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

Posted on September 27, 2022 (Updated September 28, 2022) 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 ..."

Campaign Action

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.

Democrats can build a blue wave if we get out every voter. Click here to find out all the ways you can help in the last days before Election Day.

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

Posted on August 21, 2022 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 August 15, 2022 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.

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?

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?

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 August 14, 2022 (Updated August 15, 2022) 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.

'We will not stand by and we will not stand down': Armed Trump backers protest at Phoenix FBI office

Cincinnati FBI breach suspect is killed in shootout and identified as possible Jan. 6 participant

The complete guide to every excuse Republicans have made for Trump's theft of classified documents

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

Posted on March 29, 2022 (Updated March 30, 2022) 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?

Subpoenas in Georgia’s Trump corruption probe won’t come until May at best

Posted on February 9, 2022 by Hunter

If we've learned anything in the last few years, it's that when powerful people commit crimes, the odds that our nation's various legal jurisdictions can be roused to do so much as even investigate what happened in a rational timeframe are iffy at best. It has been a year and change since the last Republican administration mounted an all-out effort to overturn the results of a not-even-close United States election; although each of of the connected plots mounted by Donald Trump, his allies, and complicit Republican lawmakers are now known in public detail, whether any of those involved face legal consequences for attempting to overthrow the United States government appears to depend on whether Rep. Liz Cheney goads the rest of government into doing so.

If you're feeling cynical about an entire year and change going by with no word from prosecutors that organizing a mob to interfere with Congress' ability to carry out a foundational constitutional function—or just calling up election officials directly to pressure them to change the vote tallies—then join the club.

Yes, yes, we are told that the wheels of justice turn slowly and that, behind the scenes, no doubt, prosecutors are gathering up vast mountains of evidence because they want to do this thing properly. That may be true and it may not be—the Mueller investigation suggests this is the rosiest possible interpretation. But as far as anybody can tell, top members of government conspired to nullify a United States election based on hoaxes, and nobody has done squat about it. The co-conspirators, in the meantime, are invited onto the Sunday shows to rail about the audacity of anyone even being upset about these things a whole year later.

In Atlanta, there is maaaaaaaybe some movement over a year past the time when the American public first heard the audio recording of the Trump White House pressuring the Georgia Secretary of State to "find" enough Trump votes to erase Biden's win of the state. Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis received court approval in late January to seat a special grand jury to hear evidence in the case; this was necessary, she said, because witnesses to Trump's pressure were refusing to cooperate with her office without subpoenas forcing them to do so.

So here we are: A year later, key witnesses to the calls are expected to be subpoenaed to give their accounts of what happened. Welcome to the American justice system, subcategory "when you're rich or know somebody who is."

When will the subpoenas demanding testimony and documents begin? Well, the special grand jury won't be seated until May, so no sooner than that. In a new CNN interview, Willis predicted that "most" will begin to come "in June and later months."

In the interview, Willis sounded determined but not necessarily gung-ho about the investigation, which is admittedly the only public demeanor you're allowed to have when investigating even crimes that threaten the stability of government itself. "This is a criminal investigation," and "we're not here playing a game," she said. She also dismissed the expected Trump defense, the claim that presidents can't be prosecuted for crimes committed while in office.

You might remember the theory from its previous versions, in which Trump and the near-entirety of House and Senate Republicans argued during one impeachment that Trump couldn't be held accountable for crimes while he was still president because Shut Up, and couldn't be held accountable for crimes committed on his way out of office because it's just too damn Divisive. But the more generic version offered up by Trump defenders is that you can't prosecute [Republican] presidents for anything, at any time, period.

As for any hint as to which way the district attorney's office is leaning, Willis gave not much. She told CNN:

"You and I have listened to that phone call. But also I have the benefit of also having talked to a lot of witnesses and probably having read more on this than most people would like to."

I'm not going to argue here that the public should be "patient" in waiting to hear if elected officials are allowed to just straight-up phone elections officials to tell them that the election results are wrong and they need to "find" some votes to fix it.

