Cross-Examination

• Epstein second batch: Another batch of unsealed court documents has been released from Jeffrey Epstein victim Virginia Giuffre’s lawsuit against Epstein accomplice Ghislaine Maxwell. This second batch includes some names of noteworthy individuals not previously known to have been associated with the convicted sex offender and former financier. The list includes several A-list celebrities such as Michael Jackson, Leonard Dicaprio, Cate Blanchett, and Bruce Willis. However, it’s clear from the context of the documents that most of these individuals who were named were not in connection to Epstein’s sex-trafficking crimes. That said, one individual who has long been known for associating with Epstein is former President Bill Clinton. According to these latest documents, Clinton is recorded as having gone to bat for Epstein. He is accused of “threatening” a Vanity Fair newsroom “not to write sex-trafficing [sic] articles about his good friend J.E.” More unsealed court documents will be released in the coming days for a total of 240, with over 170 individuals associated with Epstein named.

• Speaker Johnson rips Team Biden: “Heartbreaking and infuriating.” That was House Speaker Mike Johnson’s assessment of the Biden administration’s deliberate disaster on our southern border. Johnson was in the Texas border town of Eagle Pass on Wednesday, having led a House delegation of dozens of Republicans to the area. Adding “unmitigated disaster” to his efforts to describe the indescribable, Johnson blamed Joe Biden directly and added, “One thing is absolutely clear: America is at a breaking point.” Fox News’s Bret Baier interviewed Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas recently, but he couldn’t even get the impeachment-worthy bureaucrat to call the situation a crisis. “These numbers are historic,” said Baier. “There’s eight Rose Bowls full of illegal immigrants that came across the border just since October 1.” One of Johnson’s colleagues, House Homeland Security Committee Chairman Mark Green, called Mayorkas “the greatest domestic threat to the national security and the safety of the American people.” We’ve hit the border hard in recent days, noting both the scale of the disaster and the insanity of the Biden policies behind it. We also covered Donald Trump’s plan for fixing it — a plan that includes both securing the border and sending back the illegals on a massive scale. One can’t help but wonder, though, just how much irreparable damage has been done by Joe Biden and his fellow Democrats’ deliberate open-borders policies.

• DOJ sues TX: Joe Biden’s Justice Department is crying foul over Texas’s new law making illegal immigration a state crime. The DOJ threatened to sue the Lone Star State over the law, and on Wednesday the Department made good on its threat. The DOJ alleges that Texas overstepped its authority by treading into the federal government’s immigration and border enforcement sandbox. The DOJ’s lawsuit argues the Texas law “unconstitutionally intrudes on the federal government’s exclusive authority to regulate the entry and removal of noncitizens." The lawsuit also claims that the law "disrupt[s] the federal government’s operations" at the border. Well, if by "disrupts” the DOJ means it hampers Biden’s de facto open-border policy, then guilty as charged. Texas Governor Greg Abbott responded to the lawsuit: “Biden sued me today because I signed a law making it illegal for an illegal immigrant to enter or attempt to enter Texas directly from a foreign nation. I like my chances.”

• Defenders of “democracy” target other Republicans: It’s not just Donald Trump that Democrats are seeking to bar from ballots across the country. Using the spurious label of “insurrectionists,” Democrats have been seeking to keep current Republican congressional lawmakers off of ballots over “election denialism.” Using this rationale, Democrat Representative Bill Pascrell (NJ) tried to get 126 Republican House members banned from reelection. Democrat Representative Cori Bush (MO) has introduced similar legislation that 63 Democrat lawmakers signed onto. Democrats are effectively engaged in promoting a new version of McCarthyism, in which Republican lawmakers who dare to support Trump are being smeared as “threats to democracy.”

• VDH calls out the real insurrectionists: In a three part X missive, historian and classicist Victor Davis Hanson asks, “Who are the real insurrectionists?” As he sees it, when an unelected Maine bureaucrat and former ACLU activist removes the opposition party’s leading presidential candidate from her state’s ballot, it’s an attack on one of our fundamental institutions, our electoral system. And when the loser of the 2016 election engages in denialism and claims to be part of an organized resistance to an “illegitimate” president who had “rigged” and “stolen” the election, that’s insurrectionist behavior. And when the losing political party colludes with our nation’s intelligence services to frame and otherwise undermine a duly elected president, that too is insurrectionist behavior.

