Attempting to deflect from courts repeatedly ruling against his immigration policy, President Donald Trump lied to reporters on Monday, claiming that the courts fabricated the need for cases to be heard—despite the right to a trial being a constitutional law for more than 234 years.
“The courts have all of a sudden, out of nowhere, they said, ‘maybe you have to have trials.’ Trials, we’re going to have 5 million trials? Doesn’t work, doesn’t work. You wouldn’t have a country left,” he said.
Trump has been under fire for denying detainees due process. Students like Mahmoud Khalil and Rümeysa Öztürk have been abducted for their pro-Palestinian advocacy, and legal U.S. resident Kilmar Abrego Garcia was wrongly captured and deported to El Salvador.
On April 30, a court ordered the release of Columbia University student Mohsen Mahdawi, a Palestinian immigrant who was held by the Department of Homeland Security while it tried to find a reason for his deportation.
Contrary to Trump’s statement, the U.S. Constitution explicitly lays out the right to a trial in the Sixth Amendment:
In all criminal prosecutions, the accused shall enjoy the right to a speedy and public trial, by an impartial jury of the State and district wherein the crime shall have been committed, which district shall have been previously ascertained by law, and to be informed of the nature and cause of the accusation; to be confronted with the witnesses against him; to have compulsory process for obtaining witnesses in his favor, and to have the Assistance of Counsel for his defence.
In Suits at common law, where the value in controversy shall exceed twenty dollars, the right of trial by jury shall be preserved, and no fact tried by a jury, shall be otherwise re-examined in any Court of the United States, than according to the rules of the common law.
These rights were part of the ten amendments ratified in 1791 as part of the Bill of Rights, and nothing in U.S. law or Trump’s executive orders have nullified them. The Sixth Amendment ensures that accusations leveled by the government against people have to be proven in a court of law and not just by royal fiat, as was done by the British government in the colonial era.
Trump’s unconstitutional remarks come just one day after he told NBC “I don’t know” when asked if the president needs to uphold the Constitution. Like every president before him, Trump took an oath of office, making it clear that this was a core element of his presidential duties.
I do solemnly swear (or affirm) that I will faithfully execute the Office of President of the United States, and will to the best of my Ability, preserve, protect and defend the Constitution of the United States.
The oath is not ambiguous, and defense of the Constitution is not optional.
Trump’s ignorance of U.S. law and history was also on display when he recently argued that the Declaration of Independence was a “declaration of unity and love and respect.” The document famously severed the relationship between colonists and England, leading to the bloody Revolutionary War where hundreds of thousands died.
Of course, Trump is the only president who has been impeached twice. In both instances, he was found to be in violation of the Constitution.
No wonder he thinks the right to a trial came “out of nowhere.”
The future of the National Park System is in doubt as Donald Trump’s federal hiring freeze has put popular sites like Yosemite National Park in limbo and opened the door to privatizing federal monuments and lands.
Trump’s heavy-handed freeze not only stopped the hiring of workers, it rescinded employment for many who had already received job offers. The staffing situation was characterized as “catastrophic” by former Yosemite Superintendent Don Neubacher.
Summer camping reservations are on hold, impacting park sites from June 15 to July 14. This news comes on the heels of Yosemite officials’ announcement that a new reservation system has been delayed indefinitely. The system was supposed to be fully implemented this year and promised to eliminate the long lines and waits park visitors have faced in recent years.
“We understand the impact this has on visitors who are planning camping trips to the park,” read a statement on Yosemite’s official Instagram page. “We are grateful for your patience. Our goal is to release these campground nights as soon as possible and we will provide at least a seven-day advance notice before reservations go on sale.”
Now, Trump has teamed up with billionaires and the authors of Project 2025 to craft a much more robust plan to dismantle our country’s administrative state, which includes carving up as much federal land as possible. Their interests are far more naked and ambitious than those of Trump’s first administration.
Trump ssidekick Elon Musk and his goon squad at the so-called Department of Government Efficiency continue to illegally hamstring congressionally funded programs. The endgame is to force taxpayers to pay billionaires (like Musk) and their private businesses to do the things that our government already does—and could do—for its citizens.
