Trump breaks silence on 'burn bags' claim
The clip has Hanson saying the nation's intel agencies 'knew' that there was no Trump campaign collusion with Russia and calling out a conspiracy of the 'top people' in U.S. intelligence 'conspiring with a sitting president of the United States to destroy Donald J. Trump' – and pictures grainy video clips of Barack Obama . Members of Trump's national security team are overseeing declassification of material from the Russia probe dating to Trump's 2016 campaign against Democrat Hillary Clinton .
A series of explosive headlines have followed. The effort to put new and sensational information into the public sphere comes as Trump continues to beat back questions about the Jeffrey Epstein scandal, fueled by his own recent comments that the sexual offender 'took' staff from his spa at Mar-a-Lago . On Thursday, the Senate Judiciary Committee, chaired by Iowa Republican Charles Grassley, 91, released a bombshell 29-page classified file related to the Russia probe.
The annex from former Special Counsel John Durham 's report contains emails and other documents purporting to show a Clinton plan to link the Trump campaign to Russia. One such email, purporting to come from Leonard Benardo of the George Soros-backed Open Society Foundations states: 'Julie [Clinton Campaign Advisor] says it will be a long-term affair to demonize Putin and Trump,' one of his emails disclosed in the Durham annex states. 'Now it is good for a post-convention bounce. Later the FBI will put more oil into the fire.'
However Benardo told investigators he hadn't seen seen the July 25, 2016 email, didn't know who Julie was, and wouldn't have used that concluding phrase. The partly-redacted documents says some analysts noted that Benardo's emails appeared authentic and he had been hacked by the Russians, but others noted it was possible they were 'fabricated or altered,' undermining the central claim that there was a coordinated plot to destroy Trump's presidency. Investigators couldn't find the specific emails in question, but they did uncover messages that used the exact same language.
Special Counsel John Durham later wrote that Clinton campaign advisor Julianne Smith 'was, at minimum, playing a role in the campaign's efforts to link Trump to Russia.' Durham said the emails gave 'at least some credence' to the idea that such a plan existed. He was appointed during Trump's first term to investigate the origins of the Russia probe.
Durham also noted that regardless of whether the so-called 'Clinton Plan' was true or based on unreliable intelligence, investigators should have been more skeptical about politically charged information. Notably, the Clinton campaign helped fund the now-debunked Steele dossier, classifying the expense as legal services. Clinton herself told investigators is 'looked like Russian disinformation to [her].' Trump dove into the 'burn bag' story despite a day earlier not initially catching the drift of a question about it.
Trump, who has accused former President Barack Obama of 'treason' over recent disclosures by his Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard, kept up the drum beat on Truth Social. 'The Russia, Russia, Russia hoax is now totally undisputed! The facts are all there, in black and white,' he wrote, sprinkling in all-caps. 'It is the biggest scandal in American History. The perpetrators of this crime must pay a big price. This can never be allowed to happen in our Country again!'
Trump also posted a video clip by Devin Nunes, the former California GOP lawmakers who oversaw a report released by Gabbard. Trump quotes Nunes, who now runs his media company in his TV appearance, writing: 'What we now know for sure is not only was this a plan by Hillary Clinton, but this is also a plan of the Soros Society…the same people doing the same nonsense—from 2016 all the way up until the raid at Mar-a-Lago.
