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‘Campaigning on Summary Extra-Judicial Executions’: Critics Scorch DeSantis Over New ‘Stone Cold Dead’ Marketing

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Florida Republican Governor Ron DeSantis is using violent remarks he made last month during the GOP presidential debate in an attempt to advance his White House run, but critics are expressing concern.

“The cartels are killing tens of thousands of our fellow citizens,” DeSantis claimed. “We have to defend our people. We’re going to use force and we’re going to leave them stone cold dead, no excuses. We will get the job done.”

Those words now appear in a political ad (below) from the pro-DeSantis Super PAC, Never Back Down, as well as on a $35 “Stone Cold Dead Black 100% Cotton T-Shirt” sold by the DeSantis campaign. The new ad is “part of an almost $12 million ad buy the group is doing ahead of the early primary states. The ad includes video of DeSantis’ immigration talking points from the debate, where he called for military action in Mexico to target drug cartels,” City & State Florida reports.

ABC affiliate WMUR reports the new ad is “highlighting the governor’s proposal to kill people carrying drugs into the US to cross the southern border.”

The ad itself delivers a bit of a different message.

READ MORE: DeSantis Pledges to Install His Surgeon General, Who Reportedly Said Anti-Vax Policies Are God’s Plan, at CDC

The PAC included in its ad a comment from Fox News’ Bill Melugin, who says that DeSantis “intends to allow for deadly force to be used against anybody cutting through the border wall.”

“Analysts say the ad is another instance of DeSantis running to the right of Trump on a key GOP primary issue,” WMUR reports, while warning, “activists like Sebastian Fuentes say the ad sounds to him like open season on undocumented immigrants.”

“How do we know people are crossing the border are bad people?” Fuentes asked WMUR. “They know that’s pretty much telling not just law enforcement, but also the local folks in the southern areas that if you see somebody, hey, guess what you can you can go ahead and harm them.”

DeSantis told the news station, “it’s not just willy nilly going after anybody you know who shows up. It’s identifying people as representing either a hostile, committing hostile acts or demonstrating hostile intent.”

Asked, “How do you ensure you’re not killing innocent people or, say, asylum seekers who are not carrying drugs?” DeSantis responded, “Same way you would do on anything that we do. Same way a police officer isn’t just shooting random civilians.”

But critics are blasting DeSantis, and his PAC, for doubling down on his violent rhetoric, a charge he has repeatedly ignored.

In late July, DeSantis pledged to root out the deep state from the federal government, and vowed, “we are going to start slitting throats on Day One,” he told supporters. That same month the Florida governor told the right wing website Real America’s Voice that he would not promote a current military officer to become Secretary of Defense – not because he believes in a civilian-run military, but because he wants his Defense Secretary to “slit some throats.”

DeSantis has also used the “stone cold dead” threat several times before he used it in a nationally-televised prime time presidential debate.

READ MORE: Fani Willis Slams Jim Jordan’s ‘Illegal Intrusion’ in Scathing Rebuke: ‘You Lack a Basic Understanding of the Law’

“If they’re trying to bring fentanyl into our communities that’s going to be the last thing they do because at the border they’re going to be shot stone-cold dead,”  he told New Hampshire voters in late July.

Law professor and political scientist Anthony Michael Kreis, commenting on DeSantis’ “stone old dead” remark after the governor used it yet another time, in August stated: “Extra-judicial executions are just murder by another name.”

Former CNN and CNBC journalist John Harwood, responding to news of the new DeSantis ad, on Friday wrote: “Republican candidate for president campaigning on summary extra-judicial executions.”

Marketing strategist and Obama campaign alum Jason Karsh warned: “A Republican candidate for president explicitly calling for extrajudicial killings. The implication is it’s just gonna be brown people, but once you start summarily executing people, who’s to say where it stops, especially when this guy has so many perceived enemies.”

Former Lincoln Project Executive Director Fred Wellman called it, “Fascism and international crime as policy.”

MSNBC anchor Medhi Hasan added, “This is what authoritarianism looks and sounds like.”

Watch the full 30-second DeSantis ad from Never Back Down below or at this link.

READ MORE: ‘I Am Not Going to Take That’: DeSantis Lashes Out at Man Accusing Him of Allowing ‘People to Hunt People Like Me’
 

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Trump Sues Murdoch Over WSJ’s Epstein Birthday Letter Story

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President Donald Trump is reportedly suing Rupert Murdoch and Dow Jones, the parent company of The Wall Street Journal, over the publication of a story alleging he sent a “bawdy” birthday letter in 2003 to Jeffrey Epstein, the now-notorious convicted sex offender who died in 2019.

“Court records show that Trump filed a lawsuit alleging libel against Murdoch, the Journal’s publisher, Dow Jones, and the reporters who wrote the article in federal court for the Southern District of Florida,” CNBC reported late Friday afternoon.

Trump vehemently denied the Journal’s report and publicly threatened to sue after it was published. The Journal had reported in its story that Trump had warned he would take legal action if the story ran.

