Category: Corruption

Republicans consider a novel way to obstruct investigations of Trump

Posted on (Updated by Hunter

Well, here we go again. House Republicans have been shrieking that they're going to impeach a whole passel of top officials in the Joe Biden administration for supposed crimes that include investigating seditionist Donald Trump too much and investigating Hunter Biden too little, but every once in a while one of them remembers that Congress also has the power to simply zero out the salaries of any executive branch employees they don't particularly like.

It's akin to a bill of attainder targeting a particular executive official's career. Frustrated congressional cornballs have been sporadically remembering the power for years now, especially whenever some government agency does something that they really super do not like but can't muster the legislative votes to actually change.

Politico reports that House Republican cranks are again threatening to use this power, probably after someone in the Freedom Caucus sobered up long enough to remember it existed. The possible targets reportedly include Attorney General Merrick Garland, FBI Director Christopher Wray, and "some are hoping to use the procedure on investigators working for special counsel Jack Smith."

That last part is another bit of nice, clean proof that at least "some" House Republicans are eager to use their positions as U.S. congresscreatures to interfere specifically with the ongoing investigations and criminal charges against the coup-attempting, document-stealing Donald Trump. As House Speaker Kevin McCarthy's bag of deplorables prepare to begin impeachment proceedings against Garland for not finding anything except petty crimes to indict Hunter Biden on, yet again disrupting one of Rudy Giuliani and Republicanism's most grand pro-Russia, anti-Ukraine conspiracy theories, and enraging the petty fascists of the party beyond all hope of reason, there are at least some bozos in the caucus eager to target the Jack Smith investigation specifically.

It’s a simple enough strategy: Zero out the salaries of any Department of Justice or FBI official involved with prosecuting Trump for lying to federal officials about stolen national security documents, and you'll neatly empty out the offices of anyone willing to pursue Trump's crimes. It's a gleefully corrupt act, all premised on the House Republican insistence that the government must arrest their enemies for committing crimes they can't prove while letting powerful Republicans get away with crimes even if they're caught in the act.

And this is why it's perfectly reasonable to conclude that the Freedom Caucus and allies are not so much a political caucus as an organized crime ring. Not a well-organized crime ring, mind you, but organized enough.

Now that Politico has brought us this news, it's time for the usual caveats. Guess what? House Republicans won't actually be able to zero out salaries whether they "want" to or not, and that's because the whole scheme has the same flaw that supposed impeachment of federal officials does. The Democratic-held Senate would have to agree, and the Senate has no interest in helping Jim Jordan's crime spree along. A bill to do this would go nowhere.

It's also an arcane enough move that one imagines it wouldn't be worth all that much for House Republicans to try it for the sake of campaign trail bragging rights: "I tried to take away Merrick Garland's paycheck but it didn't work" isn't the best bullet point for a campaign flier. House Republicans will instead probably keep moving forward with a Garland impeachment "investigation," solely because it would be an opportunity for an extended, months-long spectacle. Jordan and other House Republicans are still clamoring for revenge against House Democrats who had the audacity to impeach Trump twice: once for attempting to extort the Ukrainian government for personal gain, and once for that whole "attempting to violently overthrow the United States government" thing.

Remember, too, that Jordan's been demanding state and federal prosecutors turn over their case materials to him in the cases where Trump has already been indicted. House Republicans aren't just interfering with the multiple criminal investigations of Trump, they're doing it repeatedly, continually, and as an explicit strategy. And why wouldn't they? They were willing to obstruct investigations of an attempted Republican coup, they're hardly going to recoil at this sort of old-school corruption.

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Republicans use House powers to protect Trump

Republicans use House powers to protect Trump

Posted on (Updated by Hunter

Every single time we have learned that sedition-backing Donald Trump likely committed a crime, it takes no more than a day for House Republicans to begin planning out how they will best defend him. Every single time, the chosen defense is not that Trump didn't do whatever astonishingly crooked thing investigators have uncovered; instead, they declare that whoever discovered the corruption is part of a vast conspiracy against the career con artist, and that the investigators are the ones who need to be punished and/or jailed.

And every damn time, a coatless Rep. Jim Jordan flings himself in front of the news cameras to be the loudest person whining about it.

Now the House Judiciary Chair, which is about as neat a summation of Republicanism's decline as you could ask for, Jordan is already leading the House Republican charge to sabotage the new federal indictment of Trump under Espionage Act charges. He and his fellow Republicans have settled into a pattern; Jordan is using his perch in Congress to demand that the Justice Department turn over documents about the active criminal case. CNN is now reporting that Jordan is "exploring ways to force [special counsel] Jack Smith to testify or provide information" about the criminal case, and that Jordan has declared that "all options are on the table" when it comes to forcing Smith and others to comply.

This is the now-standard means by which House Republicans look to undermine all investigations into Trump's various acts of corruption; Jordan and House Republicans turned to it immediately after Trump's indictment in New York for cooking Trump Organization books to hide hush money payments during his 2016 campaign. It quickly came to light that House Republicans were coordinating with Trump himself in their efforts to discredit the Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg.

The reasons House Republicans have been demanding investigators turn over their evidence are, of course, obvious. The intent is to share that evidence with Trump, either directly or by leaking it to the general public, and to identify key witnesses against Trump so that they can be publicly marked and demonized, and to tease out the direction of any ongoing investigative threads so that those, too, can be leaked and Trump's team alerted. All while undermining federal prosecutors and the judicial system itself.

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The House Republican pattern is now rote, in fact. Rep. Devin Nunes made a name and career for himself before Jordan took the reins; this was the go-to Republican plan during the Robert Mueller investigation into Russian espionage and election interference and during Trump's first impeachment, as well as during every other lesser scandal.

The catch now, however, is that Jordan is not attempting to sabotage a federal probe or an impeachment trial. Jordan and his fellow House Republicans are attempting to sabotage state and federal criminal cases against Trump; in demanding that the indicting prosecutors turn over their notes, their witnesses, and their evidence, Trump's Republican allies are plainly attempting to obstruct prosecutors, not investigators. And that is usually something that is a really top-notch, prison-worthy crime for anyone who is not a sitting member of Congress.

