Trump Treasury Sec Lets Slip They’re Trying to Swing Foreign Election

Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent openly admitted Wednesday that the Trump administration was looking to sway the outcome of a foreign election.

Speaking on Fox Business, Bessent seemed to suggest that the U.S. government hoped to carry President Javier Milei through Argentina’s legislative election next month, where half of the seats in the country’s Chamber of Deputies will be selected, as well as a third of the Senate.

“The plan is, as long as President Milei continues with his strong economic policies, to help him—to bridge him to the election,” said Bessent.

Earlier this week, Bessent pledged that the United States was “ready to do what is needed within its mandate to support Argentina,” which was a “systemically important U.S. ally in Latin America.” The deepening relationship between the U.S. and Argentina appears to have stemmed from President Donald Trump’s personal affinity for the self-declared “anarcho-capitalist” who runs the country.

But at home, Milei isn’t so popular, suffering a double-digit loss in the provincial midterms earlier this month, as well as congressional opposition to his cuts to health care and education, and a corruption scandal involving his sister, who managed his campaign.

“People are concerned. People are skittish. It’s very hard to believe that it is different this time, but I believe with President Milei it is,” Bessent said on Fox Business.

Bessent said that he’d met with Milei and Trump on Tuesday, lauding the Argentinian president in a post on X Wednesday for his “impressive fiscal consolidation and a broad liberalization of prices and restrictive regulations.”

In his post, Bessent said that U.S. officials were in talks to establish a $20 billion swap line with Argentina’s Central Bank—an institution Milei once promised to abolish—and even purchase secondary or primary government debt.

The secretary also hinted at handouts from U.S. companies—but said they hinged on the results of October’s legislative election. “I have also been in touch with numerous U.S. companies who intend to make substantial foreign direct investments in Argentina [in] multiple sectors in the event of a positive election outcome,” Bessent wrote.

Milei’s libertarian party, La Libertad Avanza, currently holds only seven of the 72 seats in the Senate and 39 of the 257 seats in the lower chamber. That could all change in next month’s election. Milei himself won’t be up for reelection until 2027.

“The Trump Administration is resolute in our support for allies of the United States, and President Trump has given President Milei a rare endorsement of a foreign official, showing his confidence in his government’s economic plans and the geopolitical strategic importance of the relationship between the United States and Argentina,” Bessent wrote. “Immediately after the election, we will start working with the Argentine government on its principal repayments.”

London Mayor Sadiq Khan called out President Trump for being racist, sexist, Islamophobic, and more after Trump accused him of wanting to “go to sharia law” in his United Nations General Assembly speech on Tuesday. 

“I look at London where you have a terrible mayor, a terrible, terrible mayor and it’s been changed, it’s been so changed. Now they want to go to sharia law, but you’re in a different country, you can’t do that,” Trump said about halfway through his hour-long speech. Khan, very much on the center-left, is London’s first ever Muslim mayor. Trump’s assertion that he wants to instill sharia law in London is nothing more than a lazy, racist dog whistle. 

Khan struck back accordingly. 

“People are wondering what it is about this Muslim mayor who leads a liberal, multicultural, progressive and successful city, that means I appear to be living rent-free inside Donald Trump’s head,” he told reporters on Wednesday. “I think President Trump has shown he is racist, he is sexist, he is misogynistic, and he is Islamophobic. When people say things, when people act in a certain way, when people behave in a certain way, you’ve got to believe them.”

This is far from the first time Trump has singled out Khan. Just last month, he began to criticize Khan so harshly that British Prime Minister Keir Starmer, who was next to Trump, felt the need to defend Khan, telling the president, “He’s a friend of mine, actually.” 

It’s no coincidence that Trump has unprovoked smoke for London’s first and only Muslim mayor while the U.K.’s right wing (and Elon Musk) continue to sow Islamophobia, as they call to end immigration from Muslim-majority countries and even try to ban burqas.  

Khan and his administration remain unfazed. 

“London is the greatest city in the world, safer than major U.S. cities,” a spokesman for Khan said. “And we’re delighted to welcome the record number of U.S. citizens moving here.”

The Trump campaign’s GoFundMe fundraising efforts for the victims of Hurricane Helene has left millions of dollars unaccounted for.

Fueled by their Project 2025–inspired war on the Federal Emergency Management Agency, Trump and his allies fundraised millions in aid last fall for areas of the country ravaged by the Category 4 cyclone. At the time of the disaster, they claimed that individual donations from Americans would make a more sizable impact than FEMA could manage.

“In the wake of this horrible storm, many Americans in this region felt helpless and abandoned, and left behind by their government,” Trump said last October. “And yet in North Carolina’s hour of desperation, the American people answer the call much more so than your federal government.”

Trump, still a presidential candidate, managed to raise $7.7 million—funds that the campaign later said would go to a handful of Christian charities with close ties to Trump himself. Those religious entities included Mtn2Sea Ministries, Water Mission, Samaritan’s Purse, the Clinch Foundation, and Sweetwater Mission.

Unlike FEMA, these groups are not legally required to publicly disclose their expenditures, making it next to impossible for the press, the communities in need, or those who donated to actually track down the dollars. GoFundMe, one of the largest aid distribution platforms in the world, breaks down the statistics of the donations it receives via its annual nonprofit report—but it does not track whether campaigns hit their targets or if they actually delivered on their promises.

