Trump Adviser’s Twitter DMs Expose Deep Plot to Overturn 2020 Election

One of Trump’s election fraud lawyers, Kenneth Chesebro, just had his Twitter DMs and emails turned over to Michigan prosecutors as part of search warrants in their ongoing investigation into plots to overturn the 2020 presidential election in their state. And it’s not looking good for him.

According to CNN, who got ahold of some of the documents, Chesebro’s emails show that he tried to bring some far-right celebrities to Washington, D.C. on January 6, 2021, so they could witnessTrump winning the election thanks to Chesbro’s fake electors strategy. The MAGA stars he tried to entice with free airfare and stays at Trump’s D.C. hotel included former Milwaukee County Sheriff David Clarke and the founder of the Gateway Pundit website, Jim Hoft. But none of them took him up on the offer.

“It would help to publicize that if [Mike Pence] claims the power to resolve disputes about the electoral votes on Jan. 6, he’d simply be doing what (Thomas) Jefferson did,” Chesebro told Hoft in a Twitter direct message on December 27, 2020.

“Excellent!! Thanks,” came the reply from the @GatewayPundit account. Chesebro told Hoft two days later that he had reserved a block of rooms at the Trump International Hotel, and that Hoft could stay there “gratis” if he wanted.

Chesebro was trying to get right-wing pundits and influencers to promote his theories on subverting the election, while advising the Trump campaign on the very same thing. He also specifically targeted people from the swing-state of Wisconsin, including James Wigderson, who ran a conservative news site in the state, and local radio host Vicki McKenna.

“You can spare me this stuff. Thanks. Trump lost,” Wigderson replied to Chesebro, later adding, “I really don’t have time for conspiracy theories. Thanks for understanding.”

It’s not the first time Chesebro has been embarrassed by his private communications. In February, he was found to have been hiding and lying about a secret Twitter account, prompting the search warrants. The release of his text messages from a legal settlement in March also yielded embarrassing evidence of Chesebro’s deep involvement in Trump’s plot to overthrow the election, which included blaming Pence for the January 6 riots.

Chesebro was indicted in the Georgia election fraud case, but made a last-minute deal to cooperate with prosecutors. These new revelations will probably not help him avoid further charges and prosecution, though, as he and other members of Trump’s team were directly involved in Michigan’s fake electors plot.

Former U.S. Attorney General Bill Barr revealed that Donald Trump would often remark about executing people during his time in the White House.

“I actually don’t remember him saying ‘executing,’ but I wouldn’t dispute it, you know,” Barr told CNN’s Kaitlan Collins on Friday. “The president would lose his temper and say things like that. I doubt he would’ve actually carried it out.”

“He would say things similar to that on occasions to blow off steam. But I wouldn’t take them literally every time he did it,” Barr added. “At the end of the day, it wouldn’t be carried out and you could talk sense into him.”

Trump’s remarks in the White House about killing people have been corroborated by other White House staffers, including former White House communications director Alyssa Farah Griffin on ABC’s The View in December.

Trump hasn’t held his tongue post-presidency either. In September, Trump said in a Truth Social post that Mark Milley, former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, should be executed for treason over two phone calls the general made to the Chinese government. In late March, Trump also posted a video of Joe Biden hog-tied in the back of a pickup truck. Meanwhile, his legal team is arguing before the Supreme Court that a president could be immune from prosecution even if he orders SEAL 6 to assassinate his rival.

Despite all of this, Barr recently endorsed Trump in the 2024 election, even after expressing numerous criticisms and misgivings about the former president’s tenure and temperament. He’s called the former president a “consummate narcissist” whose second term would be “chaos” and a “horror show.” In June, he said, “Should we be putting someone like this forward as the leader of the country, leader of the free world?”

“He will always put his own interests, and gratifying his own ego, ahead of everything else, including the country’s interest, there’s no question about it,” Barr told CBS’s Face the Nation at the time. And even after Barr’s endorsement, Trump brutally mocked his former cabinet member in a Truth Social post and blamed him for failing to overturn the 2020 election.

Fox News is facing another bombshell defamation lawsuit, this time featuring accusations from Hunter Biden.

A letter sent to the network and obtained Monday by NBC News revealed that the president’s son will be filing a lawsuit against the conservative media behemoth “imminently,” alleging “conspiracy and subsequent actions to defame Mr. Biden and paint him in a false light.” The letter was dated April 23 with a request that Fox respond by April 26, which they did not. It’s the second such attempt by Biden’s legal team to reach Fox regarding the suit.

In a statement, Biden attorney Mark Geragos claimed the network had “relentlessly attacked” his client for the last five years, and had “made him a caricature in order to boost ratings and for its financial gain.”

“The recent indictment of FBI informant [Alexander] Smirnov has exposed the conspiracy of disinformation that has been fueled by Fox, enabled by their paid agents and monetized by the Fox enterprise,” Geragos said. “We plan on holding them accountable.”

Another Biden attorney, Tina Glandian, told Axios that in addition to “routinely defaming and disparaging Mr. Biden, FOX has simultaneously sought to profit by the unlawful exploitation of Mr. Biden’s image, name, likeness for commercial purposes and reprehensible dissemination of salacious photographs depicting Mr. Biden,” referring to the network airing nude images of the president’s son.