I'm also not going to argue that prosecutors are dragging their feet, because we're in no position to know. But the facts of the matter are this: We're only going to be seeing subpoenas filed to investigate the Trump-Raffensperger call in summer, and the system will assuredly be gamed so that the first (secret) testimony takes place in the fall at best.

That means that the decision about whether to proceed with a Trump indictment will not be made until close to the midterm elections ... which means Willis will likely feel pressure to push it past the midterms so as to not be accused herself of influencing an election.

None of this feels like anybody, anywhere is treating an attempt to overthrow democracy via straight-up crookery as something that needs to be responded to with above-average urgency.

Yes, we get it; it takes vast amounts of time to do even the littlest things when laws are applied to people who have enough money to hire as many lawyers as it takes to make sure tee times are not threatened. But maybe that's been the underlying problem that's led to all the rest of it. We're a society in which a specific subclass of the wealthy, mostly Wall Street and real estate tycoons, can topple economies and even mount attempted coups—and it will all be considered just the sort of thing rich Americans are allowed to do.

Trump's been a crook his whole life and never faced a consequence, other than having to shell out a little bit of cash for settlements that would let the rest of his grift machine keep going. It's obvious he would expect that he could commit any crime he wanted to, as "president," and walk away again. And it's pretty damn obvious that Republican lawmakers have so internalized their positions as protectors of the wealthy that there is no crime an ally could commit that would result in abandonment. Crash the economy, kill hundreds of thousands, rouse fascist mobs to demand we put an end to vote-counting rather than put up with the results—nothing.

So long as the consequences for crimes can be pushed past the next election season, there are no consequences for crimes at all. It's just a question of being able to outlast whatever momentary public disgust is aimed at you.

Key impeachment witness Alexander Vindman sues Trump allies for intimidation, retaliation

Posted on February 2, 2022 (Updated February 3, 2022) by Hunter

It's been long overdue: Former Lt. Col. Alexander Vindman has filed a lawsuit against a host of top Donald Trump allies, accusing them of attempting to intimidate him, then retaliating against him for his testimony in the first of Congress' two Trump impeachment investigations. Vindman was a key witness in the investigation, one of the few in the White House who witnessed Trump's conversation with Ukraine's president in which Trump asked the Ukrainian government to give public credence to a hoax targeting his expected election opponent, Joe Biden. It was a hoax promoted by pro-Russian oligarchs and Trump fixer Rudy Giuliani. It was also part of a broader revealed effort in which Trump's team promoted those pro-Russian interests, removed a United States ambassador who was seen as an impediment to them, and stonewalled congressionally approved military aid to the country while pushing its leaders to provide the Trump-demanded election help.

Vindman is suing Giuliani, along with then-Deputy White House Chief of Staff Dan Scavino, staffer Julia Hahn, and Donald Trump Jr. for their roles in the attacks against him. The lawsuit charges the Trump allies with an "intentional, concerted campaign of unlawful intimidation and retaliation."

There's zero question that Vindman was both publicly threatened and had his career cut short as an act of retaliation, because nobody in Trump's orbit even bothered to hide it. Donald Trump repeatedly posted public tweets threatening those who testified against him, and both Vindman and his brother were summarily removed from their White House duties immediately after Senate Republicans scuttled further investigation and backed Trump's international extortion. Trump's team followed up with a widespread purge of government watchdogs who were seen as insufficiently loyal to Trump's schemes. Republican lawmakers, pundits, and hosts all joined the effort to demonize Vindman for agreeing to testify.

The same dynamic would occur during and after Trump's second impeachment, as Republicans have done everything within their power to stonewall House and federal investigations of a Trump-organized violent coup. (Many of those Republicans are themselves accessories to the seditious acts.) Trump allies have again threatened those who willingly testify. Trump has again floated pardons for those who committed crimes on his behalf. The fascist party again settles into backing even violence by the party's leader, rather than abide election losses.

