Hunter Biden’s ‘laptop’ looks more and more like a politically motivated criminal scheme

Posted on July 19, 2023 (Updated July 20, 2023) by Hunter

During the 2016 elections, Russian government agents hacked into the Democratic National Committee and into Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign, then dumped the stolen data in an effort to sabotage Donald Trump’s election opponent. The more we learn about the supposed “Hunter Biden laptop,” a scandal meant to roil the campaign of Donald Trump’s election opponent four years later, the more it looks like somebody was following the same hack-and-dump playbook.

Marcy Wheeler has a new post that breaks down some of the many, many known oddities of the supposed "laptop." When you consider that the whole premise of the story to begin with is that a "Hunter Biden" allegedly wandered into a random Delaware computer repair shop, handed over a damaged laptop, completely forgot about it afterward, and then somehow the computer dude and/or allies decided that Donald Trump ratf--ker Rudy freaking Giuliani was the person he needed to deliver the laptop's data to, dozens of other oddities piled on top of that begin to turn what started out as farce into a full three-ring circus of weird.

Marcy's post is, as usual, worth reading in full, but here’s the shortest version of it: Quite a lot of evidence suggests that in 2018 or 2019, Hunter Biden was the target of a successful phish or other hack that gave an outside party access to his iCloud account, his email accounts, and other data.

Of special note is a window of time during which Hunter was receiving addiction treatment (from the disgraced ex-Fox News talking head Dr. Keith Ablow, no less, just to put a nearly cartoonish spin on all this yet again) and appears to have had "limited" online communications. Despite those limited communications, somebody was using this period of time to make a hell of a lot of technical changes to Hunter's iCloud and email accounts, including:

Changed the password and related phone numbers to his rhb iCloud account

Installed and gave full access to his droidhunter gmail account a real app, called Hunter, that can send email on someone else’s behalf

Signed into that droidhunter account using a new device

Again changed emails and phone numbers associated with his rhb account

Asked for a full copy of his rhbdc iCloud account

Reset the password of that rhbdc iCloud account

Made droidhunter account the notification email for the rhbdc account

Downloaded all Hunter’s Apple Store purchases

…

Signed into the droidhunter account from a burner phone

Restored the prior trusted phone number

Added software that could record calls

Started erasing and then locked a laptop — probably the one that would eventually end up in Mac Isaac’s store

The list goes on, but the changes line up almost precisely with what you'd see in the aftermath of a successful phishing attack or other security breach. Passwords and security-related phone numbers were changed, access was granted to additional devices and burner phones, there was a "full copy" made of his iCloud account, some spyware or spyware-adjacent new tools were installed, and after a full data dump was made, some of the security changes were reverted so as to obfuscate what had just gone on.

The emails from Hunter around this time period don't suggest a man deep in the weeds of tweaking his own online security details, to put it mildly, so we're left wondering just who was doing all this fiddling.

The sheer number should have raised alarms that people had broken into Hunter Biden’s iCloud accounts when the IRS asked Apple for Hunter Biden’s subscriber information in November 2019, in advance of writing a subpoena for the laptop in custody of John Paul Mac Isaac. Additionally, there were a bunch of attempts to get into Hunter Biden’s Venmo account, and the account added two new Remembered Devices within 12 minutes of each other in August 2018, one in the LA foothills and the other in Las Vegas. That and other details (including texts and emails) might have raised questions about whether sex workers from the very same escort service on which the IRS had predicated this entire investigation took steps to compromise Hunter Biden’s devices.

The evidence is very good, then, that Hunter Biden's online accounts were successfully hacked shortly before a "laptop" purportedly belonging to him mysteriously showed up in a Delaware computer repair shop, packed with seemingly legitimate data that then was handed over to Rudy freaking Giuliani, the man in Donald Trump's orbit most intimately involved in ginning up dirt, any dirt at all, about Hunter Biden during Trump's reelection bid.

A bunch of media outlets have previously breathlessly reported that the laptop had been "verified" as belonging to Hunter Biden while simultaneously fudging what that means. It means that the laptop, or at least its alleged hard drive, does indeed contain data from Hunter's email and iCloud accounts. There's another obvious scenario, though, and that's the exact hack-and-dump scheme that the FBI was warning Twitter and Facebook off of before the New York Post reported its original scoop revealing the alleged existence of the laptop.

