President Trump just fired a top federal prosecutor because he failed to bring charges against two despised opponents, New York Attorney General Letitia James and ex-FBI chief James Comey.

The ouster of Erik Siebert, U.S. attorney for Virginia’s Eastern District — and Trump’s own appointee — came after he couldn’t find sufficient evidence to charge James with mortgage fraud.

The president blamed the firing on Siebert having been put forward by two Democratic senators – hardly a secret – under the archaic ‘blue slip’ requirement that should be abolished.

‘Yeah, I want him out,’ Trump said after ABC broke the story. Tish James is ‘very guilty of something.’

What’s more, ‘he didn’t quit, I fired him!’

It’s a blip of a story, compared to Trump and his team naming a special prosecutor to again investigate Russiagate allegations from 2016; dropping corruption charges against New York’s Mayor Eric Adams, and suspending security clearances for the law firm that Robert Mueller left four years ago (later blocked by a judge).

The larger point is that perhaps we’ve become inured to the serious spectacle of a president not just interfering with the Justice Department but literally dictating who should be charged and who should be protected.

Trump told Pam Bondi over the weekend, ‘They impeached me twice, and indicted me (five times!), OVER NOTHING. JUSTICE MUST BE SERVED, NOW!!!’ 

He said he believes James, Comey and Democratic Sen. Adam Schiff are ‘all guilty as hell’ but that nothing is being done.

As someone who used to roam the halls of the Justice Department — and covered three independent counsels involving Ronald Reagan’s AG, Ed Meese — I am acutely aware of the ethical boundaries. 

After the Watergate scandal, which included Attorney General John Mitchell going to prison, led to reforms, the idea of a wall between the White House and DOJ was further cemented. 

Joe Biden saw any involvement in criminal probes as radioactive, and no evidence of his tampering has surfaced (though he did pardon a bunch of allies, including his son).

There was a huge uproar back when Bill Clinton had a chance tarmac meeting with his AG, Loretta Lynch, while his wife was under investigation over her private email server. She said they talked about grandchildren and travel. A CBS reporter called the meeting ‘absolutely shocking.’ 

But you don’t have to rely on unnamed sources to learn about Trump giving his attorney general marching orders. He broadcasts it, even boasts about it.

Of course, Trump stretching his executive powers goes well beyond DOJ. There are his funding freezes against universities, dispatching of the National Guard in D.C. and elsewhere, and attempting to fire members of supposedly independent agencies such as the Federal Reserve.

The escalation against the media has been nothing short of stunning. Trump cheered ABC’s suspension of Jimmy Kimmel against the backdrop of FCC Chairman Brendan Carr threatening to take action against its local licenses. ‘We can do this the easy way or the hard way,’ he said, prompting some conservatives to say he sounded like a mafioso.

Trump won a $16 million settlement from ABC over George Stephanopoulos saying Trump had been held liable for ‘rape,’ not sexual abuse. He also won $16 million from CBS over the biased editing of a ’60 Minutes’ interview with Kamala Harris. 

It just so happens that Nexstar, which preempted Kimmel and owns many CBS affiliates, needs administration approval to take over Tegna, another media conglomerate.

Trump filed suit against the Wall Street Journal for reporting he’d sent a birthday message to Jeffrey Epstein with a silhouette of a naked woman–and when that surfaced with what closely resembled his signature, continued to deny he had done it.

And then there is his $15 billion suit against the New York Times, which a judge threw out after just four days for its ‘inexcusable’ breaking of the rules in a filing filled with ‘vituperation.’ It’s a strange suit because it wasn’t triggered by any particular story, just a general charge that the Times campaign coverage was illegal, including a Harris endorsement that ran on the front page.

Even the largest corporations have to spend big bucks to defend such suits, which is sort of the point.

But nothing is as sensitive and powerful as law enforcement, whose officials can shield allies and prosecute opponents.

The president’s position is that DOJ was weaponized against him during the Biden administration, and therefore he’s entitled to payback.

The latest news just broke. The Justice Department was investigating border czar Tom Homan for allegedly offering to help win federal contracts to businessmen — who were actually undercover FBI agents — in exchange for $50,000.

But as MSNBC reports, Trump’s DOJ dropped the case after he took office.
Since the hidden-camera encounter took place before Trump was elected, when Homan was a private citizen, I could argue he was just doing what hundreds of lobbyists do. Except for one nagging detail — Homan took the 50K in cash, in a Cava fast-food bag. No paper trail.