There's really no question that the intent is obstruction, either. CNN also notes that sedition-backing House Republicans like Jordan and Reps. Marjorie Taylor Greene and Matt Gaetz are pushing colleagues to defund the special counsel's office and otherwise strip funding from the Justice Department in order to pressure the department into dropping the charges against Trump.

As for why attempting to obstruct an ongoing criminal probe and indictment isn't illegal if you're a member of Congress, that's a hell of a question. Republicans are relying on congressional speech and debate protections to blur the lines, but those protections wouldn't protect Matt Gaetz or the others if they were, say, indicted on federal drug charges or for participating in a sex-trafficking ring, or for taking bribes or punching reporters or any number of other actual crimes. Demanding prosecutors expose their case strategies, evidence, and path of their ongoing investigations isn't a criminal act of obstruction, though? We'll have to have the experts explain that one to us all.

It needs to be again emphasized, though, that Republicanism now defines itself around the notion that Republicans get to do crimes. The latest Trump indictment is the most serious charge against him so far; Trump was caught hoarding an array of classified documents describing some of the country's most closely guarded national security secrets and, when federal officials attempted to get them back, took repeated steps to hide the documents from the government and his own lawyers so that he could keep them. At Mar-a-Lago. In publicly accessible rooms.

This is an extraordinary crime no matter who was doing it; it is one thing to misplace such documents, but it is unquestionably a crime to intentionally attempt to keep them by lying to the federal government about their whereabouts. It's also a much more straightforward crime than "seditious conspiracy" might be, and is trivial to prove compared to charges that might revolve around "intent" when pressing state election officials to "find" new votes on Trump's behalf.

It is a big-boy crime, a big-boy federal crime that prosecutors appear to have caught Trump and his aide dead to rights on, and one that may very well be amended in the future with actual espionage charges, if Trump had the sheer audacity to share the documents not just with aides and ghostwriters but to Saudi or other foreign officials he was trying to impress. That is the investigation and indictment that House Republicans are attempting to obstruct.

They're not doing it for Trump. Nobody gives that much of a damn about Trump, not really. Jordan and the others leap to the same defenses and the same obstructive acts whenever any powerful or half-powerful Republican faces a new corruption scandal. House Republicans are devoted to the idea that Republicans get to commit crimes and get to charge their political opponents with false ones, and they've got an entire fascist movement egging them on with that.

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Republicans are too busy to read Trump indictment

Posted on (Updated by Hunter

House and Senate Republicans have been tying themselves in knots trying to defend Trump after his newest indictments revealed his extraordinary efforts to hide highly classified nuclear and national security documents inside his Mar-a-Lago club even as government officials were trying to get them back. But there's not much for Trump's defenders to rally around, given that prosecutors have a tape of Trump literally showing off one of the classified documents because he thought it'd score him points in a petty political fight, and so "trying to defend Trump" is competing with "sprinting away from reporters with Josh Hawley-like grace" when Republicans have to decide whether to even acknowledge the charges against him.

Republican Sen. Chuck Grassley might have topped all the others. Capitol Hill reporter Joe Perticone reports that Grassley "tells me he hasn't read the indictment because he's 'not a legal analyst.'"

Yes, no legal mumbo-jumbo for Grassley here. Not for Sen. Chuck Grassley, the (checks notes) previous Republican chair of the Senate Judiciary Committee.

Perticone also reports that Joni Ernst, Steve Daines, and Deb Fischer also claim they haven't read the newest indictment of the last Republican president of the United States, which is puzzling because it’s a very quick read, something that can easily be skimmed in the span of a half hour, and you would think that Senate Republicans still willing to stick their neck out to defend Trump after two impeachments, and an attempted violent coup, and a jury confirmation of sexual assault might want to at least glance at the indictment to learn why Donald now faces Espionage Act charges as well.

House Speaker Kevin McCarthy, by contrast, says he hasn't "read it all the way through. I read a lot of portions of it, though," which is considerably more than ex-Judiciary chair Grassley could muster, and McCarthy, if you haven't noticed, has a hell of a lot more on his plate these days, what with a good chunk of his own caucus willing to sabotage their entire party agenda for the sake of squeezing a few more drops of blood out of him.

McCarthy may have only skimmed the indictment, of course, but that doesn't mean he wasn't willing to make a total ass of himself on Trump's behalf. He's the one who solemnly noted that at least "a bathroom door locks," which sent much of the political internet into spasms of giggles, and then even more giggles as a handful of reporters tried to take the big goof seriously.

does the pulitzer have a category for excellence in bulleted lists because I have a nomination to submit pic.twitter.com/Y6zfh443ij

— elaine filadelfo (@ElaineF) June 13, 2023

A twice-impeached, twice-indicted, sedition-promoting, hoax-pushing former "president" of the United States was caught red-handed hoarding national defense documents in a ballroom, bathroom, and poolside storage room at his private for-profit resort, and the best McCarthy can do is note that one of those three locations is technically sort of locked, some of the time, specifically when Trump or anyone else with access was attempting to poop.

There are worse takes, of course. Sen. Lindsey Graham manages to be terrible at this every day, all the time, and is currently waffling between noting that Trump "believes" he had the right to put classified national defense secrets in his chandeliered pooproom and, previously, offering the defense that well it's not like Trump was in league with foreign spies so shut up.

Sen. Lindsey O. Graham (R-S.C.) picked up the argument Sunday. “Espionage charges are absolutely ridiculous. Whether you like Trump or not, he did not commit espionage,” Graham said on ABC News’s “This Week.” “He did not disseminate, leak or provide information to a foreign power or to a news organization to damage this country. He is not a spy. He’s overcharged.”

Oh, Lindsey. For starters, the indictment doesn't charge Trump with disseminating the information, it only charges him with retaining it and attempting to conceal it when federal officials asked for it back—this is a case where Graham might have done himself some good to read the indictment before appearing on Sunday shows to once again make an ass of himself.

But Graham may want to put a pin in that one, because while federal prosecutors are not currently charging Trump with disseminating the documents to a foreign power, even we in the public now know that 1.) Trump had no compunctions against showing the documents to supplicants ranging from aides and ghostwriters to Kid Rock, for some reason, and 2.) not all of the classified documents Trump is believed to have made off yet have been found, including the one he was recorded waving around, and (3) Donald Trump and his family have done very well for themselves in their new partnerships with Saudi Arabian royalty, representatives of which have been in the same Bedminster, New Jersey, club that Trump is now known to have spirited some portion of the classified docs off to.