Government disinformation specialists were warning, in the wake of Giuliani's already exposed anti-Biden ratf--king efforts based in part on hoaxes pushed by pro-Russian interests (see: Trump's impeachment, as in the first one and not the second one) that foreign disinformation aimed at bending the 2020 elections was still prevalent. Counterintelligence specialists were on watch, especially after Russian agents successfully hacked into the Democratic National Committee and Hillary Clinton's presidential campaigns in 2016, "dumping" the stolen information through multiple entities in an attempt to boost Trump's chances of winning.

What we have in the Hunter laptop case appears to be an uncannily similar series of events. Hunter's email, iCloud, Venmo, and other accounts appear to have been breached in 2018 and 2019. His data was copied, spyware was installed, and cursory attempts to cover up the breach were made.

And then, lo and behold, a laptop containing a copy of that data—one that showed clear evidence of the data being tampered with—gets dumped at a computer repair shop, never to be picked up again, while a copy of its data somehow makes it to Giuliani.

The only thing that would make all of this sketchier than it already is? A bizarre Russian link—and the joke’s on you if you thought there wouldn't be one because weirdly, very very weirdly, the escort service suspected of possibly being an origin point for hacks of Hunter's Venmo account appears to be tied to Russia.

Marcy's careful to leave out speculation beyond what seems obvious: The activity surrounding Hunter's online accounts seems to strongly suggest hackers successfully breached his accounts well before the laptop ever materialized. But we can speculate where she didn't: Was this yet another hack-and-dump operation aimed, quite specifically, at damaging Trump's election opponent?

How do we explain Giuliani's front-and-center appearance here?

From the beginning, few news outlets besides the New York Post were willing to touch this story because from the computer repairman himself to the specifics of what was allegedly found and how, all of it looked like a hack and dump. Republicans have bellowed in outrage at how little traction the story is getting in the media even now that the data is supposedly "confirmed" to be Hunter's. But that's not surprising either; it's almost certainly the result of criminal hacking.

Oh, and there also hasn't been much found on the laptop that wasn't already known: Hunter Biden has suffered through addiction, has spent substantial cash on drugs and sex workers, and has muddled through his troubled life slightly better than most addicts might due to his perceived closeness to his well-connected father. But it would be a hell of a thing if this episode turned out to be exactly the Giuliani-assisted foreign operation it appeared to be from the moment the New York Post wrote it up.

Hunter Biden is done staying quiet about the laptop-based smear campaign. He's suing

CNN: House Ethics Committee is interviewing witnesses in revived Matt Gaetz probe

Posted on July 13, 2023 by Hunter

There are new signs today that the House Ethics Committee investigation into Florida Rep. Matt Gaetz may not be as dead in the water as most of us assumed it was, with Republicans in control of the House and laser-focused on obstructing investigations into Republican corruption rather than furthering them.

Gaetz must have royally pissed someone off, because CNN is now reporting that Ethics Committee investigators "have begun reaching out to witnesses as part of a recently revived investigation" into the Florida man. The original investigation began in 2021, when Democrats were still in control of the House.

As for which House "ethics" Gaetz is accused of, breaching, the CNN story evades the details so that stray internet children don't get an eyeful of them, but Gaetz was caught up in the corruption scandal centered on ex-Seminole County tax collector Joel Greenberg, who was sentenced last year to 11 years in prison for sex trafficking of a minor, wire fraud, bribery, and other crimes. That investigation resulted in accusations that Gaetz had, with Greenberg's assistance, paid at least 15 women for sex, including at least one who was underage at the time. Reporters soon found enough witnesses to report Gaetz's 2019 use of an Orlando hotel room for a cocaine-fueled sex party. Gaetz has also been caught in a bizarre bit of apparent campaign money laundering and, well, take your pick.

The Department of Justice originally asked the House Ethics Committee to suspend its own investigation while federal law enforcement investigated those and other charges, but eventually decided to close the investigation without charges. That frees House investigators to resume their work, and apparently they ... might actually be doing it now?

