Before she became known as Donald Trump Jr.'s alleged girlfriend, Palm Beach socialite Bettina Anderson was caught up in an international drug scandal.
Anderson, now 37, was flying on a private plane from the Bahamas back to Florida - but the trip home took a dramatic twist when customs agents found controlled substances in the luggage.
Anderson's brother Harry Loy Anderson, who was piloting the plane, was charged with smuggling psilocybin, also known as magic mushrooms.
The 2015 incident was reported by the Daily Mail, which first reported that Donald Jr. is having an alleged affair with Bettina Anderson.
Donald Jr. is engaged to Kimberly Guilfoyle, who has been, along with Don Jr., a prominent backer of President Trump's political efforts.
Bettina Anderson, 37, is a wealthy socialite from Palm Beach, Florida, where the Trump family has been living since relocating from Trump Tower in New York a few years back.
The little-known socialite and philanthropist reportedly was seen kissing Donald Jr. at a bar recently.
"They were definitely on a date," a witness told the Daily Mail. "They weren't exactly making out, but the kisses were romantic, and you could tell they were intimate with each other."
"Another observer said, "She seemed totally smitten with Don – and he with her."
The Daily Mail subsequently reported that in 2015, Anderson was a passenger on a plane piloted by her brother that was carrying illegal drugs.
Harry Loy Anderson III, now 47, said he had nothing to declare at customs, but agents found magic mushrooms in his bags. He was charged with importing a controlled substance and released on a $250,000 bond.
"When asked about the mushrooms, …. Anderson became very nervous and stated that those were not his; that he did not smoke or drink," a criminal complaint said at the time.
Anderson was facing heavy jail time, but he was spared prison after reaching a plea agreement that called for him to pay a $5,000 fine and surrender his pilot license.
Despite speculation of tensions in their relationship, Donald Jr. was accompanied by Guilfoyle for a trip to the Balkans this week, where he spread his father's message of peace in Ukraine.
Guilfoyle, a former prosecutor from San Francisco, still harbors resentment towards Kamala Harris over a dispute dating from their days as up-and-coming prosecutors in the city. Guilfoyle accuses Harris of blocking her from a job in the San Francisco District Attorney’s Office, where Harris launched her career in politics.
“She pretended to be a member of the hiring committee, which didn’t exist,” Guilfoyle told the New York Times recently.
Guilfoyle went on to marry, then divorce, San Francisco mayor Gavin Newsom, who is now the governor of California.
A Secret Service agent called a toll-free number to get technical support with a drone system prior to the July 13 attempt on Donald Trump's life in Butler, Pennsylvania, according to a damning Senate report.
There were numerous opportunities to stop shooter Thomas Matthew Crooks, but Secret Service somehow fumbled each one of them, according to an interim report from the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee.
The Secret Service agent in charge of operating the Counter Unmanned Aircraft Systems (C-UAS) had little experience, and he called a toll-free number to troubleshoot the drones, which remained inoperable for several hours.
Meanwhile, the Secret Service denied requests for additional drones, even as Crooks used his own personal drone to scout the rally site before the assassination attempt.
Trump survived by turning his head just in the nick of time, leaving him grazed in the ear. Crooks killed a rallygoer, Corey Comperatore, and critically wounded two others.
The Secret Service first became aware of a suspicious person 27 minutes before the shooting, but they failed to stop Trump from going on stage. Two minutes before Crooks pulled the trigger, Secret Service knew a suspicious individual was on the roof of the AGR building.
A counter-sniper also saw local police with guns drawn, but did not think to notify Trump's protective detail.
The Secret Service counter-sniper team was placed at the rally in response to a "credible intelligence" of a threat, the report said, noting that it was the first term a counter-sniper team has ever been provided to someone who is not the president, the vice president, or a major party nominee. Trump was nominated the Republican candidate for president days after surviving the shooting.
Perhaps most critically, the rooftop that provided Crooks with a clear line of sight was not secured, despite local police raising concerns.
As the Senate committee put it, the failures were "foreseeable, preventable, and directly related to the events resulting in the assassination attempt that day."
Weeks after cheating death in Pennsylvania, Trump was targeted a second time by a would-be assassin in Florida.
The Senate unanimously passed legislation this week to enhance security for major presidential candidates, but without some serious reform, Trump - and the public - unfortunately cannot have confidence that he is safe.