Sen. Marco Rubio took up the same line, whining that there's "no allegation that he sold it to a foreign power or that it was trafficked to somebody else or that anybody got access to it." Again, put a pin in that one. That is a very, very narrow limb to climb out on, when you're talking about a money-obsessed lifetime petty crook who just proved himself willing to overthrow the government rather than admit failure on his part. Do we really think—are we really quite sure—that he did not do that?

We'll see where this goes from here, but we can count on House and Senate Republicans to humiliate themselves over and over again on Trump's behalf before this is over. The short of it is that Trump has access to all of the party's deplorables, voters who themselves are quite fond of sedition and think that well maybe there should be violence to clean out their political enemies so that gun-owning malcontents can rule what's left, and nearly every Republican in the party has decided they need to support Trump through extortion, sedition, and even espionage if the alternative is losing those votes.

It will get worse. Count on it. There's no chance prosecutors are already telling us everything investigators have learned about Trump's hoard of classified documents—and there are still more indictments waiting in the wings.

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Texas lawmakers recommend impeaching Attorney General Ken Paxton after Republican investigation

Posted on by Associated Press stories chosen by Daily Kos staff

Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton teetered on the brink of impeachment Thursday after years of scandal, criminal charges and corruption accusations that the state's Republican majority had largely met with silence for years until now.

In an unanimous decision, a Republican-led investigative committee that spent months quietly looking into Paxton recommended impeaching the state's top lawyer. The state House of Representatives could vote on the recommendation as soon as Friday. If the House impeaches Paxton, he would be forced to leave office immediately.

The move sets set up a remarkably sudden downfall for one of the GOP's most prominent legal combatants, who in 2020 asked the U.S. Supreme Court to overturn President Joe Biden's victory. Only two other officials in Texas’ nearly 200-year history have been impeached.

Paxton has been under FBI investigation for years over accusations that he used his office to help a donor and was separately indicted on securities fraud charges in 2015, but has yet to stand trial.

Unlike in Congress, impeachment in Texas requires immediate removal from office until a trial is held in the Senate. That means Paxton faces ouster at the hands of GOP lawmakers just seven months after easily winning a third term over challengers — among them George P. Bush — who had urged voters to reject a compromised incumbent but discovered that many didn't know about Paxton's litany of alleged misdeeds or dismissed the accusations as political attacks. Republican Gov. Greg Abbott could appoint an interim replacement.

Paxton has suggested that the investigation that came to light to week is a politically motivated attack and said the Republican House leadership is too “liberal” for the state.

Chris Hilton, a senior lawyer in the attorney general’s office, told reporters before Thursday's committee vote that what investigators said about Paxton was “false,” “misleading,” and “full of errors big and small.” He said all of the allegations were known to voters when they reelected him in November.

Impeachment requires a two-thirds vote of the state's 150-member House chamber, where Republicans hold a commanding 85-64 majority.

In one sense, Paxton's political peril arrived with dizzying speed: House Republicans did not reveal they had been investigating him until Tuesday, followed the next day by an extraordinary public airing of alleged criminal acts he committed as one of Texas' most powerful figures.

But to Paxton's detractors, who now include a widening share of his own party in the Texas Capitol, the rebuke was seen as years in the making.

In 2014, he admitted to violating Texas securities law over not registering as an investment advisor while soliciting clients. A year later, Paxton was indicted on felony securities charges by a grand jury in his hometown near Dallas, where he was accused of defrauding investors in a tech startup. He has pleaded not guilty to two felony counts that carry a potential sentence of five to 99 years in prison.

He opened a legal defense fund and accepted $100,000 from an executive whose company was under investigation by Paxton's office for Medicaid fraud. An additional $50,000 was donated by an Arizona retiree whose son Paxton later hired to a high-ranking job but was soon fired after trying to make a point by displaying child pornography in a meeting.

What has unleashed the most serious risk to Paxton is his relationship with another wealthy donor, Austin real estate developer Nate Paul.

Several of Paxton's top aides in 2020 said they became concerned the attorney general was misusing the powers of his office to help Paul over unproven claims that an elaborate conspiracy to steal $200 million of his properties was afoot. The FBI searched Paul's home in 2019 but he has not been charged and his attorneys have denied wrongdoing. Paxton also told staff members that he had an affair with a woman who, it later emerged, worked for Paul.

Paxton's aides accused him of corruption and were all fired or quit after reporting him to the FBI. Four sued under Texas' whistleblower laws, accusing Paxton of wrongful retaliation, and in February agreed to settle the case for $3.3 million. But the Texas House must approve the payout and Phelan has said he doesn't think taxpayers should foot the bill.

Shortly after the settlement was reached, the House investigation into Paxton began. The probe amounted to rare scrutiny of Paxton in the state Capitol, where many Republicans have long taken a muted posture about the accusations that have followed the attorney general.

That includes Abbott, who in January swore in Paxton for a third term and said the way he approached the job was “the right way to run the attorney's general's office.”

Only twice has the Texas House impeached a sitting official: Gov. James Ferguson in 1917 and state Judge O.P. Carrillo in 1975.

Joe Biden ‘Will Be Impeached’ Over Report Allegedly Linking Him to ‘Criminal Scheme,’ Says MTG

Posted on by Rusty Weiss

Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene confidently predicted President Joe Biden “will be impeached” following a bombshell report alleging he engaged in criminal activity.

House Oversight Chairman James Comer (R-KY) and Senator Chuck Grassley (R-IA) announced Wednesday that a whistleblower had come forth claiming the DOJ and FBI possess a file describing an alleged “criminal scheme” between Biden and a foreign national while he was serving as Vice President.

Grassley has described the whistleblower as “credible.”

Comer subpoenaed the form in question which the accuser claims “describes an alleged criminal scheme involving then-Vice President Biden and a foreign national relating to the exchange of money for policy decisions.”

They claim the DOJ has the document in their possession.

Axios describes the claims as “the most direct allegation against President Biden himself.”

Comer’s subpoena is demanding the document within a week.

RELATED: GOP Senator Grassley Accuses FBI of Covering Up Biden Family ‘Potential Criminal Conduct’

Could Biden Be Impeached Over Alleged ‘Criminal Scheme’?

Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA) posted a ‘breaking news’ video along with a copy of the joint letter from Grassley and Comer suggesting she now has “evidence” to prove President Biden’s alleged “criminal scheme.”

While the House Oversight Committee has not procured the document claimed to be in possession of the DOJ as of yet, Greene insists the group will continue to investigate Biden’s potential pay-for-play scheme with foreign nationals.

Greene claims the material would allegedly contain “proof and information that Joe Biden, as Vice President of the United States, actually interacted with a foreign national and made a deal with a foreign national in exchange for money.”

In a subsequent interview on Steve Bannon’s podcast, Greene suggests impeachment might finally be on the table.

“Now on the Oversight Committee, because we have real subpoena powers, we have the power to investigate and we have the power to do what we’re doing now,” she said.

“And that form shows the proof that Joe Biden took a money payment from a foreign national in exchange for policy decisions while he was vice president of the United States,” Greene claims.

She added: “This means that Joe Biden will be impeached.”

RELATED: Joe Biden Named in Email Discussing Call With Hunter About Major Gas Deal With China

Will the FBI Produce the Document?

Grassley, in an interview with Fox News’ Sandra Smith, reiterated that the whistleblower is viewed as “credible” by the Committee.

“So the Justice Department, the FBI needs to come clean to the American people, what they did with the document, because we know the document exists from very credible whistleblower information that we got,” insists Grassley.

“We really need to know what steps did the Justice Department and FBI take to investigate and to vet the document to determine if it’s accurate or not?”

If they saw the name Biden and viewed it as evidence of a ‘criminal scheme’ those steps most likely involved burying it as deep as humanly possible.

“If the Justice Department and the FBI have any hopes of redeeming their once trusted position with the American people, Garland and Wray must answer this subpoena and tell us what they’re doing with this information that we think is very credible based upon what whistleblowers are telling us,” added Grassley.

The Iowa congressman has been at the forefront of investigating corruption in the Biden family.

Prior to this report, Grassley accused the FBI of hiding ‘potential criminal conduct’ by the Biden family.

Representative Comer recently suggested at least a dozen relatives of President Biden could be exposed in foreign money deals.

A statement from the White House does not expressly deny any of the accusations but blows off the whistleblower claims as more of the same from Republicans.

“For going on 5 years now, Republicans in Congress have been lobbing unfounded politically-motivated attacks against [Biden] without offering evidence for their claims,” tweeted spokesman Ian Sams.

Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump has suggested the allegations of criminal activity involving the “big guy” are so prevalent that he’s transferring the nickname ‘Crooked’ from Hillary Clinton to ‘Crooked Joe Biden.’

Comer has been indicating a press conference may come early this month where he intends to discuss the committee’s findings regarding “influence peddling” by Biden family members.

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Kevin McCarthy’s allies have spent big bucks to retaliate against Republicans who oppose him

Posted on (Updated by Hunter

We've got another press dive into the world of House Republican minority leader Kevin McCarthy, and once again, it manages to be darkly, unintentionally hilarious. The political press just cannot help but paint every politician's personal acts of revenge as Machiavellian strategery, weaving a grand basket of complications around an egg of a premise that would otherwise look tawdry, just lying there on its own.

Yes, The Washington Post has a look at "How Kevin McCarthy's political machine worked to sway the GOP field," and the answer is "with money." What the Post has discovered is a devoted effort by McCarthy and his wealthy allies to sabotage the careers of would-be House Republicans who don't back McCarthy's leadership ambitions. Most of it is through the Congressional Leadership Fund super PAC, but because this is American politics and American politics is deeply crooked, an assortment of other billionaire-backed PAC names pop in and out to help the cause as needed. There is no part of our election system that is not either controlled outright by money, or that cannot be tweaked by a single anonymous rich person so that it better aligns with their own anonymous interests. We do the voting, but it’s anonymous rich people that decide which names are on the ballots.

Mind you, there's a bunch of blowhardism thrown in from the parties involved about how no, no, McCarthy and his allies are just trying to make sure the party presents more "electable" Republicans than what they've currently been dredging up, to form a "more functioning GOP caucus." And it’s a pretty damn thin case: McCarthy and allies are still backing, for example, Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, a sedition-backing one-person wrecking crew making her way through every pretense at decency her party once tried to maintain, even as they spent freely (though secretly!) to sabotage Madison Cawthorn after Cawthorn let slip that Washington, D.C., Republicanism was a cesspit of cocaine and sex parties.

I dunno here, but let's see if we can tease out what the difference is between the pro-sedition treasonbastards that McCarthy's money team is willing to embrace and the pro-sedition treasonbastards that go too far.

"In safe Republican districts, controversial Republicans like former New York State party chair Carl Paladino, Florida state Rep. Anthony Sabatini and Trump-endorsed congressional candidate Joe Kent have been targeted after distancing themselves from McCarthy’s leadership ..."

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Oh. There it is right there. Well hell, why'd we need any of the rest of it?

Take, for example, the case of Rep. Jamie Herrera Beutler, who voted for Trump's impeachment—the sin that turned other members of the caucus into pariahs. The intolerable sin. And yet, McCarthy's allies spent big against her Trump-backed opponent, Joe Kent:

"Kent, her Trump-endorsed challenger, opposed McCarthy as speaker ..."

It does feel like a pattern:

"Sabatini, a friend of Rep. Matt Gaetz (R-Fla.), had been an outspoken critic of McCarthy."

So what we have here is a Republican would-be majority that is willing to tolerate political positions from pro-sedition to pro-impeaching the people who tried to do the sedition, so long as you don't tick off that one little box that will irritate Kevin McCarthy on a, shall we say, professional level.

And here we thought Republicanism didn't have coherent policy stances. Look! We just found a big one! Bow to the guy who controls the money, or get the snot kicked out of you!

As I said at the beginning, there's something deeply funny about this reporting. The whole premise is that rich people close to Kevin Owen McCarthy are trying to filter out some of the most conspicuous Nazi-loving or pro-sedition wackadoodles from Republican ranks. The people behind the PACs are trying to sell it as a noble effort to pull Republicanism back from, at the least, openly supporting the democracy-ending rebellion.