The Vindman case will be yet another test as to whether the nation's laws still mean anything when they run up against the petty whims of the powerful, but the evidence Vindman's team has provided isn't really disputable. The only remaining question is whether political hacks working on behalf of a president are allowed to intimidate and retaliate against witnesses simply because it was in service to a Dear Leader figure who wanted those things done. Unless Republicans retake Congress and write up a new law specifically prohibiting lawsuits against Giuliani and his accomplices—which could happen, after all—it's difficult to imagine the defense offering up any justification of Vindman's treatment that wouldn't be laughed out of the courtroom.

Fascism: Trump vows pardons for Jan. 6 seditionists, calls for nationwide protests if indicted

Posted on January 30, 2022 (Updated January 31, 2022) by Hunter

Republican Party leader and traitor to the nation Donald Trump continues to test new rally waters in anticipation of a repeat presidential bid. On Saturday the delusional narcissist made no particular effort to hide his disgust for the law and for those who would hold him to it, delivering an ugly, unhinged, and unabashedly fascist speech to a crowd of like-minded traitors.

His most newsworthy proclamation was a vow to pardon the seditionists of the January 6 insurrection. "If I run and I win, we will treat those people from Jan. 6 fairly."

"And if it requires pardons, we will give them pardons. Because they are being treated so unfairly."

BREAKING: President Trump promises to PARDON Jan. 6 prisoners if he runs and wins in 2024 pic.twitter.com/teYbYNBcuB
— RSBN 🇺🇸 (@RSBNetwork) January 30, 2022

It is not immediately clear if the traitor, who gathered and incited a crowd to "march" to the U.S. Capitol on that day and hour as part of a multi-pronged plan for his Republican Party to nullify his presidential election loss while using "emergency" presidential powers to either militarily oversee a "new" election or simply declare himself the legitimate winner, is promising a blanket pardon of all those involved in the violence. He may also be vowing to use presidential pardons to erase legal consequences for only his own inner circle of co-conspirators, just as he used it to immunize those allies when he last had the power to do so.

The intent of the message is clear either way. Trump is allying himself with those that helped him carry out his seditious—and deadly—insurrection, and is dropping promises of "pardons" as encouragement to his allies to keep fighting to block probes into the violence. Stonewall the prosecutions and refuse to cooperate with investigators, the traitorous criminal hints, and he will make your troubles go away again when he is returned to power.

But Trump went even farther. Citing the (many) investigations against him for crimes ranging from the previous insurrection to the pressure on Georgia officials to "find" new votes to a lifelong pattern of financial fraud, the fascist leader pushed his fascist supporters to respond to any potential indictment against him by taking to the streets.

"If these radical, vicious, racist prosecutors do anything wrong or illegal, I hope we are going to have in this country the biggest protest we have ever had in Washington D.C., in New York, in Atlanta and elsewhere, because our country and our elections are corrupt. They're corrupt."

After ranting about the prosecutors investigating him, Trump calls the prosecutors racist and says if they do anything illegal, he hopes there are massive protests in DC, New York, and Atlanta pic.twitter.com/RnY6F5OJNv
— Acyn (@Acyn) January 30, 2022

It is the hallmark of a fascist leader and his party: The claim that prosecution of his own crimes, or the crimes of his violent supporters, proves only that the whole nation was "corrupt" and needed to be remade. Trump is wedging racist in there because, both in Georgia and in New York, the head investigators of his crimes are Black.

Far from being deterred by the violence of his attempted insurrection, Trump is simultaneously promising to erase the crimes of those who attempted to topple the government on his behalf and pressing his Republican followers to mount even "bigger" street actions to keep his own criminal behind out of a prison cell. The man continues to betray his country in every way it is possible to betray it, and all of it is centered only around himself and his own desires.

