Donald Trump has been talking to attorney Alan Dershowitz about running for a third term in office, which is prohibited by the Constitution. 

In an Oval Office meeting, Dershowitz gave Trump a draft of a book he is writing called Could President Trump Constitutionally Serve a Third Term? Dershowitz told The Wall Street Journal that the book, due to be published next year, lays out scenarios in which a president could serve a third term, and that Trump said he would read it and wanted to know Dershowitz’s opinion.

“I said ‘It’s not clear if a president can become a third term president and it’s not clear if it’s permissible,’” Dershowitz said. The attorney and Jeffrey Epstein associate worked to defend Trump when he was facing impeachment proceedings in his first term. 

“He found it interesting as an intellectual issue,” Dershowitz added. “Do I think he’s going to run for a third term? No, I don’t think he will run for a third term.” 

But Trump has been discussing the possibility of a third term in office for a while now, telling NBC News in March that “there are methods which you could do it.” He continues to “joke” about the possibility, with his business selling “Trump 2028” hats for $50 each. Meanwhile those close to Trump, like Steve Bannon and Boris Epshteyn, continue to promote the unconstitutional move.  

On Tuesday, at a White House Hanukkah event, Miriam Adelson, one of Trump’s biggest donors, said she had spoken to Dershowitz and believed a third term was possible, as the audience broke out in chants of “four more years.” With that kind of encouragement, these threats need to be taken seriously. 

House Speaker Mike Johnson is conveniently sending Congress home the day before the Justice Department is supposed to release the Epstein files in full. The announcement came Wednesday night.

This looks like yet another instance of Johnson doing every little thing he can either to delay the release of the files or to make it so that his fellow GOPers don’t have to be in town to answer to their complicity in this monthslong campaign to avoid their release—as he did by egregiously delaying the swearing-in of Democratic Representative Adelita Grijalva for weeks.

“Like I said: view all political developments for the rest of the week in light of the fact that the Epstein Files are supposed to be released on Friday,” Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez wrote Wednesday evening on X. “House Republicans just suddenly canceled Congressional session Friday and are sending everyone home Thursday evening.”

While recent releases have produced photos of notable people alongside Epstein—like Bill Clinton, President Trump, Bill Gates, Woody Allen, and Noam Chomsky—it’s unclear what Friday’s drop will reveal. If Johnson has his way, it might not happen at all.

President Donald Trump gave a nonsensical justification Wednesday for his blockade of all “sanctioned oil tankers” coming and going from Venezuela.

Speaking to reporters, Trump appeared to claim that he was simply stealing back oil that already belonged to the United States.

“You remember they took all of our energy rights, they took all of our oil from not that long ago, and we want it back, but they took it, they illegally took it,” Trump said.

At another point, he said, “They took our oil rights. We had a lot of oil there. As you know, they threw our companies out, and we want it back.”

It seems that Trump was referring to when Hugo Chávez ordered the seizure of foreign-owned oil fields in 2007, including land and assets that belonged to U.S. oil companies ExxonMobil, Chevron, and ConocoPhillips.

In the intervening 18 years, Chevron struck a deal with Venezuela (that Trump somehow made worse) while ExxonMobil and ConocoPhillips entered into a lengthy legal battle that is still ongoing to win billions of dollars from the Venezuelan government.

It seems pretty obvious that oil fields located in Venezuela, even if they were previously owned by U.S. companies, don’t actually belong to the United States—but Trump sees things differently. On Tuesday, he wrote on Truth Social that it was time for Venezuela to “return … the Oil, Land, and other Assets that they previously stole from us.”

Trump’s blockade is the second major military escalation targeted at Venezuela’s oil industry, after Venezuela accused the United States of piracy because it seized one of Caracas’s oil tankers. This follows months of extrajudicial strikes on boats in the Caribbean Sea that the U.S. government claims, but won’t bother to prove, are smuggling drugs.........

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