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'Have to assume': GOP senator again claims without proof Iranian 'sleeper cells' may be in US - Alternet.org

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Sen. Ron Johnson (R-WI) insisted that President Donald Trump's attack on Iran made him more determined to pass a bill that could strip health care from more than 10 million Medicaid recipients.

"Does this change anything for you, knowing that we are now looking at a world where our adversaries are on the march?" Fox News host Maria Bartiromo asked Johnson during a Sunday interview.

"No, if anything, it just strengthens my resolve," Jonson replied. "I mean, how do we expect to defend this nation if we're mortgaging its future, if we're bankrupting it?"

ALSO READ:America's enemies are tricking hobbyists into sharing national secrets: experts

The senator argued, however, that Trump's One Big Beautiful Bill did not go far enough.

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"Again, I appreciate what the House has done," he said. "I really don't have a beef with what they've done. It's just inadequate to the enormity of the problem."

Watch the video below from Fox News or at the link.

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an 10 24

one of Donald Trump's promises for a potential second presidency, includes ending birthright citizenship — which would defy the US Constitution.

During a Senate hearing Thursday, Republican Senator Ron Johnson (Wisconsin) echoed the former president's sentiment.

"For those of you who've been at the border, you also probably saw what I saw," the Ohio lawmaker said. "There are so many pregnant women, I mean, in their 8th or 9th month. Of course, they come here, and that child is a US citizen. Which, personally, I believe we ought to do away with birthright citizenship."

READ MORE:'Done a lot of damage': McConnell unleashes on 'sleazeball' Trump and his supporters

Johnson continued, "We are in the minority of countries that grant that. And it's just another magnet to come here. I hope, under a serious administration, deporting criminals will be reasonably easy. But past that point, it's gonna be really difficult. Because of birthright citizenship, are you really gonna separate an infant from their mother and father?"

In a July 2024 report, NBC News noted:

*Birthright citizenship has long been understood to be required under the Constitution’s 14th Amendment, which states: “All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States.” The language was included in the constitutional amendment enacted after the Civil War to ensure that Black former slaves and their children were recognized as citizens.

*The phrase has been generally understood by legal scholars of all ideological stripes to be self-explanatory, but that has not stopped some anti-immigration advocates from pressing an alternative interpretation.

Trump floated the idea of ending birthright citizenship during his presidency, which then-Republican Speaker of the House, Paul Ryan (OH) said the MAGA hopeful "obviously" couldn't do, according to MPR News.

READ MORE:Here’s how a 'radicalized' Michael Flynn 'cashed in' on 'baseless conspiracy theories'

Watch the video below or at this link.

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Right-wing cable news networks have pushed false claims about non-citizens voting relentlessly

In the past three weeks, Fox News, Fox Business, and Newsmax together have made at least 141 baseless claims pushing falsehoods about noncitizen voting

Written by Harrison Ray

Research contributions from Rob Savillo, Tyler Monroe, Ben Van Bloem & Lis Power

Published 10/04/24

Fox Business, Fox News, and Newsmax have peddled the false conspiracy theory that noncitizens vote en masse at least 141 times since House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA) unveiled the text of the SAVE Act messaging bill. Fox anchor Maria Bartiromo and her shows have been some of the biggest propagators of the claims.

• On September 6, Johnson unveiled a continuing resolution to fund the federal government that included the text of the Safeguard American Voter Eligibility Act, “legislation backed by Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump requiring proof of citizenship to vote.” As The Washington Post’s Philip Bump put it, the SAVE Act is “a Republican effort to combine election denialism and border alarmism” that “would make Americans’ lives more difficult in service of addressing a problem that is not demonstrably significant.”

Since then, conservative cable news networks’ false claims have included suggesting that Democrats have actively encouraged noncitizens to vote in order to swing election results, stating that there have been thousands of instances of noncitizen voting, and highlighting extremely rare, individual instances of voter impersonation in order to suggest the practice is widespread.

• Video file

Video

CitationFrom the September 19, 2024, edition of Newsmax's Chris Plante The Right Squad

• Right-wing media and Republicans have pushed false claims that noncitizens are widely voting in elections for years — even though it has long been illegal for noncitizens to make a false claim of citizenship on a voter registration form or to vote in federal elections — and states have many measures in place to prevent noncitizens from voting. Additionally, studies have shown that voting by noncitizens is extremely rare and does not impact the final outcome of elections. But that hasn't stopped the networks from disseminating the lie.

• From September 6, when Johnson unveiled a continuing resolution to avoid a government shutdown that included the text of the Safeguard American Voter Eligibility Act, through October 2:

• • Fox Business, Fox News, and Newsmax together made at least 141 claims falsely suggesting or fearmongering about noncitizen voters in the 2024 elections.

• • Newsmax led all networks with the most false claims (65), which was followed by Fox News (42) and Fox Business (34).

• • Two of Maria Bartiromo's three shows — Fox Business' Mornings with Maria and Fox News’ Sunday Morning Futures with Maria Bartiromo — were among the top five shows with the most claims, with 20 and 11 claims, respectively. The other top shows spreading false claims about noncitizen voting were Newsmax's Rob Schmitt Tonight (16), The Chris Salcedo Show (11), and Wake Up America (10).

* Among the top offenders was Newsmax host Rob Schmitt, who had the most claims (10), followed by Newsmax host Chris Salcedo (7), Sen. Ron Johnson (R-WI) (5), Speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA) (5), and Fox anchor Maria Bartiromo (4).

• • In total, 52 of the 141 claims (37%) came from Republican members of Congress.

• By relentlessly pushing baseless and false claims about noncitizen voting, right-wing media are once again priming viewers to deny results of the election.

• ## Methodology

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mma

fox shrugs at Maria Bartiromo’s peddling of “kind of racist” election fraud lies

Written by Matt Gertz

Published 08/21/24

Fox’s response to Fox Business anchor Maria Bartiromo peddling thirdhand election fraud falsehoods she didn’t bother to check demonstrates how the network has abandoned anything resembling journalistic standards in its quest to return Donald Trump to the White House.

Bartiromo repeatedly told her Fox Business viewers this week about a “Democrat operation” to register “massive lines of illegals” to vote at Texas government offices, a story she originally attributed to the wife of a friend of a friend and made no apparent effort to verify. Her thirdhand gossip was swiftly debunked by the local Republican Party and the Texas Department of Public Safety, with a spokesperson for the latter noting that her conspiracy theory was “kind of racist.”

It should go without saying that at any credible news outlet, an anchor promoting wild claims they hadn’t verified that promptly dissolved like this would be facing disciplinary action for breaching standards. But Fox apparently doesn’t have standards barring its purported journalists from citing gossip they haven’t bothered to try to confirm on the air.

Zeteo News media columnist Justin Baragona reached out to a Fox spokesperson on Tuesday about whether Bartiromo planned to address or correct her false claims about undocumented immigrants registering to vote en masse in Texas.

“According to a Fox News spokesperson, Maria Bartiromo was clearly citing a source of hers and never said she confirmed the story,” Baragona subsequently posted to X. “The spox also said it is worth noting that Republicans have been speaking a lot about this issue of noncitizens voting in recent months.”

Meanwhile, Bartiromo did not mention her debunked claims on her Wednesday show, though she did ask the Republican member of Congress she hosted questions like, “Do you have any evidence that you can share with us that tells us that illegals are registered to vote?” and “Do you think you’ll be able to stop it? I mean you’ve got 76 days before the election. How many people will be voting illegally?”

Fox’s response simply emphasizes the problems with Bartiromo’s coverage:

• Yes, it is true that Bartiromo was citing a “source,” if that’s what you want to call her friend who said they heard it from a friend who heard it from their wife.
• Yes, it is true that Bartiromo never said she confirmed the story.
• Yes, it is true that Republicans have sought to undermine the election with baseless claims of noncitizens voting.

But all of that is bad!

If you work at a national cable news network, you’re not supposed to feed your viewers thirdhand, unverified gossip simply because it supports the claims of a political party, and if you do that and the story is subsequently debunked by everyone who bothers to actually try and look into it, that’s a black mark on your credibility.

I don’t want to suggest there was some halcyon day when Fox acted responsibly — the network prioritized Republican political success from its founding — but there was a time when the network’s executives at least tried to curtail its most obvious and indefensible journalistic failings.

When the hosts of Fox & Friends in 2007 cited a right-wing outlet’s quickly debunked report that then-Sen. Barack Obama had attended an extremist Islamic madrassa as a child, the network made clear both publicly and privately that its standards had been violated.

Host Steve Doocy issued a clarification on the show’s next edition. John Moody, at the time Fox’s vice president for news, also acknowledged to The New York Times that the network had erred. “The hosts violated one of our general rules, which is know what you are talking about,” he said. “They reported information from a publication whose accuracy we didn’t know.”

Moody also sent a daily editorial note to staff stating what should have been the obvious: “For the record: seeing an item on a website does not mean it is right. Nor does it mean it is ready for air on FNC.”

Seventeen years later, seeing a text from a friend detailing a story the friend’s friend heard from their spouse apparently means it is ready for air on Fox. The spokesperson’s comments about Bartiromo effectively confirm as much. And meanwhile Jesse Watters, the network’s biggest star, is now apparently preparing to send a staffer to Hawaii to “dig deep” and “get the truth” about Obama’s birth certificate.

It all makes perfect sense when you recognize that Watters, Bartiromo, and the spokesperson work not at a news outlet, but a propaganda network that is in the tank for Trump’s presidential campaign. The peril for Fox, however, is the Dominion Voting Systems defamation lawsuit shows how letting people like Bartiromo spin up poorly sourced conspiracy theories to benefit Trump can get very, very expensive.

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1. ### Maria Bartiromo's wild and “kind of racist” election conspiracy theory collapses immediately

:{08/20/24

2. ### Fox News and the MAGA media are lining up their shot at American democracy

:{05/14/24

3. ### Maria Bartiromo's source for election conspiracy theories: “The Wind tells me I’m a ghost, but I don’t believe it."

02/16/23

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mma

Bartiromo's wild and “kind of racist” election conspiracy theory collapses immediately

Bartiromo, who was deeply involved in promoting the Dominion election conspiracy theories that Fox News paid for, is at it again

Written by Matt Gertz

Research contributions from Lis Power

Published 08/20/24

Maria Bartiromo repeatedly used her Fox Business show to peddle an election fraud conspiracy theory that she claimed originated with the wife of a friend of a friend in Texas and that she made no apparent effort to confirm. But when the Texas Department of Public Safety and the local Republican Party investigated her reckless allegation, they discovered that none of it was true.

On Sunday morning, Bartiromo posted an item to X alleging that “a massive line of immigrants” had been obtaining driver’s licenses and registering to vote at three Department of Motor Vehicles offices in Texas:

From a friend ...

Friend of mine’s wife had to take her 16 yr old son to the DMV this week for a new license. Couldn’t get an online appointment(all full) so went in person and had to go to 3 DMV’s to get something done. First DMV was in Weatherford. Had a massive line of immigrants getting licenses and had a tent and table outside the front door of the DMV registering them to vote! Second one was in Fort Worth with same lines and same Dems out front. Third one was in North Fort Worth had no lines but had same voter registration drive.

Bartiromo brought the wildly flimsy allegation to Fox’s airwaves the following day, having apparently done no independent reporting to confirm claims that she said originated with the wife of a friend of her friend.

She brought up the story in at least three segments on the Monday and Tuesday editions of her Fox program — including in interviews with two Republican U.S. senators.

Indeed, the story became even more sinister for the Fox audience, with Bartiromo alleging that the people registering to vote were not just “immigrants,” as stated in her X post, but “illegals.” A spokesperson for the Texas Department of Public Safety noted that assuming that nonwhite Texans are undocumented is “kind of racist” and called her story “simply false.”

• ### Bartiromo used Fox show to trumpet thirdhand claim of “illegals” getting registered to vote

Bartiromo first flagged the story during a Monday morning interview with Sheriff Thad Cleveland of Terrell County, Texas, and Republican strategist Michael Balboni.

“I'm serious about this issue of illegals voting, and I want to get your take on this,” Bartiromo told Balboni. “Apparently, the DMV offices right now are packed with illegals right now trying to get driver's licenses, and they're getting Social Security cards, driver's licenses, apparently, in very short order after coming into the country. They want to get them naturalized as soon as possible before the election.”

She returned to the subject later in the segment, saying that a “person … spoke to me about this this weekend” detailing how DMV offices had been “jam-packed with illegals” and claiming that “he” had told her there had been a voter registration “tent and a table” in Weatherford, Texas, that had been “an obvious Democrat operation.”

Bartiromo further discussed the DMV conspiracy theory during an interview with Sen. Ron Johnson (R-WI). This time, she said the allegation came not from the wife of a friend of a friend, as she originally wrote on X, but from “a friend” who had personally seen the “massive lines of illegals getting licenses” and registering to vote, and texted her directly.

“I reported, earlier, and over the weekend, that a friend had sent me a text this weekend telling me that they went to DMV for a new license, and there were lines and lines of illegals all over the DMV office, the Department of Motor Vehicles,” Bartiromo said. “There was one in Weatherford, Texas, massive line of immigrants getting licenses. They had a tent outside and a table to register them to vote.”

“So, what is going on in terms of illegals voting in this election? And do you think that is the reason that the border has been wide open for three and a half years?” she asked.

Video

CitationFrom the August 19, 2024, edition of Fox Business' Mornings with Maria

“Yeah, I’ve been saying that for about three and a half years,” Johnson replied, quickly pivoting from Bartiromo’s anecdote to the “great replacement” conspiracy theory. “I saw no other explanation of why Joe Biden-Kamala Harris would open up the border, presenting a clear and present danger to America, other than to change the electorate to bring in more people — it would be, you know, very beneficial to them from a standpoint of getting elected.”

“Democrats want to make it easy to cheat,” he added. “They want to change the electorate, that is what this has all been about, and it’s destroying this country.”

Bartiromo discussed the story with a second senator on Tuesday.

“I got a tip over the weekend that these DMV offices are jam-packed with illegals and they’re getting them Social Security cards and drivers' licenses,” she told Sen. Roger Marshall (R-KS). “Do you have any evidence that illegals are registered to vote?”

• ### Bartiromo’s thirdhand claim was “simply false,” “kind of racist”

Others who saw Bartiromo’s initial X post did what she apparently failed to do and tried to confirm her story.

Sgt. William Lockridge, spokesperson for the Texas Department of Public Safety, told the Fort Worth Star-Telegram that the account Bartiromo promoted was “simply false” and “kind of racist.”

From the Monday report:

Contrary to Bartiromo’s friend’s wife’s account, there is no office for the Texas Department of Motor Vehicles in Weatherford. Folks there get their licenses at a DPS Driver License office.

Still, no such tent and table were set up outside the office last week.

“None of it is true,” Lockridge said, adding that the assumption that non-white Texans lined up to get their driver licenses are immigrants or illegal is “kind of racist.”

“Just because these people aren’t white, that doesn’t mean they’re illegal,” he said.

There was a table set outside the DPS Driver License office in Lake Worth on Friday, Lockridge said, but not at the other two sites mentioned in Bartiromo’s post.

Similarly, Brady Gray, the chairman of the Parker County GOP, said on X that his group had spent “24 hours investigating the claims” Bartiromo made about Weatherford and found them to be “erroneous.” From the post:

1. While we are everyday registering more voters in Parker county, there has been no large submission of registrants consistent with the claim.

2. All voter registration applications in the county are processed by the county EA office (County Voter Registrar) and are uploaded to SOS to verify the applicants eligibility to vote (i.e. citizenship, etc.). Not only have there been no recent instances of ineligible individuals attempting to register in Parker county, there have only been two in the last 15 years.

3. The DPS office has confirmed that there have been no tents or tables and no one registering voters on their premises, and that if it were the case they would be told to leave, as it is not allowed.

• ### Bartiromo’s history of promoting absurd election conspiracy theories

Bartiromo’s ludicrously thin claims of Democrats trying to register undocumented immigrants to vote in the 2024 presidential election fit neatly within her recent career.

Bartiromo promoted a series of wild claims about election fraud following the 2020 election. Her deeds included hosting Trumpist lawyer Sidney Powell to baselessly allege that Dominion Voting Systems had rigged the vote against Donald Trump. She brought Powell on after Powell forwarded her an email from a woman who claimed that Dominion’s software flipped votes from Trump to Joe Biden — and also that “the Wind tells me I’m a ghost, but I don’t believe it.”

Her Dominion segments were featured in the company’s defamation lawsuit against Fox, which resulted in her network paying a record settlement. But they had no apparent impact on her standing at Fox: She retains a weekly Fox News show and a three-hour weekday show on Fox Business, giving her platforms where she can ask U.S. senators about unverified thirdhand claims.

That leaves her well-positioned to help Trump if he once again tries to subvert a presidential election.

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hypoc

an 12 23 no lnx

Busted: Jim Jordan and James Comer have a new judicial plan

Matt Laslo

andRaw Story

December 25, 2023

WASHINGTON – Republicans in Congress aren’t just doing all they can to impeach the Biden name – and possibly President Joe Biden himself – they’re also going to extraordinary lengths to protect two billionaire GOP megadonors who helped the party remake the Supreme Court in recent years.

For one, House Judiciary Committee Chair Jim Jordan (R-OH) and Oversight Committee Chair James Comer (R-KY) are trying to stymie Washington, D.C. Attorney General Brian Schwalb’s investigation into Federalist Society co-chairman Leonard Leo.

Schwalb is looking into allegations that Leo is illegally profiting off non-profits. Jordan and Comer have responded by threatening to subpoena Schwalb.

ALSO READ: A neuroscientist’s guide to surviving Christmas with Trump-loving relatives

Meanwhile on the other side of the U.S. Capitol, Republicans on the Senate Judiciary Committee walked out en masse, boycotting Democrats’ effort to subpoena Leo and Republican jurisprudence sugar daddy Harlan Crow over the hundreds of thousands of dollars in gifts he’s given to Justice Clarence Thomas and his wife Ginni over the decades, according to a ProPublica investigation.

The GOP offensive to protect two billionaire donors is blatant hypocrisy, according to ethics watchdogs.

“There are many senators who will say anything. I mean, as long as it's their guy, they'll defend anything, and they have no consistency whatsoever and they're completely hypocritical,” Melanie Sloan, a senior adviser for nonpartisan watchdog American Oversight, told Raw Story.

ALSO READ: Florida judge’s son is a neo-Nazi patron: data leak

In today’s tribal and perpetually warring Congress, it seems even pay-to-play politics are now partisan. While Senate Republicans are vowing to use all procedural tools at their disposal to block Leo and Crow from being subpoenaed, most in the party are also backing the Biden impeachment inquiry because they say Hunter Biden was selling access to his father — an accusation for which they’ve provided no evidence to date.

On paper – paper stamped with GOP letterhead, mind you – the impeachment inquiry is focused on buying access.

“It better be, because, quite honestly, Hunter Biden's personal problems aren't the issue. The issue is whether he was selling access to a vice president willing to provide that access, and whether the vice president at the time – the current president – was enriched by it,” Sen. Kevin Cramer (R-ND) told Raw Story.

As for the hundreds of thousands of dollars in private jet travel, stays at his private retreat and luxurious free vacations aboard his 162-foot yacht that Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas and his wife Ginni admitted to receiving from Harlan Crow?

“That's not enriching yourself, because you went on a boat ride for God's sake. That's not the same as cash in your checking account,” Cramer said of ProPublica’s revelations.

Cramer argues, if the trips weren’t free “maybe he wouldn't have gone on it.”

“The difference is … he’s a friend. Friends are allowed to provide hospitality for you in their home or on their boat. That's very different than a foreign adversary providing cash to a sitting vice president of the United States through his son. That's barely, barely even in the same ballpark, if at all,” Cramer said. “It’s a stretch, to say the least. It's just, it's not the same thing.”

That’s not even mentioning the free private school tuition Thomas’ nephew – who he raised like a son – received from Crow, which ProPublica estimates could have totaled upward of $150,000.

ALSO READ: Busted: These healthcare nonprofits are accepting millions from Big Tobacco

Senate Democrats, some of whom argue Thomas was in a prime position to rule on cases that effect Crow’s fortune, are particularly interested in whether Crow declared the lavish free vacations and travel as business expenses on his federal taxes.

For Leo – co-chairman of the Federalist Society, including the $1.6 billion fortune it now controls – Campaign for Accountability filed an IRS complaint alleging he’s funneling money from seven nonprofit entities he controls to his for-profit businesses, thus illegally profiting off campaign donations. The apparent interference from Jordan and Comer is appalling to watchdogs.

“Then, at the same time, they're screaming about the politicization of justice when they talk about Donald Trump, but they want to tell a sitting U.S. attorney – you know, the state's attorney for D.C. – who he can and can't look at because they don't want him looking at Leonard Leo,” Sloan said. “They just are bowing down at the altar of Leonard Leo and his $1.6 billion.”

House Republicans deny they’re interfering with an ongoing investigation.

“I’m confused. So it’s OK for Democrats to subpoena Leonard Leo and Harlan Crow, but not OK for us to look into AG Schwalb? Isn’t that literally the definition of a double standard — a.k.a Democrats can do something, but we can’t?” Russell M. Dye, communications director and counsel for the House Judiciary Committee, emailed Raw Story.

ALSO READ: ‘Too preposterous to be real’: College hires ‘pink slime’ publisher as journalism prof

Republicans say there’s no reason for an investigation, because the megadonors aren’t accused of trying to change the outcomes of specific cases before the Supreme Court.

“I really think there's like a fundamental difference here between trading favors and not, right? The difference here is the consideration. I've seen no evidence that any of the Supreme Court justices, least of all Clarence Thomas, offered to give anything back. To me, that’s the big difference,” Sen. J.D. Vance (R-OH) told Raw Story.

“Now look, if Harlan Crow or anybody else wrote $100 million to a Supreme Court Justice, and say, ‘Hey, please do this thing in my benefit’ — well, that raises some serious problems. But is it the standard that a Supreme Court justice can't have a rich friend?” Vance continued. “If they want to set that standard, it’s up to them, but I don't think that that raises nearly the same pay-to-play concerns as Joe Biden’s situation.”

Gifts are different than business appears to be the current GOP ethical standard for such matters.

“We're not talking about gifts. This is business. So with Hunter [Biden], this is, you know, he's on the Burisma board. He's doing these foreign business deals in Ukraine and China and lots of offices, and he is openly out there selling his dad,” Sen. Josh Hawley (R-MO) told Raw Story. “At the very least, he's clearly making money off his father. The question is, did the president benefit from that? That's what they need to answer. So that's why we have the inquiry.”

When pressed on the impeachment inquiry into Biden, former Senate Judiciary Committee Chair Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-IA) wasn’t up to date on the specifics, even as he proudly remembers getting the investigative ball rolling for House Republicans.

“You’re talking about the substance of it. I’m not sure I can talk about the substance of it,” Grassley told Raw Story. “Except, the process is necessary to complete what [Sen. Ron] Johnson (R-WI) and I started four years ago, and that is to get all the information that Congress is entitled to in our oversight capacity and that's what it's all about, as far as I know.”

The Supreme Court adopted a new code of ethics since the lavish gifts were first reported, so Democrats’ complaints are outdated, Grassley argues.

ALSO READ: You blew it in New Hampshire, Joe Biden. Pray it doesn’t hurt you — and then some

“Because the judicial branch put out their … new regulation, and if that doesn’t take care of it – and we won't know that for a little while, maybe a year or two – then maybe that'd be a legitimate question,” Grassley said. “But right now it’s not a legitimate question considering the initiative of the Supreme Court.”

After all, 10 Republicans on the Senate Judiciary Committee walked out of the vote to subpoena Leo and Crow on November 30 – allowing Democrats to pass the measure 11-0 – Senate Republicans argue the vote broke committee rules.

“They’re not legal,” Sen. John Kennedy (R-LA) told Raw Story. “Anybody who knows a lawbook from a J. Crew catalog knows they can get those subpoenas quashed in one hearing.”

Because of wholesale GOP opposition, there doesn’t seem to be the votes to formalize the subpoenas on the Senate floor where Republicans are threatening to require a 60-vote threshold.

“You’ll never see this come to the floor,” Judiciary Committee ranking member Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-SC) told Politico. “We’ll attack it legally, we’ll vote against it. It’d be a s—show.”

Even as the party hasn’t decided how it will proceed in the Senate, many Democrats expected this.

“We're going after the icons of the Republican Party, Leonard Leo, of course, and, to some, Justice Thomas. They’re very sensitive to that,” Senate Democratic Whip Dick Durbin (D-IL) told Raw Story. “Public sentiment is overwhelmingly in our favor, so they have got to be strident in opposition.”

The two different standards for Biden and GOP donors is remarkable to Democrats.

“Republicans want to protect the court that they have packed, and they protect the court by maintaining its status as an unaccountable highest court of the land,” Rep. Hank Johnson (D-GA) told Raw Story. “It looks like they're doing everything they can to keep hidden the secret relationships that are going on at the court with powerful interests that bring cases before the court.”

To the top Democrat on the House Oversight Committee, Rep. Jamie Raskin (D-MD), this made-for-Fox-and-Newsmax drama shows how completely former President Donald Trump has remade the GOP in his own image.

“It is just sad the way that Donald Trump has completed his stranglehold over the Republican Party,” Raskin told Raw Story. “Donald Trump has taught them – from the Charlottesville riot forward – that there should be no enemies on the right. And they have no enemies on the right, and they will take no principled stance against anybody on the right, no matter how fascistic they are.”

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One of Washington’s wealthiest senators argues against rich paying fair share to ensure Social Security’s s​urvival

Brett Wilkins Common Dreams

https://www.alternet.org/economy/ron-johnson-2662274408/

2 23 e&e

the  lead environmental attorney for former President Donald Trump said that climate change policy is part of a larger plot to “meta control” Americans.

Jeffrey Clark, Trump’s assistant attorney general for the Justice Department’s environment and natural resources division, spoke Saturday in Florida at a conference organized by the Heartland Institute, which has spent years attacking climate science.

Clark compared the Biden administration and climate advocates to the authoritarian pig characters in George Orwell’s dystopian novel “Animal Farm.” He said the climate movement’s “foot soldiers,” such as “soccer moms” and recent college students, had been manipulated to believe climate scientists.

"“The pigs who actually run the system, I think they run it for communistic purposes, so that’s what explains the fact that there’s a debate about whether this environmental catastrophe thinking is religious or is it self-interested from dark forces,” he told the crowd. “I think it’s both.”

Clark unsuccessfully pressured Trump to appoint him acting attorney general so he could help the former president try to overturn the 2020 election. He now works for the Center for Renewing America, an organization created largely by former Trump officials to influence the next Republican administration.

The Heartland Institute’s annual conference was a who’s who of climate deniers, Trump administration officials, members of Congress and researchers who claim climate change is not a threat.

As Clark spoke, he held up a piece of cardboard on which he had written “meta control.”

Last year, the congressional committee investigating the Jan. 6, 2021, Capitol riots referred Trump and “others” to the Justice Department for potential criminal prosecution for alleged conspiracy to defraud the United States. Clark’s actions are a significant focus of the report, but it’s not clear if he was referred for prosecution. He claimed that the body cameras worn by law enforcement officials who raided his home in June were intentionally used to embarrass him because he was detained in his underwear in the driveway of his Virginia home as part of the investigation into overturning the election.

After the election, Clark pushed Trump to appoint him as acting attorney general after Bill Barr resigned. The committee found that among the people close to Trump seeking to overturn the 2020 election, Clark “stands out as a participant.” He embraced conspiracy theories about the election and wanted the Justice Department to issue a statement that it had found evidence of widespread voter fraud. The plan failed when senior Justice Department officials told Trump, in an Oval Office meeting days before the Jan. 6 insurrection, that they would resign en masse if Clark took control.

On Saturday, Clark told the Heartland conference that he had been “canceled as a result of the 2020 election, The New York Times, etc., and the Jan. 6th Committee.”

Clark also served as deputy assistant attorney general under then-President George W. Bush in the Environment and Natural Resources Division. He has fought government climate regulations and called himself a longtime “climate hysteria lawyer.”

He said at the Heartland conference that he was scheduled during the Bush administration to have a climate debate with environmental activist Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., but that Kennedy canceled. Clark praised Kennedy’s current embrace of anti-vaccine and Covid-19 conspiracy theories.

He also shared insider stories of his time as Trump’s top environmental lawyer and talked about plans that had been discussed in secret to erode environmental protections. One of those included a form of “climate court” where states could select a jury of sympathetic researchers to challenge the science undergirding environmental protections.

Clark told the Heartland conference that in 2018 a major wind developer pressured him to eliminate environmental protections for migratory birds because they threatened business. Clark said he refused because he thought renewable energy was harming Americans.

“They were begging me, ‘Please, please make this enforcement action go away.’ And of course,I told them to pound sand, because I’m not going to save them from the fact that they’re engaged in an energy boondoggle that hurts the American people,” he said.

Sen. Ron Johnson (R-Wis.), who also spoke at the Heartland conference,said he was the “most ridiculed United States senator, particularly on climate.” Johnson, who has rejected basic climate science, told the audience that he believes rising temperatures are driven by natural warming trends, not the consumption of fossil fuels.

Climate scientists determined years ago that humans are responsible for rising temperatures. The last decade has seen the warmest global temperatures ever recorded.

Johnson, who was the Senate’s _{fourth-highest recipient}_ of oil and gas donations in the last election cycle, told the crowd that he was“naturally skeptical” and refused to believe in settled climate science.

“You’ve got the other side that continues to proclaim that climate change is the greatest threat to mankind or to America,” he said. “I think the theme of my talk here today is that that is not true — the greatest threat to at least America, and I would say mankind, is radical leftism.”

https://www.alternet.org/just-believe-our-lies/

no lnx twit

Ron Johnson (R-Wisconsin) declared to Fox Business host Maria Bartiromo on Wednesday that all of the purported evidence against President Joe Biden and his son Hunter that Republicans have supposedly amassed over the last three years is something to "infer" and that "you're not necessarily going to get hard proof" of criminal activity.

"So [House of Representatives Oversight Committee Chairman] James Comer [R-Kentucky] walked us through this web of LLCs that the Biden family created and money came from China and other adversarial countries, by the way, not just China. But going into these LLCs and then from there the money went from the LLCs to, to various Biden family members. What can you tell us about that? What were they getting paid for?" Bartiromo asked Johnson.

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}:

"Well, again, on, on the bank records, you're not gonna see bribe to change this policy. You have, you have to infer what's happening here. You, you have to take a look at the, the bulk of the evidence. You have to file the money and realize what, so what did this Biden family member do to earn that amount of money? I mean, that's what we did with, with Hunter Biden in Ukraine," Johnson said.

READ MORE: 'Show the goods': Fox News host calls out House Republican over lack of Hunter Biden evidence

"I mean, what did he know about oil and gas to be on the board of Burisma and knocked down about $4 million over the course of a number of years when his father was the point person in Ukraine, that, that corrupt system," Johnson continued. "So again, you, you have to infer these things. You're not going to get necessarily hard proof, but there's such a huge body of evidence. We had it in September 2020. It was all ignored. It was all denigrated. It was all called Russian disinformation. It's the same playbook of the Democrats, the same playbook of the media that wants to prop up and cover up for the Bidens."

Johnson's remarks did not play well on social media.

MeidasTouch: "I'm going to 'infer' that Ron Johnson and his corrupt Republican friends are liars engaging in defamation the day after their dear leader was held liable for defamation in court."

Ford News: "Senator Ron Johnson on Fox News just admitted we will never get hard proof regarding the GOP probe into bank transfers from a foreign country to Hunter Biden's LLC."

READ MORE: House GOP Oversight warns DOJ: 'Do not indict Hunter Biden before Wednesday'

Kelly D: "Ron Johnson said live on Fox there is no evidence and we just need to infer that the entire Biden family is guilty. Of what, I’m not sure. But also, we don't infer sh*t in this country. Bring the evidence to the DOJ or S T F U."

Jamison Foser: "I mean I can pretty easily infer all kinds of crimes Ron Johnson has committed if this is how we're going to do things."

Art Martin: "Judge Ron Johnson: I find Joe Biden guilty beyond an unreasonable inference!"

Devin Duke: "When Trump refuses to criticize Putin on any topic ever, should we infer what's happening there?"

McSpocky™: Of course there isn't going to be 'hard proof.' Biden did nothing wrong!

Kaloyan: "Infer? You mean insinuate, right, right?"

Jo: "So, these clowns are gonna impeach President Biden because they've 'inferred' crimes? Based on something other than… EVIDENCE?!? F*cking clown show."

Outspoken: "'Just believe our lies.'"

Watch Johnson below or at this link.

READ MORE: Federal prosecutor close to a decision in Hunter Biden probe: report

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an 4 23 ron johnson

https://www.alternet.org/ron-johnson-climate-change-benefit/

vid

https://twitter.com/HeartlandSignal/status/1651253584153935874?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw%7Ctwcamp%5Etweetembed%7Ctwterm%5E1651253584153935874%7Ctwgr%5E0fa48a738269c6594ecc2455b57e0a46fbcf6b17%7Ctwcon%5Es1_&ref_url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.alternet.org%2Fron-johnson-climate-change-benefit%2F

no lnx

'Is he really that stupid?' Twitter aghast after Ron Johnson says climate change will 'benefit' US

Maya Boddie April 26, 2023

United States Senator Ron Johnson (R-WI) believes climate change is beneficial to the United States.

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}:

Heartland Signal shared a clip of Johnson's spiel via Twitter, writing, "Sen. Ron Johnson (R-WI) says climate change will be good for the U.S. because it will be less cold: 'Global warming will actually be beneficial ... Why wouldn't we take comfort in that? ... Y'know, concerned if you're in the hot region of Africa ... but we're in good shape.'"

Johnson was making the argument against a study by Dr. Michael Greenstone, professor and Director of the Energy Policy Institute at the University of Chicago (EPIC), Director of the Becker Friedman Institute, which shows the dangerous impacts of climate change.

READ MORE: Marjorie Taylor Greene stuns experts with scientifically illiterate rant on climate change

"In terms of excess deaths.. in my own state (of Wisconsin) your study shows we have the reduction mortality of somewhere between 54 and 56 people per 600,000," Johnson said pointing to a map of the United States included in Greenstone's study. "Why wouldn't we take comfort in that?"

Greenstone said, "the effects of climate change are going to be very unequal. If you look more carefully (at the map), there are large swatches of the country where the damages will be much larger."

The senator interrupted by alleging more people die in the United States from cold than from heat.

"In terms of global health, in terms of excess death, we're actually in a better position to prevent death by having the climate increase in temperature a little bit, right?" the GOP leader asked.

READ MORE: 'What a weirdo': Twitter savages 'cartoon character' Republican for declaring 'there is no climate change'

Greenstone replied, "I'm not familiar with that study. What I am familiar with is my study. There are 49 other states in the United States, and many of them will suffer. They will suffer more than Wisconsin will gain."

Twitter is stunned by the senator's assertions.

@GaryKoepnick: "Is he really that stupid? How the hell does he think the planet is going to compensate for the rising temperature? Problem is he doesn't care that flooding will be devastating for Midwest farmland 50 from now because his greedy selfish self serving ass will be dead"

Essenviews: "The irresponsibility is astonishing."

Dani: Let's teach our kids science literacy so they don't become senators who say stuff like this."

Elie Mystal: "If you made an evil Senator in a disaster movie say what Ron Johnson just said people would say the character was unbelievable."

READ MORE: 'Weaponized nonsense': Lauren Boebert ripped for calling climate change a 'religion'

Nancy Lee Grahn: "Wisconsin! You can't want someone this blatantly stupid representing you, can you? I mean come on, he's seriously off the charts embarrassing. Fix this, ok?"

@AmericaPlsAwake: "Calling him an idiot is an insult to all idiots."

@wapplehouse: "Literally one of the most evil arguments you will ever hear someone make."

Sherrilyn Ifill: "Wisconsin voters you just elected this guy to another 6 year term. You have got to do better. This is universally horrifying, but climate change is a top issue for young people. Can you imagine how they feel when they hear this?"

Christian Christenson: "Try and grasp just how dumb these people are. Then grasp that they are running the country. But, sure, the problem is Gender Studies at universities."

@blossomedchild: "Dear rest of the World, We're sorry. We are sorry and ashamed of our selfish and dumb Senior Senator from Wisconsin. I want you all to know that half of us who live here do care about the health of the Earth and your well-being too. Sincerely,, Sane Wisconsin"

Watch the video below or at this link.

READ MORE: 'Inequality kills': Author Naomi Klein explains why climate change is an 'economic justice' issue

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https://www.alternet.org/white-house-ron-johnson/

ss fact check by WH

j6 report ch 3

As discussed further in Chapter 5, that email contained Eastman’s 2-page memo proposing a strategy for January 6th based on the incorrect legal theory that Vice President Pence could assert some authority as President of the Senate to prevent or delay the election of former Vice President Biden during the joint session. Eastman’s memo relied on the fake votes, which the memo featured in the very first line: “7 states have transmitted dual slates of electors.” 120 When Eastman submitted his memo to Epshteyn, he also copied Chesebro, who had edited the memo and called it “[r]eally awesome.” 121

By that point, Chesebro and Eastman were coordinating their arguments about the fake-elector votes and how they should be used. On January 1, 2021, Chesebro sent an email to Eastman and Epshteyn that recommended that Vice President Pence derail the joint session of Congress. In it, he raised the idea of Vice President Pence declaring “that there are two competing slates of electoral votes” in several States, and taking the position that only he, or possibly Congress, could “resolve any disputes concerning them.” 122

Two days later, Eastman completed his second major memo advising President Trump and his team on strategies for January 6th, again arguing that there were “dual slates of electors from 7 states,” and calling for Vice President Pence to assert power to act “[a]s the ultimate arbiter” to take steps that could overturn the election, either by sending the election back to State legislatures to reassess or by rejecting Biden’s certified electoral votes from States in which there were also fake Trump electors.123

By early January, most of the fake elector votes had arrived in Washington, except those from Michigan and Wisconsin.124 Undeterred, the Trump team arranged to fly them to Washington and hand deliver them to Congress for the Vice President himself. “Freaking trump idiots want someone to fly original elector papers to the senate President . . .” Wisconsin Republican Party official Mark Jefferson wrote to Party Chairman Hitt on January 4th.125 Hitt responded, “Ok I see I have a missed call from [Mike] Roman and a text from someone else. Did you talk to them already? This is just nuts. . . .” 126

The next day, Trump Campaign Deputy Director for Election Day Operations G. Michael Brown sent a text message to other campaign staff suggesting that he was the person who delivered the fake votes to Congress.127 After sending the group a photo of his face with the Capitol in the background, Brown said, “This has got to be the cover a book I write one day” and “I should probably buy [Mike] [R]oman a tie or something for sending me on this one. Hasn’t been done since 1876 and it was only 3 states that did it.” 128 The reference to 1876 alludes to a controversy during that election about certain States’ electoral college votes.129

President Trump and his Campaign apparently had assistance from allies on Capitol Hill for this effort, including Senator Ron Johnson, his chief of staff, and the chief of staff to Representative Mike Kelly, although Senator Johnson has said that “[his] involvement in that attempt to deliver” fake elector paperwork “spanned the course of a couple seconds.” 130 On the morning of January 6th, Representative Kelly’s then-chief of staff texted anaide to the Vice President, Chris Hodgson, about hand-delivering the fake elector votes to the Vice President’s team before the joint session, a message that Hodgson ignored: “Just following up-any chance you or someone from your team can meet to take the Michigan and Wisconsin packets.” 131

According to the office of Senator Ron Johnson, Representative Kelly’s chief of staff then had a phone call with Senator Johnson’s chief of staff at 11:58 a.m. “about how Kelly’s office could get us the electors [sic] because they had it.” 132 Shortly after 11:30 a.m., the Trump Campaign’s lead attorney in Wisconsin had texted Senator Johnson expressing a “[n]eed to get a document on Wisconsin electors to you [for] the VP immediately. Is there a staff person I can talk to immediately.” 133 Senator Johnson then put his chief of staff in touch with the campaign to handle the issue.134

Shortly afterwards, Senator Johnson’s chief of staff texted Hodgson: “[Sen.] Johnson needs to hand something to VPOTUS please advise.” 135 When Hodgson asked what it was, the response he got was, “Alternate slate of electors for MI and WI because archivist didn’t receive them.” 136 Hodgson did not mince words: “Do not give that to him [the Vice President]. He’s about to walk over to preside over the joint session, those were supposed to come in through the mail.” 137

Those fake electoral votes, which the Trump team tried for weeks to manufacture and deliver, never made it to the Vice President. But they would have been invalid even if they did arrive on time. The Trump team’s activities were based on the false pretense that these fake electoral votes had a decisive role to play at the joint session of Congress. And yet any such role that they could have played would have helped unlawfully obstruct an official proceeding that determines how our Nation carries out the peaceful transfer of power between Presidents.

Indeed, as the joint session approached, Senator Mike Lee had expressed grave concerns about the fake elector effort in a series of text messages to one of the Trump team’s senior legal advisors. Although Senator Lee had spent a month encouraging the idea of having State legislatures endorse competing electors for Trump, he grew alarmed as it became clear that the Trump team wanted the fake electors’ votes to be considered on January 6th

...

On December 30th, Senator Lee texted Trump advisor Cleta Mitchell that January 6th was “a dangerous idea,” including “for the republic itself.” 139 He explained that, “I don’t think we have any valid basis for objecting to the electors” because “it cannot be true that we can object to any state’s presidential electors simply because we don’t think they handled their election well or suspect illegal activity.” 140 Senator Lee even questioned her about the plan’s dangerous long-term consequences: “[w]ill you please explain to me how this doesn’t create a slippery slope problem for all future presidential elections?” 141

ENDNOTES

 D.C. - January 6, 2023 marks the second anniversary of the U.S. Capitol attack. Supporters of former President Donald Trump stormed the Capitol in an attempt to overturn the 2020 election results. Their efforts were unsuccessful but following the attack, the House created a committee to investigate what led up to the attack. In their final report, the Committee points the finger at Trump for the attack in an attempt to stay in power. Also in this 800-plus report, it names northwest Pennsylvania Representative Mike Kelly’s (R- PA) former chief of staff asallegedly being part of the scheme. 

The House Select Committee investigating the January 6, 2021 U.S. Capitol attack pulled out all the stops in their investigation. They gathered more than a thousand witness interviews, a million pages of documents and issued several subpoenas. Through their nearly 18-month long investigation, the Committee laid out what they said was a multipart plan by former President Trump and his allies to overturn the 2020 presidential election.   

“He mounted a pressure campaign directed at individual state legislators to try to get them to go back into session and either declare him the winner, decertify Joe Biden as the winner or send two slates of electors to Congress; One for Biden, and one for him and pressure Vice President Pence to choose him as the winner,” said Rep. Adam Schiff (D-CA) during one of the Committee’s hearings.   

The Committee said part of that plan was a fake elector scheme.  

“At the request of the Trump campaign, the electors from these battleground states signed documents falsely asserting that they were the ‘duly elected electors from their state,’” said a Committee investigator.  

According to the Committee’s final report, two days before the attack, the Trump campaign asked republican party officials in Wisconsin to fly their fake elector documents to D.C. The Committee alleges theformer Chief of Staff for Representative Mike Kelly (R- PA) for taking part in this. Transcripts would laterallege Matt Stroia as Kelly's former chief of staff. 