Before you get carried away, note that CNN reports House investigators focused their questions on "possible lobbying violations" in their interview with CNN's anonymous source. That doesn't necessarily mean that House Republicans are still holding off on investigating the charges that one of their most notorious members is a sex-trafficking cocaine fiend, but a cynic might point out that a Republican-neutered Ethics Committee might be more eager to launch a hard-nosed probe of financial violations than to poke the hornet's nest of who, in their House Republican ranks, is spending their off time attending conservative coke orgies.

We shall see. In the meantime, Gaetz himself seems quite eager to divert attention elsewhere. On Tuesday he appeared on conspiracy network Newsmax, where he engaged in another bit of Russian boosterism while sniffling at Ukraine's bid for NATO membership.

"Why would you pick Ukraine? Why not extend NATO to Russia and make it an anti-China alliance?" Gaetz asked stupidly. "Are we really thinking that we're more afraid of the broke-down tanks from Russia than the fact that China is building a secret military base on the island of Cuba, 90 miles away from the United States?"

I'm not sure he's going to win any Putin Points for mocking the Russian army as "broke-down," as accurate as that may be. But does Rep. Matt Gaetz of Florida really not know why NATO might not be eager to add a kleptocratic mob state to the alliance's rosters? A kleptocratic dictatorship that is currently engaged in an attempted European war of conquest, no less?

Look, I think we can all understand why the alleged cocaine orgy guy still has a soft spot for Vladimir Freaking Putin, but he might want to rein it in a bit while his fellow Republicans are deciding what to do about him. It's still likely that Republicans will sweep every ethics allegation against Gaetz back under the rug, once they've done enough due diligence to assure themselves that his scandals remain sweepable, but Gaetz has clearly pissed enough of his colleagues off that it's not a sure thing.

It'd be a real hoot if House investigators decided to interview former Republican Rep. Madison Cawthorn for his thoughts on Washington, D.C., cocaine orgies, while they're at it. Wouldn't you love to be a fly on that wall?

Matt Gaetz's associate Joel Greenberg sentenced to 11 years for sex trafficking and other crimes

Federal investigation into Matt Gaetz closes without any charges against far-right congressman

The only ones interested in Republican investigations are Republicans

Posted on July 10, 2023 (Updated July 11, 2023) by Kerry Eleveld

House Republicans generally have no interest in pushing anything with the majority support of the American people, and their lengthy list of pet investigations is no exception to the rule.

After Republicans reclaimed the lower chamber last year, the incoming majority promised a series of probes to supposedly combat wokeness (i.e., own the libs) and unmask the "Biden Crime Family.” Failures at the U.S.-Mexico border, the origins of COVID-19, and "woke" school board policies were all high on the list.

But House Republicans have ended up devoting the bulk of their energy to the seediest and most incendiary of probes: whether to impeach Joe Biden or his Department of Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas, and digging into Hunter Biden's finances.

As new Morning Consult polling shows about support for the probes: Biden's impeachment rests at just 30% of voters (55% among Republicans, but just 24% among independents), Mayorkis' impeachment is at 22% (34% among Republicans and just 18% among independents), and Hunter Biden's finances rests at 27% (46% among Republicans and just 24% among independents). In other words, none of the current GOP probes dominating the headlines garner even a third of support from the general public.

New @MorningConsult poll: *NONE* of the @HouseGOP’s main “investigations” have majority support to be a top priority for Congress, despite months of intense focus by House leaders & conservative media In fact, almost all of them fail to garner support from even 1/3 of Americans pic.twitter.com/nOXlfoJd4V
— Ian Sams (@IanSams46) July 10, 2023

The issue that does have more widespread support, investigating fentanyl trafficking (58%), remains ongoing but has been overshadowed by House Republicans' infighting and their fixation on claiming a scalp before finding any real evidence to support it.

Naturally, House Republicans' investigative efforts have also been plagued by buffoonish incompetence:

They've lost their informant.
They've got lots of witnesses to prove that Biden did crimes, but none of them are available.
They "believe" Biden did crimes, they just don't have the evidence yet.

Oh, what the heck, let's just file an impeachment resolution and we'll figure out the criming part later.

