Trump Comments on Israel’s Qatar Attack in Weirdest Way Possible

White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt said President Donald Trump is awfully sorry about Israel’s military strike on Qatar Tuesday—but wouldn’t divulge whether Israel had told them ahead of time.

Speaking to reporters at a White House press briefing Tuesday, Leavitt delivered a strange statement on behalf of the president, expressing just how sad he’d been to hear about the deadly attack.

“This morning the Trump administration was notified by the United States military that Israel was attacking Hamas, which—very unfortunately—was located in a section of Doha, the capital of Qatar,” Leavitt said. While attacking Qatar “does not advance Israel or America’s goals,” eliminating Hamas was a “worthy goal,” Leavitt said.

Leavitt claimed that Trump had “immediately directed” U.S. special envoy Steve Witkoff to inform the Qatari government of the impending attack.

“The president views Qatar as a strong ally and friend of the United States, and feels very badly about the location of this attack,” Leavitt said, adding that Trump believed that the incident could be an “opportunity for peace.”

Unsurprisingly, Qatar didn’t quite see it that way. It condemned the attack as a “flagrant violation of all international laws and norms.”

Leavitt also repeatedly refused to answer questions about whether Israel had warned Trump about the strike on the U.S. ally ahead of time, referring reporters back to her “lengthy and thorough” statement.

In the aftermath of Israel’s attack on Qatar Tuesday, Israeli sources told multiple outlets—including CNN and Israel’s Channel 12—that the U.S. had prior knowledge of the attack. It looks like not even a $400 million luxury jet could buy Trump’s protection, and Leavitt’s statement was just crocodile tears.

This isn’t the first time the Trump administration hasn’t been forthcoming about its coordination with Israel.

When Israel launched a sweeping attack on Iran in June, two Israeli officials claimed that Trump had given them the green light to do it, despite the U.S. president’s claims that he’d had nothing to do with it. The sources said that Trump and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu had lied to reporters about coordinating the attack in the days before. Later, when Trump was asked whether Israel had given him a “heads-up,” he replied: “Heads-up? It wasn’t a heads-up. It was, we know what’s going on.”

A Georgia judge plans to throw out the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations, or RICO, charges against the 61 defendants who were protesting the construction of “Cop City,” the $90 million, 85-acre police training facility in the lush forest of a majority-Black Atlanta neighborhood in 2023. The facility opened in April. 

Fulton County Judge Kevin Farmer told the court that he did not think Attorney General Chris Carr had the authority to pursue the sweeping RICO indictments under Georgia law, as he had never obtained the necessary permission from Governor Brian Kemp. 

“It would have been real easy to just ask the governor, ‘Let me do this, give me a letter,’” Farmer said. “The steps just weren’t followed.” 

The “Stop Cop City” protests and subsequent arrests that followed were sparked by the police killing of environmental activist Manuel Esteban Paez Terán, a.k.a. Tortuguita, at the Stop Cop City Encampment in January 2023. Autopsy reports showed that they were shot over 50 times while sitting cross-legged with their hands up, and no traces of gunpowder were found on them, contradicting the police report stating that Terán shot first.  

“The 61 defendants together have conspired to prevent the construction of the Atlanta Public Safety Training Center by conducting, coordinating and organizing acts of violence, intimidation and property destruction,” Carr said when the Cop City protesters were first indicted.

In addition to the RICO charges, three of the defendants were originally hit with charges of money laundering after organizing a bail fund, but those charges also failed to stick. Another three activists were charged with federal intimidation after making flyers calling Jonathan Salcedo, the state trooper who murdered Tortuguita, a “murderer.” Five of the protesters were charged with domestic terrorism and arson. Farmer is considering dismissing all of the separate charges attached to the RICO, allowing Carr to pursue the domestic terrorism ones. 

Even still, this is a massive victory in the face of a state looking to bring the hammer down on people trying to stop an environmentally destructive, military-style police base from being built in their city after all legal options had been exhausted. That shouldn’t get you charges that used to be reserved for the Mafia. 

At 61 defendants, this was one of the largest RICO cases in U.S. history. 

In an 8–4 party-line vote Tuesday, Republicans on the House Rules Committee shot down a bid to put the Epstein Files Transparency Act—which would compel the Justice Department to release all unclassified records related to Jeffrey Epstein—to a floor vote.

The motion was introduced by Democratic Ranking Member Jim McGovern, who prior to the vote stressed the importance of transparency in the case of the notorious late pedophile.

“I can see why the administration might want to hide [the Epstein files] if the creepy birthday note from Trump to Epstein is any indication of what might be in those files,” McGovern said—referencing a 2003 letter, released Monday by the House Oversight Committee, in which Donald Trump appeared to offer Epstein an unsettling 50th birthday message and lewd drawing.

“But if the administration won’t follow through on their promises, Congress should force them to,” McGovern said, adding that the Epstein files legislation “does exactly that, while protecting the victims and the survivors.”

