Monday, Dec 23rd
Last update09:22:09 AM GMT
Political Glance
Lara Trump, President-elect Trump’s daughter in law and former Republican National Committee (RNC) co-chair, removed her name from consideration to replace Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.).
“After an incredible amount of thought, contemplation, and encouragement from so many, I have decided to remove my name from consideration for the United States Senate,” Trump wrote in a Saturday post on the social platform X.
A former chief adviser to New York’s mayor, Eric Adams, surrendered to city prosecutors on Thursday to face criminal charges related to an ongoing investigation of the mayor and his circle.
Ingrid Lewis-Martin, a powerful adviser of Adams, her son Glenn Martin II, aka Suave Luciano, and two real estate investors were indicted in an influence-peddling $100,000 bribery scheme.
A divided Georgia Court of Appeals disqualified the prosecutor in President-elect Donald Trump's state election racketeering case on Thursday, ruling Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis carried the appearance of impropriety in her decisions about who to prosecute and what charges to bring.
Willis had acknowledged a romantic relationship with a special counsel she hired onto the case, Nathan Wade. After fiery hearings earlier this year, Fulton County Superior Judge Scott McAfee ruled Willis showed "a tremendous lapse in judgment" but that she could remain on the case.
But Trump and eight other defendants in the sprawling prosecution appealed that decision.
The space entrepreneur Elon Musk is unlikely to receive government security clearances if he so applied, even as his SpaceX launch company blasts military and spy agency payloads into orbit, according to a report on Monday.
The billionaire, a close ally of Donald Trump, who is set to join the incoming administration as an efficiency expert and recently became the first person to exceed $400bn in self-made personal wealth, is reported by the Wall Street Journal to have been advised by SpaceX lawyers not to seek highest-level security clearances owing to personal drug use and contacts with foreign nationals.
Musk currently holds a “top-secret” clearance that took years to obtain after he discussed use of marijuana on a 2018 podcast with Joe Rogan, according to the outlet. But that may not be enough to have access to information about US government payloads in his rockets.
Pete Hegseth, Donald Trump’s pick for secretary of defense, is offering to release a woman from a non-disclosure agreement related to sexual misconduct allegations from 2017, Lindsey Graham revealed on Sunday.
Speaking on NBC’s Meet the Press, the South Carolina senator said Hegseth assured him in a private meeting that he would lift the NDA, giving the accuser an opportunity to speak publicly about her allegations.
A former FBI informant pleaded guilty on Monday to lying about a phony bribery scheme purportedly involving Joe Biden and his son Hunter that became central to an attempt to impeach the president in Congress.
Alexander Smirnov entered his plea to a felony charge in connection with the bogus story, along with a tax evasion charge stemming from a separate indictment accusing him of concealing millions of dollars of income.
An attorney for Smirnov, 44, declined to comment after the hearing in Los Angeles federal court.
Prosecutors and the defense have agreed to recommend a sentence of between four and six years in prison when he is sentenced next month.
Smirnov will get credit for the time he has served since his February arrest on charges that he told his FBI handler that executives from the Ukrainian energy company Burisma had paid Joe Biden and Hunter Biden $5m each around 2015.
"If people don't come back to work, come back into the office, they're going to be dismissed," Trump said during a press conference at Mar-a-Lago, his private club and personal residence.
"Somebody in the Biden administration gave a five-year waiver of that, so for five years people don't have to come back into the office," he added. "It's ridiculous. It was like a gift to a union, and we're obviously going to be in court to stop it."
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