Independent presidential candidate and former Democrat Robert F. Kennedy Jr. admitted this week that he supports “full-term” abortions. In a sit-down interview with former ESPN reporter Sage Steele, RFK said that while he doesn’t think women should abort their children in the eighth month of pregnancy or beyond, he wouldn’t prohibit them from doing so.
“Even if it’s full-term,” he said, later adding, “I think we have to leave it to the women rather than the state.”
RFK’s position is extreme, no matter how you slice it. The majority of Americans believe there should be some restrictions on abortions; only 37 percent believe abortion should be legal in the second trimester and just 22 percent say it should be legal in the third trimester. It also complicates recent claims from Democrats that “no one” supports abortion up until the moment of birth (an already provable lie since Virginia Democrats supported a bill that its chief sponsor admitted would legalize abortion until birth). RFK’s stance will also effectively kill any crossover he may have enjoyed with the populist right or Trump supporters, likely a welcome development for the Trump campaign, which has been hammering RFK in recent weeks as his support has ballooned and he’s made his way onto the ballot in several swing states.
One question, though, surrounding RFK’s position on abortion is whether he even believes what he is saying. After all, he’s given different answers on the abortion question throughout his short political career. In an interview with NBC’s Ali Vitali last August, RFK said he would cap abortions at three months, adding that he believes states “have a right to protect a child once the child becomes viable, and that right, it increases.” His campaign later clarified that he “misunderstood” the question. In other public statements, RFK has reiterated that he supports a woman’s right to choose in all circumstances, but claimed that late-term abortions are rare and don’t happen unless there are “extenuating circumstances.”
His own campaign website equivocates on the issue, stating, “Fortunately, there is a lot we can do to reduce abortions — by choice, not by force. As president, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. will make it easier for women to choose life. He will give them more choices than they have today, we will see a lot fewer abortions and a lot more flourishing families.”
Given the backlash toward his recent clear acknowledgment that he supports women being allowed to get “full-term” abortions, it wouldn’t be surprising if his campaign once again clarifies his stance.
-Amber Duke
On our radar
COHEN QUIETED Judge Juan Merchan directed prosecutors to tell former Trump lawyer Michael Cohen to stop speaking publicly about the so-called “hush money” trial against his former client.
WHEN IN ROME New York City mayor Eric Adams is catching heat for taking a trip to Rome, Italy as his city grapples with crime and the illegal migrant crisis. Adams said he is flying abroad because “the solutions to the problems facing our city, country and planet must be solved together.”
‘SABOTAGING THE OFFICE’ Congresswoman Nancy Mace, in an explosive interview with the Daily Mail, said she is still undoing damage wrought by former staffers, accusing the employees of hacking her phone, spying on her and her family, signing her name on documents without her permission and destroying devices to to cover their behavior.
Cuellar’s sticky situation
The vultures may be circling over south Texas, where two political consultants pleaded guilty to conspiring to help Democratic congressman Henry Cuellar launder hundreds of thousands of dollars of bribes from a Mexico City bank and Azerbaijan.
According to the plea deal struck by the two Democrats, one of whom had worked on Cuellar’s official staff, they assisted Cuellar in arranging meetings with Mexican bank executives who ultimately signed a “sham contract” to pay Cuellar’s wife even though she “performed little or no legitimate work in exchange for the payments.” That’s just one of the sensational allegations in an indictment handed down last week against Cuellar and his wife for allegedly collecting more than half a million dollars in bribes over a seven-year period.
The indictments against Cuellar have put Democrats in a precarious position, given the party’s embrace of lawfare against former president Donald Trump and the bipartisan expulsion of George Santos last year.
When asked how Cueller’s case is different from Santos’s, Congressman Pete Aguilar, one of the top-ranking Democrats in America, said that Cuellar is different because he is a “serious public official.”
Cuellar, unlike indicted Senator Bob Menendez, doesn’t seem eager to throw his wife under the bus. His lawyer says that the indictment “reads like a spy novel” and is “also fiction.” He also implied that “there’s some other agenda here [for the Justice Department] other than truth and justice,” which was echoed by none other than former president Donald Trump, who wrote on Truth Social that the feds indicted Cuellar “because the Respected Democrat Congressman wouldn’t play Crooked Joe’s Open Border game.”
But with plea deals struck by the well-connected Texas Democrats now on the books, it’s looking like bad news for the longtime lawmaker.
–Matthew Foldi
Stormy weather in Trump case
Stormy Daniels testified for more than six hours this week in the Trump “hush money” trial in Manhattan this week — most of that time under cross-examination from the defense. Her retelling of her 2006 sexual encounter with Trump raised eyebrows the world over — with several sustained objections and even Judge Juan Merchan surprised that the former president’s lawyers didn’t raise more.
Perhaps the most ironic part of her time on the stand was the defense’s attempt to undercut Daniels’s integrity as a witness by depicting the porn star as a profiteer seeking to make money off the Trump brand. Susan Necheles highlighted that on her website Daniels sold “Saint of Indictments” devotional candles, along with “#TeamStormy” t-shirts and comic books. “No, I’m making about $7,” Daniels said regarding how much she was making from the candles. Necheles then described Daniels’s e-commerce efforts as “shilling,” which Daniels took issue with. “Not unlike Mr. Trump,” she replied. A pair of star-cross’d lovers, selling crappy merch online to fund their lawsuits against each other. And they say romance is dead…
It’s worth pointing out that not much progress has been made in the trial as yet to prove that Michael Cohen’s payments to Daniels were made in order to conceal another crime — which would render the payments a felony rather than a misdemeanor. Cockburn will be waving away the descriptions of Trump’s trysts until that happens, entertaining and embarrassing though they may be.
–Cockburn
