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Chrissy Teigen doesn’t ‘know how to go on’ after her infamous Trump takedown tweet is read at House hearing

by Tracy J. Chu
NEW YORK, NEW YORK - APRIL 26: Chrissy Teigen attends the 2022 City Harvest

Chrissy Teigen reacts to her uncensored Trump tweet being read during the House Oversight Committee’s Twitter hearing. (Photo: Dia Dipasupil/Getty Images)

Chrissy Teigen doesn’t “know how to go on” after her uncensored tweet to former President Donald Trump became a talking point during Wednesday’s House Oversight Committee hearing discussing Hunter Biden’s laptop.

The Washington, D.C., hearing is looking at Twitter’s role in suppressing a New York Post story about President Joe Biden’s son in the run-up to the 2020 presidential election with testimony from former Twitter execs. However, the Cravings cookbook author and Sports Illustrated Swimsuit model was pulled into it, while home recovering from the birth of daughter Esti, when it was revealed that the White House, under Trump, tried to have one of Teigen’s tweets, critical of him, deleted.

Rep. Gerry Connelly (D-Va.) asked Anika Collier Navaroli, who was on Twitter’s content moderation team, about an online exchange between Trump and Teigen in September 2019. Before he was banned from Twitter and often went on insult sprees, Trump slammed “boring” John Legend for appearing in an NBC News special report about criminal justice reform and his “filthy-mouthed wife,” Teigen, who had nothing to do with the special but had been publicly critical of his politics. Teigen responded at the time with a tweet calling Trump a “p***y ass bitch.”

“The White House almost immediately thereafter contacted Twitter to demand the tweet be taken down. Is that accurate?” Connolly asked.

Navaroli replied, “I do remember hearing we’d received a request from the White House to make sure that we evaluated this tweet, and that they wanted it to come down because it was a derogatory statement directed towards the president.”

For the record, the tweet wasn’t taken down.

Later during the hearing, Rep. Maxwell Frost (D-Fla.) asked Navaroli

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TRAVELLING

Chrissy Teigen ‘doesn’t know how to go on’ after her lewd anti-Trump tweet is read in Congress

by Tracy J. Chu

Chrissy Teigen reacted in disbelief after an old tweet of hers was quoted during the House Oversight Committee hearing in the US.

As part of the House Republicans’ newly launched investigation into US President Joe Biden and the Democrats, Wednesday’s (8 February) hearing examined Twitter executives’ temporary move to block distribution of a 2020 story by the New York Post about Hunter Biden.

The article claimed to show emails from Hunter to an executive at a Ukrainian gas company he represented as an attorney and later served as a board member for.

However, things took an unexpected detour when Virginia’s Democratic Congressman Gerry Connelly asked former Twitter employee Anika Collier Navaroli about a past viral exchange between former US President Donald Trump and Teigen.

In September 2019, Trump heckled Teigen on Twitter, referring to her as John Legend’s “filthy-mouthed” wife. After which Teigen responded calling Trump a “pussy ass b****”.

A clip of Navaroli reading Teigen’s tweet aloud at the hearings has since been shared on Twitter, with Teigen commenting: “I… oh my god.”

Replying to a user who found her original post, asking, “is this the tweet?” Teigen wrote: “I am crying. I cannot go on.”

Continuing, Connolly then asked Navaroli: “The White House almost immediately thereafter contacted Twitter to demand the tweet be taken down. Is that accurate?”

(Chrissy Teigen/ Twitter)

(Chrissy Teigen/ Twitter)

“I do remember hearing we’d received a request from the White House to make sure we evaluated this tweet, and they wanted it to come down because it was a derogatory statement directed at the president,” Navaroli answered. The tweet was never removed.

The hearings were meant to call into question the social media giant’s alleged censorship of the Post’s story.

