Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene’s revenge porn stunt in last week’s House Oversight Committee hearing was the last straw for Democrats. They’ve introduced a resolution to censure her for her record of “racism, antisemitism, LGBTQ, hate speech, Islamophobia, anti-Asian hate, xenophobia, and other forms of hatred.” Freshman Rep. Becca Balint of Vermont has the honor of sponsoring the resolution.
“For me, censuring Rep. Taylor Greene is about the health of our democracy and faith in government. Her antisemitic, racist, transphobic rhetoric has no place in the House of Representatives,” Balint said in a statement announcing the bill. Because she introduced it as privileged, she can bring it up on the floor at any time and it will have to be considered. It won’t remove Greene from Congress, but it would require a formal rebuke of her by Speaker Kevin McCarthy while she stands in the well of the House chamber. It’s a shaming ritual.
There’s plenty of shameful behavior as evidence in the resolution: four pages detailing around 40 instances of Greene’s violent, abusive, hateful words and acts. Oh, and the conspiracy theories she spouts, everything from 9/11—the government did it—to the 2020 election Big Lie. She has “repeatedly called for violence against elected representatives and their families,” the resolution states, providing the instances, such as when she said former Speaker Nancy Pelosi was ‘‘a traitor to our country, she’s guilty of treason’’ and should ‘‘suffer death or she’ll be in prison.” Or when she “posted an image of herself holding a gun next to images of three Members of Congress with a caption encouraging ‘going on offense’ against them.”
Campaign ActionThere’s a litany of instances where Greene “repeatedly espoused antisemitic rhetoric and conspiracy theories, including through inflammatory evocations of the Holocaust.” This includes her association with white nationalist Nick Fuentes and her public slurs against Black people, Asian Americans, and LBGTQ+ people as well as her Islamophobic statements, including against sitting members of Congress who she calls the “Jihad Squad.”
Given Greene’s alliance with McCarthy, he’s not going to be willing to rebuke her. McCarthy has practically made her a member of his leadership team. He’s given her plum committee assignments on Homeland Security and Oversight, where she shared big pornographic posters. McCarthy ignored established procedures and put Greene on the conference committee charged with working with senators to reconcile the National Defense Authorization Act, a seat that would normally be reserved for an Armed Service committee member.
She’s McCarthy’s pet, or maybe his puppet master. It’s hard to tell. At any rate, leadership isn’t going to allow her to be censured. One way or another, they’ll get the resolution off the floor without condemning her, but it will still put Republicans in a bind. The resolution and all of the evidence collected in it will be read on the floor, and every Republican will be forced to say whether they stand with Greene or condemn her actions.
You wouldn’t think that would be a tough call for any member considering the Freedom Caucus decided she was too toxic to be in their club. Instead, they’ll probably reject the censure, condone her behavior, and embrace her as one of them.
Former President Trump said Wednesday on Truth Social that GOP Sens. John Cornyn (Texas) and Mitt Romney (Utah) will not win their next elections.
Cornyn and Romney have criticized Trump and his actions on various issues, including his handling of the COVID-19 pandemic and the recent debt ceiling negotiations.
Romney, one of the seven GOP senators who voted to convict Trump in his second impeachment, recently encouraged fellow Republicans donating to 2024 GOP presidential campaigns to pressure candidates who are not proving competitive to get out of the race so Trump doesn’t have to run against a larger field, which could give him an advantage in getting the party nomination.
“Who is a worse Senator, John 'The Stiff' Cornyn of Texas, or Mitt 'The Loser' Romney of Massachusetts (Utah?)?” Trump asked on Truth Social. “They are both weak, ineffective, and very bad for the Republican Party, and our Nation. With even modestly skilled opposition, they’ll lose their next Election. Who could ever forget Mitt proudly marching, with full mask, down a once proud Washington, D.C. street with BLM and Rioters? Likewise there’s Cornyn, always quick to surrender to the Dems, giving them anything they want?”
Trump last year strongly criticized Cornyn for negotiating bipartisan gun safety legislation, calling him a “RINO” — Republican in name only — and said he and other Republicans were helping facilitate the taking away of Americans' guns.