Gunshots were fired at Kamala Harris' Arizona campaign office after midnight Monday.
No one was injured in the incident, which left bullet holes in the facade of the Democratic National Committee campaign office. Police have made no arrests, and they have not identified a motive.
Staffers found bullet holes in the windows Monday morning.
"No one was inside the office during the overnight hours, but this raises concerns about the safety of those who work in that building, as well as those nearby," Tempe Police spokesperson Sgt. Ryan Cook said.
Police said the shooting near is "being investigated as a property crime as no one was in the office at the time of the occurrence."
"We are grateful to Tempe Police for coming quickly to the scene and are fortunate no one was present or injured," Sean McEnerney, Arizona Coordinated Campaign Manager, said.
This is the second time the office has been damaged in recent days. BB pellets were fired at the office after midnight on September 16.
While it's unclear if the shooting in Arizona was political, there has been an uptick in violent threats on the campaign trail. President Trump has been targeted in two assassination attempts in recent months, one of which left him bloodied.
The suspect in the most recent attempt, Ryan Routh, was charged with attempted assassination Tuesday. The Justice Department has been accused of endangering Trump by releasing a letter Routh wrote offering a bounty to kill Trump.
A Virginia man was arrested in August for threatening to kill Harris in posts on social media.
Harris is planning to visit Arizona on Friday to see the southern border, with immigration rating as a top issue for voters in the presidential election. Arizona is one of the fiercely contested battleground states that will decide the outcome of the race.
Trump has blasted Harris as a soft-on-crime liberal who wants open borders and gun confiscation - an image Harris has tried to undercut by claiming to own a gun. Harris even joked to Oprah in a recent interview that anyone caught breaking into Harris' house "is getting shot."
"I probably shouldn't have said that, but my staff will deal with that later," she joked.
The Harris campaign has not specified what type of gun Harris owns.
A jury in Texas has cleared all but one of the members of a pro-Trump trucker convoy over their involvement in a highly publicized roadway incident in 2020.
Five Trump backers in the so-called "Trump Train" were cleared of wrongdoing for surrounding a Biden-Harris campaign bus as it traveled on I-35. One Trump supporter, Eliazar Cisneros, was found liable in the civil trial for hitting a campaign volunteer's car.
The lawsuit accused the Trump supporters of intimidating the people on the bus, including Democratic former state senator Wendy Davis, who were traveling from San Antonio to Austin. The incident, which was captured on video, grabbed national attention in the final days before the 2020 election.
“For at least 90 minutes, defendants terrorized and menaced the driver and passengers,” the lawsuit alleged. “They played a madcap game of highway ‘chicken’ coming within three to four inches of the bus. They tried to run the bus off the road.”
The civil charges were brought under the Ku Klux Klan Act, a Reconstruction Era law enacted to stop political violence and voter intimidation.
No criminal charges were filed against the Trump supporters, who expressed relief to finally have their day in court after years of waiting.
“We’re just ready to feel like normal people again,” said Joeylynn Mesaros, one of the defendants. “It’s been a thousand something days to have our day in court.”
Police in the city of San Marcos reached a $175,000 settlement last year with the plaintiffs, who accused the cops of ignoring their pleas for help.
The jury in the "Trump Train" trial found Eliazar Cisneros liable for damages, ordering him to pay the bus driver $10,000 and $30,000 in punitive damages. Cisneros' lawyer said he would appeal.
The bus driver, Tim Holloway, said he is gratified by the result and that the case had nothing to do with politics.
“When I came to this case it was never about politics that day. I’m grateful, I’m proud of my team,” he said.
Back in 2020, Trump defended the pro-Trump convoy as the group fell under FBI investigation. Trump urged the FBI to focus on left-wing rioters who terrorized cities that summer following the death of George Floyd.
"In my opinion, these patriots did nothing wrong. Instead, the FBI & Justice should be investigating the terrorists, anarchists, and agitators of ANTIFA, who run around burning down our Democrat run cities and hurting our people!”
Supreme Court Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson stopped in heavily black Baltimore, Maryland to promote her new memoir, as the court's summer recess winds to a close.
Jackson was confirmed to the bench in 2022, fulfilling a pledge from Joe Biden to place the first black woman on the Supreme Court. Jackson has been fairly transparent about the symbolism of her appointment, which she discusses in her book, Lovely One.