A spokesperson for the White House called the hearing a “bizarre political stunt” and

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TRAVELLING

How it happened: Zelensky’s surprise visit to DC was months in the making

by Tracy J. Chu

In previous calls, Zelenskyy had indicated to Biden and other senior officials that the United States was the first country he wanted to visit when the time was right for him to travel, according to a U.S. official with knowledge of the conversations. So in a Dec. 11 phone call between the two leaders, Biden reiterated the invitation.

This time, Zelenskyy told Biden, was the right time.

“I really wanted to come earlier. Mr. President knows about it, but I couldn’t do it because the situation was so difficult,” Zelenskyy said from the Oval Office on Wednesday. The trip could happen now, the Ukrainian leader said, because “we controlled the situation and … first of all, because of your support.”

The behind-the-scenes details of Zelenskyy’s surprise visit to Washington were described by an aide to Pelosi, a U.S. official and a senior administration official, all of whom requested anonymity to describe planning for the secret trip. Once the wheels of planning started to roll, Zelenskyy’s 10-hour visit — which packed in an Oval Office meeting with Biden, a joint news conference at the White House and an address to a largely supportive Congress — came together quickly.

After the two presidents discussed the trip on Dec. 11, the White House extended a formal invite on Dec. 14, according to the senior administration official. Zelenskyy accepted the invitation on Friday, and the visit was confirmed two days later, at which point White House officials notified Pelosi’s office of the Ukrainian leader’s travel plans.

“I’m delighted you were able to make the trip to be here,” Biden told Zelenskyy on Wednesday. “It’s an honor to be by your side in united defense against what is a brutal, brutal war being waged by Putin.”

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky addresses a joint meeting of
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TOUR

Biden goes West on 3-state tour as midterm elections near

by Tracy J. Chu

VAIL, Colo. (AP) — Joe Biden’s three-state swing out West will capture, in a nutshell, the White House’s midterm strategy for a president who remains broadly unpopular: promote his administration’s accomplishments and appear where he can effectively rally the party faithful — all while continuing to rake in campaign cash.

Biden’s arrived Wednesday in Vail, and will travel to nearby Camp Hail to designate his administration’s first national monument at the behest of Democratic Sen. Michael Bennet, the state’s senior senator who finds himself in a competitive reelection bid. Then the president will head to California, where he will hold a pair of events promoting two of his most significant legislative achievements and headline a fundraiser for the House Democrats’ campaign arm.

Finally, Biden will stop in Oregon, where Democrats’ grip on the governor’s mansion in Salem is being threatened by an unaffiliated candidate who has captured double-digit support in polling, giving an opening for a Republican to win the race outright in November. Early voting starts in Oregon and Colorado next week and is already underway in California.

“We’ve been very clear that the president is going to go out, the vice president is going to go out,” White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre said Tuesday. “They’re going to talk about the successes that we have seen in this administration in the last 19 months.”

He is notably staying away from states where his presence could hurt Democrats; on this trip he’s skipping Nevada and Arizona, where incumbent Democratic senators are battling tough reelection bids.

It’s all part of a campaign blueprint fine-tuned over the last several months for Biden, who has been eager to travel the country but is facing the traditional midterm headwinds against the political party in power, an unsettled economic outlook and presidential approval ratings

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TRAVELLING

Biden and first lady to visit Florida and Puerto Rico after Hurricane Ian devastation

by Tracy J. Chu

President Joe Biden and first lady Jill Biden will visit Florida and Puerto Rico to assess the scope of the damage caused by Hurricane Ian.

Mr Biden will visit Puerto Rico on Monday, and Florida on Wednesday. The White House announced the trip late on Saturday.

Hurricane Ian has killed at least 67 in Florida and four in North Carolina.

According to Dr Joel Myers, AccuWeather’s founder and CEO, Hurricane Ian could total between $100bn and $120bn in damages.

Though the president and Governor Ron DeSantis have had icy relations in the past, hurricane-ian-00059331″ data-ylk=”slk:Politico” class=”link “Politico reports that the men have put aside their political differences to discuss how to best rebuild in the wake of the hurricane. They have spoken by phone on several occasions. The White House did not announce any meetings between the president and local officials, though it’s customary for the president to meet the governor of a state suffering a disaster on this scale.

