Good morning and happy Sunday! This is Notice News. It’s October 25, Election Day is nine days out, and Barack Obama spent his day yesterday telling Ohio and Michigan that Trump’s White House looks “like Saddam Hussein opened up a Cheesecake Factory.”
We’ll get into that, plus:
Abdul El-Sayed went on Fox News and scolded Bret Baier to “be a journalist”
Trump says he personally ordered the DOJ to block Alaska’s Senate results
Melania is taking credit for a ceasefire Pope Leo asked Putin for first
The White House is weighing pardons for junior staff, just in case
Plus: Iowa’s Republican nominee for lieutenant governor is being sued by his own parents
Obama says Trump’s White House looks “like Saddam Hussein opened up a Cheesecake Factory”
Before Detroit, Barack Obama stopped at Cleveland’s Public Auditorium to campaign for Amy Acton, and people lined up for hours around downtown blocks to get in.
He started with Trump’s gold-plated renovations. The White House now looks “like Saddam Hussein opened up a Cheesecake Factory,” he said.
“He should be on HGTV.”
Then he got to the people running the country, and the “chaos and cruelty” they’ve brought with them.
“These are not serious people!” he said.
He saved some for Vivek Ramaswamy, whose ad stars Acton’s estranged mother calling her a liar about her childhood. “No office is worth stooping that low,” Obama said.
Acton told the crowd about the abuse and neglect she and her brother lived through, including the years they spent living in a tent.
Meanwhile, Ramaswamy’s campaign has quietly cut the mother’s accusation from a new 30-second version of the ad, days after Trump told him to keep the original running.
On Friday, the Cook Political Report moved the race to “Lean Democrat,” writing that it was “slipping away” from Ramaswamy.
Yesterday, Obama also endorsed DSA member Angie Nixon who is running for Senate in Florida and closing the polling gap.
Abdul El-Sayed scolded Fox’s Bret Baier, “Don’t be Rogers’ campaign. Be a journalist.”
Bret Baier interviewed Abdul El-Sayed for Fox News on Friday and went straight to the attack line Republican Mike Rogers has been running against him for weeks.
“Mike Rogers has been really hitting this Muslim Brotherhood thing,” Baier said, before bringing up a 2012 open letter El-Sayed signed about Egypt’s then-president, Mohamed Morsi.
El-Sayed stopped him right there.
“You are asking this question to raise a question about… about whether or not I have dual loyalty,” he said. “My loyalty will be to the Constitution of the United States.”
“I have never been a member of the Muslim Brotherhood. I never will be.”
At Wednesday’s debate, Rogers claimed El-Sayed had never disavowed the group. El-Sayed had done exactly that days earlier.
“If the question about my faith is the issue, which Mike Rogers wants it to be, I think it is sad and beneath him,” El-Sayed told Baier, “and frankly beneath the president of the United States.”
When Baier kept pushing, El-Sayed had one more note for him.
“Don’t be Rogers’ campaign. Be a journalist.”
On Saturday, Barack Obama joined him at Cass Technical High School in Detroit and took on the attacks on El-Sayed’s faith directly. “We have seen this movie before,” Obama said.
El-Sayed said watching “a skinny guy with a funny name” win is what got him into politics.
“So when they tell me ‘Well his name’s Abdul though,’ I remind them his name was Barack though.”
He’s very good at this.
Trump says he personally ordered the DOJ’s lawsuit to block Alaska’s Senate results
The Justice Department sued Alaska on Thursday to block certification of the state’s Senate race — but only if Republican Sen. Dan Sullivan loses to Democrat Mary Peltola.
The excuse is a second candidate named Dan Sullivan on the ballot. Republicans already lost that fight. The Alaska Supreme Court ruled in June that he could run, and the state added the word “incumbent” next to the senator’s name.
The DOJ’s only legal basis is the preamble of the National Voter Registration Act. The same day it filed, Attorney General Todd Blanche told reporters the department wouldn’t get involved in certification absent a “doomsday scenario.”
Notre Dame law professor Derek Muller called the argument “one of the worst ones I’ve ever seen.”
When a reporter asked Trump about the lawsuit, he cleared up who was behind it.
“I’m the one that said do it,” he said.
Even Republican Sen. Lisa Murkowski isn’t buying it. “Alaskans don’t need any help voting for their preferred candidates,” she wrote. “The Department of Justice should never have filed this lawsuit.”
Peltola holds a thin lead in some polls. Apparently that’s the voter confusion.
Melania is taking credit for a ceasefire Pope Leo asked Putin for a week earlier
On Friday, the White House announced that Melania Trump had brokered a local ceasefire in Oleshky, a Russian-occupied Ukrainian town where the mostly elderly residents who remain urgently need food, medicine and clean water. It starts October 29 and is meant to let aid in and people out.
“It was abundantly clear that without my intervention, the possibility to bring humanitarian aid into the city and to evacuate the elderly would be impossible,” Melania said.
One week earlier, on October 16, Pope Leo phoned Vladimir Putin and asked him to arrange a ceasefire to let aid and food into the same town, the Vatican said. The Kremlin said Putin agreed to “cooperate on this matter.”
The pope made that call from his hospital bed, where he was recovering from surgery after a lung cancer diagnosis. Vatican officials, including Cardinal Pietro Parolin, say the initiative was his.
Melania’s adviser Marc Beckman went on Fox & Friends Weekend anyway and said she “single-handedly brokered” it.
Asked about the pope, Melania said, “It is great to have [the] pope’s support.”
Trump said she’s “doing better than the professionals right now.”
We’re glad help is coming for the people of Oleshky. The first call came from a pope fighting cancer.
A shocking new book reveals that in 2017, Russia's foreign military intelligence agency (GRU) hacked into Jared Kushner's phone (because he was using a personal device and not a secure government device, of course) and discovered a massive bribery slush-fund scheme orchestrated by Saudi Arabia and the UAE on behalf of Donald Trump's son-in-law.
The Russian hacker was later captured on a trip to the United Kingdom by the Dutch intelligence service and gave up the Kushner data, allowing the Dutch to reverse-engineer the hack and get access to a continual image feed of the phone’s screen.
They watched as Kushner recieved $1.75 billion through a series of bank slush funds from the Saudis and Emiratis, including accounts in Israel's central bank.
This is an explosive scandal that dwarfs anything that could possibly have been on Hillary Clinton's email server and should trigger IMMEDIATE investigations the second Democrats retake the House Oversight Committee gavel...and eventually a trial for treason against the United States.
Democrats are about to take back power. Add your name to let them know you want them to prosecute Jared Kushner for his billion-dollar foreign slush fund bribery scheme!
Become a NOTICE News Member to read the rest.
The rest of this Sunday edition is exclusively for NOTICE News members. They’re the supporters who keep the rest of our reporting free.
Become a Member