Trump’s defense nominee Pete Hegseth ripped by Tammy Duckworth as GOP grilled on cabinet picks: Live updates

During his appearance on Meet the Press this morning, Senator Eric Schmitt of Missouri said it was a “slur” to call Tulsi Gabbard, Donald Trump’s pick as director of national intelligence, a Russian asset.

NBC’s Kristen Welker played a clip of former UN ambassador Nikki Haley saying of Gabbard, a veteran and former Democrat rep: “This is not a place for a Russian, Iranian, Syrian, Chinese sympathizer. DNI has to analyze real threats. Are we comfortable with someone like that at the top of our national intelligence agencies?”

Welker asked Schmitt if he was comfortable and whether he would vote for Gabbard’s confirmation.

He replied: “I think it's — it's really interesting that anybody that has a different political view now is being cast as a Russian asset. It's totally ridiculous. Tulsi Gabbard has served in our military. She served as a congresswoman from Hawaii, as a Democrat, I might add, part of this unique coalition that President Trump has put together and won and got that mandate. But I think it's insulting. It's a slur, quite frankly.’

He continued: “You know, there's no evidence that she's an asset of another country. She served this country honorably, and by the way, she cares deeply about our Constitution and civil liberties and making sure people aren't being targeted by these intelligence agencies. So again, I think this is a reformer who can come in, who maybe is not part of the same Washington cocktail party circuit that people in the intel community are used to, but maybe that's exactly what we need right now. President Trump listened to the American people when they screamed about these issues. They want to be heard. They feel like Washington is broken. And I think bringing somebody in like Tulsi Gabbard is welcome news.”

Richard Hall and Andrew Feinberg have been looking into Gabbard’s history with Russia.

Read the full article here.

Incoming Trump National Security Advisor Mike Waltz told Fox News Sunday today that they are “hand in glove” with the outgoing Biden administration regarding “our adversaries” and that they are wrong to think they can play one administration off against another.

Chris Wright writes:

When I was young, I wasn’t even the only Chris Wright at my local dentist. I had horrible teeth as a child, but whenever I went for a check-up, I’d have to tell them my address as there were three of us in the neighbourhood.

Even last month at my local swimming pool, I found out that not only am I not the only Chris Wright on its books, but also that staff had the gall to ask if I was the Chris Wright born in the 1960s or the 1990s…?

But the most annoying mistaken identity moment happened this week at Cop29.

Read on...

Matt Gaetz’s past was too likely to come back to bite him. That was the belief inside Trump’s inner circle as the former Florida Congressman’s nomination to be attorney general came to an end, according to Rolling Stone.

One Trump adviser told the outlet that if Gaetz had become the leader of the Department of Justice, he would probably have become “the single most blackmail-able person to ever serve as attorney general of the United States … and that’s not a risk you want to take when the whole job is going after criminals.”

Gustaf Kilander has the story.

Firebrand Georgia congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene told Maria Bartiromo on Fox News’ Sunday Morning Futures about what she has in store for her new James Comer-blessed subcommittee on the Department of Government Efficiency.

She recommends stripping federal funding from so-called sanctuary cities and making good on Elon Musk’s wish to defund NPR (although that gets less than 1 percent of its funding from federal grants).

Greene wrote on X: “I lay out my vision for the [Oversight] Subcommittee on DOGE and the steps we need to take to GUT federal agencies, FIRE unelected bureaucrats, and deliver for the American people!”

Watch the full interview below:

In the waning hours of his first administration, Donald Trump enacted one of his final executive orders on January 20, 2021 and granted clemency to 143 individuals, including former aide Steve Bannon and rapper Lil Wayne.

Four years on, Trump, now with his own felony conviction, is just weeks away from returning to the White House and a raft of fellow convicted felons are already knocking at the door.

The president can issue pardons (removing a punishment after a court decision) and commutations (a reduction in punishment for a crime) as they sees fit for federal convictions, but not state crimes.

Disgraced politicians, January 6 rioters and reality TV celebrities have already begun clamoring for a Trump pardon.

The Independent has rounded up all the key names who are on the list.

In an appearance on CNN’s State of the Union, Senator James Lankford of Oklahoma downplayed Donald Trump's threats of payback at the Department of Justice over the criminal indictments he faced over election interference and classified documents.

However, he then told Dana Bash: “If someone is in the Department of Justice right now that is actively trying to undercut the president, they should be gone.”

This was a sentiment echoed by Senator Eric Schmitt of Missouri, who told NBC’s Meet the Press that one of the president-elect’s first priorities should be to fire any staff at the Justice Department who worked on cases that involved charges against Trump.

“First and foremost, the people involved with this should be fired immediately,” he told Kristen Welker. “And anybody part of this, this effort to keep President Trump off the ballot and to throw him in jail for the rest of his life because they didn’t like his politics, and who continue to cast him as a quote, unquote threat to democracy, was wrong, and so we’ll see where that goes.”

Schmitt framed his stance as a form of “accountability,” telling Kristen Welker, “[The cases] all fell apart under the weight of the law. And so I do think there needs to be accountability. I think that getting it back to crime-fighting is important, but there has to be accountability for these kinds of abuses.”