Embattled Rep. Matt Gaetz deployed his “military adviser” Monday to deflect swirling allegations of sexual and financial misconduct—only for the former employee to admit he had no exculpatory evidence and reveal he had not even spoken to the congressman in months. Gaetz’s team convened the event at the personal residence of former Air Force Capt. Nathaniel Nelson. But rather than actually aid in clearing Gaetz’s name, […]
William Bredderman
24 posts
A hotel group tied to South Dakota Gov. Kristi Noem’s campaign chair pulled in millions of dollars from her COVID-19 grant program—the latest case of those close to the Republican benefiting from the federally funded initiative. Analyzing records compiled by the Sioux Falls Argus Leader, The Daily Beast determined that hotel owner Regency Midwest Ventures Limited Partnership received a $500,000 award through Noem’s small-business relief effort. […]
He’s an international man of mystery—a reclusive billionaire who once bought a lower Manhattan skyscraper in cash. He’s cut multimillion-dollar business deals with now-sanctioned figures in Russian autocrat Vladimir Putin’s circle. And, thanks in part to Gov. Andrew Cuomo and his administration, he was left in charge of the health and well-being of thousands of poor and elderly New Yorkers throughout the COVID-19 pandemic. Typical assessments […]
Rep. James Clyburn (D-SC) is turning up the heat on giant meat producers that he believes let COVID-19 fester among workers at their facilities. Clyburn—the House Majority Whip, chairman of the new Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Crisis, and the man widely credited with securing the Democratic nomination for Joe Biden last year—blasted a fusillade of letters to Biden’s Office of Safety and Health Administration and […]
One of Saturday Night Live’s most notorious former stars has turned his radio show into a regular platform for his business partner, cushion and conspiracy hawker Mike Lindell, amplifying the Trump-loving MyPillow founder and his unfounded claims about the election, Twitter “censorship,” and the deadly Capitol insurrectionist riot. Between the early 1980s and the early 2010s, Joe Piscopo went from SNL fan favorite to punchline—but resurrected […]
Talk about miserable timing. A self-described “private party app” urging people to “get your rebel on,” Vybe is all about hosting or attending parties in the thick of the deadliest, most brutal stretch of the COVID-19 pandemic. “Miss playing beer pong, flirting with strangers, and generally just having a blast with the crew?” Vybe’s website reads. “Vybe is here for you.” Suffice it to say the […]
The creator of the online fundraising campaign for Sidney Powell’s “Kraken” lawsuits, aimed at overturning President Donald Trump’s November loss, has a patrician pedigree—and a social media profile rife with transphobia and flirtations with the far-right. Robert Matheson’s social media persona has grown so strident and extreme that Twitter banned him from its platform earlier this year after he tweeted at Portland Mayor Ted Wheeler that […]
Authorities in Pennsylvania put an official seal on President-elect Joe Biden’s victory there Tuesday—and rammed a stake through President Donald Trump’s attempts to resurrect his dreams of a second term through legal challenges. Pennsylvania Secretary of the Commonwealth Kathy Boockvar finalized the result while Team Trump still had an appeal of its last federal court loss pending. Legal experts told The Daily Beast the Pennsylvania certification […]
The past week saw Team Trump piling up losses and running out of road. The campaign dropped its lawsuit to stop the certification of President-elect Joe Biden’s victory in Michigan, while the Pennsylvania Supreme Court threw out the campaign’s claim that COVID-19 restrictions had deprived GOP observers of their right to monitor the postal vote count. Then, on Thursday night, with just four days remaining before […]
Rudy Giuliani came off a bizarre, sweaty, fact-free press conference Thursday with a legal play just as wild: Instead of providing a speck of evidence for the Trump campaign’s claims of voter fraud, he’s now calling on Pennsylvania to prove the ballots it counted were legal. It’s a desperate gambit to solve the problem that has bedeviled the president and his team since before the election: […]
Rudy Giuliani, a former federal prosecutor, appeared in a Pennsylvania courtroom on Tuesday to make outrageous and evidence-free voter fraud claims, invoking Mickey Mouse and JFK in a wild conspiracy rant that another attorney denounced as “disgraceful.” The one-time New York City mayor, who is President Trump’s personal lawyer, took over the federal lawsuit from Pennsylvania attorneys and got permission to represent the campaign at a […]
President Donald Trump’s campaign filed a new lawsuit in federal court in Michigan in an attempt to stop the certification of Joe Biden’s win—but experts say it won’t get much farther than a Chevy Vega. The Trump team, whose previous brief in the Rust Belt battleground got thrown out by the state Court of Claims last week, filed the new action in federal court for the […]
