Amid Trump’s DC Takeover, Pirro’s Office Releases Bonkers Gun Policy

After making fiery, aggressive promises to crack down on crime in Washington, D.C., U.S. Attorney Jeanine Pirro has told prosecutors not to pursue felony charges against people caught with rifles or shotguns in the nation’s capital, according to The Washington Post.

This is a surprising move that contradicts almost everything the Trump administration has said and done regarding crime in D.C. thus far. The president has compared the District to Baghdad and said that people don’t even feel safe walking to a restaurant or “newspaper stand” (which are, unfortunately, in short supply these days) because they fear being attacked or killed. Pirro has all but echoed those statements.

“I see too much violent crime being committed by young punks who think that they can get together in gangs and crews and beat the hell out of you or anyone else.… They know that we can’t touch them. Why? Because the laws are weak,” Pirro said, just over a week ago at a press conference about President Trump’s federal takeover. “I convict someone of shooting another person with an illegal gun, on a public bus, in the chest. Intent to kill? I convict him. And you know what the judge gives him? Probation.”

This doesn’t sound like someone who would ever even consider lifting the District’s ban on shotgun and rifle possession without a very specific, local permit—and yet here we are.

This move certainly sends mixed signals to supporters and opponents alike, as firearm seizure has been a primary tactic in the early days of Trump’s D.C. crackdown. The Trump administration has already seized 68 guns within city limits as of Tuesday.

But Pirro now sees D.C.’s ban on shotguns and rifles as a liberal overreach that violates the constitution.

“Nothing in this memo from the Department of Justice and the Office of Solicitor General precludes the United States Attorney’s Office from charging a felon with the possession of a firearm, which includes a rifle, shotgun, and attendant large capacity magazine pursuant to DC Code 22-4503,” Pirro said, in a memo obtained by The Washington Post. What it does preclude is a separate charge of possession of a registered rifle or shotgun.”

This raises the question, though: How exactly does making it easier to carry large, powerful guns in the nation’s capital make people safer and decrease crime, even if they’re registered legally? If Pirro actually cared about safety more than shows of force, maybe she’d realize that.

Donald Trump is not cleared of wrongdoing in relation to the Epstein files, according to House Oversight Ranking Member Robert Garcia.

Speaking on former Attorney General Bill Barr’s testimony before the Oversight Committee Tuesday, Garcia contradicted Oversight Chair James Comer, who claimed Barr said that “he had never seen anything that would implicate Trump in any of this.”

Instead, Garcia wrote in a statement, “Barr could not clear President Trump of wrongdoing.”

“Chairman Comer should release the entire unedited transcript of his interview to the public,” Garcia said.

The Trump administration has been in a tailspin over the case files since the beginning of July, when the Justice Department directly contradicted Attorney General Pam Bondi on the existence of Jeffrey Epstein’s “client list,” eliciting surprise and upset from the deepest pockets of the MAGA leader’s base.

Since then, new reporting has pointed to several new ties between the pedophilic financier and the man sitting in the Oval Office, revealing that the pair had a remarkably close relationship. Some of those details include a salacious letter Trump penned to Epstein for the sex trafficker’s 50th birthday, and testimony from the former COO of Trump’s Atlantic City casino that placed Epstein and Trump with three underage girls in the late 1980s.

And the Trump administration likely knows all about it: The Wall Street Journal reported in July that the Justice Department had notified Trump months earlier that his name appeared several times in the Epstein files.

But rather than release the Epstein files and provide the transparency so demanded by his supporters, Trump decided to go in a different direction, attempting to distract from the base-shattering scandal while seeking a new “list” from Epstein’s incarcerated longtime associate and girlfriend, Ghislaine Maxwell.

“Let’s put all of these tapes and depositions out to the public,” Garcia told Meidas Touch Tuesday. “We have nothing to hide here.”

“What I would say is that in no way [did] Bill Barr’s testimony—change the direction of this case,” he continued. “In no way did Bill Barr say anything that was groundbreaking in a way to halt our desire and need for justice for these victims and our certainty that Donald Trump and his name and other folks that may have been involved in different ways with Epstein are not in these files. We know that they are.

“So Bill Barr’s testimony was an act of Republicans trying to control a narrative,” he added.

Nobody is getting under MAGA skin like California Governor Gavin Newsom.

The Democratic bully-for-good has been on a social media crusade this week, rising to the top of algorithmic feeds by parodying Donald Trump’s posting style and his attention-grabbing stunts. Some of those low-brow trolling efforts include reposting a photoshopped image of Mount Rushmore with Newsom’s face on it, a mock-up of Newsom as a king on the cover of Time magazine, as well as an AI-hatched depiction of Newsom surrounded by Tucker Carlson, the late Hulk Hogan, and Kid Rock (and then writing in all-caps that he hates Kid Rock.)