That’s left open a major question regarding the intended Helene aid. Exactly where that money has gone or what exactly it paid for since remains a mystery, according to a Grist report.

Grist reached out to all of the organizations to get a better picture of what Trump’s fundraising efforts actually did for communities struggling to recover in the wake of the storm, but only one—Mtn2Sea Ministries—responded in specifics. The Georgia-based charity used its portion of the funds to “buy $25,000 in gift cards for rural communities in Clinch County,” according to Grist.

Millions more in aid donations, however, remain unaccounted for. Samaritan’s Purse disclosed that it had received $5.2 million, but did not elaborate on where the money went.

“South Carolina-based Water Mission would not say how much it received, though it has published updates on its website about its work supporting communities after Helene,” Grist reported. “Sweetwater Mission, located near Atlanta, did not respond at all to the request.”

Curiously, no record existed for the Clinch Foundation, though Grist did locate an entity known as the Clinch Memorial Foundation in Georgia. That group, similarly, did not respond to Grist’s inquiry.

A federal judge said Wednesday that Department of Justice officials may have violated a criminal rule and a court order by making prejudicial statements about Luigi Mangione, the 27-year-old accused of killing UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson.

U.S. District Judge Margaret Garnett issued an order responding to a letter from Mangione’s lawyers, saying that it appears that multiple DOJ employees had violated a New York criminal rule barring lawyers from making public statements that could produce prejudice in a criminal case.

Garnett said that the employees had also violated an April court order “specifically identifying the structures of this rule for counsel and directing the prosecution team to ensure that the highest levels of the Department of Justice up to and including Attorney General Bondi were aware of and understood they were bound by this Rule.”

On Tuesday, lawyers for Mangione had submitted a letter containing evidence of public statements made by DOJ employees and White House officials that they argued had ruined his right to a fair trial. Mangione’s lawyers said federal officials had “indelibly prejudiced” their client by linking him to other unrelated acts of violence, including Ryan Routh’s attempted assassination of Donald Trump and the recent assassination of right-wing activist Charlie Kirk.

One such instance was on September 19, when Chad Gilmartin, deputy director of the Department of Justice Office of Public Affairs, posted on X that Trump was “absolutely right” to claim that Mangione “shot someone in the back,” during an interview on Fox News. Gilmartin’s post was then shared by Brad Nieves, the chief of staff and associate deputy attorney general, and later deleted.

The letter also pointed to unfair statements the White House made against Mangione. Press secretary Karoline Leavitt called Mangione a “left-wing assassin [who] shot United Healthcare CEO Brian Thompson right in the back in New York City.” Earlier this week, in a press release accompanying Trump’s illegal designation of antifa as a terrorist organization, the White House had included Mangione’s name.

During an interview on Fox News earlier this week, White House deputy chief of staff Stephen Miller referred to Mangione while complaining about a so-called “organized campaign of domestic terrorism” from the left.

CEO Brian Thompson “was brutally gunned down by another self-described so-called anti-fascist that was then celebrated by other self-described anti-fascists, so of course, really Communist revolutionaries,” said Miller, who reposted a clip of him saying this on X.

Mangione’s lawyers argued in the letter that “the Government very well knows this statement to be false as they are in possession of his alleged extensive journal writings where the writer never once mentions being anti- (or pro) fascist.”

“The attempts to connect Mr. Mangione with these incidents and paint him as a ‘left wing’ violent extremist are false, prejudicial, and part of a greater political narrative that has no place in any criminal case, especially one where the death penalty is at stake,” the letter stated. “Mr. Mangione in fact does not support these violent actions, does not condone past or future political violence, nor is he in any way aligned with the group mentioned in the White House press release.”

Garnett gave the government until October 3 to provide an explanation as to how the violations occurred and what steps they would take to prevent any more. She specifically warned the deputy attorney general that further violations could result in sanctions, such as personal financial penalties or contempt of court findings.

President Donald Trump’s efforts to suppress comedian Jimmy Kimmel were thwarted by the Streisand effect, whereby attempts to censor something only cause it to circulate wider.

Kimmel’s Tuesday monologue—the first since Jimmy Kimmel Live! was canceled, then uncanceled, by ABC—has reached a massive audience and garnered significant media attention.

Whereas, CNN data analyst Harry Enten reported, the median video on Kimmel’s YouTube channel in the last six months has been viewed 240,000 times, Kimmel’s returning monologue has already garnered more than 11 million views on YouTube, with the number still rapidly growing. Another indicator of significant interest in Kimmel’s show, Enten observed, is a record-high number of Google searches for the time Jimmy Kimmel Live! airs, which were up over 10,000 percent.

Kimmel joked about the influx of attention in his monologue, saying of Trump, “You almost have to feel sorry for him. He tried his best to cancel me. Instead, he forced millions of people to watch the show. That backfired bigly! He might have to release the Epstein files to distract us from this now.”

ABC’s since-reversed decision to cancel Jimmy Kimmel Live! came after Trump’s Federal Communications Commission chair threatened companies that platformed Kimmel, due to the host’s jokes about MAGA’s reaction to the killing of conservative activist Charlie Kirk.

An hour before Kimmel’s show returned to air Tuesday, Trump complained, “I can’t believe ABC Fake News gave Jimmy Kimmel his job back. The White House was told by ABC that his Show was cancelled!” The president vowed to go after the network for being too favorable to his political opponents.