Raw Story

The Trump administration is weighing plans to publicly release audio recordings of Joe Biden’s interview with Robert Hur, the special counsel who raised concerns about the former president’s mental acuity after an investigation into his handling of classified documents.

That’s according to Politico, which reported Wednesday that while no final decision has been made, Biden’s camp is preparing for the possible release of the audio. The recordings stem from Hur’s investigation of Biden, which triggered a political firestorm when he concluded the Democrat was a “well-meaning, elderly man with a poor memory.”

The recordings have long been sought by President Donald Trump’s MAGA allies.

“The Hur audio will confirm what is one of the biggest cover ups in American history,” Far-right legal activist Mike Davis, a staunch outside Trump ally, told Politico.

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Biden had made attempts to block the tapes from reaching the public, asserting executive privilege last year to prevent House committees from obtaining the recordings, the outlet added. The Biden White House had argued that making the audio public could deter future witnesses in high-profile investigations and infringe on Biden’s privacy.

According to Politico, a deadline may force the issue.

“In separate Freedom of Information Act lawsuits brought by conservative groups like Judicial Watch and the Heritage Foundation and various news organizations, the Justice Department has been ordered by a judge to say whether it will stand by Biden’s assertion of executive privilege to block the release of the tapes,” the publication reported.

“DOJ officials will also have to indicate whether they will continue to press other arguments for keeping the audio secret, including that disclosure would invade Biden’s privacy and that it could interfere with future investigations by making high-level officials less willing to cooperate,” according to the report.

Far-right conspiracy theorist Laura Loomer is once again lashing out at the Trump administration – this time over the replacement for a nominee she herself helped tank.

Hours after President Donald Trump withdrew the nomination of Dr. Janette Nesheiwat for U.S. surgeon general – following complaints from Loomer – he announced a new pick: wellness influencer and metabolic health advocate Dr. Casey Means.

But Loomer still isn’t satisfied.

“Casey Means, the new Trump nominee for US Surgeon General doesn’t even have an active medical license in Oregon when she established her medical practice,” Loomer posted in a series of social media posts bashing Means – and her family.

“How is the top doctor in the US supposed to give medical guidance and advice to the nation when she doesn’t even have an active medical license in the state where she allegedly practiced medicine?” Loomer wrote.

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“This is so embarrassing for the Trump administration,” the MAGA influencer added. She went on to tell her social media followers that Means “didn’t even support Donald Trump” and questioned the Trump administration: “Who is doing the vetting?????”

In a post just minutes earlier, Loomer questioned the title of the position itself. “The term Surgeon General is interesting given the fact that there is no requirement to be a Surgeon to be Surgeon General,” Loomer posted.

“Turns out you can be a social media influencer and become Surgeon General,” she said. In yet another lengthier post, Loomer went after Means’ father, who she claimed “wrote a pro-trans children’s book.”

“I’m told that Casey is VERY CLOSE with her father and shares his views,” she wrote. “So basically, we are now going to have a Democrat US Surgeon General who doesn’t even have an active medical license and whose family is writing books about how to make children transgender.”

“What a mess,” Loomer concluded.

The Wall Street Journal's conservative editorial board trashed President Donald Trump's new idea to give Americans pricing relief as his "worst idea since tariffs," and potentially disastrous for prescription drug markets.

The conservative board has posted several times about the dangers of Trump's economic policy in recent months.

"President Trump and Republicans appear to be shrinking from reforming Medicaid, but that’s not the worst of it," wrote the board. "To replace the spending slowdown they won’t get in Medicaid, they may expand drug price controls. For that trade we could have elected Democrats."

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Specifically, the board wrote, Trump's idea would be to cap prices for prescription drugs covered under Medicaid at the cheapest rate they go for in other developed countries. This, they warned, would have severe unintended consequences — and wouldn't even make a dent in replacing the spending cuts the GOP is struggling to get the votes for in their budget reconciliation bill.

"Medicaid already receives hefty discounts for drugs under statutory formulas that require manufacturers to kick back a share of a medicine’s price to states in a rebate. Medicaid rebates in 2023 amounted to 52% of the program’s drug spending. Because Democrats in 2021 removed a cap on these rebates, state Medicaid programs may pay nothing for some drugs," said the report. "Drugs accounted for less than 4% of Medicaid spending ($21.2 billion) in 2023. The feds spent 10 times more on hospital payments. Even if Republicans required drug makers to give away medicines to Medicaid, savings wouldn’t come close to $880 billion."

Meanwhile, they wrote, this would actually cost more money in the long run.

"Drugs actually reduce Medicaid spending by preventing complications that require expensive hospital care. Take hepatitis C antiviral drugs, which have a 95% cure rate. A treatment course can cost upward of $24,000. But the Congressional Budget Office estimates that expanding Medicaid patient access to these drugs would save $7 billion over a decade."

The real risk, the board wrote, is that drug manufacturers would withdraw from Medicaid altogether rather than pay these rates, leaving more people to get sick and putting Medicaid on the hook for more expensive, drug-preventable illnesses.

"Drug price controls are a Democratic perennial," the board concluded. "If Republicans go along with Mr. Trump’s most-favored-nation plan, Democrats will invariably extend it to Medicare and the commercial market next time they control Congress. If Republicans lack the courage to reform Medicaid, they should at least do no harm."

The U.S. farming sector is on the brink of crisis as President Donald Trump's trade war implodes America's ability to ship crops abroad, reported CNBC on Tuesday morning.

