With Pete Hegseth’s nomination for secretary of defense is in trouble on Capitol Hill, he still has the support of a powerful conservative backer: Project 2025 architect and Heritage Foundation president Kevin Roberts.

Roberts said Thursday that his organization plans to spend $1 million to lobby senators unwilling to back the former Fox News personality accused of sexual assault.

“It’ll be messaging right now with their constituents about how out of step they are with the Trump agenda,” Roberts told the Associated Press in an interview, saying that “the establishment” was behind the opposition to Hegseth.

The conservative think tank also has a lot of supporters in the Republican Party, and Roberts’s move could sway Republican senators who are put off by Hegseth’s personal views and the allegations against him.

During his presidential campaign, Donald Trump repeatedly denied that he had anything to do with the conservative Project 2025 manifesto, despite his running mate JD Vance and multiple campaign staffers having links to the project. Since he won the election, however, Trump has made staff picks with close ties to the policy plan, and his allies have spoken openly about adopting some of its policy proposals, such as eliminating the Department of Education.

If Roberts is openly supporting Hegseth and backing up lobbying efforts with cash, it could signal that Trump’s nominee is Project 2025–approved. It may also be an effort to curry favor with the president-elect in exchange for something else.

With Trump no longer in campaign mode, his administration’s true motives and affiliations no longer have to be hidden or explained away. Likewise, the unpopular people and organizations who support him don’t have to keep their distance. Project 2025 and its leaders are now operating openly to defend the president-elect in exchange for being able to implement their horrific agenda for America.

Tulsi Gabbard’s PAC spent thousands in political funds to help get her personal manifesto on The New York Times bestseller list, Forbes reported Thursday.

Gabbard founded the leadership PAC Defend Freedom, Inc., in March. Although it initially reported having no cash on hand, the PAC would go on to spend $33,000 of its donors’ funds on a bunch of copies of Gabbard’s book.

The book, For Love of Country: Leave the Democrat Party Behind, debuted in fourth place on The New York Times hardcover nonfiction bestseller list during the week of May 4, but it was flagged for bulk purchases, as large orders might have affected its ranking. The book stayed on the list for one more week.

At least some of those bulk purchases came from Gabbard’s PAC: On July 11, Defend Freedom made the first of four disbursements for “printing” to BulkBooks, a book wholesaler based in Franklin, Tennessee, that specializes in large orders. The disbursements totaled $33,000.

“For a limited time, Defend Freedom PAC supporters who gave $100 or more received Tulsi Gabbard’s NYT bestselling book For Love of Country,” Gabbard spokesperson Erika Tsuji confirmed.

Authors normally receive royalties for book copies purchased wholesale, which indicates that Gabbard profited personally from the bulk order (rather than if her PAC had requested copies from the publisher directly). Her spokesperson didn’t comment on this when asked over email.

While this is not illegal, it is shady. “She is not a federal candidate or an officeholder, so she is allowed to personally profit when her PAC buys her book with donors’ funds,” campaign finance attorney Brett Kappel explained to Forbes.

Gabbard has shifted hard from an edgy Democrat to an unflinching, QAnon-adjacent Donald Trump loyalist. This book, and the subsequent bestseller scam, is straight from her new alt-right grifter playbook.

Rudolph Giuliani is facing more legal action from two Georgia election workers who successfully sued him for defamation in December last year.

Ruby Freeman and her daughter Shaye Moss asked a New York federal judge Thursday to impose “severe” sanctions and hold the former Donald Trump lawyer and ex–New York City mayor in civil contempt after Giuliani failed to turn over discovery documents related to the seizure of his property to settle the defamation ruling against him.

Giuliani ignored an October 28 court order to turn over the documents within 14 days and then disregarded a November 22 court order specifying a mandatory four-day window to produce the documents. After the November 26 deadline came and went with no action from Giuliani, Freeman and Moss’s attorneys told the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York that “the time has come for Court to hold Mr. Giuliani in contempt for violating both the October 28 and November 22 Orders, and enter a contempt sanction it finds appropriate.”

The MAGA gadfly has desperately tried to delay and disregard the legal proceedings against him for falsely accusing Freeman and Moss of manipulating ballots during the 2020 presidential election in Georgia, resulting in Trump supporters sending the pair death threats, engaging in harassment, and protesting at their homes.

Last month, Giuliani even cited........

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