Tommy Tuberville Boosts Trump’s Fantasy About War With China

Senator Tommy Tuberville is so excited for Donald Trump to keep chasing the Panama Canal that he’s now imagining his own fantastical version of events where the U.S. uses the waterway to wage war on China.

During an interview on Fox Business Tuesday, Tuberville got a little creative when cheerleading Trump’s outlandish push to take control of the trade route.

“We’ve gotta take the Panama Canal back, we’ve got to do something because if we’re gonna happen to go to war with China over Taiwan, and they were to shut the Panama Canal down, we’d have to go eight to ten thousand miles longer just to get things back to the war zone, if we had to go from the East Coast to China,” Tuberville said.

While Trump was once friendly with Taiwan, he criticized it on the campaign trail. The president-elect argued that the island should have to pay the U.S. for protection, and accused it of stealing U.S. semiconductor manufacturing.

Trump also promised several times on the campaign trail that his administration would be a peaceful one, so his dumbest admiral airing his ideas about going to war seems at odds with that phony foreign policy.

Trump’s threat to claim the Panama Canal comes as he has upped the ante on several expansionist musings, including using economic forces to turn Canada into the fifty-first state and buying Greenland from Denmark.

France is warning Donald Trump against attempting to annex Greenland, saying that the European Union would not “let other nations in the world—whoever they might be—attack its sovereign borders.”

French Foreign Minister Jean-Noël Barrot made the statement to public radio broadcaster France Inter on Wednesday, adding that he doesn’t expect Trump to invade the autonomous Danish territory. However, Barrot added that the world is witnessing a “return of the law of the strongest.”

Barrot’s words came after Trump refused to rule out using military force to retake Greenland and the Panama Canal in a rambling press conference on Tuesday. His son Donald Jr. also visited Greenland Tuesday in what appeared to be an attempt to legitimize the president-elect’s plans. The leaders of both Denmark and Greenland have said the territory is not for sale.

Antagonizing allies is a crazy, if typical, way for Trump to start his second term, especially a NATO member like Denmark that has boosted its defense spending, as Trump has demanded. Drawing the ire of France and the European Union doesn’t bode well for the future, especially with Trump planning to institute tariffs as soon as he is sworn in.

Trump is also threatening Canada with making it the “51st state” and angered Panama’s president with his desire to retake the canal. If he’s serious about any of his territorial ambitions, Trump might face serious opposition, with countries taking action against the United States.

A Fox News employee gave Trump’s team a set of questions in advance of an Iowa Town Hall in January, according to an upcoming book from Politico’s Alex Isenstadt. If true, this is a blatant violation of  basic journalistic ethics—and yet another blatant example of Trump’s hypocrisy, given that he has accused Democrats of doing “cheating” at debates for years.  That town hall, moreover, occurred at a crucial moment in the race: It took place as Trump’s Republican rivals for the party’s nomination were debating for the final time.

“About thirty minutes before the town hall was due to start, a senior aide started getting text messages from a person on the inside at Fox. ‘Holy [shit],’ the team thought. They were images of all the questions Trump would be asked and the planned follow-ups, down to the exact wording. Jackpot. This was like a student getting a peek at the test before the exam started,” writes Isenstadt.

Trump’s team proceeded to “workshop” their answers to the questions, which touched on political violence, his business activity, and his indictments. 

“While we do not have any evidence of this occurring, and Alex Isenstadt has conveniently refused to release the images for fact checking, we take these matters very seriously and plan to investigate should there prove to be a breach within the network,” a spokesperson for Fox News said. 

Revenge, Isenstadt’s book, comes out in March.

Attorney General Merrick Garland announced Wednesday that he will release some of the details from special counsel Jack Smith’s final report on Donald Trump’s criminal cases, but not all of them.

In a filing, Garland outlined his intentions to publicize the final memo on Trump’s 2020 election subversion case, which constitutes “volume one” of Smith’s report, while handing the controversial details of Trump’s classified documents case to the chair and ranking member of the House and Senate Judiciary Committees.

The decision immediately flouts an order from Judge Aileen Cannon, who caved to a request from two of Trump’s co-defendants Tuesday. She ruled that the Justice Department would not be allowed to release Smith’s final report on his two federal criminal investigations into the president-elect. But the joint request to block the release of the 2020 election report, which names neither of the co-defendants, is little more than a reach, according to Garland.

“Defendants [Walt] Nauta and [Carlos] De Oliveira have no cognizable interest in that volume of the Final Report, however, nor any plausible theory of Article III standing that would justify their asking this Court to grant relief with respect to it,” Garland wrote in Wednesday’s filing. “Nor would there be any legal basis for any other interested party to seek to block release of Volume One.”

Garland’s notes on Trump’s classified documents case are doubly strategic. By restricting the release of volume two of Smith’s report to the House and Senate Judiciary Committees, Garland undermined the “essential premise” of Nauta and De Oliveira’s emergency motion, which claimed that the immediate public release of the report would cause “irreparable prejudice to defendants’ criminal proceedings.”

Garland “determined that he will not make a public release of Volume Two while defendants’ cases remain pending,” the filing reads. “That should be the end of the matter.”

Cannon’s Tuesday ruling stated that Garland, the DOJ, Smith, and “all of their officers, agents, and employees, and all persons acting in active concert or participation with such individuals” could not publish any part of the report until three days after an appeals court rules on the case.

It’s unclear if the Trump-appointed judge even had the authority to make such a decision, as the case is pending outside of her jurisdiction.

This story has been updated.

Even Donald Trump’s former allies don’t understand Judge Aileen Cannon’s decision to block forthcoming details of special counsel Jack Smith’s case against the president-elect.

On Tuesday, Cannon caved to a request from two of Trump’s co-defendants, ruling that the Justice Department is not allowed to release Smith’s final report on two of the president-elect’s federal criminal investigations.

In an interview that night with CNN, former Trump attorney Ty Cobb said he believed that Cannon’s continued involvement in cloaking the details of the case made her one of Trump’s favorite tools.

“Why do you think, Ty, Cannon blocked the report?” asked OutFront host Erin Burnett.

“The only reason she’s shining is, she’s his tool and he polishes her religiously,” Cobb said. “He gets the results he needs from her. The Eleventh Circuit has already, as we know, over two years ago, had to admonish her extensively.”

Cannon was legally scolded by the Eleventh Circuit in 2022, when the appeals court unanimously vacated her decision to appoint a special master to oversee the documents obtained by the FBI after their raid of Mar-a-Lago. At the time, the court wrote that Cannon “improperly exercised equitable jurisdiction” in the case and that the judicial system could not “write a rule that allows any subject of a search warrant to block government investigations after the execution of the warrant.

“Nor can we write a rule that allows only former presidents to do so,” the appeals court added.

Cobb argued that Cannon’s heavy hand in Trump’s case had “created remedies” for the president-elect “out of whole cloth.”

“I suspect they will do so again quickly,” Cobb said, envisioning more reprimands for Cannon by the Eleventh Circuit. “They may be prepared to mitigate the stain that she is and the stain that she’s created again for the judiciary quickly on this.”

Cannon’s ruling stated that Attorney General Merrick Garland, the Department of Justice, Smith, and “all of their officers, agents, and employees, and all persons acting in active concert or participation with such individuals” could not publish any part of the report until three days after an appeals court rules on the case.

It’s unclear if the Trump-appointed judge even had the authority to make such a decision, as the case is pending outside of her jurisdiction.