In his previous rounds of presidential pardons, Trump pardoned those who committed war crimes; those who treated immigrants with illegal cruelty; those who obstructed investigations on his behalf; those who acted as agents of foreign powers. His pardons were all aimed at neutralizing prosecutions of those who did illegal things in service of racist, xenophobic, or Trump-promoting ends.

The Republican leader's promise to "pardon" those who engaged in violent insurrection on his behalf made barely a ripple on the Sunday shows or among the Republicans still loyal to that insurrection. Trump is overtly thumping for future seditious acts, and the Republican Party, purged of anyone who is not a willing accessory to even violent crimes, has little to say about it.

As gutless as ever, Sen. Lindsey Graham will only allow that it is "inappropriate" to promise pardons for insurrectionists. But only that; he will go no farther, lest he say something too bold and lose favor with the pro-fascist base.

"I think it is inappropriate" -- Lindsey Graham on Trump promising pardons to those convicted of crimes connected to the January 6 attack on Congress (Graham then tries to bothsides it by bringing up Kamala Harris) pic.twitter.com/Hr6Sgz8RPp
— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) January 30, 2022

And as spineless as ever, Sen. Susan Collins—one of the few Republicans who dared vote to impeach Trump after the insurrection, will only allow that she is "very unlikely" to support Trump as future presidential candidate.

Susan Collins won't shut the door on supporting Trump in 2024 even after voting for his conviction following his second impeachment trial pic.twitter.com/tWfNt57kYv
— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) January 30, 2022

So not even orchestrating an attempted coup is sufficient reason to fully and completely rule out support for the plotter? Truly, there may never be another political figure as relentlessly rudderless as this one.

More of the Sunday show debate was spent on allowing the defenders of insurrection to sniff about the alleged impropriety of Biden's promise to appoint a Black woman to the Supreme Court than was spent on asking those same Republicans to stand against Trump's visions of mass riots and promised pardons for insurrection.

The Sunday shows are still pointedly neutral when it comes to the choice between peaceful democracy and violence-led fascism. They do not care. Nobody involved cares. They will book the same guests to tell the same lies and support the same crimes from now until the end of the republic, and not a single host will stand against such violence if it means losing interview access to those backing it.

Trump's latest rally speeches are clear-cut attacks on the very fabric of the nation. He insists that elections are "corrupt," leading the entire Republican Party into similar rejections of our democracy's validity. He insists that those who investigate his alleged wrongdoing—up to and including violent insurrection—are "corrupt," and promises to immunize those who ally with them against the institutions that would prosecute them for such crimes.

He is a fascist-minded, mostly-delusional traitor to the republic. All those who cheer for him are the same. Trump himself appears to believe that it would be better to plunge the nation into a new civil war than recognize either the validity of his last election loss or the validity of a new one, and he has nearly all Republican Party officials and lawmakers as allies in the effort.

It is impossibly corrupt, all of it, and historians continue to scream that this is precisely how democracies are toppled. With a lazy, dull-witted press; with a party that emphasizes good corruption over bad prosecution; with a base that does not give a damn about any of it, because they are single-mindedly obsessed over the notion that the nebulous other is oppressing them and for that, must be punished.

There is no way this does not end in a tidal wave of political violence. And that, too, will likely be downplayed by Sunday show hosts looking to book those who would ally with it.

A third of states have enacted new voter suppression laws since the Republican insurrection

Posted on July 27, 2021 by Hunter

Last November, a Republican president who oversaw 500,000 unnecessary American deaths and a resulting economic collapse lost his reelection bid. Rather than a begrudging admission that a seemingly delusional compulsive liar with no skills for the job and a record of scandal and chaos was a piss-poor candidate who lost because Americans had lost patience for his bellowing performance art, countless top members of the Republican Party immediately, and at Donald Trump's behest, declared that actually the only reason Republicanism lost at the polls was because the entire world conspired against them to secretly rig the election against Burping Authoritarianism.

