Mike Johnson Pushes Blatantly False Claim About Adelita Grijalva

House Speaker Mike Johnson doesn’t think he’s doing anything wrong by blocking the deciding signature on a bipartisan petition for a vote to release the Jeffrey Epstein files in full.

Speaking on CNBC Thursday morning, Johnson denied Democratic Representative-elect Adelita Grijalva’s claim that she was unable to start constituent work because she lacks a budget, an office in her district, or even a badge allowing her access to Capitol Hill. But the Louisiana Republican insisted that wouldn’t matter, anyway.

“She has computers and 16 employees, and there’s no excuse for it,” Johnson snapped.

Johnson also rejected the suggestion that he was somehow blocking the release of the government’s files on Epstein, because in his view, the files were already coming out.

“The Epstein files are being released,” Johnson claimed, pointing to the latest batch of documents obtained by the House Oversight Committee on Friday, which he said included Epstein’s financial ledgers, daily calendar, and flight logs.

“All the things people have been saying they wanted. It’s all coming out. Why? Because the House Oversight Committee has been working through this period,” Johnson said.

“These are all distractions. All distractions from the main point. They have shut the government down for political purposes, and we gotta get it reopened,” Johnson continued.

The latest release included testimony from Alex Acosta, former U.S. attorney for the Southern District of Florida, who approved a nonprosecution deal for Epstein in 2008, allowing him to avoid federal charges despite substantial evidence of sex trafficking and abuse of minors. Acosta, who had previously served as Donald Trump’s secretary of labor, defended his decision to lawmakers. “A billionaire going to jail sends a strong signal to the community that this is not, not right, that this cannot happen,” he said Friday.

Last month, Democrats on the House Oversight and Reform Committee released excerpts of flight logs and daily schedules showing that Epstein had vacation plans with Elon Musk, held meetings with Peter Thiel and Steve Bannon, and flew around with Prince Andrew.

Previous document dumps have been more underwhelming. Democrats on the House Oversight Committee found that 97 percent of documents included in a September release of 33,000 pages had already been made public, and one journalist at the Miami Herald noted that the dump contained multiple duplicates of old reports.

Health care in Idaho just got more expensive thanks to the government shutdown.

Idaho’s Affordable Care Act portal opened Thursday with new price tags, offering the nation its first glimpse at an Obamacare marketplace without federal tax credits.

The federal government has been shut down for more than 22 days, in large part over a debate on the merits of the credits. Still, neither national political party appears willing to shatter Congress’s stalemate on how to fund Donald Trump’s “big, beautiful” budget, which included details to slice billions from Obamacare subsidies and Medicaid.

Now, recipients in Idaho are facing noticeably higher premiums.

“On average, gross premiums, or the overall cost of the premium, has gone up about 10 percent. And the net premium, or the amount the consumer pays after the tax credit has been applied, has increased about 75 percent,” Pat Kelly, executive director of Your Health Idaho, told The Hill.

“So, those are averages across all of our enrollees, but it does give an indication of overall increase and then increase to what the consumer actually pays,” he said.

The expired subsidies were created through the American Rescue Plan Act in 2021 and allowed households making more than 400 percent of the federal poverty level to qualify for lowered premiums. (That looks like a family of four on a $128,600 salary, or a single person making $62,600, per federal guidelines.) Age and residency also factor into eligibility for the credits.

Idaho has roughly 135,000 enrollees on the marketplace, more than 6 percent of the state population. Of those, about 13,000 fall within that salary bracket and are at risk of no longer receiving the credits should Congress fail to act, according to Kelly.

Recipients in other states are similarly on the chopping block. More than a dozen states have opened up their Obamacare marketplace for a window-shopping period, including California, Georgia, Kentucky, Nevada, Maryland, and Maine. Individuals in those states could see prices rise by thousands of dollars annually. People in Wyoming, West Virginia, Connecticut, and Illinois can expect the largest differential in their monthly premiums, rising anywhere from 535 percent to nearly 700 percent, reported The Hill.

The result, according to policy experts, will be a mass exodus from Obamacare plans altogether, leaving roughly four million Americans uninsured. The spike in uninsured Americans will spur a public health problem that has historically proved to make premiums more expensive for the insured as hospitals look to recoup the lost cash.

Low-income regions of the country will be particularly hard-hit, such as Mississippi, Tennessee, and South Carolina, as recipients decide whether they can afford the rising costs.

But not everyone will see it coming. Enrollees in Idaho will be automatically reenrolled into the newly pricier plans, “potentially leaving some people unaware of the upcoming spike in their monthly costs,” reported The Hill.

President Trump is reportedly taking the dirt from his demolition of the White House’s East Wing and moving it to the golf course he’s planning on taking over and renovating in Washington, D.C.