That is the problem in a nutshell: House Republicans can't really put their finger on anything specific, but their base demands instant gratification, so MAGA misfits such as Rep. Lauren Boebert of Colorado are taking action into their own hands.

In March, a Navigator Research poll found that 50% of registered voters (including a 47% plurality of independents) believed Republicans in Congress would "overreach" with their various investigations into Biden and other Democrats. That 50% was a 3-point bump from when the outlet originally asked the question in January 2023.

To date, House Republicans have more than lived up to those voters’ estimations and done nothing to convince them otherwise. At some point, Navigator will re-ask the question and it will be interesting to see if the needle has moved.

Republicans consider a novel way to obstruct investigations of Trump

Posted on July 10, 2023 (Updated July 11, 2023) by Hunter

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

House Republicans demanding Bragg's evidence against Trump have been coordinating with Trump himself

Republicans use House powers to protect Trump

Swing district House Republicans timidly remind McCarthy they exist, too

Posted on July 3, 2023 (Updated July 4, 2023) by Laura Clawson

The far-right House Freedom Caucus’s antics have gotten so bad that Republicans who represent districts won by President Joe Biden have actually started trying to affect what legislation comes to the House floor. They’re not trying very hard, mind you—whining to the media remains their main weapon, and they’ll get outsized credit for anything they accomplish, including the whining, but doing slightly more than nothing is a change.

The Washington Post reports, “In recent weeks, these lawmakers have kept some abortion-related measures from being put to a vote and sunk an amendment that would have derailed a government oversight bill.” Okay, that’s a start, as is the successful effort by some first-term New York Republicans to sink anti-union amendments.

It continues: “They also have tried to convince their far-right counterparts to avoid altering appropriation bills during committee markups, warning that any poison pills could force a big enough group to reject the bills on the House floor if they feel they could hurt their reelection chances.” They’ve tried. Huh. Is that new? Were swing district Republicans not trying to do that all along?

This, though—this is special:

Several lawmakers who represent districts President Biden won have also asked leadership to go a step further and allow them in the negotiating room with their far-right colleagues during high-profile debates to explain why the groups’ demands could jeopardize their five-vote majority, according to two people familiar with the request who, like others who spoke to The Washington Post, did so on the condition of anonymity to detail private conversations.

They’re asking to be allowed in the negotiating room. Doesn’t that seem like something that would have happened on Day One? Doesn’t it seem like Kevin McCarthy might have asked them himself?

Swing-district Republicans also have been pushing leadership to be strategic about which messaging bills they bring to the floor, arguing it’s not worth forcing vulnerable members to take tough votes on legislation that will die in the Senate.

I don’t know, all of this seems like something leadership might have figured out for itself. If Kevin McCarthy were a competent leader who hadn’t given away every shred of leverage he possessed to squeak in as speaker on the 15th vote, maybe it would have.

Some swing district Republicans say they’re nervously looking ahead to being put on the spot about expunging Donald Trump’s impeachments. Yet when it came to votes on referring Rep. Lauren Boebert’s Biden impeachment resolution to two committees and on censuring Rep. Adam Schiff, the so-called moderates knew their place. Those were party-line votes.

These Republicans should get credit for doing the right thing to the exact extent that they do the right thing. No bonus points for whining to the media. And when the media does report on them, be it the whining or the actually getting things done, those moments they fell in line on the extreme votes need to be included in the coverage.

Trump Plans To Bypass Congress And Starve ‘The Deep State’

Posted on June 28, 2023 by RealClearWire

By Philip Wegmann for RealClearWire

Sources close to former President Trump say he has a plan for keeping Congress from ever again forcing him into “disgraceful” and “ridiculous” spending situations. If he returns to the White House, Trump will seek to resurrect authority that Congress stripped from the presidency almost a half century ago.

What President Nixon squandered, his campaign promises, Trump will restore, namely the impoundment power. “A lot of you,” the former president told a New Hampshire crowd Thursday, “don’t know what that is.” Indeed, few now remember it.

Impoundment, if restored, would allow a president, in theory, to simply refuse to spend appropriations by Congress. More than just an avenue to cut spending, Trump sees that kind of authority as key to starving, and thus crushing, the so-called “deep state.”

