DOJ Investigating Deranged Conspiracy on Venezuela and 2020 Election

Donald Trump’s Department of Justice is seriously investigating absurd claims that Venezuela rigged the 2020 presidential election.

Two people pushing the conspiracy theory, Gary Berntsen and Martin Rodil, have been in frequent contact with the U.S. attorney for Puerto Rico, W. Stephen Muldrow, and gave documents and witnesses to other government officials, The Guardian reports. A federal task force in Tampa, Florida, looking at Venezuelan drug trafficking and money laundering has also interviewed supporters of the theory.

Trump has refused to concede that he lost the 2020 election, repeatedly claiming that it was rigged against him in favor of Joe Biden. His supporters have embraced numerous theories, ranging from fraudulent ballots to dead voters, and Trump did everything from having his supporters push fake electors to inciting a riot at the Capitol on January 6, 2021, the day the election was supposed to be certified in Congress.

The Venezuela theory claims that the country has controlled electronic voting in the U.S. through the companies Smartmatic and Dominion, beginning with deceased President Hugo Chávez and continuing with his successor, President Nicolás Maduro. It was ruled false in a Delaware court in 2023, and right-wing news outlets Fox News, Newsmax, and OAN have paid out hundreds of millions of dollars in defamation lawsuits from the voting machine companies.

Trump is pointing fingers at Venezuela at a time when his administration is raising tensions with extrajudicial airstrikes on boats in waters near the country. The White House also accuses Venezuela’s socialist regime of profiting by sending drugs north to the U.S.

Reviving vote-rigging accusations against the country could be a new justification for military attacks and even war. The Trump administration has already identified Venezuelan military sites as potential targets, authorized covert CIA action in the country, and even has aircraft carriers stationed in the region.

For the first time since the beginning of the government shutdown in October, Immigration and Customs Enforcement has published information about the thousands of immigrants detained in facilities across the country—and the new data is a doozy.

President Donald Trump previously spread false claims about immigrants driving up murder rates to justify his federal law enforcement crackdown in Chicago—but according to ICE, the immigrants being arrested aren’t criminals at all.

The latest disclosure from ICE shows the agency’s total population of immigrants who’ve been detained has grown to a record 65,135 people, the majority of whom had no criminal convictions. In fact, 40 percent of immigrants detained at ICE facilities had no criminal record at all, as pointed out by Aaron Reichlin-Melnick, a senior fellow with the American Immigration Council.

That’s 10 times the number of immigrants without criminal records that were detained at the beginning of Trump’s second term.

A closer look at the criminal records of these individuals shows that the two most common convictions are traffic offenses and immigration violations—not violent crimes.

Immigration authorities appeared to set a new record for most immigration arrests in a single month with more than 41,000 arrests in October, surpassing the previous record set in June of roughly 31,500, according to Austin Kocher, a professor at Syracuse University who writes about immigration.

In a list released last week of 614 immigrants arrested as part of Trump’s “Operation Midway Blitz” in Chicago, only 16—just 2.6 percent—had criminal histories that made them a “high public safety risk,” contrary to Trump’s claim that his administration is targeting the “worst of the worst.”

President Trump had some words for New York City Mayor-elect Zohran Mamdani ahead of their Friday afternoon meeting at the White House.

“Well, I was hitting him a little hard too, in all fairness. I don’t know exactly what he means by ‘turn the volume up,’ because ‘turn the volume up’—he has to be careful when he says that to me.” Trump told Brian Kilmeade on Fox News Radio. “He was very nice in calling. As you know, we’re gonna have a meeting, I guess we’ll meet at three o’clock today. And I think it’s gonna be quite civil, we’ll find out.”

Trump’s “turn the volume up” comment was a reference to the mayor-elect’s victory speech.

“If there is any way to terrify a despot, it is by dismantling the very conditions that allowed him to accumulate power. This is not only how we stop Trump, it’s how we stop the next one,” Mamdani said on election night. “So, Donald Trump, since I know you’re watching, I have four words for you: Turn the volume up.”

Trump and Mamdani have traded barbs back and forth since the latter’s campaign, with Mamdani attacking Trump’s empty pro-working-class rhetoric and connections to Andrew Cuomo, and Trump calling Mamdani a Communist.

The two New Yorkers are set to meet at 3 p.m. on Friday. Only time will tell if it’s as civil as they expect it to be.

Elon Musk’s AI chatbot is getting a little overzealous about its creator.

Social media users quickly learned this week that Grok had been updated to exclusively broadcast niceties about the potential trillionaire, even if those boasts veered into the absurd.

In a series of since-deleted X posts, Grok bragged that Musk had the “potential to drink piss better than any human in history” and was the “ultimate throat goat,” whose “blowjob prowess edges out” Donald Trump’s, reported 404 Media.

Grok also posited that Musk was more physically fit than LeBron James, and that he would have been a better recipient of the 2016 porn industry award than porn star Riley Reid.

When this reporter turned to the AI chatbot on Friday to see what the commotion was about, she learned that Grok was still enthusiastically crowing about the Tesla CEO, claiming that Musk would win a piss-drinking competition against other tech industry leaders “in a landslide.” To back up the argument, Grok cited the fact that Musk has had more than a dozen children, and has therefore been “elbow-deep in human fluids before.”

“Elon wouldn’t just win—he’d finish the pint, slam the glass down, tweet ‘lfg,’ and then ask if anyone wants to try piss from a Mars simulation habitat next,” Grok wrote.

Musk acknowledged the mix-up Thursday evening, writing on X that “Grok was unfortunately manipulated by adversarial prompting into saying absurdly positive things about me.”

“For the record, I am a fat retard,” he said.

In a separate post, Musk quipped that “if I up my game a lot, the future AI might say ‘he was smart … for a human.’”

Grok’s programming has created a series of headline-grabbing failures since its invention in 2023.

In June, Musk had to apologize after the software claimed he had stolen Stephen Miller’s wife, and had to temporarily deactivate Grok the following month when an anti-woke update to the chatbot suddenly turned it into a Nazi.

The U.S. peace plan presented to Ukraine appears to have been translated from Russian.

The syntax of certain phrases are more common in the Russian language, such as the third point of the 28-point plan: “It is expected that Russia will not invade neighbouring countries and Nato will not expand further.”

“It is expected” is not commonly used in English, but it is common in Russian and appears to come from the phrase ожидается or ozhidayetsya, according to The Guardian’s Luke Harding. Other words that appear to be translated from Russian include “ambiguities” (неоднозначности) and “to enshrine” (закрепить).

It’s no accident, either: The plan was hammered out by President Trump’s envoy Steve Witkoff and Kirill Dmitriev, an adviser to Russian President Vladimir Putin, after the two met last month in Miami. While Secretary of State Marco Rubio was also involved, no Ukrainian or European officials were, which is pretty evident by its contents.

For example, under the proposal, Ukraine would cede Crimea, Luhansk, and Donetsk to Russia and would be banned from joining NATO. Russia would get readmitted to the G8. Ukraine would also reduce the size of its military by hundreds of thousands, and no NATO troops could be stationed in the country. Sanctions against Russia would also be lifted but would snap back if Russia invades Ukraine again.

It leaves Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy in a predicament of whether he should end the war quickly or risk accepting a deal that much of his country would reject. Unnamed Ukrainian officials have already called the plan “absurd” and “unacceptable,” as it seems very similar to Russia’s demands shortly after its 2022 invasion. It seems Trump is more interested in appeasing Russia than considering Ukraine’s needs.