Republicans are sucking up to Donald Trump in the best way they know how: by being cowards.
The convicted felon has promised that when he takes office in January, he will pardon Jan. 6 insurrectionists and called for lawmakers who investigated the attempted coup to be punished. And GOP senators and Congress members, most of whom were hunkered down in the Capitol on that terrible day, are lining up to roll over for him.
“As we found from Hunter Biden, the president’s pardon authority is pretty extensive. That’s obviously a decision he’ll have to make,” incoming Senate Majority Leader John Thune told The Hill about Trump’s promised pardons.
“I don’t have a comment really on those statements,” Thune said.
Thune’s timorous stance on pardoning the rioters was parroted by fellow Republican senators.
“We’ll see what he does. I mean it’s been four or five years [since the attack]. The ones that hurt cops, they’d be in a different category for me, but we’ll leave that up to him,” said South Carolina’s Lindsey Graham.
Trump has repeatedly made false claims that the Jan. 6 committee destroyed evidence that would exonerate him. He has also publicly fantasized about committee co-chair Cheney facing a firing squad, and House Republicans including Second Amendment apologist Tim Burchett of Tennessee seem fine with Trump’s interest in political witch hunts.
“If they broke the law, then they should [be imprisoned],” Burchett told The Bulwark. “Now we know that they’ve manipulated evidence, so—if that’s the case, then absolutely.”
As always, some Republicans were eager to minimize Trump’s threats.
“It was my understanding that he backed off that statement in a subsequent interview,” said Maine Sen. Susan Collins. “So I don’t really think that there’s—since he’s backed off on it, I don’t think there’s really any need for me to comment on it.”
Other GOP leaders cheered Trump’s vendetta on—even if it means targeting their own colleagues.
“With politicians, if you’ve used a congressional committee and you’ve lied and tried to set people up and falsely imprisoned people, then you should be held accountable,” said Rep. James Comer, who is no stranger to using House committees and scant evidence to attack political opponents.
“I haven’t kept up with the January 6th stuff like other people,” Comer told The Bulwark. “I don’t know exactly what Trump was referring to. But I have two years of experience working with one of the January 6th committee members, and I can tell you he’s been nothing but completely dishonest,” Comer said, clearly referring to Democratic Rep. Jamie Raskin.
Every traitorous revelation from the Jan. 6 committee hearings was terrifying. The nearly 850-page final report by the House Select Committee to Investigate the January 6th Attack on the United States Capitol illuminating—and damning.
All-star conspiracy theorist Marjorie Taylor Greene has been given her own subcommittee to chair. The representative from Georgia will work under the House Oversight Committee and alongside Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy’s toothless Department of Government Efficiency—yes, named after the DOGE meme and crypto scheme that Musk is so fond of.
Fox News reports that Greene will chair yet another DOGE—the Delivering on Government Efficiency Committee, which will purportedly “focus on rooting out waste, fraud and abuse in the federal government.”
A longtime Donald Trump loyalist, Greene tried and failed to oust Republican House Speaker Mike Johnson earlier this year. She subsequently threatened to try it again. The prospect of chairing her own subcommittee seems to have mollified the congresswoman, as reports indicate she is now expected to support Johnson’s upcoming bid to re-up as speaker.
Democratic Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez had a perfect response to Greene’s new gig.
“This is good, actually,” AOC posted on X. “She barely shows up and doesn’t do the reading. To borrow a phrase I saw elsewhere, it’s like giving someone an unplugged controller.“
“Absolutely dying at those two now getting assigned the ‘privilege’ of ‘working” with MTG,” she continued. “That is actually hilarious. Enjoy, fellas! Very prestigious post you have there.”
Absolutely dying at those two now getting assigned the “privilege” of “working” with MTG. That is actually hilarious. Enjoy, fellas! Very prestigious post you have there 💀
In 2023, after the GOP retook control of the House, Greene got a chance to embarrass America as a committee member again. And since her very first day back, she has spewed hate, disseminated misinformation, and even had to be muzzled by her own party’s committee chair for being such a crap-tabulous person.