But such a move would fundamentally alter the balance of power, and any effort to restore the long-forgotten authority virtually guarantees a protracted legal battle over who exactly controls the power of the purse. Trump welcomes that fight. Some budget experts believe he won’t get anywhere.

Regardless, advisors close to the former president tell RealClearPolitics they are drawing up plans to challenge the 1974 Congressional Budget and Impoundment Control Act in court, and if that fails, to lean on the legislature to repeal it. The latter would require passing a law to surrender power, something lawmakers are loath to do.

Congress already went to war with another president who had expansive views of his own authority. And Congress won.

Inflation in the 1970s, the Nixon White House complained, was the result of a profligate “Credit Card Congress.” The California Republican warned Capitol Hill not to spend in excess of $250 billion. When his warning was ignored, Nixon simply refused to spend the appropriated money. A rebuke from the Supreme Court followed when the president impounded funding for environmental projects. But weakened by Watergate, Nixon eventually signed legislation effectively surrendering a power that had been exercised from the presidencies of Thomas Jefferson to Lyndon B. Johnson.

Russ Vought, Trump’s last director of the Office of Management and Budget, calls the concession of impoundment power “the original sin” that ensured “the executive branch no longer plays a meaningful role” in the appropriations process. Vought told RCP in an interview that the power of the purse has become “caricature,” where rather than “setting ceilings,” Congress now sets “spending floors.”

Hence, Trump’s “unhappy” signature on multiple multi trillion-dollar spending bills.

Trump promised he would “never sign another bill like this again” before putting his signature on a “crazy” $1.3 trillion spending bill in 2018. Two years later, he signed another omnibus bill, this one worth $1.4 trillion, that he called “disgraceful.” Both times, Trump justified voting for the bloated bills conservatives loathed by pointing to increased military spending.

Restoring impoundment authority, thus giving presidents an option to curb spending beyond just the veto, current Trump campaign and former Trump administration officials tell RCP that was part of the plan for a second term that never came.

The former president said he believes the 1974 law that gutted impoundment is unconstitutional, and if returned to the White House, would govern accordingly.

“Yes, there’s the effort to have it overturned in courts. Yes, there is the legislative effort, but when you think that a law is unconstitutional,” Vought told RCP, the administration ought to look “to do the bare minimum of what the courts have required,” and “to push the envelope.”

Trump did something like this, exercising what Vought called “impoundment-like authorities,” when he froze nearly $400 million in foreign aid to Ukraine, even though the funds were congressionally appropriated. The Government Accountability Office later said that in doing so, Trump violated the law. He was impeached by the House over a phone call to Ukrainian President Zelensky concerning the money.

Trump’s OMB disputed the GAO ruling at the time, saying the administration was simply its apportionment authority to spend the money according to the most efficient timetable.

“The reason why there wasn’t an impoundment was because we did not have the authority just to pocket the money and not spend it,” Vought recalled, saying that if a new paradigm was in place, the administration “potentially would have had the ability to go further and pocket the money.”

Trump believes impoundment would be “a crucial tool” in his fight with the administrative state. “Bringing back impoundment will give us a crucial tool with which to obliterate the Deep State, Drain the Swamp, and starve the Warmongers,” he said in campaign video first obtained and reported by Semafor. “We can simply choke off the money.”

His campaign pointed RCP to the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency within the Department of Homeland Security, an entity that House Republicans allege has been involved in censorship of Americans, as a prime example of where dollars could be impounded.

But even some conservatives have their doubts. Kevin Kosar, a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, said that when it comes to cutting spending appropriated money after the fact, there “is a limited amount of wiggle room.”

“The idea that a president is going to achieve any sort of significant savings or reduction in the size of the administrative state by exercising impoundment authorities is patently ludicrous,” Kosar told RCP.

The policy wonk agrees that the reform Nixon signed into law, mandating a complex and cumbersome budgeting process, seldom works. But without repealing and replacing that law, he said, “a president flat out refusing to spend money that was clearly appropriated for a particular purpose, saying he just doesn’t want to do it, pretty much would be grounds for impeachment.”