But even on its own terms, it’s inconsistent with reality as we know it. McCarthy continues to make very nice with the head seditionist who got people killed inside the Capitol as part of an attempted overthrow of the government. McCarthy keeps vowing to restore the committee assignments one of the most brazen pro-seditionists of all if voters put him in charge. House leadership has specifically worked to defend avid seditionists while punishing members who spoke out to condemn Trump for the attempted coup.

Instead, the most aggressive moves McCarthy and his allies have made against any House Republican were reserved for the one irritant who mentioned, on tape, that boy howdy there are a lot of coke orgies going on behind House Republican scenes.

THAT SEEMS VERY RELEVANT SOMEHOW. Can't put my finger on why. But yeah, sure, these are some bold moves by Kevin McCarthy and his biggest fundraisers to, uh, kneecap the political careers of anyone who badmouths Kevin McCarthy.

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Meet the new dark money Republican hoax and troll group, ‘Citizens for Sanity’

Posted on by Hunter

One of the hallmarks of the Steve Bannon era, and the Tucker Carlson era, the Rudy Giuliani era, and God help us all we could keep going with that for another hour if nobody reined us in, was the seemingly omnipresent political question: Are American voters really dim enough to fall for that? "That" has been a take-your-pick selection of some of the weirdest conspiracy theories and paranoias to ever have campaign money put behind them, but the answer has always seemed to be: Yes.

Yes, there is literally no invented paranoia too ridiculous for some segment of the jus' folks Republican base to refuse to latch on to. You say Central American drug cartels are working with Al Qaeda to ship dangerous sex toys to Walmart store basements? This requires immediate action! Why are Democrats letting this happen? Why are our national newspapers not up in arms about this? Why yes, I will donate $20 to your campaign or interest group so that you can bring us more news about the Al Qaeda Sex Toy Caravan!

You might remember, as one example, that Texas Republicans—the sort of people who willingly elect Louie Gohmert to office, and more than once—became convinced during the Obama years that a multistate military exercise used to test and train our large-scale military operations capabilities, dubbed by the Pentagon as Jade Helm, was secretly a plot by the federal government to take over Texas and turn it into, uh, part of America. Republicans showed up at town halls seething about these things. The state's Republican officials put out stern warnings insisting that they were on the lookout for this sort of thing, so if any Texas law enforcement folks saw any suspicious pro-Obama annexation happening, by gum there would be trouble.

No, really. State officials had to "address" this and everything.

So yeah, something we've learned over the years is that the more conservative an American is, the more willing they are to believe absolutely anything you throw at them. You say caravans, they believe caravans. You say "Obama's gonna annex Texas" they believe Obama's gonna annex Texas. They might not know what a single damn word of it means, but they will make it a core part of their identity and howl in heavily armed outrage at anyone who doesn't believe it as much as they do.

Conservative dark money groups have taken to weaponizing that paranoia, and that brings us to the current moment. A Politico story reports that a dark money group calling itself Citizens for Sanity—this is a very Washington, D.C., thing, this naming convention of picking a name that openly throat-punches the premise of the underlying thing being sold—will supposedly be spending "millions of dollars" on what amounts to a trolling campaign.

A trolling campaign aimed just as much at their own base as on anyone else, mind you: The group is targeting allegedly out-of-control "wokeness" and the terrible "woke" radicals who are threatening America with it. The first John Brabender-produced ad, reports Politico, envisions a terror-filled future in which a transgender athlete wins a sporting event.

Because yes, that's the sort of thing that will get Republican base voters worked up. Republican voters are not smart. They are extremely not smart. They are to smart what yogurt is to bridge construction. The Republican base quite literally does not care about 1 million pandemic deaths. They believe climate change is a hoax perpetrated against them by nerds. They would rather live in a post-coup fascist dystopia than pay an extra 20 cents for gas, and will tell you so to your face.

Tell them that transgender athletes are coming to win all the sporting events, thus somehow leading to America annexing Texas, you'll have these beer-burping twits out waving guns in front of government buildings in three minutes flat. Conservative campaign groups love these voters. They can be controlled with a piece of cheese on a string. Come up with even the most bizarre scenario in which a conservative talk radio listener or Fox News watcher might be expected to show a bare amount of public decency and out come the guns. Convince them that the history book mention of Fredrick Douglass on page 174 is a conspiracy to make children “woke” and they'll be dry-humping whatever politician vows to defeat that evil scheme.

Yogurt. Bridges.

So this is how unknown rich assholes will be spending their money in the months before the midterms, and we don't know which rich assholes because nobody wants their name attached to what amounts to a(nother) bottomlessly cynical professional hoax-producing outfit. Maybe it's the MyPillow guy. Maybe it's the Uline guy. Maybe it's some stadium owner, maybe it's that same group of half-dozen wealthy fascists that has been trying to overturn democracy ever since people started muttering that they should pay their damn taxes already. It's purely a trolling effort, with billboards—and, if Politico is to be believed, this is actually real—with fake slogans plastered on them like "Protect Pregnant Men from Climate Discrimination," and, "Open the jails. Open the borders. Close the schools. Vote progressive this November."

It's a multimillion dollar troll campaign, and the people being trolled aren't just conservatism's many supposed cultural enemies, but Republican voters themselves. If you want a conspiracy theory to panic over, here’s one: Republicans have spent the last five decades trying to sabotage both education and journalism, and now that a significant percentage of the U.S. population has yogurt for brains and couldn’t decipher a two-box flowchart if their lives depended on it, the party intends to capitalize on the effort by rousing the yogurt-brained as the driving force of electoral politics.

Forget about the coup attempt and the deaths in the U.S. Capitol. Forget about the Republican domestic terrorism, the new laws giving party lackeys the power to overturn election results, the million pandemic deaths, the two impeachments, the national security documents found stuffed into rooms at Mar-a-Lago. Forget about your abortion rights. If you abandon Republicanism just because of that stuff Republicans are doing, our dearly gullible Republican voters, criminals will run amuck, men will demand pregnancy rights, and children will be allowed to participate in sporting events without local party officials looking down their pants.

The premise of Citizens for Sanity: "Forget everything we've done, all you yogurt-brains. Instead, here are 50 new conspiracy theories. Just pick whichever one you want and go with it, we really don't care."