The letter claimed Fox knew the images were “hacked, stolen, and/or manipulated digital material” but continued to publish them, “in violation of the majority of states’ laws against the nonconsensual disclosure of sexually explicit images and videos,” also known as revenge porn.

Republicans have continually published the nude images taken from Biden’s laptop in an effort to discredit his character. One of the most egregious instances was when Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene waved around poster-sized printouts of the images during a House hearing and then sent those photos out in her email newsletter (potentially showing them to minors).

Fox News’s last major defamation suit was brought by Dominion Voting Systems for the network’s platforming baseless allegations brought by allies of Donald Trump, who claimed that the electronic voting machine company had partaken in a conspiracy to rig the 2020 election against Trump. Fox ended up settling the lawsuit for a historic $787.5 million settlement, and released a statement admitting that the network had aired a false story.

Fox is still working through other lawsuits related to the network’s coverage of alleged 2020 election fraud, including a $2.7 billion suit filed by another electronic voting systems company, Smartmatic, and several others brought by Fox’s shareholders, accusing the company of embracing a business strategy that placed profit over journalism and verifiable facts.

In a statement, Fox claimed that they had accurately covered relevant events pertaining to Hunter Biden, including investigations by the Department of Justice and Congress, and indictments by U.S. Attorney’s offices.

“Consistent with the First Amendment, Fox News has accurately covered these highly publicized events as well as the subsequent indictment of an FBI informant who was the source of certain claims made about Mr. Biden,” a spokesperson for the network said.

This story has been updated.

Columbia University has a message for the pro-Palestine student protesters: cut it out or get suspended.

After nearly two weeks of national attention on Columbia University’s student-led protest encampments calling on the university to divest from weapons manufacturers and other companies associated with Israel’s war on Gaza, university officials’ declared Monday they won’t won’t commit to any real policy changes.

The university told student protesters they must leave the campus by 2 p.m. Monday or else “be suspended pending further investigation” and prohibited from completing the spring semester.

That threat achieved exactly nothing.

Interestingly, Columbia’s X account also posted a summary from Columbia President Minouche Shafik’s statement, noting that after a dialogue between “academic leaders” and student organizers, the university would not commit to divesting. Instead, Shafik outlined steps to consider student proposals and allow for more transparency in the university’s investments. The university ended up deleting that post and replacing it with a much shorter summary, presumably after blowback.

Since students set up protest encampments at Columbia over the war in Gaza earlier this month they have been met with a massive police response. Similar protests quickly spread at other campuses across the country, as many politicians missed the point and urged more punitive measures. Some pundits and politicians even tried to compare the peaceful, diverse protests to the white nationalist riots in Charlottesville, Virginia, in 2017.

As commencement approaches, university officials are desperate to make these protests go away, and avoid a situation like that of University of Southern California, where commencement ceremonies were ultimately canceled, following keynote speakers backing out and the initial cancellation of pro-Palestinian valedictorian Asna Tabassum’s speech. But as long as the U.S. continues its support for Israel’s deadly war on Gaza, students will continue to protest against their university connections to the war. And if universities persist in ignoring protest demands, or worse, massively cracking down on protests, they will not surely ignite a firestorm. 

Disgraced former Representative George Santos is still trying to hold on to his 15 minutes of fame—even if it means blowing up his purported beliefs.

The ousted lawmaker announced Monday he was gunning for another Cameo grabbag, this time offering up $350 videos featuring his long-denied drag alter ego Kitara Ravache.

“Y’all weren’t ready for this drop?” Santos wrote on X, formerly known as Twitter, alongside a Cameo booking link. “I’ve decided to bring Kitara out of the closet after 18 years!”

In a video posted on the personalized messaging platform, Santos claimed that the campaign would only last a couple of days, with 10 percent of the proceeds going to the Tunnel to Towers Foundation, which donates to first responders and military veterans, and another 10 percent going to the International Fellowship of Christians and Jews. His last run on the platform in December ushered in thousands of video requests, raking in more than six figures—a sum significantly more than his $174,000 congressional salary.

The campaign is a complete reversal of where Santos stood little more than a year ago, after news first emerged that the Queens resident had actually been a queen. At the time, Santos claimed that the anecdotes and photographs of his alternate persona were simply “​​outrageous claims” peddled by the media.

“The most recent obsession from the media claiming that I am a drag Queen or ‘performed’ as a drag Queen is categorically false,” Santos said in January 2023. “I will not be distracted nor fazed by this.”

But just a couple of days later, Santos fessed up, claiming the photographs were from a time when he was “young and [having] fun at a festival.” Still, the admission didn’t sway Santos, who is gay, from his war on the rest of theLGBTQ community, which included “full blown support” for Florida’s 2022 Don’t Say Gay law, speaking out against Drag Story Hour, and even suggesting that LGBTQ Americans were grooming children.

And with the way the rest of the year is shaping up for the known fabulist, he’ll definitely need the extra cash on hand. Last week, Santos announced that he was dropping his bid for New York’s 1st Congressional District against his apparent Long Island nemesis, Representative Nick LaLota. But he still has a huge hurdle on the horizon.

The reputed hustler—who was caught fabricating his entire résumé and lying about his relation to Holocaust survivors, his connection to the 2016 Orlando nightclub shooting, and the kidnapping of his niece, among many other things—is currently facing 23 counts related to illegally receiving unemployment benefits, aggravated identity theft, and credit card fraud. Santos’s next court proceeding is scheduled for August 13, with a trial expected in September.