In her book, the 54-year-old Harvard graduate places her career in the context of the struggle for civil rights.
“I am a member of the first generation post-Civil Rights Era. And the significance of that I just don’t want anyone to miss. I was born in 1970, which was within five or six years of the Civil Rights Act, the Voting rights Act, and the end of civil pro-segregation," Jackson said at Enoch Pratt Free Library’s Central Branch.
Jackson credits her father, a teacher who later became a Miami-Dade school board attorney, with sparking her interest in the law.
“My father went back to law school when I was three years old. We lived on the campus of the University of Miami Law School,” she said. "My earliest memories are of my dad’s education table with his law books.”
The court is on its summer recess, but the institution has continued to come under scrutiny from the left, with the New York Times publishing a sprawling leak of the court's business.
The report focused heavily on three January 6th cases, including one controversy in which Jackson sided with the conservative majority. The liberal jurist surprisingly pushed back on the government's sweeping interpretation of a federal obstruction statute.
In an interview with CNN, Jackson said the law in the case was clearly against the Justice Department, despite her feelings about the January 6th riot.
"I ruled in that case consistent with what I believed the law required, given the statute at issue, the context in which it was enacted, the text of the statute, and its purposes," she told interviewer Abby Phillip.
Speaking with fans in Baltimore, Jackson shared the moment she felt the emotional impact of her promotion to the highest court in the land.
“I think the moment that hit me– the first moment–was the day I was confirmed. I actually went to the White House for the vote call, and it was really overwhelming to watch the votes come in,” she said.
Within the past few months, former President Donald Trump's life has nearly been taken by a deranged, would-be assassin's bullet.
While there are mountains of questions left to be answered in both cases, especially the latest with the would-be gunman still alive, many have formed their own theories as to who might be behind the shootings, or at least who is responsible for inspiring the shooters to make their mark.
Academy Award-nominated actor Randy Quaid stirred up the left on his X account over the weekend after he insisted that several high-profile Democrats are essentially responsible for Trump's brushes with death. Others believe Barack Obama is to blame.
Randy Quaid is one of two brothers of Hollywood A-list actor Dennis Quaid.
Randy Quaid held nothing back in his X post, insisting that former First Lady Michelle Obama's anti-Trump rhetoric has inspired the assassination attempts on the former president.
It’s @MichelleObama who asked Twitter to ban Trump in 2019, it’s she who started the hateful 'I fear Trump rhetoric.' I blame her and Biden/Harris for both shootings. Their vilification of Trump is what started it all. And her voter registration Ponzi scam should be investigated because it’s based on the Frankensteining of Trump," Quaid wrote.
He added, "Mrs Obama has a terminal case of TDS. She should be quarantined. Registering voters based on her monstering of Trump is a classic case of reckless endangerment & slanderous vilification. Trump should get damages for being shot at because of their unjust Frankensteining of him."
It’s @MichelleObama who asked Twitter to ban Trump in 2019, it’s she who started the hateful “ I fear Trump rhetoric.” I blame her and Biden/Harris for both shootings. Their vilification of Trump is what started it all. And her voter registration Ponzi scam should be investigated…
— Randy Quaid (@RandyRRQuaid) September 16, 2024
In an X post from Sept. 15, Randy Quaid wrote:
The assassin probably had Michelle Obama on a loop saying “Do something!” “Do something!” “Do something!” “Do something!”
Many social media users have blamed various elements of the left for stoking dangerous volumes of anti-Trump hatred.
Users responded to Randy Quaid's X post and offered mixed reactions to his theories on what happened.
"It always goes back to a Clinton or an Obama," one X user wrote.
Another X user wrote, "The corruption is SO deep... SO very deep. If Hillary could get away with DESTROYING evidence, the Russian Hoax, then be allowed to get on TV and say TRUMP is a threat to national security...? I'm terrified we're lost..."
Only time will tell what the investigations into both cases reveal. Even then, it's likely that we'll still be left in the dark.
Many have criticized President Joe Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris for their seeming lack of ability to get the border crisis under control.
But as many others have pointed out, the immigration disaster at the southern U.S. border is not incompetence, rather, according to Mark Krikorian, the executive director of the Center for Immigration Studies, has been carried out "on purpose."
According to Breitbart, during a House Oversight Committee hearing last month, Krikorian revealed that he's sure that the Biden-Harris administration purposely got behind the idea of allowing as many migrants in as possible.