GOP Rep. James Comer held a House Accountability and Oversight Committee hearing on Thursday titled, “A Legacy of Incompetence: Consequences of the Biden-Harris Administration’s Policy Failures.” The laughably biased display is the latest Republican attempt to bash President Joe Biden, tarnish Vice President Kamala Harris’ record, and bolster Donald Trump's flailing presidential campaign.
Not unlike the committee’s abject failure to find a single shred of evidence to impeach Biden, this new attempt did not go the Republican Party’s way. Instead of creating angry and aggrieved sound bites for MAGA minions to salivate over, the hearing was mostly a boring stream of conservative lies.
Enter Democratic Rep. Gerry Connolly of Virginia, who used his time to detail the Biden administration’s many accomplishments on behalf of the American people. Connolly enlisted Skye Perryman, CEO of public policy organization Democracy Forward and the only witness the Democrats were allowed to call during the hearing, as his willing accomplice in this brief history lesson.
He began by countering the GOP claims that the Biden administration’s environmental regulations preventing energy industries from drilling for oil willy-nilly are “impeding energy production.”
Not only are Trump and Republicans lying about how superior they are when it comes to American energy production, they are lying about the Biden administration’s historic success in reaching new levels of energy independence.
Connolly moved on from there, asking Perryman about the Trump administration’s attempts to pass an infrastructure bill.
Connolly: Did they ever pass an infrastructure bill?
Perryman: They did not.
Connolly: Did President Biden pass an infrastructure bill?
Perryman: He did.
Connolly: Is it also the largest infrastructure bill in American history?
Perryman: The Biden-Harris infrastructure bill is the largest in American history.
Connolly: And pretty comprehensive, covers lots of different kinds of infrastructure. Is that correct?
Perryman: Many infrastructure and lots of investment.
The Biden administrationdid indeed pass an infrastructure bill with nearly zero support from the Republican Party.
Connolly then detailed the Trump administration's failures in Afghanistan, including the rushed withdrawal timeline that Republicans now decry and blame on Biden. Trump tried to make his already terrible plan catastrophic by ordering a rapid withdrawal from Afghanistan after he lost the election in 2020. Thankfully, senior military staff did not follow through.
“Would it be fair to say that that development, that threat and that withholding of weapons, might be construed—if you were Vladimir Putin in the Kremlin—as a sign of weakness on the part of Ukraine and a sign that maybe the United States wasn't going to be there should something bad happen between Russia and Ukraine?” Connolly asked.
Connolly: Iran and nuclear weapons: Was there not an agreement that the United States actually led that involved Russia and China, Europe and Iran, to limit nuclear weapon production in Iran?
Perryman: There was a historic agreement.
Connolly: And was it working?
Perryman: Yes.
Connolly: In all respects?
Perryman: I believe so.
Connolly: Inspected by IAEA [the International Atomic Energy Agency] and the Trump administration, and certified by both.
Perryman: Yes.
Connolly: Is that correct? And what happened to that treaty?
Perryman: President Trump pulled out.
Connolly: And has Iran been less active in producing nuclear weapons, or more?
Perryman: Iran is now a greater threat because of that failure.
Connolly: So much for efficacy. Just thought I'd revisit that revisionist history.
Comer seems to have found a novel way to waste taxpayer money: using his position as chairman of the Accountability and Oversight Committee to nakedly campaign against the Biden-Harris administration and prop up Trump’s dogged quest to return to the White House.
If Thursday’s display was any indication, this latest effort will be about as effective as Comer’s last set of bogus hearings.
The National Republican Senatorial Committee has some dazzling guidance for attacking Vice President Kamala Harris now that she is considered the front-runner to face convicted felon Donald Trump this November. According to a memo obtained by Axios, the vice president should be described as a “radical” progressive and an architect of the border crisis. And she’s “weird.”
The memo also includes a "weird" category—mocking Harris's "habit of laughing at inappropriate moments," her self-proclaimed love of Venn diagrams and her call to ban plastic straws, among other things.
Trump’s policy record is garbage, his immigration record is one of human rights violations, and his tendency to be “weird” is off the charts. Here are 19 times Trump was … weird.
Trump has repeatedly conjured up fictional serial murderer and cannibal Hannibal Lecter during rally speeches—he even did so in his acceptance speech at the Republican National Convention. Famously played by Anthony Hopkins in the film “The Silence of the Lambs,” it is hard to parse exactly what Trump is getting at when he praises the psychopathic character.
