Category: Trump Administration

‘Inside Job?’: Republican strategist explains how GOP’s vote against the Jan. 6 commission really looks

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Conservatives seem happy to lie about everything from election fraud to Sandy Hook, until it’s time to go to court.

One Republican strategist has a relatively different take on the insurrection at the U.S. Capitol. While an overwhelming number of Americans have blamed former President Donald Trump for inciting the insurrection, one strategist actually views the entire ordeal as an “inside job.” 

On Friday, May 28, Rick Wilson appeared on The Dean Obeidallah Show where he expressed frustration over House and Senate Republicans’ failure to support the establishment of the Jan. 6 commission. where he expressed frustration over House and Senate Republicans’ failure to support the establishment of the Jan. 6 commission.While the commission would have opened the door for a thorough investigation into the U.S. Capitol insurrection, Republican lawmakers managed to block the effort by way of the filibuster. 

According to the longtime Republican, the lawmakers’ efforts appear to be relative to an “inside job.” When asked how Democratic lawmakers should move forward politically, Wilson laid out his arguments. Continue reading.

MyPillow CEO flew Kristi Noem to GOP governors conference on his private jet

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Mike Lindell was then kicked out of the RGA event after threatening to confront certain governors.

South Dakota Gov. Kristi Noem flew on MyPillow CEO Mike Lindell’s private jet on her way to the Republican Governors Association spring meeting in Nashville, Tennessee, this week, according to two people familiar with the matter. 

Lindell, a close ally of former President Donald Trump, was kicked out of the event after he had promised to confront Arizona Gov. Doug Ducey and Georgia Gov. Brian Kemp about why they aren’t pushing to overturn the 2020 election results in their states. An RGA official had said he was not allowed to attend RGA events because he wasn’t a full member of the organization.

Lindell was able to gain access to the RGA meeting as a guest of Noem’s and as a prospective member, according to one of the people familiar with Noem’s travel arrangements. Continue reading.

Gaetz: The Second Amendment Is Meant For ‘Armed Rebellion’

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Rep. Matt Gaetz (R-FL) told an audience of supporters at a rally on Thursday that the Second Amendment is about “the ability to maintain an armed rebellion against the government.”

Gaetz spoke in Dalton, Georgia, in his latest in a series of appearances alongside Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA).

Telling the crowd that they must fight to preserve their rights under the Constitution, he referred to its Second Amendment. Continue reading.

Key Trump property at center of fraud investigation, newly published subpoenas show: report

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The Daily Beast on Friday evening published three subpoenas that have not yet been previously seen by the general public.

“As two separate investigations into the Trump Organization heat up, a series of subpoenas issued by the New York attorney general and the Manhattan district attorney shows how prosecutors are probing one particular land deal,” The Beast reported.

The subpoenas were issued to the towns of Bedford, New Castle, and North Castle. Continue reading.

Author of ‘How Democracies Die’ reveals why the US is in worse shape than he thought

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During the 2020 presidential race, a wide range of Donald Trump critics — including arch-conservative columnist/author Mona Charen (who worked in the Reagan White House) and Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, a self-described “democratic socialist” — slammed Trump as dangerously authoritarian. They warned that U.S. democracy itself was on the line. Now-President Joe Biden won the election, but the threat of authoritarianism was evident when Trump tried to overturn the election results and a violent far-right mob attacked the U.S. Capitol Building on January 6. Four months into Biden’s presidency, journalist Susan B. Glasser examines the state of American democracy this week in an article for The New Yorker — and she warns that there is a lot to be worried about.

“Far from embracing Biden’s call for unity,” Glasser explains, “Republicans remain in thrall to the divisive rants and election conspiracy theories of their defeated former president. As a result, Congress is at such a partisan impasse that it cannot even agree on a commission to investigate the January 6 attack by a pro-Trump mob on its own building.”

Glasser notes that during Biden’s 2020 campaign, he “carried around” a copy of the 2018 book “How Democracies Die” — which was written by Harvard University professors Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt and warned that authoritarianism was prevailing over liberal democracy in many countries. And Biden has stressed that the United States needs to set a positive example for the world by showing how well democracy can work. But many Republican Trump supporters, according to Glasser, are showing themselves to be overtly anti-democracy. Continue reading.