Linda Bilmes, an assistant secretary at the Department of Commerce during the Clinton administration, agrees that the current budget process “has become so dysfunctional that it is very ripe for reforms.”

Now a lecturer at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government, she points to the partisan gridlock and numerous government shutdowns that are a feature of the current process. “The number of shutdowns in the entirety of U.S. history before 1974,” Bilmes said in an interview with RCP, “was zero.”

Congress has been kicking around ideas for some time on how to reform the way they spend taxpayer money. Lawmakers consistently fail to pass individual appropriation bills, opting instead to approve spending all at once with a single bill, usually at the end of year and the last minute.

Even if the process is reformed, however, Bilmes said that “the basic premise of the law, which is that the Constitution provides Congress with the ultimate authority, is very unlikely to change.”

She added that although she disagrees with the idea that reducing the national debt requires gutting the Impoundment Act, there is a recent precedent for taming runaway spending. Bilmes pointed RCP to the agreements hammered out between Bill Clinton and then-Speaker Newt Gingrich in the 1990s. That is possible again. In theory.

Syndicated with permission from RealClearWire.

The post Trump Plans To Bypass Congress And Starve ‘The Deep State’ appeared first on The Political Insider.

Republican disarray is somehow, miraculously, getting worse

Posted on June 23, 2023 by Laura Clawson

House Republicans aren’t getting anything done to benefit the nation or the voters, but they are achieving at a high level in at least one area: sheer disarray. Actually, make that two areas: sheer disarray and intense spitefulness.

The big talk among Republicans these days is impeaching President Joe Biden, with a split between people who want to impeach now without even pretending to have investigated and assembled impeachment-worthy evidence against him, and people who want to do it after a series of show trials designed to insert uncorroborated allegations into the public consciousness. Then there are the so-called “moderates,” who will whine to the press about the awful position they’re being put in—then fall in line when it’s time to vote on whatever the extremists have gotten Speaker Kevin McCarthy to back.

All of these groups are sharing their feelings with the press. The biggest splash this week was made by reports that Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene called her former ally Rep. Lauren Boebert a “bitch” as the two joust over whose impeachment resolution will get the most attention and fundraising leverage. But it’s just one moment of hostility in a party with a lot of them.

Greene says Boebert “copied my impeachment articles and probably did it, it seems to me, because there’s a fundraising deadline coming up at the end of the month,” and that she will be forcing a vote on her own impeachment resolution soon. When she does, have no doubt that she will fundraise off of it—in fact, Boebert sucking up Greene’s planned fundraising juice is no small part of the fury here.

Greene, though, is at risk of being purged from the far-right House Freedom Caucus over her closeness to McCarthy, which is seen as compromising her far-right purity. For her part, Greene says she’s just being “more realistic” in her tactics.

Greene’s “more realistic” tactics will still put Biden-district Republicans on the spot, though, and they’re unhappy about how often that’s happened recently.

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“I am concerned,” about having to vote on impeaching Biden, Rep. Tony Gonzales told CNN. “One witch hunt for another witch hunt makes this place all about witch hunts. Meanwhile, the American public are focused putting food on the table, keeping their kids safe in schools, keeping inflation down. Real issues.” That’s nice talk, but since Gonzales participated in party-line votes on referring Boebert’s impeachment resolution to two committees and on censuring Rep. Adam Schiff, it has to be filed as just talk until he actually votes against a Republican witch hunt.

And Gonzales is going to face that again and again. Whether it’s Greene and Boebert with their separate efforts to force an impeachment vote, or committee chairs like Jim Jordan and James Comer taking a little longer to put a fig leaf of fraudulent “investigation” and “evidence” on their eventual impeachment efforts, House Republicans are not letting this go. Given their failure to show how they would productively govern the United States by passing meaningful legislation—even if it died in the Senate—attacks on the president, the president’s son, and top administration officials are all they have to convince their base they’ve done something with two years in control of the House.

Extremism is a powerful drug. And these people are so awful that infighting was probably inevitable the moment Republicans had power. It's a virtuous (from Democrats’ point of view) circle: Republican disarray begets failure begets more disarray.