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The Guardian
25 minutes ago
- The Guardian
‘He has trouble completing a thought': bizarre public appearances again cast doubt on Trump's mental acuity
Donald Trump's frequently bizarre public appearances, which this month have seen the president claim, wrongly, that his uncle knew the Unabomber and rant unprompted about windmills on his recent trip to the UK, have once again raised questions about his mental acuity, experts say. For more than a year Trump, 79, has exhibited odd behavior at campaign events, in interviews, in his spontaneous remarks and at press conferences. The president repeatedly drifts off topic, including during a cabinet meeting this month when he spent 15 minutes talking about decorating, and appears to misremember simple facts about his government and his life. During his presidency, Joe Biden was subjected to intense speculation over his mental acuity – including from Trump. After Biden's disastrous debate performance in June 2024, when he repeatedly struggled to maintain his train of thought, scrutiny over Biden's fitness eventually led to him not running for re-election. Trump, however, has largely been saved the same examination, despite examples of confusion and unusual behavior that have continued throughout his second term and were on full display on his recent trip to the UK. Over the weekend Trump, during a meeting with the European Commission president, Ursula von der Leyen, abruptly switched from discussing immigration to saying this: 'The other thing I say to Europe: we've – we will not allow a windmill to be built in the United States. They're killing us. They're killing the beauty of our scenery.' Trump proceeded to speak, non-stop and unprompted, for two minutes about windmills, claiming without evidence that they drive whales 'loco' and that wind energy 'kills the birds' (the proportion of birds killed by turbines is tiny compared with the amount killed by domestic cats and from flying into power lines). The abrupt changes in conversation are an example of Trump 'digressing without thinking – he'll just switch topics without self-regulation, without having a coherent narrative', said Harry Segal, a senior lecturer in the psychology department at Cornell University and in the psychiatry department at Weill Cornell Medicine. For years, Trump has batted away questions about his mental acuity, describing himself as a 'stable genius' and bragging about 'acing' exams – later revealed to be very simple tests – which check for early signs of dementia. But Democrats have begun to more aggressively question the president's fitness, including Jasmine Crockett, the representative from Texas, and California's governor, Gavin Newsom, and this week alone offered multiple examples of Trump exhibiting odd conduct. Asked about the famine in Gaza on Sunday, Trump seemed unable to remember the aid the US has given to Gaza, and forget that others had also contributed. Trump claimed the US gave $60m 'two weeks ago'. He added: 'You really at least want to have somebody say thank you. No other country gave anything. 'Nobody acknowledged it, nobody talks about it and it makes you feel a little bad when you do that and you know you have other countries not giving anything, none of the European countries by the way gave – I mean nobody gave but us.' Trump seemed to not realize or remember that other countries have given money to Gaza – the UK announced a £60m ($80m) package in July, and the European Union has allocated €170m ($195m) in aid. And the Guardian could not find any record of the US giving $60m to Gaza two weeks ago. In June, the US state department approved a $30m grant to the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation, a group backed by Israeli and US interests which has been criticized by Democrats as 'connected to deadly violence against starving people seeking food in Gaza'. The White House did not respond to questions about Trump's claimed $60m donation. Segal said another characteristic of Trump's questionable mental acuity is confabulation. 'It's where he takes an idea or something that's happened and he adds to it things that have not happened.' A high-profile example came in mid-July, when Trump claimed his uncle, the late professor John Trump, had taught Ted Kaczynski, better known as the Unabomber, at MIT. Trump recalled: 'I said: 'What kind of a student was he, Uncle John? Dr John Trump.' I said: 'What kind of a student?' And then he said: 'Seriously, good.' He said: 'He'd correct – he'd go around correcting everybody.' But it didn't work out too well for him.' The problem is: that cannot possibly be true. First, Trump's uncle died in 1985, and Kaczynski was only publicly identified as the Unabomber in 1996. Second, Kaczynski did not study at MIT. 'The story makes no sense whatsoever, but it's told in a very warm, reflective way, as if he's remembering it,' Segal said. 'This level of thinking really has been deteriorating.' Aside from the confabulation, there have been times when Trump seems unable to focus. During the 2024 campaign there was the bizarre sight of Trump spending 40 minutes swaying to music onstage after a medical emergency at one of his campaign rallies. Trump's rambling speeches during his campaign – he would frequently drift between topics in a technique he described as 'the weave' – also drew scrutiny. The White House removed official transcripts of Trump's remarks from its website in May, claiming it was part of an effort to 'maintain consistency'. It is worth reading Trump's remarks in full, however, to get a sense of how the president speaks on a day-to-day basis. At the beginning of July, Trump was asked, 'What is the next campaign promise that you plan to fulfill to the American people?' He then rambled about meeting foreign leaders and removing regulations, adding: Sign up to This Week in Trumpland A deep dive into the policies, controversies and oddities surrounding the Trump administration after newsletter promotion I got rid of – just one I got rid of the other night, you buy a house, they have a faucet in the house, Joe, and the faucet the water doesn't come out. They have a restrictor. You can't – in areas where you have so much water they don't know what to do with it. Uh, you have a shower head the shower doesn't uh, the shower doesn't, you think it's not working. It is working. The water's dripping out and that's no good for me. I like this hair lace and [sic] – I like that hair nice and wet. Takes you – you have to stand in the shower for 20 minutes before you get the soap out of your hair. And I put a, a thing – and it sounds funny but it's really not. It's horrible. And uh, when you wash your hands, you turn on the faucet, no water comes out. You're washing whole – water barely comes out it's ridi – this was done by crazy people. And I wor – wrote it all off and got it approved in Congress so that they can't just change it.' 