The report states, “On the morning of January 6, Representative Kelly’s then chief of staff texted an aide to the vice president, Chris Hodgson, about hand delivering the fake elector votes to the vice president’s team before the joint session, a message that Hodgson ignored: ‘Just following up any chance you or someone from your team can meet to take the Michigan and Wisconsin packets.’”   

The report continues saying according to the office of Senator Ron Johnson (R-WI), Representative Kelly’s chief of staff then had a phone call with Senator Johnson’s chief of staff at 11:58 a.m. “about how Kelly's office could get us the electors [sic] because they had it.” 

“A staffer for Wisconsin Senator Ron Johnson texted a staffer for Vice President Pence just minutes before the beginning of the joint session,” said a Committee investigator. “This staffer stated that Senator Johnson wished to hand deliver to the Vice Presidents two fake electors votes from Michigan and Wisconsin. The Vice President’s aide unambiguously instructed them not to deliver the fake votes to the Vice President.” 

A statement from Rep. Kelly’s press secretary initially denied those claims from Johnson's office, calling them “patently false”. Kelly’s office would later launch their own internal investigation. Kelly’s press secretary told us in an email “To date, our current chief of staff has not found staff members to have prior knowledge of Mr. Stroia’s reported actions.” They also add” Further, Mr. Kelly is unaware of Mr. Storia’s reported actions. We have closed the internal review.” 

According to transcripts released by the Committee, they interviewed Pennsylvania republican political operative Mike Roman. In the transcripts, they asked him about 25 messages between himself and Matt Stroia. 

In the transcripts, the Committee suggests Stroia may have been involved in a November state senate hearing in Gettysburg, which pushed unfounded claims of fraud in the state’s election. The Committee said Stroia and Roman shared text messages days before that meeting between the two, which they allege Stroia said in part “I hope it turns out like we envisioned”. 

Roman would plead the fifth quite often in the Committee’s questioning including when the Committee asked point blank: “Did Mr. Stroia or Representative Kelly assist in any efforts to have state legislators choose Trump electors in Pennsylvania after the November 2020 election?”  

Roman replied: “The fifth.”   

The Committee followed up with “Did you ever talk to Representative Kelly about having Pennsylvania state legislature choose Trump electors?”  

Roman would again reply, “The fifth.”   

Mr. Stroia declined to comment when we reached out to him. We also reached out to Rep. Kelly but his office said it’s unlikely they’ll have time for an interview because of the back-and-forth Speaker of the House vote. They also add “At this time, we have no additional comment on the Jan. 6th committee’s report.” 

https://www.alternet.org/2022/10/leftist-propaganda-ron-johnson-debate/

b/c

https://www.alternet.org/2022/10/ron-johnson/ booed

Sen. Ron Johnson (R-Wisc.) on Thursday was booed and mocked during a live debate against his Democratic opponent.

During the lawmaker's debate against Wisconsin Lt. Governor Mandela Barnes, he made a number of tall claims with little evidence to back his arguments. At one point during the debate, he was asked to say something admirable about Barnes — and his remarks fell flat.

"I appreciate the fact that Lieutenant Governor Barnes had loving parents," Johnson said. "A schoolteacher father, worked third shift, so he had good upbringing. I guess what puzzles me about that is with that upbringing, why is he turning against America? Why is he finding America awful?"

That response garnered loud boos from the audience.

READ MORE: Watch: Ron Johnson shares 'unoriginal' Trumpian anecdote when asked why he is seeking a third term

As clips of Johnson's remarks began circulating on Twitter, social media users shared their reactions and mocked the Wisconsin lawmaker.

"When the crowd boos and he attempts to keep going…the look on his face is the moment went he realizes the jig is up and it’s everything," one Twitter user noted. "We need more of this towards everyone spewing this sort of utter nonsense."

At another point in the debate, Johnson was laughed at by the audience over a wild claim that the FBI set him up. That moment came after Johnson referenced a past FBI briefing during which the lawmaker was warned about hispotential to become a Russian asset and target for disinformation.

"The FBI set me up with a corrupt with a corrupt briefing and then leaped back to smear me," Johnson said as the audience laughed. "I am sorry, I'm sorry, I'm sorry. [Barnes] is referring to corruption with the FBI, which I've been I'm trying to uncover and expose."

Other clips have also highlighted Barnes' criticism of Johnson. The Democratic contender took to Twitter to raise awareness about Johnson's push to defund critical government programs.

"Self-serving, multimillionaire Ron Johnson might not need Social Security and Medicare to retire but the rest of us are depending on it," Barnes tweeted. "We WILL NOT let him put them on the chopping block."

READ MORE: Ron Johnson becomes target of ethics complaint over $280,000 cash gifts to chief of staff and wife

In addition to the Twitter responses, Jake Spence, the state director for Wisconsin's Working Families Party, also released a statement about Johnson's actions insisting the debate, which Spence said offers "a glimpse into Ron Johnson's America — an America where there's no minimum wage, where no one has access to abortions, where violent insurrectionists are protected by law, while Americans dependent on Social Security and Medicare are tossed aside."

"Trump Republicans like Johnson are good at just two things: restricting freedoms, and raking in millions of dollars for himself and his donors at the expense of working families," Spence added. "As senator, Mandela Barnes will go to the mat for working people, whether it's defending abortion access or ending bad trade deals. It's clear from tonight's debate and it's clear from everything we've heard at the doors—Mandela Barnes is the right choice for Wisconsin's working families.”

Watch the videos below or at this link.

an 10 22

United States Senator Ron Johnson (R-Wisconsin) is trailing in the polls ahead of the November midterm elections to Wisconsin's Democratic Lieutenant Governor Mandela Barnes. With just forty days to go, a group of climate activists has obtained a statue made of feces in Johnson's honor that they are showcasing around the Badger State metropolis

According toThe Huffington Post, "activists with the progressive groups NextGen PAC and MoveOn hosted events around the city with a six-foot-tall, 80-pound 'scatue' of Johnson made out of dried cow manure. The kaka creation silently stood with activists in solidarity as they protested Johnson’s belief that climate change is 'bullsh*t,' a claim he made last year."

Johnson, who denies that burning fossil fuels is triggering ecological disruptions around the world, said last year that “I don’t know about you guys, but I think climate change is ― as Lord [Christopher] Monckton said ― bullsh*t,” incorrectly adding that “there are more and more scientists” who are “just laying this to waste.”

READ MORE: 'Infiltrated': GOP senator angered that Democrats are allowed to participate in American life

Per HuffPost, "Thursday’s tour of the sh*t statue, which was created by 'a manure artist' from Colorado, is part of a broader effort by progressive activists to unseat Johnson. During their stop at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, the groups collected students’ pledges to vote and urged them to show up for Johnson’s Democratic challenger," who happens to be in charge of incumbent Democratic Governor Tony Evers' climate change task force.

“Young people are fired up because they understand the urgency of the climate crisis and are hungry for change,” Sonja Chojnacki, the Wisconsin state director of NextGen PAC, told HuffPost. “We are ready to roll up our sleeves and get people to the polls. Ron Johnson must go!”

READ MORE: Watch: Ron Johnson whines that 'people in Wisconsin think I'm a tool of Vladimir Putin'

https://www.jsonline.com/story/news/politics**/2022/03**/07/alexander-vindman-says-ron-johnson-a-huge-disappointment-ukraine/9365277002/

no lnx

Vindman says Ron Johnson, others have 'blood on their hands' over Russian invasion of Ukraine

Bill Glauber

Milwaukee Journal Sentinel

Former national security aide Alexander Vindman accused Republican U.S. Sen. Ron Johnson and others of having "blood on their hands" as Ukraine withstands a withering assault from Russian troops.

In an interview with the Journal Sentinel, Vindman included Johnson on a list with former President Donald Trump, former Secretary of State Mike Pompeo and Fox News host Tucker Carlson, claiming they undermined U.S. national security.

"Civilians are dying, Ukrainians are providing a formidable defense, defending democracy for Americans as well as for themselves and their homes. And Ron Johnson is trying to distract and obfuscate," Vindman said.

Vindman was responding to comments made Feb. 27 by Johnson on Fox News.

Vindman had been with Johnson on a key trip to Ukraine in May 2019, in which the senator sought to assure the newly elected government of congressional support.

A retired U.S. Army lieutenant colonel, Vindman also blamed Johnson and others for ending his military career.

Vindman was a key witness in the first U.S. House impeachment of Trump. He listened in on the 2019 call when Trump asked Ukraine's president, Volodymyr Zelensky, to investigate Joe Biden while withholding U.S. military aid to the country. Trump later released about $400 million in military aid to Ukraine.

Last week, in an interview with Fox News, Johnson blamed Vindman and others for helping embolden Russian president Vladimir Putin.

"I don't think Vladimir Putin would have moved on Ukraine were it not for the weakness displayed ― certainly by the Biden administration, but by the West in general," Johnson said in the interview. "I'm certainly hoping that Col. Vindman, Adam Schiff, Nancy Pelosi ― who used Ukraine as a pawn in their impeachment travesty ― are also recognizing and reflecting about how they weakened Ukraine, weakened the West, weakened America by the divisive politics that they play."

lnx

"There's much blame to go around, but in terms of atrocities, that falls squarely on the shoulders of Vladimir Putin and his cronies," Johnson said.

Johnson stands by comments

According to a statement from his office, Johnson stands behind his Fox News comments. In addition, the statement asserted, Pelosi, Schiff and Vindman "weakened Ukraine by harming its relationship with the U.S. and therefore made Ukraine more vulnerable to Russian aggression, destabilization efforts, and ultimately invasion.

"Lt. Col Vindman’s actions demonstrated disloyalty to both the U.S. President he served and the Ukrainian people we were trying to help," the statement from his office said.

Vindman, who is a senior advisor for the liberal group Vote Vets, countered that Johnson was "a huge disappointment" on the Ukraine issue.

"He's responsible more so than many of his colleagues for creating a situation in which the U.S. actually might find itself in a hot war," Vindman said.

labelled news

FBI Can't 'Be Trusted' to Investigate Hunter Biden's Laptop: Ron Johnson

BY NICK MORDOWANEC ON8/25/22

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Republican Senator Ron Johnson of Wisconsin said new whistleblower claims surrounding Hunter Biden's laptop showcase a previous lack of proper government oversight and that "the American people deserve transparency and expect allegations of government corruption to be fully and immediately investigated," according to a new letter to Inspector General Michael Horowitz.

"It is clear to me based on numerous credible whistleblower disclosures that the FBI cannot be trusted with the handling of Hunter Biden's laptop," Johnson wrote to Horowitz in the letter dated August 24. "I hope you understand that the longer your office stands on the sidelines and delays investigating the FBI's actions, the harder it will be for you to uncover the truth and hold individuals accountable for wrongdoing."

The FBI has been in conservatives' crosshairs in recent weeks, as they toughened their rhetoric against the agency following the execution of a search warrant on former President Donald Trump's Mar-a-Lago residence.

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"These new allegations provide even more evidence of FBI corruption and renew calls for you to take immediate steps to investigate the FBI's actions regarding the laptop," Johnson's new letter continued, adding that the FBI "failed to respond" and take the "appropriate and necessary investigative steps after receiving Hunter Biden's laptop."

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Ron Johnson  FBI   Hunter Biden

Republican Senator Ron Johnson of Wisconsin participates in a Senate Foreign relations Committee hearing on Capitol Hill. Johnson has written a letter to the inspector general, alleging that whistleblowers have provided him with new information regarding Hunter Biden's laptop and its contents.

MARK WILSON/GETTY IMAGES

Johnson said the new whistleblower information provided to his office regarding information stored on the laptop obtained by the FBI from a Wilmington, Delaware, computer store alleges that FBI officials told employees they would "not look at that Hunter Biden laptop" and that the FBI is "not going to change the outcome of the election again."

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In July another Republican, Senator Chuck Grassley of Iowa, wrote to FBI Director Christopher Wray and Attorney General Merrick Garland referencing similar "highly credible whistleblowers" coming forward and demanding that Congress be able to perform an independent review of documents and records related to alleged misconduct as shown by the laptop's contents.

"The volume and consistency of these allegations substantiate their credibility and necessitate this letter," Grassley wrote.

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Johnson, a ranking member of the Senate's Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations, sent a letter to Horowitz on October 21, 2020, to investigate the laptop. Horowitz declined, citing to an ongoing U.S. Attorney's Office investigation into Hunter Biden's tax affairs.

READ MORE

Fact Check: Did Jim Jordan Say 14 FBI Agents Spoke to Him About Trump Raid?

Who Is Sam Harris? Writer Admits to Ignoring Hunter Biden Laptop

FBI Raid Might Not Have Been About Indicting Trump: Experts]

Fifty-one military officials initially said in an October 19, 2020, letter that reporting, or lack thereof, on Hunter Biden and the contents of his laptop in relation to his father prior to the 2020 election had "all the classic earmarks of a Russian intelligence operation."

A Rasmussen poll in December of 2020 showed that more than 50 percent of respondents believed news organizations ignored the story to aid Joe Biden's campaign that ultimately concluded in a contested victory.

Democrats previously expressed consternation with the FBI due to actions and announcements surrounding candidate Hillary Clinton's emails, a review opened by Horowitz.

Newsweek reached out to Johnson and the Inspector General's Office for comment.

some lnx

Senator Ron Johnson of Wisconsin said new whistleblower claims surrounding Hunter Biden's laptop showcase a previous lack of proper government oversight and that "the American people deserve transparency and expect allegations of government corruption to be fully and immediately investigated," according to a new letter to Inspector General Michael Horowitz.

"It is clear to me based on numerous credible whistleblower disclosures that the FBI cannot be trusted with the handling of Hunter Biden's laptop," Johnson wrote to Horowitz in the letter dated August 24. "I hope you understand that the longer your office stands on the sidelines and delays investigating the FBI's actions, the harder it will be for you to uncover the truth and hold individuals accountable for wrongdoing."

The FBI has been in conservatives' crosshairs in recent weeks, as they toughened their rhetoric against the agency following the execution of a search warrant on former President Donald Trump's Mar-a-Lago residence...

in July another Republican, Senator Chuck Grassley of Iowa, wrote to FBI Director Christopher Wray and Attorney General Merrick Garland referencing similar "highly credible whistleblowers" coming forward and demanding that Congress be able to perform an independent review of documents and records related to alleged misconduct as shown by the laptop's contents.

"The volume and consistency of these allegations substantiate their credibility and necessitate this letter," Grassley wrote.

Johnson, a ranking member of the Senate's Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations, sent a letter to Horowitz on October 21, 2020, to investigate the laptop. Horowitz declined, citing to an ongoing U.S. Attorney's Office investigation into Hunter Biden's tax affairs.

READ MORE

• :{Fact Check: Did Jim Jordan Say 14 FBI Agents Spoke to Him About Trump Raid?:(style="box-sizing:border-box;border:0px none;list-style:outside none none;margin:0px;outline:none 0px;padding:0px;-webkit-font-smoothing:antialiased"):}:
• :{Who Is Sam Harris? Writer Admits to Ignoring Hunter Biden Laptop:(style="box-sizing:border-box;border:0px none;list-style:outside none none;margin:0px;outline:none 0px;padding:0px;-webkit-font-smoothing:antialiased"):}:
• :{FBI Raid Might Not Have Been About Indicting Trump: Experts:(style="box-sizing:border-box;border:0px none;list-style:outside none none;margin:0px;outline:none 0px;padding:0px;-webkit-font-smoothing:antialiased"):}:...

ref

https://www.newsweek.com/key-points-chuck-grassley-letter-accusing-fbi-hunter-biden-cover-1728034

no lnx

u.S.

Key Points From Chuck Grassley Letter Accusing FBI of Hunter Biden Cover-Up

BY KATHERINE FUNG ON 7/26/22

U.S.

FBI

DOJ

CHUCK GRASSLEY

HUNTER BIDEN

Senator Chuck Grassley is accusing the FBI of covering up Hunter Biden's alleged criminal financial activity by purposely launching a campaign to discredit any negative information about the president's son.

On Monday, Grassley wrote a letter to FBI Director Christopher Wray and Attorney General Merrick Garland saying that "highly credible whistleblowers" have come forward, alleging widespread misconduct by both federal agencies over the handling of derogatory information about Biden in the months leading up to the 2020 election.

"The volume and consistency of these allegations substantiate their credibility and necessitate this letter," the Iowa Republican wrote. He demanded that Wray and Garland turn over a series of documents and records so Congress can perform an independent review of the alleged misconduct.

The letter is the latest development in the senator's efforts to bring attention to the probe into Biden's business dealings. The president's son has been the subject of a federal investigation run by the U.S. attorney's office in Delaware since 2018 over concerns that his financial and business practices potentially involved money laundering and violated U.S. tax laws during his father's time as vice president.

Grassley Hunter Biden FBI

GOP Senator Chuck Grassley is demanding that the FBI's director and the U.S. attorney general turn over documents and records so Congress can perform an independent review of alleged misconduct by Hunter Biden. Above, Grassley speaks to the media on April 4.

In his letter, Grassley also said, "If these allegations are true and accurate, the Justice Department and FBI are—and have been—institutionally corrupted to their very core to the point in which the United States Congress and the American people will have no confidence in the equal application of the law."

Grassley, who serves as the top Republican on the Senate Judiciary Committee, named two FBI agents in the letter: FBI Supervisory Intelligence Analyst Brian Auten and Assistant Special Agent in Charge Timothy Thibault.

The senator alleged that Austen opened an assessment in August 2020, which was used by an FBI team to "improperly discredit negative Hunter Biden information as disinformation and caused investigative activity to cease."

Grassley said it was during that same month that he and GOP Senator Ron Johnson received an "unnecessary" briefing from the FBI that gave their Democratic counterparts ammo to accuse the senators of "advancing foreign disinformation."

READ MORE

DOJ Will Take Action Against Hunter Biden Within 2 Months: Representative

What Is Hunter Biden Being Investigated For? Details of Federal Probe

Hunter Biden, China and BHR—What We Do Know, What We Don't]

Grassley alleged that in October 2020, a month before the presidential election that was won by Biden's father, Thibault ordered the matter closed "without providing a valid reason as required by FBI guidelines."

The senator added that while the Biden matter was closed in a way that would allow for the investigation to be reopened at a later date, the senator has received "credible" allegations that FBI officials tried to mark the matter in agency systems to prevent it from being opened in the future.

In addition to the probe into Biden's financial and business practices, investigators are analyzing whether he acted as an unregistered foreign lobbying agent while working as a consultant and investor for businesses and tycoons in China, Ukraine and Kazakhstan.

The FBI told Newsweek it received Grassley's letter but had no additional comment. The Justice Department declined Newsweek's request for comment.

new 8 22

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:{Biden 'would not be president' if the FBI didn't allegedly cover up ...:(style="margin:0px;padding:0px;border:0px;font-style:inherit;font-variant:inherit;font-weight:inherit;font-stretch:inherit;vertical-align:top;display:inline-block;max-width:100%;overflow:hidden;text-overflow:ellipsis;white-space:nowrap"):}:

TodaySen. Ron Johnson, R-Wis., slammed the FBI for its alleged censorship of the Hunter Biden laptop, warning that, if the American people were aware of the scandal, Biden would "not be president"...

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4 days ago  OSHKOSH - On Tuesday, U.S. Sen. Ron Johnson (R-Wis.), ranking member of the Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations, sent a letter to Department of Justice Inspector General (DOJ IG) Michael Horowitz revealing new whistleblower allegations relating to the FBI's handling of Hunter Biden's laptop.

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3 days agoRepublican Senator Ron Johnson of Wisconsin said new whistleblower claims surrounding Hunter Biden 's laptop showcase a previous lack of proper government oversight and that "the American people ...

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:{'You Will Not Look At That Hunter Biden Laptop': Johnson Whistleblowers ...:(style="margin:0px;padding:0px;border:0px;font-style:inherit;font-variant:inherit;font-weight:inherit;font-stretch:inherit;vertical-align:top;display:inline-block;max-width:100%;overflow:hidden;text-overflow:ellipsis;white-space:nowrap"):}:

4 days ago"After the FBI obtained the Hunter Biden laptop from the Wilmington, DE computer shop, these whistleblowers stated that local FBI leadership told employees, 'you will not look at that Hunter Biden...

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:{FBI warned agents off Hunter Biden laptop due to election: whistleblowers:(style="margin:0px;padding:0px;border:0px;font-style:inherit;font-variant:inherit;font-weight:inherit;font-stretch:inherit;vertical-align:top;display:inline-block;max-width:100%;overflow:hidden;text-overflow:ellipsis;white-space:nowrap"):}:

4 days agoAccording to a whistleblower, FBI officials told agents to not investigate Hunter Biden's laptop in order to not influence the 2020 presidential election. Sen. Ron Johnson said in a letter to...

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Mar 31, 2022Republican Sen. Ron Johnson of Wisconsin slammed the media for revealing 'minimal information' on the Hunter Biden scandal, Wednesday night on ' Hannity .' TOM COTTON: It was obvious Hunter's...

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:{Sen. Ron Johnson: FBI's "Politicization, Partisanship" On Hunter Biden ...:(style="margin:0px;padding:0px;border:0px;font-style:inherit;font-variant:inherit;font-weight:inherit;font-stretch:inherit;vertical-align:top;display:inline-block;max-width:100%;overflow:hidden;text-overflow:ellipsis;white-space:nowrap"):}:

TodayOn Date August 28, 2022 Sen. Ron Johnson told FNC's "Sunday Morning Futures" the FBI asking social media companies to censor the Hunter Biden laptop scandal could have flipped the results of the...

:{https://www.hngn.com:(style="margin:0px;padding:0px;border:0px;font-style:inherit;font-variant:inherit;font-weight:inherit;font-stretch:inherit;vertical-align:baseline"):}::{ › articles › 244010 › 20220824 › hunter-biden-laptop-whistleblowers-tell-sen-ron-johnson-fbi-orders.htm:(style="margin:0px;padding:0px;border:0px;font-style:inherit;font-variant:inherit;font-weight:inherit;font-stretch:inherit;vertical-align:baseline"):}:

:{Hunter Biden Laptop: Whistleblowers Tell Sen. Ron Johnson That FBI ...:(style="margin:0px;padding:0px;border:0px;font-style:inherit;font-variant:inherit;font-weight:inherit;font-stretch:inherit;vertical-align:top;display:inline-block;max-width:100%;overflow:hidden;text-overflow:ellipsis;white-space:nowrap"):}:

3 days agoAccording to recent whistleblowers who met with Sen. Ron Johnson, the FBI purposefully delayed the Hunter Biden probe and instructed agents not to investigate the Hunter Biden laptop. Wednesday, August 24, 2022. ... it is evident to me that the FBI cannot be trusted with the custody of Hunter Biden's laptop," Johnson stated.

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Mar 28, 2022UPDATED 7:30 AM PT - Monday, March 28, 2022 Sen. Ron Johnson (R-Wis.) asserts the mainstream media covering up the truth behind the existence of Hunter Biden's laptop is "the biggest political...

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Apr 3, 202213,727 Trent Baker 3 Apr 2022 0 1:47 Senator Ron Johnson (R-WI) on Sunday weighed in on major media outlets confirming the authenticity of Hunter Biden's recovered laptop and emails revealing his business dealings.

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2 days agoNTD Evening News NTD Newsroom Aug 26, 2022. Sen. Ron Johnson on Aug. 23 made public FBI whistleblower claims that allege the FBI intentionally undermined efforts to investigate the Hunter Biden laptop. Johnson is asking the Justice Department inspector general to investigate the FBI's handling of the laptop.

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:{Senator Ron Johnson demands accountability over Hunter Biden laptop ...:(style="margin:0px;padding:0px;border:0px;font-style:inherit;font-variant:inherit;font-weight:inherit;font-stretch:inherit;vertical-align:top;display:inline-block;max-width:100%;overflow:hidden;text-overflow:ellipsis;white-space:nowrap"):}:

Mar 18, 2022Republican Senator Ron Johnson said Friday it is 'jaw-dropping' the media has 'finally acknowledged' that Hunter Biden 's laptop and its content are legitimate - even though it was verified a year ...

:{https://www.newsmax.com:(style="margin:0px;padding:0px;border:0px;font-style:inherit;font-variant:inherit;font-weight:inherit;font-stretch:inherit;vertical-align:baseline"):}::{ › newsfront › ronjohnson-biden-hunterbiden › 2022 › 08 › 28 › id › 1084961:(style="margin:0px;padding:0px;border:0px;font-style:inherit;font-variant:inherit;font-weight:inherit;font-stretch:inherit;vertical-align:baseline"):}:

:{Sen. Ron Johnson: Biden Wouldn't Be President Had Son's Laptop Been ...:(style="margin:0px;padding:0px;border:0px;font-style:inherit;font-variant:inherit;font-weight:inherit;font-stretch:inherit;vertical-align:top;display:inline-block;max-width:100%;overflow:hidden;text-overflow:ellipsis;white-space:nowrap"):}:

TodayA A President Joe Biden would not be president now if the American people had been made aware of the scandal and alleged censorship behind his son Hunter's laptop, Sen. Ron Johnson said Sunday. "The Hunter Biden laptop was censored by Twitter, Facebook.

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:{Ron Johnson's Campaign Being Interfered With, Says He Was Set Up By FBI ...:(style="margin:0px;padding:0px;border:0px;font-style:inherit;font-variant:inherit;font-weight:inherit;font-stretch:inherit;vertical-align:top;display:inline-block;max-width:100%;overflow:hidden;text-overflow:ellipsis;white-space:nowrap"):}:

TodayUS Senator Ron Johnson appeared on Maria Bartiromo's show to discuss details of his allegations that the FBI targeted him and set him up for a media smear campaign over Johnson's investigation into the laptop of Crackhead Hunter Biden.

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:{New FBI whistleblower claims bureau leadership slow-walked Hunter Biden ...:(style="margin:0px;padding:0px;border:0px;font-style:inherit;font-variant:inherit;font-weight:inherit;font-stretch:inherit;vertical-align:top;display:inline-block;max-width:100%;overflow:hidden;text-overflow:ellipsis;white-space:nowrap"):}:

4 days agoJohnson said the new whistleblower claims "allege that the FBI did not begin to examine the contents of Hunter Biden's laptop until after the 2020 presidential election — potentially a year after...

:{https://thepoliticalinsider.com:(style="margin:0px;padding:0px;border:0px;font-style:inherit;font-variant:inherit;font-weight:inherit;font-stretch:inherit;vertical-align:baseline"):}::{ › ron-johnson-on-medias-hunter-biden-laptop-story-cover-up-we-were-right-they-were-wrong:(style="margin:0px;padding:0px;border:0px;font-style:inherit;font-variant:inherit;font-weight:inherit;font-stretch:inherit;vertical-align:baseline"):}:

:{Ron Johnson On Media's Hunter Biden Laptop Story Cover Up: 'We Were ...:(style="margin:0px;padding:0px;border:0px;font-style:inherit;font-variant:inherit;font-weight:inherit;font-stretch:inherit;vertical-align:top;display:inline-block;max-width:100%;overflow:hidden;text-overflow:ellipsis;white-space:nowrap"):}:

Mar 30, 2022On Tuesday, Sen. Ron Johnson slammed the "complicit media" for failing to cover the Hunter Biden laptop story before the 2020 presidential election, or the revelations since then. The media either ignored the laptop before the election, or went even further, insinuating it was "Russian disinformation" and therefore false.

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:{Ron Johnson: 'Way Past Time' to Investigate FBI -- They've Been 'Hiding ...:(style="margin:0px;padding:0px;border:0px;font-style:inherit;font-variant:inherit;font-weight:inherit;font-stretch:inherit;vertical-align:top;display:inline-block;max-width:100%;overflow:hidden;text-overflow:ellipsis;white-space:nowrap"):}:

2 days ago26 Aug 2022 1. Thursday on Fox Business Network's "The Evening Edit," Sen. Ron Johnson (R-WI) reacted to FBI whistleblowers claiming top officials at the agency were telling agents to delay investigating Hunter Biden's laptop until after the election involving now-President Joe Biden. Johnson said it was "way past time" to ...

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:{Sen. Ron Johnson: Media 'complicit' in Hunter Biden laptop scandal ...:(style="margin:0px;padding:0px;border:0px;font-style:inherit;font-variant:inherit;font-weight:inherit;font-stretch:inherit;vertical-align:top;display:inline-block;max-width:100%;overflow:hidden;text-overflow:ellipsis;white-space:nowrap"):}:

Mar 30, 2022Wisconsin Sen. Ron Johnson blasted the media for being complicit in covering up the Hunter Biden laptop scandal on 'Hannity.' Read Full Article Half Off Deals; Contests & Giveaway; Maine Heroes; Pet of the Week; Search for: Binge Watch News ... Wisconsin Sen. Ron Johnson blasted the media for being complicit in covering up the Hunter Biden ...

:{https://www.foxbusiness.com:(style="margin:0px;padding:0px;border:0px;font-style:inherit;font-variant:inherit;font-weight:inherit;font-stretch:inherit;vertical-align:baseline"):}::{ › technology › fbi-responds-zuckerbergs-claim-joe-rogan-facebook-limited-hunter-biden-story-agency-warning:(style="margin:0px;padding:0px;border:0px;font-style:inherit;font-variant:inherit;font-weight:inherit;font-stretch:inherit;vertical-align:baseline"):}:

:{FBI responds to Zuckerberg's claim on Joe Rogan that Facebook limited ...:(style="margin:0px;padding:0px;border:0px;font-style:inherit;font-variant:inherit;font-weight:inherit;font-stretch:inherit;vertical-align:top;display:inline-block;max-width:100%;overflow:hidden;text-overflow:ellipsis;white-space:nowrap"):}:

TodaySen. Ron Johnson, R-Wisc., revealed this week in a letter to Department of Justice Inspector General Michael Horowitz that whistleblowers allege FBI officials told agents not to investigate Hunter...

:{https://www.newsmax.com:(style="margin:0px;padding:0px;border:0px;font-style:inherit;font-variant:inherit;font-weight:inherit;font-stretch:inherit;vertical-align:baseline"):}::{ › newsfront › ron-johnson-fbi-hunter-biden › 2022 › 08 › 24 › id › 1084457:(style="margin:0px;padding:0px;border:0px;font-style:inherit;font-variant:inherit;font-weight:inherit;font-stretch:inherit;vertical-align:baseline"):}:

:{Sen. Ron Johnson: FBI Whistleblowers Claim Agency Waited on Hunter ...:(style="margin:0px;padding:0px;border:0px;font-style:inherit;font-variant:inherit;font-weight:inherit;font-stretch:inherit;vertical-align:top;display:inline-block;max-width:100%;overflow:hidden;text-overflow:ellipsis;white-space:nowrap"):}:

4 days agoSen. Ron Johnson, R-Wis., said this week that whistleblowers contacted his office to "allege that the FBI did not begin to examine the contents of Hunter Biden's laptop until after the 2020 presidential election."

:{https://www.newsweek.com:(style="margin:0px;padding:0px;border:0px;font-style:inherit;font-variant:inherit;font-weight:inherit;font-stretch:inherit;vertical-align:baseline"):}::{ › hunter-biden-senators-demand-fbi-provide-answers-regarding-laptop-probe-1737574:(style="margin:0px;padding:0px;border:0px;font-style:inherit;font-variant:inherit;font-weight:inherit;font-stretch:inherit;vertical-align:baseline"):}:

:{Hunter Biden: Senators Demand FBI Provide Answers Regarding Laptop Probe:(style="margin:0px;padding:0px;border:0px;font-style:inherit;font-variant:inherit;font-weight:inherit;font-stretch:inherit;vertical-align:top;display:inline-block;max-width:100%;overflow:hidden;text-overflow:ellipsis;white-space:nowrap"):}:

1 day agoJohnson said that his office received new information from the whistleblower about material on the laptop obtained by the FBI from a Wilmington, Delaware, computer store prior to the 2020 election....

:{https://www.grassley.senate.gov:(style="margin:0px;padding:0px;border:0px;font-style:inherit;font-variant:inherit;font-weight:inherit;font-stretch:inherit;vertical-align:baseline"):}::{ › news › commentary › icymi_opinion-apologies-for-hunter-bidens-laptop:(style="margin:0px;padding:0px;border:0px;font-style:inherit;font-variant:inherit;font-weight:inherit;font-stretch:inherit;vertical-align:baseline"):}:

:{ICYMI | Opinion: Apologies for Hunter Biden's Laptop - Chuck Grassley:(style="margin:0px;padding:0px;border:0px;font-style:inherit;font-variant:inherit;font-weight:inherit;font-stretch:inherit;vertical-align:top;display:inline-block;max-width:100%;overflow:hidden;text-overflow:ellipsis;white-space:nowrap"):}:

Apr 8, 2022"Smeared as stooges for Russia in 2020, Ron Johnson and Chuck Grassley can claim vindication in 2022." ... "As courageous (and accurate) as the New York Post's October 2020 reporting on the Hunter laptop was, it came after the Johnson-Grassley bombshell. Only now—18 months late—are mainstream media outlets grudgingly confirming the ...

:{https://nypost.com:(style="margin:0px;padding:0px;border:0px;font-style:inherit;font-variant:inherit;font-weight:inherit;font-stretch:inherit;vertical-align:baseline"):}::{ › 2022 › 07 › 31 › sen-ron-johnson-doesnt-trust-fbis-hunter-biden-probe:(style="margin:0px;padding:0px;border:0px;font-style:inherit;font-variant:inherit;font-weight:inherit;font-stretch:inherit;vertical-align:baseline"):}:

:{Sen. Ron Johnson doesn't trust FBI's Hunter Biden probe - New York Post:(style="margin:0px;padding:0px;border:0px;font-style:inherit;font-variant:inherit;font-weight:inherit;font-stretch:inherit;vertical-align:top;display:inline-block;max-width:100%;overflow:hidden;text-overflow:ellipsis;white-space:nowrap"):}:

Jul 31, 2022 Sen. Ron Johnson said the FBI can't be trusted to "get to the bottom" of the allegations involving Hunter Biden's overseas business dealings following a whistleblower report that claimed

SEE TWO

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johnson went on codel, not the nra trip

Sen. Ron Johnson WI took out feingold in tea party wave?

foley & lardner cleta mitchell trump gA phone call?

https://www.alternet.org/2021/01/ron-johnson/

Ron Johnson of Wisconsin is among the Republican senators who, unlike Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, has vowed to contest the Electoral College results when the U.S. Senate and the U.S. House of Representatives meet for a joint session of Congress on Wednesday, January 6. Wisconsin was among the states that President-elect Joe Biden won in the 2020 presidential election, and the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel's editorial board slams Johnson for failing to respect the will of Wisconsin voters in a scathing editorial published on January 5.

"The arrogance of Ron Johnson is breathtaking," the Journal Sentinel declares. "Johnson and 12 other Republican senators say they will challenge the tabulation of Electoral College votes in Congress on Wednesday in a dangerous political stunt that will accomplish nothing but may burnish their image with those who would choose outgoing President Donald Trump over democracy. Johnson and his shameful friends are planning to support Trump as he directly opposes the will of the people." [twt]

the editorial board stresses that although Biden will remain president-elect regardless of the "stunt" from Johnson and other GOP senators, that doesn't make it any less shameless.

"In the end, the results of the presidential election will not change: Joe Biden will still have beaten Trump by 7 million votes and won 306 electoral votes to Trump's 232," the Journal Sentinel says. "But Johnson's stunt will do harm to our democracy."

The Journal Sentinel continues, "What precedent is being set here? What happens the next time a party — either party — loses the presidency narrowly while controlling both houses of Congress? Will those politicians do what Johnson and his hyperpartisan mob are doing? Will they make up lies about the election, cry voter fraud, complain about voting machines, election officials and any other ghost they can conjure?"

The editorial board goes on to say that politically, Johnson should pay a price for his attack on U.S. democracy.

"Johnson's disgraceful display should not go unpunished," the Journal Sentinel tells readers. "While there is no way to recall a sitting senator — and censure or expulsion, though deserved, is unlikely given the politics of the moment — we urge voters to remember what Johnson has done. Hold him accountable. Demand that qualified challengers, Republican and Democrat alike, run against him if he has the audacity to break another promise and try for a third term in 2022."

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--> IMPEACH

https://www.alternet.org/2020/09/democrats-say-the-gops-attempt-to-smear-biden-accidentally-exposed-a-trump-officials-corrupt-scheme/

igor salon

the Republican report aimed at raising questions about the dealings of Democratic nominee Joe Biden and his son Hunter Biden in Ukraine appears to have accidentally implicated former Energy Secretary Rick Perry in an energy scheme in the foreign nation, according to the top Democrat on the Senate Finance Committee.

Republicans led by Sen. Ron Johnson, R-Wis., released their much-hyped report on Hunter Biden’s role at the Ukrainian energy firm Burisma on Wednesday. However, it found no evidence of actual wrongdoing and relied largely on debunked claims, old statements and narratives pushed as part of a Russian disinformation campaign.

But the report did find new evidence related to Perry’s actions in Ukraine while he served in President Donald Trump’s Cabinet.

Amos Hochstein, a member of the supervisory board at the state-owned Ukrainian energy firm Naftogaz, told lawmakers that Perry “inappropriately pressured the Ukrainian government” to place Texas oil executive Robert Bensh on the board of the company while officials at the Department of Energy pressured the government to sign a deal with a “private business entity connected to Mr. Bensh,” according to a letter Wyden sent to Department of Energy Inspector General Teri Donaldson.

perry also pressured the Ukrainian government to place one of his longtime campaign supporters, Michael Bleyzer, on the board during a trip to Ukraine for President Volodymyr Zelensky’s inauguration in 2019, Wyden wrote. Bleyzer and his partner were later awarded a drilling contract in the country.

“Mr. Bleyzer’s contract that he was awarded was despite the fact that he was not the highest bidder in the process,” Hochstein told lawmakers. “Other . . . bids were higher, and therefore, Ukraine chose a bid that paid itself less.”

The heads of the state-owned Naftogaz conglomerate have since filed a lawsuit seeking to overturn the contract, arguing that the Ukrainian government acted “illegally and with bias” in agreeing to the deal, Wyden noted.

“Witness testimony in this investigation has directly implicated former Secretary Rick Perry in alleged wrongdoing, and the department more broadly, in a scheme to undermine anti-corruption efforts that were implemented by Ukraine in partnership with the international community,” Wyden wrote.

Politico reported last year that Perry — who along with then-Ambassador to the European Union Gordon Sondland and Ukraine envoy Kurt Volker were the “three amigos” who pushed a shadow foreign policy in Ukraine — played an active role in the Trump administration’s pressure on Zelensky, which ultimately led to thepresident’s impeachment.

ProPublica reported earlier this month that Perry repeatedly pushed deals that “were potentially worth billions of dollars to Perry’s friends and political donors” and could “stand to benefit” the secretary himself. Two of the deals, including one worth $20 billion, went to the Texas firm Energy Transfer. Perry served on the company’s board before and after his stint at the Energy Department and bought shares now worth about $800,000 three months after leaving his post, according to the report.

Ethics experts told the outlet that Perry’s efforts were violations of federal regulations. His actions also caught the attention of federal prosecutors, though he is reportedly not the target of any investigations.

The interview with Hochstein was part of the Senate Republicans’ investigation into whether Hunter Biden’s position at Burisma affected U.S. foreign policy. The report asserted that his position was “problematic and did interfere in the efficient execution of policy with respect to Ukraine.” However, it did not include any new evidence suggesting his role affected the Obama administration’s policy. It also acknowledged that “the extent to which Hunter Biden’s role on Burisma’s board affected U.S. policy toward Ukraine is not clear.”

Wyden, the ranking Democrat on the Senate Finance Committee, said the probe pushed “Russian disinformation.” He further described it as “an attempted political hit job facilitated by the State Department.”

A Finance Committee aide told Talking Points Memo that finding new evidence against the Trump administration “was certainly not Republicans’ goal.”

“While Republicans’ Ukraine investigation showed Vice President Biden did nothing wrong,” the aide said, “it succeeded in implicating former Secretary Perry in a corrupt scheme to pressure the Ukrainian government to change the board of Naftogaz.”

an 920

ron Johnson and Chuck Grassley drop their Biden bombshell — and it’s an absolute dud

Mark Sumner / Daily KosSeptember 23, 2020

For months, Republican Senator Ron Johnson has promised to deliver a body blow to Joe Biden. Like the report being put together by William Barr and John Durham, this was one…

==

https://www.alternet.org/2020/08/history-repeating-trump-is-openly-pushing-russian-propaganda-against-biden

no lnx

Cody Fenwick August 18, 2020

Though former Special Counsel Robert Mueller did not establish that Donald Trump or members of his campaign conspired with the Kremlin in 2016 to influence the election, he famously concluded:

The presidential campaign of Donald J. Trump (“Trump Campaign” or “Campaign”) showed interest in WikiLeaks’s releases of documents and welcomed their potential to damage candidate Clinton.

…

[The] investigation established that the Russian government perceived it would benefit from a Trump presidency and worked to secure that outcome, and that the Campaign expected it would benefit electorally from information stolen and released through Russian efforts…

And this is, undoubtedly, happening again. Despite everything that happened in 2016, the chaos and scandal it unleashed, and all we’ve learned about the Russian efforts to interfere an American Democracy since then, Trump is welcoming Russia’s help once again.

On Sunday, Trump shared a tweet that included audio that U.S. intelligence has determined to be Russian propaganda.

As CNN reported:

Late Sunday, Trump amplified a tweet that contained audiotapes of a 2016 conversation between Biden and then-Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko — material that was released earlier this year by Andriy Derkach, a Ukrainian lawmaker named by the US intelligence community in its August 7 statement about Russia’s disinformation campaign against Biden. US authorities labeled Derkach’s efforts as disinformation because they are intentionally designed to spread false or misleading information about Biden.

By retweeting material that the US government has already labeled as propaganda — and doing so with the 2020 Democratic National Convention kicking off on Monday — Trump demonstrated once again that he is willing to capitalize on foreign election meddling for his own political gain.

The conversation does not actually implicate Biden in any wrongdoing. A voice, purportedly Poroshenko, seems to cast doubt on the claim that the prosecutor Biden pushed out of a top position in Ukraine while he was vice president was corrupt. However, it was the official position of the U.S. government that the prosecutor was corrupt, and his removal was a goal shared by international allies. Additionally, Poroshenko has dismissed the recordings as fake.

The AP reported:

By amplifying the recording to his more than 85 million Twitter followers, Trump underscored the ease with which pro-Russian narratives can seep into American public discourse ahead of the 2020 election despite being flagged by intelligence officials as the product of a concerted Russian effort.

Russia has also published disinformation under the guise of legitimate news stories, U.S. officials say, reflecting something of a shift in tactics from 2016, when Russia relied on a social media campaign to sow discord and also orchestrated the release of stolen Democratic emails.

To be clear: Trump has undoubtedly been briefed on what’s going on. So either he knows what he’s doing or is barely paying attention enough to care.

And he’s not the only one. Sen. Ron Johnson (R-WI) has been warned that the investigation he’s leading into Biden’s past is tainted with Russian disinformation. But he has dismissed these concerns. And despite the obviously opportunistic nature of the inquiry — Republicans had no interest in Biden’s actions in Ukraine until he became a candidate for president — he is shamelessly ramping it up. And he has openly admitted that the section of he could use the portion of his probe focused on Trump’s “Obamagate” conspiracy theory to have an impact on the election.