• Jack Smith is no straight shooter: It’s no secret that Trump special prosecutor Jack Smith is a zealot. Indeed, as we noted earlier this week, he’s both unscrupulous and unconstitutional. After all, it’s not every lawyer who can boast that his legal tactics have been unanimously rebuked by the U.S. Supreme Court. More evidence of Smith’s anti-Republican bias came to light this week when, as Fox News reports, we learned that one of his top prosecutors, Ray Hulser, “discouraged the FBI from pursuing an investigation into the Clinton Foundation in 2016 due to what he viewed as negligible evidence, despite multiple Suspicious Activity Reports (SARs) related to hundreds of thousands of dollars in foreign transactions.” According to the Durham report, three separate FBI field offices had opened investigations into the Clinton Foundation for possible criminal activity back in 2016, but, well, nothing to see here. Move along. And we trust this guy, Jack Smith, to give Donald Trump a fair shake?

• Dems aim to offset Biden Crime Family: In an effort to deflect from Joe Biden’s shady influence-peddling gig, Democrats on the House Oversight Committee released details regarding some $7.8 million in payments Trump’s businesses received from foreign governments while he was president. Democrats claim Trump violated the Constitution’s Emoluments Clause that forbids elected officials from taking gifts from foreign governments without congressional approval. The problem is that one of Trump’s big businesses is hotels, and while he divested from controlling his businesses while president, he didn’t sell them. What this amounts to is another spurious accusation by Democrats, who refuse to take a look at the legitimate and serious evidence of Biden’s pay-to-play influence racket, while they spin Trump’s legitimate businesses as nefarious foreign influence-peddling operations.

• Haley says New Hampshire will “correct” Iowa: During a campaign event Wednesday in New Hampshire, Nikki Haley gave voters yet one more indication that she’s not ready for prime time. “We have an opportunity to get this right,” she told her audience. “And I know we’ll get it right, and I trust you. I trust every single one of you. You know how to do this. You know Iowa starts it. You know that you correct it.” Translation: Iowans get it wrong. This is perhaps her worst gaffe yet, both because it was utterly unforced and because it was so deeply condescending. Does she not understand that modern technology allows her comments to be recorded and played back by other people in other places? “I trust Iowans to make their own decisions,” said Iowa Governor Kim Reynolds in response. “No ‘corrections’ needed!” Florida Governor Ron DeSantis, who’s locked in a tight race for second place with Haley in Iowa, and who will debate Haley there on Wednesday, called her remarks “a slap in the face to Iowans to say that they somehow need to be corrected,” adding, “It’s almost as if she’s acknowledging she’s not going to do well here, and she’s blaming the voters.” In any case, it’ll be interesting to see what kind of reception Haley gets when she returns to the Hawkeye State next week, and whether DeSantis asks her to explain her remark to those in attendance.

Headlines

• Iowa school shooter allegedly part of the transgender movement (RedState)

• U.S. payrolls increased by 216,000 in December, much better than expected (CNBC)

• Blue states saw highest homeless rates in 2023 (Daily Caller)

• House Democrats urge Clarence Thomas to recuse himself from Trump Colorado ballot case (NBC News)

• Next Republican debate will only feature Nikki Haley and Ron DeSantis (CBS News)

• NYC files $700 million lawsuit against bus companies that have transported migrants from Texas to the Big Apple (National Review)

• B-1 bomber crashes during training mission in South Dakota; crew ejected safely (Fox News)

• Wild video shows three-time felon leaping over bench, assaulting judge (Daily Wire)

• Mega-study finds that minorities don’t receive harsher criminal punishments, but that academics said so anyway (Daily Wire)

• ISIS claims responsibility for suicide bomb attacks on Soleimani memorial in Iran (Fox News)

• Humor: Hillary Clinton seen at Bass Pro Shops buying new sniper rifle (Babylon Bee)

For more editors’ choice headlines, click here.