Cornyn said in May he will support someone other than Trump in 2024.
“We need to come up with an alternative,” he said on a call with Texas reporters. “I think President Trump’s time has passed him by and what’s the most important thing to me is we have a candidate who can actually win.”
The popular podcaster Joe Rogan offered up a theory as to why the late convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein kept a disturbing painting depicting Bill Clinton wearing a dress in his possession.
The infamous portrait featured the former president wearing red high heels and a blue dress, and Epstein had it hanging in his Manhattan townhouse.
Rogan, in a recent episode of “The Joe Rogan Experience,” opined that the painting was used as some sort of leverage or even blackmail against Clinton.
“That painting is like: ‘I got you, b****,” Rogan said. “You know he knows about it.”
“Imagine if I knew some horrible dark secrets about you and you came over to my house and I have a giant painting of you,” he continued. “Right when you walk into the front door of you in a dress and I’m like, ‘Hey buddy.'”
WATCH
: Joe Rogan suggests that Bill Clinton was blackmailed by Jeffrey Epstein who hung a painting of the former president in a dress at his home.
“That that painting is like: ‘I got you bitch.’”
Clinton, who flew on Epstein’s jet at least 26 times & who went to ‘orgy island’… pic.twitter.com/dkN367N3XJ
— Officer Lew (@officer_Lew) July 19, 2023
RELATED: Shotgun Found 30 Feet From Body of Epstein-Linked Clinton Aid Whose Death Was Ruled a Suicide
Travel logs indicate that Clinton traveled on Epstein’s jet – known as the “Lolita Express” – 26 separate times, according to a Fox News analysis.
Doug Band, a former top aide to Clinton, made shocking allegations in a 2020 interview with Vanity Fair, including claims that the former president took a trip in 2003 to Epstein’s famed private island.
Epstein was convicted of procuring for prostitution a girl below the age of 18 in 2008 and was facing sex trafficking charges until he died by alleged suicide, according to authorities, in a Manhattan jail cell in 2019.
Clinton, according to a 2020 Daily Beast report, invited Ghislaine Maxwell to a “cozy” dinner in 2014. Maxwell had, at that point, already been accused of procuring underage girls for Epstein.
Last year, a reporter confronted Clinton and asked about his relationship with Epstein, prompting an awkward response as the former President was ushered away by an aide.
I confronted @BillClinton at the rally he held with @RepCuellar in Laredo about his alleged connections to child sex trafficker Jeffrey Epstein. “I think the answer is clear.” pic.twitter.com/ZtDR96PJwF
— Juan Mendoza Díaz (@JuanMoreNews) November 7, 2022
The Epstein-owned painting of Clinton in a blue dress is called “Parsing Bill,” and is the work of New York-based Australian artist, Petrina Ryan-Kleid.
Ryan-Kleid told Artnet that the portrait was just “silly school artwork” and confirmed that the blue dress Clinton is wearing in the image is a reference to the famous Monica Lewinsky dress.
The model who posed for her in order to create the painting said he was “stunned to find out that Epstein” bought the artwork.
Joe Rogan claims Jeffrey Epstein used sultry oil painting to blackmail Bill Clinton
The oil painting depicts Clinton in a blue dress eerily similar to the one Monica Lewinsky famously wore during their infamous White House affair.Petrina Ryan-Kleid pic.twitter.com/MH3fNMZq09— Gv Tricks
Ultra MAGA, Patriot
#FJB
It’s not the first time Lewinsky’s famous blue dress somehow made it into a painting of Clinton.
In 2005, artist Nelson Shanks claimed a shadow in his official portrait of President Clinton was actually modeled after a blue dress on a mannequin and was meant to symbolize Clinton’s affair with Lewinsky.
If you’re too young to remember, Lewinsky had a politically earth-shattering affair with the then-President Clinton in the ’90s, a relationship which would lead to his impeachment for perjury and obstruction of justice.