“The Wall Street Journal printed a FAKE letter, supposedly to Epstein,” Trump wrote on his Truth Social platform Thursday night. “These are not my words, not the way I talk. Also, I don’t draw pictures. I told Rupert Murdoch it was a Scam, that he shouldn’t print this Fake Story. But he did, and now I’m going to sue his a– off, and that of his third rate newspaper. Thank you for your attention to this matter! DJT”

READ MORE: FBI Told to Flag Mentions of Trump in Epstein Files, Dem Says in Scathing Letter to Bondi

Image via Reuters

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FBI Told to Flag Mentions of Trump in Epstein Files, Dem Says in Scathing Letter to Bondi

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One thousand employees of the Federal Bureau of Investigation sifting through thousands of pages of the Epstein files were instructed to flag any mentions of President Donald Trump, according to Democratic U.S. Senator Dick Durbin, the Ranking Member of the Judiciary Committee.

“According to information my office received,” Senator Durbin wrote in a letter (below) to U.S. Attorney General Pam Bondi on Friday, “you…pressured the FBI to put approximately 1,000 personnel…on 24-hour shifts to review approximately 100,000 Epstein-related records in order to produce more documents that could then be released on an arbitrarily short deadline.”

“My office was told that these personnel were instructed to ‘flag’ any records in which President Trump was mentioned,” Durbin charged.

The files are from the criminal investigation into the notorious Jeffrey Epstein, who was convicted of child sex offenses.

RELATED: ‘He’s So Frustrated’: Johnson Defends Trump Over Explosive Epstein Birthday Letter

In his letter, Senator Durbin also posed a series of more than a dozen questions to Bondi. Among them:

“Have you personally reviewed all files in DOJ’s possession related to Jeffrey Epstein?”

“The records DOJ released on February 27 did not include a client list. Why did you
publicly claim on February 21 that the client list was ‘sitting on my desk right now to review’?”

“Why were personnel told to flag records in which President Trump was mentioned?”

“Please list all political appointees and senior DOJ officials involved in the decision to flag records in which President Trump was mentioned.”

“What happened to the records mentioning President Trump once they were flagged?”

CNBC reported that “Durbin asked the Justice Department and FBI to explain what his office called ‘apparent discrepancies’ regarding handling of the Epstein files and findings from a Justice Department memo.”

In his four-page letter, Durbin also wrote, “in 2002, Mr. Trump said of Mr. Epstein, ‘I’ve known Jeff for 15 years. Terrific guy, He’s a lot of fun to be with. It is even said that he likes beautiful women as much as I do, and many of them are on the younger side.’ Just yesterday, it was reported that the Department previously reviewed a ‘leather-bound album’ comprised of dozens of letters from Mr. Epstein’s friends in celebration of his 50th birthday in 2003.”

READ MORE: ‘War Is Peace’: White House’s Navarro Mocked Over Claim Tariffs Are ‘Tax Cuts’

“The letters were collected by Mr. Epstein’s partner Ghislaine Maxwell and included one from President Trump that allegedly ‘contains several lines of typewritten text framed by the outline of a naked woman, which appears to be hand-drawn with a heavy marker … and the future president’s signature is a squiggly ‘Donald’ below her waist.'”

“Despite tens of thousands of personnel hours reviewing and re-reviewing these Epstein- related records over the course of two weeks in March, it took DOJ more than three additional months to officially find there is ‘no incriminating ‘client list,’ and the memorandum with this finding includes no mention of the whistleblower or additional documents, the existence of which you publicly claimed on February 27.”

Read a copy of Senator Durbin’s letter below or at this link.

READ MORE: ‘Trust in Trump’: White House Touts ‘Incredible’ Economy as Inflation Jumps

Image via Reuters

 

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‘Would the President Say This?’: Rubio Demands Diplomats Echo Trump

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U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio, after cutting 1,300 employees last week, is now ordering diplomats to not comment on foreign elections and internal affairs—limiting official communications to congratulating the declared winner.

“Rubio has instructed U.S. diplomats not to comment on the legitimacy or fairness of foreign elections, breaking with decades of American diplomatic practice,” The Daily Beast reports. In a memo, the Secretary stated that U.S. missions will no longer issue election-related statements unless there is a “clear and compelling” foreign policy reason for doing so.

“Diplomatic personnel writing official messages are instead instructed to ask themselves: ‘Would the President say this?'”

The memo, seen by Reuters, says the messages “should be brief, focused on congratulating the winning candidate and, when appropriate, noting shared foreign policy interests.”

READ MORE: ‘He’s So Frustrated’: Johnson Defends Trump Over Explosive Epstein Birthday Letter

The memo makes clear, based on President Trump’s remarks, that the U.S. will “pursue partnerships with countries wherever our strategic interests align,” regardless of democratic values.

U.S. promotion of human rights, democracy, and press freedoms has traditionally been a “core foreign policy objective,” Reuters reported.

“Under Trump, the administration has increasingly moved away from the promotion of democracy and human rights, largely seeing it as interference in another country’s affairs.”

The Washington Post adds that for “decades, the United States has offered judgments on whether elections were conducted in a free or fair matter [sic], a judgment that can have significant impact in countries.”

“Scholars have accused the United States of democratic backsliding since Trump, who refused to accept the results of the 2020 presidential election, returned to office this year.

President Trump and Vice President JD Vance have defended right-wing and far-right political groups, including Germany’s Alternative for Germany (AfD) party, which reportedly has ties to right-wing extremists.

Secretary Rubio in May ignited a “spat” with Germany’s foreign ministry when it “hit back…after he criticized the decision to classify the Alternative for Germany party as a ‘right-wing extremist’ organization,” the Associated Press reported at the time.

READ MORE: ‘War Is Peace’: White House’s Navarro Mocked Over Claim Tariffs Are ‘Tax Cuts’

Image via Reuters

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