COMMENTARY: The United States is at the mercy of those who think they’re God’s elect

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I’m going to try connecting things that don’t at first seem related. They are the fight over a commission to investigate the January 6 insurrection; the disproportional number of covid deaths in states run by Republican governors; this week’s shooting massacre in San Jose, Calif., and every other one like it; and, let’s see, what else? Well, feel free at the end of this piece to add your own examples. There are plenty more.

All have in common the political concept that God divided the world between the elected and the unelected, that is, between His chosen and everyone else deserving of eternal damnation. (They deserve what’s coming to them, in other words.) For the chosen, anything is possible. For God’s enemies, God’s law. All politics, all historical struggle over power and limited resources, can be seen through a lens in which everything begins with the chosen and ends with the chosen. It’s a closed circuit—politically, religiously, economically and every way that matters. Important for you to understand is this: it’s impervious to democracy, morality, justice and the truth. If you want to keep this republic of ours, you’ve got to keep these people away from power.

The commission

The Republicans in the United States Senate this morning filibustered a bipartisan House bill that would have created an independent ideologically neutral commission to investigate the January 6 sacking and looting of the United States Capitol. The United States Congress created such commissions after the Oklahoma City bombing in the 1990s and the terrorist attacks on September 11, 2001. Along with being good for democracy and patriotism, a commission of this kind is the right thing to do. Continue reading.

Sen. Murkowski delivers pointed criticism of fellow Republicans, including McConnell, who oppose Jan. 6 commission

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On the eve of the failure of a measure that would form a commission to investigate the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol, Sen. Lisa Murkowski (R-Alaska) told reporters that the decision facing senators is about more than “just one election cycle.”

Murkowski made the remarks in an extraordinary exchange at the Capitol on Thursday night. It comes as Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) has been urging Republican senators to oppose the establishment of an independent commission, which he argued is “extraneous,” and as relatives of the late Capitol Police officer Brian D. Sicknick plead with senators to back the legislation.

“They don’t want to rock the boat,” Murkowski said of Republican senators who oppose the commission. “They don’t want to upset. But again, it’s important that there be a focus on the facts and on the truth. And that may be unsettling, but we need to understand that.” Continue reading.

Senate GOP blocks legislation on Jan. 6 commission

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Senate Republicans on Friday blocked legislation to form a commission to probe the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol.

Senators voted 54-35 on the House-passed bill, falling short of the 10 GOP votes needed to get it over an initial hurdle and marking the first successful filibuster by Republicans in the 117th Congress. 

GOP Sens. Lisa Murkowski (Alaska), Mitt Romney (Utah), Susan Collins(Maine), Bill Cassidy (La.), Rob Portman (Ohio) and Ben Sasse (Neb.) broke ranks and voted to advance the legislation. Continue reading.

New Poll: Arizona Voters Reject 2020 Election ‘Audit’

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A majority of likely voters in Arizona oppose the audit state Senate Republicans forced of some 2.1 million ballots cast in the state’s 2020 presidential elections, according to a poll released Thursday by a GOP consulting firm in the state, a fact Republican analysts say could be problematic for the party in the coming midterm elections.

The poll found 55 percent of voters don’t support the hand recount of some 2.1 million ballots in Maricopa County, the state’s largest. Democrats overwhelmingly oppose it, but so do 68 percent of unaffiliated voters.

What’s more, 44.5 percent of likely voters say they would be less likely to vote for a candidate who supported the audit, leading Chuck Coughlin, a Republican who is the president and CEO of the firm that conducted the poll, to say it proves the audit is a political liability for the GOP. Continue reading.

The GOP’s brazen move to strip power from a fraud-narrative-busting secretary of state — again

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Georgia Republicans earlier this year passed new voting restrictions, leading corporations including Major League Baseball to protest. What followed was a big to-do about whether that was an overreaction. The bill didn’t exactly match up with Democrats’ claims of a modern-day “Jim Crow,” and many of the new provisions were within the mainstream of even blue states.

But the bill was also watered-down from much-bolder proposals that had previously passed, including one transparently targeted at limiting voter drives by Black churches. Mix in the effort’s proximity to Republicans losing the state for the first time in 28 years — and to similar efforts in other GOP-controlled states despite no proof of actual, significant voter fraud — and it wasn’t difficult to draw conclusions about why this was done.

And there was perhaps one part of the law that best drove home how much this was aimed at gaming the system. It removed Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger (R) from the state election board. This effectively allowed the GOP-controlled state legislature to appoint a majority of the board. Continue reading.