Ulterior Motive Much? Shady Trumper Has Plans to Buy TikTok

Former Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin revealed Thursday that he is building an investor group to buy TikTok, which could put a major resource for young people in the hands of one of Donald Trump’s allies.

Mnuchin’s announcement comes a day after the House of Representatives passed a bill that would force TikTok’s parent company, ByteDance, to sell the platform within six months or risk it being banned from U.S. app stores. The bill flew through the House with massive bipartisan support, and President Joe Biden—who is currently campaigning on TikTok—has promised to sign the measure if it reaches his desk.

“I think the legislation should pass, and I think it should be sold,” Mnuchin, who served as treasury secretary for Trump’s entire term, told CNBC Thursday morning. “It’s a great business, and I’m going to put together a group to buy TikTok.”

Mnuchin leads the private equity firm Liberty Strategic Capital. He did not indicate which other investors he might recruit or how much he planned to offer for TikTok. During his time in the Trump administration, Mnuchin came under fire when it was revealed that some large corporations applied for and received pandemic-era loans intended to help small businesses. Prior to the White House, Mnuchin ran the bank OneWest, where he was accused of profiting off the Great Recession housing crisis by foreclosing on homes and forcing the owners out.

If the TikTok bill passes, it will likely face lengthy battles before it can be implemented. Critics, including the ACLU, have slammed the measure as a free speech violation masked as national security concern.

“Make no mistake: The House’s TikTok bill is a ban, and it’s blatant censorship,” ACLU senior policy counsel Jenna Leventoff said in a statement after the House vote. “Today, the House of Representatives voted to violate the First Amendment rights of more than half of the country. The Senate must reject this unconstitutional and reckless bill.”

ByteDance, meanwhile, appears to have no intention of selling TikTok. The platform’s CEO Shou Zi Chew has indicated that selling isn’t an option.

China’s foreign ministry spokesperson Wang Wenbin accused the United States of violating “the principles of fair competition and international economic and trade rules.”

“If so-called reasons of national security can be used to arbitrarily suppress excellent companies from other countries, then there is no fairness and justice at all,” Wang said Thursday. “When someone sees a good thing another person has and tries to take it for themselves, this is entirely the logic of a bandit.”

Mnuchin is not involved in Trump’s reelection campaign, and he was reportedly privately furious with the former president over the January 6 attack. Just not furious enough to actually do anything, apparently: While Mnuchin condemned the violence, he was careful to avoid publicly criticizing Trump.

If Mnuchin succeeds in buying TikTok, this would mean that a Trump-sympathetic Republican would sit at the helm of a major information resource. As Representative Mike Gallagher, the House bill’s Republican co-sponsor, noted Wednesday, TikTok is “becoming the dominant news platform for Americans under 30.” If Mnuchin controls the app, he could attempt to influence what information can be shared on the platform.

Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer called for new elections in Israel on Thursday, noting that Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu had “lost his way.”

In a scathing speech on the Senate floor, Schumer argued that Netanyahu had allowed his “political survival to take precedence over the best interests” of the country and criticized him for aligning with far-right extremists. He also named four obstacles on the road to a two-state solution: Hamas, Palestinian authority President Mahmoud Abbas, right-wingers in the Israeli government, and Netanyahu.

“Nobody expects Prime Minister Netanyahu to do the things that must be done to break the cycle of violence, preserve Israel’s credibility on the world stage, and work towards a two-state solution,” Schumer said.

“At this critical juncture, I believe a new election is the only way to allow for a healthy and open decision-making process about the future of Israel, at a time when so many Israelis have lost their confidence in the vision and direction of their government,” he said.

“The Netanyahu coalition no longer fits the needs of Israel after October 7. The world has changed, radically, since then, and the Israeli people are being stifled right now by a governing vision that is stuck in the past.”

Schumer has spent months in relative silence while more than 31,000 Palestinians were killed, largely avoiding publicly remarking on Israel’s war on Gaza. His comments come at a time of high pressure for Democrats, who fear they could alienate young voters on the issue if they don’t take radical action.

While Donald Trump’s legal team prepared to make arguments attempting to dismiss his classified documents criminal case, Trump was working on a new angle of his own.

In a prerecorded interview that aired Wednesday, Trump effortlessly unraveled the work of his defense team, telling Newsmax’s Greg Kelly point blank that he actually did take the classified documents, describing the process of shamelessly packing them away while leaving office.

“I took ’em very legally,” Trump said. “And I wasn’t hiding them.”

“We had boxes on the front of the—and a lot of those boxes had clothing and a lot of—we were moving out, OK? Unfortunately, we were moving out of the White House. And because we’re moving out of the White House our country is going to hell.”

“But um, we weren’t hiding anything. He was,” he added, referring to President Joe Biden having kept a box with a handful of classified documents in his garage. By comparison, the FBI seized 11,000 records at Mar-a-Lago.

The admission is just another self-induced nick in a narrowing defense for someone who clearly knew that he took privileged documents and illegally kept them.

In a July 2021 recording, Trump confessed the obvious: that he actually couldn’t have declassified the “secret” documents as he said he did because he wasn’t president.

“As president, I could have declassified, but now I can’t,” he said at the time.

“Except it is like, highly confidential. Secret. This is secret information,” Trump added at another point in the recording.

