Donald Trump’s appointment announcements are getting weird.

The president-elect’s selection of Susie Wiles as his chief of staff, and Florida Sen. Marco Rubio as his secretary of state nominee, suggested a step toward GOP convention. But Trump’s pick of former Democratic Rep. Tulsi Gabbard as his director of national intelligence—along with his announced plans to nominate Fox News host Pete Hegseth as secretary of defense, and Rep. Matt Gaetz (R-Fla.) for attorney general, represent a pivot toward the kooky.

Trump plans to put Gabbard, a dabbler in conspiracy theories, in a job overseeing 18 spy agencies, with responsiblity for preparing the president’s daily intelligence briefing. Gabbard did not respond to inquiries on Wednesday.

Gabbard’s nomination was announced Wednesday by longtime Trump adviser Roger Stone, who read Trump’s press release on the pick aloud on Alex Jones’ conspiracy-mongering InfoWars minutes before the release went public.

Gabbard, a former lieutenant colonel in the Army Reserve, is a one-time middle-of-the-road Democratic member of Congress who has evolved into a Trump supporter. She moved leftward in 2016—endorsing Sen. Bernie Sanders that year—and ran for the party’s presidential nomination in 2020 on a campaign that blasted the Democratic foreign policy establishment, before endorsing Trump this year.

Along the way, Gabbard has demonstrated excessive credulity about claims of autocrats hostile to the United States. In 2017, she drew fire for meeting with Syrian President Bashar al-Assad during a secret trip to Syria. Later that year, she said she was skeptical of US intelligence findings that led then–Secretary of State Rex Tillerson to say US officials had “a very high level of confidence” that chemical weapons attacks that killed dozens of people in Syria were carried out under Assad’s direction.

Gabbard’s position aligned with arguments from Russian officials, who provided key backing to Assad and argued that the 2017 attack was staged by agents of the United Kingdom.

Gabbard again bolstered Russian propaganda in 2022, when she tweeted a video repeating Kremlin claims that US-funded labs in Ukraine were developing biological weapons. The Russian claims appeared to be largely made-up justifications for Russia invading its neighbor.  

Gabbard’s comments drew widespread criticism. “Tulsi Gabbard is parroting false Russian propaganda,” Sen. Mitt Romney (R-Utah) tweeted at the time. “Her treasonous lies may well cost lives.”

Gabbard has defended her various statements as examples of her willingness to buck a hawkish Washington foreign policy establishment too eager to drop bombs. “I am here to help prevent World War III,” she told Fox News on Monday.

But in defying what she dubs conventional views, Gabbard has demonstrated a high tolerance for conspiracy theories and disinformation: that is, she seems wide-open to bullshit.

That’s a particularly problematic penchant for someone tasked with advising the president on US intelligence findings—but it appears to be a quality this particular president desires.

Donald Trump’s appointment announcements are getting weird.

The president-elect’s selection of Susie Wiles as his chief of staff, and Florida Sen. Marco Rubio as his secretary of state nominee, suggested a step toward GOP convention. But Trump’s pick of former Democratic Rep. Tulsi Gabbard as his director of national intelligence—along with his announced plans to nominate Fox News host Pete Hegseth as secretary of defense, and Rep. Matt Gaetz (R-Fla.) for attorney general, represent a pivot toward the kooky.

Trump plans to put Gabbard, a dabbler in conspiracy theories, in a job overseeing 18 spy agencies, with responsiblity for preparing the president’s daily intelligence briefing. Gabbard did not respond to inquiries on Wednesday.

Gabbard’s nomination was announced Wednesday by longtime Trump adviser Roger Stone, who read Trump’s press release on the pick aloud on Alex Jones’ conspiracy-mongering InfoWars minutes before the release went public.

Gabbard, a former lieutenant colonel in the Army Reserve, is a one-time middle-of-the-road Democratic member of Congress who has evolved into a Trump supporter. She moved leftward in 2016—endorsing Sen. Bernie Sanders that year—and ran for the party’s presidential nomination in 2020 on a campaign that blasted the Democratic foreign policy establishment, before endorsing Trump this year.

Along the way, Gabbard has demonstrated excessive credulity about claims of autocrats hostile to the United States. In 2017, she drew fire for meeting with Syrian President Bashar al-Assad during a secret trip to Syria. Later that year, she said she was skeptical of US intelligence findings that led then–Secretary of State Rex Tillerson to say US officials had “a very high level of confidence” that chemical weapons attacks that killed dozens of people in Syria were carried out under Assad’s direction.

Gabbard’s position aligned with arguments from Russian officials, who provided key backing to Assad and argued that the 2017 attack was staged by agents of the United Kingdom.

Gabbard again bolstered Russian propaganda in 2022, when she tweeted a video repeating Kremlin claims that US-funded labs in Ukraine were developing biological weapons. The Russian claims appeared to be largely made-up justifications for Russia invading its neighbor.  

Gabbard’s comments drew widespread criticism. “Tulsi Gabbard is parroting false Russian propaganda,” Sen. Mitt Romney (R-Utah) tweeted at the time. “Her treasonous lies may well cost lives.”

Gabbard has defended her various statements as examples of her willingness to buck a hawkish Washington foreign policy establishment too eager to drop bombs. “I am here to help prevent World War III,” she told Fox News on Monday.

But in defying what she dubs conventional views, Gabbard has demonstrated a high tolerance for conspiracy theories and disinformation: that is, she seems wide-open to bullshit.

That’s a particularly problematic penchant for someone tasked with advising the president on US intelligence findings—but it appears to be a quality this particular president desires.

A few weeks ago, Vice President-elect JD Vance dubbed Donald Trump “the candidate of peace” during a blitz of Sunday morning show appearances.

Vance was talking about a guy who during his last term reportedly expressed interest in firing missiles into Mexico, and mused about nuking both North Korea and hurricanes.

And, less than a week after Trump’s election victory, the notion of the president-elect as anti-war, a common theme for Vance, has been badly undermined by Trump’s selection of a series of national security hawks—people who advocate using military force to solve international problems—for key administration jobs.

On the campaign trail, Trump found some success in positioning himself in an anti-war lane. He pledged to immediately impose a peace deal for Ukraine and pushed (extremely vaguely) for an end to the war in Gaza. He also bragged, incorrectly, that there were no wars during his administration. (Trump was helped by Vice President Kamala Harris’ reluctance to distance herself from President Joe Biden’s establishment-oriented foreign policy.)

“If these appointments are as advertised, it looks like an appeal to the unreconstructed Liz Cheney caucus.”

Since Trump’s election, there has been a scramble among supporters close to him to nudge the president-elect toward policies and appointments that reject the neoconservative bent of many Republicans. Tucker Carlson and Donald Trump Jr. reportedly were among insiders pushing the president-elect not to select for a job former Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, who has aggressive views on Ukraine, China, and Iran. Trump gave those backers some hope with his announcement last week that he would “not be inviting” Pompeo or former UN Ambassador Nikki Haley “to join the Trump Administration.”

But those small wins are being overshadowed as Trump names a series of hawkish figures to key posts.

Earlier this week, Trump decided to nominate Sen. Marco Rubio, (R-Fla.) as Secretary of State, according to the New York Times, and to name Rep. Mike Waltz (R-Fla.) as his national security adviser. (Sources said that Trump-world figures still hope to stop Rubio, whose selection Trump has not announced, from actually receiving the Secretary of State nomination.)

This news was followed by Trump’s announcement that he would make Rep. Elise Stefanik (R-N.Y.) United Nations Ambassador and former Arkansas Governor Mike Huckabee US ambassador to Israel. On Wednesday, Trump said he would appoint Steven Witkoff, a real estate investor and campaign donor who is also a reliable Netanyahu booster, to be Special Envoy to the Middle East. And he picked John Ratcliffe—a loyalist who in 2020 used his job as Trump’s director of national intelligence to selectively declassify information aimed at bolstering Trump’s false claims about the origins of the Russia scandal—as director of the Central Intelligence Agency.

Trump is “trying to appeal to at least two sides of the party that are diametrically opposed,” said Justin Logan, director of defense and foreign policy studies at the Cato Institute, which has advocated for reducing defense spending and US commitments overseas. “If these appointments are as advertised, it looks like an appeal to the unreconstructed Liz Cheney caucus. It’s an open question whether that is offset by any more than JD Vance.”

Though Cheney supported Harris this year, she and her father, former Vice President Dick Cheney, are identified with the GOP’s long-dominant neoconservative approach to national security policy.

Trump may not have figures like Pompeo and Haley and former national security adviser John Bolton in the White House this time, but “many of the people he has named represent the same views,” said Triti Parsi, the executive vice president of the Quincy Institute.

While both Rubio and Waltz have followed Trump’s lead by expressing skepticism about NATO and the level of US support for Ukraine, they are known as foreign policy hawks. Stefanik, who has espoused similar views, is who is likely to follow Haley’s example of using the UN job as a stage to performatively support the policies Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Israel’s far-right government.

Former Democratic Rep. Tulsi Gabbard, a Trump-backer who is herself hoping to win a national security job in the incoming administration, in July urged Trump to avoid Rubio, who she said “represents the neo-con, war mongering establishment.”

Huckabee has been an aggressive advocate of Netanyahu’s expansion of Israeli settlements in the West Bank, even adopting the talking points of Israel’s openly racist far-right, which rejects the idea that Palestinians have any right to live in the West Bank. “There is no such thing as a West Bank,” Huckbee said during a 2017 visit to Israel. “It’s Judea and Samaria. There’s no such thing as an occupation.”

Trump has faulted Biden for the president’s limited efforts to dissuade Netanyahu from continuing his war in Gaza and in Lebanon. Along with that suggestion of carte blanche, Trump’s appointments look likely to further enable Israeli war-making, critics said.

Trump “is naming people based on their loyalty rather than their ideology,” Parsi told Mother Jones. “This doesn’t look particularly encouraging from a foreign policy standpoint, at least when it comes Middle East.”

Despite Trump’s appointments so far, people hoping the president-elect fills the role that Vance imagined are still working to push him away from war advocates.

“The hour is still young,” Logan said. “I am cautiously not pessimistic.”

Donald Trump announced Thursday that Susie Wiles, who as his de facto campaign manager is credited with imposing a measure of discipline that helped him win on Tuesday, will serve as his chief of staff.

Wiles has earned a reputation as a smart, pragmatic, and effective campaign operative. For critics of Trump’s agenda—which includes deporting millions of immigrants, imposing tariffs likely to increase inflation, firing vast swaths of civil servants and using the Justice Department to prosecute critics—her appointment is bad news.