Once again: Republicanism is reliant on hoaxes. It is now how they campaign, and how they govern, and how they try to evade responsibility for even criminal acts. Not just the dark money groups, but individual campaigns are now centered around "The 2020 elections were secretly rigged against Trump," or, "The entire American education system is actually a trick perpetrated on the country by woke anti-racist groomers." Hoax-based gibberish is now the basis of all of Republicanism.

And we're left once again wondering: Will it work? How much will it work? What percentage of conservative voters, after turning their own brains to absolute mush by watching pro-fascist conspiracy programs propped up by the Murdoch family for just a bit more wealth, will vote to ignore the abortion debate, Florida's future coastlines, the future inhabitability of large parts of the Republican-held South, the return of polio, and an economy that's no longer collapsing because they are absolutely convinced a secret plot by "woke" people will destroy the country if they don't keep voting for the party that turns everything it governs to crap?

The FBI Is Now The Federal Bureau Of Intimidation

Posted on by RealClearWire

By Frank Miele for RealClearPolitics

Nothing symbolizes the decline of the American republic better than the weaponization of justice that we saw last week when the FBI raided the home of former President Trump.

And nothing better represents the divide that now exists between Democrats and Republicans than the fact that some people still have faith in the FBI.

Aren’t they paying attention? Heck, that’s like a citizen of the old Soviet Union saying they had faith in the KGB – yeah, to crush dissent and lock up opponents of the regime in a Siberian gulag.

RELATED: FBI Now Warning About ‘Dirty Bomb’ Threats, Calls for ‘Civil War’ Following Mar-a-Lago Raid

The evidence is overwhelming. The Federal Bureau of Investigation is now the Federal Bureau of Intimidation. Or more appropriately, the Federal Intimidation Bureau, whose acronym would spell out FIB, as in the Big Lie. Face it, nothing the FBI has said for the last six years since they joined with the Democratic Party to invent the Russia collusion hoax can be taken seriously.

Is there any need to go through the whole laundry list of lies and fabrications that the FBI, with the aid and comfort of the Justice Department, has foisted on the American public?

You can start with the extraordinary 2016 press conference when FBI Director James Comey detailed crimes committed by presidential candidate Hillary Clinton related to her improper use of a private email account to store classified material. Moments after saying she had broken the law, Comey announced with a straight face that “no reasonable prosecutor” would ever bring a case against her. Yeah, because she was a Democrat!

A couple months later, Comey set up President Trump’s National Security adviser, Gen. Michael Flynn, by sending agents to interview him about his supposed contacts with Russians.

“What’s our goal? Truth/Admission or to get him to lie, so we can prosecute him or get him fired?” wrote Bill Priestap in a memo before the interview. Priestap was counterintelligence director at the FBI, and it became evident later that the agency’s goal was indeed to get him fired – and more importantly to get Trump impeached, fired, humiliated, you name it.

Comey himself admitted that the FBI targeted Flynn and chose not to approach him through the White House legal counsel, but informally with a direct phone call to arrange an interview. As Comey later told a reporter, it was “something I probably wouldn’t have done or maybe gotten away with in a more … organized administration.”

What about the FBI’s abuse of Carter Page and George Papadopoulos? The agency made up evidence in support of subpoenas, FISA warrants, whatever it took to get the desired result. What about the FBI and Department of Justice targeting parents at school boards as “domestic terrorists” because they demanded that their elected representatives actually represent them? What about the unilateral rescission of executive privilege and attorney-client privilege wherever it would have protected President Trump and his advisers?

RELATED: Republicans Demand Garland Brief Homeland Security On Trump FBI Raid, Slam ‘Politically Motivated Witch Hunt’

The purpose of all of this activity, along with the raid at Mar-a-Lago, was to intimidate not just Trump, but also his supporters. Anyone other than Donald Trump would have given up long ago. Who could possibly withstand the power of the state marshaled against you for six long years – through multiple FBI investigations, through two impeachments, through relentless persecution of your children and your friends and family?

Finally, what about the double standard that allows Democrats and their government allies to go unpunished for a multitude of sins? Notwithstanding Attorney General Merrick Garland’s feigned indignation on behalf of the bureau, what about the FBI agents who lied repeatedly during the Trump-Russia investigation, sometimes under oath.

Even more stunning has been the FBI’s monumental failure to investigate presidential son Hunter Biden, even though it received his laptop with extensive incriminating evidence of criminal activity in 2019.

Even when the laptop was made public during the 2020 presidential election, the FBI stood silent and thus gave tacit approval to the cynical Democratic Party talking point that the laptop was somehow a GOP dirty trick.

It would be interesting to know if the FBI had anything to do with the letter signed by 51 national security experts, falsely claiming that the laptop was “Russian disinformation”! Maybe, like Comey before him, FBI Director Chris Wray thought he could “get away with it.”

That is certainly the only explanation for the raid on the president’s personal residence. It was not appropriate. It was not reasonable. It had no precedent. The FBI claims that the pre-dawn raid by more than 30 armed agents was for the purpose of collecting presidential papers that the National Archive wanted.

The Washington Post says that Trump reportedly had documents with nuclear secrets on them, and the legacy media went ballistic with the story. But wait a minute, isn’t that the same Washington Post that won a Pulitzer Prize for collaborating with the FBI to invent the Russia collusion hoax?

RELATED: Judge Who Signed Mar-a-Lago Warrant Defended Jeffrey Epstein Employees, Donated To Obama

Don’t believe a word from either the Washington Post or the FBI. Trump had been cooperating with the National Archive and had already turned over 15 boxes of documents, all of which he could have made a claim to legally possess. If they wanted papers turned over, they could have gone through Trump’s lawyers. No, they wanted the spectacle. They wanted the sizzle. They wanted the headlines.

This wasn’t about the rule of law; it was about the rule of the schoolyard. Bullies get what they want through force and intimidation, and there is no reason for any of us to believe that the raid had any purpose other than to intimidate Donald Trump into backing down from his plans to run for president in 2024.

Essentially what the FBI was saying is “We know where you live, and we aren’t afraid to come for you.” They even rifled through Melania Trump’s closet, as if she might have been hiding top-secret documents in her hat box. When do we find out they also spent an hour sorting through her lingerie?