He said that even though the border policies are contrary to federal immigration law, Biden and Harris, along with their top Cabinet members, have let their ideologies dictate border policy, on purpose.
Krikorian held nothing back in his assessment of what has really happened on the immigration front since Biden and Harris took office.
"The Biden-Harris record on immigration is the result of neither incompetence nor failure. The largest border crisis in the history of our country, probably the largest such event in human history, began on January 20, 2021, on purpose — not due to incompetence,” he said at the time.
Mark Krikorian says that when it comes to immigration, our hearing title is wrong.
“Don't take this the wrong way, but with regard to immigration, the title of the hearing is a little bit misleading.
“The Biden-Harris record on immigration is the result of neither incompetence… pic.twitter.com/Hj36mnwKLK
— Terri Green (@TerriGreenUSA) September 19, 2024
He added, "Since that date, there have been more than 10 million encounters of inadmissible aliens at our borders, millions of whom have been and who continue to be unlawfully allowed to enter the United States."
"This did not happen because the Biden-Harris administration and its impeached Secretary of Homeland Security Alejandro Mayorkas made mistakes or miscalculations," he continued.
Krikorian went on to explain that there are two different ways of looking at immigration, and noted that the current administration's view is that anyone in the world has a right to come here and that American citizens have no say in the matter.
The immigration expert isn't a fan of using the term "open borders" and prefers instead to call it "unlimited immigration."
Krikorian said, "I would describe the Biden-Harris approach to immigration as one of unlimited immigration that holds that any limits on the levels of immigration are morally indefensible and circumventing those limits by any means is a moral duty."
The Biden-Harris administration will face the music on the immigration issue at the polls in November.
Many believe that most Americans will vote for their safety over ideology regarding that particular topic. Let's hope so.
A leftist comedian apologized for lying about comments Donald Trump made during the presidential debate.
Progressive comedian Michael Ian Black falsely accused Trump of inventing the name of a Taliban leader whom Trump referred to simply as "Abdul."
During the debut episode of CNN's new comedy show Have I Got News For You, Black accused Trump of coming up with a stereotypical Arab name.
"He's such a hack. Like, he picked the most obvious name to make up for the head of the Taliban,” Black said.
Trump has repeatedly told a story about threatening to blow up the house of a Taliban leader named "Abdul." President Trump told the story again during his presidential debate with Kamala Harris on September 10.
"I got involved. And Abdul is the head of the Taliban. He is still the head of the Taliban. And I told Abdul, 'Don’t do it anymore. You do it anymore, you’re going to have problems.' And he said, 'Why do you send me a picture of my house?' I said, 'You’re going to have to figure that out, Abdul.' And for 18 months we had nobody killed."
Trump's story became the target of "fact checks" and mockery from the left.
In fact, Trump negotiated a treaty to end the war in Afghanistan with Taliban founder Abdul Ghani Baradar. Currently, Baradar serves as the deputy prime minister of the Taliban regime that took over the country after the Biden administration's botched 2021 withdrawal.
CNN promoted Michael Ian Black's tedious and misleading "joke," but Black later apologized in a statement on X.
"On behalf of the entire Have I Got News for You team I offer my sincere apologies,” the comedian said, before deleting the apology.
.@MichaelIanBlack why did you delete your apology to the American people? pic.twitter.com/2pNlcpLwrX
— Jerry Dunleavy IV 🇺🇸 (@JerryDunleavy) September 17, 2024
Trump has often told the story about threatening "Abdul" to take credit for an 18-month period in which no U.S. soldiers were killed in Afghanistan.
That period came to an abrupt end with the Biden administration's deadly August 2021 evacuation, which cost 13 U.S. troops their lives.
Biden infamously ignored the 13 fallen troops when he falsely claimed that no soldiers have died on his watch during his June debate with Trump on CNN.
During this month's ABC debate, Kamala Harris told several whoppers that went unchallenged by the moderators, including the false claim that there are no U.S. soldiers in active combat zones.
The leaker behind a massive breach of Supreme Court secrets may have been a justice aligned with the left side of the bench, according to the Daily Caller.
Conservative legal experts told the outlet that a recent New York Times report bears the imprint of a leftist conspiracy to discredit and undermine the high court.