As an excuse for a poor performance by a singularly unimpressive buffoon, it would have been merely pathetic. The moment the Republican Party began to act on their own false propaganda, crafting law after law predicated on false "fraud" that all aimed squarely at throwing up new obstacles to voting in communities that voted against them the last time around, it became an attack on democracy itself.

The Brennan Center for Justice now identifies one third of all American states as having passed new laws blocking access to the polls in the months since the last election. That's not laws proposed. That's laws already passed in Republican Party attempts to win future elections by specifically targeting working class, poor, communities of color, and other groups with new restrictions that make voting slightly harder or slightly more complicated.

Because mail-in voting during a deadly pandemic swung sharply against the Republican presidential candidate, mail-in voting is being sharply curtailed by Republican state legislatures. Because early voting and expanded poll hours both have allowed voters a chance to evade hours-long lines on election days—lines which continue to be conspicuously commonplace in neighborhoods of color even as polling places in nearby Republican-leaning communities enjoy more resources and few such delays—Republican legislatures are slashing early voting locations and times so as to force non-Republican leaning voters back into the long lines racist governments had previously engineered.

Other laws have placed new restrictions on providing any help to voters, whether it be help seeking ballots, help returning ballots, or even providing food or water to voters stuck in the hours-long lines that Republican lawmakers have insisted on preserving. New paperwork requirements present new hurdles for working class voters to overcome, hurdles of time, money, or both.

All of it is based on the Big Lie: A Republican Party-backed declaration that the last election was "stolen" from the incompetent Republican candidate, therefore justifying drastic nationwide action to do ... the same sort of vote-suppressing activities that the party has relied on for the last half century.

Federal action is currently being stymied by, of course, the same Republican lawmakers who united to save Trump from impeachment after he goaded violent insurrection with the exact propaganda being used by Republican state legislatures to justify new voter suppression laws now. The conventions of the Senate allow a minority—currently set at 40 senators, after multiple past changes to the number that were each themselves a response to a rump of racist lawmakers blocking past federal action to enforce basic civil rights protections—to block new federal protections giving all communities uniform minimum voting standards.

What's still not getting through the heads of some lawmakers, however, is just how extensive current Republican Party moves to reshape our elections truly are. A third of U.S. states have already seen voters placed under new, suppressive restrictions. Republican Party leaders are continuing to push completely false propaganda asserting that they "won" a presidential election they did not win. House and Senate Republicans continue their attempts to sabotage a probe of the resulting violent insurrection, in large part because any such probe of necessity must document how the party's provably false claims were spread to insurrectionist ears.

Civil rights activists are warning that attempts to "out-organize" new suppressive laws will not necessarily succeed. The point of widespread Republican voter suppression is to knock even the smallest possible fraction of Americans off the voting roles; not every one of the voters affected can be made whole again. Activists are thus beginning to express their frustration with this Democratic dawdling.

There may be a tradition, in the Senate, of using the filibuster to block new civil rights protections so as to allow the efforts of racist state lawmakers to continue unimpeded. There's also a tradition of altering the rules of the filibuster when it is being abused for that purpose.

There may be no more urgent time to protect voting rights than in the aftermath of a violent insurrection premised squarely on overturning an election rather than abide by voters' will. The anti-democratic party that goaded an attempted toppling of government by promoting false claims is using those same false claims to justify new roadblocks between voters and future ballot boxes. Both acts must be rebuffed.

Democrat Rep. Swalwell Spends Tons Of Campaign Cash On Booze, Limos, Expensive Restaurants

Posted on July 21, 2021 by Becky Noble

A new report from The Daily Caller shows that Rep. Eric Swalwell (D-CA) spent thousands of dollars in campaign funds on alcohol, pricy restaurants, limo services, and the opulent hotel where is wife had previously worked.

In Federal Election Commission reports first reviewed by Fox News, the Swalwell for Congress campaign committee spent roughly $500,000 during the second quarter of 2021, a curious amount of money for a non-election year.