“Susie is tough, smart, innovative, and is universally admired and respected,” Trump said in a statement Thursday. “Susie will continue to work tirelessly to Make America great again,”

Wiles will not be John Kelly, who, along with labeling Trump a fascist, has let it be known that as Trump’s chief of staff from 2017 to 2019, he worked to prevent Trump from indulging his worst instincts.

Wiles is not going to the White House to stop Trump implementing his plans—she will be there to help him more effectively impose them. Wiles may be a reason that Trump, a bumbling, wanna-be authoritarian in his first term, will be a more effective one in his second.

Nor is Wiles likely to go too far in stopping Trump from pursuing some of his worst impulses.

As Tim Alberta reported recently in the Atlantic, Wiles was occasionally willing to push back on Trump’s bad ideas, but not too often. Here is Alberta describing how Wiles handled Trump’s insistence on allowing far-right conspiracy theorist Laura Loomer to travel with Trump in September, a decision that drew embarrassing headlines when Loomer, who has claimed the 9/11 attack was an “inside job,” joined Trump at a 9/11 memorial event.

“Wiles knew that nothing good could come of this. Still, after one more round of gentle pushback, she acquiesced. (Even people like Wiles, who have a track record of talking Trump out of certain reckless ideas, learn that you cannot retain a seat at the table if you tell the man ‘no’ one time too many.) Wiles decided that allowing Loomer on the trip was not a hill to die on. Perhaps, she would later remark to friends, it should have been.”

The daughter of late NFL broadcaster Pat Summerall, Wiles is a longtime GOP operative in Florida with a history of working for rich candidates. She ran Sen. Rick Scott’s 2010 campaign for Florida’s governorship, worked as former Utah Gov. Jon Huntsman’s presidential campaign manager in 2012, and ran Trump’s campaign in Florida in 2016 and 2020. She also worked for Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis before a falling out with him.

Wiles has also worked as a lobbyist, and held onto a senior lobbying position with the Republican-leaning advocacy firm Mercury Public Affairs during the campaign, according to the New York Times. She was registered as a lobbyist for a tobacco company as recently as this year.

Wiles also worked from 2017 through 2019 as a lobbyist for Ballard Partners, formerly a Florida-based firm that built a thriving DC practice after Trump’s 2016 election—based in part on perceived access to him.

While Wiles worked there, the firm signed up a colorful roster of clients that included a Russian billionaire, a firm run by a man linked to Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad, and a solar company controlled by a state-owned Chinese firm. Wiles wasn’t a registered lobbyist for all of those clients. But she registered to represent a host of outfits, including General Motors and the Motion Picture Association of America.

Wiles also lobbied on behalf of Globovisión, a Venezuelan firm that was looking to expand into US markets. That plan hit a hitch in 2018, when the Justice Department indicted its founder, Raul Gorrin, on corruption charges. Ballard said it cut ties with the firm after learning of the federal probe. Last month, the Justice Department indicted Gorrin again, alleging that he helped “to launder funds corruptly obtained from Venezuela’s state-owned and state-controlled energy company… in exchange for hundreds of millions in bribe payments to Venezuelan officials.”

A Trump spokesperson didn’t respond immediately to a request for comment on Wiles’ lobbying work.

Donald Trump announced Thursday that Susie Wiles, who as his de facto campaign manager is credited with imposing a measure of discipline that helped him win on Tuesday, will serve as his chief of staff.

Wiles has earned a reputation as a smart, pragmatic, and effective campaign operative. For critics of Trump’s agenda—which includes deporting millions of immigrants, imposing tariffs likely to increase inflation, firing vast swaths of civil servants and using the Justice Department to prosecute critics—her appointment is bad news.

“Susie is tough, smart, innovative, and is universally admired and respected,” Trump said in a statement Thursday. “Susie will continue to work tirelessly to Make America great again,”

Wiles will not be John Kelly, who, along with labeling Trump a fascist, has let it be known that as Trump’s chief of staff from 2017 to 2019, he worked to prevent Trump from indulging his worst instincts.

Wiles is not going to the White House to stop Trump implementing his plans—she will be there to help him more effectively impose them. Wiles may be a reason that Trump, a bumbling, wanna-be authoritarian in his first term, will be a more effective one in his second.

Nor is Wiles likely to go too far in stopping Trump from pursuing some of his worst impulses.

As Tim Alberta reported recently in the Atlantic, Wiles was occasionally willing to push back on Trump’s bad ideas, but not too often. Here is Alberta describing how Wiles handled Trump’s insistence on allowing far-right conspiracy theorist Laura Loomer to travel with Trump in September, a decision that drew embarrassing headlines when Loomer, who has claimed the 9/11 attack was an “inside job,” joined Trump at a 9/11 memorial event.

“Wiles knew that nothing good could come of this. Still, after one more round of gentle pushback, she acquiesced. (Even people like Wiles, who have a track record of talking Trump out of certain reckless ideas, learn that you cannot retain a seat at the table if you tell the man ‘no’ one time too many.) Wiles decided that allowing Loomer on the trip was not a hill to die on. Perhaps, she would later remark to friends, it should have been.”

The daughter of late NFL broadcaster Pat Summerall, Wiles is a longtime GOP operative in Florida with a history of working for rich candidates. She ran Sen. Rick Scott’s 2010 campaign for Florida’s governorship, worked as former Utah Gov. Jon Huntsman’s presidential campaign manager in 2012, and ran Trump’s campaign in Florida in 2016 and 2020. She also worked for Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis before a falling out with him.

Wiles has also worked as a lobbyist, and held onto a senior lobbying position with the Republican-leaning advocacy firm Mercury Public Affairs during the campaign, according to the New York Times. She was registered as a lobbyist for a tobacco company as recently as this year.

Wiles also worked from 2017 through 2019 as a lobbyist for Ballard Partners, formerly a Florida-based firm that built a thriving DC practice after Trump’s 2016 election—based in part on perceived access to him.

While Wiles worked there, the firm signed up a colorful roster of clients that included a Russian billionaire, a firm run by a man linked to Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad, and a solar company controlled by a state-owned Chinese firm. Wiles wasn’t a registered lobbyist for all of those clients. But she registered to represent a host of outfits, including General Motors and the Motion Picture Association of America.

Wiles also lobbied on behalf of Globovisión, a Venezuelan firm that was looking to expand into US markets. That plan hit a hitch in 2018, when the Justice Department indicted its founder, Raul Gorrin, on corruption charges. Ballard said it cut ties with the firm after learning of the federal probe. Last month, the Justice Department indicted Gorrin again, alleging that he helped “to launder funds corruptly obtained from Venezuela’s state-owned and state-controlled energy company… in exchange for hundreds of millions in bribe payments to Venezuelan officials.”

A Trump spokesperson didn’t respond immediately to a request for comment on Wiles’ lobbying work.

More than 1,500 people charged with or convicted of crimes related to the January 6, 2021, attack on Congress are now presumably hoping to win pardons and commutations that the now president-elect has repeatedly, if vaguely, promised to give many of them.

And they aren’t alone. Numerous people convicted since 2020 of federal crimes in prosecutions they claim were politically motivated seem to be positioning themselves to seek clemency when Donald Trump takes office in January.

On the campaign trail, Trump—who doled out various pardons to political allies ruing his first term—made frequent, though somewhat qualified, pledges to offer clemency to January 6 attackers. In a July exchange with ABC news anchor Rachel Scott, for instance, Trump said that he would “absolutely” pardon even rioters who were convicted of assaulting police officers. He then said he would do so “if they’re innocent,” but also said they had faced a “tough system.”

These statements have people charged with crimes on January 6 positioning themselves for pardons in the wake of Trump’s victory.

On Wednesday, Christopher Carnell, a man charged with entering the Capitol on January 6, asked a DC judge to postpone his case, citing Trump’s statements about pardoning January 6 attackers.

“Throughout his campaign, President-elect Trump has made multiple clemency promises to the January 6 defendants, particularly to those who were nonviolent participants,” Carnell’s lawyer wrote. “Mr. Carnell, who was an 18 year old nonviolent entrant into the Capitol on January 6, is expecting to be relieved of the criminal prosecution that he is currently facing when the new administration takes office.”

This is one of what will likely be a deluge of similar filings. Judges are under no obligation to postpone proceedings based on such requests.

Trump might pardon not only rank-and-file January 6 rioters but high-profile far-right leaders convicted of helping to organize the attack.

Enrique Tarrio, the former leader of the far-right Proud Boys, who is serving a 22-year sentence for seditious conspiracy and other charges related to the January 6 attack, is exploring a pardon, even as he continues to appeal his sentence, Tarrio’s lawyer, Nayib Hassan indicated to HuffPost. “We look forward to what the future holds, both in terms of the judicial process for our client and the broader political landscape under the new administration,” Hassan said.

Stewart Rhodes, the Oath Keepers founder sentenced last year to 18 years in prison for seditious conspiracy due to his role in the attack, could also receive a Trump pardon, a prospect Rhodes’ ex-wife and son have said causes them fear for their safety due to what they allege is his past physical abuse. (Rhodes has denied abusing family members.)

Trump used the pardon process liberally while president to free war criminals, personal allies, campaign donors, people who could have acted as witnesses against him, and others—a use of clemency power that was unprecedented in American history and deeply corrupt.

In a second term, he may continue to pardon allies facing federal charges or seeking help with past convictions.

Former advisers Peter Navarro and Steve Bannon, both of whom already served four-month prison terms for contempt of Congress after ignoring subpoenas from the House January 6 committee, may receive pardons aimed at clearing their names. (Trump pardoned Bannon in 2020 on charges that he defrauded donors to a charity that claimed to be raising private funds to help build Trump’s promised wall along the Mexican border, but he can’t help Bannon with pending New York state charges related to the same alleged scam.)

Bannon could also lobby Trump to pardon his former patron Guo Wengui, a Chinese real estate mogul convicted of stealing hundreds of millions of dollars from Chinese diaspora followers of a movement Guo and Bannon launched in 2019. Guo used that movement and a network of Chinese-language media companies to spread disinformation aimed at helping Trump in 2020.

New York Mayor Eric Adams, facing charges for accepting bribes from Turkish interests, has ludicrously suggested that he was prosecuted by the Justice Department due to criticizing the Biden White House over immigration issues. That sounds like a bid for a pardon. Trump might prove amenable.

Then there is former Sen. Robert Menendez (D-N.J.), convicted last year of taking bribes from Egyptian agents in exchange for helping advance Cairo’s interests in the United States. Menendez previously persuaded Trump to pardon Salomon Melgen, a Florida eye doctor accused of bribing Menendez in a case that ended in a mistrial, but who was also convicted of defrauding Medicare. Could Menendez join other corrupt Democrats Trump pardoned, like former Detroit Mayor Kwame Kilpatrick and ex-Illinois Gov. Rod Blagojevich? Don’t rule it out.

