Obama RETURNS to take Trump down

Jack Smith walked into the Senate Judiciary Committee yesterday and said it plainly: "Our investigation developed proof beyond a reasonable doubt that President Trump engaged in serious crimes against our nation."

He said that grand juries in two separate districts reached the same conclusion — that Trump ran a criminal scheme to overturn the 2020 election and block the lawful transfer of power — and that if asked today, he would prosecute a former president again, Republican or Democrat.

The hearing was supposed to be MAGA's chance to rough him up. Instead, they gave voters another reminder of Trump’s willingness to break the law.

Missouri Sen. Eric Schmitt tried to catch Smith in a perjury trap by claiming he attended an Atlanta Hawks game in Atlanta in February 2024 — a supposed link to Fani Willis — only for Smith to calmly explain that he attended an Iowa Hawkeyes women's college basketball game in Maryland, roughly 550 miles away.

Schmitt had confused the Hawks with the Hawkeyes. Alabama Sen. Katie Britt was spotted looking mortified in a viral slow zoom moment. Schmitt left the hearing. CNN's Kaitlan Collins called it a Capitol Hill "classic."

We think Jack Smith is a good candidate for the next Attorney General when this national nightmare is over.

With 35 days until November 3, Trump's inner circle has privately told CNN what the polls have been screaming for months: it's going to be bad.

The best-case scenario, per one adviser, is losing the House but narrowly holding the Senate. And that was before Barack Obama stepped back in the ring.

The former president will headline his first Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee fundraiser of the cycle on October 7, sitting down with Delaware Sen. Lisa Blunt Rochester to talk about flipping the Senate.

Obama's name still moves votes. An NBC News poll found 43% of registered voters, including 77% of Democrats, are more likely to back a candidate he endorses.

Now look at the other side. Republicans are scrubbing Trump from their campaign websites, and fewer than 1% of GOP ads in early September mentioned him at all. Twenty percent of Democratic ads did.

Democrats need four seats, and the map keeps looking better. Even in Texas, Trump-endorsed Ken Paxton is trailing James Talarico in multiple polls.

Frank Luntz, the GOP's own pollster, is calling Trump's midterm strategy "very dangerous."

One party is putting its former president on stage. The other is hoping voters forget it has a current one.

The last American troops leave Iraq today. That ends a 23-year occupation sold on weapons of mass destruction that never existed. About 4,500 Americans died there.

Trump is treating the exit like his own idea. "We don't think we need the military there anymore," he said. The timeline actually comes from a 2024 agreement Joe Biden signed.

The timing is worse than the credit-grab. The US and Israel have been bombing Iran since February 28, and US bases in Kurdistan have been taking regular fire ever since. An Iran-backed militia commander is calling the pullout "a crushing defeat for the American project." A Kurdish commander warns that ISIS morale "has been boosted."

Four presidents, 23 years, trillions of dollars, and the winner is Iran.

Federal prosecutors have charged Wilber Rafael Garcés Pérez, 28, with assaulting a federal officer. The charge stems from a September 20 incident in Texas in which an ICE agent shot Garcés Pérez while he was sitting in his car.

His attorney says he still has a bullet lodged in his back.

Prosecutors say he struck an agent with his side mirror while trying to drive away. The government's position, apparently, is that a man who was being shot at should have stayed still. He appeared in Austin federal court Tuesday.

The Trump administration has struck secret deals with 35 countries to deport up to 25,000 migrants — not to their home countries, but to random third nations they have no connection to whatsoever.

A Sierra Leonean nurse was handcuffed and flown to Ghana. An Iranian dissident ended up in the Central African Republic. A Cameroonian was sent to Equatorial Guinea.

These aren't deportations — they're banishments. Guardian investigations correspondent Louisa Loveluck, reporting as part of a consortium organized by Forbidden Stories, surfaced the human stories behind what the administration has been doing in the dark. The legal question of whether any of this is even permissible remains wide open. The administration has been doing it anyway.