“The more that we expose of the corruption of the transition process between Obama and Trump, the more we expose of the corruption within those agencies, I would think it would certainly help Donald Trump win reelection and certainly be pretty good, I would say, evidence about not voting for Vice President Biden,” Johnson said in a recent interview, as Politico reported.

More broadly, the GOP has, again and again, rejected Democratic efforts to secure our elections and to forestall further foreign intervention in our politics. While not as overt as Trump and Johnson, the party as a whole has — tacitly or otherwise — become comfortable with letting Russia help the president. What was scandalous in 2016 has now become commonplace.

==

==

active measures russia

https://www.alternet.org/2020/08/democrats-raise-alarms-about-the-trump-administration-concealing-threats-to-the-2020-election/

no lnx

Democrats raise alarms about the Trump administration concealing threats to the 2020 election

Written by Kerry Eleveld / Daily Kos August 7, 2020

Congressional Democrats are sounding the alarm bells about 2016 redux playing out in this year’s election with extensive foreign interference while American voters are left in the dark.

Shortly before a closed-door intelligence briefing for senators on Tuesday, Sen. Richard Blumenthal of Connecticut called the classified documents he had reviewed as “chilling.”

“Declassify this information,” he urged in a tweet. “Americans deserve & need to know about ongoing foreign interference (even sabotage) in our election system.”

Now three of his Democratic colleagues have written to FBI Director Chris Wray, urging him to go public with the attacks being leveled at U.S. elections by foreign actors. The Democrats—Sen. Bob Menendez of New Jersey, the ranking member of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee; Senate Democratic Whip Dick Durbin of Illinois; and Sen. Jack Reed of Rhode Island, ranking member of the Senate Armed Services Committee—seem particularly concerned about foreign disinformation being targeted at Congress, laundered by certain members, and then disseminated to the public with the apparent imprimatur of a U.S. lawmaker. Specifically, Democrats believe they are seeing that play out with a probe GOP Sen. Ron Johnson of Wisconsin is currently leading into Joe Biden’s Ukraine diplomacy while he was vice president.

“Senator Schumer and Speaker Pelosi noted in their July 13th letter to you that ‘Congress appears to be the target of a concerted foreign interference campaign, which seeks to launder and amplify disinformation in order to influence congressional activity, public debate, and the presidential election in November,’” the senators wrote to Wray, in a letter obtained by Politico. “We attended classified briefings from the intelligence community and FBI over the past week and our concerns with respect to this targeting have only grown.”

Pelosi and Schumer attached an addendum to their mid-July letter singling out Johnson’s inquiry as a vehicle for the spread of Russian disinformation.

The briefings have detailed malign actions taken by both Russia and China. Politico reports that in one briefing, William Evanina, director of the National Counterintelligence and Security Center, admitted under pressure from Pelosi that Russia is specifically trying to help Trump get reelected while politically damaging Biden.

The briefings have also singled out Ukrainian individuals by name such as Andrii Telizhenko and Andrii Derkach who have made dubious claims about both the Democratic National Committee and Joe Biden. Both men also say they have turned over information to Sen. Johnson’s investigators.

The letter from Menendez, Durbin, and Reed pressed Wray to brief all senators on the information so they would be aware of foreign efforts to manipulate them. “Members must understand the risks inherent in accepting information generated by foreign sources, especially those committees currently conducting investigations,” they wrote.

Johnson remains obstinate about such warnings, saying Democrats’ objections only lead him to believe he’s on the right track. Johnson, who gave Trump cover on his initial effort to illegally fabricate a Ukrainian investigation, seems dead set on delivering Trump the corrupt Ukraine probe that was scuttled last year by a whistleblower complaint. Apparently, voting to acquit Trump of soliciting foreign help in his reelection wasn’t enough for Johnson. Now he’s recreating the bogus investigation that even Ukrainian officials refused to conduct.

It should be incumbent on the FBI to make crystal clear to the American people who’s trying to manipulate this election and how they are trying to do so. Nothing less than the integrity of U.S. elections and the future of the republic are at stake.

GOP chairman won’t confirm or deny receiving Biden ‘materials’ from foreign sources — even as Ukrainians say they’re passing him dirt

Matthew Chapman / Raw Story July 22, 2020

On Wednesday, NBC News reported that Senate Homeland Security Committee Chairman Ron Johnson (R-WI), who is currently running a probe into the financial dealings of former Vice President Joe Biden’s family in…

==

https://www.alternet.org/2020/07/democrats-warn-the-fbi-that-a-gop-senator-is-laundering-a-foreign-operation-to-attack-biden-report/

On  Monday, Politico reported that Democratic congressional leaders have sent a letter to FBI Director Christopher Wray demanding a briefing on foreign efforts to target members of Congress as part of an influence campaign.

“Among the Democrats’ concerns is that a Senate investigation being led by Sen. Ron Johnson (R-Wis.) has become a vehicle for ‘laundering’ a foreign influence campaign to damage Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden, according to two people familiar with the demand,” reported Natasha Bertrand. “Though the letter did not mention the Johnson investigation, it included a classified addendum that the two sources say identified the probe as one of the sources of their concern.”

The letter was signed by House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-CA), Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY), House Intelligence Committee Chairman Adam Schiff (D-CA), and Senate Intelligence Committee ranking member Mark Warner (D-VA).

Johnson, who chairs the Senate Homeland Security Committee, opened the investigation ostensibly to audit the origins of the Russia investigation in the previous administration. But even some Republicans have raised concerns that the overly political nature of the probe will backfire on them.

https://www.alternet.org/2020/05/obamas-office-slams-two-gop-senators-for-promoting-russian-disinformation-in-letter-to-national-archives/

no lnx doc

Alex Henderson May 6, 2020

Former President Barack Obama generally kept a low profile during the Ukraine scandal and the impeachment trial of President Donald Trump, preferring to let other prominent Democrats such as House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and House Intelligence Committee Chairman Adam Schiff do the talking. But according to BuzzFeed News reporter Emma Loop, Obama’s office — in a March 13 letter — slammed Republican senators for trying to link Ukraine and former Vice President Joe Biden to interference in the United States’ 2016 presidential election.

A far-right conspiracy theory claims that it was the Ukrainian government, not the Russian government and President Vladimir Putin, that interfered in the 2016 election — and that Ukraine interfered on behalf of Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton. That debunked claim, according to former special counsel Robert Mueller, has no validity. But many Trump supporters have promoted that conspiracy theory anyway, as have Putin allies in the Russian media. And in November 2019, two Republican senators (Chuck Grassley and Ron Johnson) tried to link the Obama Administration, including Biden, to the Ukrainian government.

Emma Loop

@LoopEmma

Scoop: In a letter to the National Archives, former president Barack Obama blasted the Senate GOP investigation into Joe Biden and alleged Ukrainian election interference, calling it an effort to "to give credence to a Russian disinformation campaign."https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/emmaloop/obama-records-biden-ukraine-russian-disinformation …

View image on TwitterView image on Twitter

Loop reports that Grassley and Johnson “have been investigating matters related to Democrats and Ukraine since the fall, when Trump was impeached for his interactions with Ukraine. Grassley and Johnson…. asked the National Archives for records on meetings between the Obama Administration and Ukrainian officials, as well meetings between Obama officials and Alexandra Chalupa, the Democratic operative at the heart of the debunked Ukrainian election interference narrative.”

In a March 13 letter — which was addressed to David S. Ferreiro of the National Archives and Records Administration (NARA) in Washington, D.C. — the office of Barack Obama and former First Lady Michelle Obama asserted that a November 19, 2019 records request from Grassley and Johnson was “not a proper use of” NARA’s resources.

Anita Decker Breckenridge, a records specialist in the Obamas’ office, told Ferreiro, “The request for early release of presidential records in order to give credence to a Russian disinformation campaign —  one that has already been thoroughly investigated by a bipartisan congressional committee — is without precedent…. This use of the special access process serves no legitimate purpose.”

Breckinridge, who sent copies of the letter to Johnson and Grassley, went on to say that “in the interest of countering the misinformation campaign underlying this request,” the Obamas’ office was “prepared” to give “access to the records” that were requested — and added, “In doing so, we emphasize that abuse of the special access process strikes at the heart of presidential confidentiality interests and undermines the statutory framework and norms that govern access to presidential records.”

==

no lnx

Republicans are willing to accept millions dying because they have ’embraced’ Trump’s death cult: conservative columnist

Written by Tom Boggioni / Raw Story March 24, 2020

In a blistering column for the Daily Beast, conservative Matt Lewis ripped into the Republican Party for demonstrating it really does stand for putting profits before people if its response to the coronavirus pandemic is any indication.

According to the author of “Too Dumb to Fail: How the GOP Went from the Party of Reagan to the Party of Trump,” the GOP has joined the president’s “death cult.”

Starting with a blunt, “In the last 24 hours, it has become clear that, despite warnings from experts like Dr. Fauci, Donald Trump is willing to sacrifice lives to try and save the economy and his chances for re-election,” Lewis suggested Republicans are not only backing the president — they’re proudly and publically embracing it.

Pointing to Sen. Ron Johnson (R-WI) proclaiming, “We don’t shut down our economy because tens of thousands of people die on the highways. It’s a risk we accept so we can move about. We don’t shut down our economies because tens of thousands of people die from the common flu,” the columnist expressed his disgust by writing, “I’m pretty sure Johnson just said he was comfortable with millions of Americans dying of coronavirus—so long as it doesn’t disrupt economic activity.”

“This logic is spreading among Republicans,” he continued. “Consider the comments Texas Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick made Monday night on Fox News: ‘No one reached out to me and said as a senior citizen, are you willing to take a chance on your survival in exchange for keeping the America that all America loves for your children and grandchildren. And if that’s the exchange, I’m all in.’”

“I’m old enough to remember when conservatives worried that Obamacare rationing would lead to “death panels” whereby older patients would be deemed too sick and expensive to help,” he wrote. “After all, why throw good money after bad? A few short years later, and it is Republicans who are making a shockingly similar rationalization.”

Stating, “This is a weird turn of events for the party of life,” Lewis lamented, “We have skipped over that nuanced discussion and gone straight to Republicans rationalizing the idea that we can just wipe out a million or so people to fix the economy.”

“Ultimately, we have a political party that has shown its true colors. Look no further than its standard-bearer. Consider his selfish motivations and petty behavior. Consider his long-held worldview that sees some people as genetic winners and some people as losers,” he explained. ” This is a man who responded to a pandemic by thinking, ‘How can I be on TV more?’ It’s truly depraved.”

“If human life and GDP become mutually exclusive for a pandemic-stricken America, which one do you think he’s going to choose? I think we already know the answer to that one,” he concluded.

[more]

==

also ?

Fox News’ Tucker Carlson goes off on GOP senator caught dumping stocks — says he must explain or resign

https://www.alternet.org/2020/03/fox-news-tucker-carlson-goes-off-on-gop-senator-caught-dumping-stocks-says-he-must-explain-or-resign/

https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2019/10/08/gop-theory-that-ukraine-set-up-trump/

no lnx

Fact Checker

Analysis

The GOP theory that Ukraine ‘set up’ Trump

Glenn Kessler

October 8, 2019

“That’s the piece of the puzzle I’m here to report today, that unlike the narrative of the press, that President Trump wants to dig up dirt on his 2020 opponent, what he wants is he wants an accounting of what happened in 2016. Who set him up? Did things spring from Ukraine? There’s a good piece we got an Oversight [Committee] letter on from Politico in 2017. Let me quote the article. It says: ‘Ukrainian government officials tried to help Hillary Clinton and undermine Trump.’ They did so by disseminating documents ‘implicating a top Trump aide in corruption,’ suggesting they were investigating the matter. Ukrainian officials also reportedly ‘helped Clinton allies research damaging information on Trump and his advisers.’ There is potential interference in the 2016 election. That’s what Trump wants to get to the bottom of, but the press doesn’t want to.”

— Sen. Ron Johnson (R-Wis.), during an interview on NBC’s “Meet the Press,” Oct. 6, 2019

Never mind that the rough transcript released by the White House of the July 25 call between Trump and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky shows that Trump said, “There’s a lot of talk about Biden’s son, that Biden stopped the prosecution and lot of people want to find out about that so whatever you can do with the Attorney General would be great.”

Johnson says that what Trump really wanted to find out from Ukrainian officials is what happened in 2016. “Who set him up?” he asked. “Did things spring from Ukraine?”

In the course of the July 25 conversation, Trump did say: “I would like you to do us a favor though because our country has been through a lot and Ukraine knows a lot about it. I would like you to find out what happened with this whole situation with Ukraine, they say Crowdstrike… I guess you have one of your wealthy people… The server, they say Ukraine has it.” (The ellipses are in the transcript, and it’s unclear if something has been edited out.)

Johnson, in his television interview, did not mention CrowdStrike but quoted from a Politico article from 2017. So what’s going on? Here is an explanation of three theories promoted by Republicans to suggest that Trump was “set up” by Ukraine.

The Facts

First of all, the evidence so far indicates there is nothing that took place in Ukraine that even begins to compare to the Russian intervention in the 2016 election. Special counsel Robert S. Mueller III documented in great detail a top-down effort, initiated by Russian President Vladimir Putin, to illegally hack and release information in a deliberate attempt to meddle in the presidential election on behalf of Trump.

What we have in Ukraine, so far, is just flotsam and jetsam that does not add up to state-level efforts to change the course of history.

DNC staff member

The Politico article cited by Johnson says a Ukrainian American Democratic operative, Alexandra Chalupa, began looking into Trump campaign official Paul Manafort’s ties to Ukrainian politician Viktor Yanukovych, who served as president from 2010 until his ouster in 2014. Chalupa was hired as a consultant to the Democratic National Committee during the 2016 campaign to help mobilize ethnic communities. She left the DNC in July 2016, the DNC said.

She continued her research into Manafort on her own, sometimes with the help of Ukrainian Embassy officials, and she said she sometimes shared her findings with officials at the DNC and Clinton’s campaign. But former Clinton campaign officials said they never received information from Chalupa.

The exact role of embassy officials is unclear. Chalupa told Politico that officials at the Ukrainian Embassy were helpful in providing “guidance” in response to her questions and that the embassy also worked with reporters researching Trump, Manafort and Russia. A top embassy official denied working with reporters or with Chalupa on issues related to Trump or Manafort, but a former embassy officer said he was instructed to help Chalupa with her research.

DNC officials denied that they coordinated with Chalupa on opposition research. She was not a researcher for the DNC, and the DNC did not incorporate her findings about Manafort, Politico reported. DNC officials told Politico that the Democratic Party had been looking into Trump and his ties to Russia long before Chalupa alerted them.

Chalupa disputed the framing of the Politico story in a Facebook post. “During the 2016 US election, I was a part time consultant for the DNC running an ethnic engagement program,” she said in a lengthy statement to CNN. “I was not an opposition researcher for the DNC, and the DNC never asked me to go to the Ukrainian Embassy to collect information.”

Chalupa may have worked with some embassy officials, but there’s no evidence that the DNC used information gathered by Chalupa or that the Ukrainians coordinated opposition research with the DNC.

The Politico article was published nearly two years ago, and it’s revealing that Johnson still is quoting from it. Sen. Charles E. Grassley (R-Iowa) wrote a letter to the Justice Department in 2017, and more recently Grassley and Johnson wrote a follow-up letter asking again for an investigation. A Johnson spokesman directed The Fact Checker to a cryptic statement by the Justice Department that a team is evaluating “the extent to which a number of countries, including Ukraine, played a role in the counterintelligence investigation directed at the Trump campaign during the 2016 election.”

Manafort ‘black ledger’

Manafort, briefly, was Trump’s campaign chairman in 2016. In August 2016, a Ukrainian government agency released ledgers that reportedly showed $12.7 million in cash payments from Yanukovych’s party that were earmarked for Manafort. Reports about these payments prompted Manafort to step down from his position in the Trump campaign, though the Mueller report says he continued to provide advice to campaign officials.

Serhiy Leshchenko, a Ukrainian lawmaker and former investigative journalist, and Artem Sytnyk, a director of the National Anti-Corruption Bureau, publicized these ledgers, which, according to Leshchenko, were found by an anonymous source in the burned-out ruins of the headquarters of Yanukovych’s party.

In December, a Kiev court said the decision to publish the documents amounted to interference in the U.S. presidential election — a conclusion that Leshchenko said was politically motivated and aimed at undermining Sytnyk. In July, the ruling was overturned by an appeals court. “The court concluded that all the charges against me were unfounded, and even obliged my opponents to reimburse me for $100 in legal costs,” Leshchenko wrote in The Washington Post.

“Corruption is harmful whether it takes place in America or Ukraine. My desire to expose Manafort’s doings was motivated by the desire for justice,” Leshchenko wrote. “Neither Hillary Clinton, nor Joe Biden, nor John Podesta, nor George Soros asked me to publish the information from the black ledger. I wanted to obtain accountability for the lobbyist whose client immersed Ukraine in a blood bath during the Revolution of Dignity and the subsequent war in eastern Ukraine, when Yanukovych called on Russia to send troops.” He added: “I have no doubt that Yanukovych paid Manafort for his services out of the funds he robbed from Ukrainian taxpayers.”

Glenn Beck on Oct. 3 promoted an audiotape, purportedly of Sytnyk bragging that he “helped Hillary’s campaign,” that was made public in March by Borislav Rosenblatt, a Ukrainian legislator behind the now-overturned lawsuit claiming election interference. But Rosenblatt had been investigated by Sytnyk’s anti-corruption bureau, suggesting he is not a credible source.

While some Republicans have suggested that the ledger was fake, Manafort’s defense lawyers did not make that argument as they unsuccessfully defended him on charges that included failing to report on his income taxes millions of dollars he had earned working for Yanukovych.

CrowdStrike

This is the strangest claim — that somehow a private company co-founded by a Ukrainian American had a role in starting the “Russian hoax.” It is based on virtually no evidence, yet it emerged from the president’s mouth during a phone conversation with his Ukrainian counterpart. “The server, they say Ukraine has it,” Trump told Zelensky.

Trump has been obsessed with the idea that the FBI never took physical possession of the servers at the DNC that were hacked. (Our database of Trump’s false and misleading claims shows he has brought this up more than 20 times.)

But the FBI felt it was not necessary to enter the DNC’s premises and take custody of the affected servers, as agents were able to obtain complete copies of forensic images made by CrowdStrike, which first identified that the DNC had been hacked by Russian operatives. Former FBI director James B. Comey testified that his staff told him this arrangement was an “appropriate substitute.”

CrowdStrike co-founder Dmitri Alperovitch is a Russia-born cyber and national security expert and a U.S. citizen; he is not Ukrainian. In any case, Mueller’s investigation confirmed CrowdStrike’s findings and even indicted 12 Russian intelligence officers in 2018 for their role in the breach.

Thomas P. Bossert, who served as Trump’s first homeland security adviser, said Sept. 29 that the president has been repeatedly told that the story has been “completely debunked,” yet Trump continues to embrace it. “The DNC server and that conspiracy theory has got to go,” Bossert said on ABC’s “This Week.” “If he continues to focus on that white whale, it’s going to bring him down.”

The Bottom Line

The CrowdStrike allegation is crazy stuff, dismissed by even Trump’s own aides. So let’s ignore that.

The story of Chalupa’s work at the DNC has not advanced since 2017, and it’s pretty thin beer, especially when compared with state-ordered hacking by Russia. She may or may not have worked with embassy officials, and the DNC did not use her research. The impact, if any, seems minimal.

The release of the “black ledger” — via a Ukrainian state agency and legislator — did result in Manafort’s removal from the campaign and prompted questions about Trump and Russia. (Trump might have avoided some of these questions if he had done some due diligence and not hired Manafort in the first place, given Manafort’s deep ties to Russian figures.) But the legal ruling in Ukraine that this was election inference has been overturned. And again, people appear to have acted out of individual motivations, not at the behest of the head of state.

We’ll see what, if anything, the Justice Department investigation uncovers. But there’s little to suggest this is a fruitful avenue for inquiry.

==

https://www.alternet.org/2019/10/gop-sens-ron-johnson-and-marsha-blackburn-are-tied-to-russian-money-and-trump-conspiracy-theories-theyre-not-alone/

no lnx

GOP Sens. Ron Johnson and Marsha Blackburn are tied to Russian money and Trump conspiracy theories. They’re not alone

Written by Sophia Tesfaye / Salon October 30, 2019

Nancy Pelosi has announced that the House will finally hold a formal vote dictating the rules for the impeachment inquiry, six weeks after it was launched by a whistleblower’s complaint mysteriously withheld from Congress. And on Tuesday, Lt. Col. Alexander Vindman backed up both the initial whistleblower and U.S. diplomat Bill Taylor by testifying that he too was concerned about the Trump administration’s push to use congressionally-allocated military aid to Ukraine to coerce an investigation into Joe Biden.

Congressional Republicans have long since stopped defending Trump on the merits since shortly after the White House released a transcript of a July call between President Trump and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky. Instead, they’ve sought refuge in increasingly meaningless process arguments. So of course Pelosi agreeing to a formal vote on the rules of impeachment hasn’t stopped Republican complaints about the process. The goalposts will shift once again. No matter what the Democrats agree to, Republicans will complain about procedural unfairness and also refuse to concede the inquiry is legitimate. But how much of Republicans’ unwillingness to hold Trump accountable for his self-dealing is because they’re in on it?

On Monday the Washington Post published an interview with a Ukrainian diplomat who claimed to have met with Sen. Ron Johnson, R-Wis., this summer to discuss the baseless conspiracy theory promoted by President Trump that Ukrainian officials had interfered in the 2016 election on behalf of Hillary Clinton.

Johnson reportedly met with Ukrainian diplomat Andrii Telizhenko for at least 30 minutes on Capitol Hill in July, and Telizhenko then met with Johnson’s Senate staff for five additional hours. According to the report, “the discussions focused in part on ‘the DNC issue’ — a reference to his unsubstantiated claim that the Democratic National Committee worked with the Ukrainian government in 2016 to gather incriminating information about then-Trump campaign chairman Paul Manafort. Telizhenko said he could not recall the date of the meeting, but a review of his Facebook page revealed a photo of him and Johnson posted on July 11.”

Johnson is a vocal Trump defender who has hounded the inspector general of the intelligence community about investigating media leaks regarding the Ukraine call. He has previously admitted that he was told by Gordon Sondland, the U.S. ambassador to the European Union, that Ukraine needed to “get to the bottom of what happened in 2016” in order to receive military aid.

As Johnson told the Wall Street Journal earlier this month, after Sondland told him that, he was assured “if President Trump has that confidence” that the Ukrainians would do his bidding, “then he’ll release the military spending.” Now, as the Post points out, Johnson’s “knowledge of key events” in the case may “complicate his role as a juror in a trial by the Senate.”

Recall that when Johnson was asked about his defense of Trump’s actions, he snapped at the simple question from NBC News’ Chuck Todd and spun out the same deep state conspiracy theory pushed by the likes of Fox News’ Sean Hannity.

Beyond his apparent involvement in Trump’s Ukraine dealings, Johnson is alleged to have benefited from campaign money illegally funneled from Russia via shell corporations owned by the National Rifle Association, which helped him win his tight 2016 race in Wisconsin.

Political action committees for Republican Sens. Mitch McConnell, Marco Rubio and Lindsey Graham reportedly accepted $7.35 million in contributions from a Ukrainian-born oligarch with close ties to Russian President Vladimir Putin during the 2016 election. McConnell and Graham are co-sponsors of a new resolution condemning the House impeachment inquiry. At least 50 Senate Republicans, several of whom have refused to publicly comment on the growing Ukraine scandal — citing a need to remain impartial for a likely Senate impeachment trial — have already signed onto that bill. The resolution is currently paused in the Senate Rules Committee until the House votes on impeachment rules later this week.

As House Democrats’ investigation has rapidly unveiled ever more damaging material regarding Trump’s Ukraine scandal, public support for impeachment has shot up. Reportedly nervous about his wall of defense in the Senate crumbling, the president recently hosted several GOP senators at the White House, including top Johnson, Graham, John Thune of South Dakota and John Kennedy of Louisiana, last week. A day earlier, Thune and Kennedy, had blocked a Democratic bill to provide funding for states to shore up election security. The next day, Sen. Marsha Blackburn, R-Tenn., quietly blocked three election-security bills for the second time this year.

“You know, it’s not a good sign if you’re doing the same thing over and over and expecting a different result,” Blackburn said on the Senate floor late last week. She is among the Republican senators with close ties to a U.S.-sanctioned Russian politician who is accused of illegally channeling Russian funds through the NRA. Under Senate rules, any individual senator can block a vote on a bill.

When Senate Republicans are not prematurely dismissing an impeachment inquiry on which they will probably have to render judgment, they continue to protect Trump’s refusal to clamp down on potential election interference. If Republican charges of a “kangaroo court” are anything, they are a classic case of projection: How can Senate Republicans possibly serve as impartial jurors in a trial of the president, when they are implicated in the same pattern of political malfeasance?

Sophia Tesfaye is Salon’s Deputy Politics Editor and resides in Washington, D.C. You can find her on Twitter at @SophiaTesfaye.

==

no lnx

Republican humiliates himself at Senate hearing as his attempt to nail Instagram for liberal bias falls flat

Republican humiliates himself at Senate hearing as his attempt to nail Instagram for liberal bias falls flat Image via Wikimedia Commons.

written by Brad Reed / Raw Story June 25, 2019

30

Sen. Ron Johnson (R-WI) on Tuesday fell flat on his face when he tried to get technology experts to admit that major social media platforms were biased against conservatives.

While talking with assorted experts on artificial intelligence and algorithms, Johnson said that he had his staff members go to Politico’s Instagram account and record what other recommendations the app gave to them after following it.

According to Johnson, the vast majority of recommendations that came back were for news websites like the Washington Post or progressive outlets like Huffington Post, and none were for right-wing websites such as Breitbart.

Dr. Stephen Wolfram, the founder and chief executive officer of Wolfram Research, scoffed at Johnson’s claim of bias and said it was more likely that Instagram delivered liberal recommendations to Politico followers because those followers were more likely to follow neutral or progressive political news websites in the first place.

“The thing that will happen is, if there’s no other information, it will tend to be just where the most content that people on the platform in general have clicked,” he said. “It may be a statement, in that case — I’m really speculating — that the users of that platform tend to like those things.”

Johnson also complained that many conservative news groups were having their articles removed from social media feeds — but Ms. Rashida Richardson, the director of policy research at the AI Now Institute, said that research shows most of those removals came because those articles contained demonstrably false information.

“That’s more of a content moderation issue,” she said.

“OK, anyway,” Johnson replied.

Watch the video below.

NEW

https://www.alternet.org/2019/04/the-bizarre-link-between-wisconsin-and-russia/

no lnx

Daily Kos Staff / Daily Kos April 22, 2019

The Mueller Report had plenty of information as to how Russians worked to subvert our elections and gained influence in our current US government. But what jumps out to me is how much of that story and related Russian affairs connected back to Wisconsin.

Our state appears in the Mueller Report as one of a handful in the Midwest that former Trump campaign chair Paul Manafort passed information about to a Russian intelligence agent. The report indicates that this was done to tell the Russians the best way to boost Trump’s chances in those states.

View image on Twitter

Bob Cesca

?

@bobcesca_go

Jesus! Mueller: "Michigan, Wisconsin, Pennsylvania and Minnesota" were discussed between Manafort and GRU operative Kilimnik.

7,595

9:01 AM - Apr 18, 2019

And you may recall that Trump did surprisingly well in all of those states in November 2016. Funny, that.

One of the biggest assists Trump got was in the form of a record investment by the National Rifle Association. Keep that NRA support in mind when you hear about this story from Friday night.

Maria Butina, who has admitted to working as a Russian agent to infiltrate an influential U.S. gun rights group and make inroads with conservative activists and Republicans, asked the court to sentence her to time served ahead of her April 26 sentencing, according to court documents.

Butina, 30, a former graduate student at American University who publicly advocated for gun rights, pleaded guilty in December to one count of conspiring to act as a foreign agent for Russia. She has remained in custody since her arrest in July 2018.

Prosecutors filed a memo on Friday ahead of this week’s sentencing. And check out this segment of that report, which might be familiar to you:

Soon after [Butina] drafted the Diplomacy Project proposal, in April 2015, she traveled to the United States to attend the Gun Rights Organization (aka the NRA) annual meetings with the Russian Official, where she highlighted her experience as a gun-rights advocate in Russia and was introduced to influential members of Political Party 1, one of whom announced his Presidential campaign shortly thereafter.  Statement of Offense at 3.  She did so in furtherance of the conspiracy’s goal to establish the back channel of communication as laid out in the Diplomacy Project.  Id. at 3.  Butina attended this announcement event in July 2015 and, after being tasked by the Russian Official to do so, wrote a report to him in which she emphasized the fact that she was introduced to one of that candidate’s three advisors for matters concerning international politics.   A copy of the Twitter chats, along with the report, is attached hereto as Exhibit 4.   According to her notes from a meeting with then-Russian Ambassador Sergei Kislyak in May 2015, she said she would “send the name of the advisor [to the candidate whose announcement event she later attended] who can come to Moscow.”

Looks like those Twitter chats will be released when the Butina file is redacted, likely after the sentencing happens on Friday.

But who was this candidate that Butina and Putin-appointed central banker Alexander Torshin met up with, and whose presidential announcement event did she go to in July 2015?

After Walker washed out of the 2016 election race, the sentencing memo describes how Butina organized a meeting with the NRA back home in Mother Russia.

In December 2015, Butina invited powerful members of the Gun Rights Organization to Moscow as part of the conspiracy’s plan to establish the unofficial channel of communication. Statement of Offense at 3. She actively sought out meetings for this group with high-level Russian government officials, as arranged by the Russian Official.  Id.  As part of this endeavor, the defendant sought information from U.S. Person 1 about the degree of political influence held by the Gun Rights Organization members in the United States and stressed the need for a “political program” as part of the Gun Rights Organization trip to Moscow.  Id. at 3-4.

Following the Gun Rights Organization trip to Moscow, the defendant and the Russian Official discussed the need to “hold the spot” now that “everyone has realized that [the Gun Rights Organization] is a valuable contact,” and she noted that there will be “attempts to seize the  initiative.”  Exhibit 2. Butina has since confirmed that she was worried about others within the Russian government or a political group or activist noticing that the contacts she had built with the Gun Rights Organization were valuable and cutting her and the Russian Official out of the loop. Just days later, Butina noted to the Russian Official that they would “quietly press” or “put pressure on [members of the Gun Rights Organization] later.”

Guess who was in Russia in December 2015?

View image on Twitter

David A. Clarke, Jr.

@SheriffClarke

Red Square near the Kremlin with a Russian officer. Met earlier with Russian Foreign Minister who spoke on Mid East.

1,078

11:42 AM - Dec 10, 2015

Also don’t forget that a couple of Wisconsin politicians knew about these Russian efforts before the 2016 election, but hid it from unsuspecting Wisconsin voters.In late Summer 2016, President Obama organized a “Gang of 12” to let them know about potential Russian hacking and interference, and 2 of the members of that meeting were then-House Speaker Paul Ryan, and Senate Homeland Security Chair Ron Johnson. That meeting that was kept from public knowledge before the elections after complaints from Senate GOP Leader Mitch McConnell.

I’ve referenced this Bruce Murphy article in Urban Milwaukee from January 2017 in the past, and that’s because it continues to link back to developments in the Trump-GOP-Russia connection. It also points to Johnson being complicit in keeping Wisconsinites from knowing about the Russian garbage that was being sent to their computers, and flat-out lying later on about what intelligence agencies told him.

Russia’s interference with the American elections fit the pattern of a country engaged in disinformation and destabilization efforts across the globe, as Johnson has described it. And Russia’s leader was someone Johnson already suspected of nefarious acts. Johnson had previously sponsored resolutions calling for a full investigation into the murder of a Russian political opposition leader and for an investigation of Russia’s attacks on the Ukraine.

Johnson, in short, had an opportunity to be a patriot and condemn the fact that Russia was now engaged in such activities in the United States. But he issued no resolutions — in fact, not one word — on Russian’s cyber attacks on America.

Worse, he has engaged in his own pattern of misinformation on the subject. After the CIA publicly released a report in January concluding that Russia meddled in the presidential election to help Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump win the election, Johnson issued a statement to the Wisconsin State Journal saying he would “would need more definitive information before drawing further conclusions.” Johnson did not reveal that he had been informed back in September this was happening.

Johnson went on to complain to CNBC that the CIA refused to brief him on Russian hacking, saying “I have not seen the evidence that it actually was Russia,” while failing to note the CIA report’s echoed the briefing he’d received from other intelligence leaders in September.

In addition, Ron Johnson was 1 of several GOP Senators who decided last year’s US Independence Day was a great time…to visit the Russians.

Sounds like investigative media might want to ask some questions of these Sconnie Republicans, why many seem to have no problem hanging out with high-level Russian officials, and ask what’s being done to prevent Wisconsinites from being targeted and propagandized against in 2020. The (non)-answers they give might be quiteilluminating.

I’d also like to see Walker, Clarke, Paul Ryan, ex-Trump Chief of Staff Reince Priebus (named several times in the Mueller Report) and Ron Johnson go before Congress and answer some pointed questions in the coming months. They have a lot to answer for in how they’ve allowed our democracy to be threatened over the last few years, and why they don’t seem too willing to do much about it.

LNX below

https://www.alternet.org/2019/04/the-bizarre-link-between-wisconsin-and-russia/

no twt pix clarke w/ rooskie soldier

Mueller Report had plenty of information as to how Russians worked to subvert our elections and gained influence in our current US government. But what jumps out to me is how much of that story and related Russian affairs connected back to Wisconsin.

Our state appears in the Mueller Report as one of a handful in the Midwest that former Trump campaign chair Paul Manafort passed information about to a Russian intelligence agent. The report indicates that this was done to tell the Russians the best way to boost Trump’s chances in those states.

[twt manafort briek kilimnick?]

nd you may recall that Trump did surprisingly well in all of those states in November 2016. Funny, that.

One of the biggest assists Trump got was in the form of a record investment by the National Rifle Association. Keep that NRA support in mind when you hear about this story from Friday night.

"Maria Butina, who has admitted to working as a Russian agent to infiltrate an influential U.S. gun rights group and make inroads with conservative activists and Republicans, asked the court to sentence her to time served ahead of her April 26 sentencing, according to court documents.

Butina, 30, a former graduate student at American University who publicly advocated for gun rights, pleaded guilty in December to one count of conspiring to act as a foreign agent for Russia. She has remained in custody since her arrest in July 2018.

Prosecutors filed a memo on Friday ahead of this week’s sentencing. And check out this segment of that report, which might be familiar to you.

Soon after [Butina] drafted the Diplomacy Project proposal, in April 2015, she traveled to the United States to attend the Gun Rights Organization (aka the NRA) annual meetings with the Russian Official, where she highlighted her experience as a gun-rights advocate in Russia and was introduced to influential members of Political Party 1, one of whom announced his Presidential campaign shortly thereafter.  Statement of Offense at 3.  She did so in furtherance of the conspiracy’s goal to establish the back channel of communication as laid out in the Diplomacy Project.  Id. at 3.  Butina attended this announcement event in July 2015 and, after being tasked by the Russian Official to do so, wrote a report to him in which she emphasized the fact that she was introduced to one of that candidate’s three advisors for matters concerning international politics.   A copy of the Twitter chats, along with the report, is attached hereto as Exhibit 4.   According to her notes from a meeting with then-Russian Ambassador Sergei Kislyak in May 2015, she said she would “send the name of the advisor [to the candidate whose announcement event she later attended] who can come to Moscow.”

Looks like those Twitter chats will be released when the Butina file is redacted, likely after the sentencing happens on Friday.

But who was this candidate that Butina and Putin-appointed central banker Alexander Torshin met up with, and whose presidential announcement event did she go to in July 2015?

After Walker washed out of the 2016 election race, the sentencing memo describes how Butina organized a meeting with the NRA back home in Mother Russia.

"In December 2015, Butina invited powerful members of the Gun Rights Organization to Moscow as part of the conspiracy’s plan to establish the unofficial channel of communication. Statement of Offense at 3. She actively sought out meetings for this group with high-level Russian government officials, as arranged by the Russian Official.  Id.  As part of this endeavor, the defendant sought information from U.S. Person 1 about the degree of political influence held by the Gun Rights Organization members in the United States and stressed the need for a “political program” as part of the Gun Rights Organization trip to Moscow.  Id. at 3-4.

Following the Gun Rights Organization trip to Moscow, the defendant and the Russian Official discussed the need to “hold the spot” now that “everyone has realized that [the Gun Rights Organization] is a valuable contact,” and she noted that there will be “attempts to seize the  initiative.”  Exhibit 2. Butina has since confirmed that she was worried about others within the Russian government or a political group or activist noticing that the contacts she had built with the Gun Rights Organization were valuable and cutting her and the Russian Official out of the loop. Just days later, Butina noted to the Russian Official that they would “quietly press” or “put pressure on [members of the Gun Rights Organization] later.”

Guess who was in Russia in December 2015?

[pix]

Also don’t forget that a couple of Wisconsin politicians knew about these Russian efforts before the 2016 election, but hid it from unsuspecting Wisconsin voters. In late Summer 2016, President Obama organized a “Gang of 12” to let them know about potential Russian hacking and interference, and 2 of the members of that meeting were then-House Speaker Paul Ryan, and Senate Homeland Security Chair Ron Johnson. That meeting that was kept from public knowledge before the elections after complaints from Senate GOP Leader Mitch McConnell.

I’ve referenced this Bruce Murphy article in Urban Milwaukee from January 2017 in the past, and that’s because it continues to link back to developments in the Trump-GOP-Russia connection. It also points to Johnson being complicit in keeping Wisconsinites from knowing about the Russian garbage that was being sent to their computers, and flat-out lying later on about what intelligence agencies told him.

Russia’s interference with the American elections fit the pattern of a country engaged in disinformation and destabilization efforts across the globe, as Johnson has described it. And Russia’s leader was someone Johnson already suspected of nefarious acts. Johnson had previously sponsored resolutions calling for a full investigation into the murder of a Russian political opposition leader and for an investigation of Russia’s attacks on the Ukraine.

Johnson, in short, had an opportunity to be a patriot and condemn the fact that Russia was now engaged in such activities in the United States. But he issued no resolutions — in fact, not one word — on Russian’s cyber attacks on America.

Worse, he has engaged in his own pattern of misinformation on the subject. After the CIA publicly released a report in January concluding that Russia meddled in the presidential election to help Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump win the election, Johnson issued a statement to the Wisconsin State Journal saying he would “would need more definitive information before drawing further conclusions.” Johnson did not reveal that he had been informed back in September this was happening.

Johnson went on to complain to CNBC that the CIA refused to brief him on Russian hacking, saying “I have not seen the evidence that it actually was Russia,” while failing to note the CIA report’s echoed the briefing he’d received from other intelligence leaders in September.

In addition, Ron Johnson was 1 of several GOP Senators who decided last year’s US Independence Day was a great time…to visit the Russians.

Sounds like investigative media might want to ask some questions of these Sconnie Republicans, why many seem to have no problem hanging out with high-level Russian officials, and ask what’s being done to prevent Wisconsinites from being targeted and propagandized against in 2020. The (non)-answers they give might be quite illuminating.

I’d also like to see Walker, Clarke, Paul Ryan, ex-Trump Chief of Staff Reince Priebus (named several times in the Mueller Report) and Ron Johnson go before Congress and answer some pointed questions in the coming months. They have a lot to answer for in how they’ve allowed our democracy to be threatened over the last few years, and why they don’t seem too willing to do much about it.

==

ref

https://urbanmilwaukee.com/2017/01/10/murphys-law-ron-johnson-asleep-on-russian-hacking/

Yesterday, in an interview with Wisconsin Public Radio, Sen. Ron Johnson made it clear he takes a very tough stand on Russia and its leader Vladimir Putin.

“I’m very wary of Vladimir Putin,” Johnson said. “There have been close to 30 suspicious political assassinations since he has taken power.”

As for Putin and Russian using cyber hacking to interfere with America’s elections, he declared, “I take it very seriously. As chair of European Subcommittee on Foreign Relations, we’ve held a number of hearings on Russia’s disinformation campaign and how they are trying to de-stabilize certainly Eastern European countries, but just their destabilization efforts around the world.”

Indeed, Johnson had “heard firsthand of Russia’s efforts to destabilize and interfere in the internal affairs of its neighbors,” he told the Wisconsin State Journal.

And yet back in mid-September when Johnson was informed by intelligence leaders of Russian hacking and was asked to join a bipartisan effort to warn Russia to desist, Johnson did nothing.

To date no one in the Wisconsin media has even reported that Johnson attended this intelligence briefing, much less that he had no response to the information.

The details of the mid-September meeting are in a story by the Washington Post, which reported that President Barack Obama had dispatched his counterterrorism and homeland security adviser, Lisa Monaco, FBI Director James B. Comey and Homeland Security Secretary Jeh Johnson “to make the pitch for a ‘show of solidarity and bipartisan unity’ against Russian interference in the election,” as a senior administration official told the Post.

As chairman of the Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee, Johnson was one the so-called “Gang of 12,” the top 12 congressional leaders, who were invited to the meeting. (House Speaker Paul Ryan also attended the meeting.) Johnson later confirmed to Politico that he participated in the briefing.

“In a secure room in the Capitol used for briefings involving classified information, administration officials broadly laid out the evidence U.S. spy agencies had collected, showing Russia’s role in cyber-intrusions in at least two states and in hacking the emails of the Democratic organizations and individuals,” the Post reported.

“And they made a case for a united, bipartisan front in response to what one official described as ‘the threat posed by unprecedented meddling by a foreign power in our election process.’”

But Republican leaders declined to join a bipartisan response to the information. Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell “raised doubts about the underlying intelligence and made clear to the administration that he would consider any effort by the White House to challenge the Russians publicly an act of partisan politics,” the Post reports.

Russia’s interference with the American elections fit the pattern of a country engaged in disinformation and destabilization efforts across the globe, as Johnson has described it. And Russia’s leader was someone Johnson already suspected of nefarious acts. Johnson had previously sponsored resolutions calling for a full investigation into the murder of a Russian political opposition leader and for an investigation of Russia’s attacks on the Ukraine.

Johnson, in short, had an opportunity to be a patriot and condemn the fact that Russia was now engaged in such activities in the United States. But he issued no resolutions — in fact, not one word — on Russian’s cyber attacks on America.

Worse, he has engaged in his own pattern of misinformation on the subject. After the CIA publicly released a report in January concluding that Russia meddled in the presidential election to help Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump win the election, Johnson issued a statement to the Wisconsin State Journal saying he would “would need more definitive information before drawing further conclusions.” Johnson did not reveal that he had been informed back in September this was happening.

Johnson went on to complain to CNBC that the CIA refused to brief him on Russian hacking, saying “I have not seen the evidence that it actually was Russia,” while failing to note the CIA report’s echoed the briefing he’d received from other intelligence leaders in September.

Johnson also complained that Obama had failed to confront the Russia government with strength, even though the Obama administration had proposed a strong stand on cyber hacking which Johnson declined to join.