2. His strange preoccupation with the “genius” of realizing that the word “us” appears in the acronym “U.S.A.”
“You know, you spell us right? You spell us U-S. I just picked that up. Has anyone ever thought of that? A couple of days [ago] I’m reading and it said us. And I said, you know, if you think about it, us equals U-S.”
Trump’s first foreign tour as president began in the Middle East where he met with Saudi Arabia’s King Salman bin Abdul-Aziz Al Saud, and the two men did this:
Picture of really rich guys putting their hands on a lit up orb depicting the earth. Totally normal. Nothing to see here.
We all know that Trump loves him some dictators, but it was strange when he decided to give a military salute to an adversarial country’s general. The strangeness took place during a summit between North Korean leader Kim Jong Un and Trump when the salutation occurred.
8. Electric boat versus battery versus shark?
Do you remember where you were when Trump offered up a thought experiment about whether you would prefer to be electrocuted in water or eaten by a shark? And that tangent was in response to Trump explaining the problems with electric vehicles?
So I said, so there’s a shark 10 yards away from the boat, 10 yards or here, do I get electrocuted if the boat is sinking? Water goes over the battery, the boat is sinking. Do I stay on top of the boat and get electrocuted, or do I jump over by the shark and not get electrocuted? Because I will tell you, he didn’t know the answer. He said, ‘You know, nobody’s ever asked me that question.” I said, ‘I think it’s a good question.’ I think there’s a lot of electric current coming through that water. But you know what I’d do if there was a shark or you get electrocuted, I’ll take electrocution every single time. I’m not getting near the shark. So we’re going to end that.
That was Trump rambling about toilets, sinks, and showers. “You turn on the faucet and you don’t get any water. They take a shower and water comes dripping out. Just dripping out, very quietly dripping out,” was just one of the many odd facts Trump gave out during his attacks on water-saving regulations. The ranting went on well past the White House, as Trump took his mystifying takes on the road to rallies—all the way through his second impeachment.
Trump’s bizarre attempt to frighten Alabama residents by crudely doctoring a map, forecasting the path of a hurricane, will always go down as both ridiculous and insidious.
It was April 2020, and while COVID-19 was ravaging countries around the world, Trump took to the world stage to suggest to the press, and his own officials, that disinfectant might be injected into the human body to kill the virus.
So supposing we hit the body with a tremendous, whether it’s ultraviolet or just very powerful light. And I think you said that hasn’t been checked but you’re going to test it. And then I said supposing you brought the light inside the body, which you can do either through the skin or in some other way. And I think you said you’re going to test that, too. Sounds interesting. Right? And then I see the disinfectant, it knocks it out in a minute. One minute. And is there a way we can do something like that, by injection inside or almost a cleaning? Because you see it gets in the lungs and it does a tremendous number on the lungs, so it would be interesting to check that. So you’re going to have to use medical doctors, right? But it sounds interesting to me. So we’ll see, but the whole concept of the light, the way it kills it in one minute. That’s pretty powerful.
It is hard to compete with this Trump statement from January: “All I know about magnets is this, give me a glass of water, let me drop it on the magnets, that's the end of the magnets.”
“I am very proud now that we have a museum on the National Mall where people can learn about Reverend King, so many other things,” Trump said. “Frederick Douglass is an example of somebody who’s done an amazing job and is being recognized more and more, I notice.”
14. The time when the Continental Army took over the airports.
Trump blamed his teleprompter, but his retelling of the American Revolution, including the heroic takeover of airports over 100 years before the airplane was invented, was very peculiar.
“Our army manned the air, it rammed the ramparts, it took over the airports, it did everything it had to do, and at Fort McHenry, under the rockets’ red glare, it had nothing but victory.”
Trump has frequently railed against windmills but he’s also shown a curious understanding of how renewable energy functions in the real world. Here he is in 2019, explaining a theoretical conversation a couple has after installing windmills.
“Let's put up some windmills. When the wind doesn't blow, just turn off the television darling, please. There's no wind, please turn off the television quickly.”