One person Trump probably won’t have to pardon is himself. The Justice Department “is evaluating how to wind down the two federal criminal cases against Donald Trump before he takes office to comply with longstanding department policy that a sitting president can’t be prosecuted,” NBC News’ Ken Dilanian reported Wednesday. That would relieve Trump of having to take the unprecedented and controversial step of telling DOJ to drop charges into himself.

Correction: An earlier version of this story misidentified one of the politicians Trump pardoned.

Steve Bannon claims he is setting up a new version of the Willard Hotel “war room”—the infamous locale from which he and other Trump allies attempted to oversee last-ditch efforts in January 2021 to overturn the results of the 2020 presidential election.

Bannon told CBS News’ Robert Costa that the “war room” is being “revived and reorganized” in the hours ahead of today’s election results, with he and other Trump backers gathering at the posh downtown DC hotel.

As with much of what Bannon does, his Election Day announcement mixes self-promotion that may include exaggeration of his importance with genuine menace.

Bannon has been courting media attention since he was released from federal prison last week, where he served four months for contempt of Congress. His new “war room,” on election night, differs from the 2021 gathering on January 5 and 6, where various Trump backers schemed to stop Joe Biden from taking office in part by lobbying GOP lawmakers. It’s not just earlier in the process: Bannon will be thousands of miles away from Trump and his top advisers, who are gathering at the former president’s Mar-a-Lago estate. It is not clear that the assembly Bannon plans will be more than a watch party.

But it’s safe to assume he sees it as potentially significant. Since 2021, Bannon has used his “War Room” podcast to push the false claim that the 2020 election was stolen and to encourage election deniers to run for local positions that will allow them play a role in the counting of votes in key swing states. That effort appears to have enjoyed substantial success in placing far-right election deniers in key jobs, and could prove vital to Trump’s expected efforts to challenge results in key battleground states.

In a news conference last week, Bannon urged Trump to falsely declare victory on election day, in a effort to convince Trump fans that a win by Vice President Kamala Harris could result only from cheating. “If the votes come in like it looks like they’re gonna come in, he should step up and inform American citizens of exactly what’s going on and not keep people in the dark like was done in 2020,” Bannon told reporters.

Such a declaration would aim to improve on Trump’s false claim of victory at 2am four years ago. In an audio recording I first uncovered in 2022, Bannon told a group of allies assembled on October 31, 2020, that Trump would assert success on election day, even if he lost.

“What Trump’s gonna do is just declare victory,” Bannon said. “Right? He’s gonna declare victory. But that doesn’t mean he’s the winner. He’s just gonna say he’s the winner.”

Special Counsel Jack Smith cited those statements in a motion last month that showed Bannon played a big role in what Smith alleges was a criminal conspiracy led by Trump to interfere with the certification of electoral votes in 2024. Bannon is not charged with a crime in that case.

Smith also revealed that Bannon appeared to have influenced Trump’s decision to pressure Vice President Mike Pence to assert power to block certification of Biden’s victory on January 6. The filing noted that Trump had a conversation with Bannon less than 15 minutes before he called Pence on Jan. 1—a call during which Trump berated Pence for his reluctance to follow a plan Pence later called unconstitutional.

It was on January 5 and 6, 2021, that Bannon, former New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani, attorney John Eastman, longtime Trump adviser Roger Stone, and other Trump advisers gathered in a suite of rooms in the Willard to try to coordinate Trump’s efforts to retain power. (Women for America First, a nonprofit set by far right activists Amy and Kylie Kremer paid $70,000 to book the Willard Rooms used by Trump backers, using funds put up by Publix heir Julie Jenkins Fancelli, as I reported earlier this year.)

Smith alleged in his motion last month that the efforts at the Willard Room included calls by Giuliani—made at Trump’s behest—to exploit the mob attack on Congress on Jan. 6 while it was underway, using that mayhem to urge senators to delay the certification of electoral votes.

It remains to be seen if Bannon and other Trump allies get the chance to reconstitute such “war room” efforts on January 6, 2025. Bannon may be tied up then. Starting in December, he is set to face trial in New York for allegedly defrauding donors to a charity that claimed to be raising private funds to help build Trump’s promised wall along the Mexican border.

At a rally Saturday in Gastonia, North Carolina, Donald Trump thanked God for an October jobs report that showed a slow-down in job growth due in part to the recent hurricane that decimated the western part of the state.

“How good was that?” Trump asked the crowd. “To get those numbers four days before the vote was…” Trump said, trailing off. Then he paused and looked upward, presumably to God, who he told: “Thank you very much sir. Thank you.”

“He’d prefer to run on a problem instead of fixing a problem.”

The Bureau of Labor Statistics reported Friday that the US economy added just 12,000 jobs in October. Acting Labor Secretary Julie Su attributed the slow growth to “significant impacts from hurricanes and strike activity.” That’s a reference to Hurricanes Helene and Milton and an ongoing strike by Boeing machinists. Noting the unemployment rate remains at 4.1 percent and inflation is falling, Su said the jobs report “reflects an atypical month rather than a shift in the broader economic outlook.”

Trump’s jobs remarks were hardly the worst thing he said this weekend. He labeled journalists covering his rally “monsters,” mocked trans people, and called his opponent a product of political correctness and “stupid,” with a racist and sexist subtext hard to miss. He defended his racist Madison Square Garden rally. On Friday night in Milwaukee he inexplicably expressed frustration with audio issues by pretending to perform fellatio on a microphone stand.

But the reaction to the jobs report was revealing in the gusto with which Trump embraced bad news for Americans as good for him. To be fair, he did describe the numbers as “bad news” during his Friday address. But in North Carolina on Saturday, he celebrated the political benefit he claimed to be getting from the new report—without mentioning the hurricane economists say helped slow hiring by causing catastrophic flooding and hundreds of deaths, including more than 100 in the state he spoke in.

“I mean, how good is that if you happen to be running against the people that did that?” Trump, referring to the jobs report.

This wasn’t the only time he seemed to be rejoicing in doom. Elsewhere in the speech, Trump celebrated, as he generally does at his rallies, an increase in border crossings that followed his exit from office. He has consistently made few bones about his belief that problems at the border are good for him. Early this year, Trump successfully lobbied to jettison a bipartisan bill aimed at toughening security on the Mexican border. Trump’s push was widely understood as an effort to stop Congress from trying to solve a problem that he wanted to use to attack Democrats. Sen. James Lankford (R-Okla.), who was a key author of the bill, has said that critics of the measures argued: “We don’t want President Trump to lose that issue.”

Vice President Kamala Harris has faulted Trump’s opposition to the measure, calling it evidence that “he’d prefer to run on a problem instead of fixing a problem.”

Nothing in Trump’s remarks Saturday refuted that criticism.

Donald Trump is amplifying attacks on the media in the final days of the campaign, broadly threatening retaliation against the industry for coverage critical of him.

“To make America great you really have to get the news shaped up,” Trump told Fox News Saturday morning.

During a rally in North Carolina later that day, Trump called journalists covering the event “monsters,” and “horrible, horrible, dishonest people.”

During the Fox News interview, Trump attacked several outlets. He called ABC News “corrupt,” renewing his gripe that the network’s David Muir during a September debate had correctly noted that that FBI data shows violent crime declining, contradicting Trump’s erroneous claims that it was “through the roof.”

Trump called journalists covering the event “monsters,” and “horrible, horrible, dishonest people.”

Trump isn’t just going after the media with words. On Thursday, the former president sued CBS News for $10 billion, alleging that the editing of a “60 Minutes” interview with Kamala Harris “amounts to a brazen attempt to interfere in the 2024 US Presidential Election.” The lawsuit was filed in the Northern District of Texas where the sole judge is Matthew Kacsmaryk, a Trump appointee known for partisan pro-GOP rulings. Even so, the suit has little chance of success. TV networks routinely edit interviews (including those featuring Trump, who backed out of appearing on “60 Minutes” last month.) My colleague Pema Levy wrote more about this lawsuit and its chances for success here.

Trump’s suit is “without merit” a CBS spokesperson said last week. “The interview was not doctored; and 60 Minutes did not hide any part of the vice president’s answer to the question at issue…60 Minutes fairly presented the interview to inform the viewing audience, and not to mislead it.”

Trump has also said that CBS should lose its license to broadcast news due to the Harris interview. That’s one of many such threats. CNN recently noted that Trump in the last two years has called for every major American TV news network, including Fox News, to be punished for coverage he deemed unfair. Trump has also vowed that if he wins back the White House, he plans to seize greater control of independent regulatory agencies, including the FCC.

As president, Trump tried to punish media outlets that criticized him. His administration tried to block AT&T acquisition of CNN’s parent company and to deny a cloud computing contract for Amazon, which was founded by Washington Post owner Jeff Bezos.

Trump has also threatened to jail journalists who report information he contends has national security implications. (Trump himself, of course, has been indicted for illegally retaining highly sensitive national security documents he removed from the White House.) In 2022, NPR recently noted, Trump repeatedly said the prospect of prison rape would cause reporters to disclose sources. “When this person realizes that he is going to be the bride of another prisoner shortly, he will say, ‘I’d very much like to tell you exactly who that was,'” Trump said at a Texas event.

All these statements amount to an ongoing threat that, if elected, Trump will use his power to curb speech critical of him. That’s a direct challenge to the First Amendment, and hence not likely to fully succeed, even among increasingly partisan judges.

But Trump could still made life difficult for media outlets, and his threats already appear to have had a chilling effect. Amid attacks from Trump and his allies over his philanthropic efforts to help register voters in 2020, Meta founder Mark Zuckerberg has tried to extract himself from politics, including by limiting what the company deems political content on its platforms. The Washington Post editorial page’s scuttling of an endorsement of Harris has been widely read as an attempt by Bezos to avoid angering Trump, though Bezos disputes that. The Los Angeles Times also drew fire for declining to endorse a candidate this year.

The Post‘s move didn’t appease Trump. The former president ripped the paper during his Fox call-in Saturday, even suggesting the 250,000 lost subscriptions and high-profile resignations the paper suffered due to the non-endorsement was connected to his gripes with the paper. Why is the Post facing these problems? According to Trump, it’s “because they don’t have credibility.”

At a rally Saturday in Gastonia, North Carolina, Donald Trump thanked God for an October jobs report that showed a slow-down in job growth due in part to the recent hurricane that decimated the western part of the state.

“How good was that?” Trump asked the crowd. “To get those numbers four days before the vote was…” Trump said, trailing off. Then he paused and looked upward, presumably to God, who he told: “Thank you very much sir. Thank you.”

“He’d prefer to run on a problem instead of fixing a problem.”