The ranking member’s ultimately unsuccessful effort comes as Democratic Representative Ro Khanna of California and Republican Representative Thomas Massie of Kentucky continue a broader campaign to force a vote on their bill. Their petition remains, as of this writing, two signatures short of the 218 required to do so. All 212 House Democrats are on board, but just four Republicans.

McGovern urged his GOP colleagues to “see the light and sign Mr. Massie’s discharge petition.” Last week, survivors of Epstein’s abuse also held a press conference in front of the Capitol demanding Congress pass the bipartisan bill.

Nonetheless, all Republican Rules Committee members present voted against it. The only “yes” votes came from McGovern and his three fellow Democratic committee members.

Here is the name of every Republican who voted to block the Epstein Files Transparency Act on Tuesday.

• Virginia Foxx—North Carolina
• Michelle Fischbach—Minnesota
• Ralph Norman—South Carolina
• Chip Roy—Texas
• Nicholas Langworthy—New York
• Austin Scott—Georgia
• H. Morgan Griffith—Virginia
• Brian Jack—Georgia

Representative James Comer, the chair of the House Committee on Oversight and Reform, said Tuesday that he has no intention to follow up on President Donald Trump’s lewd birthday letter to alleged sex trafficker Jeffrey Epstein.

Speaking to CNN’s Manu Raju Tuesday, Comer said that he believed the White House’s desperate claim that the letter and signature were fake.

“The president says he did not sign it. So I take the president [at] his word,” Comer said, according to Raju on X. “You asked if I’m going to be trying to figure out whether that, you know, fake or not, probably not. We’re going to be trying to get justice for the victim.

“Twenty-two years ago was when that was allegedly sent,” Comer added. “So, I don’t think the Oversight Committee is going to invest in looking up something that was 22 years ago.”

But Comer saying that he won’t look into an incident from 22 years ago directly contradicts his claim that he’s seeking justice for survivors of Epstein’s decades-long abuse of women, which allegedly occurred more than 22 years ago.

It seems clear that the timing isn’t an issue. It’s just that the Kentucky Republican is unwilling to point a finger at Trump.

Comer had issued the subpoena of Epstein’s estate, demanding things like Epstein’s infamous 50th “birthday book” that includes a letter from Trump, flight logs, bank information, anything that “could be reasonably construed to be a potential list of clients.” But the actual results of the subpoena don’t seem to interest him, as the head of Congress’s main investigative arm.

During the previous administration, Comer relentlessly pursued debunked claims against former President Joe Biden, former Vice President Kamala Harris, and Minnesota Governor Tim Walz.

Now Comer is convinced that Trump, a famous and well-documented liar, is telling the truth.

President Donald Trump’s administration wants the last four digits of every voter’s Social Security number—as part of its sweeping efforts to compile a federal voting database, The New York Times reported Tuesday.

Michael Gates, deputy assistant attorney general in the Department of Justice’s recently overhauled civil rights division, told top state elections officials in a private meeting that he planned to request information from all 50 states. Specifically, he wanted the last four digits of voters’ SSNs, so they could be cross-referenced with a database of noncitizens at the Department of Homeland Security.

The administration could use the database to investigate claims of noncitizen voting, an obsession of Trump and other Republicans who claimed the 2020 election had been stolen through massive voter fraud.

In reality, the only ones concocting a scheme to fake votes in that election were in Donald Trump’s camp.

The issue of noncitizen voting remains small to nonexistent. In 2016, noncitizen votes accounted for just 0.0001 percent of the votes cast, according to the Brennan Center for Justice. One might notice that Trump’s complaints about noncitizen voting evaporated after his victory last November. However, Trump seems to have revived his obsession ahead of the midterm elections.

The DOJ has already sent requests to 16 Republican-led states and at least 17 Democrat-led states or swing states, including Pennsylvania, Nevada, New York, and Wisconsin. Some states, like North Carolina, were approached by the DOJ and DHS with an offer to simply use the federal SAVE database to run their voter list.

But such a sweeping request for personal information may not be legal, according to Justin Levitt, a former Justice Department official and election law expert at Loyola Marymount University’s law school. He said that it could potentially violate the 1974 Privacy Act, which requires agencies to be careful in their handling of sensitive information.

Across the country, both Democratic and Republican leaders have refused to hand over information. California’s Secretary of State Shirley Weber said her office was “not obligated to follow along” with Trump’s efforts to “conscript states to carry out nonstatutory policy priorities of the president.” Al Schmidt, the Republican secretary of the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania said the requests “represent a concerning attempt to expand the federal government’s role in our country’s electoral process.”

Earlier this month, a South Carolina local judge blocked the DOJ’s request for the “full name, date of birth, residential address, his or her state driver’s license number, or the last four digits of the registrant’s social security number” of every South Carolina voter, after one woman sued, saying it would violate citizens’ constitutional privacy rights.

The project, led by election deniers, has also raised serious concerns that the Trump administration could use the database to fuel claims of voter fraud in future elections.

“The biggest structural concern is using this information in an irresponsible manner to fuel the narrative that something is amiss in any election in which the preferred outcome is not the actual outcome,” Sophia Lin Lakin, the director of the Voting Rights Project at the American Civil Liberties Union, told the Times.