16. When Trump shoved a world leader out of the way in order to be in front for a photo.
Trump’s comments in 2017, coupled with comments he’s made since, sure implies he is under the impression that we have Wonder Woman technology.
"With the Air Force, we're ordering a lot of planes, in particular the F-35 fighter jet, which is, you know, almost like an invisible fighter," he said. "I was asking the Air Force guys, I said, 'How good is this plane?' They said, 'Well, sir, you can't see it.' I said, yeah, but in a fight —you know, a fight, like I watch in the movies —they fight, they're fighting. How good is this? They say, 'Well, it wins every time because the enemy cannot see it. Even if it's right next to it, it can't see it.' I said, 'That helps. That's a good thing.'"
Finally, who could forget Trump’s attempt to give his own wow-filled Gettysburg Address in April. That’s when he recounted American history like … this:
There’s an infinite amount of examples detailing the strangeness of Trump. The GOP going after Harris for laughing sounds like a desperate recipe for failure. Here’s a bonus memory for the QAnon traveler who happens upon this article, because Trump hangs with only the best people:
GOP Rep. Anna Paulina Luna of Florida, best known for fabricating her entire life story, told Fox News that she has a plan to get the sergeant-at-arms to arrest Attorney General Merrick Garland.
“Several months ago, I introduced a resolution for something called inherent contempt of Congress. This is something that Congress has the authority to do, and it hasn’t been done since the early 1900’s,” she told host Maria Bartiromo on Monday.
Luna was responding to questions about the Justice Department’s announcement that it would not prosecute Garland for not turning over audio of President Joe Biden’s interview with special counsel Robert Hur.
“And what that allows Congress to do is really be the punitive arm and really hold Garland accountable by using the sergeant-at-arms to essentially go and get him,” Luna went on, “as well as the tapes, bring him to the well of the house and really be a check-and-balance on the Department of Justice.”
Like most of what Luna says, there are all kinds of facts being misrepresented here. For one, her assertion that she introduced her inherent contempt of Congress resolution “several months ago” is belied by the fact that she actually announced it on May 7. And while that is technically more than one month, it is far less than several months. Though, to be fair, her announcement could have been missed, since it came the same day that Stormy Daniels was testifying … in Trump’s criminal trial.
The sergeant-at-arms is "the chamber’s primary law enforcement official and protocol officer, responsible for maintaining security on the House floor and the House side of the U.S. Capitol complex.”
The case from the “early 1900’s” that Luna is referring to is something some legal scholars felt was more apropos to the unwillingness to comply with requests from Congress by the Trump administration.
The Teapot Dome scandal, which involved President Warren G. Harding’s Secretary of the Interior Albert Bacon Fall’s no-bid contract to lease federal oil fields in Teapot Dome, Wyoming, happened in 1922. Attorney General Harry M. Daugherty was heavily criticized at the time for not more thoroughly investigating Fall, who was later convicted of taking a $100,000 bribe.
The scandal escalated to the Senate committee subpoenaing Mally S. Daugherty, the attorney general’s brother.
When Mally Daugherty refused to show up to testify before Congress, the Senate Sergeant at Arms David S. Barry deputized John J. McGrain to arrest him and bring him to Washington to testify.
The Republicans’ fixation on getting audio, despite having already received the entire transcript of Hur’s interview with Biden, has been a transparently political endeavor. Hur, a Republican, released a 375-page report in February saying that no charges were warranted and that Biden had likely kept the documents as a private citizen by “mistake.”
Since then, House Republicans voted to hold Garland in contempt. Speaker Mike Johnson vowed to take the Garland contempt case to court after the DOJ announced it planned no further action. But whether Johnson will bring Luna’s resolution to a vote remains to be seen.
There has been very little tangible action that has come out of the GOP’s neverending political theater. This past year it spent an inordinate amount of time attacking Biden’s border security while trying to impeach Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas—a stunt that failed miserably.
Luna’s newest resolution is the GOP’s latest political stunt to create a cloud of doubt over Biden’s reelection campaign against convicted felon Trump.
Hopium Chronicles' Simon Rosenberg joins Markos to discuss the “red wave-ification” of the economy and how prepared Democrats are for November. There is still work to do but we have a better candidate—and we have the edge.