The Bureau of Labor Statistics reported Friday that the US economy added just 12,000 jobs in October. Acting Labor Secretary Julie Su attributed the slow growth to “significant impacts from hurricanes and strike activity.” That’s a reference to Hurricanes Helene and Milton and an ongoing strike by Boeing machinists. Noting the unemployment rate remains at 4.1 percent and inflation is falling, Su said the jobs report “reflects an atypical month rather than a shift in the broader economic outlook.”

Trump’s jobs remarks were hardly the worst thing he said this weekend. He labeled journalists covering his rally “monsters,” mocked trans people, and called his opponent a product of political correctness and “stupid,” with a racist and sexist subtext hard to miss. He defended his racist Madison Square Garden rally. On Friday night in Milwaukee he inexplicably expressed frustration with audio issues by pretending to perform fellatio on a microphone stand.

But the reaction to the jobs report was revealing in the gusto with which Trump embraced bad news for Americans as good for him. To be fair, he did describe the numbers as “bad news” during his Friday address. But in North Carolina on Saturday, he celebrated the political benefit he claimed to be getting from the new report—without mentioning the hurricane economists say helped slow hiring by causing catastrophic flooding and hundreds of deaths, including more than 100 in the state he spoke in.

“I mean, how good is that if you happen to be running against the people that did that?” Trump, referring to the jobs report.

This wasn’t the only time he seemed to be rejoicing in doom. Elsewhere in the speech, Trump celebrated, as he generally does at his rallies, an increase in border crossings that followed his exit from office. He has consistently made few bones about his belief that problems at the border are good for him. Early this year, Trump successfully lobbied to jettison a bipartisan bill aimed at toughening security on the Mexican border. Trump’s push was widely understood as an effort to stop Congress from trying to solve a problem that he wanted to use to attack Democrats. Sen. James Lankford (R-Okla.), who was a key author of the bill, has said that critics of the measures argued: “We don’t want President Trump to lose that issue.”

Vice President Kamala Harris has faulted Trump’s opposition to the measure, calling it evidence that “he’d prefer to run on a problem instead of fixing a problem.”

Nothing in Trump’s remarks Saturday refuted that criticism.

Donald Trump is amplifying attacks on the media in the final days of the campaign, broadly threatening retaliation against the industry for coverage critical of him.

“To make America great you really have to get the news shaped up,” Trump told Fox News Saturday morning.

During a rally in North Carolina later that day, Trump called journalists covering the event “monsters,” and “horrible, horrible, dishonest people.”

During the Fox News interview, Trump attacked several outlets. He called ABC News “corrupt,” renewing his gripe that the network’s David Muir during a September debate had correctly noted that that FBI data shows violent crime declining, contradicting Trump’s erroneous claims that it was “through the roof.”

Trump called journalists covering the event “monsters,” and “horrible, horrible, dishonest people.”

Trump isn’t just going after the media with words. On Thursday, the former president sued CBS News for $10 billion, alleging that the editing of a “60 Minutes” interview with Kamala Harris “amounts to a brazen attempt to interfere in the 2024 US Presidential Election.” The lawsuit was filed in the Northern District of Texas where the sole judge is Matthew Kacsmaryk, a Trump appointee known for partisan pro-GOP rulings. Even so, the suit has little chance of success. TV networks routinely edit interviews (including those featuring Trump, who backed out of appearing on “60 Minutes” last month.) My colleague Pema Levy wrote more about this lawsuit and its chances for success here.

Trump’s suit is “without merit” a CBS spokesperson said last week. “The interview was not doctored; and 60 Minutes did not hide any part of the vice president’s answer to the question at issue…60 Minutes fairly presented the interview to inform the viewing audience, and not to mislead it.”

Trump has also said that CBS should lose its license to broadcast news due to the Harris interview. That’s one of many such threats. CNN recently noted that Trump in the last two years has called for every major American TV news network, including Fox News, to be punished for coverage he deemed unfair. Trump has also vowed that if he wins back the White House, he plans to seize greater control of independent regulatory agencies, including the FCC.

As president, Trump tried to punish media outlets that criticized him. His administration tried to block AT&T acquisition of CNN’s parent company and to deny a cloud computing contract for Amazon, which was founded by Washington Post owner Jeff Bezos.

Trump has also threatened to jail journalists who report information he contends has national security implications. (Trump himself, of course, has been indicted for illegally retaining highly sensitive national security documents he removed from the White House.) In 2022, NPR recently noted, Trump repeatedly said the prospect of prison rape would cause reporters to disclose sources. “When this person realizes that he is going to be the bride of another prisoner shortly, he will say, ‘I’d very much like to tell you exactly who that was,'” Trump said at a Texas event.

All these statements amount to an ongoing threat that, if elected, Trump will use his power to curb speech critical of him. That’s a direct challenge to the First Amendment, and hence not likely to fully succeed, even among increasingly partisan judges.

But Trump could still made life difficult for media outlets, and his threats already appear to have had a chilling effect. Amid attacks from Trump and his allies over his philanthropic efforts to help register voters in 2020, Meta founder Mark Zuckerberg has tried to extract himself from politics, including by limiting what the company deems political content on its platforms. The Washington Post editorial page’s scuttling of an endorsement of Harris has been widely read as an attempt by Bezos to avoid angering Trump, though Bezos disputes that. The Los Angeles Times also drew fire for declining to endorse a candidate this year.

The Post‘s move didn’t appease Trump. The former president ripped the paper during his Fox call-in Saturday, even suggesting the 250,000 lost subscriptions and high-profile resignations the paper suffered due to the non-endorsement was connected to his gripes with the paper. Why is the Post facing these problems? According to Trump, it’s “because they don’t have credibility.”

As Donald Trump campaigns to be a dictator for one day, he’s asking: “Are you better off now than you were when I was president?” Great question! To help answer it, our Trump Files series is delving into consequential events from the 45th president’s time in office that Americans might have forgotten—or wish they had.

Five years ago, Donald Trump told Turkish president Recep Tayyip Erdogan to go ahead and invade Syria—an unexpected capitulation to personal pressure from the Turkish strongman that upended US policy, allowing Turkish attacks on Kurdish fighters seen as staunch US allies.

Trump’s green light to Erdogan during an October 6, 2019, phone call forced US troops in Syria to hastily flee from posts near the Turkish border and shocked Washington, drawing bipartisan condemnation of the president’s decision.

The Turkish troops who invaded went on to display “shameful disregard for civilian life, carrying out serious violations and war crimes, including summary killings and unlawful attacks that have killed and injured civilians,” Amnesty International charged. News reports said at least 70 civilians were killed while hundreds of thousands of people were displaced by the invasion.

The okay to invade was one of various ways that Trump helped Erdogan while in office. Trump intervened with the Justice Department to aid a Turkish national bank, Halkbank, which was accused of helping Iran evade US sanctions. Prosecutors have argued the bank helped to finance Iran’s nuclear weapons program. The case against the bank implicated allies of Erdogan, who had authorized the sanctions-evasion scheme, a witness in the case said. Under personal pressure from Erdogan, Trump also pressed his advisers, including DOJ officials, to drop a case against the bank built by prosecutors in the Southern District of New York, according to accounts of former Trump administration officials.

Geoffrey Berman, at the time the US attorney in Manhattan, later said in a book that he received pressure from acting Attorney General Matthew Whitaker in 2018 and that Whitaker’s successor, Bill Barr, pressed him to settle the case on terms favorable to Halkbank. Berman charged that Barr urged him to grant immunity to Turkish officials with ties to Erdogan and suggested hiding those deals from a federal court—a step Berman said would be illegal. Berman and Barr did not respond to requests for comment.

Turkey’s invasion of Syria, oddly, caused problems Halkbank. The criticism Trump faced for allowing Erdogan to invade appeared to embarrass the US president. He responded by attempting to reverse course. In a bizarre public letter, he threatened to “destroy” Turkey’s economy. “Don’t be a tough guy,” Trump wrote. During this spat, Trump and his advisers, including Barr, dropped their opposition to indicting Halkbank. Berman later recounted that Trump’s “falling out” with Erdogan resulted in a “green light to indict Halkbank. And we did it within 24 hours.”

Trump’s approval of Turkey’s invasion of Syria, and his reaction to the criticism it drew, has received limited attention during the 2024 campaign. But it highlights several of Trump’s weaknesses in managing US foreign policy.

Though he casts himself as an effective negotiator, in office Trump consistently accommodated autocrats, offering concessions without winning concomitant benefits, former aides said. “He would interfere in the regular government process to do something for a foreign leader,” John Bolton, Trump’s former national security adviser, told the Times in 2020. “In anticipation of what? In anticipation of another favor from that person down the road.”

Bolton wrote in a book that Trump in 2019 told Chinese President Xi Jinping that his decision to detain Uighur Muslims in concentration camps was “exactly the right thing to do” and urged Xi to “go ahead with building the camps.” In another meeting that year, Bolton wrote, Trump “pleaded” with Xi to help Trump’s electoral prospects by purchasing US soybeans and wheat. Trump apparently hoped the trade would win him votes in rural states hurt by his trade war with China.

This tendency to appease autocrats who flatter him is part of Trump’s personalization of foreign policy, a tendency to make diplomacy about his own interests, rather than those of Americans.

Then there are the conflicts of interest. Trump, in late 2015, acknowledged that “I have a little conflict of interest” in dealing with Turkey, due to his licensing deal that paid him for his name to appear on two glass towers in Istanbul. The 2020 leak of some of Trump’s tax returns revealed that he had in fact received at least $13 million, including at least $1 million while he was the president, through the deal. A man who helped broker Trump’s licensing deal later lobbied the Trump administration on behalf of Turkish interests.

If he is elected again, Trump’s business interests will result in similar conflicts with Vietnam, Oman, and the United Arab Emirates, among others. Through his family, he would also have business-related conflicts with Albania, Qatar, Serbia, and Saudi Arabia, which has paid $87 million to a fund set up by Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner.

It is not clear to what extent financial interests—as opposed to flattery or a wish for the approval of autocrats—influences Trump. The problem is that Americans don’t know what interests he follows.

But it is likely that Erdogan expects Trump will be accommodating if he wins, perhaps starting with Halkbank. A federal appeals court recently ruled that the bank’s prosecution can proceed, following the bank’s effort to claim sovereign immunity.

Turkish interests allegedly spent heavily to corruptly influence New York Mayor Eric Adams, who is accused of ordering that Turkey’s 36-story consulate be allowed to open despite safety concerns. If Adams would help fix a fire code issue, what might Trump do for Erdogan?

Steve Bannon emerged Tuesday from four months in federal prison. He was tanned, supposedly “empowered,” and obviously eager to again help Donald Trump lie about election results if he loses.