So things stood until this week, when Johnson did an about face and declared his concern about Russia’s cyber hacking of his country. Why the sudden shift of position?

Perhaps because Trump’s election was certified last week so Russia’s efforts to help elect him can’t be used to pry away any electoral votes. Or perhaps because of the Senate hearing last Thursday, where senators on both sides of the aisle expressed concern about testimony by intelligence leaders on Russian hacking. As GOP Sen. Lindsay Graham noted, Republicans could be the next target of cyberattacks. “Could it be Republicans next election?” he said. “It’s not like we’re so much better at cybersecurity than Democrats.”

Indeed, all Americans are threatened when a hostile nation targets us for cyber attacks. That’s true now, and was true back in mid-September when Ron Johnson failed to take any action. Perhaps it’s time for him to explain why.

More about the Russian Affair

Op Ed: Is Walker a Russian Dupe? - Bill Kaplan - Jul 24th, 2018

Gov. Scott Walker Political Operation Snagged $250,000 Check Mere Days After Meeting With Accused Russian Spy - One Wisconsin Now - Jul 20th, 2018

What’s Walker Hiding? - Democratic Party of Wisconsin - Jul 18th, 2018

Campaign Cash: Russian Operative Highlights Walker’s NRA Ties - Wisconsin Democracy Campaign - Jul 18th, 2018

Matt Flynn Blasts Scott Walker for Meeting with Russian Spy - Matt Flynn - Jul 16th, 2018

Plenty of Horne: Giuliani Can’t Practice Law in D.C. - Michael Horne - Jun 28th, 2018

Pocan Statement Regarding Reports that Russian-Linked Facebook Ads Targeted Wisconsin - U.S. Rep Mark Pocan - Oct 4th, 2017

Wisconsin Notified of Unsuccessful Russian Hacking Attempt - Wisconsin Elections Commission - Sep 22nd, 2017

Murphy’s Law: Wisconsin A Key State for Russian Hacking - Bruce Murphy - Aug 8th, 2017

Report Suggests Wisconsin Voters Targeted by Collusion Between Trump Campaign, Russian Fake News Operation - One Wisconsin Now - Jul 13th, 2017

Rep. Pocan Statement on Former FBI Director James Comey’s Testimony on Trump and Russia - U.S. Rep Mark Pocan - Jun 8th, 2017

Speaker Paul Ryan Swears House GOP To Secrecy Regarding Trump’s Ties To Russia, Spokesperson Lies About The Conversation - Democratic Party of Wisconsin - May 17th, 2017

As FBI Confirms Russia Investigation - Democratic Party of Wisconsin - Mar 21st, 2017

FBI Investigation into Links Between Trump/Russia Highlights Need for Special Prosecutor - U.S. Rep. Gwen Moore - Mar 20th, 2017

Revelations about Sessions’ Contact with Russia Warrants his Removal - U.S. Rep. Gwen Moore - Mar 2nd, 2017

Senators Call for Independent Prosecutor to Investigate Trump Officials’ Collusion with Russia and Apparent White House Cover-Up - U.S. Sen. Tammy Baldwin - Feb 15th, 2017

Rep. Pocan Urges President Trump to Fully Declassify Report on Russian Interference in 2016 Election - U.S. Rep Mark Pocan - Feb 14th, 2017

Murphy’s Law: Ron Johnson Asleep on Russian Hacking? - Bruce Murphy - Jan 10th, 2017

U.S. Senator Tammy Baldwin Joins Call for Bipartisan Senate Select Committee Investigation of Russian Interference in 2016 Election - U.S. Sen. Tammy Baldwin - Jan 3rd, 2017

U.S. Senator Tammy Baldwin Statement on Russian Cyberattacks - U.S. Sen. Tammy Baldwin - Dec 16th, 2016

Wisconsin Comrades Set to Welcome Donald Trump, Whitewash Russian Attempts to Influence Elections- One Wisconsin Now - Dec 13th, 2016

==

==

also ref

https://www.jsonline.com/story/news/politics/2018/07/05/johnson-urges-dialogue-russia-but-warns-against-midterms-interference/761043002/

republican U.S. Sen. Ron Johnson said Thursday that he and others in a congressional delegation to Moscow put Russians on notice not to interfere with the 2018 midterm elections.

Johnson was in the group of congressional Republicans that traveled this week to Moscow for talks with Russian lawmakers.

Johnson said Russia's meddling in the 2016 U.S. elections was "brought up constantly by multiple senators."

"The point was made," Johnson said. "I think they are very well aware of the fact that a way to blow up this first step would be to interfere in the 2018 elections.

"They were very well put on notice that we're not buying what they're saying. That we're basically issuing, let me be kind here, guidance that it would not be smart to be caught meddling in 2018. I think they got the message. There's no way they couldn't have had."

The Washington Post reported the Republicans "sounded a newly conciliatory tone" in the talks that were held ahead of President Donald Trump's July 16 summit with Russian President Vladimir Putin in Helsinki, Finland.

U.S. Sen. Richard Shelby (R-Ala.) led the delegation. Johnson said he was only "cleared" to go on the trip last week, left for Moscow on Sunday and returned to Wisconsin Thursday.

Late last year, Johnson and fellow Republican Sen. John Barrasso of Wyoming called off a planned trip to Moscow after Russia denied a visa to Democratic Sen. Jeanne Shaheen of New Hampshire.

RELATED: Sen. Ron Johnson backs Russia probes but downplays urgency

RELATED: Wisconsin Sen. Ron Johnson walks back claims of an anti-Trump 'secret society' within FBI

RELATED: Russian Twitter trolls stoked racial tension in wake of Sherman Park rioting in Milwaukee before 2016 election

Johnson said relations between the U.S. and Russia are "strained."

"I've been saying for a long time that I wish Russia was no worse than a friendly rival as opposed to an unfriendly adversary," he said. "I don't want it to degrade to the enemy category."

"Right now, we're adversaries, there's no two ways about it," he said.

But Johnson was hopeful that a process could be started for "an ongoing dialogue to find individuals so we can actually find relationships."

"Those on-going personal relationships can be crucial in uncertain times," he said.

"My takeaway there was a sincere desire on both sides to improve relationships," he added.

Johnson, who chairs the European subcommittee of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, defended the trip that saw the U.S. lawmakers in Moscow over July 4th.

"This is an important relationship," he said. "Russia is not going away."

He added, "The main reason you go there is to understand their perspective."

This was Johnson's first trip Moscow, which he described as "a modern, well-maintained European city. There was nothing shabby about it."

He said there was "no evidence" that international sanctions were having an effect on the Russian economy. But he said Russia is rankled by sanctions on individuals, "targeting the oligarchs, their legislators."

see distraction

https://www.alternet.org/2019/04/trio-of-republican-senators-demand-doj-hand-over-information-on-clinton-email-probe-as-ag-barr-prepares-for-release-of-redacted-mueller-report/

As Attorney General William Barr prepares the release of a redacted version of special counsel Robert Mueller’s Russia investigation report, Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-SC) is reportedly recruiting other Republican senators help with a separate endeavor. As MSNBC reports, “a trio of top Republican senators” are demanding the Justice Department “hand over information on the handling of the probe into Hillary Clinton’s private email server.”

Graham, along with Sen. Ron Johnson (R-WI) and Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-IA) sent a letter to Barr on Tuesday requesting documents pertaining to the department’s investigation of the former secretary of state.

The document request comes despite federal investigators clearing Clinton of criminal wrongdoing, and a separate Justice Department inspector general examination that reviewed the department’s probe. According to Politico, the trio of senators have requested a “classified briefing on steps the Justice Department plans to take in light of its inspector general’s 2018 report,” according to Politico.

“Now that the Special Counsel’s investigation has concluded, we are unaware of any legitimate basis upon which the Department can refuse to answer the Judiciary Committee’s inquiries,” Graham, Johnson and Grassley — who chair the Senate Judiciary Committee, Senate Homeland Security and Government Affairs Committee and Senate Finance Committee, respectively — wrote in their letter to Barr.

The lawmakers also claimed a portion of the inspector general’s report “raises significant issues associated with the FBI’s failure to review certain highly classified information in support of its Midyear investigation.”

As Politico notes, Graham has likewise pledged to investigate whether the DOJ and FBI attempted to influence the 2016 to stop Donald Trump from becoming president.

==

==

For more than a decade, WPA — now WPAi — has been developing, honing, testing, innovating, and implementing various strategies using data science and predictive analytics.

Successes reach back to Utah Senator Mike Lee’s 2010 unexpected victory over a long-time incumbent, 2012’s upset by attorney Ted Cruz over an establishment favorite, to our 2016 work on behalf of the Club for Growth to assist in Wisconsin Senator Ron Johnson’s come-from-behind victory.

==

Anatomy of a Fox News scandal

If you were paying attention to right-wing media on February 7, you saw a major scandal unfold. Based on a report from Sen. Ron Johnson (R-WI), conservatives accused then-President Obama of interfering in the Clinton email investigation. The basis for this was a text from an FBI agent on Sep. 2, 2016, that said "potus wants to know everything we're doing." Fox & Friends repeatedly covered the story as a "bombshell." Trump tweeted about it at 11:10 ET, saying in all caps "NEW FBI TEXTS ARE BOMBSHELLS!"

By noon, the story began to collapse as people noted that 1) the Clinton email investigation was closed months before this text was sent and 2) this text was actually about the FBI's investigation into Russian interference in the election. (In fact, just days after this text, Obama had a "blunt" meeting with Putin.)

In the early afternoon, the story was debunked by Rupert Murdoch's Wall Street Journal. And yet, Fox News was undeterred. On Fox News' flagship staight news show, the panel talked about "more questions" being raised. In the 7 pm hour, Ed Henry reported that it was "up for debate" whether the text was about the Russia investigation or the Clinton investigation.

It was in the evening that this scandal changed into a different scandal, as personalities started attacking Obama for being briefed on Russian interference in the election at all. By the morning of Feb. 8, Kellyanne Conway joined Fox & Friends to make the same argument. It's only a matter of time until they use this pseudo-scandal as a justification for whatever ridiculous thing Trump does.

Also: Fox News barely mentioned that the Trump administration is refusing to enact sanctions on Russia that were passed by a bipartisan, vet-proof majority in Congress; the network also ignored reports that Trump's White House had known about domestic abuse allegations against a top Trump staffer for months.

==

https://www.npr.org/2016/12/06/504590408/republicans-raise-concerns-about-uptick-in-midnight-regulations

Department of Homeland Security issued a regulation Tuesday putting restrictions on the kinds of archaeological materials that can be imported from Egypt.

That may not sound like a big deal unless maybe you're a collector or a museum. There are lots of federal regulations taking effect every day, and in fact there's been an uptick as the Obama administration's time in office wanes.

Such an increase is troubling to Republicans, but gives hope to those who want new policies in place before a new administration moves into the White House.

They're called "midnight regulations," implying they are issued in the dark of night or at the last hour of an outgoing administration.

Susan Dudley, director of the Regulatory Studies Center at George Washington University defined them more broadly.

"I tend to think of true midnight regulations as those issued after the elections," during the three months between election day and inauguration day, she said.

Dudley said that in every recent administration, regardless of party, "we tend to see an uptick in regulatory activity in that window."

The GW center said there are now some 340 significant regulations in the works that fit that bill. Fifty-nine of those are deemed economically significant, which means they are expected to have a impact on the economy of $100 million or more.

White House spokesman Josh Earnest pushed back against the notion that the Obama administration is working overtime to issue new regulations.

"The regulatory work that's being done in this administration is not going to be characterized by a last minute rush on the way out the door," Earnest said. "I think what it will be characterized by is a continuous and persistent effort to complete the work that's already been started."

Groups concerned about the environment hope the administration will issue new rules onenergy efficiency for appliances and protecting the Arctic. David Goldston, director of Government Affairs at the Natural Resources Defense Council said those "are probably two of the most prominent remaining sets."

Expanding public lands, including a proposed "Bears Ears" National Monument in Utah is also on the wish list.

Republicans in Congress, meanwhile, are telling the Obama administration to stop issuing regulations entirely.

Sen. Ron Johnson, R-Wis., has sent that message to a number of agencies, including the Department of Labor about its rule expanding the number of salaried employees eligible for overtime (which has been blocked by a Federal judge,) the Environmental Protection Agency, and the Food and Drug Administration, over its already-implemented regulations on e-cigarettes.

Johnson wants the FDA to "take a pause on" the vaping regulation, because it could put "an entire industry or most of an industry out of business, thousand of workers out of work and you could really harm people."

Johnson said the Obama administration has been in "overdrive" in terms of issuing major regulations, and that it will be the Senate's job "to really prioritize" and eliminate those regulations "where the costs far exceed any kind of benefit" and make American workers less competitive.

Congress can overturn regulations issued in the last 60 working days under the Congressional Review Act. They'll have to prioritize though, because such votes take valuable time in the Senate, which also needs to act on hundreds of Trump administration nominees and pass a budget.

Goldston of the NRDC says though many regulations, which may not be popular with lawmakers sometimes are to their constituents.

"Often there's kind of this general visceral reaction against regulation," Goldston said. "But once the public is looking at a specific protection where they see the reason for it they generally react badly to it being reversed."

rematch:

By Jessica Mason

Wisconsin Senator Ron Johnson, a Republican, is scrambling to hold off Democratic challenger Russ Feingold in a race that will help determine which party controls the U.S. Senate. But for all his claims to "outsider" status, incumbent Johnson's campaign is being driven by millions in outside spending by industry front groups, national Republican PACs and right-wing dark money groups, including the Koch brothers' Americans for Prosperity.

With an empty seat at the U.S. Supreme Court and public pressure mounting to overturn the Court's Citizens United decision, which open the door to unlimited spending by nominally "independent" Super PACs and dark money nonprofits, the stakes could not be higher for the Kochs and their cronies who have worked for decades to undermine disclosure rules and limits on political spending.

Flood of Undisclosed Dark Money Enters Race More than a Year in Advance

Johnson's campaign reported raising $2.1 million in the first quarter of 2016, while Feingold's campaign raised $3.4 million.

Those totals don't account for the whopping $2.7 million that special interest groups have already spent supporting Johnson, according to newspaper reports.

Some of the money is being spent on positive ads to bump up Johnson's name recognition in the state. Johnson who holds telephonic town hall meetings from Washington, D.C., had his name recognition between 30-40 percent said Wisconsin pollster Charles Franklin. In the Senate, Johnson is the Chair of the Homeland Security and Government Affairs Committee.

On the flip side no outside money has been spent supporting Feingold, who just released his first campaign ad last week. Feingold who held the Senate seat until 2010, is best known for his role in working with Senator John McCain (R-AZ) to pass the 2002 Bi-Partisan Campaign Reform Act (also known as McCain-Feingold), as well as for defending civil liberties by voting against the USA PATRIOT Act.

In this race, Feingold has challenged Johnson to limit outside spending by taking a pledge to donate 50 percent of any outside ad's cost to the charity of the opponent's choice. U.S. Senator Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) and her opponent Scott Brown took a similar pledge in 2012 which discouraged outside money. So far, Johnson has declined.

Americans for Prosperity Spends Big on Kochs' "Model Legislator"

Back in April 2013, Johnson attended a Koch seminar at the luxurious Renaissance Esmeralda Resort in Indian Wells, California, rubbing elbows with big money donors who mused about whether Koch funding was a viable alternative to the Republican Party itself.

He was described as the Kochs' "model legislator," reports Politico's Ken Vogel who infiltrated the summit. Koch Industries has been the 8th largest contributor to Ron Johnson throughout his six-year term, according to the Center for Responsive Politics.

Now the Koch's are coming to his aid. On April 6, 2016, Americans for Prosperity (AFP), the Kochs' "grassroots" 501(c)(4) nonprofit, launched a $1.1 million dollar ad campaign praising Ron Johnson's "vision," which was reinforced by a canvassing push by AFP volunteers in seven cities. As a "social welfare" nonprofit, AFP is not required to disclose its donors.

Club for Growth Spends Big

Club for Growth, another right-wing 501(c)(4), has already spent $700,000 on two separate ads targeting Feingold through its 527 PAC, Club for Growth Action, and shows no signs of slowing down. The organization reportedly planned to spend more than $2.5 million in the Wisconsin Senate race, according to USA Today.

Club for Growth has been a top contributor to Ron Johnson throughout his career. The Executive Vice-President of Club for Growth and Assistant Treasurer of Club for Growth Action, Chuck Pike, was previously the Chief of Staff to former U.S. Congressman Mark Neumann in his unsuccessful Senate run against Feingold in 1998. Pike also previously served as Vice-President of The Neumann Companies.

The Koch-backed Freedom Partners provided a $1 million grant to Club for Growth in 2014, according to its IRS filings, and Wisconsin billionaire Richard Uihlein has been Club for Growth Action's top donor in the 2016 cycle with $1.5 million in contributions.

AFP and Club for Growth are not the only early spenders in the race.

Secretive Front Group Wisconsin Alliance for Reform

Wisconsin Alliance for Reform is a 501(c)(4) non-profit registered in Wisconsin by Lorri Pickens, a long-time political operative in the state of Wisconsin who has worked for the Kochs' AFP in the past. The group has already run three ads attacking Feingold focusing on taxes, immigration, military spending and "Obamacare." The group also runs the website Feingoldfacts.com, which purports to provide information on "Russ Feingold's failed liberal agenda." Because the group runs phony "issue ads," like this one, how much the group has spent is not yet known.

In a recent Wisconsin Supreme Court race, WAR appeared to be spending the money usually spent by Wisconsin Manufactures and Commerce and Wisconsin Club for Growth in Supreme Court races. The U.S. Chamber of Commerce has endorsed Johnson.

Wisconsin Billionaires Richard Uihlein and Terry Kohler

Various right-wing billionaires are also readying to unload on Feingold.

Richard Uihlein, who owns a shipping supply company in Wisconsin, is almost single-handedly bankrolling two other Super PACs, Restoration PAC and Americas PAC. Terry Kohler, the Wisconsin toilet magnate, contributed $50,000 to Restoration PAC.

In July 2015, well over a year before the election, Restoration PAC reportedly ran $500,000 worth of TV ads in Green Bay, Madison and Milwaukee praising Johnson for his opposition to President Obama's nuclear deal with Iran. The ad, made by infamous "Swift Boat Veterans for Truth" producer Rick Reed, was given a "Pants on Fire" rating from Politifact. A separate ad attacks Feingold for hypothetically "rubber stamping" the deal. In January 2016, Americas PAC reported spending $60,000 on radio opposing Feingold.

Terry Kohler has also established a committee called the Reform America Fund that may be preparing to enter the race. The committee was recently registered by Lorri Pickens, but Scott Walker's campaign guru R.J. Johnson has long had ties to Kohler and could be involved in any expenditures on the billionaire's behalf.

Johnson SuperPAC Run by Former Staffer

Johnson's former Chief Strategist Mark Stephens oversees Let America Work, which is expected to be the central super PAC supporting his re-election bid. The Super PAC has launched two ads, spending over $400,000 on the race so far, mostly on negative ads against Feingold.

Johnson is also benefiting from ads recently released by the National Republican Senatorial Committee, which fear mongers on terrorism and criticize Feingold for his PATRIOT Act vote, and the Republican Party of Wisconsin, which attack Feingold for Obama's foreign policy.

In a small state like Wisconsin this flood of early money is likely to have an impact.

http://www.prwatch.org/news/2016/04/13086/kochs-americans-prosperity-club-growth-wi-shell-save-ron-johnson

==

Koch Industries PAC is one of Ryan's top 10 career contributors, according to Open Secrets. It was notable to CMD that Ryan recently did a 180-degree turn on criminal justice reform, shortly after the Kochs signaled their support for self-serving criminal justice reform. Ryan has appeared at several Koch summits, has spoken frequently to the Kochs' Americans for Prosperity group, and Politico's Ken Vogel reported in 2012 that the Kochs may have helped Ryan secure the VP slot on the Romney ticket.

Kochs Go to Bat for U.S. Senator Ron Johnson

In other Koch news, Patrick Marley at the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel reported yesterday the Kochs' Americans for Prosperity astroturf group would be spending in Russ Feingold's race against incumbent U.S. Senator Ron Johnson.

They will spend $1 million in four weeks with positive ads trying to raise the profile of Johnson, who is virtually unknown in the state. While Feingold visited every one of Wisconsin's 72 counties every year during his time in the U.S. Senate, Johnson rarely faces the public, preferring to have controlled "telephonic" town hall meetings.

Other dark money groups backed by millionaires and billionaires are prepping to unload on Feingold including "Restoration PAC," bankrolled by Wisconsin businessman Richard Uihlein, and "Reform America Fund," bankrolled by toilet magnate Terry Kohler. Uihlein spent some $500,000 on ads supporting Johnson last year.

Reform America was recently registered by Koch operative Lorri Pickens at the FEC. Kohler has long worked with Scott Walker's campaign guru R.J. Johnson, and was last spotted in an unseemly scandal regarding a $500,000 government appropriation for a phony sporting organization packed with Koch insiders.

This is an unprecedented pattern in Wisconsin politics. Politicians no longer have to travel the state, meet constituents, and earn media if they have millionaires willing to spend on positive ads to boost their poll numbers and attack their opponents.

Will Undisclosed Dark Money Be the Big Winner in the WI Supreme Court Race?

Finally, Koch money could also be in play in a close Wisconsin Supreme Court race where a dark money group called "Wisconsin Alliance for Reform" is spending $2.6 million on misleading attack ads on Wisconsin Judge Joanne Kloppenburg, according to an estimate from the nonprofit Wisconsin Democracy Campaign.

As CMD uncovered, WAR was also registered by Pickens, who has served as a dark money maven in the state for many decades. Pickens was involved in another Supreme Court race in 1997 that resulted in $60,000 in fines for illegal coordination between the committee of Justice Jon Wilcox and a purportedly independent third party group run by Pickens' husband and Mark Block. Pickens has worked for the Koch's Americans for Prosperity and numerous other groups that pushed for a trio of bills in 2015 that laid to waste Wisconsin's anti-corruption laws. One of the bills allowed unlimited undisclosed dark money into Wisconsin campaigns and elections for the first time.

While the Kochs and their servants are working hard to keep voters in the dark on election day, disclosure in campaign financing is broadly supported by the American public, including Republicans. In a recent poll, 77 percent of Americans want limits on money in politics and 88 percent wanted to "make fundamental changes" or "completely rebuild" the campaign finance system.

Koch Fingerprints on Wisconsin Voter Supression

Today also marks for many Wisconsin voters their first encounter with the state's Koch-backed and ALEC-inspired voter ID law which threatens to disenfranchise up to 300,000 eligible voters who lack needed ID.

While the law explicitly requires a public campaign to educate voters about new ID requirements, it is no coincidence that the state legislature hasn't appropriated money to run public service ads in this cycle. Democracy advocates will be on the look-out for problems, and voters facing problems can call an emergency hotline: 1-866- OUR-VOTE.

Despite a near-total absence of in-person voter fraud, voter ID was passed in 2011 but immediately drew legal challenges and a court injunction. An all-Republican panel of 7th Circuit justices reinstated voter ID just a few weeks before the November 2014 election. When the full court—whose eleventh seat has been vacant since 2010—heard the case, it issued a 5-5 decision split along party lines, leaving the panel's ruling intact.

Backed by the same political network that pushed voter ID through in the first place, the Senator who has been blocking that 7th Circuit appointment for nearly six years is none other than Ron Johnson.

• See more at: http://www.prwatch.org/news/2016/04/13076/kochs-make-news-wisconsin-voters-threaten-turn-races-upside-down#sthash.ED7242fY.dpuf

==

scalia:

Judicial Crisis Network

Judicial Confirmation Network

The Judicial Confirmation Network (JCN) was created just as the debate in the Senate over Republican leaders' plans to eliminate the use of the filibuster on judicial nominations was reaching its apex. JCN was also active in the right-wing campaign to confirm Chief Justice John Roberts and Justice Samuel Alito.

Read more

Ron Johnson Is Taking His SCOTUS Talking Points Straight From Right-Wing Groups

Sen. Ron Johnson of Wisconsin is one of the Republican senators who is under considerable pressure in his home state to break from his party leadership and consider the nomination of Judge Merrick Garland to the Supreme Court.

So far, Johnson has toed the party line and says that he supports blocking any nominee to the Supreme Court for the remainder of Obama’s presidency. In defending this position, he has turned to a number of stock talking points cooked up by right-wing groups seeking to keep an Obama nominee off the Supreme Court.

As soon as President Obama announced his nomination of Garland, Johnson turned to the talking point that the conservative Judicial Crisis Network has been promoting since soon after Justice Antonin Scalia’s death left a vacant seat on the Supreme Court.

In just 8 months, the American people will decide direction of the country. Give them a voice on the direction of court. #SCOTUSnominee

— Senator Ron Johnson (@SenRonJohnson) March 16, 2016

Johnson’s appeal to let the American people “decide” and give them a “voice” by discounting President Obama’s entire last year in office, comes straight out of the messaging that JCN started hammering in early ads urging obstruction. In JCN’s first ad, a narrator says:

It’s ‘We the People.’ Sometimes the politicians forget that. The Supreme Court has a vacancy and your vote in November is your only voice. Sen. Chuck Grassley agrees: the American people should decide. This isn’t about Republicans or Democrats. It’s about your voice. You choose the next president, the next president chooses the next justice. Call Sen. Chuck Grassley. Thank him for letting the people decide.

Of course, the people already did have a voice in choosing who would pick the next Supreme Court justice when they reelected President Obama for a second four-year term in 2012.

The New York Times reported yesterday on an event in Wisconsin at which Johnson attempted to justify the Senate GOP’s obstructionism by implying that the Constitution’s requirement of “advice and consent” can mean the Senate advising the president not to make any judicial nomination at all:

“Yeah, I am hearing the drumbeat, ‘Do your job! Do your job!’ ” Mr. Johnson said, invoking the Democrats’ battle cry in their quest to get Judge Garland a hearing. “We’re doing our job,” Mr. Johnson declared, to shouts of “yes.”

“Our job as a coequal branch in the nomination process is advise and consent,” he said. “Well, President Obama — surprise — didn’t heed our advice. So now we are doing the second part of that advice and consent: We’re withholding our consent. Completely appropriate.”

This is a talking point that Jay Sekulow of the American Center for Law and Justice, a longtime right-wing player in judicial fights, pioneered very soon after the death of Justice Scalia, when he told televangelist Pat Robertson, “The Senate has a role in this, the Constitution says ‘advice and consent.’ The advice here is, ‘Don’t put up a nominee when you’re only going to be the president, you’re a lame duck and you’re only going to be the president for 11 months.’”

==

"“I absolutely do not believe in the science of man-caused climate change,” Johnson said. “It’s not proven by any stretch of the imagination. It's far more likely that it's sunspot activity or just something in the geologic eons of time.”[source]

==

An ad campaign targeting climate-denying politicians appears to be having something of an effect.

Sen. Ron Johnson (R-Wis.), under fire for being a climate denier in a world ravaged by climate change, this week denied believing that humans are not warming the planet. Yet the senator still will not acknowledge the basic fact that humans are warming the planet.

Confused? So are we. But we’ll try to explain.

Johnson is one of four members of Congress being targeted by a $2 million TV advertising campaign funded by the League of Conservation Voters. LCV went after Johnson because of statements he’s made denying climate science, like in 2010 when he told the Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel, “I absolutely do not believe in the science of man-caused climate change,” and speculated that sunspots or “something in the geologic eons of time” might instead be responsible for the changing weather.

But on Wednesday, Johnson stepped back from such strong assertions. During a Madison Rotary Club luncheon, he said he’s a “strong environmentalist.” (What is this — 1984?) Here were his comments to the group when asked about climate change, as reported by the Isthmus Daily Page:

“I don’t have a belief one way or the other,” he told the crowd of some 300 Rotarians. “I’m willing to accept the science. I’m willing to accept the facts. What I’m not willing to accept is that until we know conclusively what’s doing it and if any action we take would have any kind of measurable impact, I don’t think we should be spending trillions of dollars unilaterally.”

Here’s the thing: If you “don’t have a belief” that humans are changing the climate, then you are a climate denier.

This is the LCV ad that appears to have fueled Johnson’s half-hearted flip-flop:

JH

Yet, hundreds of these (c)(4)s – mostly right-wing – are flagrantly violating the tax law by operating primarily as political fronts for funneling secret corporate donations into raw, partisan campaigns. How did they get their privileged status as charities? By outright lying to the IRS, then defying the agency to stop them as they dump millions of corrupt dollars into our elections.

For example, American Action Network, a (c)(4) created by Wall Street lobbyists, has spent two-thirds of its revenue on elections, including putting up $745,000 from secret donors to elect Sen. Ron Johnson of Wisconsin. How ironic, then, that Johnson is now one of the tea party mad dogs howling at IRS officials. It’s scandalous, Johnson shrieks, that some tea party groups have not been given (c)(4) status, because IRS agents have had the temerity to question whether the groups actually are charitable enterprises – or just rank political outfits fraudulently posing as charities.

Tea Party groups should not be singled out for IRS scrutiny, but neither should they be allowed to cheat by shamefully masquerading as Little Sisters of the Poor. That’s the real scandal.

"Groups Targeted By I.R.S. Tested Rules on Politics," The New York Times, May 27, 2013.

"Five 501(c)(4) Groups That Might Have Broken the Law," www.thenation.com, May 21, 2013.

"Dubious Dealing of Tea Party Groups Could Have Drawn IRS Scrutiny," www.motherjones.com, May 17, 2013

"Whose Welfare?" The New York Times, June 4, 2012.

==wiki

Ronald Harold "Ron" Johnson (born April 8, 1955) is the senior United States Senator for Wisconsin and a member of the Republican Party.[1][2] Prior to his election to the Senate, he was chief executive officer of PACUR, LLC, a polyester and plastics manufacturer.[2][3]

Contents  [hide]

1 Early life and education

2 Business career

3 U.S. Senate

3.1 Elections

3.2 Tenure

3.2.1 Regulatory reform

3.2.2 Fiscal issues

3.2.3 Health care

3.2.4 Immigration

3.3 Committee assignments

4 Political positions

4.1 Statute of limitations for sex crimes

4.2 Fiscal issues

4.3 Climate change

4.4 Health care

4.5 Domestic oil production

4.6 Social issues

4.7 Gun policy

5 Electoral history

6 Personal life

7 References

8 External links

Early life and education[edit]

Johnson was born in Mankato, Minnesota, the son of Jeanette Elizabeth (née Thisius) and Dale Robert Johnson. His father was of Norwegian descent and his mother was of German ancestry.[4] While growing up, Johnson delivered newspapers, worked as a caddy at a golf course, baled hay on his uncle's dairy farm, and worked as a dishwasher in a restaurant.[5] He attended the University of Minnesota while working full-time and graduated in 1977 with a degree in business and accounting. He continued studying until 1979 but did not receive a postgraduate degree.[6]

Business career[edit]

In 1979, Johnson moved to Wisconsin with his wife Jane, and both started working for PACUR, a custom sheet extruder company, with his wife's brother, Patrick Curler, for whom the company was named. PACUR had been created a few months before Johnson arrived in Wisconsin with funding from Patrick and from Jane's father Howard Curler. PACUR's sole customer for the first several years of the company's existence was a company called Bemis, which was run by Howard Curler.[7]

For nearly a year, Johnson worked as the accountant and as a machine operator, trading 12-hour shifts with his brother-in-law, with whom he also shared a small cot. The company later expanded into the area of medical device packaging, which involved hiring salespeople and exporting products to other countries. In the mid-80s Pat Curler left PACUR and Johnson became CEO. In 1987, the Curler family sold PACUR to Bowater Industries for $18 million. Bowater kept Johnson on as the company's CEO. In 1997, Johnson purchased PACUR from Bowater; he remained as the company's CEO until he was elected to the US Senate in 2010.[8]

U.S. Senate[edit]

Elections[edit]

2010

Main article: United States Senate election in Wisconsin, 2010

In the September 14, 2010, Republican primary, Johnson, running a largely self-financed campaign,[12] defeated Watertownbusinessman Dave Westlake, taking 85% of the vote, with 10% going to Westlake and the remaining 5% going to Stephen Finn.[13][14]

The 2010 US Senate campaign was Johnson's first run for elective office. He was described as a "political blank slate" because he had no history of campaigning or holding office.[9] He attracted the attention of the Tea Party movement when he gave two emotional speeches at Tea Party rallies. According to The New York Times, he said he "did kind of spring out of the Tea Party" and is glad to be associated with it,[10] although he did not subsequently join the Senate Tea Party Caucus.[11]

As a candidate, Johnson opposed the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009. He launched his campaign by telling the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel that, "We would have been far better off not spending any of the money and let the recovery happen as it was going to happen." The newspaper later reported that the education council Johnson led considered applying for stimulus money in 2009, but ultimately elected not to do so. The Johnson campaign stated that non-profits consider "many possibilities," but that the council "made no application."[15]

In the November 2, 2010, general election, Johnson defeated Democratic incumbent Russ Feingold with 52% of the vote.[16]

Johnson contributed $9 million of his own money to his campaign, which raised a total of $15.2 million.[17][18] In June 2011, Johnson's financial disclosures showed Pacur, where he was CEO for 13 years until elected to the Senate, had paid him $10 million in deferred compensation in early 2011. The compensation covered the period from 1997–2011, during which he took no salary from PACUR. Johnson said that he, as CEO, had personally determined the dollar amount and that the amount was unrelated to the contributions he had given to his campaign.[19][20]

After being elected to the Senate, Johnson "sold every liquid asset so there would be absolutely no chance for conflict of interest," although he was not required to sell these holdings.[21]

2016

Main article: United States Senate election in Wisconsin, 2016

In March 2013, Johnson announced that he would seek re-election to the US Senate in 2016. In November 2014, he was endorsed by the fiscally conservative Club for Growth;[22] that month, he said he would not self-finance his re-election bid.[23]

In December 2014, the Washington Post rated Johnson the most vulnerable incumbent US Senator in the 2016 election cycle.[24] In May 2015, former Democratic U.S. Senator Russ Feingold, whom Johnson had defeated in 2010, announced he would run to win the Senate seat back.[25] In the November 8, 2016, general election, Johnson won his reelection bid against Feingold with 50.2% of the vote.[26]

Tenure[edit]

Regulatory reform[edit]

In July 2011, Johnson introduced S. 1438, the Regulation Moratorium and Job Preservation Act. The bill would impose a moratorium on significant new federal regulations until the national unemployment level falls to 7.7 percent – just below where it was when President Obama took office.[27] Johnson cited the EPA "Boiler MACT" rule as one example of a new regulation which would be blocked.[28]

Fiscal issues[edit]

In the Senate, Johnson has established a reputation for working behind the scenes to address fiscal issues. He has been particularly focused on limiting federal spending in order to reduce the deficit, and has been active in attempting to drive consensus on fiscal issues between Republicans in the Senate and the House. He was involved in the deals to raise the debt ceiling in July 2011 and January 2013.[11]

Johnson said that 2011 debate over whether to increase the US debt ceiling presented an opportunity to establish hard caps on federal spending.[29] He argued that Congress could not keep raising the debt limit, and needed to prioritize spending.[30] Johnson called for open negotiations over the debt ceiling, saying that the closed-door talks were "outrageous" and "disgusting." He said that default should not have been a concern, because the government had plenty of funding to pay interest on debt, Social Security benefits, and salary for soldiers.[31]

In January 2013, Johnson voted for the fiscal cliff agreement that reduced pending tax increases and delayed spending cuts that were precipitated by the 2011 debt ceiling deal.[11]

Health care[edit]

In 2013, Johnson co-sponsored legislation that would have allowed people at risk of losing their healthcare coverage due to Obamacare to keep their current healthcare plans. In an editorial for the Wall Street Journal on April 13, 2015, Johnson said that he would propose legislation to allow current Obamacare enrollees to keep their healthcare plans through August 2017 and to continue to receive existing subsidies. New enrollees would not receive subsidies. However, the individual and employer mandates would end. Mandated coverages would also be terminated to enable less expensive policies.[32][33]

In early 2014, Johnson criticized the ability of Congress to continue using pre-tax employer contributions to help pay for their medical care, rather than being subject to the full text of the Affordable Care Act that the rest of the nation must follow.[34] Johnson initiated a lawsuit against the Obama Administration offering ACA exemptions to members of Congress and their staff.[34] "I really do believe that the American people expect, and they have every right to expect, that members of Congress, the political class here in Washington, should be fully subject to all of the rules, all the laws that Congress imposes on the rest of America...", Johnson said.[34] In July 2014, a court ruled that the Senator did not have standing and dismissed the case. In April 2015, a three-judge panel of the United States Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit also said Johnson lacked legal standing to bring the case forward.[35][36]

Johnson has declined to support efforts to tie funding the federal government with defunding Obamacare, stating: "Even if we were to not pass the continuing resolution [to fund the federal government], you're not going to be able to defund Obamacare, absent of President Obama signing a law, which I think is highly unlikely."[37]

Immigration[edit]

As chairman of the Senate Homeland Security Committee, Johnson introduced the Secure the Border First Act of 2015.[38]

Committee assignments[edit]

Committee on Foreign Relations

Subcommittee on Europe and Regional Security Cooperation (Chairman)

Committee on the Budget

Committee on Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs (Chairman)

Subcommittee on Oversight of Government Management, the Federal Workforce and the District of Columbia

Subcommittee on Federal Financial Management, Government Information and International Security

Ad Hoc Subcommittee on Disaster Recovery and Intergovernmental Affairs

United States Senate Committee on Commerce, Science, and Transportation

Political positions[edit]

Statute of limitations for sex crimes[edit]

In January 2010, prior to holding elective office, Johnson opposed a Wisconsin bill that would have eliminated the time limit for future child sex abuse victims to bring lawsuits while allowing an additional three years for past victims to sue.[39] Johnson testified before the Wisconsin Senate that "punishment for the actual perpetrators should be severe," but questioned whether it would be just for employers of perpetrators to be severely financially damaged or destroyed by lawsuits.[40] He added that the bill, if enacted, might actually reduce the reporting of child sex abuse.[9][39] At the time of his testimony, Johnson was on the Finance Council of the Roman Catholic Diocese of Green Bay.[9][39] In June 2010 he told the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, "I can't think of a penalty that would be too harsh for these guys"[41] and in late September 2010, Johnson indicated that the legislation would have financially crippled organizations such as the Boys & Girls Clubs and that the punishment for child sex abuse should be, "severe and swift."[39] He also sought to address reports about his testimony, saying “I sought to warn legislators of those consequences in order to correct legislative language so that any bills that passed would punish the perpetrators and those that protect them, not honorable organizations that do so much good for our communities. We must rid our society of people who prey on children.”[42]

Fiscal issues[edit]

Johnson has opposed increased government spending and the federal stimulus. He has supported broad reduction in federal tax rates, simplifying regulations on business and free-market health care options.[43]

When asked if Johnson would get rid of home mortgage interest deductions (claiming mortgage interest as a tax-deductible expense), he said he "wouldn’t rule it out" as part of an effort to lower taxes and simplify the tax code.[44]

Climate change[edit]

In a 2010 interview, Johnson called scientists who attribute global warming to man-made causes "crazy", saying the theory is "lunacy" and attributing climate change to causes other than human activity.[45] In February 2016, Johnson said "I've never denied climate change. The climate has always changed, and it always will".[46] While on a radio talk show August 1, 2015, on Racine, Wisconsin's WRJN-AM, Johnson said that "the climate hasn't warmed in quite a few years. That is proven scientifically."[47] Johnson is a cosponsor of the Energy Tax Prevention Act, which would block the EPA from imposing new rules on carbon emissions.[48]

Health care[edit]

Johnson is opposed to the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act. In an op-ed article written for the Wall Street Journal, Johnson spoke of his personal experience with his daughter, who was born with a congenital heart defect, and suggested that the life-saving treatment she received was only possible because of the United States' free-market health care system.[49] Johnson says the PPACA "will lead to rationed care, lower the quality of care, increase medical costs and severely limit medical innovation… this law will add trillions of dollars to our nation’s debt and deficit".[50] He is a cosponsor of legislation to suspend implementation of PPACA while legal challenges to the bill are decided.[51]

Domestic oil production[edit]

When asked about allowing additional drilling for oil in the continental US, including the Great Lakes if oil was to be found there, Johnson responded: "We have to get the oil where it is, but we need to do it responsibly. We need to utilize American ingenuity and American technology to make sure we do it environmentally sensitively and safely." After criticism from the Feingold campaign, Johnson said in July 2010 that his answer did not mean he supported drilling in the Great Lakes.[52] Johnson argues that America's dependence on imported oil creates "both security and economic threats to the nation".[53] Johnson is a cosponsor of legislation to encourage job growth, reduce energy costs, and increase tax revenue by expanding domestic oil production.[54]

Social issues[edit]

Johnson opposes abortion except in cases of incest, rape, or when the mother's life is in danger.[55][56] He opposes the funding of research that uses embryonic stem cells. Johnson has stated he disagrees with it morally and also has said that eliminating the funding of the research would help balance the federal budget.[57]

In March 2015, Johnson voted for an amendment to establish a deficit-neutral reserve fund to allow employees to earn paid sick time.[58]

Gun policy[edit]

Johnson is a strong supporter of gun rights. He is cosponsor of S.570, a bill that, if passed, would prohibit the Department of Justice from tracking and cataloging the purchases of multiple rifles and shotguns.[59] In April 2013, Johnson was one of 12 Republican Senators who signed a letter threatening to filibuster any newly introduced gun control legislation.[60] That month, Johnson joined 45 other Senators in defeating the Manchin-Toomey Amendment, which would have required background checks on all commercial sales of guns.[61]

...