The Times piece paints Chief Justice John Roberts as steering three major January 6th-related cases in Donald Trump's favor. The article cites a confidential February memo from Roberts that criticized what he saw as the careless reasoning of a lower court in Trump's historic immunity case.
The Supreme Court ultimately reversed 6-3, clarifying that presidents have broad immunity from prosecution.
The article draws from "details from the justices’ private memos, documentation of the proceedings and interviews with court insiders, both conservative and liberal."
As the left sees it, the Times exposed further evidence of a right-wing takeover that threatens the court's very legitimacy. Many conservatives are more concerned by the leak itself and what it points to: a partisan war on the court by Democrats, liberal media, and the court's own left-wing staff.
“This is another disturbing leak from the Court, and Congress should look into it because clearly a member of the minority is conspiring with the Left to destroy the Court,” Judicial Crisis Network President Carrie Severino told the Daily Caller.
South Texas College of Law Houston professor Josh Blackman went further in an article at Reason and named Justice Elena Kagan as a possible culprit, citing her absence from the Times report and the article's consistency with Kagan's point of view.
Notably, Kagan echoed Democratic demands for an enforceable ethics code at a judicial conference of the Ninth Circuit.
“If Kagan is willing to publicly undermine her colleagues in a speech at the Ninth Circuit, why would she do any less off-the-record?” Blackman wrote.
“Moreover, this entire story is consistent with Kagan’s MO, and describing the Court as bending over backward for Trump.”
In what was then an unprecedented breach, the Supreme Court's 2022 opinion overturning Roe v. Wade was leaked to the public before the court released it. The leaker was never identified.
Blackman called the Times leaks "far worse than the Dobbs leak” because they are so extensive and would have required the complicity of multiple sources.
President Biden has called for a sweeping overhaul of the court, including term limits. Republicans have blasted the proposed changes as a smokescreen for a partisan power grab that threatens the separation of powers.
An Alaska man who supports Democrats was arrested Wednesday for threatening to kill six of the Supreme Court justices. A California man is currently facing trial for attempting to kill conservative Brett Kavanaugh.
Due to the conservative majority on the Supreme Court, which comes after decades of leftist majority, Democrats are demanding that the Supreme Court be "reformed."
Democrats from President Joe Biden down to the faceless radical activists of the left are clamoring for a fundamental rebuild of the Supreme Court in order to destroy the conservative majority.
"Reforms" range from term limits to adding more justices, or in other words, packing the Supreme Court to change the ideological balance in favor of leftists.
Back in July, Biden proposed a plan that would introduce term limits that would force Supreme Court Justices to retire after 18 years.
18 years is an oddly specific number that conveniently would force Supreme Court Justices Roberts, Alito, and Thomas who have all served over 18 years with Alito and Roberts having just crossed the 18-year mark.
Democrats have been talking about respecting our institutions and preserving the nonpartisan nature of our government but are now openly trying to subvert the Supreme Court to retire conservative justices and replace them with leftist justices.
Besides Biden's convenient plan to force multiple conservative justices to retire, other Democrats are openly endorsing packing the Supreme Court.
Senator Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) posted to X saying, "I've said it before and I'll say it again: it's time to expand the Court."
Democrats deceptively disguise these demands as Supreme Court "reform" when this has nothing to do with a failure or inefficiency in the Supreme Court doing its job. This is purely a political effort and Democrats are trying to convince Americans otherwise.
Expanding the Supreme Court is particularly insane in its partisanship as Democrats have proposed adding up to four justices.
The Supreme Court has never had more than 10 justices and the current figure of 9 has been the standard since 1869. The only time expansion was seriously discussed was during FDR's tyrannical push of "New Deal" socialism which mirrors what Democrats are trying to do today.
The conservative Supreme Court has knocked down Roe v. Wade, enforced presidential immunity, and taken a chainsaw to the cancerous administrative state that has been allowed to grow for decades.
All of these decisions have either made life better for regular Americans or righted long-standing partisan decisions that stood at odds with the Constitution. In the case of Roe v. Wade, that decision made a state-level issue a federal issue for far too long.
This has outraged the left who have been tearing down the Constitution for decades so it is no wonder that they talk about the Supreme Court needing reform as if the Supreme Court isn't doing its job for the first time in years.
Democrats are supremely disqualified from casting judgement on the Supreme Court considering their open desire to subvert it and corrupt it.