Bannon was convicted of contempt of Congress after he ignored a subpoena from the House January 6 Committee. The former Trump strategist—who claimed “executive privilege” allowed him to blow off the committee in 2021, even though he had last worked in White House in 2017—likely could have avoided prison if he’d negotiated with the panel or shown up and asserted his Fifth Amendment rights.

But he presented himself on his War Room show and in a press conference Tuesday as a freedom fighter.

“If you’re not prepared to be thrown in prison by this weaponized justice system, then you’re not prepared to stand up and fight for your country,” Bannon said after serving his sentence at a low-security prison in Connecticut.

Bannon insisted in his press conference that the 2020 election “was stolen” from Trump and said he would again urge Trump to declare victory on election night even if the results, yet again, are unclear and ballots are still being counted.

The War Room host said Trump, who had falsely claimed victory after 2 am on election night four years ago, erred only by failing to lie about the results at “11 o’clock,” instead. This year, Bannon said, “if the votes come in like it looks like they’re gonna come in, he should step up and inform American citizens of exactly what’s going on and not keep people in the dark like was done in 2020.”

Bannon insisted that he urged Trump to declare victory in 2020 because “the Democrat Party was going to steal the election with illegitimate mail in ballots.”

But that’s not what Bannon said in 2020. In an audio recording from an October 31, 2020, meeting, which I reported in 2022, Bannon said that Trump planned declare victory on election night even if he was losing.

“What Trump’s gonna do is just declare victory,” Bannon said. “Right? He’s gonna declare victory. But that doesn’t mean he’s the winner. He’s just gonna say he’s the winner.”

Bannon explained pretty clearly back then that Trump intended to take advantage of a perception that he was ahead, even if the reality differed. Because Democrats were more likely to vote by mail, their ballots would take longer to be counted. That would give them “a natural disadvantage,” Bannon said at the time. “And Trump’s going to take advantage of it. That’s our strategy. He’s gonna declare himself a winner.”

Special counsel Jack Smith cited Bannon’s statement in an October 2 motion as one of various pieces of evidence indicating that Trump before Election Day 2020 had formulated plans, if he faced defeat, to use a “false declaration” of victory to attempt to steal the election.

In 2024, Democrats are again more likely to vote by mail. In Pennsylvania, Democrats are reportedly voting by mail at twice the rate of Republicans. Trump may again have a chance to try to use the “red mirage” to convince his followers that he’s being cheated.

Bannon may be in an interlude between prison sentences. He is set face trial in December in New York for allegedly defrauding donors to a charity that claimed to be raising private funds to help build Trump’s promised wall along the Mexican border.

But until then, Bannon will have the chance to once again “go the mattresses,” as he put it, to help Trump return to the White House.

As Donald Trump campaigns to be a dictator for one day, he’s asking: “Are you better off now than you were when I was president?” Great question! To help answer it, our Trump Files series is delving into consequential events from the 45th president’s time in office that Americans might have forgotten—or wish they had.

Donald Trump has said that if he is elected president again, he will use the Justice Department to prosecute political enemies. We should believe him, because he attempted to do just that in his first term, with some success. And he will be better prepared to execute his plans if he returns to the White House.

NPR recently tallied more than 100 times Trump called for the prosecution or jailing of his perceived foes. His stated targets include Kamala Harris, Joe Biden and his family, Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton, Nancy Pelosi, Liz Cheney, Adam Schiff, James Comey, Bill Barr, John Kelly, Mark Zuckerberg, federal prosecutors, election officials, journalists, and pro-Palestinian protestors. He reportedly wanted retired military officers who criticized him, Admiral William McRaven and General Stanley McChrystal, called back to active duty so they could be court-martialed. He suggested that Mark Milley, who previously served as Trump’s chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, deserved to be executed.

The frequency of those threats makes them seem silly. Trump probably isn’t going to sic prosecutors on all those prominent people. But his record suggests he is serious about using the power of his office against many critics. Contrary to the claims of defenders like J.D. Vance—who said recently that Trump “didn’t go after his political opponents” while in office—Trump made sustained public and private efforts while in the White House to order up probes into critics and political opponents. Trump succeeded in numerous cases in having foes investigated, media reports and accounts of former aides show.

Lock Her Up

After calling for Hillary Clinton’s prosecution on the campaign trail, Trump, despite briefly disavowing the idea, pushed throughout his presidency for Clinton’s prosecution. This campaign came in public tweets and private pressure on aides, and was mounted alongside his anger over investigations into his campaign’s contacts with Russian agents in 2016. Trump pressured all three of his attorneys general to open or advance investigations targeting Clinton. They partly resisted but substantially complied.

Many people recall Trump’s fury at Attorney General Jeff Sessions for recusing himself from matters to the 2016 election—which led the appointment of special counsel Robert Mueller. But despite that pledge, Sessions partly appeased Trump by instructing the US attorney for Utah, John Huber, to reexamine Clinton’s use of a private email server and allegations about the Clinton Foundation. Sessions’ order came amid Trump’s repeated public calls for him to look into Clinton’s “crimes.” After firing Sessions in 2020, Trump privately urged acting Attorney General Matthew Whitaker to push Huber to be more aggressive, the Washington Post reported. When Huber’s investigation ended in 2020 without finding wrongdoing by Clinton, Trump publicly attacked the prosecutor as a “garbage disposal.”

But by then, Trump’s third AG, Bill Barr, had appointed John Durham, the Connecticut US attorney, to launch an investigation into the origins of the FBI’s Trump-Russia investigation. Barr named Durham on heels of misrepresenting Mueller’s report, which found that the Trump campaign “expected to benefit” from secret Russian help in 2016. The Durham appointment also came after reports that Trump and his advisers were seeking revenge against his investigators.

Durham’s effort floundered legally, with the acquittal of two of the three men charged with crimes related to the investigation. But the probe, which lasted four years, fared better as an exercise in arming Trump with talking points. Durham appeared to consider that part of his job, though he has publicly disputed that. When the Justice Department’s inspector general in 2019 issued a report that found no evidence the FBI’s Trump investigation was politically motivated, Durham, in consultation with Barr, issued a strange statement disagreeing, without offering any evidence for why.

Durham decided to charge Michael Sussmann, a lawyer who worked for Democrats in 2016, with lying to the FBI, despite evidence so thin two prosecutors quit in connection with the charge. Sussmann was acquitted in 2022, but through filings in the case, Durham publicly aired allegations about Clinton campaign efforts to advance the Russia story, details that did not appear necessary to his case. Right-wing news outlets in February 2022 jumped one such-Durham motion to falsely report the Clinton’s campaign had spied on Trump White House servers. In his final report in 2023, Durham extensively cited material he acknowledged was dubious possible Russian disinformation in an effort to suggest Clinton had helped drive the FBI probe into Trump.

FBI

After firing James Comey as FBI director in 2017, which resulted in Mueller’s appointment, Trump pressed for the Justice Department to prosecute Comey for mishandling sensitive government information by allegedly orchestrating leaks that were damaging to Trump. According to the New York Times, this pressure led to “two investigations of leaks potentially involving” Comey. The DOJ declined to charge Comey.

Other former FBI officials who drew Trump’s ire—former deputy FBI director Andrew McCabe, and Peter Strzok, originally the lead FBI agent on the Russia investigation—faced DOJ probes after Trump railed against them. Sessions fired McCabe the day before his 2018 retirement, in what appeared to be a deliberate act to deny him a pension and benefits. Prosecutors in 2019 tried to charge McCabe for allegedly lying to FBI officials about media contacts, but in an unusual move that suggests a weak case, a grand jury declined to return an indictment.

John Kerry

In a March 2019 press conference, Trump said former Secretary of State John Kerry, who negotiated the 2015 deal freezing Iran’s nuclear weapons development, could be prosecuted for violating the Logan Act, a 1799 law barring private US citizens from negotiating with foreign governments in disputes with the United States. Trump was irked at Kerry’s ongoing contacts with Iranian officials and by past threats by Mueller’s team to charge former national security adviser Michael Flynn with violating the act. Trump told reporters that Kerry should be charged, but “my people don’t want to do anything,” adding, “Only the Democrats do that kind of stuff.

False. Trump’s public and private efforts had by then already secured DOJ scrutiny of Kerry. Former Trump national security adviser John Bolton told the Times he’d witnessed Trump demand Kerry’s prosecution “on at least a half dozen occasions” in 2018 and 2019. Trump also made the case in tweets and public statements. Days after one of Trump’s tweets, in May 2018, a top DOJ official had told prosecutors in Manhattan to investigate Kerry’s contacts with Iranians, according to the Times. Geoffrey Berman, at the time the US attorney in Manhattan, wrote in a 2022 book that the Kerry probe appeared to result from Trump’s edict. “No one needed to talk with Trump to know what he wanted,” Berman wrote. “You could read his tweets.”

Trump succeeded in sparking investigations into his critics and political foes by continually pressing subordinates to deliver actual prosecutions, as former aides like Kelly, Bolton and White House counsel Don McGahn have revealed. In some cases, the resulting probes appear to have been solutions settled on by officials attempting to manage Trump’s pressure with partial measures.

But in a new term, Trump will surely be more aggressive and even less restrained, as his public threats make clear. The Supreme Court’s July declaration that the president has absolute immunity from prosecution for many types of official conduct will leave him with few worries about facing legal consequences for his own actions. And the aides who partly restrained him before will be gone, replaced by more sycophantic enablers.

As Trump pledges to pervert presidential power to prosecute critics, Americans have to take him at this word. If he wins, who is going to stop him?

As Donald Trump campaigns to be a dictator for one day, he’s asking: “Are you better off now than you were when I was president?” Great question! To help answer it, our Trump Files series is delving into consequential events from the 45th president’s time in office that Americans might have forgotten—or wish they had.

Steve Bannon was indicted in 2020 for allegedly helping defraud Donald Trump fans who donated to a nonprofit that promised to privately fund a border wall. The other defendants in the plot went to prison. But in the final hours of his presidency, Trump pardoned Bannon, reportedly over the objections of various advisers, due to what the Washington Post described as Bannon’s “vociferous support” for Trump’s efforts to steal the 2020 election.

Trump doled out pardons and commutations throughout his presidency, culminating in a deluge of clemency during his final weeks office. He pardoned service members accused of war crimes whose cases were promoted on Fox News; Lil Wayne; most of the Republican congressmen convicted of federal felonies this century; the ex-husband of an unctuous Fox News host; and a former Dick Cheney aide whose pardon might irk former FBI chief James Comey. He even pardoned some people who probably deserved it.