And in a June interview with Fox News’s Bret Baier, Trump claimed he was too “busy” to give the boxes back to the federal government.

“Because I had boxes. I want to go through the boxes and get all my personal things out. I don’t want to hand that over to [the archives] yet,” Trump said. “And I was very busy, as you have sort of seen. I have been very, very busy.”

On Monday, one of Trump’s former Mar-a-Lago employees, Brian Butler, anonymously referred to in court documents as “Trump Employee 5,” confessed that he had been part of an orchestrated move to transport the documents out of Mar-a-Lago and to Bedminster, New Jersey, ahead of a meeting between Trump and the Justice Department in June 2022—two months before the FBI raid at the Florida estate.

Some of Donald Trump’s campaign ads are running alongside pro-Nazi videos, meaning the former president’s campaign is helping to monetize such horrific content. And his campaign seems totally fine with it.

Trump’s ads are running at the start of certain videos posted on Rumble, a streaming platform popular with the far right, Rolling Stone reported Thursday. In the ads, Trump asks viewers to donate to his campaign.

As of Monday, the ads were playing alongside a video made by far-right commentator Stew Peters. In the video, which was posted last week, Peters calls Adolf Hitler a “hero” for the Nazi book burnings of the 1930s, a phenomenon Peters describes as “awesome.” Peters also calls for current-day book burnings and accuses Jewish people of trying to “make us surrender” to accepting LGBTQ people and sexual “degeneracy.”

Neither Rumble nor Peters responded to Rolling Stone’s request for comment, so it’s not clear how the Trump ad ended up on Peters’s video, nor how much money Peters is making off that particular post or on Rumble in general.

Trump’s campaign, however, blamed Rumble for placing the ad alongside Peters’s video. “We aren’t picking any particular video or channel to run ads on, and we are not given visibility into every single ad that is served during every video,” a spokesperson told Rolling Stone. The campaign did not say whether it had any concerns about monetizing Peters’s content or about advertising on Rumble more generally.

But it’s not surprising that Trump advertising has landed on a pro-Nazi video. Trump openly embraced authoritarianism while he was in the White House. He regularly praised various dictators and allegedly had a list of things he liked about Hitler.

And it’s somehow gotten worse during his current campaign. He has repeatedly paraphrased Hitler’s rhetoric in campaign speeches, and on Friday, he hosted Hungarian leader Viktor Orbán at Mar-a-Lago. Although he has joked about only acting like a dictator on “day one” of a potential second term, Trump and his allies are already bragging about their plans should they retake the White House.

Ironically, though, Peters is not a fan of Trump, apparently because the former president isn’t Nazi-esque enough. Peters, a Holocaust denier, has pushed anti–Covid vaccine conspiracies and called for Anthony Fauci and Hunter Biden to be hanged.

Peters has promoted antisemitism, masked as aggressive anti-Zionism, in response to the war in Gaza. And he has hosted fellow Holocaust denier Nick Fuentes and the leader of the neo-Nazi group Goyim Defense League on his show.

Trump, on the other hand, “bows to his Zionist masters,” according to Peters. He has also accused the former president of prioritizing Israel over the United States.

Donald Trump perhaps did not leave quite the splash with Russian President Vladimir Putin that he thought he did.

In an interview with state media on Wednesday, Putin glibly recounted a private conversation in 2020 in which Trump discussed the upcoming U.S. presidential election. In it, Trump could barely contain his envy upon hearing the Russian leader’s fondness for Biden, “admonishing” Putin and acting more like a jealous girlfriend than a political leader.

“This was more than four years ago. He told me that in one conversation: ‘You want him to win.’ Excuse me, I’ll say it like he did, it’s just direct speech, ‘for Sleepy Joe to win.’ He told me this when he was still president,” Putin said, according to The Daily Beast.

The answer came about after the Russian leader was asked whether his public support for Biden could be seen as election meddling. Putin maintained that Russia was not involved in election interference in the U.S. “in any way.”

Recall that special counsel Robert Mueller determined Russia had aided Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign and would likely attempt to influence American elections again. In his 448-page report, Mueller wrote that the “the Russian government perceived it would benefit from a Trump presidency and worked to secure that outcome, and that the Campaign expected it would benefit electorally from information stolen and released through Russian efforts.”

Trump has, in recent months, made several nods to his support of Russia. Last month, he used the legacy of Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny to his own benefit while refusing to condemn Putin for his murder, likening his own criminal trials for fraud and rape to the attempted poisonings of Navalny, who fought for Russian liberation.

Trump also said he told European leaders that Russia could “do whatever the hell they want” to NATO allies if the countries didn’t “pay” their “bills”—though his former national security adviser John Bolton has since cast doubt on the tall tale, claiming Trump’s disdain for the Western international alliance is very real but the details of the story are probably completely made up.

And in another signaled boon to Putin, Trump has declared that he would completely end U.S. aid to Ukraine if he were to win the general election, effectively allowing the burgeoning Western ally to fall into Russian control—at least, that’s what he described in a “friendly” private meeting with Hungary’s autocratic leader, Prime Minister Viktor Orbán.

“He (Trump) has a very clear vision,” Orbán told Hungarian broadcaster M1 on Sunday. “He says the following: First, he will not give a single penny for the Russo-Ukrainian war. That’s why the war will end, because it’s obvious that Ukraine cannot stand on its own two feet.”