It looks like the guy who has made it perfectly clear he doesn’t care about federal law is violating federal law. Oh, and also he’s about to be the president of the United States.
Donald Trump and his campaign are currently in violation of the Presidential Transition Act, a federal law that coordinates and funds the transition of power from one administration to the next.
The PTA has a few components that must be submitted by the Trump campaign—and so far, the president-elect’s team hasn’t handed over a single one.
Trump has yet to submit a Memo of Understanding to the General Services Administration, which would theoretically articulate an ethics policy pledging not to hire individuals with conflicts of interest to assist with its transition. The document would provide $7.2 million to fund Trump’s transition, and was due at the beginning of October.
It’s become increasingly clear the president-elect has no intention to submit one. That’s possibly because the PTA also requires candidates to disclose all of their private donors, and places a $5,000 cap on individual donations to the transition.
Trump will be sworn in regardless of whether he complies with the Presidential Transition Act, but his noncompliance will likely stall and disrupt the transition process. In lieu of federal funding, Trump might look elsewhere for big dollar donations, such as his inaugural committee, which is set to be headed by millionaire real estate investor Steve Witkoff and Kelly Loeffler, a former Republican U.S. senator.
Trump has also failed to submit security clearance requests for members of his administration, with each appointment more disturbing than the last.
Last week, the Department of Justice said that it was ready to “process requests for security clearances for those who will need access to national security information.” Trump’s top advisers have previously suggested that the president-elect hand out security clearances without FBI vetting.
InfoWars host Alex Jones appears to have issued his final broadcast.
On Tuesday, the virulent conspiracy theorist—who lost a $1.5 billion case for claiming that the Sandy Hook Elementary School massacre that claimed the lives of 20 first graders and six adults was a hoax—announced that his right-wing media empire, InfoWars, was being staged for a federal auction.
“Wednesday afternoon, Infowars, the equipment, InfoWars.com, InfoWarsStore.com, and a whole bunch of other stuff, is at a federal bankruptcy auction, from the fake judgements and the rigged trials where I was found guilty beforehand, and they had literal show trials like out of the Soviet Union or Nazi Germany,” Jones said in a video posted to X (formerly Twitter).
“I saw the auctioneers inside the building, going around and surveying to make sure all the stuff is here,” Jones continued. “Everything tagged, everything marked.”
Jones appeared to be under the impression that “good guys” would buy the fringe network, though he did not reveal who they were. In the run-up to the auction, several groups expressed interest in InfoWars assets, including a coalition of liberal and anti-disinformation watchdog groups, according to The Daily Beast, as well as some of Jones’s own supporters, including Donald Trump ally Roger Stone.
Alex Jones announces tonight that auctioneers are now in his offices, and InfoWars is being shut down with everything being auctioned off on Wednesday. pic.twitter.com/bfArjmUi1P
Jones has sacrificed practically every element of his life in order to hock his conspiracies.
In 2017, the InfoWars host lost primary custody of his children in a case that pinned him as a “cult leader” of an online conspiracy network.
Jones filed for bankruptcy in 2022 after losing his case against the families of victims of the Sandy Hook tragedy. Jones himself filed in June to liquidate all of his assets (which, at the time, amounted to roughly $9 million in personal assets, $6 million in InfoWars’ parent company Free Speech Systems, and $1.2 million worth of inventory—all a relative drop in the bucket for paying off his massive debt). A year later, the victims’ families took mercy on Jones, agreeing to settle the outstanding debt for a minimum of just $85 million over the course of 10 years.
Jones is still working to appeal the judgments against him. He now admits that the shooting was actually “100 percent real” but argues that his First Amendment rights should permit him to say that it wasn’t.
Mark Meadows tried to appeal to the Supreme Court over his election interference charges in Georgia, and was swiftly shut down.
Hoping to have his case moved to federal court, Meadows appealed to the Supreme Court, but on Tuesday the court denied his request. A former White House chief of staff under Donald Trump, Meadows faces two charges over his efforts to overturn the 2020 presidential election results in the Peach State.
Meadows’s legal team argued that since he was a “federal officer” at the time, the case should be moved to federal court, where he likely hoped to........