Elise Stefanik Tries to Scrub Ties to Org. That Invited Nazis to Party |
New York Representative Elise Stefanik is trying to completely erase her history with the New York Young Republican Club after they invited racists and German white supremacists to their annual party.
It became clear on Saturday that the club was willing to welcome even the fringiest members of the far right when white nationalists and Nazi slogan–chanting far-right German leaders attended the New York Young Republican Club’s annual gala.
In the days since, Stefanik—who “formally joined” the group in 2022, per a club announcement—has claimed that she was never affiliated with the group to begin with, according to Politico’s Jason Beeferman.
But that’s just not true. The club’s website listed Stefanik’s name on its member page as of October, though it no longer appears to. It is unclear when her name was removed from the site.
She’s also supported the Young Republican cohort financially. In an August 2021 post, the official New York Young Republican Club X account thanked Stefanik for being a “generous donor to our Clubhouse Fund,” referring to her as a “staunch supporter of the NYYRC’s activism.”
Even the people around her have profound ties to the organization, including her longtime senior adviser, Alex deGrasse, who wrote on X in 2021 that he was a “a proud member” of the club.
The convenient rebrand could be the result of Stefanik’s political ambitions: The 41-year-old Albany native is vying to become the state’s first Republican governor in two decades. Peeling away from the club’s beliefs could make her more palatable to the large liberal population in New York City required to win the gubernatorial race.
Albany’s current leadership—and Stefanik’s 2026 Democratic opponent—was unimpressed with the effort.
“This is not the first time Stefanik has been caught palling around with hateful antisemites, and it won’t be the last,” Kathy Hochul campaign spokesperson Ryan Radulovacki told The New Republic.
Stefanik was also affiliated with another youth Republican group bearing a strikingly similar name—the New York State Young Republican Club—which made national headlines in October when leaked screenshots from a private group chat revealed the race-based vitriol among its top members. In it, Young Republican leaders referred to Black people as monkeys and joked about rape, slavery, and the gas chamber.*
* This piece originally misstated which organization had the leaked group chat.
White House chief of staff Susie Wiles seems to have been caught lying about her statements regarding Elon Musk’s ketamine use, leading us to question everything else she denies from her series of interviews with Vanity Fair’s Chris Whipple.
“The challenge with Elon is keeping up with him,” Wiles told Whipple, in part one of the article. “He’s an avowed ketamine [user]. And he sleeps in a sleeping bag in the [Executive Office Building] in the daytime. And he’s an odd, odd duck, as I think geniuses are. You know, it’s not helpful, but he is his own person.”
While Musk’s drug use has been previously reported on, Musk had only admitted to casual and infrequent use of ketamine specifically. Wiles’s comments blow that notion up entirely.
Wiles, of course, profusely denied that she said this.
“That’s ridiculous,” she told The New York Times. “I wouldn’t have said it and I wouldn’t know.”
But Whipple’s reporting comes from a series of sit-downs that Wiles did with him, and The New York Times confirmed that Whipple played them a recording in which the White House chief of staff is heard making the ketamine comment.
This interview was a disaster for Wiles. She inexplicably gave Vanity Fair—and the general public—even more fodder against an already tumultuous administration. She said that Trump “has an alcoholic’s personality,” that Attorney General Pam Bondi “whiffed” on her handling of the Epstein files, and that Vice President JD Vance was a conspiracy theorist, among other things. And it seems that Whipple has solid ground to stand on, given his recordings of her, no matter how much she and her administration deny it.
The Trump administration is trying to claim that the FBI believed it didn’t have probable cause to search Donald Trump’s Mar-a-Lago estate in 2022, citing a Fox News article claiming to have declassified emails.
White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt posted the article on X Tuesday, calling it a “story that matters.” The article claims that the FBI was hesitant to search the estate of the then-former president for missing classified documents, but was pushed by the Department of Justice at the time.
One email reportedly states that at one point, the FBI’s Washington Field Office did “not believe (and has articulated to [DOJ]), that we have established probable cause for the search warrant for classified records at Mar a Lago.” Another email states that the bureau thought a raid would be “counterproductive,” suggesting “alternative, less intrusive and likelier quicker options for resolution” to recover the documents at the heart of the case.
It’s not surprising that the White House would want to highlight this article, because it makes the Biden administration look like it was pushing for a raid over the objections of federal law enforcement. But the search of Mar-a-Lago, which a federal judge signed a warrant for, ultimately undermines that argument.
Classified documents were found all over the estate, including in the ballroom, bathroom and shower, an office, Trump’s bedroom, and a storage room, according to special counsel Jack Smith’s indictment. Agents allegedly found documents from seven government agencies, including the Central Intelligence Agency, Department of Defense, National Security Agency, and........