This follows warnings from lawmakers in Trump's own party who represent agricultural areas, fearing the negative impact on the mounting taxes and retaliatory taxes from other countries.

"What began as a rapid drop in U.S. imports as shippers cut orders from manufacturing partners around the world has now extended into a nationwide export slump, with the U.S. agricultural sector and top farm products including soybeans, corn and beef taking the hardest hit," said the report. "The latest trade data shows that a slide in U.S. exports to the world, and China in particular, that began in January now extends to most U.S. ports, according to trade tracker Vizion, which analyzed U.S. export container bookings for the five-week period before President Donald Trump’s tariffs began and the five weeks after the tariffs took effect."

The numbers, per the report, are some of the worst that have been seen since the COVID-19 pandemic disrupted supply chains in 2020.

“We haven’t seen anything like this since the disruptions of summer 2020,” Vizion's CEO Kyle Henderson told CNBC. “That means goods expected to arrive in the next six to eight weeks simply won’t. With tariffs driving costs higher, small businesses are pausing orders. Products that once moved reliably are now twice as expensive, forcing importers into tough decisions.”

Even before these numbers, the report noted, the agricultural industry "has been warning of a 'crisis' and ports data is showing more evidence of lack of ability to move product out to global markets." Some of the worst hit areas are Pacific Northwest ports like Portland and Tacoma, which specialize in shipping U.S. crops to Asia; the Port of Portland has already seen a 51 percent drop in exports.

One of the core rationales for Trump enacting the tariffs in the first place was his paranoia over trade deficits, or countries sending more imports to the U.S. than they take in exports.

Economists have long agreed trade deficits aren't an inherently bad thing, but Trump and his advisers are convinced they are an indicator of unfair foreign trade practices, and explicitly set their tariffs based on the size of each country's trade deficit.

President Donald Trump is quickly running into a problem in court, Politico reported on Tuesday — federal judges have lost patience and trust with the Justice Department attorneys defending his policies.

The long string of cases in which DOJ attorneys under Pam Bondi have either been caught lying to judges, or the Trump administration has simply misrepresented judges' own rulings or tried to ignore them outright, are starting to work against them, wrote Ankush Khardori.

And it's eliminating a key advantage most administrations get in federal court.

"Judges and juries alike tend to trust DOJ lawyers out of the gate — even ones they have never met before — by virtue of their positions and their obligation to uphold the Constitution and advance the public interest," said the report.

"Many federal judges were once Justice Department lawyers themselves. All day every day, in federal courthouses across the country, the Justice Department benefits from a general presumption of good faith when a DOJ lawyer walks into a courtroom because people assume that they are both honest and well-intentioned. That may be changing."

A number of judges in recent months have grown visibly frustrated and distrusting, the report continued, as they "have been unusually sharp — at times directly questioning the honesty of the government’s lawyers and the accuracy of their factual claims — and taken together, they suggest that the administration’s officials are squandering the department’s credibility just when they need it most."

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The case of Maryland father Kilmar Abrego Garcia, who remains in an El Salvadoran prison despite multiple courts' demands the administration work for his return, is a clear example.

This even makes its way up to the Supreme Court itself, a body with a majority of six Republican appointees — and the problem stretches even further back to 2019, when the court struck down Trump's plan to use the Census to interrogate people about citizenship and claimed it was just an attempt to enforce anti-discrimination law.

“We are presented ... with an explanation for agency action that is incongruent with what the record reveals about the agency’s priorities and decisionmaking process,” wrote Roberts, effectively calling out the DOJ's dishonesty.

"We may get our first real sign next week of whether these credibility concerns have reached any of the Supreme Court’s Republican appointees — who are now entering a period in which they will have to directly and substantively engage with the Trump administration’s unprecedented effort to expand the powers of the presidency, and who now hold the fate of much of Trump’s second-term agenda in their hands," the report concluded.

CNN face-checker Daniel Dale made clear Tuesday morning that President Donald Trump is “wildly overstating” when he bashes Canada.

The comments came ahead of Trump’s meeting Tuesday with the new Prime Minister of Canada, Mark Carney.

Dale took aim at the president's claim that Canada imposes high tariffs on its neighbor.

“The facts are that Canada is a low-tariff country,” Dale said. “The last international data we have from 2022, the World Bank published that Canada was 102nd on a list of 137 countries for average tariffs. It had lower average tariffs than the United States.”

He noted Trump’s claims about Canada's agricultural tariffs are also false. “[Trump] does not mention that those high dairy tariffs only kick in after a certain quantity of tariff-free U.S. exports to Canada, a certain quantity negotiated in his own USMCA are hit, and that the U.S. is not even close to hitting those maximum quantities,” Dale said.

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“[Trump] also does not mention that the U.S. Department of Agriculture itself says on its website that almost all U.S. agricultural exports to Canada are tariff-free and barrier-free. So the milk stuff, the dairy stuff that exists, but again, there are exemptions. And number two, those are the exception, not the rule.”

He later went on to criticize Trump’s claim that the United States has a massive trade deficit with its neighbor to the north. “[Trump] says the number 200 billion, almost every time he talks about Canada, it is wildly overstated,” Dale said. “So the United States' goods and services trade deficit with Canada in 2024 was under 40 billion.”

Dale shortly after corrected himself, “It's almost about 36 billion, I'm sorry. So he's multiplying it several times. Now, if you only talk about trade in goods and ignore the services trade at which the United States excels, he's still grossly exaggerating it.”

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