Chris McGrath/Getty As you were—that’s the order the Supreme Court gave to Pennsylvania Friday night amid the Trump campaign’s legal challenges to vote-counting there. Justice Samuel Alito, a leader of the highest bench’s conservative faction, issued an order in response to an afternoon request from Pennsylvania Republicans that left the situation in the Keystone State virtually unchanged: with ballots that arrived after 8 p.m. on Election […]
Donald Trump’s last-ditch barrage of election lawsuits, which he touted again in an falsehood-laden national address Thursday, are “baseless” and “absurd,” amounting to little more than a hopeless effort to confuse voters about a contest he has already lost. Or at least that’s what veteran GOP lawyers, none of whom were Trump supporters but who have served Republican presidents or helped candidates prevail in litigation against […]
Less than a week after pockets of Hasidic Brooklyn erupted in response to new COVID-19 restrictions shuttering schools and other institutions in highly infected areas, the Bet Yaakov Ateret Torah yeshiva has its doors open and parents’ cars lining up on Coney Island Avenue to drop off and collect students on the same old 9 a.m. to 3 p.m. schedule. Starting around 2:30 p.m., kids’ voices […]
The inflammatory social media personality who allegedly incited the assault of a Jewish journalist in Brooklyn during Wednesday night demonstrations against new pandemic-related restrictions says he will be allowed to turn himself in to police on unspecified charges after this weekend. Harold “Heshy” Tischler—caught on video swaggering through crowds of irate ultra-Orthodox Jewish youths with a Trump bumper sticker on his shirt, and apparently goading protesters […]
Hours before a new coronavirus crackdown began in New York, Borough Park was fuming. On Monday, Gov. Andrew Cuomo ordered public and private schools to close in 20 New York City zip codes where positivity rates had spiked in recent weeks, most of them home to substantial ultra-Orthodox Jewish communities. Anger was already palpable that afternoon on the streets of one of the hottest hotspots citywide, […]
When former White House chief strategist Steve Bannon’s nonprofit sought to restore an American golden age, it turned to a company with connections to a consortium that allegedly strip-mined the retirement accounts of elderly conservatives, The Daily Beast has discovered. Bannon’s “economic nationalist” group Citizens of the American Republic hired the Wyoming-based firm Platinum Advertising Corporation in 2018 to handle its “websites/social media,” Internal Revenue Service […]
Socialism—it’s a convention tradition for the GOP. References to the economic philosophy of government ownership were only slightly outnumbered by the words “the” and “Trump” on the first night of the remote-access GOP summit on Monday. Ex-United Nations Ambassador Nikki Haley warned of the nefarious influence “the socialist left” would have on former Vice President Joseph Biden’s prospective administration, while Sen. Tim Scott (R-SC) imagined the […]
The GOP—including a Black Republican organization—plans to hold “a First Amendment demonstration” during convention week in the same park where law enforcement rousted Black Lives Matter protesters to clear the way for a President Donald Trump photo-op in June. The Daily Beast obtained a permit application that the Maryland GOP submitted Thursday afternoon for three gatherings of 10,000 people on National Parks Service property, which the […]
Talk about family values. Disclosures obtained by a watchdog group show that White House Senior Advisor Jared Kushner raked in as much as $3,000,000 from projects benefiting from Trump administration initiatives in 2019, plus up to $1,000,000 more in rent money from firms which later received COVID-related small business loans from the government. The documents, released by Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, show that […]
Weeks before Gov. Gavin Newsom’s announcement Monday that California would dramatically reverse its reopening, a doctor 2,500 miles away saw a new COVID-19 crisis emerging there. It began ahead of Memorial Day, as clusters erupted in the deserts of Imperial County, down along the Mexican border. Driven north with increasing commercial activity and seasonal travel, as the state reopened and summer began, the disease tore through […]
An exclusive California golf course that has counted Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin among its members is seeing plenty of the taxpayers’ green. The Riviera Country Club, located in a posh enclave of Los Angeles, received $2 million to $5 million in assistance through the Paycheck Protection Program—a multibillion-dollar initiative intended to carry small businesses and their employees through the COVID-19 pandemic. Mnuchin, whose Department of the […]
President Donald Trump went postal on Twitter Monday morning over the threat he claims mailed ballots pose to the integrity of U.S. elections—but his family seems to have never gotten the message. The commander in chief fired off another social media fusillade against the practice of submitting ballots through the post, which he has previously labeled “horrible,” “terrible,” and “corrupt,” as well as “dangerous,” “fraudulent,” and […]