Opinion: The absurdity of Putin’s lies should be obvious. Thanks to Trump, it isn’t.

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For the past few years, Republicans in Congress have echoed Russian propaganda. On Wednesday, in Geneva, Vladimir Putin returned the favor: He echoed Republican propaganda.

After a meeting with President Biden, Russia’s strongman used his moment on the international stage to hold a news conference. ABC News’s Rachel Scott was waiting for him.

“The list of your political opponents who are dead, imprisoned or jailed is long,” she said, including “Alexei Navalny, whose organization calls for free and fair elections and an end to corruption …. So my question, Mr. President: What are you so afraid of?” Continue reading.

Trump supporter who led ‘armed fighters’ into the Capitol was just angry about having to wear a mask: lawyers

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According to The Daily Beast, an attorney for Russell Taylor, a California man accused of leading a group of “armed fighters” into the Capitol to stop election certification on January 6, insisted in court that he should be released ahead of trial because he is not really a terrorist or an insurrectionist — he’s just an ordinary guy who was driven to do what he did because he was angry about COVID-19 mask mandates.

“‘He’s kind of boring, this is probably the most exciting thing that’ll happen in his life,’ Taylor’s lawyer, Dyke Huish, said during a Tuesday detention hearing,” reported Pilar Melendez. “‘Really he’s kind of a vanilla kind of guy — though admittedly he was upset about the masks.’ Huish describing his client as ‘moderately successful,’ and a religious man who doesn’t drink and went to Brigham Young University. He insisted that Taylor’s actions during the insurrection were unique and spurred by his anger over the state-wide lockdown and mask mandate. He denied that Taylor is a militiaman — just that his documented violent actions were misunderstood. ‘This was a guy who got mad about the masks and so he got wound up and felt like this was an appropriate thing to do,’ Huish said during the hearing.”

Prosecutors, however, outlined evidence that Taylor wasn’t quite the easygoing family man his lawyer characterized him as. Continue reading.

Congressman reveals new photo from the Capitol riot after Republicans try to ‘memory hole’ the insurrection

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During a hearing this week, Rep. Paul Gosar (R-AZ) questioned FBI Director Christopher Wray over the shooting death of Ashli Babbitt, the QAnon-believing woman who stormed the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6 along with a mob of Trump supporters, saying that she was “executed.”

“It’s disturbing,” Gosar said. “The Capitol Police officer that did that shooting appeared to be hiding, lying in wait and then gave no warning before killing her.”

But Rep. Ruben Gallego (D-AZ) doesn’t see it that way. Responding to Gosar’s comments on Twitter, Gallego posted a photo that he took on Jan. 6, showing the mob outside the door where Babbitt was shot. Continue reading.

Fiona Hill recalls horrific experiences of Trump’s meeting with Putin — and how she expects Biden’s will go

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Fiona Hill, the former official at the U.S. National Security Council, specializing in Russian and European affairs, spoke to CNN’s Don Lemon, remembering what it was like during the meeting between former President Donald Trump and Russia’s Vladimir Putin.

President Joe Biden will meet with Putin in the early hours of Wednesday morning in the United States, and there will be a significant difference between the Biden and Trump meetings. 

Hill is the former expert who shredded Republican lies about the Russia investigation. She also revealed as part of the investigation into Trump’s bribery of Ukraine that Rudy Giuliani was circumventing the National Security Council with his own shadow efforts. Giuliani has now become part of an investigation by the FBI into his international dealings.  Continue reading.

21 House Republicans vote against awarding Congressional Gold Medal to all police officers who responded on Jan. 6

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Twenty-one House Republicans on Tuesday voted against awarding the Congressional Gold Medal to all police officers who responded to the Jan. 6 violent attack on the Capitol by a pro-Trump mob.

The measure passed the House with overwhelming bipartisan support from 406 lawmakers. But the 21 Republicans who voted “no” drew immediate condemnation from some of their colleagues, and the vote underscored the lingering tensions in Congressamid efforts by some GOP lawmakers to whitewash the events of that day.

Rep. Robert C. “Bobby” Scott (D-Va.) called the “no” votes “a sad commentary on the @HouseGOP,” while Rep. Adam Kinzinger (R-Ill.) declared, “How you can vote no to this is beyond me.” Continue reading.

Opinion: A trove of preposterous emails raises the question: How can Republicans still be loyal to this man?

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MANY REPUBLICANS want the nation to ignore and forget President Donald Trump’s poisonous final months in office — the most dangerous moment in modern presidential history, orchestrated by the man to whom the GOP still swears allegiance. Yet the country must not forget how close it came to a full-blown constitutional crisis, or worse. Tuesday brought another reminder that, but for the principled resistance of some key officials, the consequences could have been disastrous.

