Bill Maher pressed former GOP congressman and attorney general nominee Matt Gaetz as to whether he’d ever engaged in sex with an “underage girl” on his podcast Sunday.
Gaetz
joined Maher’s Club Random show weeks after dropping his name from consideration to run the US Justice Department and quitting the House. Gaetz has since launched a show
on the conservative network One America News.
On Maher’s podcast, Gaetz answered questions about topics ranging from masturbation to his loathing of former House Speaker Kevin McCarthy. About 30 minutes into the 68-minute podcast, Maher finally asked Gaetz about allegations he paid prostitutes and committed statutory rape
.
Gaetz was accused of doing both by witnesses who spoke to the House Ethics Committee. Gaetz disputed the claims and noted he was never charged with a crime. He answered questions about his scandalous exit from Congress while speaking to Maher.
Maher said, “So, people want to know two basic things. One, was he ever with an underage girl?”
Gaetz fired back, “No.”
Maher said he was inclined to believe Gaetz, given former President Joe Biden’s Justice Department would have charged the Florida Republican, he said:
Okay. I know you said that. And if the Justice Department had any evidence – and again, if people are going to attack me – I’m not defending Matt Gaetz. I’m telling the truth as to what it is. And if you don’t want to hear the truth, you’re the hack. The Justice Department, this is Biden’s Justice Department declined. I can’t believe Biden’s Justice Department wouldn’t have wanted to get you if there was something. So, the fact that they said we got nothing tells me something, that they had nothing.
Maher then asked Gaetz if he ever hired prostitutes and read text messages made public about the inquiry into the latter’s personal life. Gaetz denied ever paying for sex.
Later in the interview, Maher noted the House committee noted in its report
two women aged 25 and 27 said they had romantic relationships with Gaetz that neither considered “transactional.”
Gaetz sarcastically replied, “It sounded scandalous. Me dating a 25-year-old woman and a 27-year-old woman and having a non-transactional relationship.”
He also suggested McCarthy was behind the release of the report, which Maher said would not have traditionally been released since it came out after Gaetz resigned from his seat.
“I have a lot of enemies on the Republican side,” Gaetz said while referring to McCarthy as a “golden goose” he “killed” when he tanked his speakership.
He concluded, “Kevin McCarthy raised a billion dollars in special interest money and distributed that among a couple hundred Republicans. That makes you a lot of fucking friends.”
Former CIA Director John Brennan
claims former Rep. Tulsi Gabbard (D-HI) will intentionally withhold intelligence from President Donald Trump if confirmed to his cabinet.
Shortly after his November victory, Trump nominated Gabbard as Director of National Intelligence. As a lawmaker, Gabbard became known for her anti-interventionists foreign policy views.
During a MSNBC interview with former RNC Chair Michael Steele, Brennan told the panel that Gabbard, along with Trump’s new CIA chief John Ratcliffe, may withhold information from the president that could be “detrimental” to national security.
Well, when there are national security council meetings that the president chairs in the White House Situation Room, usually the first person to speak would be the director of national intelligence and the director of CIA. They lay down the intelligence basis for any type of policy discussion that ensues. And so if that intelligence basis, that briefing is going to be skewed or is going to be lacking some very important critical information, the policy decision that ultimately comes out of it is also going to be baseless. And also, you know, it’s going to be potentially threatening to our national security. So, again, it’s the president’s daily brief, but also the role that the director of national intelligence director, CIA play in order to ensure that the people who have to make those decisions on the national security counsel have are fully informed about what the reality is, what the intelligence is, what our intelligence gaps are. And if they withhold things or if they skew things, it really is going to be detrimental.
Before kicking the winning field goal against the Buccaneers earlier in the playoffs, Gonzalez adjusted his socks on the sideline and fixed his hair multiple times before
Israeli forces killed at least 22 people and injured dozens more in southern Lebanon on Sunday, Lebanese officials said. In Gaza, Israel said Hamas had violated the terms of the truce.
The Supreme Court on Tuesday gave Brenda Evers Andrew another chance to challenge her death sentence and conviction for the murder of her estranged husband. Andrew, who was sentenced to death in 2004, has long maintained that she is innocent, and her boyfriend James Pavatt, who confessed to the killing, insisted that she was not involved in the crime. Andrew argues that her right to a fair trial was violated because prosecutors at her 2004 trial relied on evidence about her sexuality, including presenting the jury with her thong during closing arguments.
Andrew and Pavatt were both charged with capital murder based on evidence that they had plotted the murder together to obtain the proceeds of a life insurance policy. But Andrew’s sex life and sexual history became a focal point at her trial. Prosecutors told the jury (as one state judge wrote) that she was a “bad wife, bad mother, and a bad woman.”
The court issued an unsigned 10-page opinion vacating a ruling by the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 10th Circuit in Andrew’s case and ordering the court of appeals to take another look. The move came as part of a list of orders
from the justices’ private conference on Friday, Jan. 17. After adding five new cases to their docket
on Friday afternoon, the justices did not – as expected – grant review in any additional cases on Tuesday.