The déjà vu is intended to serve as a jarring mirror for Republicans still allied with the authoritarian president, and, incredibly, it’s working.

“He’s trying to mimic President Trump,” Trump’s first term chief strategist Steve Bannon told Politico Playbook. “He’s no Trump, but if you look at the Democratic Party, he’s at least getting up there, and he’s trying to imitate a Trumpian vision of fighting, right? He looks like the only person in the Democratic Party who is organizing a fight that they feel they can win.”

“People in the MAGA movement and the America First movement should start paying attention to this, because it’s not going to go away, they’re only going to get more intense,” Bannon added.

The California governor’s social media strategy is a novel one for Democrats, fighting the right’s AI-generated slop with even more AI-generated slop. In one particularly viral post, Newsom ragged on the president’s latest variant of “covfefe,” mocking Trump for posting “bela” to his most frequented communication platform, Truth Social.

“DONALD (TINY HANDS), HAS WRITTEN HIS AUTOBIOGRAPHY THIS MORNING—UNFORTUNATELY (LOW IQ) HE SPELLED IT WRONG—‘BETA,’” Newsom wrote. “SOON YOU WILL BE A ‘FIRED’ BETA BECAUSE OF MY PERFECT, ‘BEAUTIFUL MAPS.’ THANK YOU FOR YOUR ATTENTION TO THIS MATTER!—GCN”

Newsom, in his own words, has “changed.”

“The facts have changed; [Democrats] need to change,” Newsom told Fox LA’s Elex Michaelson Tuesday.

Breaking character momentarily during a press conference last week, Newsom said that he hoped the dumbed-down antics would serve as a “wake-up call for the president of the United States.”

“I’m sort of following his example. If you’ve got issues with what I’m putting out, you sure as hell should have concerns about what he’s putting out as president,” Newsom continued. “I think the deeper question is how have we allowed the normalization of his tweets, Truth Social posts over the course of the last many years, to go without similar scrutiny and notice?”

Newsom’s nonsense has ruffled feathers all the way to the Oval Office. Asked for a request to comment to Politico, the White House issued what could be the first official statement in meme format.

Draft dodger Donald Trump claimed to be a “war hero” while gushing similarly about Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.

While calling in to The Mark Levin Show Tuesday night, Trump defended his old pal “Bibi”—and took the opportunity to pat himself on the back too. 

“He’s a good man, he’s in there fighting. He’s fighting, you know they’re trying to put him in jail on top of everything else. How about that? He’s—he’s a war hero, because we worked together. He’s a war hero, I guess I am too. Nobody cares, but I am too, I mean, I sent those planes,” Trump said, likely referring to his controversial strike on nuclear facilities in Iran.   

But Netanyahu isn’t a war hero—he’s a war criminal accused of committing crimes against humanity by the International Criminal Court, which has issued a warrant for his arrest. Netanyahu’s sweeping military campaign in Gaza has killed more than 60,000 people, including civilians, children, and journalists. Incarcerated Palestinians in Israel have reported horrific torture and abuse at the hands of their captors, according to the United Nations. Israel’s destruction of Gaza has displaced nearly two million Palestinians and resulted in a widespread famine that threatens to kill thousands more. 

Earlier this month, Trump and Netanyahu reportedly got into a shouting match over the phone when the Israeli leader tried to claim that there was no starvation in Gaza. But less than a month later, Trump is back to singing his praises—and trying to take credit for the violence he has sown. 

And Trump is far from a war hero himself, no matter how many conflicts he claims to have resolved—and being complicit in Netanyahu’s war crimes certainly isn’t helping. 

President Trump’s Attorney General Pam Bondi has clashed with ethics officials over her openness to accepting gifts and favors—something her boss also struggles with mightily.

The New Yorker has reported that Bondi argued with ethics folks over keeping a FIFA soccer ball, sitting in President Trump’s box at the FIFA Club World Cup at MetLife Stadium, and holding onto a box of cigars that MMA fighter and convicted rapist Conor McGregor had initially given to Trump. Bondi ended up sitting in the box seats.

“Every new Administration needs time to adjust to ethics rules that might seem trivial,” one source told The New Yorker. “What wasn’t normal was the amount of pushback that we got.”

A DOJ official told The New Republic that “whenever the AG receives any item, DOJ staff consults with ethics officials as required and fully complies with their guidance—this isn’t newsworthy or controversial.”

DOJ protocol, though, only allows employees to accept “gifts of $20 or less per occasion, not to exceed $50 in a year from one source.”

The woman in charge of the DOJ has already eclipsed that with just one gift, as those FIFA Club World Cup box seats with Trump ran anywhere between from $5,300 to $73,000.

But this kind of blatant corruption seems to be par for the course from the administration. Bondi has yet to comment on The New Yorker’s reporting.

This story has been updated.