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Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas is appearing before the House Judiciary Committee on Wednesday, just one day after a federal court struck down a Biden administration policy restricting migrants’ access to asylum.
The rule required migrants to first seek and be denied asylum in a country they passed through along their way to the U.S. and also blocked asylum seekers from seeking protection after crossing between ports of entry -- a practice protected under U.S. asylum law.
Mayorkas has been the focus of broad GOP criticism, including calls for impeachment, over the large numbers of migrants who have attempted to enter the U.S. since Biden took office.
The hearing is scheduled for 10 a.m. ET.
Watch the live video above.
Hapless House Speaker Kevin McCarthy handed his gavel over to a group that can’t even decide whether shutting down the government is a good thing to do. On Tuesday, members of the Freedom Caucus held a press conference hosted by Freedom Works, the Koch-funded dark money organization that basically created the far-right caucus. They were there to make more of their incoherent and ever-changing demands for government funding. The “demands” boiled down to basically no government funding.
But don’t worry, said Rep. Andy Biggs of Arizona: “I don't believe you’re looking at a government shutdown.” Instead, Biggs said that some of the 12 necessary appropriations bills will go to the floor, and then “what we call a minibus” will combine the rest, and “then you’ll see a short-term continuing resolution to continue spending.” Never mind that one of the things the caucus demanded McCarthy agree to was that no appropriations bill could get a vote until all 12 were approved by the committee. And that there wouldn’t be any kind of “omnibus” that combined the bills.
Then Rep. Bob Good piped up. “We should not fear a government shutdown,” he said, because, “[m]ost of what we do up here is bad anyway.” Bring it on!
“Most of the American people won’t even miss if the government is shut down temporarily,” Good continued. McCarthy, he said, “has an opportunity to be a transformational historical speaker that stared down the Democrats, that stared down the free spenders, that stared down the president and said no.”
So that’s what Good wants out of all this: for McCarthy to just say “no.” Add that to all the other constantly moving goalposts these guys have erected:
Funding levels at fiscal year 2022 levels.
Funding levels at FY22 and also no emergency funding bills.
Funding levels at FY22 and no emergency funding bills and lawmakers have to claw back money handed out last year.
Pre-COVID funding levels for everything but defense.
The demands from the caucus as a whole are never-ending, and then there’s what the individual members want. For example, Rep. Chip Roy of Texas said Monday that he would only “consider” passing funding if Congress reduces spending to pre-COVID levels, ends the border “invasion,” defunds the FBI, ends federal diversity policies, ends Ukraine support, and ends the “War on Reliable Energy,” whatever that is supposed to mean. What Roy wants matters because McCarthy gave him a seat on the powerful Rules Committee, the one that decides what goes to the floor for a vote.
These are not people who are going to be happy to go along with stopgap funding bills to keep the government open until somehow they work this all out. It will take just five Republican House members to stop one unless McCarthy decides to work with Democrats to pass it, which would only enrage the Freedom Caucus anew. It’s going to take a miracle, or McCarthy becoming an actual leader (which would also be a miracle), to avoid a shutdown this fall, which is bad for the country and worse for Republicans.
“What would happen if Republicans for once stared down the Democrats and were the ones who refused to cave and to betray the American people and the trust they put in us when they gave us the majority?” Good asked Tuesday. “We don't fear the government shutdown.”
What would happen is that Republicans would lose that majority in 2024. And the Senate, and the White House. But you do you, Congressman Good.
President Joe Biden's son, Hunter Biden, faced new challenges on the eve of a scheduled court appearance Wednesday in which he's set to plead guilty in a deal with prosecutors on tax and gun charges.
On Capitol Hill, where Republicans are ramping up their investigations of the president and his son, the GOP chairman of the House Ways and Means Committee took the unusual step of filing court documents urging the judge in Hunter Biden's case to consider testimony from IRS whistleblowers. The whistleblowers alleged the Justice Department interfered with investigations into Biden, a charge that has been denied by the lead prosecutor in the case, who was appointed by former President Donald Trump.