For nearly a year, Head of the House Oversight Committee Rep. James Comer has used the power of his position to produce an evidence-free investigation into what he has called the “Biden family cover-up.” Warping half-truths in order to drive an investigation into old and debunked conspiracy theories has resulted in virtually no meaningful evidence of wrongdoing by President Joe Biden. It has, however, exposed the world to how much of a raging hypocrite Comer is.
In August, Comer told Newsmax that “Joe Biden was using pseudonyms to hide the fact that he was working with his son to peddle access to our enemies around the world.” The Kentucky congressman has repeatedly implied Biden’s use of aliases, a “common practice” in government correspondence, is proof he was involved in shady activities connected to his son Hunter Biden’s business dealings.
The Daily Beast reports that when he was Kentucky’s commissioner of agriculture in 2011, Comer was sending pseudonymous emails for government business. In fact, he was bungling hemp seed deals with China, and sending those emails from a government account, named after his 7-year-old son, to a big campaign donor who had a possible interest in the hemp product.
This is just the latest example of how enormous his hypocrisy is in regards to the allegations he levied against President Biden.
Back in November 2023, Comer accused Joe Biden of corruption based on a check for $200,000 he gave to his brother Jim Biden in 2018, which was repaid. Comer called it a “bombshell” piece of evidence. Days later, it was revealed that Comer had also paid his own brother $200,000, in one of many “land swaps” deals the Comers and their businesses had been involved in over the years.
In March 2023, the Congressional Integrity Project—the Democratic-aligned group committed to putting Republicans on the defensive—wrote a letter asking for a Kentucky prosecutor to investigate Comer for possibly committing “at least one, and perhaps multiple, felony offenses during his failed attempt to secure the Republican nomination for governor in 2015.” The motivation for the letter was a New York Times profile on Comer, in which the congressman talked about the tight gubernatorial primary he had lost—which included allegations by a blogger against him that he was abusive to a college girlfriend:
The month before the primary, a story appeared in The Lexington Herald-Leader in which leaked emails suggested coordination between the blogger and the husband of the running mate of one of Mr. Comer’s opponents in the race, the Louisville developer Hal Heiner.
The rumor whispered around Kentucky political circles at the time was that Mr. Comer had swiped the emails from the computer server for the husband’s former law firm and leaked them to the newspaper. In an interview with The Times, Mr. Comer confirmed, for the first time, that he had been behind the leak and strongly hinted he had gotten them from the server.
“I’ve had two servers in my lifetime,” Mr. Comer said when asked about the emails. “Hunter Biden’s is one, and you can — I’m not going to say who the other one was, but you can use your imagination.”
This tactic by Comer seems to have worked out as well as his investigation into Biden, as Comer’s former girlfriend, angered by the leaked emails, wrote and published a letter detailing what she described as a “toxic, abusive” relationship with Comer. Comer has denied the allegations of abuse.
Recently, reports say Comer spends his days fantasizing about the dead-end Biden impeachment disappearing. The constant humiliation of having failed to actually prove anything against Biden has prompted even right-wing news outlets like Fox News to stop giving him primetime mentions.
However, Donald Trump is running for president again, and the demands to create the semblance of corruption by Biden seems to be Comer’s primary job. On Sunday, Comer told Fox News’ Maria Bartiromo he was not done with trying to get Biden, saying “This is just the beginning.”
He’s had almost a year, and all he’s proven is that Biden is a supportive father.
Donald Trump was convicted on 34 counts of falsifying business records on May 30. What are potential voters saying about this historic news? And what is the Biden-Harris campaign doing now that the “teflon Don" is no more?
The Republican Party’s attempted impeachment fiasco and beleaguered House Speaker Mike Johnson were the subjects of late-night talk show host Stephen Colbert’s opening monologue Wednesday night. Colbert observed that while the House Republicans targeting Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas “never identified a specific high crime or misdemeanor for the impeachment, which is usually kind of a thing,” the event was still historic.
It's only the second time in America that a Cabinet member has been impeached. The first was Secretary of War William Belknap back in 1876, which Congress accused of ‘prostituting his high office to his lust for private gain.’