The House Committee on Oversight and Reform on Tuesday released emails showing that the White House waged a behind-the-scenes effort to enlist the Justice Department in its crusade to advance Mr. Trump’s baseless allegations of fraud in the 2020 election. On Dec. 14, 10 days before Jeffrey Rosen took over as acting attorney general, Mr. Trump’s assistant emailed Mr. Rosen, asserting that Dominion Voting Systems machines in Michigan were intentionally fixed and pointing to a debunked analysis showing what “the machines can and did do to move votes.” The email declared, “We believe it has happened everywhere.”

Later that month, Mr. Trump’s assistant sent Mr. Rosen a brief that the president apparently wanted the Justice Department to submit to the Supreme Court. The draft mirrored the empty arguments that the state of Texas made to the court before the justices dismissed the state’s lawsuit. Piling on the pressure, then-White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows also dispatched an email asking Mr. Rosen to examine allegations of voter fraud in Georgia. A day later, Mr. Meadows apparently forwarded Mr. Rosen a video alleging that Italians used satellites to manipulate voting equipment. These were just some of the preposterous White House emails claiming fraud in arguably the most secure presidential election ever. Continue reading.

Past criticism of Trump becomes potent weapon in GOP primaries

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As Republican candidates jockey for position in contests for open U.S. Senate seats, support from former President Trump has become the most coveted prize to be won, an instant differentiator that can help them stand out from a crowded field. 

By the same token, opposition researchers are discovering the most potent weapon against potential rivals: past comments critical of Trump, or acknowledgement that Trump lost to President Biden in the 2020 election. 

In key races across the country, those practitioners of the political dark arts are combing through radio and television interviews, Twitter feeds and public statements looking for any signs of apostasy among Republican contenders running for office. And while there are months to go before voters cast ballots, the earliest salvos in some key races have come against candidates who dared to criticize or question the ousted president.  Continue reading.

Senate on collision course over Trump DOJ subpoenas

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Senate Democrats are quickly running into a GOP buzzsaw as they probe the Trump-era Justice Department’s collection of lawmaker records.

Reports that the Department of Justice (DOJ) under former President Trumpobtained lawmaker communications data, and similar info on former White House Counsel Don McGahn, have sparked a days-long fury that’s sent Attorney General Merrick Garland scrambling to contain the fallout.

As part of the fierce backlash from Capitol Hill, Democrats on the Senate Judiciary Committee launched a probe this week and are threatening to subpoena former Attorneys General William Barr and Jeff Sessions if they don’t testify voluntarily. Continue reading.

We’re learning more about how Trump leveraged his power to bolster his election fantasies

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He had already been impeached on allegations of using federal resources for his own political benefit

On Dec. 14, 2020, about 2,500 people died of covid-19, the disease for which a vaccine was just beginning to be deployed. On that day, more than 200,000 people contracted the coronavirus, a number equal to 13 out of every 20,000 Americans. But in the White House, President Donald Trump’s focus was largely elsewhere: on his desperate effort to overturn the results of the presidential election that had been settled more than a month before.

At 5:39 p.m., Trump announced that his attorney general, William P. Barr, would be leaving his administration. The timing was odd, given that Trump had only a month left in office. But Trump, we learned on Tuesday, wasted no time in getting Barr’s replacement up to speed on the president’s primary concern.

About 40 minutes before Trump’s announcement about Barr, the president “sent an email via his assistant to Jeffrey A. Rosen, the incoming acting attorney general, that contained documents purporting to show evidence of election fraud in northern Michigan — the same claims that a federal judge had thrown out a week earlier in a lawsuit filed by one of Mr. Trump’s personal lawyers,” the New York Times’s Katie Benner reported. Continue reading.

Why Mike Lindell Can’t Stop

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The MyPillow tycoon has lost business pumping up Trump conspiracy theories, and probably lost his chance at a political future. But he believes he’s on a divine mission to overturn the election—and he’s not alone.

CHASKA, Minn.—One day in mid-May, after a rally in South Dakota to promote his new website, Mike Lindell, the pillow magnate and indefatigable election-conspiracy promoter, barreled into his company headquarters, sat himself down at a long table in a conference room he uses as a makeshift office and slid a dropper under his tongue.

The dropper was full of oleandrin, a plant extract that he touts—alarmingly, to scientists—as both a preventative and “miracle” cure for Covid-19. He squeezed.

“Look at this … I can never get the virus,” he said, near the beginning of the roughly six hours I spent with him over two days at MyPillow. “It’s impossible for me to get it.” Continue reading.