U.S. District Judge Maryellen Noreika, who was also appointed by Trump, will consider whether to accept the plea agreement. Judges rarely throw out plea bargains, but the effort to intervene by Ways and Means Chairman Jason Smith of Missouri amounted to a high-profile push to raise questions about the deal, which is expected to spare the president's son from jail time.
The dynamics of the case became even more complicated hours after the lawmakers filed their motion. A court clerk received a call requesting that “sensitive grand jury, taxpayer and social security information” it contained be kept under seal, according to an oral order from Noreika.
The lawyer gave her name and said she worked with an attorney from the Ways and Means Committee but was in fact a lawyer with the defense team, a clerk wrote in an email to Theodore Kittila, an attorney representing Smith.
When Noreika learned of the situation, she demanded the defense show why she should not consider sanctioning them for “misrepresentations to the court.”
Defense attorneys answered that their lawyer had represented herself truthfully from the start, and called from a phone number that typically displays the firm’s name, Latham & Watkins, on the caller ID. Jessica Bengels said in court documents that she did speak to two different clerk’s office employees, which could have contributed to the misunderstanding. The second employee emailed Kittila.
Biden’s attorneys are still seeking to keep information deemed private out of the public court record. Kittila, though, said he had only filed materials that the committee had already released publicly online. The judge agreed to keep the information sealed for a day to consider the issue.
The dustup came hours before Biden is expected to plead guilty to misdemeanor tax charges in an agreement that allows him to avoid prosecution on a gun charge if he meets certain conditions. Republicans have decried the agreement as a “sweetheart deal” and heard from two IRS agents who claimed the long-running investigation was “slow walked” and the prosecutor overseeing it was refused broader special counsel powers.
Delaware U.S. Attorney David Weiss, a Trump appointee, denied that in a letter to Congress, saying he had “full authority” over the probe and never requested special counsel status.
A spokeswoman for Weiss directed queries back to the court clerk’s office.
House Speaker Kevin McCarthy's recent comments about opening an impeachment inquiry into President Biden were greeted with skepticism from Senate Republicans, including one who warned against following the lead of Democrats who "cheapened" the process under former President Trump.
"You'd have to have the argument," Senate Minority Whip John Thune, R-S.D., told reporters Tuesday. "It's a high threshold. I'd assume they'd have to have evidence and some process where they would at least get that evidence if they don't have it."
"Clearly the statements they're making would lead me to believe they have evidence. Or they think they have evidence that could reach that threshold of high crimes and misdemeanors," Thune added. "I'll say what I said before, and that is I think the best way to change the presidency is win the election… I think it's in our best interest to be making an argument for why we need to have the majority in the House, the Senate and the White House come Jan. 2025."
In a Monday night in an interview on "Hannity," McCarthy escalated his talk about potentially impeaching Biden by saying "this is rising to the level of impeachment inquiry." The speaker said evidence uncovered by House committees' investigations into the president may necessitate a full inquiry to gather more evidence of alleged corruption by the Biden family.
HOUSE CONSERVATIVES HUNGRY FOR BIDEN IMPEACHMENT AFTER MCCARTHY'S COMMENTS: ‘GROUND SHIFTED’
"You've got IRS whistleblowers saying something when it comes to government treating the Bidens different. You've got an informant claiming that the Biden family had been bribed. Should you ignore that or should investigate that?" McCarthy told reporters Tuesday. "The only way you can investigate that is through an impeachment inquiry. So the committee would have the power to get all the documents that they would need."
However, Senate Republicans were not excited about the prospect of a third presidential impeachment in four years.
"It's getting to be a habit around here, isn't it?" Sen. John Cornyn, R-Texas, said of impeachments.
"No it's not," Cornyn added when asked if that was a good thing. "Unfortunately what goes around, comes around. But obviously the stuff that the House is revealing about the Biden family business is very disturbing. But obviously the Senate doesn't have any role in that."
"I'll wait to see what evidence they present," Sen. Thom Tillis, R-N.C., said. "But we've got to do the homework. They cheapened the process the last two impeachments and we don't want to repeat that mistake."