This is sickening, no matter how much MSNBC and the Washington Post want you to think you can still trust the FBI. Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, shame on me. Fool me over and over and over again, and I must be a Democrat.

Frank Miele, the retired editor of the Daily Inter Lake in Kalispell Mont., is a columnist for RealClearPolitics. His new book, “What Matters Most: God, Country, Family and Friends,” is available from his Amazon author page. Visit him at HeartlandDiaryUSA.com or follow him on Facebook @HeartlandDiaryUSA or on Twitter or Gettr @HeartlandDiary.

The post The FBI Is Now The Federal Bureau Of Intimidation appeared first on The Political Insider.

Trump breaks the law, so Republicans say it’s the law that needs to go—and the agents who caught him

Posted on (Updated by Hunter

The Republican reactions to Trump, ahem, being caught with highly classified nuclear weapons-related documents after asserting to federal agents he didn't have them continues, and as the facts worsen for Trump his pro-attempted-coup Republican allies are sliding towards the obvious endpoint. If a Republican leader commits a crime against the government, well then maybe that thing shouldn't even be a crime at all!

Rand Paul has been homing in on that one. He started out claiming that the FBI might have been planting evidence against Trump.

Rand Paul suggests the FBI may have planted evidence in boxes they seized from Mar-a-Lago pic.twitter.com/3yd6I9tlaa

— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) August 10, 2022

Then we found out that it wasn't just any documents the government was hunting for, but classified nuclear weapons documents, and that among the potential criminal charges facing Trump was violations of the Espionage Act, so Paul had to revise and extend his hackery. If Donald Trump violated the Espionage Act, and the government has him dead to rights on that, it can only mean the Espionage Act is wrong. "It is long past time to repeal this egregious affront to the 1st Amendment," tweeted Paul.

It's not enough to merely suggest that the FBI is full of crooks who would plant evidence against Dear Leader, as addled Trump supporters throughout the country target FBI offices and individual FBI agents. No, if Donald Trump is caught with classified national security documents being stored in a room at his spy-riddled for-profit golf club, it is A Violation Of The First Amendment Itself to not let him keep them. Or to, you know, even look into it.

Good work, Rand. Can always count on you to jump off any rhetorical bridge you might come across. A First Amendment right to keep and sell classified nuclear secrets, sure, you stick with that one.

Rand Paul has always been a bit of a turd, piping up with sudden libertarian proclamations in between advocating for big government powers, but ... actually, I forget where I'm going with that. He's just a turd.

On Team Spy, however, Trump ally Peter Navarro isn't content with "let's just repeal whatever laws Donald Trump was caught violating." He wants you to know that Donald Trump was patriotically planning on patriotically leaking our nuclear secrets so that the American people can "get more jobs."

The video suggests that Navarro was on exactly as much cocaine as you think he was when suggesting this.

Peter Navarro says the documents Trump had should never have been classified in the first place, and Trump needed them to let the American people know what was in them so we can stay out of wars and get more jobs. pic.twitter.com/ZMRc7Eon9G

— Ron Filipkowski 🇺🇦 (@RonFilipkowski) August 12, 2022

Got it? Donald Trump is a big-brain whistleblower who was going to out national nuclear secrets so that the United States would "stay out of wars." Then you'll all get jobs, America. Don't you want jobs?

Surely, we can all agree that Donald Golf Resort Trump, in between hosting Saudi golf tournaments and attempting to overthrow the United States government, only has the American people's best interests at heart. He wasn't going to trade those documents away for the right to build a new hotel in Saudi Arabia or in the center of Moscow. He was going to patriotically release that information for the good of everyone who congregates in midwestern diners.

It is not enough, say other Republicans, to merely erase whatever laws Donald Trump may have willingly broken. The Republican focus during two impeachment trials and during every other scandal during Trump's years was always on finding out who was trying to enforce laws Donald wanted to break, so that those people or government agencies could be punished good and hard.

That's why Trump and his lawyers released a their copy of the government warrant papers served at Mar-a-Lago with the names of the goverment agents involved left unredacted, which in turn immediately led to Trump's base hunting down information about the agents and, predictably, death threats. It's why Republicans followed up the release with a party-wide campaign accusing the FBI of being corrupt, which almost immediately led to an attack on FBI offices because of course it did.

By Wednesday the Republican message was already out, though. Sen. Rand Paul was only one of the Republicans whose immediate reaction to the raid was to parrot the Trumpworld insistence that whatever Bad Stuff the FBI might have found was, uh, actually planted there. Why, Dear Leader being caught doing a crime means it's time to gut the FBI, which every Republican knows has been corrupt this whole time!

The FBI has a long history of corruption that’s only grown over time - but these recent actions are the straw that broke the camel’s back. It’s time for Congress to bring the swamp to heel. pic.twitter.com/IR83QaAdP5

— Rep. Dan Bishop (@RepDanBishop) August 10, 2022

Don't just get rid of the laws Trump broke. Find out who found out he was breaking the laws, call them corrupt, release their public information, and shutter their whole agencies if we have to. All hail Dear Leader, and so forth.

Obviously, catching Donald Trump with nuclear weapons secrets in the basement of his spy club means that the sitting attorney general also has to go. That's just common sense.

GOP strategist: Trump has to be indicted or Merrick Garland has to resignhttps://t.co/UiDw3f3qgt

— Ryan Struyk (@ryanstruyk) August 14, 2022

Here's a tip: "GOP strategist" is not a news thing. CNN chose to host a "GOP strategist" despite the job of "GOP strategist" being, quite literally, strategizing how to best bullshit the American people with party-flattering spins on news events. It is not news; CNN, as a network, is reliant on booking partisan liars to mislead the public about current events in between news reports of what those current events actually are. Hosting professional liars is the core network strategy; it's cheap, it's assured to generate faux-"controversy," and you can be abso-tootly sure that party-paid propagandists will always, always be willing to show up. They own the suits, they know where the studio is, and they know how to look presentable on camera. Can’t say that about government records law experts.

But sure, this is all very bad news for Merrick Garland. The first former president to be caught stealing nuclear secrets is really putting Merrick Garland in a bind here, and if Merrick Garland doesn't want to be seen as overplaying his hand he either has to put Donald in prison or this or resign in shame.