While there have been no accusations of wrong doing, the half-million-dollar spending spree by a congressman in a non-competitive district has raised some eyebrows.

Fox and the New York Post had initially ran headlines that indicated Swalwell’s wife currently works at the hotel in question, but have since updated their pieces.

Caught. OMG look at these major retractions. pic.twitter.com/BrJ7stRvNh

— Carmine Sabia (@CarmineSabia) July 21, 2021

Running Up Tabs

Swalwell clearly has expensive tastes and has run up some fairly hefty bills in three months time. Some of those expenses include over $10,000 for limo rides and other luxury car services.

According to FEC records, the Swalwell campaign spent approximately $7,000 on posh restaurants in Washington D.C., and also an additional 13 meals at high-end restaurants in New York City and California.

In the “food and beverage” category, the campaign bought from Capitol Hill Wine & Spirits, a local D.C. liquor store during seven trips totaling $1,151 for ‘refreshments.’

The Swalwell for Congress campaign was not through. Over $26,000 was spent on expensive hotels, including $20,000 at the Ritz Carlton Half Moon Bay, where Swalwell’s wife Brittany was apparently employed as director of sales for the hotel up until 2019.

Swalwell’s Congressional district regularly votes 70+% Democrat, making his campaign fundraising and spending a pretty sweet gig, if you can get it.

Settle down… it was part of a healing process to clear his mind and recenter his chi after banging a Chinese spy and farting on TV. @RepSwalwell amirite?

Eric Swalwell spent thousands in campaign funds on hotels and booze https://t.co/mX5g81IONq via @MailOnline

— Charlatan the Dog (@3kidzlater) July 21, 2021

Checkered Career

Eric Swalwell has been at the center of some recent controversies. In 2020, Swalwell was suspected of having a close relationship with a woman named Fang Fang, who is suspected of being a Chinese spy.

Fang helped to raise campaign funds for Swalwell’s 2014 campaign, and had an intern hired in Swalwell’s D.C. office. Forbes also says that Fang worked as a bundler of sorts for Swalwell, convincing big-money donors to write checks to the campaign.

Recently, Swalwell, along with his wife and several other members of congress took a trip to Qatar paid for by the US-Qatar Business Council.

The group says they are, “dedicated exclusively to enhancing the bilateral business relationship between the US and Qatar.”

The total tab for the trip was $84,621.59. Pictures have also surfaced of the trip of a shirtless Swalwell along with others riding camels.

Tucker Carlson slams Eric Swalwell after it was revealed he spent campaign funds on limos, booze, his wife's hotel. pic.twitter.com/Svb0cJCyxJ

— The Post Millennial (@TPostMillennial) July 21, 2021

Outspoken Trump Critic

Eric Swalwell has been one of the most outspoken Democrat critics of former President Donald Trump. He was one of the loudest accusing Trump of colluding with Russia.

He served as a House Impeachment Manager, and in March, filed a lawsuit against Trump, Donald Trump Jr., Trump’s attorney Rudy Giuliani, and Rep. Mo Brooks (R-AL).

The suit claimed that both Trumps, Giuliani, and Brooks should be held liable for any injuries or destruction that Swalwell claimed came from their alleged incitement of the Jan. 6 riot at the Capitol.

As allegations of an inappropriate relationship with a suspected Chinese spy and alleged campaign fund irregularities surround him, Swalwell continues to serve on the Judiciary and Homeland Security committees.

We’re really looking forward to hearing Dem Rep. Eric Swalwell’s explanation for his campaign’s luxury spending spree https://t.co/gQa4LMXP7N

— Twitchy Team (@TwitchyTeam) July 20, 2021

Now is the time to support and share the sources you trust.
The Political Insider ranks #16 on Feedspot’s “Top 70 Conservative Political Blogs, Websites & Influencers in 2021.”

The post Democrat Rep. Swalwell Spends Tons Of Campaign Cash On Booze, Limos, Expensive Restaurants appeared first on The Political Insider.