So-called moderates like Gonzales are reportedly trying to get McCarthy to stop giving in to the Freedom Caucus, but giving in to extremists is what McCarthy does—especially since the deal he struck to become speaker on the 15th vote gave any single member the ability to call for a vote to replace him. McCarthy is spending as much time trying to save his own hide as he is trying to lead his party. Not that McCarthy’s party is leadable, even under someone far more adept than he is.

Take Rep. Matt Gaetz, sounding like the id of the Republican Party. Using privileged resolutions to force votes on things like impeachment, as Boebert did, is “actually going to be a new doctrine for us,” he told CNN.

“I sort of have had enough struggle sessions,” he said. “I’m ready for action, action, action.”

If that action involves Greene and Boebert trading insults, Greene at risk of being kicked out of the Freedom Caucus, McCarthy being eternally under pressure, and every Republican who represents a district that voted for Biden having to take unpopular vote after unpopular vote, I’m here for it.

This week on “The Brief,” we are joined by Christina Reynolds of Emily’s List. Reynolds is the Senior Vice President of Communications and Content at the progressive organization, which works to get women elected to office. On the anniversary of the outrageous Supreme Court decision to take away the reproductive protections of Roe v. Wade, Reynolds talks about what she is seeing up and down the ballot this election cycle.

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Republican House ‘moderates’ talk big, fail to step up

Posted on June 22, 2023 by Joan McCarter

The attempted impeachment of President Joe Biden is now a thing House Republicans will have to spend actual time on, thanks to Colorado wingnut Rep. Lauren Boebert. Whatever procedural moves leadership takes now to get the issue off the floor won’t matter because the Freedom Caucus and other hardliners have decided this is how they will hijack the House. That’s a big headache for Speaker Kevin McCarthy, one that the would-be moderates could exploit to the benefit of the country, if only they could be bothered.

Those so-called moderates are talking big about their few “accomplishments” thus far. For instance, last week they voted against some amendments to legislation intended to make it harder for the federal government to regulate stuff. It’s a dangerous and ridiculous bill that every single Republican voted for, but these guys are crowing to Politico about how they voted against Freedom Caucus amendments to it. “We were sending a signal,” one of them said, calling it their strategy to hold the MAGA wing “accountable” but not hurt leadership.

The lawmaker, who insisted on anonymity to discuss how tough they were, bragged about how they told Rep. Bob Good, a Virginia congressman who thinks the Republican-appointed FBI director should be impeached over the Trump classified documents case: “You want Good bills passed, [then] put another name on it.” So, so anonymously brave. They’re admitting that they don’t have a problem with the content of any Freedom Caucus bill, just the sponsor, with one exception: Rep. Brian Fitzpatrick said his votes against the amendments were policy-based. As for the rest of them? Their claims of moderation are about as valid as their claim on family values or being pro-life.

They disproved that again Wednesday when nearly all of them voted to censure Democratic Rep. Adam Schiff for his role in Intelligence Committee investigations and the impeachments of Donald Trump. This group voted against the first censure vote last week because it came with a ridiculous $16 million fine. Once that was dropped, they were happy to pile on in this proxy vote for Trump. Because that’s what this is. They’re all still mad about both Trump impeachments, the Jan. 6 investigations conducted by House Democrats, and the ongoing investigations surrounding Trump. Schiff is their scapegoat.

There’s a lot these not-Freedom Caucus Republicans could do to force McCarthy to throw over the extremists. There’s a hell of a lot more of them. If they acted as a bloc, they could take over the House the same way 11 assholes did a few weeks ago, when they shut the House down with a procedural vote. Will they muster the courage?

Probably not, Main Street Caucus Chair Dusty Johnson of South Dakota says. “I’ve heard people talk about that tactic, you know, out of frustration,” he told Politico, but suggested it’s not likely. He said that, in his group, “people understand that the best way—the most productive way—to move forward is try to stick together.” In other words, seeking safety in numbers, cowering in fear while their feral colleagues take all of them down in a spiral of nonsense.