And yet Pam Bondi’s department gave him a pass.

Prosecutors in every administration must make difficult judgment calls about whether they have enough evidence to convict, especially against government officials or high-profile figures. 

And next time there’s a Democrat in the White House, what’s to stop that person from playing the same kind of hardball, saying their party was entitled to payback? The cycles could be endless.

As for now, it would be easier to have confidence in these prosecution decisions if the president wasn’t openly calling the shots. 

The Supreme Court on Monday backed President Donald Trump’s decision to fire a commissioner on the Federal Trade Commission, sending yet another signal that the high court intends to revisit a 90-year-old court precedent about executive firing power.

The temporary decision to maintain Biden-appointed Commissioner Rebecca Slaughter’s termination was issued 6-3 along ideological lines. The Supreme Court set oral arguments in the case for December.

Trump’s decision to fire Slaughter and another Democrat-appointed commissioner, Alvaro Bedoya, faced legal challenges because it stood in tension with the FTC Act, which says commissioners should only be fired from their seven-year tenures for cause, such as malfeasance.

Trump fired Slaughter and Bedoya shortly after he took office without citing a cause other than the president’s broad constitutional authority over the executive branch. Bedoya resigned, but Slaughter vowed to fight her firing in court and see the case through to its conclusion.

A lower court initially sided with Slaughter and reinstated her, but she has since been fired and rehired several times as her case made its way to the Supreme Court. Monday’s decision came after the Trump administration asked the high court on an emergency basis to temporarily pause Slaughter’s reinstatement while it considers the merits of the case.

The Supreme Court’s decision to keep Slaughter’s firing intact means she will remain sidelined from the FTC until after the high court hears arguments about the case in December.

The case raises a pivotal question of whether Trump has the ability to fire members of independent agencies as the president pushes for a more unified executive branch. Independent agencies, such as the FTC, various labor boards and the Securities and Exchange Commission, have long been insulated by law from at-will firings.

Slaughter had argued to the Supreme Court that siding with Trump, even on an interim basis, directly flew in the face of the precedent set in Humphrey’s Executor vs. the United States, which deemed President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s firing of an FTC commissioner unlawful.

Legal experts have speculated that the current conservative-leaning Supreme Court is interested in narrowing or reversing Humphrey’s Executor, which could carry broader implications about a president’s ability to fire members of certain independent agencies.

The three liberal justices dissented and would have denied Trump’s stay request. Writing for the dissent, Justice Elena Kagan speculated that the court’s majority may be ‘raring’ to reverse Humphrey’s Executor. She said, though, that it should not make decisions on the shadow docket that contravene that precedent and instead wait until such a reversal happens.

‘Our emergency docket should never be used, as it has been this year, to permit what our own precedent bars,’ Kagan wrote. ‘Still more, it should not be used, as it also has been, to transfer government authority from Congress to the President, and thus to reshape the Nation’s separation of powers.’

Fox News Digital reached out to a representative for Slaughter for comment.

Jurors in Fort Pierce, Florida, are expected to begin deliberations Tuesday on the federal criminal charges brought against Ryan Routh, the man accused of attempting to assassinate then-presidential candidate Donald Trump at his golf course in Florida last year.

Routh, who has been representing himself in the federal criminal trial, ended his defense after less than a day on Monday. He called only three witnesses, and told U.S. District Judge Aileen Cannon that he would not be taking the stand to testify in his own case, a notion he had previously considered. 

Both the prosecution and defense formally rested their cases at 2:20 p.m., and Cannon ordered the court to reconvene for closing arguments Tuesday at 9 a.m.

Prosecutors and Routh will take turns presenting their closing arguments to jurors, followed immediately by jury deliberations, Cannon said, before instructing the jury on the deliberation process.

Cannon instructed jurors to consider whether prosecutors met the standard for conviction on each of the five federal charges against Routh. The 59-year-old has pleaded not guilty to all counts, which include attempting to assassinate a major presidential candidate, assaulting a federal officer, and multiple firearms offenses.

A verdict in the case could come as early as Tuesday or Wednesday, pending the length of the closing arguments and the deliberation time needed. If convicted, Routh could face a maximum of life in prison.

The closing arguments come after Routh rested his case after just hours of presenting arguments to jurors. He called only three witnesses, and did not introduce new evidence.

