Friday News Roundup
Trump selected Matt Gaetz as his pick for attorney general, at the same time that House Ethics Committee testimony is emerging that Gaetz had sex with a 17-year-old girl. This is yet another sexual misconduct allegation among Trump's Cabinet picks, including Secretary of Defense nominee Pete Hegseth.
Trump has picked Tulsi Gabbard as his pick for Director of National Intelligence, a woman once nicknamed by Ukrainian security services as "Russia's girlfriend", while opting to refuse standard FBI background checks for his nominees.
In addition to putting Elon Musk on a phone call with Ukrainian leader Volodymyr Zelensky, Trump brought Musk along to a meeting with Iran's UN ambassador, which raises questions about whether Trump wants to create a new class of billionaire oligarchs to rewrite our foreign policy.
Donald Trump tapped Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. to head the Department of Health & Human Services. Although previous news coverage about a parasitic brain worm or an incident where he beheaded a whale carcass have made it easy to ridicule RFK, RFK's role in worsening a 2019 measles outbreak in Samoa, which killed 83 people, should be instantly disqualifying.
In an attempt to drum up a nuisance lawsuit against freedom of speech, Trump's attorneys sent out a threatening letter demanding $10 billion from the New York Time and Penguin Random House publishing what Trump calls "false and defamatory statements" about him. As Trump feels free to act vindictively toward the media, distressing reports suggest Senate Democratic leader Chuck Schumer is throttling the PRESS Act, a last-minute piece of legislation passed by the House aimed at protecting journalists from government surveillance.