Andrew, who is the only woman on death row in Oklahoma, came to the Supreme Court in January 2024, asking the justices to reverse her conviction. She contended that the Supreme Court’s cases prohibit the use of evidence that, as in her case, makes the trial fundamentally unfair. “Indeed,” she contended, “to convict and condemn a woman to death because her clothing, appearance, demeanor, and sexual history does not comply with stereotypes of womanhood is ‘odious in all aspects [and] especially pernicious in the administration of justice.’”
After considering the case at 11 consecutive conferences, the court on Tuesday sent the case back to the lower courts so that they can consider whether the improper introduction of evidence against her was so “unduly prejudicial” that it made her trial fundamentally unfair. The court of appeals, it explained, rejected Andrew’s claim “because, it thought, no holding of this Court established a general rule that the erroneous admission of prejudicial evidence could violate due process. That was wrong,” the court concluded.
Justice Samuel Alito wrote a one-paragraph opinion in which he concurred with the court’s decision to send the case back to the lower courts. He agreed that the Supreme Court’s “case law establishes that a defendant’s due-process rights can be violated when the properly admitted evidence at trial is overwhelmed by a flood of irrelevant and highly prejudicial evidence that renders the trial fundamentally unfair.” He made clear, however, that he was not expressing any “view on whether that very high standard is met” in Andrew’s case.
Justice Clarence Thomas, joined by Justice Neil Gorsuch, dissented from the court’s decision and would have rejected Andrew’s plea for relief. He suggested that prosecutors had “presented ‘overwhelming evidence’ that Andrew participated in the murder of her husband,” and that “[s]ex and marriage were unavoidable issues at Andrew’s trial.” And Thomas faulted his colleagues for framing the legal principles at issue in the case at too high a level of generality, contending that Tuesday’s decision is the first time the court has “ever summarily set aside a lower court decision for failing to find that a legal rule is clearly established under” the 1996 federal law governing efforts to obtain post-conviction relief.
Thomas concluded by complaining that the relief provided to Andrew on Tuesday is a “rare disposition” that the court “has traditionally reserved” for “the uncommon ‘situations in which the law is settled and stable, the facts are not in dispute, and the decision below is clearly in error.” By contrast, he posited, in Andrew’s case “the Court turns this approach on its head, steamrolling settled AEDPA principles to set aside an entirely correct Tenth Circuit decision.”
The justices on Tuesday did not act on several high-profile petitions for review that they considered at Friday’s conference, including a challenge to Maryland’s ban on assault rifles
, a challenge by Native Americans
to the transfer of land that they regard as a sacred site to a mining company, and a challenge to a ruling by the Oklahoma Supreme Court that blocked the opening of publicly funded religious charter school.
The justices will meet again for another private conference – the last regularly scheduled one for nearly a month – on Friday. Orders from that conference are expected on Monday, Jan. 27, at 9:30 am.
CNN’s Fareed Zakaria cautioned Sunday from Davos he believed that President Donald Trump could disrupt the delicate foreign policy ecosystem the US created in the last century and that it could ultimately “destroy the world.”
The host
, who was reporting live from the World Economic Forum, spoke to attendees about Trump’s
America-first agenda. He concluded the world that America’s post-World War II policies helped build now risked being undone by the president’s shortsighted desire to impose his will.
Zakaria said that prior to 1941, Americans preferred isolationism to empire and that the country did something unthinkable after freeing Europe, Africa, and Asia from dictators. He noted instead of seeking repayment, it paid war-torn countries to rebuild.
The host said American foreign policy allowed it to act in its own best interests while building up others in the eight decades after the war ended. Due to innumerable policies of “goodwill” from Washington, Zakaria said, America had been given the benefit of the doubt time and again when acting unilaterally on the global stage.
He cited one “foreign leader” who asked to remain anonymous who told him, “We all accommodate American requests and wishes far more than those from any other country.”
But Zakaria warned he believed Trump now risked burning decades of goodwill and room to operate down for a series of cheap and easy personal wins.
“He wants to squeeze every foreigner for more,” Zakaria said.
While discussing the Panama Canal, which Trump has threatened to retake while complaining of fees for the US military to use it, Zakaria said:
But Trump wanted to shake down a poorer Central American country and get a discount. It’s a way of being that is always about a transaction rather than a relationship. America is so powerful that it’s quite possible that Trump will succeed in getting these discounts as he threatens other countries, most of them friends, allies, and partners. But in doing so, he will lose the goodwill generated over decades of American foreign policy that made so many countries around the world want to ally with Washington against the Soviet Union, or Russia, or China.
And he might unleash forces of nationalism and protectionism that, over time, will damage, even destroy the world that America created, a world that has been more stable, peaceful, prosperous, and free than any we have known before.