But many of his pardons, like the one he gave Bannon, were clearly corrupt—a misuse of power to benefit his supporters and please his allies. Trump may have acted legally in exercising his constitutional pardon power, but that doesn’t make his actions any more defensible. He granted pardons in apparent exchange for political support, to campaign donors, and to clients of lawyers charging small fortunes for access to him. He dangled the possibility pardons for potential witnesses who might testify about his campaign’s ties to Russia.

This orgy of transactional clemency was a preview of the authoritarian powers Trump has promised to wield without restraint in a second term. Trump has pledged to pardon people charged with crimes connected to January 6 and, if he wins, he’s expected to claim power to order the DOJ to drop the two federal cases against him. And he appears prepared to use his power to block federal charges against federal officials who commit alleged crimes in service of his goals.

Here is a non-complete list of some of Trump’s most outrageous pardons.

Friends and Family of Jared

Trump’s process for assessing pardon pleas in his final days in office was reportedly chaotic, with little involvement from the DOJ office tasked with assisting federal clemency efforts. Instead, Trump’s son-in-law, Jared Kushner, oversaw the process. Many people with connections to Kushner won pardons, most notably his father, real estate developer Charles Kushner, who was convicted in 2005 of crimes that included hiring a prostitute to film herself having sex with his sister’s husband, a way to punish her for cooperating in a federal investigation. Trump’s pardon announcement did not mention what role Jared may have played in helping his dad. A Kushner spokesperson did not respond to a request for comment.

Kushner-connected pardon recipients include 27 people with ties two Orthodox Jewish organizations that had worked with Kushner on criminal justice reform, the New York Times reported. Several of those hired pro-Trump attorney Alan Dershowitz, who advised Kushner on Middle East policy and represented Trump during his first impeachment trial, to help them seek pardons.

That group includes Jonathan Braun, a Staten Island man whose 10-year sentence for drug dealing Trump commuted even as Braun was under investigation for his role in a loan-sharking scheme in which the defendants were accused of repeatedly threatening violence. A federal judge fined Braun for $20 million in February. In August, Braun was arrested and charged with assaulting his wife and her 75-year old father.

Another Dershowitz client who won a commutation was Eliyahu Weinstein, who Trump freed eight years into a 24-year sentence for running a ponzi scheme. Weinstein was indicted last year for allegedly running a new, similar scheme, that prosecutors said he launched “soon after” his release.

Ken Kurson, a close friend of Kushner’s, received a pardon for charges that he had cyber-stalked and harassed three people. In 2022, Kurson pleaded guilty to cyberstalking his ex-wife.

Anyone Who Might Support Him

Trump has mostly pardoned Republicans, but he did help a few Democrats. He pardoned former Illinois Gov. Rod Blagojevich, who was convicted of attempting to sell a Senate appointment and who had appeared on “The Apprentice” in 2010. Since the pardon, Blagojevich has supported Trump. Trump in 2021 also commuted the 28-year prison sentence that former Detroit Mayor Kwame Kilpatrick received for extensive corruption. Kilpatrick is now campaigning for Trump, explaining that he is “grateful” for Trump’s help.

In 2019, Angela Stanton, who was convicted in 2004 for her role in a car theft ring and later supported Trump’s foray into criminal justice reform, appeared on a Fox News panel of Black voters as a Trump supporter. In 2020, Trump pardoned Stanton.

Alice Johnson, a woman whose decades-long sentence for cocaine distribution Trump commuted in 2018, appeared in a 2020 Trump campaign ad that aired during the Super Bowl. Johnson also spoke in support of him at during the Republican National Convention that year. Trump granted her a full pardon the next day.

Celebrities

Trump’s 2021 pardon of Lil Wayne came after the rapper, whose real name is Dwayne Carter, endorsed him (and hired a lawyer who previously had appeared on the “Apprentice” in 2004). Kodak Black, another rapper, who was freed from prison when Trump pardoned him, released a pro-Trump song in August. Trump also pardoned Casey Urlacher on charges of helping run a massive gambling ring, after meeting months earlier with Urlacher’s brother, former Chicago Bears linebacker Brian Urlacher. The former All-Pro endorsed Trump in September and cut an ad for him.

Medicare Fraudsters

Trump’s cross-aisle pardons included Salomon Melgen, a Florida eye-doctor who was a financial backer and friend of former Sen. Bob Menendez (D-N.J.). A hung jury in 2017 helped Menendez avoid conviction on charges that he did political favors for Melgen in exchange for financial benefits. (Menendez was convicted in July 2024 in a different corruption case.)

Unlike Menendez, Melgen was convicted in 2017 on 67 counts related to bilking Medicare out of at least $73 million by persuading numerous elderly patients to undergo tests and get treatment for diseases they did not have. Trump’s pardon of Melgen, which came after a request from Menendez, is one of at least five the former president granted to people convicted of defrauding Medicare or Medicaid, the Washington Post noted in March. Such pardons coexist uneasily with Trump’s claim that he would cut federal spending on those programs by cracking down on fraud.

Of particular note, Trump pardoned Philip Esformes—who had been sentenced to 20 years in prison for his role in stealing more than $1.3 billion from federal programs via fraudulent billing at nursing homes he owned—after his father gave $65,000 to a Kushner-linked charity. Esformes was recently arrested on felony charges related to domestic violence.

People With Connected Lawyers

Trump’s willingness to grant pardons created a robust market for people claiming they had the president’s ear. Former Trump lawyer John Dowd reportedly earned tens of thousands of dollars securing a pardon for a Las Vegas gambler, William Walters, sentenced to prison in 2017 for insider trading. That’s nothing compared to Matt Schlapp, the head of the American Conservative Union, who disclosed receiving $750,000 to lobby for pardon for man named Parker Petit, who was convicted in 2020 of accounting fraud—even though Petit didn’t get a pardon. Rudy Giuliani has denied multiple claims that he requested $2 million to help pardon-seekers get Trump’s attention. Bradley Birkenfeld, a man convicted of fraud in 2008, told the Atlantic in 2021 that former Trump adviser Corey Lewandowski had demanded $500,000 to meet with Trump about a pardon and $1 million more if Trump granted it. Lewandowski denied that claim.

Russia, Russia, Russia

Trump’s attraction to revenge pardons and personal interest combined in his wiliness to undo charges against those caught in investigations into his campaign’s connections to Russia.

Trump pardoned even minor figures convicted of crimes in the scandal, such as George Papadopoulos, a Trump campaign foreign policy adviser who a Trump aide dismissed in 2017 as mere “coffee boy.” Trump pardoned Paul Erickson, a marginal Republican operative best known for dating convicted Russian agent Maria Butina. In a statement at the time, Trump said Erickson’s conviction “was based off the Russian collusion hoax.” In fact, Erickson pleaded guilty to defrauding would-be real estate investors in North Dakota in a scheme unrelated to the Russian matter.

Trump pardoned longtime adviser Roger Stone, who was convicted in 2019 of lying to Congress about his role in helping Trump benefit from Democrats’ emails hacked by Russian agents. Stone was “covering up for the president” when he lied to the House Intelligence Committee, Judge Amy Jackson Berman said while sentencing him. Trump’s pardon of former national security adviser Michael Flynn similarly appeared to reward loyalty. Flynn in 2017 pleaded guilty to lying to the FBI about contacts with Russia. Just before Flynn’s plea, Dowd, the Trump lawyer, left a voicemail for a Flynn attorney in which he asked for a “heads up” if there was any “information that implicates the president.” Dowd added: “Remember what we’ve always said about the president and his feeling toward Flynn, and all that still remains.” Dowd has denied that he was dangling a pardon. Flynn later attempted to reverse his plea. And he never did implicate Trump in wrongdoing.

Nowhere did Trump use his pardon power more successfully than with Paul Manafort. As special counsel Robert Mueller’s team prosecuted Manafort over his secret lobbying for Ukraine’s former pro-Russian president and untaxed payments Manafort received, Trump “made it known that Manafort could receive a pardon,” Mueller later reported. Manafort did eventually plead guilty to some charges and signed a cooperation agreement. But prosecutors later determined he had likely lied to them. He even funneled information on the investigation to Trump’s lawyers, in an apparent effort to remain in line for the pardon Trump finally delivered in 2020.

While working for Trump’s campaign in 2016, Manafort met secretly with a suspected Russian agent to discuss winning Trump’s support for a plan to settle the conflict then occurring in eastern Ukraine by essentially handing control of the region to Moscow. It’s unclear what if anything Manafort said to Trump about this supposed peace plan at the time. But eight years later, following Russia’s full-scale invasion, Trump says he has a solution that would end the war in Ukraine immediately. His new plan sounds something like the idea Manafort discussed back in 2016.

In an extraordinary monologue Tuesday at a Univision town hall, Donald Trump repeated the lie that the mob that attacked the Capitol on January 6—which he described using the pronoun “we”—was unarmed.

“There were no guns down there. We didn’t have guns. The others had guns, but we didn’t have guns,” Trump said. “That was a day of love.”

That is a lie. The latest evidence showing that Trump’s claim is false came in a guilty plea Wednesday by a Texas man named Roger Preacher. Preacher admitted to carrying a pistol on the grounds of the Capitol on January 6, though he knew that doing so was illegal.

Preacher said that he traveled to Washington with two other men who also brought “pistols and AR-style” rifles on the trip. They drove into Washington on January 6 from a Virginia hotel room with three rifles in a bag, the filing says. They left the bag in the car, but Preacher carried his pistol in “an inside-the-waistband holster “ to the lower West Terrace of the Capitol grounds where he remained for around an hour. Preacher said he believed the other two men “were also carrying firearms on their persons.”

Preacher’s admission adds to the heap of evidence that many people in the crowd outside the Capitol on January 6 had guns. Mother Jones compiled evidence of the many guns among January 6 perpetrators back in 2021, in a report based on public video footage, congressional testimony, and criminal cases.

Because police officers made few arrests on January 6 itself to limit violence, few of the attackers were caught with firearms on them. This has allowed the myth pushed by Trump and his allies that the crowd was unarmed to spread. But numerous cases since have revealed that some rioters carried weapons or, like members of the Oath Keepers militia, stashed arms nearby.

The House January 6 committee’s final report, released in 2022, cited police reports indicating that DC officers spotted numerous people descending on the National Mall that day who appeared to be carrying guns. Police stopped few of them, presumably because they feared being shot.

The committee’s report notes that many Trump supporters who arrived for his speech at the Ellipse that day were armed, and that White House officials, including Trump, knew that.

In testimony to the House committee detailed in its final report, Cassidy Hutchinson, who served as a top aide to Trump chief of staff Mark Meadows, said that Trump berated a top Secret Service official on January 6 because agents had placed magnetometers around the Ellipse, deterring some of his gun-toting fans from attending. “I don’t fucking care that they have weapons,” Trump said, according to Hutchinson. “They’re not here to hurt me.”