Sen. John Kennedy, R-La., said there are serious lingering questions about the Biden family, including what the president knew about his son Hunter's overseas business dealings and if Biden got any money from those deals. However, Kennedy said mere political disagreements should not be grounds for an impeachment.
DOJ OFFERS HUNTER BIDEN INVESTIGATOR FOR TESTIMONY BEFORE THE HOUSE
"No one should be impeached, certainly not a president, unless there is substantial evidence that the president has committed a high crime or misdemeanor," Kennedy said. "I'm not going to support – and I'm not suggesting this is what Kevin has suggested – but I'm not gonna support impeaching somebody just because I don't like their politics."
It is up to the House to impeach a president, but removal from office only happens if two-thirds of the Senate votes to convict the commander in chief.
An impeachment would be very difficult to get through the House with McCarthy's narrow GOP majority. It would also put massive pressure on his most moderate members in districts that voted for Biden if impeachment came to the floor. Like the two Trump impeachments, it is highly unlikely the Senate would vote to convict Biden given its Democratic majority and the supermajority vote needed to remove Biden.
IRS WHISTLEBLOWER: 'INDEPENDENT ATTORNEY' NEEDED IN HUNTER BIDEN DELAWARE CASE
However, at least one Republican in the Senate welcomed the prospect of more investigative tools for the House as it looks into the Biden family.
"I think we're gonna get to a point really soon, you may have to stand up a committee that then would open an impeachment inquiry just to do the investigation, particularly because the White House isn't cooperating at all," said Sen. Josh Hawley, R-Mo.
He added, "The American people deserve to know if the president's a crook."
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However, even Sen. Chuck Grassley R-Iowa, who has been among the leading voices on investigating the president and Hunter Biden, said in a floor speech about evidence detailing a bribery allegation against the president that his focus is on federal law enforcement.
"I want to make clear what my oversight focus is and will be holding the Justice Department and the FBI accountable to explain to the American people what they did to investigate and what they found," Grassley said.
Fox News' Brianna O'Neil and Ben Florance contributed to this report.
Secretary of State Antony Blinken warned of "problematic behavior," from China during his visit to the Polynesian island of Tonga on Wednesday.
"What I think one of the things that we've seen is that as China's engagement in the region has grown, there has been some, from our perspective, increasingly problematic behavior," Blinken said, pointing to concerns over China's "unlawful maritime claims," "predatory" economic activity and investments that "promote corruption."
The comment follows Blinken's high-stakes trip to China last month, where he met with Chinese President Xi Jinping amid rising tensions between the countries. The trip to Tonga is Blinken's third visit to the Asia-Pacific region over the past two months, having also visited Indonesia.
The trip comes as part of the White House's efforts to push back on China's growing influence in the Pacific islands region and increase the U.S. presence. In a notice sent to Congress earlier this month, the State Department said it is planning a sharp increase in diplomatic personnel and spending for new U.S. embassies in the Pacific islands.
Meeting with Tongan Prime Minister Siaosi ‘Ofakivahafolau Sovaleni on Wednesday, Blinken dedicated a new U.S. embassy in Tonga that opened two months ago.
"We acknowledged a changing global landscape, the impacts of conflict and the strategic importance of the Pacific Island region," Sovaleni said.
He also told reporters that Tonga's growing partnership with the U.S. is rooted in a "shared respect for democracy, the rule of law, and the rights of freedom of others." Solvaleni said he and Blinken discussed the focuses of the partnership, including the climate crisis, education and defense.
When asked about Tonga's debt to China, Sovaleni said the country has officially started to pay off the debt and does not "have any problems or concerns," about it.
"When we talk about 'free and open,' we mean a region where all countries are free to choose their own path and their own partners; where problems are dealt with openly; where rules are reached transparency and applied fairly; where goods, where ideas, where people can move freely and lawfully," Blinken said.
The secretary of State will next head to New Zealand to meet with officials and watch the Women's World Cup soccer match between the U.S. and Netherlands. He will then visit Brisbane, Australia, to meet with Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin and their Australian counterparts.
The Associated Press contributed.