=

==

Wausau Homes $26,800 $26,800 $0

Koch Industries $25,650 $15,650 $10,000

Northwestern Mutual Life $23,550 $16,150 $7,400

Foley & Lardner $22,150 $19,650 $2,500

BayCare Clinic $20,725 $20,725 $0

Blue Cross/Blue Shield $20,000 $0 $20,000

Fiduciary Management Inc $19,400 $19,400 $0

Aurora Health Care $19,150 $19,150 $0

Michels Corp $17,800 $17,800 $0

Pacur $17,100 $17,100 $0

Fisher-Barton Group $17,034 $17,034 $0

Oshkosh Corp $16,563 $6,563 $10,000

Sargento Foods $14,750 $14,750 $0

Abc Supply $13,930 $13,930 $0

Baker Tilly $13,200 $13,200 $0

Fox Valley Surgical Assoc $13,100 $13,100 $0

Murray Energy $13,078 $13,078 $0

Industry Total

Retired $640,110

Health Professionals $246,026

Misc Manufacturing & Distributing $228,284

Securities & Investment $208,435

Leadership PACs $172,396

Real Estate $166,830

Insurance $161,700

Republican/Conservative $156,107

Misc Finance $136,571

Lawyers/Law Firms $106,575

Oil & Gas $102,350

Misc Business $91,850

Commercial Banks $91,225

Chemical & Related Manufacturing $88,534

Business Services $83,700

Food Processing & Sales $66,470

Building Materials & Equipment $64,030

Accountants $62,400

Mining $61,628

General Contractors $61,050

Agribusiness $240,715 $69,750 $170,965

Communications/Electronics $125,051 $31,500 $93,551

Construction $255,900 $44,500 $211,400

Defense $21,400 $13,000 $8,400

Energy & Natural Resources $197,078 $49,000 $148,078

Finance, Insurance & Real Estate $838,261 $217,750 $620,511

Health $374,426 $98,325 $276,101

Lawyers & Lobbyists $156,325 $11,000 $145,325

Transportation $131,013 $54,500 $76,513

Misc Business $696,354 $158,250 $538,104

Labor $2,250 $2,250 $0

Ideological/Single-Issue $382,660 $203,918 $178,742

Other $700,073 $2,000 $698,073

lcv score zero

Fundraiser for Wisconsin anti-worker rights politicians

On March 16, 2011, BGR hosted a lavish, Washington, D.C. fundraiser for Wisconsin Republican politicians. Guests were expected to donate a minimum of $1,000 at the door. They could become "sponsors" by donating $2,500 or "hosts" by donating $5,000. Guests included Wisconsin's Senate Majority Leader Scott Fitzgerald and the state's Assembly Speaker Jeff Fitzgerald. The event was held just days after Republicans in Wisconsin's legislature voted 18-1 to eliminate collective bargaining rights for public employees. The vote was held with no Democrats in attendance. All five Republican members of Wisconsin's congressional delegation were invited to attend the D.C. fundraiser, along with Republican U.S. Senator Ron Johnson.[2][3]

The fundraiser sparked protest from pro-worker groups and workers' rights supporters who gathered in front of BGR Group offices to draw attention to Wisconsin Republicans' union-busting bill, and their subsequent efforts to raise money from out-of-state corporations in support of their actions.[4]

small words

10. Ron Johnson, R-WI: Johnson has been a harsh critic of the government stimulus bills. But somehow that didn’t stop him from seeking stimulus funds for renovations to the Grand Opera House when he was president of the venue’s board. His explanation when asked to justify the apparent hypocrisy was that “he may have asked a question or two, but that doesn’t mean he supports the stimulus effort or even wanted the money.” Of course not. He was just curious to see if they would hand over the cash, which he would have promptly returned.

5. Sen. Russ Feingold’s Loss

Sen. Russ Feingold’s (D-Wisc.) three-term tenure in the U.S. Senate as a champion of campaign finance reform came to an end at the hands of a multi-millionaire, Tea Party-backed, self-funded candidate named Ron Johnson. It’s a bitter irony that outside groups spent nearly $2.4 million to benefit Johnson, including three-quarters of a million dollars in attack ads by the U.S. Chamber. (Feingold has demanded for years that outside groups not spend money on his behalf.) But in the end, the outside campaign proved so decisive that Sen.-elect Johnson paid a “thank you” visit to his new bosses over at the Chamber in December. Feingold’s record on reform, though battered by the courts, will live on as an example of a long-standing elected official who served until the end by doing what he believed was right for his constituents and the nation. That type of courage and commitment to principles will be missed in Congress.

thinkprogress

Newly-Elected Senator Ron Johnson Travels To The Chamber To Pay Homage For Helping Him Win

Conservative Republican Ron Johnson defeated incumbent Sen. Russ Feingold (D-WI) in the Wisconsin senate content this year. Many of the ads attacking Feingold came not from Johnson, but from outside groups like Karl Rove’s American Crossroads and the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, the big business lobbying organization. The Chamber used outright falsehoods against Feingold, including one ad that falsely stated that he supported a “government takeover” of health care.

In response to the Chamber’s pivotal contributions to the race, the Los Angeles Times reports that last week Johnson visited the Chamber to personally thank Chamber CEO Tom Donohue:

When it comes to money in politics, the new normal is already on vivid display. It could be seen last week in posh restaurants and corporate townhouses on Capitol Hill, where politicians held fundraisers at a record pace. It was evident at Washington’s blue-chip law firms, where campaign finance lawyers began work setting up new political committees to collect unlimited donations. It was apparent in the halls of Congress, where lawmakers swapped strategies about how to contend with muscular interest groups looking to take them out. The unusually intense December bustle is the product of this year’s elections, where spending surged to $4 billion in sharp-edged campaigns across the country — a record for a midterm. [...] In a sign of the new order, a newly elected Republican senator, Wisconsin’s Ron Johnson, paid a personal visit last week to U.S. Chamber of Commerce President Tom Donohue to thank him for the chamber’s unsolicited support of his candidacy.

Earlier this year, ThinkProgress reported that, in addition to donations from health insurance companies and Wall Street banks, the Chamber had solicited donations from foreign businesses, including state-run oil companies in Bahrain and outsourcing firms in India. To his credit, Johnson was one of the few Republican candidates who called for the Chamber to disclose the funding of its ads. The Chamber so far has refused any voluntary disclosures — but will the newly elected senator from Wisconsin continue to press the Chamber for transparency? Historically, the Chamber fundraises for its political program by telling corporations that they may more effectively lobby by funneling donations through the Chamber. While its clear Johnson appreciates the help from the Chamber, what will he do in return?

ENDIT1

two

troll caucus orig house?

ayn rand fanboy

EMPulse weapons, force dr give ivermectin

https://scorecard.lcv.org/moc/ron-johnson

24* 7%

2021

500Sung Confirmation (Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals)Judiciary

2021459Restoring the Voting Rights ActJustice and Democracy

2021426Pérez Confirmation (Second Circuit Court of Appeals)Judiciary

2021420Voting Rights and Democracy ReformsJustice and Democracy

2021401Stone-Manning Confirmation (BLM Director)Other, Public Lands/Forests

2021357Build Back Better Budget ResolutionClimate Change, Clean Energy, Environmental Justice, Public Lands/Forests

2021346Promoting Polluting Energy SourcesDirty Energy, Climate Change, Air

2021320Eliminating Safeguards on Fossil Fuel ProductionDrilling, Dirty Energy, Climate Change, Oceans, Public Lands/Forests

2021303Defunding the Civilian Conservation Corps and Wildland FirefightingClimate Change, Public Lands/Forests, Other

2021298Restarting Construction of the Harmful Border WallWildlife, Public Lands/Forests, Environmental Justice

2021279Kim Confirmation (DOJ-ENRD Assistant Attorney General)Other, Environmental Justice

2021246Voting Rights and Democracy ReformsJustice and Democracy

2021236Fox Confirmation (EPA Assistant Administrator)Water

2021231Jackson Confirmation (D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals)Judiciary, Climate Change, Justice and Democracy

2021203Clarke Confirmation (DOJ-CRD Assistant Attorney General)Justice and Democracy, Other

2021178Investing in Water InfrastructureWater

2021175Repealing Assault on Methane Pollution SafeguardsClimate Change, Dirty Energy

2021150Mallory Confirmation (Council on Environmental Quality Chair)Other, Environmental Justice

2021125Becerra Confirmation (Health and Human Services Secretary)Other, Environmental Justice

2021123Tai Confirmation (United States Trade Representative)Other

2021119Haaland Confirmation (Interior Secretary)Other, Public Lands/Forests

2021116Regan Confirmation (EPA Administrator)Other, Climate Change, Water, Air, Environmental Justice

2021114Garland Confirmation (Attorney General)Other, Justice and Democracy

2021113Fudge Confirmation (Housing and Urban Development Secretary)Other, Environmental Justice

202186Striking Provisions to Help Farmers of ColorEnvironmental Justice, Agriculture

202170Raimondo Confirmation (Commerce Secretary)Other, Oceans

202166Granholm Confirmation (Energy Secretary)Other, Clean Energy

202159Impeachment for Incitement of InsurrectionJustice and Democracy

202143Bolstering the Dirty Water RuleClean Water

202132Supporting the Destructive Keystone XL PipelineDirty Energy, Environmental Justice...-----not on env

2021   28Promoting Drilling for Fossil FuelsDirty Energy, Drilling

202111Buttigieg Confirmation (Transportation Secretary)Other, Transportation

20212Certifying Pennsylvania’s Electoral VotesJustice and Democracy

20211Certifying Arizona’s Electoral VotesJustice and Democracy

2020224Barrett Confirmation (Supreme Court)Judiciary

2020222Barrett Cloture Vote (Supreme Court)Judiciary

2020168Inadequate COVID Relief PackageOther

2020126Inadequate Policing ReformJudiciary, Other

2020125Wilson Confirmation (Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals)Judiciary

2020123Walker Confirmation (D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals)Judiciary

2020121Great American Outdoors ActLands/Forests

2020118Defeating Effort to Derail the Great American Outdoors ActLands/Forests

202072Danly Confirmation (Federal Energy Regulatory Commission)Dirty Energy, Clean Energy, Climate Change

202060MacGregor Confirmation (Interior Deputy Secretary)Dirty Energy, Climate Change, Lands/Forests, Oceans, Drilling, Wildlife

202041Kindred Confirmation (U.S. District Court for the District of Alaska)Judiciary

202036Brasher Confirmation (Eleventh Circuit Court of Appeals)Judiciary

202014USMCA Trade DealClimate Change; Other

2019339Undermining the Land and Water Conservation FundLands/Forests

2019324Stopping Rollbacks of Carbon Pollution Limits for Power PlantsClimate Change

2019313Scalia Confirmation (Labor Secretary)Other

2019300Jorjani Confirmation (Interior Solicitor)Other, Lands/Forests

201977Bernhardt Confirmation (Interior Secretary)Climate Change, Drilling, Lands/Forests, Wildlife, Other

201968Wyrick Confirmation (District Court for Western District of Oklahoma)Other, Justice and Democracy

201944Rao Confirmation (D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals)Other, Justice and Democracy

201933Wheeler Confirmation (EPA Administrator)Climate Change, Clean Air, Clean Water

201929Miller Confirmation (Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals)Other, Justice and Democracy

201922Public Lands Package Lands/Forests

201920Undermining the Antiquities Act Lands/Forests

201919Blocking Permanent Reauthorization of the Land & Water Conservation Fund Lands/Forests

2018259Farm Bill Conference Report Climate Change, Clean Water

when up for re-election?now   ; behind in polls to mandela barnes?

https://www.alternet.org/2022/08/ron-johnson-targets-medicare-and-social-security-for-annual-budget-discussions/

8 22 an raw

Sen. Ron Johnson (R-WI) suggested over the weekend that Democrats are engaging in voter suppression because many people in Wisconsin believe he is a "tool" of Russia.

During a Sunday interview on Fox News, host Maria Bartiromo argued that there was reason to "distrust and question" the honesty of elections.

"That was part of what went on in 2020," she told Johnson. "People were questioning. Well, can we trust them? We know what they just did in the Russia collusion hoax."

"You say they are interfering with your election!" the host exclaimed, "because of these smears on you."

Bartiromo added: "Tell me about your opponent and why you believe you are being smeared and this is the result: 50% for [Mandela] Barnes, 46% for Johnson in the Wisconsin senate race [polls]."

Johnson claimed Democrats "interfered in the 2020 election far greater than anything Russia or China could ever do."

The senator said that Democrats leaked a briefing about his connections to Russia.

"Basically saying that I'm a tool of Russia, which I am not," Johnson remarked. "It's a completely false accusation. The Wisconsin press picks that up and [some] people in Wisconsin think I'm a tool of Vladimir Putin."

"Nothing could be further from the truth," he insisted. "But they have smeared me publicly and they just might impact the 2022 election here in Wisconsin as well. Because, let's face it, Maria, they do not want me reelected because I would be chairman on the permanent subcommittee on investigations. They know I will investigate their corruption."

Watch the video clip below from Fox News.

up north enter reporter

...Republican incumbent, who’s up for re-election this November, cited inflation and issues with the legislative process as reasons why he voted against the bill and its efforts to help Ukraine withstand an ongoing Russian invasion.

“Once again Congress is voting on a massive bill – 2,700 pages – that no one has had time to read, spends $1.5 trillion, and further mortgages our children’s future,” Johnson said. “Even though this bill funds many important priorities, I simply cannot support such a dysfunctional and harmful process.”

Johnson—who expressed no such reservations about how his 2017 tax cut for billionaires would impact future generations—is no stranger to voting no when it comes to helping Ukraine withstand Russian aggression.

Between 2014—when Russia first invaded and annexed the Crimean peninsula in southern Ukraine—and 2021, Johnson voted against providing aid to Ukraine four different times:

In Fiscal Year (FY) 2015, he voted against providing $47 million for Ukraine via the Foreign Military Financing (FMF) program.

In FY 2018, Johnson voted against giving Ukraine $95 million via the FMF and $195.5 million via the Ukraine Security Assistance Initiative (USAI).

In FY 2020, he voted against giving Ukraine $115 million via the FMF and $256.7 million via the USAI.

In FY 2021, Johnson was one of six senators to vote against giving Ukraine $115 million in FMF financing and $275 million for the USAI.

This money went to help train and equip the Ukrainian Armed Forces, which has thus far withstood the Russian attack with impressive resilience. Johnson did vote to provide Ukraine with hundreds of millions of dollars in aid via three yes votes for spending bills for Fiscal Year (FY) 2016, 2017, and 2019, but he’s also been a reliable faucet of Russian misinformation tied to Ukraine over the years.

johnson—who vacationed in Moscow during the July 4th holiday in 2018—also tried to pin the blame for the Russian invasion on the Democrats’ first impeachment of former President Donald Trump. In 2019, Trump withheld critical aid to Ukraine and tried to pressure Ukrainian President Volodomyr Zelenskyy to investigate then-candidate Joe Biden. To hear Johnson tell it, this impeachment of Trump over his shakedown of Zelenskyy is why Putin invaded Ukraine. [NOT TRUMP USING JAVELINS FOR EXTOERTION FOR BOGUS DIRT ON BIDENS?!]

“I don’t think Vladimir Putin would have moved on Ukraine were it not for the weakness displayed—certainly by the Biden administration but also by the west in general,” Johnson said in late February. “And I’m certainly hoping that Col. [Alexander] Vindman, [US Rep.] Adam Schiff, [Speaker of the House] Nancy Pelosi, who used Ukraine as a pawn in their impeachment travesty are also recognizing, reflecting how they weakened Ukraine, weakened the west, weakened America by the divisive politics that they play.”

As public sentiment quickly became almost universally pro-Ukraine, however, Johnson appeared to reverse course. He called Putin a “war criminal” and sought to burnish his own pro-Ukraine credentials by co-sponsoring new bills and issuing statements aimed at supporting Ukraine.

Johnson also called on Biden to expedite the transfer of aircraft and air defense systems, as well as additional support capabilities to Ukraine. Ironically, that demand came one day after he voted against giving Ukraine $13.6 billion in aid.

The mixed record on aid to Ukraine is emblematic of a fractured Congress that has yet to pass a single standalone measure related to the war—measures that would ban Russian oil imports, remove trade preferences, denounce Putin as a war criminal, and give the government more resources to go after the assets of Russian oligarchs. Each has stalled, for reasons ranging from fiscal to social issues to basic mistrust between parties as politicians jockey ahead of midterm elections that will determine who controls Congress next year....

https://theintercept.com/2022/08/23/ron-johnson-january-6-fake-electors/

no lnx twt vid

Playing Dumb: Sen. Ron Johnson’s Role in Jan. 6 Plot Is Hiding in Plain Sight

The Republican senator from Wisconsin won’t say why he agreed to hand fake slates of electors to then-Vice President Mike Pence on January 6, 2021.

Robert Mackey

August 23 2022,ON THE CAMPAIGN TRAIL in Wisconsin last week, Sen. Ron Johnson, the Republican incumbent, acknowledged but attempted to downplay his role in a plot to overthrow American democracy on January 6, 2021.

Asked by Matt Smith of WISN-TV Milwaukee if he would be willing to testify to the House committee investigating the attack on the Capitol, Johnson argued that he had spent only “a couple seconds” that day furthering a scheme to keep the defeated president, Donald Trump, in office by falsifying Electoral College results.

As he struggled to minimize his role in the plot by Republican operatives in Wisconsin to submit a slate of electors who would ignore Trump’s defeat at the ballot box, Johnson appeared to contradict himself multiple times in the interview. Moments after telling Smith that he “had nothing to do with the alternate slate,” the senator admitted that he had, in fact, sent text messages on January 6 to connect his chief of staff with a lawyer for the Trump campaign in Wisconsin who wanted Johnson to hand-deliver fabricated electoral votes for Trump to then-Vice President Mike Pence.

As text messages released by the January 6 committee in June showed, the scheme quickly fizzled because an aide to Pence told Johnson’s chief of staff that the vice president would not accept the fake electoral votes from the senator. Since then, whenever he has been asked why he agreed to facilitate the plot, Johnson has drawn attention to how quickly it failed, as if that somehow exonerated him.

WASHINGTON, DC - JUNE 21: A text exchange between a staffer for Sen. Ron Johnson and an aide to former U.S. Vice President Mike Pence appears on a video screen during the fourth hearing on the January 6th investigation in the Cannon House Office Building on June 21, 2022 in Washington, DC. The bipartisan committee, which has been gathering evidence for almost a year related to the January 6 attack at the U.S. Capitol, is presenting its findings in a series of televised hearings. On January 6, 2021, supporters of former President Donald Trump attacked the U.S. Capitol Building during an attempt to disrupt a congressional vote to confirm the electoral college win for President Joe Biden. (Photo by Kevin Dietsch/Getty Images)A Jan. 6, 2021, text exchange between Sen. Ron Johnson’s chief of staff and an aide to then-Vice President Mike Pence is revealed by the House January 6 committee at a hearing in June. Photo: Kevin Dietsch/Getty Images]

“My involvement in that attempt to deliver spanned the course of a couple seconds. I got — I think I fielded three texts and sent two,” Johnson told Smith. “I had virtually no involvement. Literally, my involvement lasted seconds.”

[MOST READ The Origin of Student Debt: Reagan Adviser Warned Free College Would Create a Dangerous “Educated Proletariat”

Jon Schwarz]

Johnson refused to explain why he had agreed to act as a go-between with Pence for Jim Troupis, the Trump campaign lawyer in Wisconsin who wanted the fake electors for Trump from Wisconsin and Michigan to be counted instead of those for Biden, who had been elected by the popular vote in those two states.

Johnson’s frequently hapless efforts to evade direct questions about his role in the plot began with outright falsehoods in June, when the text exchange between his chief of staff and the Pence aide on January 6 was projected on a big screen during a hearing of the House select committee.

Pressed by reporters that day to explain what his role had been, Johnson tried to dodge questions by pretending to be on the phone and then falsely said that he had no idea who had passed the fake slates of electors on to his office.

Later the same day, the senator again lied to reporters by saying that “interns” were to blame for accepting the slates of fabricated electors and that he “had no idea” who had delivered them to his aides.

Two days later, Johnson himself revealed that he knew all along that Troupis was the source of the fabricated electoral votes by providing more text messages to the conservative activist and columnist John Solomon. The texts published by Solomon, embedded in a column that accused the January 6 committee of making too much of the senator’s role in the plot, also showed that the senator had put Trump’s lawyer in touch with his chief of staff, Sean Riley, just six minutes after being asked to pass on the fake electoral votes.

A screenshot of a Jan. 6, 2021, text message to Sen. Ron Johnson from Jim Troupis, a lawyer for the Trump campaign in Wisconsin. The text was obtained by John Solomon, a conservative activist and columnist.]

A screenshot of Jan. 6, 2021, text messages sent by Sen. Ron Johnson to Jim Troupis and Johnson’s chief of staff, Sean Riley. The texts were obtained by John Solomon.

Solomon also obtained and published a longer version of the text exchange between Riley and the Pence aide, Chris Hodgson — which was apparently copied from Riley’s phone.

A screenshot of a Jan. 6, 2021, text exchange between Sean Riley and Chris Hodgson, an aide to then-Vice President Mike Pence. The texts were obtained by John Solomon.]

The longer version of the exchange shows that Pence’s aide explained that the fake Electoral College votes “were supposed to come in through the mail.” That text suggests that the vice president’s office was not taken by surprise by the effort to submit false electoral votes and was perhaps just sticking more rigorously to the letter of the law governing presidential elections, which states that the results of the Electoral College votes in each state are supposed to be sent to the vice president by registered mail, not hand-delivered.

In an interview with a sympathetic right-wing radio host in Wisconsin two days after the committee pointed to his role, Johnson stressed that the text messages showed that his documented role in the plot lasted just over an hour. “My office’s entire involvement in this thing lasted 70 minutes,” Johnson told radio host Vicki McKenna. “My involvement was probably seconds, maybe a minute or two,” he said.

By focusing so intently, in interview after interview, on the time stamps of the text messages about the fake electors plot he sent and received on January 6, Johnson seems to be drawing attention away from the question of why he instantly agreed to help Trump’s lawyer, Troupis, push the plot forward.

And when Johnson claims, as he did to the right-wing Wisconsin radio host, that he barely knew Troupis at the time, he is banking on listeners in McKenna’s ultraconservative audience not knowing that Troupis was a central figure in the effort to undermine the certification of the electoral vote and that Johnson had given Troupis a public platform to push his lies about election fraud just three weeks before January 6.

On December 16, 2020, Johnson chaired a hearing of the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee dedicated to “Examining Irregularities in the 2020 Election,” which featured testimony from Troupis and Jesse Binnall, another Trump lawyer who had unsuccessfully filed suit to overturn the results of the presidential election in Nevada.

A week later, Johnson used his official Twitter feed to share false claims of electoral fraud in Wisconsin that Troupis had made at the hearing.

Just one week before that hearing, on December 9, 2020, Troupis had received detailed written instructions about how to create a fake slate of electors for Trump from another lawyer working with the Trump campaign, Kenneth Chesebro, an ally of John Eastman, whose plan for halting congressional certification of the Electoral College results on January 6, 2021, had been embraced by Trump. As the New York Times reported last month, Troupis also wrote to a Trump adviser on December 7, 2020, that submitting alternate slates of electors in swing states was part of a plot to give Pence a reason to delay congressional certification of the Electoral College results on January 6.

some lnx solomon: https://justthenews.com/government/jan-6-panels-ron-johnson-narrative-exposes-ills-one-sided-hearing

...just one week before that hearing, on December 9, 2020, Troupis had received detailed written instructions about how to create a fake slate of electors for Trump from another lawyer working with the Trump campaign, Kenneth Chesebro, an ally of John Eastman, whose plan for halting congressional certification of the Electoral College results on January 6, 2021, had been embraced by Trump. As the New York Times reported last month, Troupis also wrote to a Trump adviser on December 7, 2020, that submitting alternate slates of electors in swing states was part of a plot to give Pence a reason to delay congressional certification of the Electoral College results on January 6.

Sen. Ron Johnson (R-WI) has refused to speak to the Jan. 6 Committee because his participation in a plot to overturn the 2020 presidential election only lasted "a couple seconds."

During a recent interview, WISN's Matt Smith asked Johnson if he would agree to speak to the Jan. 6 Committee.

"No, I had nothing to do with Jan. 6," Johnson said.

"If they asked you to testify, would you?" Smith wondered.

"What would they ask me to testify about?" Johnson said.

"The Republican electors," Smith noted, referring to a fake slate of electors that Johnson was asked to deliver to then-Vice President Mike Pence in an effort to steal the election from Joe Biden.

"Again, another grotesque distortion," Johnson complained. "I had nothing to do with the alternate slate. I had no idea anybody was going to ask me to deliver those. My involvement in that -- that attempt to deliver spanned the course of a couple seconds."

The senator said that he "fielded three texts and sent two and talked to my chief of staff that somebody wants to deliver something."

"I knew nothing about it," he added. "In the end, those electors were not delivered because we found out from the vice president's staff they didn't want them delivered. End of story. I know that's been blown out of proportion."

"You think so," Smith remarked.

Johnson insisted that it was wrong to look at the plot to overturn the election as a "massive conspiracy."

"I had virtually no involvement!" he asserted. "Literally, my involvement lasted seconds. OK?"

Johnson initially denied having any knowledge of the alternate electors.

Watch the video below from WISN.

https://www.alternet.org/2022/07/ron-johnson-joe-biden-comprised/

sex trafficker?!

an 7 22

Wisconsin will have some closely watched statewide races in the 2022 midterms, including a gubernatorial race and a U.S. Senate race. Democratic Gov. Tony Evers and far-right Republican Sen. Ron Johnson are both seeking reelection. Democrats would love to unseat Johnson, who is running for a third term even though, in the past, he promised he would retire from the Senate after two terms. But it remains to be seen how strong a candidate the Democratic nominee will be in the general election; Wisconsin’s primaries are set for Tuesday, August 9.

Johnson, who was first elected to the U.S. Senate in 2010 and reelected in 2016, has become the target of a new ethics complaint. On Monday, July 11, according to Wisconsin State Journal reporter Alexander Shur, an ethnics complaint was filed against Johnson for allegedly violating Senate rules.

Shur reports, “U.S. Sen. Ron Johnson and his wife paid his former chief of staff and his wife $280,000 in cash gifts while they worked together — an arrangement Democrats say is a breach of Senate rules, according to an ethics complaint filed Monday. Noting the cash gifts in the complaint had been publicly available for years, Johnson spokesperson Alexa Henning called the complaint frivolous and said the Oshkosh Republican hasn’t done anything wrong by gifting money to his former chief of staff and long-time friend, Anthony Blando.”

READ MORE: 'Bold and brave' Cassidy Hutchinson showed how Republicans can avoid losing their souls: conservative

According to Shur, Henning “declined to specify why Johnson made the payments” but “noted Johnson first contacted Blando in 2003 after Blando was diagnosed with cancer, and Johnson offered to pay for his continued treatment.”

“The Senate has ethics rules meant to limit how much congressional aides can be compensated and also how much and from whom they can receive gifts,” Shur observes. “The Johnsons’ cash gifts to Blando appear to follow one guideline allowing aides to receive gifts from senators, but appear to clash with another guideline saying cash gifts aren’t acceptable. They also raise questions about whether they are an attempt to circumvent the compensation limits.”

Shur reports that according to federal records reported on the website LegiStorm, Johnson and his wife “gave Blando and Blando’s wife each $24,000 in fiscal year 2014, $28,000 in 2016 and in 2017, and $30,000 in 2018 and 2020, for a total of $280,000.”

The ethics complaint against Johnson, according to Shur, was filed by Wisconsin resident Laurene Bach “in conjunction with” the Wisconsin Democratic Party.”

https://madison.com/news/local/govt-and-politics/sen-ron-johnsons-tangled-relationship-with-ukraine-and-russia

No LNX

RON JOHNSON | RECORD ON RUSSIA

Sen. Ron Johnson's tangled relationship with Ukraine and Russia

Alexander Shur | Wisconsin State Journal Mar 13, 2022

Ron Johnson meets with Zelenskyy

U.S. Sen. Ron Johnson and other U.S. politicians meet with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy on Feb. 14, 2020.

US EMBASSY IN KIEV

Since Russia annexed Crimea and interfered with the 2016 U.S. elections, U.S. Sen. Ron Johnson has walked a fine line between Republican leaders’ praise of Russia and what he has considered his long support for Ukraine.

His record on Ukraine also includes accusations and warnings that he was disseminating misinformation potentially picked up from Russian-linked Ukrainians.

But Johnson has also challenged former President Donald Trump for not supporting Ukraine enough — though he now heaps that criticism on Democrats.

The Oshkosh Republican voted to acquit Trump during his first impeachment, which centered on Trump’s attempt to withhold aid from Ukraine if it didn’t investigate his political rivals.

“I feared any sign of reduced U.S. support could prompt (Russian President Vladimir Putin) to demonstrate even more aggression, and because I was convinced (Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy) was sincere in his desire to fight corruption, this was no time to be withholding aid for any reason,” Johnson wrote in November 2019.

[Amid impeachment inquiry, Ron Johnson defends Donald Trump, blasts FBI, CIA

Riley Vetterkind | Wisconsin State Journal]

Johnson voiced similar criticism days after Russia attacked Ukraine in February, only this time it was lobbed at Democratic leaders and a critical impeachment witness.

“I am certainly hoping that (retired Col. Alexander Vindman), (Democratic Calif. Rep.) Adam Schiff, (Democratic House Speaker) Nancy Pelosi who used Ukraine as a pawn in their impeachment travesty are also recognizing, reflecting on how they weakened Ukraine, weakened the West, weakened America by the divisive politics that they played,” Johnson said on Fox News.

But to paint Johnson as a consistently loyal supporter of Ukraine — willing to lash out at both Democrats and Republicans — would ignore other anti-Ukrainian comments he has made over the years as the FBI warned him that he was a target of Russian misinformation.

On Russia

GOP senator subpoenas FBI over Russia, defends Biden probe (copy) (copy) (copy)

Sen. Ron Johnson, R-Wis., speaks during a Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee on Thursday, Aug. 6, 2020, in Washington. (Toni Sandys/The Washington Post via AP, Pool)

Toni Sandys

On July 4, 2018, Johnson visited Russian officials with other Republicans, reportedly to warn the country not to interfere with the 2020 elections.

After the trip, Johnson told the Washington Examiner that the United States’ response to Russian interference was overblown.

“We need to really honestly assess what actually happened, what effect did it have, and what effect are our sanctions actually having, positively and negatively,” he said.

Sen. Ron Johnson's meeting underscores his involvement in Ukrainian saga

Riley Vetterkind | Wisconsin State Journal]

He also called for sanctions focusing more on Putin’s inner circle, and suggested the two countries don’t have to be enemies.

A year later on “Meet the Press,” in the lead-up to Trump’s first impeachment, Johnson was unequivocal that Russia interfered with the 2016 election, but added, “I don’t know to what extent the Ukrainians did. I don’t know to what extent DNC and Hillary Clinton campaign were involved in kinda juicin’ up the — the Ukrainian involvements as well.”

Johnson’s statement came just a few months after he met with a former Ukrainian diplomat, Andriy Telizhenko, to discuss unsubstantiated claims that Ukraine aided Hillary Clinton’s 2016 campaign for the presidency. Telizhenko, the FBI would warn Republican lawmakers a few months later in March 2020, was a potential conduit for Russian disinformation.

Telizhenko told The Washington Post he met with Johnson for at least half an hour on Capitol Hill and with Senate staff for another five hours. He said Johnson invited him to meet. The meeting took place July 11, 2019, according to a photograph taken of the two posted to Telizhenko’s Facebook page.

[Finland Trump Putin Summit

Former U.S. President Donald Trump speaks alongside Russian President Vladimir Putin during a news conference after their meeting on July 16, 2018, at the Presidential Palace in Helsinki, Finland.]

That was about two weeks before former President Donald Trump’s phone call with Zelenskyy in which Trump told Zelenskyy he wanted him to do a “favor” and investigate the Bidens and alleged Ukrainian interference in the election. That phone call eventually led to Trump’s first impeachment.

According to The Washington Post, U.S. Sen. Ron Wyden, D-Oregon, claimed Johnson wanted to “give credibility” to disinformation advanced by Telizhenko and Andriy Derkach, a Ukrainian politician accused by the Treasury Department of having been an active Russian agent, for the purpose of helping Trump’s reelection campaign. Johnson has pushed back against that claim, and said his staff vetted the reliability of Telizhenko’s information.

In August 2020, the FBI warned Johnson that he was the target of Russian disinformation U.S. intelligence officials believed the foreign adversary was using to promote its interests in the lead-up to the November presidential election.

But Johnson said he disregarded the warning due to a lack of evidence provided by intelligence officials.

[Ron Johnson condemns impeachment probe after first day of Senate trial

Riley Vetterkind | Wisconsin State Journal]

“Without specific information, I felt the briefing was completely useless and unnecessary (since I was fully aware of the dangers of Russian disinformation),” Johnson told The Washington Post.

Around the time the FBI issued its warnings, Johnson, who served as chair of the Senate Committee on Homeland Security, oversaw the committee’s investigation into President Joe Biden’s son Hunter’s role with a Ukrainian energy company while Biden was vice president. The final report, issued before the November presidential election, found no evidence that Hunter’s role affected U.S. policy.

The invasion

As Russia made its way toward Ukraine in late February, Trump called Putin’s move “genius” and “wonderful,” resulting in widespread condemnation.

[Finland Trump Putin Summit

Former U.S. President Donald Trump speaks alongside Russian President Vladimir Putin during a news conference after their meeting on July 16, 2018, at the Presidential Palace in Helsinki, Finland.]

UW-Madison political science professor Andrew Kydd said for some Republicans embracing Putin has become “a big problem right now, politically speaking.”

“That invasion is so brutal. Ukrainians are so heroic and their resistance to it is making it look really bad to have been on Team Putin all this time,” he continued.

Unlike some from his fellow party, Johnson hasn’t taken a pro-Putin view since the invasion began.

But he has spread misinformation, Kydd said, by saying Trump’s first impeachment weakened Ukraine.

“I think that’s directly opposite of the truth in the sense that Trump was basically extorting Ukraine, and the fact that that became publicly known forced him to backtrack and got Congress to approve further military aid for Ukraine,” Kydd said.

[Ron Johnson says FBI warned him he was target of Russian disinformation

Riley Vetterkind | Wisconsin State Journal]

Just as the impeachment inquiry began, $35 million of the aid Trump withheld from Ukraine couldn’t be disbursed by the fiscal year deadline, requiring Congress to pass a law extending the deadline to the next fiscal year. Johnson voted for the fiscal year to be extended, though all of the 16 U.S. Senators voting against its extension were Republicans.

Asked why Johnson suggested the impeachment inquiry weakened Ukraine, Johnson’s spokesperson Alexa Henning said, “Because countries look to America for support, anytime our relationship with another country becomes a partisan issue — for whatever reason — that weakens our support for that nation, thereby weakening the country and making it more vulnerable.”

Johnson has critiqued Democrats for weakening Ukraine, but that tactic may not be surprising given the hyper-partisan nature of the country’s political system.

“(Zelenskyy) has now emerged as an iconic leader with tremendous courage as he rallies Ukrainians to defend their country and inspires a global coalition to provide assistance,” Johnson wrote on his website on March 1. “Ukraine faces a better equipped Russian military, but the Ukrainians are fighting for their families and freedom, whereas, Russian soldiers are fighting for a corrupt Russian kleptocracy.”

At a town hall the following day, Johnson said about the invasion, “It’s a travesty, and we’ve already always known that Vladimir Putin was a murderous thug.”

About a week later, more than 40 Republican U.S. Senators, including Johnson, penned a letter to Biden asking for him to provide Ukraine with aircraft after officials declined to help transfer Polish fighter jets to the country.

Johnson also wants heavier sanctions against Russia, Henning said.

“He has been an outspoken advocate of increasing the cost Putin pays for his actions in order to change his calculus, including for pushing for sanctioning and dismantling Russia’s Nord Stream 2 pipeline, to name one prominent example,” she said.

The same day the letter was dated, Johnson was one of 31 U.S. Senators to vote against a $1.5 trillion government funding bill that includes $13.6 billion in aid to Ukraine.

“We just learned inflation hit a forty year high at 7.9% — wiping out wage gains and making life more difficult,” he said in a statement about his vote. “Even though this bill funds many important priorities, I simply cannot support such a dysfunctional and harmful process.”

U.S. Sen. Ron Johnson discussing issues at the Milwaukee Latino roundtable

Panelists & U.S. Sen. Ron Johnson talk private school vouchers

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Panelists & U.S. Sen. Ron Johnson talk private school vouchers

Alexander Shur | Wisconsin State JournalFeb 22, 2022

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Panelists & U.S. Sen. Ron Johnson talk inflation

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Panelists & U.S. Sen. Ron Johnson talk inflation

Updated Jul 29, 2022

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U.S. Sen. Ron Johnson on crime

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U.S. Sen. Ron Johnson on crime

Updated Aug 16, 2022

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Panelists & U.S. Sen. Ron Johnson talk about COVID-19

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Panelists & U.S. Sen. Ron Johnson talk about COVID-19

Updated Aug 24, 2022

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U.S. Sen. Ron Johnson on COVID-19 response

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NO LNX

Newsweek

Hunter Biden: Senators Demand FBI Provide Answers Regarding Laptop Probe

Republican Senators Chuck Grassley and Ron Johnson sent a letter to the FBI on Thursday, demanding that the agency explain alleged...

.1 day ago

Newsweek

FBI Can't 'Be Trusted' to Investigate Hunter Biden's Laptop: Ron Johnson

Republican Senator Ron Johnson of Wisconsin said new whistleblower claims surrounding Hunter Biden's laptop showcase a previous lack of...

.3 days ago

The White House

Remarks by President Biden at a Reception for the ...

... war with — with Russia, depending on what we do and how we do it. ... say that lightly — (laughter) — Senator Ron Johnson of Wisconsin,...

.2 days ago

National Review

Hunter Biden Laptop: Zuckerberg Admits Facebook ...

The FBI told Facebook that “there was a lot of Russian propaganda in ... Whistleblowers told Republican Wisconsin Senator Ron Johnson that...

.2 days ago

New York Post

House GOP leader McCarthy: Hunter Biden probe will expand to what US intel chiefs knew

“If we are right, this is Russia trying to influence how ... Ron Johnson (R-Wisconsin) have said they have “no faith” in the FBI or Justice...

.3 weeks ago

The Hill

Ron Johnson suggests Medicare, Social Security be approved on annual basis

The Wisconsin senator, who is up for reelection in a highly contested race this fall that will help determine which party holds the majority...

.3 weeks ago

Shepherd Express

Ron Johnson's a National Joke as a Senator and an ...

Johnson's assignment was to personally deliver to Vice President Mike Pence 26 fraudulent electoral votes from Wisconsin and Michigan for Trump...

.3 weeks ago

Milwaukee Journal Sentinel

'Outrageous': Wisconsin Congressional Republicans criticize ...

Ron Johnson, rhetorically asking against whom the government will "weaponize" the IRS agents provided in the Inflation Reduction Act.

.3 weeks ago

The Washington Post

Post Politics Now: After losing in Wyoming, Cheney says she's ...

Wisconsin Lt. Gov. Mandela Barnes, a Democrat, holds a slight lead over Republican incumbent Ron Johnson in the race for Johnson's Senate...

.1 week ago

Madison.com

Sen. Ron Johnson's tangled relationship with Ukraine and ...

Since Russia annexed Crimea and interfered with the 2016 U.S. elections, U.S. Sen. Ron Johnson has walked a fine line between Republican...

.Mar 13, 2022

beast

pennsylvania Rep. Mike Kelly initially denied his staff had any involvement in a scheme to give fake elector papers to former Vice President Mike Pence. Now, he isn’t so sure. Kelly’s press secretary confirmed to the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel Wednesday that Kelly’s chief of staff has started an internal probe into whether his staff played a role. Sen. Ron Johnson (R-WI) raised the allegation after he was accused of trying to give the bogus papers to Pence on Jan. 6. He claimed he was only delivering papers given to him by Kelly’s office. In fact, Johnson’s office gave the Sentinel a screenshot Wednesday showing that the chiefs of staff for both lawmakers had a two-minute phone call that morning, and a Johnson spokesperson said it was “about how Kelly’s office could get us the electors because they had it.” Kelly’s chief of staff in question no longer works for him and did not comment to the Sentinel.

https://www.msnbc.com/rachel-maddow-show/maddowblog/ron-johnson-still-trying-explain-efforts-jan-6-rcna35725

ron Johnson is still trying to explain his efforts on Jan. 6

As his hometown paper put it, "Johnson has proven by his past actions that he isn’t fit to be a senator. This latest episode only makes that more clear."

June 28, 2022,

By Steve Benen

When politicians facing a controversy start changing their story, it tends to make the controversy worse. Sen. Ron Johnson may not fully appreciate this simple truth. Politico reported this morning on the Wisconsin Republican and the latest evolution in his story about his Jan. 6 efforts.

The story Sen. Ron Johnson (R-Wis.) is telling about his actions on Jan. 6, 2021, continues to change.... In video posted Monday, Johnson seems to acknowledge the whole push was futile. “There was never going to be a chance of disallowing any elector,” he tells journalist and activist Lauren Windsor in video uploaded to Twitter.

At face value, this may not seem especially notable, but let’s revisit our earlier coverage and review how we arrived at this point.

A week ago today, we learned that on Jan. 6, just minutes before Congress was set to certify the election results, Johnson’s chief of staff reached out to an aide for then-Vice President Mike Pence. The senator’s top staffer said the GOP senator “needed” to hand-deliver forged election materials from fake electors in Michigan and Wisconsin to Pence.

The then-vice president’s aide responded, “Do not give that to him.”

After these revelations came to light, reporters pressed Johnson for an explanation. After a hilarious attempt at pretending to be on the phone, the senator eventually said he was “basically unaware” of the whole scheme, adding, “I had no knowledge of this.”

The then-chairman of the Senate Homeland Security Committee, we were told, had simply played the role of a clueless delivery guy. Some unknown person dropped off an envelope at his office, at which point Johnson agreed to serve as a mindless, uncritical conduit between Republican operatives and the office of the vice president.

Then the story changed a bit. The Milwaukee Journal Sentinel reported on Johnson conceding, two days after the initial revelations, that he coordinated with a Wisconsin-based attorney — Dane County attorney Jim Troupis, who at the time, was a Trump campaign counsel — and his chief of staff about the bogus electors.

Johnson then added some more details, claiming that the documents arrived at his office by way of Republican Rep. Mike Kelly — an assertion the Pennsylvania congressman quickly described as “patently false.” Kelly added in a statement, “Mr. Kelly has not spoken to Sen. Johnson for the better part of a decade, and he has no knowledge of the claims Mr. Johnson is making related to the 2020 election.”

politico

What happened: The story Sen. Ron Johnson (R-Wis.) is telling about his actions on Jan. 6, 2021, continues to change. Let's catch up with where the claims have gone.

June 21: The Jan. 6 panel reveals that a top aide to Johnson tried to get false, pro-Trump electors to Vice President Mike Pence moments before the certification of the Electoral College began. Johnson dismisses it as a "non-story" and says he has "no idea" who tried to deliver them.

June 22: We report that the assertion by Johnson's aide, in a text to Pence's senior aide, that the National Archives didn't receive the false elector certificates from Michigan and Wisconsin was untrue.

June 23: Johnson acknowledges facilitating a connection between Jim Troupis, then a Trump campaign counsel, and the aide, chief of staff Sean Riley, during a radio interview. He claims the slate came from the office of Rep. Mike Kelly (R-Pa.), though the congressman strongly denies that allegation. The Wisconsin senator says his involvement in the whole situation was "probably seconds, maybe a minute or two."

June 27: In video posted Monday, Johnson seems to acknowledge the whole push was futile. "There was never going to be a chance of disallowing any elector," he tells journalist and activist Lauren Windsor in video uploaded to Twitter.

Johnson's maintained this whole episode is a "complete non-story." But he can't seem to get the details of it consistent.

Notably, the Jan. 6 committee is holding a surprise hearing today about "recently obtained evidence." We'll keep our ears listening for any mentions of Johnson.

— Anthony Adragna

https://www.alternet.org/2022/06/ron-johnson-faking-phone-call/

courier 2 state fake elector slates, hand to VP, claimed to not know what they were // 1/6 hearing day 4

an 6 22

Ron Johnson (R-WI) made it clear why it's so difficult to get Republicans and Democrats to come together around gun safety solutions that are overwhelmingly supported by American voters.

On Tuesday, Johnson was asked about increasing the age to buy a gun to 21 and expanding background checks. Instead of talking about bipartisan efforts or indicating what he would support, he turned to attack Hunter Biden.