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House Republicans desperately seeking reason to impeach Biden

Posted on June 22, 2023 (Updated June 23, 2023) by Laura Clawson

House Republican leadership isn’t happy with Rep. Lauren Boebert’s current impeachment shenanigans, but that’s not because they don’t plan to impeach Biden. They just don’t like the timing and the specifics. Speaker Kevin McCarthy knows that his members and the Republican base will demand a baseless impeachment while the party has a House majority, but he wants to at least pretend it’s not a foregone conclusion, and that Republicans only went where the evidence lead after sober consideration. (Ha ha ha.)

McCarthy’s line, offered to reporters on Wednesday, is: “What I am saying is these investigations will follow the information we get wherever it will take us.” He also repeated uncorroborated accusations against the president, though, in case you were tempted to believe that the fix wasn’t in.

House Oversight Committee Chair James Comer, who is leading a series of “investigations” into the president and his son Hunter, is similarly pretending that impeachment is a giant question mark.

“We’ve never said impeachment, yes or no,” Comer told Punchbowl. “If it leads to impeachment, it leads to impeachment. Our investigation, we’ve still got several more months of work to do before I can issue a report … I don’t think what happens tomorrow [on the Boebert resolution] will have any impact. Nor will the plea-bargain deal with the president’s son.”

House Freedom Caucus Chair Scott Perry insists, “The goal is not impeachment.” The real goal, he said, was information. “But if the information leads you to facts that require and demand accountability, that’s the only accountability.” And “yes,” Perry believes Republicans will uncover said “information” against Biden and support for impeachment will build.

Other Republicans are being even less circumspect.

“Ultimately, you’re going to see Biden impeached,” Rep. Andy Ogles told Punchbowl. “The question is when and is it soon enough for the American people?” Ogles, like Boebert and Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, has introduced an impeachment resolution. Rep. Eli Crane said impeachment will “absolutely” be an outcome of the investigations.

The likelihood that McCarthy will be able to stifle the demands for Biden’s impeachment is only slightly higher than the likelihood that McCarthy will be remembered as an effective speaker. Under his leadership, House Republicans have few legislative accomplishments to tout, and the promised bombshell hearings on Hunter Biden and anything else they could dig up to undermine the president have flopped. Impeachment is what Republicans have left to pander to their base, mollify the people whose support McCarthy lobbied and traded for through 15 speaker votes, and pretend they have gotten something done.

But an impeachment could very well backfire on Republicans. They’ll be going into it, after all, with scant evidence and screamingly obvious partisan motivations. And unless they conduct impeachment hearings with a much higher level of professionalism than they’ve shown to this point, it’s going to be a clown show that reveals again and again that this is about revenge against Democrats for impeaching Donald Trump and about undermining the Biden presidency after Republicans failed to overturn the 2020 elections. Comer says his report won’t come out for “several more months,” which would likely put any impeachment proceedings into 2024. It might motivate their base, but it’s unlikely to be what independent voters want to see from the House of Representatives.

”How can you impeach someone with no evidence?” asked Rep. Jamie Raskin, the ranking Democrat on the House Oversight Committee. Raskin is pretty smart, so I’m going to assume that was a rhetorical question. He knows Republicans don’t care about evidence, and if they move forward on impeachment, even voters who aren’t paying very much attention will realize that.

Joining us on "The Downballot" this week is North Carolina Rep. Wiley Nickel, the first member of Congress to appear on the show! Nickel gives us the blow-by-blow of his unlikely victory that saw him flip an extremely competitive seat from red to blue last year, including how he adjusted when a new map gave him a very different district and why highlighting the extremism of his MAGA-flavored opponent was key to his success. A true election nerd, Nickel tells us which precincts he was tracking on election night that let him know he was going to win—and which fellow House freshman is the one you want to rock out with at a concert.

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Republicans use House powers to protect Trump

Posted on June 14, 2023 (Updated June 15, 2023) by Hunter

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

House Republicans demanding Bragg's evidence against Trump have been coordinating with Trump himself

New York Times whitewashes Jim Jordan's part in wrestling scandal

Donald Trump is facing even more legal jeopardy and the sharks in the Republican Party seem to sense there is some blood in the water. Chris Christie has made his campaign all about going directly at Trump, and Ron DeSantis seems to be closer and closer to becoming completely isolated from the field.

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