'Any fair-minded mental-health expert would be very worried about Donald Trump's performance,' Richard A Friedman, a professor of clinical psychiatry and the director of the psychopharmacology clinic at Weill Cornell Medical College, wrote in the Atlantic, after a stumbling performance from Trump in his debate against Kamala Harris last September. He added: 'If a patient presented to me with the verbal incoherence, tangential thinking, and repetitive speech that Trump now regularly demonstrates, I would almost certainly refer them for a rigorous neuropsychiatric evaluation to rule out a cognitive illness.' At a recent cabinet meeting called to discuss the flooding tragedy in Texas, the war in Ukraine and Gaza, the bombing of Iran, and global tariffs, Trump went on a 13-minute monologue about how he had decorated the cabinet meeting room. After talking about paintings which he said he had personally selected from 'the vaults', Trump said. 'Look at those frames, you know, I'm a frame person, sometimes I like frames more than I like the pictures,' and added he had overseen the cleaning of some china. As department heads, including the defense secretary, Pete Hegseth, and the secretary of state, Marco Rubio, waited to be dismissed so they could go and do their jobs, Trump continued: Here we put out – you know these, these lamps have been very important actually, whether people love them or not but they're if you see pictures like Pearl Harbor or Tora! Tora! Tora!, you see movies about the White House where wars are being discussed, oftentimes they'll show those lamps or something like those lamps, something that looks like them. Probably not the reals, because I don't think they're allowed to – this is a very important room, this is a sacred room, and I don't think they made movies from here. You never know what they do. But they were missing, er, medallions. See the medallions on top? They had a chain going into the ceiling. And I said: 'You can't do that. You have to have a medallion.' They said, 'What's a medallion?' I said: 'I'll show you.' And then we got some beautiful medallions, and you see them, they were put up there, makes the lamps look [inaudible] so we did these changes. And when you think of it, the cost was almost nothing. We also painted the room a nice color, beige color, and it's been really something. The only question is, will I gold-leaf the corners? You could maybe tell me. My cabinet could take a vote. You see the top-line moldings, and the only question is do you go and leaf it? Because you can't paint it, if you paint it it won't look good because they've never found a paint that looks like gold. You see that in the Oval Office. Er, they've tried for years and years. Somebody could become very wealthy, but they've never found a paint that looks like gold. So painting is easy but it won't look right.' The White House pushes back aggressively on the issue of Trump's mental fitness. 'The Guardian is a left-wing mouthpiece that should be embarrassed to pass off deranged resistance leftists as 'experts'. Anyone pathetic enough to defend Biden's mental state – while being labeled as unethical by their peers – has zero credibility. President Trump's mental sharpness is second to none and he is working around the clock to secure amazing deals for the American people,' said White House spokesperson Liz Huston. So do his political allies. 'As President Trump's former personal physician, former physician to the president, and White House physician for 14 years across three administrations, I can tell you unequivocally: President Donald J Trump is the healthiest president this nation has ever seen. I continue to consult with his current physician and medical team at the White House and still spend significant time with the president. He is mentally and physically sharper than ever before,' said congressman Ronny Jackson. In April, Trump's White House physician, Dr Sean Barbabella, wrote that the president 'exhibits excellent cognitive and physical health and is fully fit to execute the duties of the commander-in-chief and head of state'. He said Trump was assessed for cognitive function, which was normal. That report hasn't stopped people from questioning Trump's mental acuity. 'What we see are the classic signs of dementia, which is gross deterioration from someone's baseline and function,' John Gartner, a psychologist and author who spent 28 years as an assistant professor of psychiatry at Johns Hopkins University Medical School, said in June. 'If you go back and look at film from the 1980s, [Trump] actually was extremely articulate. He was still a jerk, but he was able to express himself in polished paragraphs, and now he really has trouble completing a thought and that is a huge deterioration.' Gartner, who during Trump's first term co-founded Duty to Warn, a group of mental health professionals who believed Trump had the personality disorder malignant narcissism, warned: 'I predicted before the election that he would probably fall off the cliff before the end of his term. And at the rate he is deteriorating, you know … we'll see. 'But the point is that it's going to get worse. That's my prediction.'
