Cross-Examination

• Trump, et al. get GA mugshots: Today, former President Donald Trump will turn himself into the Fulton County authorities to be booked, photographed for a mug shot, and arraigned. In doing so, Trump will join his fellow “co-conspirators” who have been either already booked or soon will be in this blatantly politically motivated charade and mockery of the American justice system. Indeed, Trump’s lawyers are included in the specious charges for daring to do what lawyers do — advise their clients — which exposes this sham for what it is: a vindictive plot against a candidate the Left loathes. The remaining question is, will Trump smile for his mug shot?

• Biden’s Venezuela election integrity demand: Evidently, measures to ensure election integrity matter to the Biden administration only when it comes to foreign countries. Case in point, Venezuela’s authoritarian socialist leader President Nicolas Maduro, who has been in power since 2013, is soon expected to announce his run for reelection next year. After Venezuela descended into becoming a socialist authoritarian state, the U.S. raised sanctions against the South American nation, targeting its top export, oil. The Biden administration is now floating sanctions relief in a bid to get Maduro to hold a free and fair election. As Adrienne Watson, a spokeswoman for Biden’s National Security Advisor, stated, “Should Venezuela take concrete actions toward restoring democracy, leading to free and fair elections, we are prepared to provide corresponding sanctions relief.”

• Prigozhin dead? On Wednesday, a plane crashed outside of Moscow, Russia, killing all who were on board. According to the flight manifest, Yevgeny Prigozhin, the head of the Wagner mercenary group, was on that flight. Earlier this year, Prigozhin led a short-lived mutiny against the Russian military leadership after months of him publicly voicing his displeasure with the Kremlin. The mutiny inexplicably ended after a deal was brokered by Belarusian President Aleksandr Lukashenko between Russian President Vladimir Putin and Prigozhin. After that deal, many speculated that Prigozhin’s days were numbered given Putin’s history of knocking off potential rivals. Well, it now appears that speculation was warranted, assuming Prigozhin was actually on the doomed flight. Putin and Prigozhin’s longtime friendship combined with Prigozhin’s strange decision to end his mutiny when he had the upper hand causes one to wonder.

• Antifa thugs ordered to pay Ngo: Investigative journalist Andy Ngo, who was attacked and severely beaten by a mob of antifa activists in 2019 while he was covering protests in Portland, Oregon, finally got at least a little semblance of justice. While a jury failed to rule in Ngo’s favor in a civil trial against two other antifa members, a circuit court judge ruled that three other antifa defendants who failed to show for court summons now owe Ngo $300,000. Ngo responded, “She gave the full amount that she could, the full amount that I requested in my lawsuit.” He added: “That’s quite telling. It’s such a different outcome from the jury verdict.” However, given who these antifa thugs are, Ngo is under no delusion that he will see any money from them. “This is part of the reason why you don’t see victims of Antifa suing them,” he explained. “A lot of them are losers with no assets.” Ngo pointed to the root of the problem: “So, they escape accountability in the criminal-justice system because they carry out criminal activities in jurisdictions where there are [progressive] district attorneys like [Portland’s] Mike Schmidt. And civilly, they also escape justice because the resources that it takes to go through this legal process are immense.”

• Renewed restrictions on offshore drilling: The Biden administration leaned even harder into the anti-fossil fuel agenda, as the Interior Department on Tuesday rolled out its new offshore drilling regulations that will make future oil development and production that much more difficult and costly. Under the guise of ensuring greater worker safety, the new regulations are a return to the Obama-era regulations for the industry that the Trump administration rolled back, but are now even more stringent. For example, the new rule introduces a third-party requirement for permit applications that will significantly hamper the process with unnecessary red tape. American Petroleum Institute (API) Vice President Holly Hopkins charged that “this rule continues the rampant politicization of the rulemaking process and represents another policy swing from administration to administration, resulting in a policy that fails to meaningfully improve the safety of workers or protect the environment.”

• Follow the money: Speaking of regulations, Democrat Senator Sheldon Whitehouse has introduced several pieces of legislation pushing the climate change agenda that present a potential conflict of interest. Whitehouse’s wife, Sandra, just happens to serve as an advisor for a startup green company, Running Tide Technology, that could end up benefiting financially from the legislation that the Rhode Island senator is pushing. Making matters worse, Whitehouse was the one who raised ethics concerns over Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas’s wife Ginni Thomas working for a consulting company. Whitehouse called for “significant ethics reform at the Supreme Court.” Meanwhile, Whitehouse’s wife works for Running Tide, which lobbied Congress to “mandate” more government spending on carbon capture and retrieval technology from the ocean, the business that Running Tide just happens to be engaged in.

Headlines

• Key takeaways from the first 2024 Republican primary debate (Daily Signal)

• Six highlights of Trump’s debate-disrupting interview with Tucker Carlson (Daily Signal)

• Hunter Biden traveled to at least 13 countries with VP dad (Fox News)

• FDA taps new Human Foods Program head after baby formula crisis (Roll Call)

• New York Times slammed by the Left over Ann Coulter byline; critics recall she once fantasized about bombing their offices (Mediaite)

• New York Times confirms St. Louis gender clinic whistleblower’s claim that adolescents were rushed into “affirming” care (National Review)

• South Carolina Supreme Court rules state’s “heartbeat” abortion law constitutional (Daily Signal)

• Court rules against Dr. Jordan Peterson, upholds regulatory group’s requirement that he undergo “re-education” for expressing his opinions online (Blaze Media)

• Mortgage demand hits lowest level in nearly three decades (Washington Examiner)

• Policy: Biden’s incoherent energy policy continues (Daily Signal)

• Satire: Leader of failed Russian uprising dead after accidental ingestion of surface-to-air missile (Babylon Bee)

For more editors’ choice headlines, click here.