The right has used President Joe Biden's son in the same way they used Hillary Clinton's emails. The last surviving Biden son is the source of several conspiracy theories involving Ukraine and China. Former President Donald Trump even went so far as to claim that Hunter Biden got $1.5 billion from China and used the government plane to do it. There's never been any proof to confirm it. At the same time, Hunter Biden isn't listed on the Forbes list of American billionaires. FactCheck.org ruled the claim unsubstantiated and Trump hasn't been able to provide the world with proof for his claims.

Still, Republicans have decided that if they take back the House and Senate, their main goal will be bringing down President Joe Biden by destroying his children, who haven't served in the White House as a senior advisers. Republicans have indicated that they intend to spend the two years leading into the 2024 election investigating Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris in an attempt to get Donald Trump reelected.

It prompted those online to question why Ron Johnson cares more about the president's son over the safety of children, churches, movie theaters and other mass shooting sites.

Others couldn't help but joke that Hunter Biden's laptop never killed anyone.

See the comments below:

https://www.alternet.org/2022/06/ron-johnson/

hates to be challenged by dr

https://www.alternet.org/2022/05/ron-johnson-2657406341/

Senator blames CRT, ‘liberal indoctrination’ and lack of religion for mass shooting in small Texas town

https://www.alternet.org/2022/05/ron-johnson-falsely-claims-it-may-be-true-that-19-vaccines-cause-aids/

no lnx twt

Ron Johnson challenger says senator is 'bought and paid for' by Big Pharma

Elizabeth Preza August 17, 2022

The campaign of Wisconsin Lt. Gov. Mandela Barnes, who is running to unseat U.S. Sen. Ron Johnson, declared Tuesday that the Republican incumbent "is bought and paid for by Big Pharma."

That charge came in response to Johnson's Monday comments about Medicare negotiating the cost of certain prescription drugs, which is included in the Inflation Reduction Act that U.S. President Joe Biden signed into law Tuesday afternoon.

Appearing on "The Brian Kilmeade Show," Johnson told the Fox News host that "when you start punishing the pharmaceutical industry, you're gonna have less innovation; you're gonna have fewer lifesaving drugs. That's not a good thing."

Barnes—who won the Democratic primary last week—said Tuesday that "while Ron Johnson is worried about protecting the bottom lines of big pharmaceutical companies, I'm worried about working families across Wisconsin who are forced to choose between putting food on the table or affording the medication they need."

"For over a decade, Ron Johnson has put big corporations and his wealthy donors before the working people he was elected to represent," he asserted. "In the Senate, I'll hold Big Pharma accountable and ensure every Wisconsinite has a fair shot."

The progressive Democrat's campaign also highlighted recent reporting by The Cap Times that Johnson, while chairing the Senate Committee on Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs in 2018, "declined to subpoena Teva Pharmaceuticals as part of a Democrat-led investigation of the drugmaker's role in the opioid epidemic." In the months that followed, the company donated to both Johnson's campaign and an affiliated political action committee (PAC).

Johnson spokesperson Alexa Henning told the Madison-based newspaper that the "senator appreciates the support that people offer, but he doesn't personally track who gives what, and donations never impact his views on issues or how he votes." She added that asking about Teva's contributions "is another politically motivated hit job by the corporate media and cheered on by their allies in the Democrat Party."

Barnes' campaign, meanwhile, said Tuesday:

Ron Johnson has a long history of selling out Wisconsinites in favor of his large corporate donors. Earlier this year, Johnson justified sending 1,000 good-paying, family-sustaining jobs out of Wisconsin by claiming, "It's not like we don't have enough jobs here in Wisconsin." Reporting later showed the company shipping jobs out of state, Oshkosh Corp., "ranks seventh among Johnson's top career contributors."

Johnson, a businessman, was elected to the Senate in 2010 and won a second term in 2016.

In his bid to replace Johnson, Barnes has secured the support of various progressives groups across Wisconsin and the nation along with local, state, and federal elected officials, including Sens. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) and Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.).

On the healthcare front, Barnes backs not only drug pricing reforms like those in the new law but also putting the United States on a path to universal healthcare by passing Medicare for All legislation at the federal level.

"In the richest nation in the world," the candidate says in a campaign video, "no one should be going bankrupt because of their medical bills."

sinclair consistent vxr?

https://www.mediamatters.org/sinclair-broadcast-group/sinclair-broadcast-group-recklessly-allows-sen-ron-johnson-spread-more

https://www.rightwingwatch.org/post/peoples-convoy-fails-to-disrupt-washingtons-roads-meets-with-far-right-congress-members/

no lnx

rww thus trifecta 3 22

the convoy of anti-vaccine-mandate, pro-Trump, and QAnon-conspiracy activists was determined to disrupt Washington, D.C., by circling the Beltway, the 64 miles of highway that’s generally a hellscape for commuters. Organizers of the “People’s Convoy” modeled their efforts after the trucker convoy in Canada that took over downtown Ottawa and shut down the bridge connecting Ontario to Michigan, disrupting trade and business in both countries. U.S. organizers demanded an end to vaccine and mask mandates and an end to the national emergency around COVID-19 that was declared under former President Donald Trump and extended under President Joe Biden.

On Monday, the truck convoy entered the Beltway with instructions to take up two lanes of traffic. By 2 p.m., the convoy was “struggling to occupy one lane of traffic let alone two,” The Daily Beast’s Zachary Petrizzo reported. Regular traffic separated convoy vehicles as it had on Sunday. With diesel hitting $4.75 this week, driving their gas-guzzlers slowly around the Beltway seemed like an expensive effort in futility, especially since D.C. had lifted its mask and vaccine mandate and the Biden administration and Congress had. Brase stated the convoy’s demands to “end the state of emergency, end the vaccine mandates” and to hold “our elected and unelected officials accountable for their actions that led to this,”” the AFCLF representative told Cruz and Johnson. “We have a pendulum that’s swinging from ‘woke’ to ‘the great awakening’.”

Shortly thereafter, a larger group met with Reps. Matt Gaetz, Marjorie Taylor Greene, and Thomas Massie for a “trucker round table” on Capitol Hill. The truckers and adjacent activists complained about rising gas prices, mask and vaccine mandates, critical race theory, and government tyranny, with one trucker calling on the legislators to simply stop funding the government. When one convoy member from Michigan asked how to prevent stolen elections, Gaetz repeated debunked voter fraud claims about the state.

“Michigan, where they waited, the center in Detroit, to see how the rest of the state voted to figure out how many ballots they needed,” Gaetz said. “You want to be very suspicious of federalizing elections. If we federalize elections, then we have the swamp and the Washington, D.C., Beltway telling you how to count votes in Lansing, Michigan.”

Massie decided to focus on mail-in ballots—which Trump baselessly insists was a source of voter fraud in the 2020 presidential election—warning that “they may have to find some excuse to go back to mail-in ballots.”

Greene was in agreement. “The last thing you want is the federal government to be involved in your election,” she said.

Gaetz tried to wrap up the questions, joking that if the group stayed over its allotted time in the room he reserved, they would be accused of “an insurrection.”

“We don’t want to be accused of that,” Greene said. “It’s frowned upon here.”

The meeting with far-right members of Congress and the focus on the Big Lie from a convoy demanding an end to COVID-19-related mandates might be surprising to those just tuning in. But the rhetoric exhibited on rally stages and social media throughout the convoy’s two-week trek across the country and the organizations supporting the convoy have always indicated that this was never just about public health mandates.

A new report from the nonprofit research organization Advance Democracy, Inc., details the ties that three organizations supporting the effort have to the so-called Stop the Steal movement, whose massive rallies to overturn the 2020 presidential election attracted many of the same elements featured in the People’s Convoy.

AFCLF, whose representative met with Cruz and Johnson, has faced scrutiny over its connections to dubious efforts to overturn 2020 election results in Michigan. It claims to have raised more than $1.6 million for the convoy as of Monday, but it’s unclear how that money has been used.

The People’s Convoy also partnered with Freedom Fighter Nation on strategic and logistical planning, Brase, the convoy organizer, said on a Feb. 12 livestream.

“We don’t want to end up on the news for weird money stuff, we’re making sure that accountants and attorneys are handling it personally through freedomfighternation.org. They have helped set up a lot of this infrastructure. They are working with us one on one to help guide us,” Brase said.

Freedom Fighter Nation is led by Leigh Dundas, a COVID-19 and election conspiracy theorist who was seen near the U.S. Capitol during the insurrection. The day before the attack, she told Trump supporters at a D.C. rally that they would be “well within our rights to take any alleged American who acted in a turncoat fashion and sold us out and committed treason, we would be well within our rights to take ’em out back and shoot ’em or hang ’em, because that is what we did when they tried to overthrow our government by way of assassinating Abe Lincoln, and it is not too good of an end for the guys who sold out our government on our own soil.” Dundas and Chris Marston of AFCLF say they are https://www.washingtonpost.com/dc-md-va/2022/03/04/peoples-convoy-donations-fraud-afclf

Before the convoy left from California to make its way across the country, it was also supported by The America Project, an organization founded by election conspiracy theorists Mike Flynn and Patrick Byrne.

The organization frequently promotes election fraud claims and contributed $3.2 million to fund the 2020 election audit in Maricopa, Arizona. The group was listed as a supporter of the convoy in a Feb. 20 press release, but by Feb. 23—when the convoy began its trip and...Byrne announced The America Project was “stepping away” from the convoy, alleging that it had been “penetrated by the left.” The convoy—which an estimated 1,000 people committed time and money to join—doesn’t appear to be penetrated by the left in the least bit.

At a Sunday night convoy rally in Hagerstown, Maryland, speakers railed against tyranny, stolen elections, and the mainstream media. QAnon conspiracy theorists ...;Christian nationalists, members of the Proud Boys hate group, and likened the rally to a “county fair,” with music, food, and speeches building community and connections among factions of the fringe right-wing.

The convoy continues its Beltway circling this week. It has yet to be as successful as its Canadian counterpart in bringing gridlock to the nation’s capital, but it has served a purpose for far-right organizers, attracting Republican star power and bringing activists from different factions of the movement together under the banner of “freedom.”

Tags: Marjorie Taylor Greene American Foundation for Civil Liberties and Freedom Freedom Fighter Nation People's Convoy

wapo

Ron Johnson’s extreme effort to distance Trump supporters from the Capitol riot

By Aaron Blake

Staff writer

February 23, 2021

Since the Jan. 6 riot at the U.S. Capitol, some of former president Donald Trump’s supporters have suggested it wasn’t all it was cracked up to be.

Initially, the argument was that maybe this was the work of provocateurs like antifa trying to give Trump supporters a bad name. That died down as scores of Trump supporters were arrested in connection with the violence — with some bristling at the idea that their actions would be blamed on antifa — and as GOP leaders cautioned their colleagues against the theory. Then the argument was that the storming of the Capitol wasn’t really that bad: that it wasn’t the “insurrection” that some alleged. This also runs afoul of the actual evidence.

oct 2019

Nancy Pelosi has announced that the House will finally hold a formal vote dictating the rules for the impeachment inquiry, six weeks after it was launched by a whistleblower’s complaint mysteriously withheld from Congress. And on Tuesday, Lt. Col. Alexander Vindman backed up both the initial whistleblower and U.S. diplomat Bill Taylor by testifying that he too was concerned about the Trump administration’s push to use congressionally-allocated military aid to Ukraine to coerce an investigation into Joe Biden.

Congressional Republicans have long since stopped defending Trump on the merits since shortly after the White House released a transcript of a July call between President Trump and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky. Instead, they’ve sought refuge in increasingly meaningless process arguments. So of course Pelosi agreeing to a formal vote on the rules of impeachment hasn’t stopped Republican complaints about the process. The goalposts will shift once again. No matter what the Democrats agree to, Republicans will complain about procedural unfairness and also refuse to concede the inquiry is legitimate. But how much of Republicans’ unwillingness to hold Trump accountable for his self-dealing is because they're in on it?

On Monday the Washington Post published an interview with a Ukrainian diplomat who claimed to have met with Sen. Ron Johnson, R-Wis., this summer to discuss the baseless conspiracy theory promoted by President Trump that Ukrainian officials had interfered in the 2016 election on behalf of Hillary Clinton.

Johnson reportedly met with Ukrainian diplomat Andrii Telizhenko for at least 30 minutes on Capitol Hill in July, and Telizhenko then met with Johnson’s Senate staff for five additional hours. According to the report, “the discussions focused in part on ‘the DNC issue’ — a reference to his unsubstantiated claim that the Democratic National Committee worked with the Ukrainian government in 2016 to gather incriminating information about then-Trump campaign chairman Paul Manafort. Telizhenko said he could not recall the date of the meeting, but a review of his Facebook page revealed a photo of him and Johnson posted on July 11.”

Johnson is a vocal Trump defender who has hounded the inspector general of the intelligence community about investigating media leaks regarding the Ukraine call. He has previously admitted that he was told by Gordon Sondland, the U.S. ambassador to the European Union, that Ukraine needed to "get to the bottom of what happened in 2016" in order to receive military aid.

As Johnson told the Wall Street Journal earlier this month, after Sondland told him that, he was assured "if President Trump has that confidence" that the Ukrainians would do his bidding, "then he'll release the military spending." Now, as the Post points out, Johnson's "knowledge of key events" in the case may "complicate his role as a juror in a trial by the Senate."

Recall that when Johnson was asked about his defense of Trump’s actions, he snapped at the simple question from NBC News’ Chuck Todd and spun out the same deep state conspiracy theory pushed by the likes of Fox News’ Sean Hannity.

Beyond his apparent involvement in Trump’s Ukraine dealings, Johnson is alleged to have benefited from campaign money illegally funneled from Russia via shell corporations owned by the National Rifle Association, which helped him win his tight 2016 race in Wisconsin.

Political action committees for Republican Sens. Mitch McConnell, Marco Rubio and Lindsey Graham reportedly accepted $7.35 million in contributions from a Ukrainian-born oligarch with close ties to Russian President Vladimir Putin during the 2016 election. McConnell and Graham are co-sponsors of a new resolution condemning the House impeachment inquiry. At least 50 Senate Republicans, several of whom have refused to publicly comment on the growing Ukraine scandal — citing a need to remain impartial for a likely Senate impeachment trial — have already signed onto that bill. The resolution is currently paused in the Senate Rules Committee until the House votes on impeachment rules later this week.

As House Democrats’ investigation has rapidly unveiled ever more damaging material regarding Trump’s Ukraine scandal, public support for impeachment has shot up. Reportedly nervous about his wall of defense in the Senate crumbling, the president recently hosted several GOP senators at the White House, including top Johnson, Graham, John Thune of South Dakota and John Kennedy of Louisiana, last week. A day earlier, Thune and Kennedy, had blocked a Democratic bill to provide funding for states to shore up election security. The next day, Sen. Marsha Blackburn, R-Tenn., quietly blocked three election-security bills for the second time this year.

“You know, it’s not a good sign if you’re doing the same thing over and over and expecting a different result," Blackburn said on the Senate floor late last week. She is among the Republican senators with close ties to a U.S.-sanctioned Russian politician who is accused of illegally channeling Russian funds through the NRA. Under Senate rules, any individual senator can block a vote on a bill.

When Senate Republicans are not prematurely dismissing an impeachment inquiry on which they will probably have to render judgment, they continue to protect Trump’s refusal to clamp down on potential election interference. If Republican charges of a "kangaroo court" are anything, they are a classic case of projection: How can Senate Republicans possibly serve as impartial jurors in a trial of the president, when they are implicated in the same pattern of political malfeasance?

Sophia Tesfaye is Salon's Deputy Politics Editor and resides in Washington, D.C. You can find her on Twitter at @SophiaTesfaye.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/nra-at-center-of-new-lawsuit-against-the-federal-election-commission/2019/04/24

ref wapo

Politics

NRA at center of new lawsuit against the Federal Election Commission

By Colby Itkowitz

April 24, 2019

President Trump speaks May 4 at the National Rifle Association’s annual convention in Dallas. ]

An anti-gun-violence organization founded by former congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords filed a lawsuit Wednesday against the Federal Election Commission for failing to take action against the National Rifle Association for alleged campaign finance violations.

The lawsuit charges that the federal agency did nothing when confronted with repeated complaints by Giffords and the Campaign Legal Center accusing the NRA of using shell corporations to donate more than the legal amount to seven federal candidates, including President Trump, and to coordinate with their campaigns without disclosing it....

vs Feingold?

https://democracychronicles.org/lawsuit-nra/

from the Campaign Legal Center:

Today, Campaign Legal Center Action (CLC Action) filed suit on behalf of Giffords against the Federal Election Commission (FEC) for failing to announce any action against the National Rifle Association (NRA) for using shell corporations to coordinate campaign spending with seven federal candidates spanning three election cycles from 2014-2018. The lawsuit was filed two days before President Trump addresses the NRA’s annual convention for the third year in a row – the only time in American history a president has done so.

The NRA’s complicated scheme had the effect of evading campaign contribution limits and shielding millions of dollars of political spending – including up to $25 million coordinated with Donald Trump’s presidential campaign – from public scrutiny. The Trace first reported on the NRA’s scheme.

Campaign Legal Center (CLC) and Giffords filed four complaints with the FEC to address these violations. The FEC is the independent regulatory agency tasked with enforcing campaign finance laws in federal elections, the agency routinely deadlocks and fails to reach the required four votes necessary to open an investigation. Today, Giffords is asserting its right of action in the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia after the 120-day period expired in which the FEC was legally required to respond.

“Our elections are awash in secret cash, and the federal agency charged with enforcing our nation’s election laws is asleep on the job,” said Trevor Potter, president of CLC, and a former Republican Chairman of the FEC. “Campaign finance laws are supposed to limit the influence of money in our politics. For our system to function properly, the FEC needs to enforce the laws that preserve the independence of campaigns and limit the influence of well-funded special interests.”

“When the FEC doesn’t do its job, groups like the NRA are able to get around the rules designed to limit the influence of money on our democracy,” said Brendan Fischer, director, federal reform at CLC. “The FEC’s failure to enforce the law sends a message to wealthy special interests that they can push the legal envelope and get away with it.”

“The FEC is supposed to be the nation’s election watchdog, but in this case it didn’t bite, bark, or even whimper,” said Adam Skaggs, Chief Counsel, Giffords Law Center. “Instead, it turned a blind eye while the NRA’s leadership made clear it’s more interested in handing bags of cash to candidates who will carry its water than following American laws or looking out for the interests of gun owners. In a desperate attempt to hold onto power and influence, NRA executives have flagrantly ignored our campaign finance laws and undermined the integrity of our election system. The FEC must bring illegal campaign conduct into the light of day and we are proud to join with CLC in calling on it to uphold the laws that protect the legitimacy of our democracy.”

Watch our video, which explains the underlying story behind the NRA’s scheme.

Campaign finance law allows outside groups like the NRA to make unlimited expenditures supporting candidates only if the expenditures are completely independent of those candidates. To protect this independence, the FEC has rules prohibiting coordination between outside groups and campaigns, which include restrictions on how a vendor may work for both a candidate and an outside group supporting that candidate. Otherwise, the common vendor can act as a conduit to funnel strategic information to the outside group, and then that group’s expenditures are no longer independent.

The lawsuit implicates the NRA’s spending in support of the following seven candidates:

Matt Rosendale (2018 campaign for U.S. Senate in Montana)

Josh Hawley (2018 campaign for U.S. Senate in Missouri)

Donald Trump (2016 campaign for President of the United States)

Ron Johnson (2016 campaign for U.S. Senate in Wisconsin)

Thom Tillis (2014 campaign for U.S. Senate in North Carolina)

Cory Gardner (2014 campaign for U.S. Senate in Colorado)

Tom Cotton (2014 campaign for U.S. Senate in Arkansas)

You can see the full video here:

https://www.alternet.org/2022/03/gop-lawmakers-face-barrage-of-questions-over-viral-russian-ad/

[vid]

an 322

Republican Party is being labeled as the "Party of Treason” in a new, scathing political ad chronicling all that has transpired since Russia invaded Ukraine.

According to HuffPost, the ad was released by Really American, a progressive political action committee (PAC). The video highlights Independence Day 2018 when several Republican lawmakers' traveled to Moscow to visit the Kremlin.

With the video, the PAC tweeted, "A day after the Senate Intelligence Committee confirmed Russia interfered in our elections, 8 Republicans flew to Russia for a photo-op. Now they're blaming Biden for the invasion of Ukraine while repeating Kremlin talking points."

Although the trip was reportedly intended to address Russian interference, the video notes that Sen. Ron Johnson (R-Wis.), "downplayed said established threat just days later."[twt]

the video's narrator posed a number of compelling questions to Republican lawmakers asking: "why Republicans have 'consistently taken' the side of Russian President Vladimir Putin by, among other things, voting to block election security bills and backing Donald Trump for threatening to withhold military aid to Ukraine in exchange for dirt on Joe Biden, misconduct that led to the first impeachment of the former president."

The narrator concluded by saying, “Putin has shown his goal is to destabilize Western democracy from Ukraine to the U.S. We can’t allow his puppets to sink their claws deeper into our government.”

In just a short period of time, the video has gone viral. Since its release on Thursday, March 10, it has received more than 850,000 views as it continues to circulate on social media.

[ron j, shelby, moran, daines, thune, kay granger, john kennedy hoeven

#partyoftraitors

ref 2

... GOP is slammed as the “#PartyOfTreason” in a new viral ad from progressive PAC Really American.

The group’s spot recalls the visit to the Kremlin that eight Republican lawmakers controversially made on Independence Day in 2018,

https://www.npr.org/2018/07/06/626664156/gop-senators-spend-july-4-in-moscow no names ] a day after the Senate Intelligence Committee confirmed Russian interference in the 2016 U.S. presidential election.

ref july 2018

mADISON – Republican Sen. Ron Johnson is downplaying the threat Russia poses to U.S. elections, saying “these are not the greatest threats to our democracy.”

Johnson was part of a contingent of senators who met with Russian officials in Russia last week. He told reporters Tuesday that over half of their five-hour discussion focused on Russia’s involvement in the 2016 U.S. elections.

Johnson says Russian interference is “unacceptable” and “serious,” but “when you look at threats to this nation I look at much larger threats.”

He says U.S. elections are very difficult to hack and remain secure, while Russia’s interference on social media in 2016 was minimal.

Johnson has been critical of Senate sanctions against Russia, saying they have been ineffective and don’t leave President Donald Trump with enough negotiating room on other issues.

an 2 22

As weird as it might seem now, Sen. Ron Johnson (R-Wisc.) was once a normal Republican lawmaker. Now, he's devolved into a backer of conspiracy theories and a fierce supporter of former President Donald Trump. Now, The Bulwark's Charlie Sykes has considered a number of theories that might explain Johnson's downward spiral into the TrumpWorld.

During an appearance on The Daily Beast's "New Abnormal" podcast, Sykes spoke with the show's co-host Molly Jong-Fast where he offered a comparison of Johnson before Trump's presidency and after.

“There was a while when I tried to come up with various theories about it, because I was trying to think, how did he get from this normal sort of Wall Street Journal-reading businessman from Oshkosh, Wisconsin, to RonAnon [Ron + QAnon]? What drew him down those rabbit holes?” he said. “He turned out to model himself on Joseph McCarthy, our other legendary senator from Wisconsin.”

So, what happened to Johnson? Sykes shared his theory saying, “He's fallen in with a bad crowd... and apparently also lost his mind.”

According to Sykes, Johnson isn't the only one in Wisconsin who has changed. In fact, he believes the state's entire political landscape has shifted a bit.

“The establishment here decided it was gonna go along and appease the Trumpists. They would throw a little bit of red meat. They figured that they could grow the crocodile in the bathtub and it wouldn't get big and come out and eat them,” he explains. And well, “now they have Ron Johnson, one of the craziest United States senators.”

Sykes remarks about Johnson come after multiple reports on the Republican lawmaker's warped perspective of the COVID-19 pandemic, the presidential election, and the insurrection on the U.S. Capitol.

Although there was never substantial evidence to suggest widespread voter fraud ever took place or evidence to support the other conspiracies Johnson supported, he continued to sound off with claims that led to critical responses for him.

https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/6784093-IWF-Wisconsin-Report-FINAL.html

afp voter suppression IWF 2016

That evaluation, procured by IWF/V, takes the position that IWF/V was exceptionally successful in Wisconsin in moving independent voters to support Donald Trump and Ron Johnson, in 2016, by double-digit percentages.

bad polls

https://www.alternet.org/2022/02/ron-johnson-2656689600/

Wisconsin Republican businessman David Irwin can't help but notice that the state's GOP senator appears to be in political peril. According to his piece in the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, Sen. Ron Johnson's (R-WI) popularity problem is one entirely of his own making.

A Morning Consult poll shows that Johnson is radically unpopular. Wisconsin voters who approve of Johnson's job performance sit at just 36 percent. Where 51 percent of the state disapproves. A whopping 56 percent of independent voters also reject Johnson's performance. It means that unless there's a huge influx of Republican voters that outperform independents and Democrats, Johnson is done.

Irwin blames the whited sepulcher of Johnson's politics.

"At a time when so many Wisconsinites are hungry for a sane counter to Washington’s left turn, Johnson is firmly isolating himself, spouting fringe ideas and neglecting to advance a positive vision," he wrote.

Irwin doesn't believe in the "big lie," that Donald Trump secretly won the election. While he agrees that people could talk about election process solutions, Johnson wants to eliminate the bi-partisan Wisconsin Elections Commission.

"This is one of these big Democrat strongholds that just can’t seem to get their votes counted until they know exactly how many votes they need," Johnson said, singling out Milwaukee.

All it does is alienate Wisconsinites, all to ensure that the former president continues to love him.

All the while, "even former Vice President Mike Pence and House Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) are making statements to separate themselves and the party from the cult of personality," said Irwin.

Then there's the matter of the COVID conspiracy theories Johnson spins, including the false claim that mouth wash could cure it.

"Wisconsinites deserve better than his conspiracy and conspiracy-adjacent pronouncements," Irwin closed. "For example, I can say with absolute clarity that Republican gubernatorial candidate Tim Ramthun and his followers are wrong when they say they have discovered proof that the 2020 election was stolen, and that Wisconsin’s electoral votes can be taken back. Will Ron Johnson be so clear? His record says he will not."

He explained that it's the clearest reason that Johnson isn't who he once was and that the state deserves better.

"By his words and his deeds, the 2022 version of Ron Johnson is failing the conservative cause and our state," Irwin said.

Read the full column at the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel.

wingnuttery somewhat neglected

https://www.alternet.org/2022/01/ron-johnson-2656483858/

soc safe net

sen. Ron Johnson (R-Wisc.) is being lambasted by fact-checkers yet again for circulating false claims. A new piece published by The Houston Chronicle's Laura Schulte lays out the remarks made by the Republican senator and fact-checkers rebuttal torching his baseless claims.

This particular ordeal centers on Johnson's January 26, 2022, appearance on "The Charlie Kirk Show." At the time, Johnson and Kirk discussed COVID vaccines.

"We’ve heard story after story. All these athletes dropping dead on the field," he said during a conversation about the possible adverse effects of COVID vaccines. "But we’re supposed to ignore that. Nothing happening here, nothing to see. This is a travesty, this is a scandal."

Schulte immediately zeroed in on Johnson's exaggerated claim about athletes "dropping dead on the field."

"Is Johnson right?" Schulte asked as she immediately followed with a sharp answer to the question with a resounding, "No."

She continued, "Let’s take a closer look."

In wake of Johnson's outlandish remarks, he was asked to provide evidence of his claim. His spokeswoman Vanessa Ambrosini reportedly told The Houston Chronicle that Johnson "has been alarmed by stories he has heard of athletes dying on the field."

"The Senator’s point in raising these issues," Ambrosini said via email, "has always been that our federal health agencies should be concerned about reports on adverse reactions related to COVID-19 vaccines and they should fully investigate and make their findings available to the American people."

While Schulte did acknowledge the validity of those remarks, she argued the specifics of Johnson's remarks. "The claim was that there are stories about all sorts of athletes dying in the midst of competition, or at least while practicing," she specified.

Although Johnson has a tendency to cite information from the federal database documenting adverse events, Schulte noted that "the database itself notes the claims are not vetted to establish a cause between them."

Patrick Remington —a former epidemiologist for the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) and director for the preventive medicine residency program at the University of Wisconsin-Madison— offered a detailed explanation of what the CDC actually looks for: "causation, not just coincidence"

"The burden is on credible scientists to study whether vaccination could be associated with this outcome, and no credible science exists to say it is," he said. "We continue to do ongoing surveillance, the vaccine surveillance system is in place to study any possible associations that come up. But to date, I am not aware of any studies or any credible research that suggests that vaccines cause death in young athletes."

Ambrosini also provided a copy of an article published by GoodSciencing.com that suggests "hundreds" of young athletes have died as a result of vaccine complications. "We found no proof of a causal relationship in any of the cases between the vaccines and the injuries or deaths," the fact-check refuted Johnson's claim confirming there were 6 deaths.

Another fact check also broke the claim down. Schulte noted: "Days before Johnson took to the Charlie Kirk Show, former NBA All-Star John Stockton on Jan. 23 2022 claimed more than 100 professional athletes who were vaccinated have dropped dead "right on the pitch, right on the field, right on the court."

PolitiFact National along with a group of doctors, have also pushed back.

"PolitiFact National rated this False in a Jan. 26, 2022 fact-check. In it, Matthew Martinez, a sports cardiologist with the National Football League, National Basketball Association, National Hockey League and Major League Soccer and who is director of sports cardiology at Morristown Medical Center in New Jersey said he was not aware of a single COVID vaccine-related cardiac complication in professional sports."

The same report went on to address misinformation about the risk of myocarditis; a claim Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.) also misstated.

As for Johnson's false claim, The Houston Chronicle rated it as "false" and offered an explanation of why.

"There is also the obvious problem with those cases, as they relate to supporting Johnson’s claim, so far as that the two athletes are not, well, dead," Schulte wrote.

In conclusion, she wrote, "Finally, health experts have also said that no research shows the link between sudden death incidents in sports players and vaccines."

https://www.alternet.org/2022/01/ron-johnson-s-vaccine-claims-busted-in-brual-fact-check/

pow deficit now voter suppress steal; is he up in 2022?

so he's not pro russia so much as pro trump? in any case a useful idiot

nra russian money?

321 prolly neglected as regular font of BS, eg not afraid of insurr but if BLM or antifa

Menendez calls Ron Johnson a 'racist' on the Senate floor: 'Like rubbing salt in an open wound'

https://www.alternet.org/2021/03/ron-johnson-2651112600/

pledged not run 3rd term broke pledge;

ppr edit: https://www.alternet.org/2022/01/ron-johnson-grifter/

republicans in Wisconsin have upped the operational tempo in their ongoing war on free and fair elections. Trump stalwart United States Senator Ron Johnson is exhorting state GOP legislators in his home state to illegally seize control of federal election administration over the objections of the governor. Johnson's plan is contravened not only by a Wisconsin Supreme Court ruling, but also by a ruling of the US Supreme Court. But who's counting?

Johnson is buoyed by a fringe constitutional theory popularized by Trump lawyer John Eastman in his notorious coup memos. Eastman asserted that state legislatures had ultimate power over election administration, including the right to cast aside the popular vote for Biden and choose Trump electors instead, provided a Republican yells "fraud" loudly enough.

A long-awaited report commissioned by the Republican state legislature found no evidence of election fraud in 2020. Instead of reflecting on the life choices that have led their state to the brink of one-party rule, the Wisconsin GOP has redirected its rage towards the non-partisan Wisconsin Elections Commission. These legislators are looking for a pretext to abolish the WEC and usurp its powers.

The report alleged a handful of picayune violations of election law by the WEC, including sending absentee ballots to nursing homes. WEC Administrator Meagan Wolfe defended her commission's work and said the report contains errors. These errors could have been resolved if the WEC had been allowed to review the report before publication, as audited agencies typically are. But the first rule of endlessly re-litigating the 2020 election is never to let the facts get in the way of a good smear.

Republican vindictiveness knows no bounds. It's not enough to slander Wolfe and her colleagues, and demand their resignations. Earlier this month, the Republican sheriff of Racine County asked the Republican district attorney to file felony charges against five of the WEC's six members. Their alleged crime? Helping little old ladies vote in nursing homes while protecting them from Covid.

If Racine County DA Patricia Hanson agrees to go along with this charade, these dedicated public servants could each be charged with two Class 1 felonies, which, in the vanishingly unlikely event they are convicted, could carry up to three and a half years in prison apiece.

Wisconsin law requires pairs of officials known as "special voting deputies" to visit every nursing home in the state twice to help residents vote. However, during that phase of the pandemic, most nursing homes banned all visitors, including the deputies. And for good reason. It didn't seem very safe to send these officials and their various hangers-on traipsing from one nursing home to the next, interacting with patients, and possibly spreading the virus.

Therefore, the WEC voted to stop trying to send deputies to nursing homes (where they were already banned) and instead to send absentee ballots to nursing homes. The sheriff alleges that illegal votes were cast because cognitively impaired residents were assisted in voting. This despite the fact that people with cognitive disabilities retain their right to vote in Wisconsin unless a judge determines that they are incompetent. A family member's gut feeling that Mom is too senile to vote is legally worthless.

Wolfe insists the decision to send absentee ballots was not only legal but required by state law: "The law says if you cannot accomplish those two visits by special voting deputies, if a voter cannot vote during those two visits, that you have to send the ballots to the voters in those care facilities," Wolfe explained. She also noted that if they hadn't sent absentee ballots, these elderly and disabled voters would have been disenfranchised.

Elections officials across the country have been subjected to death threats from voters who have been duped by the Big Lie of election fraud. The threat of felony charges is taking the terror campaign to the next level.

https://www.alternet.org/2021/10/law-professor-expertly-shuts-down-sen-ron-johnson-s-false-claim-that-social-media-biased-against-the-right/

no lnx twt

Law professor expertly shuts down Sen. Ron Johnson's false claim that social media is biased against the right

Meaghan Ellis October 30, 2021

One law expert had a particularly insightful response to Ron Johnson's (R-Wisc.) arguments suggesting social media oversight typically tilts in favor of the left. During the Senate Committee on Homeland Security and Government Affairs on Friday, October 29, Johnson shared his grievances about social media appearing to be more favorable for liberal media.

However, Dr. Mary Anne Franks pushed back against Johnson's claims as she decimated his suggestion of liberal bias on social media platforms. Franks, a professor of law at the University of Miami School of Law and Michael R. Klein Distinguished Scholar Chair, masterfully explained how right-wing extremism is at the root of the problem and why right-wing content must be regulated.

While she did acknowledge that Americans have a right to free speech, she also explained why it does not apply in this particular case.

"Yes, we do have a First Amendment," Franks said. "We do have a right to free speech but we also know, of course, that private companies are not obligated under the First Amendment to take all comers. They are allowed to make their own decisions about what is considered to be high-quality and low-quality content. They can make any number of decisions and I think we would applaud them in many cases to make those decisions.

In a hearing in the Senate Committee on Homeland Security & Gov Affairs today, @ma_franks had a sharp response to S… https://t.co/jqiJcjDNjv

— Justin Hendrix (@Justin Hendrix) 1635450216.0

She went on to pinpoint the real problem with right-wing content and why it appears to be censored more than left-wing content. In short, it has to be.

"When it comes to the questions of conservative vs. liberal bias, this is not a notion that I am suggesting here. This is not about intuitions or impressions although I know that those can go in many different directions," Franks explained.

She continued, "This is about what the data actually suggests. The data actually do indicate that right-wing content is more amplified on these social media platforms than left-wing content and that right-wing content is more disproportionately associated with real-world violence; not hurt feelings, people being upset but, in fact, actual violence, actual armed insurrections, actual notions of terrorism, and anarchy."

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no lnx twt

'Deeply dangerous': MSNBC host reveals the history behind the GOP embrace of a deadly conspiracy theory

Mehdi Hasan // Hasan

Alex Henderson October 01, 2021

Fox News' Tucker Carlson generated considerable controversy when, on his April 8 show, he promoted the Great Replacement Theory — a racist conspiracy theory that has become prominent in white supremacist and white nationalist ideology. And almost half a year later, Carlson is still claiming that President Joe Biden and other Democrats are trying to "replace" white voters with immigrants from developing countries. MSNBC's Mehdi Hasan called Carlson out on his show this week, warning that he is promoting a claim that "gets people killed."

The progressive firebrand described the Great Replacement as a "conspiracy theory so vile, so extreme, so dangerous" that it was, in the past, avoided by mainstream conservatives and kept "on the furthest fringes of the far right."

Hasan told viewers, "What is the Great Replacement? It's a story, or a theory if you will, about liberal elites secretly changing our demographics, helping Black and Brown immigrants to invade America and replace white people. It's a white supremacist story about so-called white genocide. Scary, right? Bonkers, too. And yet, this year, Fox's Tucker Carlson came along and thought, 'Hmmm, let's bring this idea into the light to a prime-time cable audience."

The MSNBC host went on to say that the Great Replacement Theory has become a "rallying cry for the neo-Nazi far right," noting that it originated in France with white nationalist author Renaud Camus and his book "Le Grand Remplacement." And Hasan noted that a series of terrorist attacks have been carried out by White supremacists who embrace and promote that theory.

"The Great Replacement Theory gets people killed," Hasan warned. "And yet, you now have Tucker Carlson — the most influential right-wing cable news host in America — defending it, promoting it, mainstreaming it. And elected Republicans are now following in his footsteps…. Members of the GOP are now openly trafficking in neo-Nazi rhetoric."

Hasan showed clips of Rep. Scott Perry of Pennsylvania, Sen. Ron Johnson of Wisconsin and Rep. Brian Babin of Texas promoting the Great Replacement Theory, arguing that "members of the GOP are now openly trafficking in neo-Nazi rhetoric" rather than simply using racist "dog whistles" like Republicans of the past. And he noted that Rep. Matt Gaetz of Florida has vigorously defended Carlson by explicitly promoting the Great Replacement Theory by name.

"This is how white supremacy is normalized in America today: the marriage between Rupert Murdoch's Fox and Donald Trump's GOP," Hasan warned. "And they make us numb to this stuff…. This is a deeply dangerous moment for America."

pushed horse dewormer?

https://www.alternet.org/2021/08/scathing-editorial-by-wisconsin-newspaper-slams-ron-johnson-as-a-con-artist-whose-grifting-made-his-cronies-even-richer/

MOSCOW JULY 4

https://www.alternet.org/2021/07/ron-johnson-2653798788/

covis fails

https://thefederalist.com/2021/07/07/cnn-smears-sen-ron-johnson-as-climate-denier-for-not-bowing-to-climate-alarmism/

cNN Smears Sen. Ron Johnson As ‘Climate Denier’ For Not Bowing To Climate Alarmism

JULY 7, 2021 By Gabe Kaminsky

CNN’s Chris Cuomo opened his Tuesday monologue smearing Wisconsin Republican Sen. Ron Johnson for refusing to bow down to climate alarmism after a new “KFILE” report found a video of Johnson calling climate change, “bullsh-t.”

KFILE reported Johnson told attendees at a June Republican Women of Greater Wisconsin luncheon, “I don’t know about you guys, but I think climate change is — as Lord Monckton said — bullsh-t.”

Cuomo blasted Johnson for his comments. “We need to call out garbage in the form of the game,” he said. “The target tonight, Wisconsin Republican Senator Ron Johnson … Sounds like a denier, no?” He continued:

Now many see Johnson as just selling stupidity. I see something worse. I know this guy. I remember him when he came to the Senate. Businessman, and he said, ‘I don’t know anything about this politics, I’m just here to make things happen.’ …He wanted to come on my show and show economic theories and principles and do charts to justify policy. Now he’s this. This is how he responds to a heatwave gripping North America.

Johnson failed to walk the politically correct line, so CNN thought they scored a win. But in reality, the senator provided a full comment to the outlet that it did not include in its story. Reporters Em Steck and Andrew Kaczynski included the first four sentences of Johnson’s response.

“My statements are consistent. I am not a climate change denier, but I also am not a climate change alarmist. Climate is not static. It has always changed and always will change,” Johnson said.

The rest? Deemed irrelevant to the narrative, as spokeswoman Alexa Henning indicated to The Federalist. Here’s what they left out:

I do not share Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s view that the “world is going to end in 12 years if we don’t address climate change.” Or President Biden saying the “greatest threat” to U.S. security is climate change. I consider those to be extreme positions — to say the least. At some point, all the Malthusian predictions that have not come true should begin reducing the credibility of the scaremongers. But that would take honest reporting by mainstream media, so I’m not holding my breath.

Marc Morano and other seasoned energy experts have consistently exposed climate alarmism as another way for the left to expand government regulation on false premises.

Cuomo connected the heatwave across the country to climate change. But Morano, the author of “Green Fraud: Why the Green New Deal Is Even Worse Than You Think” and a former George W. Bush administration staffer in the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee, told The Federalist this is false.

“Any heatwave, hurricane, tornado outbreak, etc., are always used by the media and other climate activists as some kind of ‘proof’ of a climate emergency,” Morano said. “At least these claims are more plausible than claims that building collapses or illegal immigration is caused by ‘climate change.'”

Morano said the current global satellite temperature for June 2021 is below the 30-year average, and that in addition to the U.S. heatwave, there are ongoing record cold temperatures elsewhere.

“The media gaslight anyone who mocks ‘global warming’ on a record cold or snowy day but has no problem doing the exact same thing whenever it’s hot. As University of Alabama climate scientist John Christy’s research has found: ‘About 75% of the states recorded their hottest temperature prior to 1955, and over 50 percent of the states experienced their record cold temperatures after 1940,'” he said.

Johnson said climate change is “bullsh-it,” and he is not wrong. He even told CNN “climate is not static” and that he is “not a climate change denier,” but the outlet wants to mold a narrative.

Gabe Kaminsky is an intern at The Federalist. His writing has been featured in the Daily Wire, The American Conservative, the Washington Examiner, and other outlets. He has also appeared on Fox News, Hill.TV, and various radio programs. Follow him on Twitter @Gabe__Kaminsky or email gkaminskycontact@gmail.com.

Unearthed video reveals Republican Sen. Ron Johnson's profane and conspiratorial rant at GOP lunch

Matthew Chapman Raw Story July 07, 2021

On Tuesday, CNN's KFILE unearthed comments made by Sen. Ron Johnson (R-WI) at a meeting with the Republican Women of Greater Wisconsin luncheon in Wauwatosa, in which he spun profanity-laced...

~ biden

https://www.alternet.org/2021/06/ron-johnson-russia/

https://www.alternet.org/2021/06/ron-johnson-2653358201/

deplat on covid BS?

Sick and twisted excuse for a human being': Wisconsin paper slams Ron Johnson for defending Jan. 6 insurrectionists

Alex Henderson June 03, 2021

Sen. Ron Johnson of Wisconsin not only voted against a bill calling for a commission to investigate the January 6 insurrection — he has also downplayed the violence that occurred that day, insisting that the insurrectionists...

https://www.alternet.org/2021/06/dark-money-groups/

ah

Earlier this year, Democrats in the U.S. House of Representatives took a stand against voter suppression when they passed House Resolution 1, a.k.a. the For the People Act — a comprehensive voting rights/election reform bill that now faces an uphill climb in the U.S. Senate under the rules of the filibuster, which requires 60 or more votes for most legislation. Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell and many other Senate Republicans are vehemently opposed to HR 1, and according to the watchdog group Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Government, "dark money" from "the Koch network" is helping to fuel that opposition.

