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“No country can be great without fair and honest elections,” Trump, himself notorious for lying, said in his speech.

The Washington State Supreme Court will rule on whether Amber Kim, who is trans, can return to a women’s prison.

Democrats across the country questioned the president’s fitness after his baseless, incendiary prime-time Thursday night speech accusing foreign agents of tampering with our last three elections—all to push his restrictive SAVE America Act.“This is a 25th Amendment moment,” California Governor Gavin Newsom said, referring to the law that allows Congress to replace the president if deemed “unable to discharge the powers and duties” of the job. “I just watched the ramblings of a mad king, and what else can I say—the only thing missing was tinfoil. Donald Trump is trying to rig our elections, and we have to stop him. Show up and VOTE this November.”“How can anyone deny the urgency of the 25th Amendment at this point,” echoed Representative Yassamin Ansari.Others focused on the illegitimacy of the claims Trump made.“Tonight I heard a failed and desperate president who as war spirals and prices rise is as always focused on his grievances, his shame, and above all his fear of the accountability that will come with defeat,” Senator Jon Ossoff wrote on X. “I also heard a president signaling his unmistakable intent to attack these elections and our voting rights, just as he tried to throw out our votes and seize the presidency in 2020. Our answer will be overwhelming.”“Donald Trump is releasing unverified, meaningless documents to appease his own delusions about an election he lost resoundingly, all while continuing to withhold 3 million pages of the Epstein files,” wrote Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer.“Donald Trump is a feeble, unhinged conspiracy-peddling 80-year old failed President. The economy is a disaster under this guy and the American people know it,” House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffires said. “Pathetic.”“Trump says Democrats forgot to rig the election in 2016, successfully rigged it while *he* was president in 2020, then forgot how to rig it again in 2024. So the only election Democrats supposedly stole was the one he himself controlled,” said Representative Jim McGovern. “You have to be a special kind of stupid to believe this bullshit.”“Donald Trump just used a primetime address to relitigate an election he lost six years ago—and to demand new laws making it harder to vote,” former gubernatorial candidate turned voting rights activist Stacey Abrams wrote. “Americans see through the lies. He tried this in Georgia first: a call to ‘find 11,780 votes,’ a raid on Fulton County, and now a war on the ballot itself. That’s not democracy. That’s cowardice. America, we’ve beaten it before.”“Tonight, the same President who once badgered Georgia’s Republican Secretary of State to find 11,780 votes that didn’t exist, so he could overtake Biden’s lead in the state in 2020, put out a whole new set of lies about our elections, past and present,” Senator and Trump nemesis Adam Schiff added. “All of his claims and the selective release of any documents must be treated with the greatest skepticism given the President’s many lies and misrepresentations about our elections.”Outgoing GOP Representative Thomas Massie had some words for the president, as well.“This is absurd,” he wrote. “Every piece of voter data Trump mentions here, as well as which elections each voter voted in, is readily available in Kentucky for a small fee.”Trump’s rambling speech was as inaccurate as it was disconcerting. He sounded bad, had no energy, and stuck so closely to the teleprompter it seemed like he’d never seen the speech before he read it. Not exactly a vote of confidence for the next two years.

Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche’s meeting with several Epstein survivors was a major bust. The Thursday meeting was an obvious gambit for Senate support for Blanche’s potential promotion to permanent attorney general. The encounter was arranged hours after Republican Senator Thom Tillis said that his vote for Blanche’s confirmation would be predicated on whether the acting attorney general met with Jeffrey Epstein’s victims.During the second day of Blanche’s committee confirmation hearing, Epstein victim Dani Bensky warned the Senate Judiciary Committee that Blanche had dodged her and other victims for months, yet showed a sudden willingness to talk shop once he needed them to advance his Senate confirmation.By 4 p.m., the meeting was a go, as several survivors were spotted filing into the Justice Department. Two hours later, however, they reappeared outside the building, looking “distraught and emotional,” according to MS NOW. Sky Roberts, the brother of the late Virginia Giuffre, informed reporters outside the Justice Department: “I think we have a little ways to go here.”“It had absolutely nothing to do with us, and it had everything to do with Blanche checking a box so that he can get a promotion,” Epstein victim and anti–human trafficking educator Elizabeth Stein told the network. “I don’t think that we had high expectations going into this meeting. I certainly did not. But I didn’t expect to walk out of the meeting feeling the way that we feel right now.” “It was demoralizing, to say the very least,” she added.Stein recalled that Blanche was completely unwilling to provide the group with anything substantial, actively dodging questions and refusing to provide assurances that his department would follow up on potential investigative leads. She noted that he could not provide a concrete explanation for Ghislaine Maxwell’s cushy prison transfer to a low-security prison camp, and wouldn’t clarify the improper redactions rampant throughout the released Epstein files.“It just felt like more political posturing and using survivors the way that we’ve been used as political pawns,” Stein continued. “We’re victims of the crime of sex trafficking. And the fact that our Department of Justice will not take that seriously is beyond concerning, not just to us, but should be concerning to Americans all across this country.”Epstein survivor Annie Farmer told ABC News she is “even more confident in urging senators to vote against his confirmation as the United States Attorney General” after finally meeting Blanche face to face.“I found him abrasive, condescending, and intentionally noncommittal to survivors—a marked contrast to his public testimony during his confirmation hearing,” said Farmer, who served as a key witness for the government during Ghislaine Maxwell’s criminal trial.Tillis did not feel the same way: The North Carolina senator indicated over social media Thursday evening that he was satisfied by Blanche’s efforts. “I commend Todd Blanche for doing what all his predecessors over the last two decades never did: meet with the victims of Jeffery Epstein’s horrific crimes,” Tillis wrote. “I appreciate his willingness to directly engage and listen to them.”

Donald Trump promised “really big news” in his primetime address on election integrity on Thursday night but failed to deliver any. Instead, he recited a laundry list of disinformation and misinformation but provided no evidence votes were changed or voting systems manipulated in the election he lost six years ago. Election experts called it “shockingly […]