Martin Austermuhle, a reporter for local news site The 51st, noted Wednesday that dirt was being trucked from the White House to Hains Point, where the East Potomac Golf Links is located. Trump has reportedly been considering rebranding the golf course as the “Washington National Golf Course,” with a new logo eerily similar to that of his own courses.

So we have the president tearing up the East Wing of the White House to both make a ballroom and renovate a golf course, with no regard for any rules or regulations. If any other president was doing this kind of thing in office they’d be eviscerated with accusations of greed, corruption, or at least a lack of focus. But no one has batted an eye.

Dr. Mehmet Oz got his math completely wrong while trying to defend President Donald Trump on drug prices.

NBC’s Kristen Welker pointed out in an interview Wednesday night that Trump has repeatedly mentioned cutting drug prices by more than 100 percent, even throwing out mathematically impossible figures such as “1,200; 1,300; 1,400; 1,500 percent.” Welker asked Oz if making cuts of 100 percent or higher would essentially make drugs free.

“Is that a realistic goal from the president?” she asked. The former TV host failed to clear things up.

“The president does the calculation by saying, ‘OK, if a drug was $100 and you reduce it to $50, it’s 100 percent cheaper because you’re taking $50 off and left with only $50, so the amount you took off the price is equal to the amount that’s left. They’re equal so it’s 100 percent,” Oz replied.

Walker reminded Oz that Trump threw out 1,500 percent as one figure, and Oz doubled down in his reply.

“Well, if you take a drug that is $200 or $240, like we did last week, and reduce it to $10, those are the numbers you’re talking about. That stated, the bigger question we should be asking ourselves is why didn’t we do this earlier?” Oz said.

Oz’s explanation does not back up the president’s impossible numbers, nor does it reflect reality. Meanwhile, health care costs stand to go up significantly if Affordable Care Act tax subsidies expire at the end of the year, an issue at the center of the current government shutdown. Will the president offer a coherent solution or keep throwing out numbers that don’t make sense?

Some of America’s largest corporations are backing Donald Trump’s $300 million ballroom.

With no warning, the president razed the White House’s East Wing this week to make way for his lavish project, destroying the portion of the building that has traditionally been the starting point for White House tours and served as the dedicated space for the first lady’s offices.

Speaking with reporters in the Oval Office Wednesday, Trump said the 90,000-square-foot ballroom would be nearly twice the size of the White House, and quietly added $100 million on top of the project’s previously announced price tag. He also swore that the government would not bear the cost of the gathering space, noting that it would be paid “100 percent by me and some friends of mine.”

Those “friends” include the likes of Apple, Google, Amazon, Microsoft, and Meta, according to a list released by the Trump administration of people and companies expected to attend a dinner about the construction project. Other stand-out names include the defense titan Palantir, cell service provider T-Mobile, and the names of some of the country’s wealthiest families.

Read the full list below.

1. Altria Group, Inc.
2. Amazon
3. Apple
4. Booz Allen Hamilton
5. Caterpillar, Inc.
6. Coinbase
7. Comcast Corporation
8. J. Pepe and Emilia Fanjul
9. Hard Rock International
10. Google
11. HP Inc.
12. Lockheed Martin
13. Meta Platforms
14. Micron Technology
15. Microsoft
16. NextEra Energy, Inc.
17. Palantir Technologies Inc.
18. Ripple
19. Reynolds American
20. T-Mobile
21. Tether America
22. Union Pacific Railroad
23. Adelson Family Foundation
24. Stefan E. Brodie
25. Betty Wold Johnson Foundation
26. Charles and Marissa Cascarilla
27. Edward and Shari Glazer
28. Harold Hamm
29. Benjamin Leon Jr.
30. The Lutnick Family
31. The Laura & Isaac Perlmutter Foundation
32. Stephen A. Schwarzman
33. Konstantin Sokolov
34. Kelly Loeffler and Jeff Sprecher
35. Paolo Tiramani
36. Cameron Winklevoss
37. Tyler Winklevoss

Donations are being managed by the Trust for the National Mall, a nonprofit that previously oversaw the restoration of the Washington Monument in the wake of the 2011 earthquake. Exactly how Trump will be aggregating the funds, however, is not totally clear. Some of the expected money will come by way of previous arrangements in Trump’s settled lawsuits. Google’s parent company, Alphabet, for instance, agreed to contribute $22 million to the ballroom’s construction as recompense for banning Trump from YouTube in the fallout of the January 6 Capitol riot.

At least one unlisted entity is already roped into the ballroom development plan, according to Trump: the U.S. military.

“We’re also working with the military on it because they want to make sure everything is perfect,” Trump said. “And the military is very much involved in this. They want to make sure everything is absolutely beautiful.”