In an article published on May 28, CREW members Meghan Faulkner and Miru Osuga explain, "There's a whole lot of dark money behind the opponents of democracy reform. The Koch network alone has spent tens of millions backing many of the senators who are opposing the For the People Act, which would overhaul campaign finance rules and enforcement and make it harder for dark money groups, like those in the Koch network, to secretly influence our elections."

Faulkner and Osuga note how much "the Koch network" has spent "backing" GOP opponents of the For the People Act, including $5.6 million spent on Sen. Marsha Blackburn of Tennessee, $1.3 million on Sen. Roy Blunt of Missouri, $4.9 million on Sen. Joni Ernst of Iowa, $4.3 million on Sen. Ron Johnson of Wisconsin, $5.7 million on Sen. John Cornyn of Texas and $4.3 million on Sen. Tom Cotton of Arkansas.

"All told," Faulkner and Osuga note, "groups associated with the Koch network have spent over $100 million boosting the campaigns of current Republican senators, none of whom are supportive of comprehensive campaign finance reform. That total doesn't even include millions of dollars in additional dark money spending from these groups that was never reported to the Federal Election Commission."

KochPAC is a political action committee funded by employees of Koch Industries and their allies. Billionaire oligarch Charles Koch, the 85-year-old brother of the late David Koch, has been a major supporter of right-wing causes.

According to CREW, one of the things that troubles "the Koch network" is how "popular" the proposals of the For the People Act are. The bill comes at a time when Republicans in state legislatures all over the United States are aggressively pushing voter suppression bills.

"The Koch network and other dark money groups know exactly how popular this democracy reform is and how much it threatens the broken campaign finance system they depend on," Faulkner and Osuga stress. "That's why they're doing their best to defeat it quietly in Congress, aided by the senators whose campaigns they've boosted with millions of dollars of secret money."

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https://www.alternet.org/2021/03/ron-johnson-2651170911/

agno?

~ 1/6 comm

https://www.alternet.org/2021/05/ron-johnson-2653077615/

https://www.alternet.org/2021/05/ron-johnson-2653047519/ agitators, rest peaceful

common dr

this is what you shall do... stand up for the stupid and crazy...

— Walt Whitman, Preface to the first edition of Leaves of Grass

A number of readers wondered whether, following my recent piece on The Triplets in the House of Representatives, I was being unfair to the United States Senate, a body that includes at least two people deserving recognition as much as the triplets in the House. I can only acknowledge my oversight with a mea culpa and make amends by directing the readers' attention to two Senators who, with each utterance, warm the cockles of the trumpian heart and the hearts of all who love and miss the trump.

The two Senators are Senators Ron Johnson of Wisconsin and Josh Hawley of Missouri. Great minds can differ on which of the two men is the dumbest man in the Senate. NBC's Joe Scarborough bestowed the label on Josh, calling him the dumbest guy in the Senate, but I prefer to bestow that honor on Wisconsin's Ron Johnson. Ron does not have the academic credentials of Josh. Josh attended Stanford, and Yale law school. The lack of those credentials does not, however, deprive him of the right to being first, not second, in the competition.

Ron has served in the Senate since 2010. During that time ample opportunities for him to show his stupidity have presented themselves, and he has rarely failed to take advantage of them. In 2021, however, he has taken positions that in the opinion of this writer give him an insurmountable lead over Josh Hawley. Among his most memorable demonstrations were his comments on the rioters who stormed the United States Capitol as Ron and his colleague took refuge in a safe space in the Capitol building. Ron said of his time being sequestered in a safe space in the Capitol that: "I never felt threatened I didn't foresee this. They made up their own standards in terms of incitement. The first question was 'Was this predictable? Was it foreseeable? And the answer was no, it wasn't. I don't know any Trump supporters who would do that."

In an interview in March he said of the rioters that: "I know those were people who love this country, that truly respect law enforcement, would never do anything to break the law, so I wasn't concerned." He went on to say that had the rioters been members of the Black Lives Matter crowd he would have been more concerned for his safety. He did not explain why he joined his colleagues in being taken to a refuge where they were protected from the people showing their love for the country by storming its capitol nor has he explained why more than 400 of them have been criminally indicted for trying to prove their love of country.

Ron's observations about the good intentions of the rioters by themselves, would perhaps not earn him the distinction I have granted him. It is also his expertise on the Covid-19 vaccine. He has repeatedly downplayed the need for people to get vaccinated against the virus. In an interview with Vicky McKenna on April 23 he explained that if a person had the vaccine he or she didn't need to worry about whether anyone else got the vaccine. As he explained: "So if you have a vaccine, quite honestly, what do you care if your neighbor has one or not. I mean, what is it to you?... So why this big push to make sure everybody gets vaccinated?" The more than 570,000 American who have died could explain why taking the vaccine is important. Anthony Fauci responded to Johnson's comments saying they were nonsense. He said we have very effective vaccines and it makes no sense to take the Johnson position that if he's been vaccinated no one else needs to take the vaccine.

Johnson's competitor is Josh Hawley. Josh is better credentialed than Ron. Josh received his undergraduate degree from Stanford University and his law degree from Yale Law School. Both of his degrees have served him in poor stead proving, as a president of Harvard once said, the mere fact that you graduate from a great university does not mean you are an educated person. On December 30, 2020, Josh announced by means of a trump like tweet, that he would refuse to certify the vote that Joe Biden had been elected president. "I cannot vote to certify the Electoral College results on January 6 without raising the fact that some states, particularly Pennsylvania, failed to follow their own state election laws." Not content to express his unwillingness to certify the electoral college results, as the rioters gathered on January 6 preparing to launch their attack on the Capitol, Josh walked by them pumping his fist in the air in a gesture of support. What happened next is history.

Commenting on Josh's tweets and conduct, John Danforth, a former Missouri Senator said: "Supporting Josh Hawley. . . was the worst decision I've ever made in my life. He has consciously appealed to the worst. He has attempted to drive us apart and he has undermined public belief in our democracy. And that's great damage." Senator Danforth got that right. Josh Hawley is a national disgrace. So is Ron Johnson. The nut jobs in the House of Representatives have not upstaged the ones in the Senate. The electorate has made sure there are enough to go around.

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vax BS

https://www.alternet.org/2021/05/ron-johnson/

https://www.alternet.org/2021/03/republican-paramilitaries/

no lnx

ron Johnson said recently that he wasn't scared when, on January 6, armed insurgents sacked and looted the United States Capitol. They "love this country," the Wisconsin Republican said. But "had the tables been turned and President Trump won the election and tens of thousands of Black Lives Matter and antifa [stormed the seat of government], I might have been a little concerned."

That statement was disturbing not only for the implicit racism it carried, but for the stunning confirmation of what's becoming clear to those of us who are paying attention. The Republican Party has a paramilitary problem, and it isn't new.

During his 2016 campaign, Donald Trump alleged, without proof, that the electoral system was fraudulent, raising concerns about the impact that his false accusations would have in the event of his defeat. His unexpected victory opened the door to the far-right fringe and legitimized efforts that contributed to strengthening the ties between them. Many feared that this close relationship would be critical in the 2020 presidential election cycle, with rising domestic tensions and the role that paramilitaries would play in addition to Trump's false claims about the election.

It has been clear for some time now that the Republican Party had a more-than-welcoming attitude toward certain paramilitary groups. The deadly events in Charlottesville in 2017, although fundamentally led by white supremacists called by the former president "very fine people," also had protection services provided by paramilitaries. The following year, more signs of backing for their man in the White House came from Trump-supporting paramilitary groups targeting Muslims. In Oregon, a walkout staged by Republican state senators, in 2019, gained support from paramilitary groups that made credible threats against a planned rally.

For almost three decades, these paramilitaries (thought to be in the hundreds across the country) have viewed the government as the adversary. With a friend residing in the White House, however, these groups experienced an identity crisis. This need for an enemy explains the shift into targeting immigrants and religious minorities. It wasn't just to please their man. It was to embrace a cause allowing them to grow.

After Trump won, there was an increase in the number of paramilitary groups, but the GOP has been no stranger to them. In 2017, a local chapter of the Republican Party in Oregon passed a resolution allowing paramilitaries (the Oath Keepers and the Three Percenters, for instance) to provide security at the local party events. These groups are part of the Patriot Movement, a loose far-right network affiliated with the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing and armed confrontations in Nevada and Oregon in 2016.

The Republican Party seems to be very comfortable with these groups around, as we have seen in Nevada, Oregon, Michigan, and other states. However, this is not a recent venture, since the accounts of strengthening ties can be traced back even before Trump won the election in 2016. The openness about their common interests is perhaps new, but it's not surprising. Alarms were sounded when state Senate Majority Leader, Republican Mike Shirkey of Michigan, participated in a rally organized by paramilitaries that stormed the Michigan Capitol back in April 2020 alongside a member of a group involved in the planned kidnapping of Gov. Gretchen Whitmer.

Though Michigan has a history of paramilitaries, the state GOP had tied itself to them, especially since the election as party co-chair of Meshawn Maddock. She organized a protest to interrupt ballot counting in Detroit, where paramilitaries were present.

Johnson's statement is outrageous, not only for the racism, but also for the approval of white armed groups as opposed to unarmed groups as well as the acknowledgement that he didn't feel threatened by them since they were exercising their freedom. Compare that to his comments about BLM and Antifa, but that's another discussion.

The connections the Republican Party has with paramilitaries are not ambiguous, yet the ongoing investigation into the Capitol attack will likely provide more evidence of the extremely disturbing behavior of the formerly conservative party. Ties between not only Trump and his associates, like Roger Stone, whose security detail included members of the Oath Keepers, but the GOP at state and local levels, should bring into the discussion how one of the major parties in the country is going to stand for democracy while leading a double-life with paramilitaries bent on racial supremacy.

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==

https://www.alternet.org/2021/02/ron-johnson-2650738309/

~ Amy Klo called out at end; he read a blog post into congr recd

Sen. Ron Johnson (R-Wis.) faced heightened criticism as he attempted to push a false narrative of the U.S. Capitol riots.

Despite photos, footage, and even social media posts from Trump supporters admitting they'd stormed the U.S. Capitol to hinder the Electoral College certification, Johnson claimed "agent provocateurs" and "fake Trump protesters" were responsible for the deadly riots, according to the Washington Post.

Lawmakers from both sides of the aisle quickly fired back at the Wisconsin lawmaker's baseless claims. Rep. Adam Kinzinger (R-Ill.) lambasted his colleague describing his spread of misinformation campaigns as "disgraceful."

"It's disgraceful for a sitting Senator to spread disinformation so blatantly," Rep. Adam Kinzinger (R-Ill.), who has been an outspoken critic of Trump and his role in the insurrection, said on Twitter Tuesday evening. "It's a disservice to the people he serves to continue lying to them like this. It's dangerous and it must stop."...

i forgot fox had them; was there ever any standards/integrity that wd not be crossed/ ppl who wd not quality/ be invited/ refused? if all news, esp on fox is just opinion/bloviator, then no one barred, plus heat is good for ratings, and the purpose of fox is to insult dems, even more than lift gop

https://www.alternet.org/2021/02/journalism-lies/

On Sunday, NBC's "Meet the Press" interviewed United States Senator Ron Johnson. ABC's "This Week" interviewed House Minority Whip Steve Scalise. CBS's "Face the Nation" interviewed United States Senator Lindsey Graham. "Fox News Sunday" interviewed United States Senator Rand Paul. They're Republicans and they had a message for a combined television audience of millions: Donald Trump won.

Not in those exact words, but that was the clear implication. This thing or that thing—it didn't really matter what thing—meant in their "view" that the former president was robbed and the legitimacy of the current president, Joe Biden, is somehow suspect.

I bring this up not because yesterday was a disaster for journalism and the integrity of the public square (though it was that). I bring this up because it seems to me an answer to the question that haunts democratic discourse: How does a republic deal with parties that lie so intensely, so voluminously and so shamelessly? Some say we should afford them the same respect we ourselves would expect. If we call them liars, that might encourage them to lie more given the outrage of being called liars. Better to check their facts, state the truth and move on in hopes that they behave in kind.

This was certainly the thinking behind Frank Bruni's latest, titled "Must We Dance on Rush Limbaugh Grave?" The Times columnist said Sunday that while the radio broadcaster, who died last week, was a white-power racist, sexist, fear-mongering, homophobic crank (not his words), it's crude and rough and, worse of all, "screechy" to say as much about a man recently killed off by the cancer. It's one thing to speak ill of the dead, Bruni wrote, "but the pitch of that ill-speak needn't be screechy. The manner of it needn't be savage. It has more credibility—and I think, more impact—when it's neither of these things. And we preserve some crucial measure of civility and grace."

For four decades, Rush Limbaugh had the biggest media megaphone through which he spit poison every day straight into the ears of 20 million Americans. He lied and lied, and he lied and lied. If there were no Limbaugh, there would be no President Trump, who himself told more than 30,500 lies, falsehoods and misleading claims during four years. Their canon of lies included lies about the covid pandemic, culminating in a death toll now exceeding half a million. Their repertoire of lies included lies about the election, culminating in the worst attack on our government since September 11, 2001. Their stockpile of lies included The Big One repeated Sunday by three GOP senators and one GOP House leader to the detriment of millions of television viewers. How does a republic deal with parties that lie nonstop? There's never been an easy answer. Whatever it is, it's not "civility and grace" alone, because they alone do not work.

It's not that I think Bruni is wrong to remind people to follow the Golden Rule. He's correct, in a purely abstract sense, to say that, "If you're going to fling your opinions at the world, you must be braced for the world to fling its reaction back at you. Those are the terms of the contract." But we are not talking about public morality in the abstract. We are talking about public morality in this place and in this time and in the spirit of defending our republic from ghouls conspiring, and still conspiring, to bring it down. Moreover, a Golden Rule that's wholly decontextualized and dehistoricized can be a gag preventing us from speaking the truth and silencing all but the most powerful.

You know who Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez is. During last week's deep freeze in Texas, she started a fundraiser that has raised, as of this writing, more than $4 million to alleviate hunger and suffering in the Lone Star State. She was doing for Texans what you'd think Texans would do for her (and other New Yorkers). But instead of gratitude, the Texas Republican Party answered generosity with slander: "The gesture is appreciated, but it doesn't remove the fact that her Green New Deal philosophy failed Texans," wrote Chairman Allen West. Fact No. 1: The Green New Deal is Ocasio-Cortez's policy idea. It's not anything more yet. Fact No. 2: Texas has nothing to do with her policy idea. Fact No. 3: Wind power accounts for 10 percent of energy use in Texas. Conclusion: West is smearing Ocasio-Cortez even as she's trying to help.

This is clear later when he writes that Ocasio-Cortez's charity is not charity. What appears to be the Golden Rule is actually something sinister. West wrote: "What Texans found out this week is that wind energy, and solar, are not reliable, dependable, and available energy resources. Therefore, ma'am [Ocasio-Cortez], you're not going to buy off Texans for your green new deal energy pipe dream for $2 million" (my italics). Ocasio-Cortez did not blame Texas politicians for the straits they're in. Her pitch has not been "screechy," as Frank Bruni wrote. Her manner has not been "savage." She has been living up to the Golden Rule according to Bruni's advice. But what does she get in return? Lies, slander, contempt, and rancid accusations of trying to "buy off Texans."

Ocasio-Cortez (as well as Beto O'Rourke, who's also raised impressive sums) is modeling what Texans could expect from a government of, by and for the people. That's a threat to corrupt parties like the Texas GOP. It's therefore in the interest of people like West to run Ocasio-Cortez down, even if he comes off as gauche in the process. Fact is, coming off as gauche might be a good thing, as a lack of manners and etiquette and decorum tends to look like authentic strength, and when that's set side-by-side with kindness, authentic strength usually wins though it's a lie. The real problem, West might as well said, isn't that Texas is corrupt. The real problem isn't that the state's government failed its people. The real problem is carpetbaggers and their "New York values" coming down here, making us look bad. That's not nice.

As I said, Bruni isn't wrong in terms of substance. He's wrong in terms of engagement. He's so aloof as to be extraterrestrial. This is the world we live in. This is the world we struggle to change. It's not going to change if truth stops at the border of politeness.

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https://www.alternet.org/2021/02/ron-johnson-2650594793

Ron Johnson of Wisconsin, a die-hard Trump supporter, is under attack after claiming the January 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol wasn't an "armed insurrection." "This didn't seem like an armed insurrection to me," Senator Johnson told far right wing host Jay Weber on WISN, as The Washington Post reports. "When you hear the word 'armed,' don't you think of firearms? Here's the questions I would have liked to ask: How many firearms were confiscated? How many shots were fired?"

"If that was a planned armed insurrection, man, you had really a bunch of idiots," Johnson added...

an 121

...(The satirical news site The Onion deftly handled this, calling out each of the 126 with an individualized message. To Rep. Gus Bilirakis of Florida, "You have been absolutely fearless when stopping the American people from participating in elections;" to Rep. Tim Burchett of Tennessee, "Never again will we allow U.S. citizens to recklessly turn in their ballots;" to Rep. Mike Johnson of Louisiana, "Thank you for bravely standing up to the American voters;" and so on. Each was accompanied by an especially beguiling photo of a maggot.)

Many of those same members and more—some 140—are now lending their names to the smoke-and-mirrors effort in Congress to challenge the votes of the Electoral College, which already has given the election to Joe Biden. The votes of the electors officially are to be announced on Wednesday by Vice President Mike Pence in his capacity as President of the Senate.

In normal times, this would be a mere formality, but Trump and Republicans have decided to turn it into a clumsy attempt at a coup d'etat, ignoring the rule of law and numerous court rulings. They're putting on an act, trying to overturn the results of a free and fair election as a dumbshow of power, all out of fear of Tin Hat Trump's "base" of voters and to preserve a status quo that ignores the diversity of America, cossets the rich and fosters hate, poverty and inequality.

In the House, the leaders of this effort include the feckless Louie Gohmert of Texas, known as "America's craziest and dumbest congressman." Having just had an election lawsuit thrown out by a Federal appeals court on New Year's Day, he went on Newsmax suggesting that the alternative now is going to the streets and "being as violent as antifa and BLM."

He's joined in this mad pursuit—simultaneously dumbing down and radicalizing a significant portion of the party and American populace—by the usual suspects, led by Rep. Mo Brooks of Alabama and including Jeff Van Drew of New Jersey, Jody Hice of Georgia and Joe Wilson of South Carolina. New members of the House are piping up, too, including QAnon queen Marjorie Taylor Greene of Georgia.

On the Senate side, opposition to finalizing the presidential result is being led by Josh Hawley of Missouri, a man of vaulting ambition who wants to be president so badly he's is willing to violate his sworn oath of office and destroy the Constitution and Bill of Rights to get there, using conspiracy theories and falsehoods to oil his way into the White House as early as 2024.

In a letter published Saturday, eleven other Republican senators and senators-elect demanded an "emergency 10-day audit" of results in "the disputed states,"—in other words, the states Trump is shocked—shocked!—that he lost to Joe Biden, states he assumed would be a cinch for him. They weren't.

Remember their names:

Ted Cruz (Texas)

Ron Johnson (Wisconsin)

James Lankford (Oklahoma)

Steve Daines (Montana)

John Kennedy (Louisiana)

Marsha Blackburn (Tennessee)

Mike Braun (Indiana)

Cynthia Lummis (Wyoming) (new senator)

Roger Marshall (Kansas) (new senator)

Bill Hagerty (Tennessee) (new senator)

Tommy Tuberville (Alabama) (new senator)

Sadly, this Dirty Dozen (including Hawley), a so-called "Sedition Caucus" in the Senate, probably won't be deterred by news of that phone call Trump made to Georgia's Republican Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger, trying to bully him into finding more votes to change the result in the state from Biden to Trump—a conversation much like the one with Ukraine President Zelensky that a year ago got Donald Trump impeached.

Trump's impeachment didn't lead to conviction by the Senate, thanks to Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, who would brook no new evidence or witnesses, turning the trial into a sham with a predetermined outcome. But McConnell now is opposed to his colleagues' efforts to subvert the Electoral College. Why? Because McConnell is all about the raw power he alone holds in the Senate. He cares for that and little else except, of course, tax cuts for the superrich, holding rules and regulations at bay and getting as many conservative Federal judges approved by the Senate as quickly as he can.

...

https://www.alternet.org/2021/01/chuck-todd/

Jay Rosen, a New York University journalism professor who is one of the preeminent critics of the profession he teaches, on New Year's Day blasted NBC News and MSNBC's Chuck Todd.

"Everything Chuck Todd ever said about his alarm at what the Republicans are doing is hollow and meaningless," Rosen said on Twitter, about the "Meet the Press" host. "After all this, to welcome Ron Johnson back is such a pathetic surrender."

Rosen was referring to news that Todd's guest on this coming Sunday's "Meet the Press" will be Senator Ron Johnson (R-WI), a far right pro-Trump conspiracy theorist.[twt]

rosen's timely takedown of Todd comes just days after he penned a piece slamming the NBC News/MSNBC host on his PressThink website, for his "strategic blindness."

"Three years after Kellyanne Conway introduced the doctrine of 'alternative facts' on his own program, a light went on for Chuck Todd," Rosen wrote. "Republican strategy, he now realized, was to make stuff up, spread it on social media, repeat it in your answers to journalists — even when you know it's a lie with crumbs of truth mixed in — and then convert whatever controversy arises into go-get-em points with the base, while pocketing for the party a juicy dividend: additional mistrust of the news media to help insulate President Trump among loyalists when his increasingly brazen actions are reported as news."

Rosen slammed Todd for taking so long to see what many had already told him about the GOP, and then further ignoring it.

"You cannot call that an oversight. It's a strategic blindness that he superintended," Rosen charged, calling it "malpractice."

Read Rosen's full article, "The Christmas Eve Confessions of Chuck Todd," at PressThink.

FROM YOUR SITE ARTICLES

NBC's Chuck Todd goes down in flames while coaxing Buttigieg to ... ›

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Chuck Todd now realizes he's being used for propaganda. What ... ›

Right now an estimated 12.6 million Americans are out of work and many more are struggling as the worsening COVID-19 pandemic has shuttered numerous businesses and industries. The last time Congress provided $1,200 economic stimulus checks to individual Americans was in March. Nine months have passed since then.

But as President Donald Trump, Democratic Congress members and 11 Republican Senators have all signaled their readiness to provide a new round of $1,200 checks to 382 million Americans, one Republican senator has voted down the measure twice: Senator Ron Johnson of Minnesota.

On Friday, Johnson voted twice to block a measure that would've issue the checks to every U.S. resident.

"I'm not heartless," Johnson said, defending his votes. "I want to help people. I voted to help people. I voted for the $2.2 trillion CARES Act, but I also am concerned about our children's future."

Johnson said he's concerned that the costs of issuing checks would inflate the national debt, nevermind that alleviating economic worries would help heal the increases in drug use, depression and domestic abuse that have increased during the nearly year-long economic downturn.

On December 10, Republican Senator Josh Hawley of Missouri and Independent Senator and former Democratic presidential candidate Bernie Sanders of Vermont pushed colleagues to vote for a second round of stimulus checks. In separate speeches, both senators said the checks should mirror those issued early in the pandemic which gave $1,200 to adults and $500 for each child. The first checks were passed with bipartisan and presidential approval at a point when the pandemic was less severe than it is now.

As of Thursday, however, Politico reported that the latest $908 billion economic stimulus package being negotiated in Congress only allotted for $600 stimulus checks.

FROM YOUR SITE ARTICLES

Sen. Ron Johnson invites AIDS-denying anti-vaxxer to testify on ... ›

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RELATED ARTICLES AROUND THE WEB

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Ron Johnson gambles his political future on Trump - POLITICO ›

==

1220 dn

On Capitol Hill, the Senate Homeland Security Committee chair, Wisconsin Republican Senator Ron Johnson, has invited members of a fringe medical association to testify on the coronavirus pandemic. The lead witness, Dr. Jane M. Orient, has expressed anti-vaccine views and has pushed the use of hydroxychloroquine — an antimalarial drug once promoted by President Trump, which can cause heart rhythm problems and showed no benefit in treating COVID-19. Another witness testifying today, Dr. Ramin Oskoui, has falsely claimed that masks and social distancing don’t work at combating the spread of coronavirus.

ron j?

https://www.axios.com/republicans-ukraine-reform-prosecutors-office-biden-11988d59-49e1-4e07-9b92-596575b9e68d.html

oct 2019

3 Republican senators joined a 2016 push for Ukraine to reform its prosecutor general's office and judiciary, a bipartisan letter uncovered by CNN shows, mirroring the contemporaneous work of then-Vice President Joe Biden.

Why it matters: The letter to former Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko illuminates bipartisan support in the U.S. to pursue corruption reforms in the prosecutor general's office. It also undermines claims from President Trump and Republicans that Biden demanded Ukraine terminate Prosecutor General Viktor Shokin and drop its investigation into the company for which Biden's son, Hunter, sat on the board.

The letter was signed by 8 senators — 5 Democrats and 3 Republicans: Sens. Ron Johnson (Wis.), Rob Portman (Ohio) and Mark Kirk (Ill.). Kirk is no longer serving in the Senate.

The signatories acknowledged governmental reforms already made in Ukraine and expressed concern about the resignation of a Cabinet minister who heralded those reforms.

"We similarly urge you to press ahead with urgent reforms to the Prosecutor General's Office and judiciary," the letter reads. "The unanimous adoption by the Cabinet of Ministers of the Basic Principles and Action Plan is a good step."

Worth noting: Johnson asked the Justice Department earlier this week to look into links between Ukraine and Hillary Clinton's 2016 presidential campaign. His letter questioned the narrative that Biden's actions in Ukraine had nothing to do with his son's connection.

Context: As President Trump is facing an impeachment threat over requesting Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky to investigate Biden, Senate Republicans have attempted to highlight Biden's role in the prosecutor's ouster.

But the sentiments expressed in the 2016 letter reflect a 2015 speech Biden made to the Ukrainian parliament with "similar calls for changes to the judiciary and the General Prosecutor's office," per CNN.

"It's not enough to set up a new anti-corruption bureau and establish a special prosecutor fighting corruption," Biden said in Kiev. "The Office of the General Prosecutor desperately needs reform. The judiciary should be overhauled."

There is no evidence that Biden's work in Ukraine was to protect his son or that he committed any form of corruption.

Go deeper: Fact check: What Joe and Hunter Biden actually did in Ukraine

https://www.alternet.org/2020/10/trump-and-the-right-share-a-darwinist-herd-mentality-and-preference-for-sacrificing-the-weak-to-capitalism/

carl pope salon

Donald Trump's promise in an ABC News town hall last month that the United States would soon achieve herd immunity for the coronavirus, and conflating that with herd mentality, may be explained because Trump is counting on the latter to rescue his second term. It's otherwise impossible to imagine a campaign whose endgame is to recover the lost loyalty of voters over 65 selecting as its closing argument, "Not enough of you have died yet."

It's a safe bet that none of his 2016 Republican primary challengers would have embraced the idea that the solution to the pandemic was more American casualties than the Civil War and World War II combined. But many of Trump's Republican comrades-in-arms have embraced, often eagerly, a default preference for herd immunity — harkening back to the harsh social Darwinism that underlies much of modern conservatism. Early on in the pandemic there were Texas Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick, Rep. Trey Hollingsworth of Indiana and radio host Glenn Beck, all of whom argued that the loss of more American lives was preferable to scaling back the economy. Then, when the issue became wearing masks, some opponents argued "if I'm going to get COVID and die from it, so be it …" Of course they really meant, "If you are going to get COVID ..." Wearing masks was a deprivation of freedom — although this argument seems never to have been extended by Republicans to the prohibition on public nudity.

As the pandemic surged again, by October Sen. Ron Johnson of Wisconsin was referring to "unjustified hysteria" about covid, and asked, after he became infected, ""Why do we think we actually can stop the progression of a contagious disease?" (The obvious answer is that we have been doing so, with increasing success, since the 1854 cholera pump moment. That is rejected by many on the right, because stopping a pandemic may require the government to prevent citizens from endangering others.)

Herd immunity can sometimes reduce mortality from a disease, but over the centuries has failed to end the curse of influenza, tuberculosis, smallpox, polio, rabies or dengue fever. It fits neatly, however, into a social Darwinist framework. Those who die are the "weak" — the poorest, the youngest and the oldest young — or can at any rate be classified as weak and deserving to die, because they died. Survival of the fittest requires discarding the weak. Remember the "let them die" hecklers who populated some of the 2011 Republican debates on health care.

This underlying value distortion — my personal freedom extends to my right to endanger you — spreads out across a range of other issues. Today's Republican reluctance to curb pollution even when it is demonstrably is killing a power plant's neighbors, to keep pesticides that kill farm workers out of the fields or to do anything at all about the climate crisis, which conservatives have privately conceded for years was real and caused by carbon pollution, are all illustrations of how the toxin of social Darwinism still contaminates much of the right's thinking about freedom.

So Trump's response to the COVID crisis — and the willingness of the Republican congressional establishment to enable it — illustrates a deep-rooted flaw in the American right. In a world in which we are, like it or not, all bound together, a tolerable conservatism is one that is willing to protect me from irresponsible neighbors, whether those are COVID-risking teenagers, irresponsible gun owners or multinational chemical companies.

--> IMPEACH

https://www.alternet.org/2020/09/democrats-say-the-gops-attempt-to-smear-biden-accidentally-exposed-a-trump-officials-corrupt-scheme/

igor salon

the Republican report aimed at raising questions about the dealings of Democratic nominee Joe Biden and his son Hunter Biden in Ukraine appears to have accidentally implicated former Energy Secretary Rick Perry in an energy scheme in the foreign nation, according to the top Democrat on the Senate Finance Committee.

Republicans led by Sen. Ron Johnson, R-Wis., released their much-hyped report on Hunter Biden’s role at the Ukrainian energy firm Burisma on Wednesday. However, it found no evidence of actual wrongdoing and relied largely on debunked claims, old statements and narratives pushed as part of a Russian disinformation campaign.

But the report did find new evidence related to Perry’s actions in Ukraine while he served in President Donald Trump’s Cabinet.

Amos Hochstein, a member of the supervisory board at the state-owned Ukrainian energy firm Naftogaz, told lawmakers that Perry “inappropriately pressured the Ukrainian government” to place Texas oil executive Robert Bensh on the board of the company while officials at the Department of Energy pressured the government to sign a deal with a “private business entity connected to Mr. Bensh,” according to a letter Wyden sent to Department of Energy Inspector General Teri Donaldson.

perry also pressured the Ukrainian government to place one of his longtime campaign supporters, Michael Bleyzer, on the board during a trip to Ukraine for President Volodymyr Zelensky’s inauguration in 2019, Wyden wrote. Bleyzer and his partner were later awarded a drilling contract in the country.

“Mr. Bleyzer’s contract that he was awarded was despite the fact that he was not the highest bidder in the process,” Hochstein told lawmakers. “Other . . . bids were higher, and therefore, Ukraine chose a bid that paid itself less.”

The heads of the state-owned Naftogaz conglomerate have since filed a lawsuit seeking to overturn the contract, arguing that the Ukrainian government acted “illegally and with bias” in agreeing to the deal, Wyden noted.

“Witness testimony in this investigation has directly implicated former Secretary Rick Perry in alleged wrongdoing, and the department more broadly, in a scheme to undermine anti-corruption efforts that were implemented by Ukraine in partnership with the international community,” Wyden wrote.

Politico reported last year that Perry — who along with then-Ambassador to the European Union Gordon Sondland and Ukraine envoy Kurt Volker were the “three amigos” who pushed a shadow foreign policy in Ukraine — played an active role in the Trump administration’s pressure on Zelensky, which ultimately led to thepresident’s impeachment.

ProPublica reported earlier this month that Perry repeatedly pushed deals that “were potentially worth billions of dollars to Perry’s friends and political donors” and could “stand to benefit” the secretary himself. Two of the deals, including one worth $20 billion, went to the Texas firm Energy Transfer. Perry served on the company’s board before and after his stint at the Energy Department and bought shares now worth about $800,000 three months after leaving his post, according to the report.

Ethics experts told the outlet that Perry’s efforts were violations of federal regulations. His actions also caught the attention of federal prosecutors, though he is reportedly not the target of any investigations.

The interview with Hochstein was part of the Senate Republicans’ investigation into whether Hunter Biden’s position at Burisma affected U.S. foreign policy. The report asserted that his position was “problematic and did interfere in the efficient execution of policy with respect to Ukraine.” However, it did not include any new evidence suggesting his role affected the Obama administration’s policy. It also acknowledged that “the extent to which Hunter Biden’s role on Burisma’s board affected U.S. policy toward Ukraine is not clear.”

Wyden, the ranking Democrat on the Senate Finance Committee, said the probe pushed “Russian disinformation.” He further described it as “an attempted political hit job facilitated by the State Department.”

A Finance Committee aide told Talking Points Memo that finding new evidence against the Trump administration “was certainly not Republicans’ goal.”

“While Republicans’ Ukraine investigation showed Vice President Biden did nothing wrong,” the aide said, “it succeeded in implicating former Secretary Perry in a corrupt scheme to pressure the Ukrainian government to change the board of Naftogaz.”

an 920

ron Johnson and Chuck Grassley drop their Biden bombshell — and it’s an absolute dud

Mark Sumner / Daily KosSeptember 23, 2020

For months, Republican Senator Ron Johnson has promised to deliver a body blow to Joe Biden. Like the report being put together by William Barr and John Durham, this was one…

==

an

shades of benghazi

Republicans finally tell the truth about Biden probe: “It would certainly help Donald Trump win re-election”

Igor Derysh / Salon  September 17, 2020

Democrats accused Sen. Ron Johnson, R-Wis., of abusing his position after he publicly admitted that his investigation into the party’s presidential nominee Joe Biden would “certainly” help President Donald Trump’s re-election chances. Johnson,…

stokes violence then sez only he can stop THOSE PPL:

https://www.alternet.org/2020/08/trumps-signal-to-his-followers-is-clear-violence-and-chaos-are-my-only-hope/

no twt vid link

prez trump’s signal to his followers is clear: Violence and chaos are my only hope

Written by Heather Digby Parton / Salon August 31, 2020

President Trump was having a normal one on Sunday morning, tweeting and retweeting 89 times over the course of three and a half hours. Many of them were tweets of polling numbers from obscure firms showing him in the lead after the Republican convention. But most of the tweets and retweets were incitement to violence among his true believers and complaints about “Democrat cities,” an ongoing mantra which he seems to think is a slam dunk to get him re-elected.

He repeatedly insulted and mocked Joe Biden, of course, and Portland, Oregon Mayor Ted Wheeler will undoubtedly have to change his phone number after the president of the United States posted it on Twitter so his followers could call and demand his resignation.

He also showed support for one of his fans in Wisconsin:

[]

It was a manic tweet spree and one that couldn’t have show the president’s state of mind any more clearly. Biden has said Trump is “rooting for violence,” and I don’t think anyone can reasonably argue with that.

In fact, Trump’s surrogates are saying it right out loud. Fox News’ Chris Wallace asked Trump campaign adviser Lara Trump whether she agreed with White House counselor Kellyanne Conway’s assertion that “the more chaos and anarchy and vandalism and violence reigns, the better it is for the very clear choice on who’s best on public safety and law and order.” Lara answered, “Well, I think it paints a very clear picture.” She might as well have said, “You go, boys!”

On CNN on Sunday, Sen. Ron Johnson, R-Wis., agreed with Trump that the shootings by a 17-year-old Trump fan last Tuesday night in Kenosha were understandable:[]

What the president did was he offered to surge manpower and resources so the violence could end. The governor did not accept that that day, that night tragically two people lost their lives because citizens took matters into their own hands. I’m not for vigilantism. I’m not sure that’s what was happening. People felt, because the governor — local officials were looking for help. The governor did not accept the help, and so there was not the resolve to end the rioting, and so people took matters into their own hands, and that’s what ended up happening. People die.

Johnson is confused about everything, as usual. Trump publicly berated Wisconsin Gov. Tony Evers for failing to call in the National Guard hours after Evers had already done so, telling his followers that Evers wasn’t protecting the city. Johnson basically said that people felt they needed to take matters into their own hands because the president had lied to them and told them the governor wasn’t protecting them. Yet somehow he’s against vigilantism. Everything about that is a grotesque inversion of anything one could call “law and order.”

Trump was at it again later on Sunday, tweeting in response to a press conference by Wheeler, the Portland mayor. Trump called him a “dummy” and ranted on, saying, “He would like to blame me and the federal government for going in, but he hasn’t seen anything yet. We have only been there with a small group to defend our U.S. courthouse, because he couldn’t do it.”

Conway’s little gaffe in which she admitted that the White House and the Trump campaign believe street violence is good for them illuminates the president’s fanning of the flames. He has finally grasped that he cannot unilaterally sending in a bunch of federal cops, as he did in Washington to stage his photo-op last June. Instead, he’s not-very-subtly signaling to his gun-toting fans that they are going to have to take action on their own if they hope to scare people into voting for him. Leave the propaganda to him, just ramp up the chaos.

He tweeted that MAGA “protesters” who came to Portland in a caravan on Saturday night were “Great Patriots!” and later explained why their behavior was understandable:

The Atlantic’s Ron Brownstein wondered on Twitter whether “suburban voters look at these pictures and say, ‘yes, where I belong is in the same political coalition as men who crowd into pickup trucks w/guns, as in Bosnia 1998 or a Third World dictatorship?'” (Those huge flags flying behind them reminded me of men crowded “into pickup trucks w/guns,” as in news photographs of ISIS fighters.)

It’s a jarringly familiar sight, but it doesn’t look like anything we’ve seen in America before.

There was an actual shooting that night and someone died. It’s unclear what exactly happened. But it is very clear that this kind of confrontation is something that Trump and his henchmen are actively stoking for political gain.

As I wrote on Friday, this is hardly the first time Trump has deployed crude, racist fear-mongering. He’s been doing it for years, going all the way back to the full-page Central Park Five ad. If it isn’t marauding gangs of Black teenagers, it’s Muslim terrorists or Mexican rapists or left-wing anarchists. There’s always some bogeyman coming to get you.

The only thing he knows how to do is point a finger at “the other” and then promise people that he’s the only one who can save them. He feels confident that he’s got the troops to back him up, one way or the other. He gave an interview with Breitbart back in 2019 in which he made this explicit:

You know, the left plays a tougher game, it’s very funny. I actually think that the people on the right are tougher, but they don’t play it tougher. Okay? I can tell you I have the support of the police, the support of the military, the support of the Bikers for Trump — I have the tough people, but they don’t play it tough — until they go to a certain point, and then it would be very bad, very bad.

Yes, it would be very bad. The question is whether or not anyone will believe that Donald Trump is the man who can save America from all this mayhem he is creating. After all, he’s been promising to do that ever since he came down that elevator. Here he is at the 2016 Republican convention:

I guess that’s yet another promise he’ll fulfill after he makes America Great Again — Again.

https://www.alternet.org/2020/08/putins-useful-idiot-this-gop-senator-is-promoting-a-russian-disinformation-campaign-to-help-get-trump-reelected

Senator Ron Johnson is basically using his position as chair of the Homeland Security Committee to do what Trump was impeached for asking Ukraine to do—smear Joe Biden based on his efforts to end corruption in that country during his tenure as Obama’s vice president.

Even Republican Senators Richard Burr and Marco Rubio are warning Johnson that his efforts could aid the disinformation campaign that Moscow is spearheading against Biden. As Ryan Goodman and Asha Rangappa document, Johnson seems to be getting his information from three sources.

There are three channels of Russian disinformation that have apparently affected Sen. Johnson’s Ukraine-related investigations.

Channel 1. Russian-linked Ukrainian operatives communicating directly with Sen. Johnson and his staff.

Channel 2. Russian-linked Ukrainian operatives spreading disinformation via media outlets, which have been picked up and expressly relied upon by Sen. Johnson.

Channel 3. Russian-linked Ukrainian operatives providing information via “Team [Rudy] Giuliani.”

That is bad enough. But then this week, Johnson actually said the quiet parts out loud.

“The more that we expose of the corruption of the transition process between Obama and Trump, the more we expose of the corruption within those agencies, I would think it would certainly help Donald Trump win reelection and certainly be pretty good, I would say, evidence about not voting for Vice President Biden,” Johnson said in a little-noticed Tuesday interview with Minneapolis-based radio hosts Jon Justice and Drew Lee.

In other words, the senator from Wisconsin is engaging in a Russian disinformation campaign, which he admits is designed to damage Biden and help Trump get reelected. Johnson is doing so four years after he joined Biden in demanding that Ukraine “press ahead with urgent reforms to the Prosecutor General’s office and judiciary.”

All of that raises questions about whether Johnson is acting as a “useful idiot” on Vladimir Putin’s behalf. But it is important to keep in mind that the senator isn’t the sharpest knife in the drawer. After all, this is the guy who turned a joke from Lisa Page into a claim that he had an “informant” who said that there was a “secret society” of FBI agents meeting off site. The inference was that they were plotting to destroy the Trump presidency. He is also the senator who issued a report, wrote an op-ed, and held a hearing to make the unconscionable claim that Medicaid is responsible for fueling the opioid epidemic.

For Johnson, there doesn’t seem to be an Alex Jones-type conspiracy theory that he won’t peddle. Most often, he jumps in and gets pilloried for failing to do an even basic review of facts. That’s why, whether he intends to or not, he is certainly playing the role of being Putin’s useful idiot.

nancy let wa mo

==

active measures russia

https://www.alternet.org/2020/08/democrats-raise-alarms-about-the-trump-administration-concealing-threats-to-the-2020-election/

no lnx

Democrats raise alarms about the Trump administration concealing threats to the 2020 election

Written by Kerry Eleveld / Daily Kos August 7, 2020

Congressional Democrats are sounding the alarm bells about 2016 redux playing out in this year’s election with extensive foreign interference while American voters are left in the dark.

Shortly before a closed-door intelligence briefing for senators on Tuesday, Sen. Richard Blumenthal of Connecticut called the classified documents he had reviewed as “chilling.”

“Declassify this information,” he urged in a tweet. “Americans deserve & need to know about ongoing foreign interference (even sabotage) in our election system.”

Now three of his Democratic colleagues have written to FBI Director Chris Wray, urging him to go public with the attacks being leveled at U.S. elections by foreign actors. The Democrats—Sen. Bob Menendez of New Jersey, the ranking member of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee; Senate Democratic Whip Dick Durbin of Illinois; and Sen. Jack Reed of Rhode Island, ranking member of the Senate Armed Services Committee—seem particularly concerned about foreign disinformation being targeted at Congress, laundered by certain members, and then disseminated to the public with the apparent imprimatur of a U.S. lawmaker. Specifically, Democrats believe they are seeing that play out with a probe GOP Sen. Ron Johnson of Wisconsin is currently leading into Joe Biden’s Ukraine diplomacy while he was vice president.

“Senator Schumer and Speaker Pelosi noted in their July 13th letter to you that ‘Congress appears to be the target of a concerted foreign interference campaign, which seeks to launder and amplify disinformation in order to influence congressional activity, public debate, and the presidential election in November,’” the senators wrote to Wray, in a letter obtained by Politico. “We attended classified briefings from the intelligence community and FBI over the past week and our concerns with respect to this targeting have only grown.”

