Trump won’t disclose ‘secret’ transition money as Don Jr’s influence looms over cabinet picks: Live updates

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.”

As President-elect Donald Trump makes his transition to the White House, it’s not just his cabinet picks garnering scrutiny — it’s now also his funding as he’s keeping the donors funding the transition effort a secret.

Trump has not yet signed an agreement with the outgoing Biden administration — a requirement laid out in the Presidential Transition Act that places restrictions on the amount of fundraising cash in exchange for more than $7 million in federal funds for the “orderly transfer” of power.

Because Trump hasn’t signed the agreement, he doesn’t have to work within the confines of the fundraising limits or disclose what interest groups are funding his transition to the White House, The New York Times first reported.

Kelly Rissman reports.