Tag: Republicans

DFL Condemns Rep. Munson’s “Fake News” Civics Lesson

SAINT PAUL, MINNESOTA – Today, Representative Jeremy Munson hosted a mock legislative debate for a class of 65 6th grade students from St Clair Elementary School, all while dressed as a “fake news reporter.”

Ken Martin, Chairman of the Minnesota DFL, released the following statement:

“It is crucial that we teach young Minnesotans about the importance of democracy, and part of those lessons must include the role a free and independent press plays in educating the American electorate and holding our leaders accountable.

Continue reading “DFL Condemns Rep. Munson’s “Fake News” Civics Lesson”

In impeachment inquiry, Republican lawmakers ask questions about whistleblower, loyalty to Trump and conspiracy theories

Washington Post logoRepublican 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.

GOP members and staffers have repeatedly raised the name of a person suspected of filing the whistleblower complaint that exposed Trump’s effort to pressure Ukraine to conduct investigations into his political adversaries, officials said.

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.

View the complete October 26 article by Greg Miller and Rachael Bade on The Washington Post website here.

GOP vows to take new steps to protect Trump

The Hill logoRepublicans are vowing more action after they stormed the secure impeachment hearing room last week, disrupting a deposition and grabbing headlines that were cheered by President Trump. 

The problem is they just don’t know what to do next.

Republicans could continue to protest and disrupt future closed-door hearings, but that move has undermined their own complaints about the Democrats’ impeachment process and raised concerns about the GOP violating security protocols.

View the complete October 27 article by Scott Wong and Juliegrace Brufke on The Hill website here.

In impeachment inquiry, Republican lawmakers ask questions about whistleblower, loyalty to Trump and conspiracy theories

Washington Post logoRepublican 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.

GOP members and staffers have repeatedly raised the name of a person suspected of filing the whistleblower complaint that exposed Trump’s effort to pressure Ukraine to conduct investigations into his political adversaries, officials said.

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.

View the complete October 26 article by Greg Miller and Rachael Bade on The Washington Post website here.

Bill Barr’s alternate universe ‘investigation’ has a goal: Right-wing authoritarian rule

AlterNet logoStudents 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

The Hill logoRepublican 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.

View the complete October 23 article by Katelyn Polantz, Scott Glover and Vicky Ward on the CNN website here.

Republicans Grind Impeachment Inquiry to Halt as Evidence Mounts Against Trump

New York Times logoHouse Republicans staged a protest in the secure suite on Capitol Hill where the impeachment inquiry is proceeding, seeking to shift the focus away from damaging revelations about the president.

WASHINGTON — House Republicans ground the impeachment inquiry to a halt for hours on Wednesday, staging a protest at the Capitol that sowed chaos and delayed a crucial deposition as they sought to deflect the spotlight from the revelations the investigation has unearthed about President Trump.

Chanting “Let us in! Let us in!” about two dozen Republican members of the House pushed past Capitol Police officers to enter the secure rooms of the House Intelligence Committee, where impeachment investigators have been conducting private interviews that have painted a damaging picture of the president’s behavior.

They refused to leave, and the standoff in the normally hushed corridors was marked by shouting matches between Republican and Democratic lawmakers and an appearance by the House sergeant-at-arms, the top law enforcement official in the chamber.

View the complete October 23 article by Sheryl Gay Stolberg and Nicholas Fandos on The New York Times website here.

‘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

Washington Post logoThe initial revelations about the whistleblower complaint and transcript of President Trump’s call with Ukraine’s president made it difficult for Republicans to defend Trump. Now, after a month of actions by the White House that seemed designed to test the limits of their willingness to go along, the cracks in Republicans’ tenuous defense are starting to show.

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.