he was too bogged down working on pardons to pay much attention. Because pardons, particularly when they include one for your father, are so much more important than bloodshed involved in storming the Capitol.
Understandably, Trump is the focus of the Jan. 6 hearings, not Kushner. But Trump is—well, Trump. Pretty much everything he does happens in plain sight. There’s not much been said so far in the hearings about his behavior that we don’t already know. But Kushner? Think about the callousness and the self-interest that was revealed by what Kushner said in his interview. A pardon for Dad, among others, was so much more important than rioting, murder, and breaking the Constitution. I have done extensive research on Kushner, and the evidence has always pointed to the very likely possibility that Kushner did not go into the government for public service but for self-service—and, almost daily, this notion gets reinforced, even after the fact.
Many people on both side of the political aisle I’ve spoken to agree with this assessment—and yet, people just shrug. They just don’t care.
And that’s a problem, partly because it’s really, really unfair.
I told you that it was important to link three different legal cases: former ambassador to UAE and Pakistan Richard Olson’s plea deal regarding lobbying of Qatar; the charges against Trump crony and real estate developer Tom Barrack of illegally lobbying the Trump administration on behalf of the UAE and lying to the FBI about it; and charges by the FBI against Trump crony Steve Wynn, who is accused of lying about acting as an unregistered agent for the Chinese. (Wynn has said he didn’t need to register and Barrack has denied the charges.) I told you to watch for more indictments by the FBI.
What I didn’t say—because it wasn’t yet in plain sight—is that new legal documents show there is a task force at work in DC expressly to stop the washing of foreign money—especially to prevent Gulf states from influencing former U.S. government officials.
As the latest exhibit of this, it emerged last night that the FBI has seized data going back to 2016 of General John Allen, one of the country’s most distinguished military men and now the president of the prestigious DC think tank Brookings (though perhaps not for much longer, given what’s going on. At the time of this writing, Allen was placed on administrative leave according to an email from Brookings, per the New York Times). The FBI claims that Allen, just like Barrack, was acting on behalf of a foreign Gulf country (this time Qatar) without registering and with potentially millions of dollars in personal upside.
With so much of the media focused on the war in Ukraine, you may have missed the really important news that Yemen—the terrorist hotbed just south of Saudi Arabia, which has been embroiled in a grim civil war for seven years, causing one of the world’s worst humanitarian crisises—has reached a truce extension.
Why does this matter?
It matters hugely for global security, the economy, the environment, and for humanity.
Here to talk about this extraordinary accomplishment and what it means is the U.S. Special Envoy to Yemen, Tim Lenderking, whom President Biden personally thanked for his efforts in getting us to the truce extension.