His ‘pro se’ defense starkly contrasts with the prosecution’s, which spent nearly two weeks carefully and extemporaneously making its case against Routh to a jury in Fort Pierce, Florida.

In that span, jurors heard from 38 witnesses and reviewed hundreds of exhibits — text messages, call logs, bank records, and cellphone data — linking Routh to the alleged gun purchase and placing him near Trump International Golf Club in West Palm Beach in the weeks before the alleged attempted assassination.

Shortly before the defense rested, Cannon asked Routh if he had any more motions for acquittal. He said he did not.

President Donald Trump will highlight the ‘return of American strength’ in his second administration during his speech at the United Nations General Assembly Tuesday, while delivering ‘blunt’ and ‘tough talk’ about the ‘failures of globalism,’ a White House official told Fox News Digital.

The president is scheduled to deliver his first address of his second administration at the UN General Assembly in New York City Tuesday just before 10 a.m.

A White House official gave Fox News Digital an exclusive preview of the president’s address.

‘President Trump has effectively restored American strength on the world stage,’ a White House official told Fox News Digital. ‘His historic speech at the United Nations General Assembly will highlight his success in delivering peace on a scale that no other president has accomplished, while simultaneously speaking bluntly about how globalist ideologies risk destroying successful nations around the world.’

The president is expected to highlight his successful efforts to negotiate peace around the world—specifically, Armenia and Azerbaijan; Thailand and Cambodia; Rwanda and the Democratic Republic of the Congo; among others.

The president is also expected to highlight his strikes against narcoterrorists from Venezuela.

Earlier this month, a U.S. military strike blew apart a Venezuelan drug boat in the southern Caribbean, leaving nearly a dozen suspected Tren de Aragua narcoterrorists dead. And last week, the president announced that the U.S. military had carried out its second kinetic strike on Venezuelan drug trafficking cartels.

Also last week, the president announced that he ordered a lethal strike on a vessel allegedly linked to a designated terrorist organization conducting narcotrafficking in the U.S. Southern Command’s area of responsibility. That strike left three narcoterrorists dead.

‘Intelligence confirmed the vessel was trafficking illicit narcotics, and was transiting along a known narcotrafficking passage en route to poison Americans,’ Trump posted to his Truth Social announcing the strike.

The president is also expected to highlight his ‘Operation Midnight Hammer,’ which marked the largest B-2 operational strike in history and represented the United States’ move to deliver a decisive blow against Iran’s nuclear program back in June.

Trump’s historic precision strikes on Iran’s nuclear sites hit their targets and ‘destroyed’ and ‘badly damaged’ the facilities’ critical infrastructure—an assessment agreed upon by Iran’s Foreign Ministry, Israel, and the United States.

Trump is also set to detail his work to ‘deliver historic peace deals in decades-long conflicts,’ the official told Fox News Digital.

Meanwhile, the president’s speech will also feature ‘some blunt, tough talk about the failures of globalism.’

‘This will include the global migration regime, energy and climate, and how these ideologies pushed by globalists are on the verge of destroying successful nations,’ a White House official told Fox News Digital.

The president is also expected to discuss America’s position as a ‘defender of western civilization.’

‘As the president delivers peace in major conflicts around the world, what has the United Nations been doing?’ the official said.

After his speech at the United Nations, the president is expected to have meetings with the Secretary-General of the United Nations, António Guterres; Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy; the president of Argentina, Javier Milei; and the president of the European Commission, Ursula von der Leyen.

The president is also scheduled to have a multilateral meeting with leaders from Qatar, Jordan, Turkey, Pakistan, Indonesia, Egypt, the UAE and Saudi Arabia.  

In the end, Disney and ABC had absolutely no choice but to rehire Jimmy Kimmel.

The reason the late-night host is returning to the air tonight is that this whole thing has been an utter PR debacle for ABC, and more personally for Disney chief Bob Iger, who even got whacked by his predecessor as CEO, Michael Eisner, accusing him of bowing to ‘out-of-control intimidation.’

I don’t think I’m going out on a limb in saying that Iger’s reputation is shattered forever.

The company became the poster child as a high-profile opponent of free speech — a deadly label for a news organization like ABC.

So the ‘indefinite’ suspension is over.