Preacher is one of around 1,500 people charged with crimes related to January 6, among them Trump himself. Special Counsel Jack Smith wrote in a filing on Tuesday that Trump was responsible for the attack. The former president, the filing said, “willfully caused his supporters to obstruct and attempt to obstruct the proceeding by summoning them to Washington, D.C.”

Special Counsel Jack Smith, in a court filing made public on Wednesday, revealed a litany of damning new allegations about former President Donald Trump’s attempts to steal the 2020 election—details that could impact the neck-and-neck presidential race between Trump and Vice President Kamala Harris.

After Trump’s 2020 presidential election defeat, “he resorted to crimes to try to stay in office,” the 165-page motion unsealed by Judge Tanya Chutkan says. “With private co-conspirators, the defendant launched a series of increasingly desperate plans to overturn the legitimate election results in seven states that he had lost.”

The filing presents new evidence that Trump knew his election fraud claims were false but proceeded anyway with a scheme to use so-called fake electors and outside pressure to stop Joe Biden’s electoral victory from being made official. Smith’s motion contains previously unreported information on Trump’s effort to pressure former Vice President Mike Pence to illegally refuse to certify the election results on January 6, 2021.

The document directly faults Trump for inciting the mob of supporters who attacked Congress on January 6 as part of his effort to disrupt the certification proceedings that day. And it details Trump’s effort to “exploit”—rather than halt—the attack, in the hope that the violence would create an excuse for delaying certification.

The lightly redacted filing argues that Trump’s scheme to use bogus election fraud claims to stop Biden from taking office “was fundamentally a private one” and did not involve “official conduct.” If the courts accept that argument, the indictment could survive the expansive presidential “immunity” standard invented by the Supreme Court in its controversial July 1 decision.

But regardless of the fate of Smith’s legal case, the motion matters politically. It bolsters the argument that Trump’s disregard for the Constitution, democracy, and the rule of law leave him unfit to return to office. And it functions as a reminder for distractible voters about the seriousness of the charges against the first election loser in American history to incite violence in bid to retain power.

Trump’s lawyers fought unsuccessfully in court to block release of the motion based on the claim that it could affect the election, an argument Chutkan, who has repeatedly said she does not consider Trump’s status as a presidential candidate to be relevant to her proceedings, rejected. Smith also filed an appendix that includes FBI interviews, grand jury testimony, and other evidence, which remains sealed, though parts of that could also be made public before election day.

Trump campaign spokesperson Steven Cheung claimed without evidence Wednesday that Smith’s motion was part of an effort by the Biden administration to “weaponize” the Justice Department against Trump. “The entire case is a partisan, Unconstitutional Witch Hunt that should be dismissed entirely, together with ALL of the remaining Democrat hoaxes,” Cheung said in a statement.

The new filing offers a general narrative that has previously been outlined by the media and the House January 6 Committee. But the document includes extensive details that have not been reported, along with a pointed new description of Trump’s conduct.

It says that Trump told three advisers before Election Day that, if he had an early lead in the vote count on election night due to slower counting of mail-in ballots—which were expected to favor Biden—he would “simply declare victory before all the ballots were counted and any winner was projected.”

Smith’s filing also cites audio from October 31, 2020, first revealed by Mother Jones. In it, Trump strategist Steve Bannon said that on election night, “Trump is gonna declare victory. But that doesn’t mean he’s the winner. He’s just gonna say he’s the winner.” Trump “did exactly that” on election night, the brief notes, claiming that he should have won but was a victim of voter fraud.

Smith’s brief reveals that shortly after the election, a Trump aide gave the president an “honest assessment” that his fraud claims would fail in court. “The details don’t matter,” Trump responded.

“It doesn’t matter if you won or lost the election,” Trump told members of his family at another point, according to the brief. “You still have to fight like hell.”

Smith alleges in the filing that Trump signed a “verification of fraud” that he knew was false as part of a lawsuit he filed aimed at overturning his defeat in Georgia. The motion notes that attorneys, whose names are redacted, told Trump that the document contained inaccurate claims. One lawyer told the president that any attorney who the signed the complaint the verification supported “would get disbarred.” Trump signed it anyway.

Smith also points out that even as Trump pressured state election officials in states where he was narrowly defeated to refuse to certify his loss, he didn’t bother checking with them on the validity of his claims. “These officials would have been the best sources of information to determine whether there was any merit to specific allegations of election fraud in their states,” but Trump “never contacted any of them to ask,” the motion says.

The filing also details Trump’s effort to pressure Pence to refuse to certify the election, despite the VP’s protestations that he lacked that power.

Pence, the filing reveals, repeatedly urged Trump to accept defeat. At a private lunch on November 12, Pence suggested that Trump, even if he refused to concede, should “recognize the process is over.” At another private lunch on December 21, Pence suggested Trump, once his legal efforts were exhausted, should “take a bow,” meaning admit defeat.

Pence’s refusal to break the law led Trump to include lines calling on the vice president to do “the right thing,” in his remarks, helping drive anger at Pence when he did not comply with Trump’s demands. According to Smith, Pence’s refusal left the president determined to use the mob he had assembled in Washington as a last-ditch means to pressure lawmakers not to certify his loss.

Trump knew that he had “only one last hope to prevent Biden’s certification as president, the large and angry crowd standing in front of him,” the filing says. “So for more than an hour, the defendant delivered a speech designed to inflame his supporters and motivate them to march to the Capitol.”

Hours later, Trump tweeted that Pence “didn’t have the courage to do what should have been done,” incensing rioters who called to “hang” the vice president as they ransacked the Capitol. Alone in the White House dining room, Trump “personally posted the tweet,” prosecutors said, “at a point when he already understood the Capitol had been breached.”

Minutes later, an aide entered the dining room to inform Trump of efforts to ensure Pence’s safety. The filing says that Trump looked at the staffer “and said only, ‘So what?’”

In December 2018, Sam Nunberg met with Steve Bannon at the Loews Regency hotel in Manhattan. Nunberg, a former Donald Trump campaign aide, expected to discuss work he was doing for a PAC that Bannon ran. But Bannon, whom Trump had fired from a White House job the year before, had other plans.

Nunberg says that moments after the meeting began, Bannon pulled out what he said was a printed lawsuit and warned that the fugitive Chinese mogul Guo Wengui was poised to sue Nunberg.

Bannon—who was working for Guo at the time—said he could have the lawsuit shelved. But Bannon wanted something in return: Nunberg would have to appear in a video with Guo and claim that Nunberg had learned that three other men had conspired to fabricate a rape allegation against Guo made by a former personal assistant—an allegation that had resulted in a criminal case in China and a lawsuit in New York, both begun in 2017.

Further, Bannon wanted Nunberg to say that the same three supposed accomplices—a Chinese entrepreneur named Bruno Wu, casino mogul Steve Wynn, and GOP fundraiser Elliott Broidy—were involved in the issuing of a “red notice” by Interpol seeking the arrest of Guo for alleged financial crimes in China, Nunberg recalled.

“You have to cooperate, and this can be dropped,” Bannon said, according to a memo Nunberg wrote shortly after the incident. “Otherwise Kwok is going to bankrupt you and ruin your life.” (Ho Wan Kwok is one of several aliases used by Guo.) Nunberg, who recounted this exchange in a series of recent interviews with Mother Jones, wrote in his memo that the quotes he used are “almost verbatim.”

Nunberg, who said the story Bannon proposed was totally false, refused his demands. Days later, Guo sued Nunberg for defamation and other claims.

Bannon is currently serving a four-month federal prison sentence in Connecticut following his 2022 conviction on contempt of Congress charges related to his refusal to comply with a subpoena from the House January 6 committee. He did not respond to requests made through his attorney to comment for this story. Representatives for Guo, Broidy, Wu, and Wynn declined to comment.

The narrative Bannon wanted Nunberg to recite incorporated some reality. Wu was a Guo adversary already embroiled in litigation against Guo. And Wu acknowledged, in a 2021 deposition, that after learning of the rape accusation against Guo, he had helped Guo’s accuser find a US lawyer, a step with which Nunberg, who did legal work for Wu, had assisted. Wu also said in the deposition that he paid the legal costs for the accuser’s US lawsuit against Guo, which included putting up a $150,00o retainer.

Broidy and Wynn had both lobbied Trump in 2017 to have Guo—who’d fled China in 2014 and later styled himself a top critic of the Chinese Communist Party—extradited to his home country. In 2020, Broidy pleaded guilty to conspiring to violate foreign lobbying laws, in part by working at the behest of a Chinese government official to have Guo returned. The Justice Department sued Wynn in 2022 for failing to register as a foreign agent for China, arguing that he had personally lobbied Trump for Guo’s extradition in a bid to get favorable treatment for casinos he owned in China’s Macao region. Wynn, who denied those allegations, prevailed in court.

But while Bannon had correctly identified four actual Guo enemies, there is zero evidence that they had conspired to concoct the rape allegation against Guo or were responsible for other charges being leveled against him in China.

The rape accusation against Guo was made by Rui Ma, a former personal assistant for Guo who sued the tycoon in New York. Ma detailed her allegations in a daylong deposition on June 3, 2021, which she took part in via video from China. Ma said that Guo, after hiring her in 2015 when she was in her mid-twenties, had effectively held her as a prisoner for two years before she escaped via the Chinese embassy in London. In her complaint and her deposition, Ma detailed the circumstances of at least five alleged assaults.

“I have been raped by him so many times,” Ma said in the deposition. “It made me hate myself so much.” Ma said that the attacks left her depressed. “I wanted to commit suicide every day, every second,” she recounted later in the deposition. “Kwok has cursed me, abused me, attacks me in ways, the worst words you can use in this world.”

Guo has denied Ma’s allegations, claiming that they, along with various criminal charges he faces in China, were invented by Chinese Communist Party officials in retaliation for his criticism of the country’s rulers. Ma said in her deposition that she had reported the assaults to local police at the encouragement of her parents, without any outside influence.

Nunberg said in recent interviews that he had nothing to do with the rape charge, beyond helping Ma find a US lawyer, or the other allegations against Guo in China. Nunberg also said that he has never met Broidy or Wynn, let alone conspired with them. Wu said in his deposition in the Ma case that he had contacted Ma and helped her file suit in the US only after learning she had reported Guo’s alleged attacks to Chinese police.

Bannon’s intervention in the dispute gained new relevance in July, when a jury in New York convicted Guo of nine felonies related to federal charges that he stole hundreds of millions of dollars in investments he had raised from ardent supporters of an anti-CCP political movement that he and Bannon had launched together. One of the charges Guo was convicted on was racketeering conspiracy. Prosecutors argued that Guo and his associates protected their criminal enterprise through various thuggish methods.