Sure, fine. Let's go with that. The dude who defended Trump through a list of half-dozen treasons and counting is going with it, so you know it's gonna be a (very stupid) thing. But we agree: If the Department of Justice can't see its way to prosecuting a very powerful figure caught dead to rights doing the sort of crime other people get decades in prison for, then it would certainly demonstrate Justice Department leadership isn't up to snuff. That's what you meant, right?

All right, so the Republican response is now morphing into one in which Trump violating the Espionage Act means we have to erase the Espionage Act, Donald Trump hiding nuclear weapons secrets in his for-profit golf club serves only as proof that Donald Trump was valiantly trying to save the American people by spilling those secrets, the FBI discovering that Donald Trump was lying through his crooked teeth when he claimed he didn't have the documents now requires a wholesale purge of the FBI for Their Unholy Audacity, and the attorney general who oversaw getting those papers back is now hopelessly politically compromised because he may have actually believed the bullshit we tell our schoolchildren about "nobody being above the law," which is not something the Republican Party has believed at any point in its modern history.

Fox host defends Trump’s handling of top secret documents: “President Nixon said, that if the president does it, that it is not illegal. Is that not truly the standard when it comes to classified documents?” https://t.co/xGTOhrP52O pic.twitter.com/ZXorS95AV4

— Media Matters (@mmfa) August 14, 2022

If you're going to eliminate whatever laws Donald breaks from now until his eventual McDonald's-caused death, plus whatever agents discovered the crimes, plus whatever agencies the agents belong to, plus the attorney general for having the audacity to believe he had any right to, for example, take classified nuclear documents out of Donald's golf club and for-profit wedding venue even if Donald didn't want him to, there's not much of America that's going to be left. You're undermining everything that counts as "rule of law," when people say "rule of law."

At some point you don't have a government at all, if you're getting rid of all the parts that might inconvenience Dear Leader during a crime spree.

Which, as it turns out, is what the pro-insurrection parts of Republicanism's violent base are again saying out loud. Republicanism is becoming indistinguishable from the threats of terrorism it fosters. And it's all because Republicans think that whatever Trump wants, whether it's stealing nuclear weapons secrets or staying in office despite losing an election, Trump should get.

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House Republican resolution would erase House impeachment of Trump for Ukraine extortion

Posted on (Updated by Hunter

Republicans have been trying very hard to shift to a pro-Ukraine stance since Russian autocrat and far-right hero Vladimir Putin invaded the country and began a systemic program of war crimes, but it has been hard going. The Republican talking points of the Donald Trump era were that Ukraine was a hopelessly corrupt country and that we needed to support whatever crackpot schemes Rudy Giuliani and other party toadies came up with to put the screws to its corrupt-but-not-in-the-right-way government. Also oh-by-the-way maybe it was Ukraine, not Russia, who attacked our 2016 presidential elections, and maybe it was Donald Trump's political opponents who orchestrated it rather than a laundry list of Donald Trump's grifting underlings and kin.

No matter how hard walking lie dispenser Sen. Mitch McConnell or other Republicans bluster that actually the party has been pro-Ukraine, anti-Russia all along, it regularly goes to hell again when some pro-Trump House Republican pipes up with a new defense of how Donald Trump had every right to block military aid from reaching Ukraine until the Ukrainian president did him, personally, an election favor.

Sure enough, here comes Oklahoma's Rep. Markwayne Mullin, and with impeccable timing. Mullin is taking this moment to introduce a new House resolution that would "expunge" Donald Trump's first impeachment. It would officially, according to, uh, this document, never have happened. And Mullin is doing this because, he told Fox News, Democrats were "manipulating a perfect phone call with a vulnerable nation" for their "political gain."

It is possible this bearded gas station bollard was drunk when he was saying that, because nobody in full possession of their faculties would still use the phrase "perfect phone call" in the year Dickety Dickety Two unless Donald Trump was standing behind them with a gun to their back. It is a level of maudlin sycophancy that even Sen. Lindsey Graham shies away from these days.

Though we have never once said this and will never say it again: Markwayne Mullin is right. The House of Representatives should absolutely be taking time out of whatever the hell they are currently pretending to do to revisit the debate on whether Donald Trump's extortion of the Ukrainian government was, as they have insisted ever since, how the Republican Party believes their foreign policy should function. Whether it is reasonable for a president to make congressionally mandated military assistance contingent on an allied government announcing false accusations against Republican enemies. Whether the timing of Trump's delay, which took place as Russian cutouts and Russian forces were stepping up military attacks inside Ukraine as part of the overall plan to annex the eastern side of the nation outright was coincidental or conspiratorial.

We should again all be pondering whether the near-entirety of the Republican Party, its lawmakers, its allies, and its pundits sought to immunize Trump from consequences because they genuinely do not feel that a president corrupting foreign policy to gain personal, nongovernmental benefits is out of bounds—or if they believe only that Republican elected officials ought to be able to commit such crimes.

And, of course, the House needs to come to terms with the most consequential question of all: whether the near-unanimous Republican decision to immunize Trump against charges of corruption against our democracy led directly, a short time later, to Trump attacking our democracy even more directly with a propaganda-premised coup attempt that turned violent inside the halls of the U.S. Capitol. By. All. Means.

Come to think of it, Mullin's request that Trump not just be immunized from consequences for extorting the Ukrainian government, but the records "expunged" of any mention that Congress even objected, is something that would fit well with the House select committee probing the Jan. 6 insurrection. Donald Trump clearly believed that in a showdown between this nation's written Constitution and his own personal ambitions, Republicans would choose him. Why did he think so? Why was he so certain that the Republican Party would, so long as a little bit of preemptive violence was added to the mix so that all parties would understand the consequences for opposing him, fall in line and demand that the election be erased rather than acknowledge his loss?

Which, in fact, happened: The majority of Republican lawmakers did vote to nullify the election. But Democrats, at that particular moment in time, happened to outnumber them anyway.

Why would Trump think that the Republican Party would back him even if he committed sedition itself? Why was he so certain?

Mullin, author of a new resolution calling on Congress to "expunge" the impeachment charges Trump faced after an international extortion scheme looking to boost his own power even if it directly conflicted with laws passed by Congress: Do you have any insight as to why Trump would believe House Republicans would allow him to commit any crime he wanted to?