I could sniff that things were moving in this direction when I learned the two sides were talking. And when Disney asked Kimmel for a second meeting the other day, I knew the only question was which day he’d be back.

Let’s revisit the dumb and inaccurate comment that got Kimmel in trouble. And remember, like Stephen Colbert, he is so vociferously anti-Trump that he surrendered half his audience:

‘We hit some new lows over the weekend with the MAGA gang desperately trying to characterize this kid who murdered Charlie Kirk as anything other than one of them.’  

First, it was beyond tone-deaf, with feelings rubbed so raw over Charlie Kirk’s assassination. And the killer is not ‘MAGA,’ just another crazed lunatic who said he was acting out of ‘hatred’ for Kirk, but also sympathetic to gays and transgender people like his roommate and romantic partner.

At the same time, there was pressure from the FCC, with Chairman Brendan Carr blundering by saying he would act on Kimmel if ABC didn’t. Even Carr’s allies, like Ted Cruz, said he sounded like a mob boss by declaring ‘we can do it the easy way or the hard way.’

Nice little network you got here – be a shame if anything happened to it. Carr walked it back the next day.

What Kimmel said wasn’t the worst thing ever uttered on the air, and maybe in a month it would have passed unnoticed. But not so soon after the targeted assassination.

With that kind of blatant government pressure, ABC caved and took Kimmel off the air as he was about to tape last Wednesday’s show – and was said to be preparing an even tougher monologue about the Kirk killer. Again, he failed to read the electronic room.

It was downhill from there.

For anyone who believes in free speech – and that includes some Democrats who don’t agree with Kirk on just about anything–Disney and ABC were now the enemy.

Howard Stern, Kimmel’s closest friend – their families vacation together – said yesterday he had canceled his Disney+ subscription, as did Robin Quivers. After conferring with Kimmel, he said on his first live show since the suspension:

‘When the government says, ‘I’m not pleased with you, so we’re going to orchestrate a way to silence you,’ it’s the wrong direction for our country. It isn’t good.’

Stern called the suspension ‘horrible’ and ‘outrageous’ for such a ‘big talent… You can’t support this kind of a move. I don’t care whether you like Jimmy or not. It’s about freedom of speech. If ABC wanted to fire Jimmy because they didn’t like him, or he had low ratings — they didn’t want to fire him. They’re being pressured by the United States government. We can’t have that, not if we’re going to have a democracy.’

Howard has an awful lot of followers on Sirius XM that would take their cue from him. 

Some 400 celebrities signed an ACLU letter calling this ‘a dark moment for freedom of speech in our nation.’ These include Jennifer Aniston, Jason Bateman, Robert De Niro, Jane Fonda, Selena Gomez, Tom Hanks, Olivia Rodrigo, Ben Stiller, Jamie Lee Curtis, Julia Louis-Dreyfus, Maggie Gyllenhaal, Michael Keaton, Regina King, Diego Luna, Lin-Manuel Miranda, Natalie Portman, Maya Rudolph, Martin Short and Kerry Washington.

This is the kind of thing that Hollywood really cares about, the bold-faced names.

Kimmel is said to be concerned about the jobs of dozens of producers, staff members and contractors who would lose their livelihoods if the show was deep-sixed.

Disney made a point of saying in its statement that Kimmel was suspended because ‘we felt some of the comments were ill-timed and thus insensitive.’ But ‘thoughtful’ conversations led to Jimmy’s return.

Whether you like Kimmel or not, no company can withstand that kind of pressure, even if it goes against the wishes of Donald Trump, who celebrated the suspension.

Now here’s the challenge Kimmel and Disney/ABC faced.

The suits had already been urging Kimmel to tone down the attacks against Trump. But Kimmel, who has hosted the program since 2003, and parlayed that into Oscars-hosting gigs, has always insisted on his independence. He’s arguably the most famous face at the network.

I played a small role in this last year by asking Trump about Kimmel after the Oscars, and the candidate slammed him, escalating their feud. Jimmy even took a swipe at me (horrors).

So perhaps with a wink and a nod, Kimmel has now agreed to tone things down a tad and the brass has agreed to let him basically say what’s on his mind.

Jimmy Kimmel is the only clear winner in this.

Everyone else – Disney, Bob Iger, Brendan Carr, ABC – is unmistakably a loser and will forever be branded, fairly or otherwise, as cowardly opponents of free speech.

And hey, ratings for tonight’s show should be through the roof.