Federal prosecutors named Bannon as a co-conspirator in the case, though Bannon has not been charged with a crime in the matter.

Bannon’s alleged threat to Nunberg highlights how deeply enmeshed in Guo’s operations the former Trump campaign chief was. Bannon was infamously arrested on Guo’s yacht in 2020 as part of an unrelated case, but his role in helping to launch Guo’s political and financial operations in the United States exceeds what is generally known or what Bannon has publicly acknowledged.

Guo had made a fortune in Chinese real estate before fleeing China in late 2014 ahead of the filing of criminal charges for fraud and bribing a top state official. In 2017, from a $68 million penthouse in Manhattan, Guo began broadcasting allegations about corruption in the Chinese Communist Party, and he began cultivating ties to US political operatives close to Trump, most prominently Bannon.

Guo in 2018 began paying Bannon $1 million a year, according to information revealed during Guo’s trial. Guo also allowed Bannon to use his private plane and gave him access to his Connecticut house and the $30 million yacht. In addition, Guo became a key funder for War Room, the influential podcast Bannon launched in 2019.

Bannon in turn helped Guo start a series of companies and nonprofits supposedly aimed at undermining the Chinese Communist Party. The men called this collective enterprise a “whistleblower” movement and leveraged it to win support from tens of thousands of people in the Chinese diaspora. When Guo in 2020 began rolling out “investment opportunities” for his supporters, Bannon provided behind-the-scenes advice along with public promotion. He continued extolling Guo, who he called the “George Washington of the new China,” even as critics began complaining that Guo had ripped them off. Bannon, in short, was crucial to the fraud scheme that Guo was recently convicted of executing.

Bannon’s alleged threat against Nunberg appears to have been part of a pattern of Guo and his allies using expensive lawsuits to harass his critics. Guo sued the Wall Street Journal, CNN, and McClatchy newspapers for reporting on allegations that he had acted in the US as a Chinese intelligence agent. He sued former employees who criticized him. He sued Broidy, past business partners, even a law firm that once represented him. Guo has found little success in court. Many of his suits were quickly dismissed. But his complaints, often accompanied by allegations that the person he sued was a CCP agent, made it clear that he was willing to use his wealth to impose legal costs on detractors.

In 2023, a federal judge sanctioned Guo lawyers for filing a “frivolous” lawsuit accusing the US trustee in a bankruptcy case initiated by Guo of violating foreign lobbying laws. Though the suit was filed on behalf of a group of Guo supporters, Judge Valerie Caproni said in her ruling that the case was part of a legal campaign waged by Guo. Caproni ripped the attorneys for their “pattern of bringing meritless…claims against Mr. [Guo’s] adversaries — conduct that he has praised.” She said the plaintiffs’ “true preoccupation is…trying to ‘defend’ [Guo] by harassing those perceived to be his adversaries.”

One Guo legal action that did succeed was a 2018 lawsuit he filed against longtime Trump adviser Roger Stone. Stone, in appearances on Alex Jones’ Infowars, had falsely claimed that Guo was found guilty and convicted of financial crimes in the US and had made illegal political donations to Hillary Clinton. Guo sued Stone for defamation, seeking $100 million in damages.

Stone settled the suit in December 2018 by acknowledging his remarks were untrue and apologizing in ads he was required to place in national newspapers. In a statement he issued at the time, Stone, who had previously worked closely with Nunberg before the two had a falling out, blamed his former colleague. “I made the error of relying on the representations of Sam Nunberg in my report on this matter and for that I apologized,” Stone said.

Bannon’s attempt to pressure Nunberg came the day after news of Stone’s settlement. And Bannon referenced it in the Loews meeting. “You saw what just happened to Roger Stone,” Bannon said, according to Nunberg’s memo.

Nunberg said in an interview that Stone’s statement was false. “I never talked to Roger about Guo,” he maintained.

But Guo’s lawsuit against Nunberg picked up on Stone’s story. It accused Nunberg of conspiring with Wu to spread “false information about [Guo] to prominent United States media personalities.” These claims were separate from the rape allegations. A New York judge dismissed Guo’s suit, finding it failed to provide sufficient facts about how Nunberg and Wu supposedly defamed him.

A few months later, Nunberg sued Guo for defamation, citing a series of online videos in which Guo repeated, and elaborated on, the allegations he made in his lawsuit against Nunberg. In his complaint, Nunberg called Guo’s allegations “preposterous fictions.” Nunberg’s lawsuit, along with Ma’s case against Guo, is pending.

Guo, who has been jailed since his March 2023 arrest, is likely to receive a long prison term when he is sentenced on December 9. Nunberg said he hopes that by speaking up about the 2018 incident, he can help thwart any efforts by Bannon to win clemency for Guo if Trump retakes the White House. Bannon received his own pardon on Trump’s last day in office in 2021, allowing Bannon to avoid federal prosecution on charges that he helped to defraud donors to a charity that purported to raise private funds to build Trump’s border wall. Bannon is set to face trial on similar state-level charges in New York in December.

“Steve is completely compromised by Guo,” Nunberg said. “He will do anything and everything to push for Guo to be pardoned for his massive, billion-dollar fraud scheme. I hope any future Trump White House rejects Bannon’s request.”

Special Counsel Jack Smith, in a court filing made public on Wednesday, revealed a litany of damning new allegations about former President Donald Trump’s attempts to steal the 2020 election—details that could impact the neck-and-neck presidential race between Trump and Vice President Kamala Harris.

After Trump’s 2020 presidential election defeat, “he resorted to crimes to try to stay in office,” the 165-page motion unsealed by Judge Tanya Chutkan says. “With private co-conspirators, the defendant launched a series of increasingly desperate plans to overturn the legitimate election results in seven states that he had lost.”

The filing presents new evidence that Trump knew his election fraud claims were false but proceeded anyway with a scheme to use so-called fake electors and outside pressure to stop Joe Biden’s electoral victory from being made official. Smith’s motion contains previously unreported information on Trump’s effort to pressure former Vice President Mike Pence to illegally refuse to certify the election results on January 6, 2021.

The document directly faults Trump for inciting the mob of supporters who attacked Congress on January 6 as part of his effort to disrupt the certification proceedings that day. And it details Trump’s effort to “exploit”—rather than halt—the attack, in the hope that the violence would create an excuse for delaying certification.

The lightly redacted filing argues that Trump’s scheme to use bogus election fraud claims to stop Biden from taking office “was fundamentally a private one” and did not involve “official conduct.” If the courts accept that argument, the indictment could survive the expansive presidential “immunity” standard invented by the Supreme Court in its controversial July 1 decision.

But regardless of the fate of Smith’s legal case, the motion matters politically. It bolsters the argument that Trump’s disregard for the Constitution, democracy, and the rule of law leave him unfit to return to office. And it functions as a reminder for distractible voters about the seriousness of the charges against the first election loser in American history to incite violence in bid to retain power.

Trump’s lawyers fought unsuccessfully in court to block release of the motion based on the claim that it could affect the election, an argument Chutkan, who has repeatedly said she does not consider Trump’s status as a presidential candidate to be relevant to her proceedings, rejected. Smith also filed an appendix that includes FBI interviews, grand jury testimony, and other evidence, which remains sealed, though parts of that could also be made public before election day.

Trump campaign spokesperson Steven Cheung claimed without evidence Wednesday that Smith’s motion was part of an effort by the Biden administration to “weaponize” the Justice Department against Trump. “The entire case is a partisan, Unconstitutional Witch Hunt that should be dismissed entirely, together with ALL of the remaining Democrat hoaxes,” Cheung said in a statement.

The new filing offers a general narrative that has previously been outlined by the media and the House January 6 Committee. But the document includes extensive details that have not been reported, along with a pointed new description of Trump’s conduct.

It says that Trump told three advisers before Election Day that, if he had an early lead in the vote count on election night due to slower counting of mail-in ballots—which were expected to favor Biden—he would “simply declare victory before all the ballots were counted and any winner was projected.”

Smith’s filing also cites audio from October 31, 2020, first revealed by Mother Jones. In it, Trump strategist Steve Bannon said that on election night, “Trump is gonna declare victory. But that doesn’t mean he’s the winner. He’s just gonna say he’s the winner.” Trump “did exactly that” on election night, the brief notes, claiming that he should have won but was a victim of voter fraud.

Smith’s brief reveals that shortly after the election, a Trump aide gave the president an “honest assessment” that his fraud claims would fail in court. “The details don’t matter,” Trump responded.

“It doesn’t matter if you won or lost the election,” Trump told members of his family at another point, according to the brief. “You still have to fight like hell.”

Smith alleges in the filing that Trump signed a “verification of fraud” that he knew was false as part of a lawsuit he filed aimed at overturning his defeat in Georgia. The motion notes that attorneys, whose names are redacted, told Trump that the document contained inaccurate claims. One lawyer told the president that any attorney who the signed the complaint the verification supported “would get disbarred.” Trump signed it anyway.

Smith also points out that even as Trump pressured state election officials in states where he was narrowly defeated to refuse to certify his loss, he didn’t bother checking with them on the validity of his claims. “These officials would have been the best sources of information to determine whether there was any merit to specific allegations of election fraud in their states,” but Trump “never contacted any of them to ask,” the motion says.

The filing also details Trump’s effort to pressure Pence to refuse to certify the election, despite the VP’s protestations that he lacked that power.

Pence, the filing reveals, repeatedly urged Trump to accept defeat. At a private lunch on November 12, Pence suggested that Trump, even if he refused to concede, should “recognize the process is over.” At another private lunch on December 21, Pence suggested Trump, once his legal efforts were exhausted, should “take a bow,” meaning admit defeat.

Pence’s refusal to break the law led Trump to include lines calling on the vice president to do “the right thing,” in his remarks, helping drive anger at Pence when he did not comply with Trump’s demands. According to Smith, Pence’s refusal left the president determined to use the mob he had assembled in Washington as a last-ditch means to pressure lawmakers not to certify his loss.

Trump knew that he had “only one last hope to prevent Biden’s certification as president, the large and angry crowd standing in front of him,” the filing says. “So for more than an hour, the defendant delivered a speech designed to inflame his supporters and motivate them to march to the Capitol.”

Hours later, Trump tweeted that Pence “didn’t have the courage to do what should have been done,” incensing rioters who called to “hang” the vice president as they ransacked the Capitol. Alone in the White House dining room, Trump “personally posted the tweet,” prosecutors said, “at a point when he already understood the Capitol had been breached.”

Minutes later, an aide entered the dining room to inform Trump of efforts to ensure Pence’s safety. The filing says that Trump looked at the staffer “and said only, ‘So what?’”