“I made it clear to the governor and the mayors that the federal government is ready to help in every single way possible,” Mr Biden said Wednesday. “We’ll be there every step of the way.”

Mr DeSantis has largely been appreciative of Mr Biden’s help, and even offering rare praise on Fox News.

“It’s my sense the administration wants to help,”Mr DeSantis said Tuesday night on Fox News. “They realize this is a very significant storm.”

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VACATION

Positive COVID test upends Biden’s police plan announcement

by Tracy J. Chu

FILE - President Joe Biden speaks during an event to celebrate the passage of the "Bipartisan Safer Communities Act," a law meant to reduce gun violence, on the South Lawn of the White House, July 11, 2022, in Washington. . (AP Photo/Evan Vucci, File)

FILE – President Joe Biden speaks during an event to celebrate the passage of the “Bipartisan Safer Communities Act,” a law meant to reduce gun violence, on the South Lawn of the White House, July 11, 2022, in Washington. . (AP Photo/Evan Vucci, File)


Evan Vucci

AP

WASHINGTON

President Joe Biden plans to propose a steep funding increase for police, hoping to show that Democrats are serious about combating violent crime, despite the move potentially causing backlash from top members of his party’s left flank.

But a scheduled trip to Pennsylvania to ask Congress to spend roughly $37 billion for fighting and preventing crime was canceled Thursday when Biden tested positive for COVID-19.

His proposal is set to include $13 billion to help communities hire and train 100,000 police officers over five years. Biden was going to outline it during a visit to Wilkes University in Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania until White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre announced he was experiencing “very mild symptoms” after the positive result.

Instead, the president spoke by phone with Sen. Bob Casey, D-Pa., and Rep. Matt Cartwright, D-Pa., as well as Wilkes-Barre Mayor George Brown and Paige Cognetti, mayor of nearby Scranton, the White House said. Biden discussed his crime plan and expressed “his disappointment that he was unable to travel to Scranton and Wilkes-Barre this afternoon.”

Casey tweeted after his call with Biden that the president “sounded great and is in good spirits” and said he was “looking forward to welcoming him back” to Pennsylvania soon.

The White House also canceled Biden’s scheduled Philadelphia trip for a Democratic National Committee fundraiser on Thursday night and plans for him to spend the weekend at his home in Delaware.

Biden, 79, is fully vaccinated, after getting two doses of the Pfizer coronavirus vaccine shortly before taking

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TRAVELLING

Gas Prices: How Low Could They Go?

by Tracy J. Chu

What’s happening

Gas prices have continued to decline since reaching an all-time average high of $5.02 in mid-June.

Why it matters

Lower prices would help American households battle ongoing inflation.

Gas prices continue to decline, with a gallon of unleaded averaging $4.41 nationwide on Friday. That’s a healthy decline from the all-time high of $5.02, reached on June 14. The cost could drop even further in the coming weeks, analysts predict.  

Barring hurricanes, outages and other unforeseen disruptions, the national average should fall to $3.99 again by mid-August, Patrick De Haan, head of petroleum analysis at GasBuddy, predicted in a recent blog post.   

“So far, we’ve seen the national average drop for 34 straight days, with over 25,000 stations now back at $3.99 per gallon or less, and thousands more stations will join this week,” De Haan added.  

Here’s what you need to know about gasoline prices, including where they might go next and what the White House is doing to keep them in check.

For more on the gas crisis, find out which states are holding gas tax holidays and which are issuing gas rebate checks, and check out quick tips for saving money at the pump.

How low will gas prices go?

Though we’re a far cry from the $2.82 a gallon average we saw in 2019 — or even the $3.16 average this time last year — experts predict the price of gas will soon drop below $4 for the first time since March 2022.

“We already have many gas stations around the country that are below $4,” White House energy advisor Amos Hochstein said on CBS News’ Face the Nation on Sunday. 

Hochstein added that the swift decline was all the more notable given that there’s “a war in Europe where one of

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