Republican lawmakers have used the congressional impeachment inquiry to gather information on a CIA employee who filed a whistleblower complaint, press witnesses on their loyalty to President Trump and advance conspiratorial claims that Ukraine was involved in the 2016 election, according to current and former officials involved in the proceedings.The Republicans have refrained during hearings from explicitly accusing the individual of filing the explosive complaint with the U.S. intelligence community’s inspector general two months ago, officials said.
Tag: GOP
Bill Barr’s alternate universe ‘investigation’ has a goal: Right-wing authoritarian rule
Students of the modern conservative movement often date the recent supercharged radicalization of the Republican Party to the rise of Newt Gingrich and the Republican Revolution in the early 1990s. It’s true that the GOP went seriously off the rails during that period and the craziness has been picking up speed ever since. But in reality, the conservative movement has been radical from its beginnings, starting with the anti-communist crusade after World War II all the way through Goldwater to Reagan, Gingrich and now Trump. Now it has finally shed all trappings of a sophisticated political ideology, culminating in this surreal parody of a presidency in 2019. The conservative “three legged stool” of small government, traditional values and global military leadership has completely disintegrated.
But one aspect of that earlier conservative movement has continued to chug along with its long-term project to transform the U.S. into an undemocratic, quasi-authoritarian plutocracy. That would be the group of far-right lawyers who started the Federalist Society, with the goal of packing the judiciary with true believers, along with a certain group of Reagan-era legal wunderkinds who came to believe that the GOP could dominate the presidency for decades to come. They developed the theory of the “unitary executive,” originally advanced by Reagan’s odious attorney general Ed Meese ( recently awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom) which holds that massive, unaccountable power is vested in the president of the United States.
Attorney General William Barr was one of those lawyers, along with White House counsel Pat Cipollone, former appeals court judge Michael Luttig and others who encouraged Barr to take the job, particularly after his famous memo declaring that what any normal person would see as obstruction of justice doesn’t apply to the president. (In a nutshell, Barr agrees with former President Richard Nixon, who said, “If the president does it, it’s not illegal.”)
View the complete October 25 article by Heather Digby Parton on the AlterNet website here.
GOP worries it’s losing impeachment fight
Republican senators fear President Trump and their party are losing the public opinion fight over impeachment.
Many in the GOP think House Democrats are playing politics with impeachment and that Trump’s actions don’t merit impeachment. They also think the media is biased against the White House and the president.
All the same, they think they’re losing the public battle and that Trump’s lack of discipline is hurting them.
View the complete October 25 article by Alexander Bolton on The Hill website here.
How two businessmen hustled to profit from access to Rudy Giuliani and the Trump administration
WASHINGTON, DC (CNN) — Long before they burst onto the national scene with their high-profile arrests at Dulles International Airport earlier this month, Soviet-born businessmen Lev Parnas and Igor Fruman were already turning heads in Republican fundraising circles.
“They seemed like hustlers — but not in a bad way. In a good way,” one high-ranking Republican operative familiar with the pair told CNN.
But a CNN review of campaign contributions and court filings, as well as interviews with nearly a dozen people with knowledge of Parnas and Fruman’s interactions, tell a different story. The pair raked in hundreds of thousands of dollars and jetted around the world touting their connections to Giuliani and the Trump administration while pushing for business and favors, even claiming to arrange a Fox News interview, right up until the day they were arrested for conspiracy and campaign-finance related charges.
At one point, they pushed a Ukrainian businessman to pay them to bring Trump administration officials to Ukraine. At another time, they convinced a Florida-based businessman to loan them $100,000 so they could connect him with Giuliani and other prominent conservatives. And in a third instance, they attempted to influence the management board of a Ukrainian gas company.
‘No Persuasive Evidence’: GOP Silent After Clinton Exoneration
Republicans have been largely silent following the release of a State Department report last week that cleared former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton of any deliberate mishandling of classified information when she used her personal email to conduct official government business.
The report, sent to Senate Finance Committee Chair Chuck Grassley on Oct. 16, found 38 employees “culpable” of violating department security protocol, but those violations did not apply to any transmitted material that had been marked as “classified.”
“Additionally, APD adjudicated 497 valid violations where no individual was found to bear culpability, resulting in a ”valid, but not culpable’ determination,” the report stated. It added that “by and large, the individuals interviewed were aware of security policies and did their best to implement them.”
View the complete October 22 article by Josh Israel on the National Memo website here.
A few Republican cracks on impeachment are showing
Here’s one of Trump’s most vocal defenders in the Senate, a lawmaker known for bending or ignoring the facts to back up Trump, opening the door to impeachment of the president:
“Sure. I mean … show me something that … is a crime,” said Sen. Lindsey O. Graham (R-S.C.) to Axios on HBO in an interview on Tuesday. “If you could show me that, you know, Trump actually was engaging in a quid pro quo, outside the phone call, that would be very disturbing.”
View the complete October 21 article by Amber Phillips on The Washington Post website here.
Supreme Court throws out challenge to Michigan electoral map
The Supreme Court, in another defeat for gerrymandering reformers, overturned a lower court’s ruling that Michigan’s electoral districts are overly partisan and need to be redrawn.
Monday’s order follows a June decision from the nation’s top court that found that questions related to partisan gerrymandering are not under the jurisdiction of federal courts.
The new order returns the case to the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Michigan. A three-judge panel in that court had ruled that 34 state legislative and congressional districts needed to be redrawn because they were designed to favor Republicans.
View the complete October 21 article by Harper Neidig on The Hill website here.
Growing number of Republicans struggle to defend Trump on G-7 choice, Ukraine and Syria
One Republican, Rep. Francis Rooney (Fla.) — whose district Trump carried by 22 percentage points — did not rule out voting to impeach the president and compared the situation to the Watergate scandal that ended Richard Nixon’s presidency.
Trump Visits Texas, Where the Fallout From a Secret Tape Awaits Him
The Republican speaker of the Texas House was recorded saying President Trump is “killing us” in suburban districts. On Thursday, the president came to Dallas for a rally.
AUSTIN, Texas — With President Trump arriving in red-state Texas for a campaign rally in Dallas on Thursday, the Republican Party in the state faces a host of troubles.
The Republican-controlled Texas House of Representatives is engulfed in scandal. Six of the state’s 23 Republican members of the United States House of Representatives say they will not run for re-election, opening new opportunities for Democrats. And one of the state’s three top Republican leaders believes that the president has become a political liability among a crucial bloc of voters.
“With all due respect to Trump — who I love, by the way — he’s killing us in urban-suburban districts,” Dennis Bonnen, the speaker of the state House and the central figure in the legislative scandal, said in a 64-minute tape recording released on Tuesday.
View the complete October 17 article by Dave Montgomery on The New York Times website here.
Republicans criticize House impeachment process — while fully participating in probe
“It starts one hour, one hour,” said Rep. Mark Meadows (R-N.C.), explaining how the questioning moves beyond one-hour blocks for each side. “Then it goes 45, 45, 45, 45, with breaks, occasionally, and breaks for lunch.”
View the complete October 16 article by Paul Kane on The Washignton Post website here.