Obama DEFENDS Ilhan Omar against Trump

Barack Obama rarely weighs in on a single member of Congress. On Sunday, he went to bat for Rep. Ilhan Omar in a post viewed more than 2 million times.

“The full weight of the federal government is being brought down on a law-abiding elected official,” Obama wrote, “because she has dared to criticize the president.”

“And it’s not the first time this has happened.”

Federal agents searched Omar’s home last Monday. The Wall Street Journal reports the administration is building a case to strip her citizenship over her immigration paperwork. Immigration officials reviewed those same records during Trump’s first term and found nothing.

Trump’s border czar Tom Homan was less subtle on Fox News Saturday. “If you lie during the naturalization process, there is a process to denaturalize somebody,” he said. “We’ve done it before.” Asked whether that meant deporting her, he said, “Of course.”

Obama’s warning was for everyone else. “If this becomes the new normal, there’s no reason to believe it will stop with her,” he wrote, “or that future presidents, in either party, won’t do the same.”

Omar became a citizen in 2000. She’s on the ballot in 15 days.

Trump got his start in politics by asking where Barack Obama was born.

Volodymyr Zelensky sat down with Kristen Welker on Meet the Press Sunday and didn’t soften it.

“If the United States will officially take the side of Russia … we will not prevail and we will not be able to stand,” he said.

He called Trump’s waiver of the Graham Act sanctions “really big support for Putin.” On the same show, Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent declined three times to say whether Ukraine is a U.S. ally.

By Sunday afternoon, Trump was on Truth Social. “Zelenskyy is using Diesel Refineries in Russia as a target,” he wrote, and said Zelensky “doesn’t want to end this war, and probably never did.”

Then the Wall Street Journal reported that Putin has proposed a summit with Trump and Xi Jinping next month in China to end the war without Zelensky in the room. Trump hasn’t agreed.

Ukraine, for its part, spent early Sunday hitting an oil terminal in St. Petersburg, Putin’s hometown.

Asked Saturday about the Starlink slowdown that Reuters traced to the White House, Marco Rubio said, “I’m not sure Zelensky knows what he’s talking about.”

Albania's Supreme Court was set on fire Saturday night, on the fifth straight day of riots in Tirana. Police answered with rubber bullets, tear gas and water cannon.

This started in May as a fight over flamingos. Jared Kushner and Ivanka Trump want a €1.4 billion luxury resort on Sazan Island and the protected Vjosa-Narta wetland, and Prime Minister Edi Rama's government signed off. Then prosecutors said the coastline had been sold on allegedly forged deeds by a man accused of cocaine trafficking.

Kushner's side paid more than $120 million for it anyway, after villagers had written to his team saying the land was theirs.

Now students furious about jobs, schools and corruption have joined in. One crowd torched a suitcase at the education ministry to say they're done leaving the country to find a future. Police have arrested 167 people. Rama, in power since 2013, refuses to resign.

Serbia ran Kushner out of Belgrade last December. Albania is going for the sequel.

Remember “Tommy,” the man who stood up at Abdul El-Sayed’s town hall in Caro, Michigan, on Saturday and asked him to disavow the Muslim Brotherhood? El-Sayed spent nearly five minutes walking him through the Constitution, and he left.

The Handbasket’s Marisa Kabas identified him as Thomas Teepell. Until February, he was operations director for Sen. Josh Hawley.

His father, Timmy Teepell, ran Bobby Jindal’s 2015 presidential campaign and helped Hawley win his Senate seat. Earlier this month, the Michigan Daily reported that America Next, a group Jindal founded, offered College Republicans $200 to disrupt El-Sayed’s events. Neither Teepell nor America Next answered whether he was paid.

Early Sunday, CBS News chief legal correspondent Jan Crawford praised Tommy in a post. Then she deleted it. “I deleted that tweet because it was a violation of CBS News standards. I apologize,” she wrote.

Republican Mike Rogers went on CNN Sunday and insisted El-Sayed still hadn’t disavowed the group. “I want to be factual. He said, ‘Yeah, sure,’” Dana Bash told him.

“I don’t know why the press is so eager for him — to protect this guy,” Rogers said.

On Saturday, Michigan Democrats also reposted audio of Rogers, first reported by the Detroit News in May, laying out his Election Day idea.

“Let’s put retired or off-duty police officers as our poll watchers in Detroit.”

JD Vance sat for a CBS News town hall in Flat Rock, Michigan, on Saturday night. The voters came with questions.

Joey Amor’s wife, Master Sgt. Nicole Amor, was killed by an Iranian drone strike in Kuwait in March. He told Vance there were “a lot of fundamental failures” that led up to her death, and asked how the administration would hold leaders accountable.

Vance said it was “literally the first time I’ve heard of this.” As vice president, he explained, “you live in a bit of a bubble,” and “sometimes information doesn’t filter up to me.”

A Detroit barber who voted for Trump asked about gas prices. Vance blamed Joe Biden. Host Tony Dokoupil told him, “At a certain point, it becomes your economy, not Joe Biden’s economy.”

Sister Nancy Sylvester asked how ICE’s behavior squares with faith. Vance called enforcement “constantly a work in progress.”

A naturalized citizen asked why he keeps scapegoating immigrants. “To the extent that my rhetoric has been imperfect here, that’s on me,” Vance said.

He’s the vice president, and he hadn’t heard. Nicole Amor was 39.

Consumer prices rose 3.7% in September, the fastest pace in five months. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent went on Meet the Press Sunday and blamed Joe Biden.

“Why don’t we revisit the Biden-era policies where the American people got smoked?” he asked.

Kristen Welker had the math ready. “I hear you blaming President Biden, but President Trump has been in office now for 636 days,” she said. “At what point does the administration take responsibility for the economy and say this is the Trump economy?”

Inflation was 3% when Trump took office, she noted. Gas is up 44% since his war with Iran began.

Bessent’s first answer was “Kristen, we have an energy shock.” A minute later, he conceded the point.

“Well, we will own the economy.”

The same morning, a Washington Post-ABC-Ipsos poll put Trump’s approval at a record-low 33%. Two-thirds said he’s using the presidency to enrich himself.

636 days in, they’ll own it. Election Day is in 15.

On October 9, Justice Department lawyers told U.S. District Judge Ana Reyes that the plan to rebuild East Potomac Golf Links, the public course in D.C., “remains at an early and conceptual stage.” At most, they said, Trump had given it “preliminary thought.”

On Sunday, Trump posted the whole plan. Construction starts November 15 and takes about 15 months, he wrote. He called the current course “old, broken, dilapidated, and of no further use or effect.”

Reyes gave the administration until 8 p.m. Sunday to say whether it still stands by what it told her. She has also ordered the acting Park Service director, Interior’s chief of staff and Associate Attorney General Stanley Woodward to testify under oath at a hearing today.

Workers have already cut down about 500 trees there. Reyes called it “inexcusable” and halted tree removal through October 26. The Justice Department’s response was to ask that she be taken off the case.

Last week, ousted press secretary Katie Zacharia posted a photo from the Oval Office with a blurred-out map on Trump’s desk. Critics said it showed East Potomac Park. The image in Trump’s Sunday post looks a lot like it.