The Guardian
25 minutes ago
- The Guardian
Sydney Sweeney's Republican voter registration revealed amid jeans ad controversy
Sydney Sweeney registered as a Republican voter in Florida a few months before Donald Trump won a second US presidency, it has been revealed, as the public continues fixating on a new jeans ad campaign featuring the actor and a pun about her genes. The Euphoria and White Lotus star registered to vote in Florida on 14 June 2024 – shortly after buying a mansion in the Keys – and listed her party affiliation as Republican, according to publicly available records reviewed by the Guardian on Sunday. That was about two weeks after Trump, another registered Republican Florida voter, was convicted in New York City of criminal falsification of business records and before he secured a return to the White House in November's presidential election. It was also about two years after Sweeney, 27, faced criticism from some US media consumers after she was photographed at her mother's birthday party where several of the guests were seen wearing hats that called to mind those which bear Trump's Make America Great Again (Maga) slogan. The native of Spokane, Washington, subsequently issued a statement on social media pleading with the public to 'stop making assumptions'. 'An innocent celebration … has turned into an absurd political statement, which was not the intention,' Sweeney's statement added at the time. Sweeney has not addressed her Florida Republican voter registration, the existence of which went viral on social media on Saturday and was later reported on by traditional news outlets. The actor by then had generated considerable media coverage after the outfitter American Eagle released several videos showing her modeling the company's denim jeans and jackets. American Eagle's campaign generally revolves around the punny use of the phrase, 'Sydney Sweeney has great genes.' In one video, 'genes' is crossed out and replaced with 'jeans'. Another clip showed the blue-eyed blond suggestively looking at the camera and discussing how her body's composition 'is determined by … genes'. 'Genes are passed down from parents to offspring, often determining traits like hair color, personality and even eye color. My jeans are blue,' Sweeney continues in the advertisements, which include a joke about the cameraperson becoming distracted by her breasts. Some social media users dismissed the campaign as tone deaf, arguing that it echoed rhetoric associated with eugenics and white supremacy at a time when the Trump administration was seeking to eliminate diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) initiatives as well as aggressively pushing to detain and deport immigrants en masse. One TikTok reaction video that received hundreds of thousands of likes accused Sweeney of ignoring the political climate of the moment, saying 'it's literally giving … Nazi propaganda'. US conservatives have seized on the indignation over the campaign on the liberal fringes, rushing to praise Sweeney for landing a blow on 'woke' advertising, invoking a term some use to criticize DEI measures. Trump spokesperson Steven Cheung wrote on social media that criticizing Sweeney's collaboration with American Eagle was 'cancel culture run amok'. Nonetheless, many have judged backlash to Sweeney and American Eagle's collaboration as exaggerated and overblown. American Eagle's stock has reportedly risen in the wake of its Sweeney-centered campaign. A statement from the company on Friday defended the campaign, saying: ''Sydney Sweeney Has Great Jeans' is and always was about the jeans. Her jeans. Her story.' That outcome cut a stark contrast with the 2023 Bud Light advertisement involving trans activist Dylan Mulvaney. A conservative-organized boycott against Bud Light substantially drove sales down. The brand lost its place as the US beer market's top seller. And Bud Light's owner, Anheuser-Busch, sought to distance itself from Mulvaney in a statement which blamed the promotion on an 'outside agency without … management awareness or approval'. 'No one was trying to cancel Sydney Sweeney,' said a post on the X account Wu Tang is for the Children, which counts on more than 270,000 followers. 'And no one cares if she's Republican or not.'
Daily Mail
25 minutes ago
- Daily Mail
Skeptical psychologist uses controversial new therapy to speak with his dead son... and hears extraordinary details of the afterlife
When Dr Matthew McKay's son was killed, he grieved the loss of his voice and presence - until something extraordinary happened that he believes is proof of an afterlife. Jordan McKay was just 23 when he died. A recent University of California Santa Cruz graduate with a degree in economics, he had a promising career in animation and post-production, helping build 3D environments for an upcoming Bruce Willis thriller.