[In Trump voice singing Bette Midler song] Did you ever know that you're my hero …
Colbert then laid it on thick, claiming that his entire show would be dedicated to covering the Senate’s impeachment trial of Mayorkas, before someone off camera told him the Senate immediately voted to dismiss the articles of impeachment.
“That was quick,” said a stunned Colbert. “So, what do you guys want to talk about?”
Colbert then pivoted to the precarious position GOP Speaker Mike Johnson finds himself in, even though “they just got rid of the last guy six months ago.”
Republican speaker of the House has joined the list of least secure jobs, just below No. 2 leader of ISIS; World's Oldest Man; and Rupert Murdoch fiancée.
Colbert: Republican Speaker of the House Mike Johnson, seen here in his profile pic on HammerYourOwnPenis.com.
After playing a clip of Johnson telling Fox Business’ Maria Bartiromo that Trump is "100% with me," Colbert threw to a clip of Trump being asked whether he will support Johnson.
Trump: Well, we'll see what happens with that.
Colbert: That is a dose of classic Trump loyalty. He's got your back ... so he can push you under a bus.
Zachary Mueller is the senior research director for America’s Voice and America’s Voice Education Fund. He brings his expertise on immigration politics to talk about how much money the GOP is using to promote its racist immigration campaigns.
A House Oversight Committee hearing into China’s “political warfare” against the United States went off the rails Wednesday when Republican Rep. James Comer interrupted Democratic Rep. Jamie Raskin to push attacks on President Joe Biden and his family.
Raskin was using his allotted time to point out that the “smoking gun” whistleblower who Comer and Rep. Jim Jordan were hanging their entire impeachment case on was in fact a Russian mole.
“That's just simply not true,” Comer interrupted. “But go ahead.”
It is true and the two did go ahead, in an argument that escalated and went on for more than five minutes.
Of course, Raskin had the benefit of facts and reality on his side. When Comer, who chairs the Oversight Committee, tried to repeat a thoroughly discredited claim that Biden received money from Chinese interests, Raskin reminded him that it was then-President Donald Trump who actually received millions of dollars from China.
Raskin then called Comer’s bluff and asked him to put up or shut up on impeaching Biden, something fellow Democratic Rep. Jared Moskowitz has previously attempted. That led to this exchange:
Raskin: Where is your impeachment investigation? If Joe Biden took a $9 million bribe from China, why aren't you impeaching him for that?
Comer: Well, who says we're not?
Raskin: I can invite Mr. Moskowitz to come back in. Do you want to move for impeachment today? Because I thought that that was your main agenda item. You said it was the paramount priority of the committee?
Comer: No, this is a hearing on China. And you all have an obsession with Russia and Trump. It's disturbing.
Raskin: We can talk about China and Trump, or Russia and Trump --
Comer: --You need therapy, Mr. Raskin.
Raskin: No, no, you need therapy. You're the one who's involved with the deranged politician, not me. Okay? I've divorced myself from Donald Trump a long time ago. You're the one who needs to disentangle from that situation.
And I will tell you this: If you believe that it would have been illegal for Joe Biden to take $5 million from Ukraine, it certainly would have been. What do you think about Donald Trump taking more than $5 million from the Chinese government while he was president?
At one point, when Comer claimed that the ongoing GOP investigations into the Biden family didn’t cost many millions of taxpayer dollars, Raskin snarked, "Oh, it's been for free? Okay. All right. Well, you know what, then? We get what we paid for it because you got nothing. You got nothing on Joe Biden."
When Comer tried to continue on with a new speaker and dismiss “Mr. Raskins,” Raskin vociferously demanded his time back—but not before putting Comer’s disrespect on notice:
Let me start with this. My last name is Raskin. Okay? We've sat next to each other for more than a year. You don't have to add the S. Number two, I would like my time restored. Number three, you have not identified a single crime. What is the crime that you want to impeach Joe Biden for and keep this nonsense going? Why? Well, what is the crime? Tell America right now.
You can watch the full exchange in the video below.
Zachary Mueller is the senior research director for America’s Voice and America’s Voice Education Fund. He brings his expertise on immigration politics to talk about how much money the GOP is using to promote its racist immigration campaigns.