Pelosi and Schumer attached an addendum to their mid-July letter singling out Johnson’s inquiry as a vehicle for the spread of Russian disinformation.

The briefings have detailed malign actions taken by both Russia and China. Politico reports that in one briefing, William Evanina, director of the National Counterintelligence and Security Center, admitted under pressure from Pelosi that Russia is specifically trying to help Trump get reelected while politically damaging Biden.

The briefings have also singled out Ukrainian individuals by name such as Andrii Telizhenko and Andrii Derkach who have made dubious claims about both the Democratic National Committee and Joe Biden. Both men also say they have turned over information to Sen. Johnson’s investigators.

The letter from Menendez, Durbin, and Reed pressed Wray to brief all senators on the information so they would be aware of foreign efforts to manipulate them. “Members must understand the risks inherent in accepting information generated by foreign sources, especially those committees currently conducting investigations,” they wrote.

Johnson remains obstinate about such warnings, saying Democrats’ objections only lead him to believe he’s on the right track. Johnson, who gave Trump cover on his initial effort to illegally fabricate a Ukrainian investigation, seems dead set on delivering Trump the corrupt Ukraine probe that was scuttled last year by a whistleblower complaint. Apparently, voting to acquit Trump of soliciting foreign help in his reelection wasn’t enough for Johnson. Now he’s recreating the bogus investigation that even Ukrainian officials refused to conduct.

It should be incumbent on the FBI to make crystal clear to the American people who’s trying to manipulate this election and how they are trying to do so. Nothing less than the integrity of U.S. elections and the future of the republic are at stake.

ref no lnx

https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2020/8/6/1967134/-Top-GOP-senator-presses-on-with-Ukraine-probe-sure-to-open-Pandora-s-box-of-Russian-disinformation

sen. Ron Johnson of Wisconsin is using his investigative powers as chair of a Senate panel to push forward with a thinly veiled attempt to stir up Russian disinformation about presumptive Democratic nominee Joe Biden.

Johnson, who chairs the Senate Committee on Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs, says he's investigating if the hiring of Biden's son Hunter by a Ukrainian gas company posed a conflict of interest for Biden while he was serving as vice president. Hunter Biden, a trained lawyer, served on the board of Burisma Holdings from 2014 to 2019 as the company sought to repair its image following allegations of corruption in its ranks.

No credible news organization has found any meat to the allegation that Biden's diplomacy in Ukraine was improperly influenced in any way. In fact, Biden's work in 2015 and 2016 to help oust the corrupt Ukrainian top prosecutor had the support of U.S allies across the international spectrum.

But however thoroughly discredited this right-wing conspiracy theory is, The Washington Post reports that Johnson is intent on rehashing it along with the help of GOP Sen. Chuck Grassley of Iowa, who chairs the Senate Finance Committee. And Democrats charge the probe is just a gateway into fanning the flames of a bunch of Russian disinformation about Biden and Ukraine. In other words, Johnson and Grassley are giving Trump the investigation he got impeached over—trying to force Ukraine into doing his dirty work. Ukraine officials ultimately declined to even announce such a probe, let alone conduct one.

But Johnson and Grassley? Sure, let's give legitimacy to an investigation Ukrainian officials already declared illegitimate. Apparently, there aren't more important things to do right now as Senate Republicans let a relief package flounder that's critical to keeping the country from sliding into an economic depression.

“Senator Johnson is diverting his committee from oversight of the failing response to the pandemic — even though over 4.5 million Americans have been infected — and is instead facilitating a foreign influence operation to undermine our democracy,” Biden campaign spokesman Andrew Bates said.

Johnson's no neophyte when it comes to doing Trump's bidding on Ukraine. During the House impeachment probe, Johnson admitted to The Wall Street Journal that he had been alerted early to Trump's quid pro quo pressure campaign in which he withheld $400 million in U.S. aide from Ukraine. But Johnson was content to raise the issue with Trump and take his denial of the allegation at face value—because Trump's nothing if not a man of his word. Just FYI, that’s the type of interview a senator gives to a friendly outlet when they want to frame a story before it’s publicly revealed by someone else. In fact, a House impeachment probe might be just the type of incentive that makes a senator want to come clean.

Ukraine is currently a hotbed of disinformation on the topic. "Johnson’s probe is proceeding as Ukrainians with a variety of competing agendas and links to Trump attorney Rudolph W. Giuliani have been releasing apparently pilfered official conversations that Biden conducted while vice president with Ukraine’s then-President Petro Poroshenko, aiming to tarnish the presumptive Democratic nominee and his longtime interlocutor in Kyiv," writes the Post. So there's lot of dubious fodder for Johnson to blow up.

When the Post asked Johnson if he was getting information from "pro-Russian Ukrainians," he offered only that he was receiving input from "a variety of sources," including the U.S. government. He also said that they would "verify" all information before publicizing it in a report he's promising to deliver in September.

In response to the probe, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer have asked the FBI to deliver a “defensive counterintelligence briefing” to all members of the House.

“Congress appears to be the target of a concerted foreign influence campaign, which seeks to launder and amplify disinformation in order to influence congressional activity, public debate, and the presidential election in November,” Pelosi and Schumer wrote in a July letter to the FBI.

Of all people, even Sens. Lindsey Graham of South Carolina and former GOP intelligence chair Richard Burr of North Carolina have raised concerns about Senate staffers potentially using Russian disinformation supplied via Ukraine as the basis for a bogus investigation.

Johnson declined an interview with the Post but issued a statement saying he refused to be deterred by "despicable tactics designed to discredit a legitimate investigation."

Nothing good will come of this. Not with Johnson behind it. He already discredited himself by admitting how easily he let Trump off the hook for soliciting foreign interference in the upcoming election. But now Johnson is actually doing Trump's dirty work for him. Can't imagine why a sitting U.S. senator would do that.

==

https://www.alternet.org/2020/07/democrats-warn-the-fbi-that-a-gop-senator-is-laundering-a-foreign-operation-to-attack-biden-report/

On  Monday, Politico reported that Democratic congressional leaders have sent a letter to FBI Director Christopher Wray demanding a briefing on foreign efforts to target members of Congress as part of an influence campaign.

“Among the Democrats’ concerns is that a Senate investigation being led by Sen. Ron Johnson (R-Wis.) has become a vehicle for ‘laundering’ a foreign influence campaign to damage Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden, according to two people familiar with the demand,” reported Natasha Bertrand. “Though the letter did not mention the Johnson investigation, it included a classified addendum that the two sources say identified the probe as one of the sources of their concern.”

The letter was signed by House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-CA), Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY), House Intelligence Committee Chairman Adam Schiff (D-CA), and Senate Intelligence Committee ranking member Mark Warner (D-VA).

Johnson, who chairs the Senate Homeland Security Committee, opened the investigation ostensibly to audit the origins of the Russia investigation in the previous administration. But even some Republicans have raised concerns that the overly political nature of the probe will backfire on them.

USEFUL IDIOT?

==

no lnx

Republicans are willing to accept millions dying because they have ’embraced’ Trump’s death cult: conservative columnist

Written by Tom Boggioni / Raw Story March 24, 2020

In a blistering column for the Daily Beast, conservative Matt Lewis ripped into the Republican Party for demonstrating it really does stand for putting profits before people if its response to the coronavirus pandemic is any indication.

According to the author of “Too Dumb to Fail: How the GOP Went from the Party of Reagan to the Party of Trump,” the GOP has joined the president’s “death cult.”

Starting with a blunt, “In the last 24 hours, it has become clear that, despite warnings from experts like Dr. Fauci, Donald Trump is willing to sacrifice lives to try and save the economy and his chances for re-election,” Lewis suggested Republicans are not only backing the president — they’re proudly and publically embracing it.

Pointing to Sen. Ron Johnson (R-WI) proclaiming, “We don’t shut down our economy because tens of thousands of people die on the highways. It’s a risk we accept so we can move about. We don’t shut down our economies because tens of thousands of people die from the common flu,” the columnist expressed his disgust by writing, “I’m pretty sure Johnson just said he was comfortable with millions of Americans dying of coronavirus—so long as it doesn’t disrupt economic activity.”

“This logic is spreading among Republicans,” he continued. “Consider the comments Texas Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick made Monday night on Fox News: ‘No one reached out to me and said as a senior citizen, are you willing to take a chance on your survival in exchange for keeping the America that all America loves for your children and grandchildren. And if that’s the exchange, I’m all in.’”

“I’m old enough to remember when conservatives worried that Obamacare rationing would lead to “death panels” whereby older patients would be deemed too sick and expensive to help,” he wrote. “After all, why throw good money after bad? A few short years later, and it is Republicans who are making a shockingly similar rationalization.”

Stating, “This is a weird turn of events for the party of life,” Lewis lamented, “We have skipped over that nuanced discussion and gone straight to Republicans rationalizing the idea that we can just wipe out a million or so people to fix the economy.”

“Ultimately, we have a political party that has shown its true colors. Look no further than its standard-bearer. Consider his selfish motivations and petty behavior. Consider his long-held worldview that sees some people as genetic winners and some people as losers,” he explained. ” This is a man who responded to a pandemic by thinking, ‘How can I be on TV more?’ It’s truly depraved.”

“If human life and GDP become mutually exclusive for a pandemic-stricken America, which one do you think he’s going to choose? I think we already know the answer to that one,” he concluded.

[more]

==

https://www.alternet.org/2020/03/a-pandemic-is-laying-bare-the-gops-blatant-corruption-and-recklessness/

no lnx

A pandemic is laying bare the GOP’s blatant corruption and recklessness

President Donald J. Trump applauds during the federal judicial confirmation milestone event Wednesday, Nov. 6, 2019, in the East Room of the White House. (Official White House Photo by Julianna Luz)

Written by Heather Digby Parton / Salon March 20, 2020

As we watch states around the country start to shut down, one by one, as if the lights were all going out across the country, there is plenty of discussion about President Trump’s bungled response and his compulsion to deliver happy talk and disinformation to the American people. Now that he is unable to hold his beloved rallies and has taken over the daily coronavirus briefing, the opportunities for the latter are unfortunately multiplying. His performances before the cameras every day are getting more and more surreal.

On Thursday, Trump came before the country touting a supposed wonder drug that he promised looked like a major breakthrough. (In fact, it’s a standard antimalarial medication.) As usual, the experts had to walk that back later, saying that it’s just one of many drugs being considered as a possible treatment but they won’t know for months. Reports coming from within the administration confirm that the bungling continues unabated. Between Jared’ Kushner’s “shadow task force” and turf wars among the various players, it seems nobody really knows who’s running the show. It certainly isn’t Trump, who is clearly spending most of his time watching Fox News and the stock market ticker.

There was a time when we might have expected Republicans in Congress to wake up from their stupor and exert some leadership in the face of a president’s overwhelming incompetence in such a crisis. Sure, maybe they felt it was no big deal that he engaged in a criminal cover-up from the moment he took his oath, or that he extorted a foreign leader to smear his political opponent.

Maybe it doesn’t mean anything to them that he’s pretty much dismantled the executive branch as a functional part of government and completely destroyed America’s reputation abroad. Assaulting the press, nepotism, rampant corruption and intentionally dividing the country into warring camps obviously aren’t things that keep them up at night.

But you would have thought GOP lawmakers might be just a little bit concerned about their own voters getting sick and dying in droves. Not to mention the collapse of the world economy.

Unfortunately, leading Republicans don’t seem all that worked up about it, or at least not in public. Recall that Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell adjourned the Senate for three days last week. He didn’t feel it was necessary to stay in session so they could put together an emergency economic package to help the millions of workers and owners who have lost their jobs and businesses overnight.

He had priorities and they didn’t include trying to mitigate the effects of what appears to be an impending economic meltdown:

Sherrod Brown

@SenSherrodBrown

This is why Mitch McConnell sent the Senate home for the weekend. To join Brett Kavanaugh at an oath ceremony for one of his judicial nominees.

Unbelievable.https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/mcconnell-absent-from-negotiations-on-coronavirus-economic-relief-package/2020/03/13/7f5f495e-6541-11ea-b3fc-7841686c5c57_story.html …

McConnell finally reconvened the Senate this week and Republicans came up with their own plan on Thursday evening — over which, unfortunately, the GOP caucus is still squabbling. Politico’s Jake Sherman reports that Sen. Lindsey Graham, R-S.C.. and new White House chief of staff Mark Meadows are lobbying Trump to reject the idea of immediate cash payments. Apparently they don’t think it’s important to get money into the hands of the millions of people whose incomes have abruptly dried up, and prefer an increase in unemployment benefits. (Why this should be either/or is beyond me. Clearly, we need both.)

They aren’t the only Republican senators who don’t like the bill McConnell came up with, with some favoring loans to small businesses and others arguing against bailouts. As they continue to bicker amongst themselves. many are displaying their ignorance, shallowness and irresponsibility during this emergency.

Here’s Alaska’s long-serving solo congressman, Rep. Don Young, sounding like one of those drunken kids on spring break in Fort Lauderdale, characterizing the response to the epidemic as “hysteria” and exhorting a group of senior citizens not to follow the instructions of public health experts:

This beer virus I call it — they call it a coronavirus, I call it a beer virus — how do you like that? It attacks our senior citizens. Now, I’m one of you. I still say we have to as a nation, as a state, to go forth with our everyday activities.

Sen. Ron Johnson of Wisconsin expressed his skepticism as well:

I’m not denying what a nasty disease COVID-19 can be, and how it’s obviously devastating to somewhere between 1 and 3.4 percent of the population. But that means 97 to 99 percent will get through this and develop immunities and will be able to move beyond this. But we don’t shut down our economy because tens of thousands of people die on the highways. It’s a risk we accept so we can move about. We don’t shut down our economies because tens of thousands of people die from the common flu.

Johnson is a multimillionaire businessman, but he seems to be a bit confused about numbers. Traffic accidents account for about 34,000 deaths per year in the U.S. If the coronavirus kills 1 to 3.4 percent of the population, that would add up to somewhere between 3 and 11 million people. I suspect that could be pretty bad for business, but what do I know?

Sen. Rand Paul, R-Ky., wasted everyone’s time with an irrelevant amendment and gave a speech in which he referred to immigrants as “non-people.” Sen. Chuck Grassley, R-Iowa, said he couldn’t understand why Chinese people would be upset that Trump is calling this disease the “Chinese virus” because “Spain never got upset when we referred to the Spanish flu in 1918 and 1919.” (They did get upset. That pandemic originated in Kansas, but Spain was the only country not under wartime censorship so that’s where it was first reported. That’s not a good precedent.)

The Republicans have lost the ability to legislate, even in an emergency. All they know how to do is confirm unqualified judges and protect Donald Trump from accountability.

Well, actually — they also know how to look out for No. 1. NPR reported on Thursday that Sen. Richard Burr, R-N.C., had given a private briefing to some influential big donors on Feb. 27. As chairman of the Intelligence Committee as well as co-author of the Pandemic and All-Hazards Preparedness Act, Burr was in a good position to know what was coming down. He warned this select audience that the coronavirus was akin to the 1918 flu pandemic and that we might have to close schools, curtail travel and call out the military.

Here’s what the president was telling the American people at that time:

Aaron Rupar

@atrupar

“We’re going to be pretty soon at only 5 people, and we could be at just 1 or 2 people over the next short period of time” — Trump on US coronavirus cases on February 26 (there are now more than 10,000 cases in the country)

Embedded video

JM Rieger

@RiegerReport

Trump earlier today on coronavirus:

“It’s going to disappear one day, it’s like a miracle, it will disappear. And from our shores, you know, it could get worse before it gets better, could maybe go away, we’ll see what happens. Nobody really knows.”

Embedded video

ProPublica reported later on Thursday that Burr had sold millions of dollars worth of stock days before he gave his big-donor buddies this helpful heads-up. As it happens, Sen. Kelly Loeffler, R-Ga., whose husband just happens to be the chairman and CEO of the New York Stock Exchange, also dumped millions of dollars worth of stock immediately after a full Senate briefing on the virus by the subcommittee on health.

How likely is it that they are the only ones?

Everyone thinks the Republican establishment is afraid of Donald Trump. This entire episode suggests that’s not true. It isn’t that they’re afraid of him. They’re just like him.

==

https://www.rollcall.com/news/politics/republican-senator-returns-moscow-says-election-meddling-overblown

One of the Republican senators back from a trip to Moscow is suggesting that Congress went too far in punishing Russia for meddling in the 2016 U.S. presidential election.

“I’ve been pretty upfront that the election interference — as serious as that was, and unacceptable — is not the greatest threat to our democracy,” Sen. Ron Johnson said in an interview with the Washington Examiner published over the weekend. “We’ve blown it way out of proportion.”

“We need to really honestly assess what actually happened, what effect did it have, and what effect are our sanctions actually having, positively and negatively,” the Republican from Wisconsin said.

Johnson won re-election in 2016, with President Donald Trump on the top of the ticket. He has said that the Senate may have gone too far with mandatory sanctions against a host of Russian entities, leaving Trump with too little negotiating room on other matters. He also said the sanctions did not appear to be working as intended.

Trump is scheduled to meet with Russian President Vladimir Putin next week in Helsinki.

Other Republican senators on the trip returned to the United States with a much more strident tone, including Louisiana’s John Kennedy.

Kennedy said in a CNN interview Monday that the message for Russia was, “stop screwing with American elections.”

Sen. Jerry Moran of Kansas, another member of the all-GOP delegation, said their Russian counterparts pushed back whenever there were accusations made about the 2016 interference.

“The point of the visit was to indicate a willingness to begin dialogue. I think the interest in many of us, particularly as a Republican delegation — my view is that for Russians to hear that Republicans from the United States Senate believe that meddling occurred, that it needs to stop,” Moran told NPR. “And that’s a component criteria before any kind of relationship change can really occur that needs to come to an end."

according to Johnson, when the Russian delegation was pushed on issues like the public release of private emails of 2016 presidential nominee Hillary Clinton, they would respond with charges about U.S.-backed media entities like Voice of America.

Johnson’s remarks to the Examiner were highlighted by Russian state media.

The Russian news agency TASS reported on Johnson’s comments, as did Sputnik International.

Senate Appropriations Chairman Richard C. Shelby of Alabama led the trip, which took place during the Independence Day recess period. The Shelby group met with a number of senior Russian officials, including Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov.

“The United States does not want, nor does it need, to resume a Cold War posture with Russia, and our delegation trip was a small step towards trying to ensure that does not happen. We will always be competitors, but we do not have to be adversaries,” Shelby said in a statement. “Russia can achieve a better relationship with the U.S., but it has to be earned, one step at a time.”

On Monday, Kennedy called Lavrov, “a bully.”

“He impressed me as the sort of guy who started out in the world as a smartass and worked his way up,” said Kennedy.

While the delegation of U.S. lawmakers was overseas, the Senate Intelligence Committee issued an update on its findings so far in the ongoing investigation of Russian interference. The committee, on a bipartisan basis, backed up the findings of the intelligence community that Russia was meddling and did favor Trump over Clinton.

Johnson elaborated on his position in a Monday interview with WOSH-AM radio, in which he said there were more serious threats.

“We’ve had briefings on this — it’s very difficult to really meddle in our elections. It just is. These are locally run, it’s almost impossible to change the vote tally. My concern would be violating the voter files, but we have those issues anyway and there are plenty of controls on that,” he said. “You know from a standpoint of using social media we spent a couple of billion dollars on the last election, they maybe spent a couple hundred thousand.”

==

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/08/27/us/politics/russia-senators-ron-johnson-chris-murphy.html

aug 2019

new

Russian government officials have barred two American senators critical of the Kremlin from visiting the country as part of a bipartisan congressional trip, according to the two lawmakers.

Senators Ron Johnson, Republican of Wisconsin, and Christopher S. Murphy, Democrat of Connecticut, both members of the Foreign Relations Committee, planned to visit Russia next week with Senator Mike Lee, Republican of Utah, to meet with government officials and American businesses in the country. But both Mr. Johnson and Mr. Murphy said they were denied visas.

“I had hoped direct dialogue with Russian parliamentarians could help set the stage for better future relations between our two nations,” Mr. Johnson said in a statement. “Unfortunately, Russian officials continue to play diplomatic games with this sincere effort. Regardless of this petty affront, I will continue to advocate a strong and resolute response to Russian aggression — and frank dialogue when possible.”

Mr. Murphy accused Russian officials of “further isolating their country by blocking the trip.”

“With the collapse of recent arms control agreements and significant domestic opposition to Vladimir Putin’s authoritarian rule, this is potentially a perilous moment for our two nations’ fragile relationship, and it’s a shame that Russia isn’t interested in dialogue,” he said.

Both lawmakers have been outspoken in their criticism of Russia’s annexation of Crimea and have called for sanctions on Moscow over the construction of an offshore pipeline to counter Russia’s efforts to consolidate its position in the natural gas market in Eastern Europe. Mr. Murphy also has supported a series of measures in the Senate that would impose stiff sanctions on Moscow over its interference in the 2016 presidential election.

The Russian Embassy said in a statement on Monday that Mr. Johnson “did not inform about his plans to visit,” and accused him of comporting himself “in his usual Russophobic manner.”

“Senator Ron Johnson’s groundless accusations against Russia leave no doubts — he is not ready for a dialogue, but a confrontation,” the statement said. The Russian Foreign Ministry told Sputnik, a Russian government-owned news agency on Tuesday, however, that Mr. Johnson is on a government blacklist.

The move is the latest escalation in a retributive back-and-forth between the two countries, even as President Trump is pushing to readmit Russia into the Group of 7 industrialized nations. The Obama administration barred dozens of Russians, including close friends of President Vladimir V. Putin’s, in response to Russia’s annexation of Crimea and its activities to destabilize Ukraine. Russian officials expanded their own blacklist last year, after the Trump administration imposed sanctions on 19 Russian individuals and five entities in relation to Russia’s interference in the presidential election.

Senator Jeanne Shaheen, Democrat of New Hampshire and a member of the Foreign Relations Committee, was also blocked from entering the country in 2017. In response, Mr. Johnson and Senator John Barrasso, Republican of Wyoming, who were also scheduled to visit Russia with Ms. Shaheen, canceled the trip.

In an effort to sustain pressure on Moscow, a group of Senate Democrats on Tuesday, led by Chuck Schumer of New York, the minority leader, urged Mr. Trump in a separate letter not to readmit Russia to the Group of 7 until the government “undertakes demonstrable actions to show its willingness to be a responsible actor on the world stage.”

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primary 419 many tags Butina russia trip, horo...

1119 bak

johnson went on codel, not the nra trip

Sen. Ron Johnson WI took out feingold in tea party wave?

==

https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2019/10/08/gop-theory-that-ukraine-set-up-trump/

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Fact Checker

Analysis

The GOP theory that Ukraine ‘set up’ Trump

Glenn Kessler

October 8, 2019

“That’s the piece of the puzzle I’m here to report today, that unlike the narrative of the press, that President Trump wants to dig up dirt on his 2020 opponent, what he wants is he wants an accounting of what happened in 2016. Who set him up? Did things spring from Ukraine? There’s a good piece we got an Oversight [Committee] letter on from Politico in 2017. Let me quote the article. It says: ‘Ukrainian government officials tried to help Hillary Clinton and undermine Trump.’ They did so by disseminating documents ‘implicating a top Trump aide in corruption,’ suggesting they were investigating the matter. Ukrainian officials also reportedly ‘helped Clinton allies research damaging information on Trump and his advisers.’ There is potential interference in the 2016 election. That’s what Trump wants to get to the bottom of, but the press doesn’t want to.”

— Sen. Ron Johnson (R-Wis.), during an interview on NBC’s “Meet the Press,” Oct. 6, 2019

Never mind that the rough transcript released by the White House of the July 25 call between Trump and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky shows that Trump said, “There’s a lot of talk about Biden’s son, that Biden stopped the prosecution and lot of people want to find out about that so whatever you can do with the Attorney General would be great.”

Johnson says that what Trump really wanted to find out from Ukrainian officials is what happened in 2016. “Who set him up?” he asked. “Did things spring from Ukraine?”

In the course of the July 25 conversation, Trump did say: “I would like you to do us a favor though because our country has been through a lot and Ukraine knows a lot about it. I would like you to find out what happened with this whole situation with Ukraine, they say Crowdstrike… I guess you have one of your wealthy people… The server, they say Ukraine has it.” (The ellipses are in the transcript, and it’s unclear if something has been edited out.)

Johnson, in his television interview, did not mention CrowdStrike but quoted from a Politico article from 2017. So what’s going on? Here is an explanation of three theories promoted by Republicans to suggest that Trump was “set up” by Ukraine.

The Facts

First of all, the evidence so far indicates there is nothing that took place in Ukraine that even begins to compare to the Russian intervention in the 2016 election. Special counsel Robert S. Mueller III documented in great detail a top-down effort, initiated by Russian President Vladimir Putin, to illegally hack and release information in a deliberate attempt to meddle in the presidential election on behalf of Trump.

What we have in Ukraine, so far, is just flotsam and jetsam that does not add up to state-level efforts to change the course of history.

DNC staff member

The Politico article cited by Johnson says a Ukrainian American Democratic operative, Alexandra Chalupa, began looking into Trump campaign official Paul Manafort’s ties to Ukrainian politician Viktor Yanukovych, who served as president from 2010 until his ouster in 2014. Chalupa was hired as a consultant to the Democratic National Committee during the 2016 campaign to help mobilize ethnic communities. She left the DNC in July 2016, the DNC said.

She continued her research into Manafort on her own, sometimes with the help of Ukrainian Embassy officials, and she said she sometimes shared her findings with officials at the DNC and Clinton’s campaign. But former Clinton campaign officials said they never received information from Chalupa.

The exact role of embassy officials is unclear. Chalupa told Politico that officials at the Ukrainian Embassy were helpful in providing “guidance” in response to her questions and that the embassy also worked with reporters researching Trump, Manafort and Russia. A top embassy official denied working with reporters or with Chalupa on issues related to Trump or Manafort, but a former embassy officer said he was instructed to help Chalupa with her research.

DNC officials denied that they coordinated with Chalupa on opposition research. She was not a researcher for the DNC, and the DNC did not incorporate her findings about Manafort, Politico reported. DNC officials told Politico that the Democratic Party had been looking into Trump and his ties to Russia long before Chalupa alerted them.

Chalupa disputed the framing of the Politico story in a Facebook post. “During the 2016 US election, I was a part time consultant for the DNC running an ethnic engagement program,” she said in a lengthy statement to CNN. “I was not an opposition researcher for the DNC, and the DNC never asked me to go to the Ukrainian Embassy to collect information.”

Chalupa may have worked with some embassy officials, but there’s no evidence that the DNC used information gathered by Chalupa or that the Ukrainians coordinated opposition research with the DNC.

The Politico article was published nearly two years ago, and it’s revealing that Johnson still is quoting from it. Sen. Charles E. Grassley (R-Iowa) wrote a letter to the Justice Department in 2017, and more recently Grassley and Johnson wrote a follow-up letter asking again for an investigation. A Johnson spokesman directed The Fact Checker to a cryptic statement by the Justice Department that a team is evaluating “the extent to which a number of countries, including Ukraine, played a role in the counterintelligence investigation directed at the Trump campaign during the 2016 election.”

Manafort ‘black ledger’

Manafort, briefly, was Trump’s campaign chairman in 2016. In August 2016, a Ukrainian government agency released ledgers that reportedly showed $12.7 million in cash payments from Yanukovych’s party that were earmarked for Manafort. Reports about these payments prompted Manafort to step down from his position in the Trump campaign, though the Mueller report says he continued to provide advice to campaign officials.

Serhiy Leshchenko, a Ukrainian lawmaker and former investigative journalist, and Artem Sytnyk, a director of the National Anti-Corruption Bureau, publicized these ledgers, which, according to Leshchenko, were found by an anonymous source in the burned-out ruins of the headquarters of Yanukovych’s party.

In December, a Kiev court said the decision to publish the documents amounted to interference in the U.S. presidential election — a conclusion that Leshchenko said was politically motivated and aimed at undermining Sytnyk. In July, the ruling was overturned by an appeals court. “The court concluded that all the charges against me were unfounded, and even obliged my opponents to reimburse me for $100 in legal costs,” Leshchenko wrote in The Washington Post.

“Corruption is harmful whether it takes place in America or Ukraine. My desire to expose Manafort’s doings was motivated by the desire for justice,” Leshchenko wrote. “Neither Hillary Clinton, nor Joe Biden, nor John Podesta, nor George Soros asked me to publish the information from the black ledger. I wanted to obtain accountability for the lobbyist whose client immersed Ukraine in a blood bath during the Revolution of Dignity and the subsequent war in eastern Ukraine, when Yanukovych called on Russia to send troops.” He added: “I have no doubt that Yanukovych paid Manafort for his services out of the funds he robbed from Ukrainian taxpayers.”

Glenn Beck on Oct. 3 promoted an audiotape, purportedly of Sytnyk bragging that he “helped Hillary’s campaign,” that was made public in March by Borislav Rosenblatt, a Ukrainian legislator behind the now-overturned lawsuit claiming election interference. But Rosenblatt had been investigated by Sytnyk’s anti-corruption bureau, suggesting he is not a credible source.

While some Republicans have suggested that the ledger was fake, Manafort’s defense lawyers did not make that argument as they unsuccessfully defended him on charges that included failing to report on his income taxes millions of dollars he had earned working for Yanukovych.

CrowdStrike

This is the strangest claim — that somehow a private company co-founded by a Ukrainian American had a role in starting the “Russian hoax.” It is based on virtually no evidence, yet it emerged from the president’s mouth during a phone conversation with his Ukrainian counterpart. “The server, they say Ukraine has it,” Trump told Zelensky.

Trump has been obsessed with the idea that the FBI never took physical possession of the servers at the DNC that were hacked. (Our database of Trump’s false and misleading claims shows he has brought this up more than 20 times.)

But the FBI felt it was not necessary to enter the DNC’s premises and take custody of the affected servers, as agents were able to obtain complete copies of forensic images made by CrowdStrike, which first identified that the DNC had been hacked by Russian operatives. Former FBI director James B. Comey testified that his staff told him this arrangement was an “appropriate substitute.”

CrowdStrike co-founder Dmitri Alperovitch is a Russia-born cyber and national security expert and a U.S. citizen; he is not Ukrainian. In any case, Mueller’s investigation confirmed CrowdStrike’s findings and even indicted 12 Russian intelligence officers in 2018 for their role in the breach.

Thomas P. Bossert, who served as Trump’s first homeland security adviser, said Sept. 29 that the president has been repeatedly told that the story has been “completely debunked,” yet Trump continues to embrace it. “The DNC server and that conspiracy theory has got to go,” Bossert said on ABC’s “This Week.” “If he continues to focus on that white whale, it’s going to bring him down.”

The Bottom Line

The CrowdStrike allegation is crazy stuff, dismissed by even Trump’s own aides. So let’s ignore that.

The story of Chalupa’s work at the DNC has not advanced since 2017, and it’s pretty thin beer, especially when compared with state-ordered hacking by Russia. She may or may not have worked with embassy officials, and the DNC did not use her research. The impact, if any, seems minimal.

The release of the “black ledger” — via a Ukrainian state agency and legislator — did result in Manafort’s removal from the campaign and prompted questions about Trump and Russia. (Trump might have avoided some of these questions if he had done some due diligence and not hired Manafort in the first place, given Manafort’s deep ties to Russian figures.) But the legal ruling in Ukraine that this was election inference has been overturned. And again, people appear to have acted out of individual motivations, not at the behest of the head of state.

We’ll see what, if anything, the Justice Department investigation uncovers. But there’s little to suggest this is a fruitful avenue for inquiry.

==

https://www.alternet.org/2019/10/gop-sens-ron-johnson-and-marsha-blackburn-are-tied-to-russian-money-and-trump-conspiracy-theories-theyre-not-alone/

no lnx

GOP Sens. Ron Johnson and Marsha Blackburn are tied to Russian money and Trump conspiracy theories. They’re not alone

Written by Sophia Tesfaye / Salon October 30, 2019

Nancy Pelosi has announced that the House will finally hold a formal vote dictating the rules for the impeachment inquiry, six weeks after it was launched by a whistleblower’s complaint mysteriously withheld from Congress. And on Tuesday, Lt. Col. Alexander Vindman backed up both the initial whistleblower and U.S. diplomat Bill Taylor by testifying that he too was concerned about the Trump administration’s push to use congressionally-allocated military aid to Ukraine to coerce an investigation into Joe Biden.

Congressional Republicans have long since stopped defending Trump on the merits since shortly after the White House released a transcript of a July call between President Trump and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky. Instead, they’ve sought refuge in increasingly meaningless process arguments. So of course Pelosi agreeing to a formal vote on the rules of impeachment hasn’t stopped Republican complaints about the process. The goalposts will shift once again. No matter what the Democrats agree to, Republicans will complain about procedural unfairness and also refuse to concede the inquiry is legitimate. But how much of Republicans’ unwillingness to hold Trump accountable for his self-dealing is because they’re in on it?

On Monday the Washington Post published an interview with a Ukrainian diplomat who claimed to have met with Sen. Ron Johnson, R-Wis., this summer to discuss the baseless conspiracy theory promoted by President Trump that Ukrainian officials had interfered in the 2016 election on behalf of Hillary Clinton.

Johnson reportedly met with Ukrainian diplomat Andrii Telizhenko for at least 30 minutes on Capitol Hill in July, and Telizhenko then met with Johnson’s Senate staff for five additional hours. According to the report, “the discussions focused in part on ‘the DNC issue’ — a reference to his unsubstantiated claim that the Democratic National Committee worked with the Ukrainian government in 2016 to gather incriminating information about then-Trump campaign chairman Paul Manafort. Telizhenko said he could not recall the date of the meeting, but a review of his Facebook page revealed a photo of him and Johnson posted on July 11.”

Johnson is a vocal Trump defender who has hounded the inspector general of the intelligence community about investigating media leaks regarding the Ukraine call. He has previously admitted that he was told by Gordon Sondland, the U.S. ambassador to the European Union, that Ukraine needed to “get to the bottom of what happened in 2016” in order to receive military aid.

As Johnson told the Wall Street Journal earlier this month, after Sondland told him that, he was assured “if President Trump has that confidence” that the Ukrainians would do his bidding, “then he’ll release the military spending.” Now, as the Post points out, Johnson’s “knowledge of key events” in the case may “complicate his role as a juror in a trial by the Senate.”

Recall that when Johnson was asked about his defense of Trump’s actions, he snapped at the simple question from NBC News’ Chuck Todd and spun out the same deep state conspiracy theory pushed by the likes of Fox News’ Sean Hannity.

Beyond his apparent involvement in Trump’s Ukraine dealings, Johnson is alleged to have benefited from campaign money illegally funneled from Russia via shell corporations owned by the National Rifle Association, which helped him win his tight 2016 race in Wisconsin.

Political action committees for Republican Sens. Mitch McConnell, Marco Rubio and Lindsey Graham reportedly accepted $7.35 million in contributions from a Ukrainian-born oligarch with close ties to Russian President Vladimir Putin during the 2016 election. McConnell and Graham are co-sponsors of a new resolution condemning the House impeachment inquiry. At least 50 Senate Republicans, several of whom have refused to publicly comment on the growing Ukraine scandal — citing a need to remain impartial for a likely Senate impeachment trial — have already signed onto that bill. The resolution is currently paused in the Senate Rules Committee until the House votes on impeachment rules later this week.

As House Democrats’ investigation has rapidly unveiled ever more damaging material regarding Trump’s Ukraine scandal, public support for impeachment has shot up. Reportedly nervous about his wall of defense in the Senate crumbling, the president recently hosted several GOP senators at the White House, including top Johnson, Graham, John Thune of South Dakota and John Kennedy of Louisiana, last week. A day earlier, Thune and Kennedy, had blocked a Democratic bill to provide funding for states to shore up election security. The next day, Sen. Marsha Blackburn, R-Tenn., quietly blocked three election-security bills for the second time this year.

“You know, it’s not a good sign if you’re doing the same thing over and over and expecting a different result,” Blackburn said on the Senate floor late last week. She is among the Republican senators with close ties to a U.S.-sanctioned Russian politician who is accused of illegally channeling Russian funds through the NRA. Under Senate rules, any individual senator can block a vote on a bill.

When Senate Republicans are not prematurely dismissing an impeachment inquiry on which they will probably have to render judgment, they continue to protect Trump’s refusal to clamp down on potential election interference. If Republican charges of a “kangaroo court” are anything, they are a classic case of projection: How can Senate Republicans possibly serve as impartial jurors in a trial of the president, when they are implicated in the same pattern of political malfeasance?

Sophia Tesfaye is Salon’s Deputy Politics Editor and resides in Washington, D.C. You can find her on Twitter at @SophiaTesfaye.

==

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Republican humiliates himself at Senate hearing as his attempt to nail Instagram for liberal bias falls flat

Republican humiliates himself at Senate hearing as his attempt to nail Instagram for liberal bias falls flat Image via Wikimedia Commons.

written by Brad Reed / Raw Story June 25, 2019

30

Sen. Ron Johnson (R-WI) on Tuesday fell flat on his face when he tried to get technology experts to admit that major social media platforms were biased against conservatives.

While talking with assorted experts on artificial intelligence and algorithms, Johnson said that he had his staff members go to Politico’s Instagram account and record what other recommendations the app gave to them after following it.

According to Johnson, the vast majority of recommendations that came back were for news websites like the Washington Post or progressive outlets like Huffington Post, and none were for right-wing websites such as Breitbart.

Dr. Stephen Wolfram, the founder and chief executive officer of Wolfram Research, scoffed at Johnson’s claim of bias and said it was more likely that Instagram delivered liberal recommendations to Politico followers because those followers were more likely to follow neutral or progressive political news websites in the first place.

“The thing that will happen is, if there’s no other information, it will tend to be just where the most content that people on the platform in general have clicked,” he said. “It may be a statement, in that case — I’m really speculating — that the users of that platform tend to like those things.”

Johnson also complained that many conservative news groups were having their articles removed from social media feeds — but Ms. Rashida Richardson, the director of policy research at the AI Now Institute, said that research shows most of those removals came because those articles contained demonstrably false information.

“That’s more of a content moderation issue,” she said.

“OK, anyway,” Johnson replied.

Watch the video below.

NEW

https://www.alternet.org/2019/04/the-bizarre-link-between-wisconsin-and-russia/

no lnx

Daily Kos Staff / Daily Kos April 22, 2019

The Mueller Report had plenty of information as to how Russians worked to subvert our elections and gained influence in our current US government. But what jumps out to me is how much of that story and related Russian affairs connected back to Wisconsin.

Our state appears in the Mueller Report as one of a handful in the Midwest that former Trump campaign chair Paul Manafort passed information about to a Russian intelligence agent. The report indicates that this was done to tell the Russians the best way to boost Trump’s chances in those states.

View image on Twitter

Bob Cesca

?

@bobcesca_go

Jesus! Mueller: "Michigan, Wisconsin, Pennsylvania and Minnesota" were discussed between Manafort and GRU operative Kilimnik.

7,595

9:01 AM - Apr 18, 2019

And you may recall that Trump did surprisingly well in all of those states in November 2016. Funny, that.

One of the biggest assists Trump got was in the form of a record investment by the National Rifle Association. Keep that NRA support in mind when you hear about this story from Friday night.

Maria Butina, who has admitted to working as a Russian agent to infiltrate an influential U.S. gun rights group and make inroads with conservative activists and Republicans, asked the court to sentence her to time served ahead of her April 26 sentencing, according to court documents.

Butina, 30, a former graduate student at American University who publicly advocated for gun rights, pleaded guilty in December to one count of conspiring to act as a foreign agent for Russia. She has remained in custody since her arrest in July 2018.

Prosecutors filed a memo on Friday ahead of this week’s sentencing. And check out this segment of that report, which might be familiar to you:

Soon after [Butina] drafted the Diplomacy Project proposal, in April 2015, she traveled to the United States to attend the Gun Rights Organization (aka the NRA) annual meetings with the Russian Official, where she highlighted her experience as a gun-rights advocate in Russia and was introduced to influential members of Political Party 1, one of whom announced his Presidential campaign shortly thereafter.  Statement of Offense at 3.  She did so in furtherance of the conspiracy’s goal to establish the back channel of communication as laid out in the Diplomacy Project.  Id. at 3.  Butina attended this announcement event in July 2015 and, after being tasked by the Russian Official to do so, wrote a report to him in which she emphasized the fact that she was introduced to one of that candidate’s three advisors for matters concerning international politics.   A copy of the Twitter chats, along with the report, is attached hereto as Exhibit 4.   According to her notes from a meeting with then-Russian Ambassador Sergei Kislyak in May 2015, she said she would “send the name of the advisor [to the candidate whose announcement event she later attended] who can come to Moscow.”

Looks like those Twitter chats will be released when the Butina file is redacted, likely after the sentencing happens on Friday.

But who was this candidate that Butina and Putin-appointed central banker Alexander Torshin met up with, and whose presidential announcement event did she go to in July 2015?

After Walker washed out of the 2016 election race, the sentencing memo describes how Butina organized a meeting with the NRA back home in Mother Russia.

In December 2015, Butina invited powerful members of the Gun Rights Organization to Moscow as part of the conspiracy’s plan to establish the unofficial channel of communication. Statement of Offense at 3. She actively sought out meetings for this group with high-level Russian government officials, as arranged by the Russian Official.  Id.  As part of this endeavor, the defendant sought information from U.S. Person 1 about the degree of political influence held by the Gun Rights Organization members in the United States and stressed the need for a “political program” as part of the Gun Rights Organization trip to Moscow.  Id. at 3-4.

Following the Gun Rights Organization trip to Moscow, the defendant and the Russian Official discussed the need to “hold the spot” now that “everyone has realized that [the Gun Rights Organization] is a valuable contact,” and she noted that there will be “attempts to seize the  initiative.”  Exhibit 2. Butina has since confirmed that she was worried about others within the Russian government or a political group or activist noticing that the contacts she had built with the Gun Rights Organization were valuable and cutting her and the Russian Official out of the loop. Just days later, Butina noted to the Russian Official that they would “quietly press” or “put pressure on [members of the Gun Rights Organization] later.”

Guess who was in Russia in December 2015?

View image on Twitter

David A. Clarke, Jr.

@SheriffClarke

Red Square near the Kremlin with a Russian officer. Met earlier with Russian Foreign Minister who spoke on Mid East.

1,078

11:42 AM - Dec 10, 2015

Also don’t forget that a couple of Wisconsin politicians knew about these Russian efforts before the 2016 election, but hid it from unsuspecting Wisconsin voters.In late Summer 2016, President Obama organized a “Gang of 12” to let them know about potential Russian hacking and interference, and 2 of the members of that meeting were then-House Speaker Paul Ryan, and Senate Homeland Security Chair Ron Johnson. That meeting that was kept from public knowledge before the elections after complaints from Senate GOP Leader Mitch McConnell.

I’ve referenced this Bruce Murphy article in Urban Milwaukee from January 2017 in the past, and that’s because it continues to link back to developments in the Trump-GOP-Russia connection. It also points to Johnson being complicit in keeping Wisconsinites from knowing about the Russian garbage that was being sent to their computers, and flat-out lying later on about what intelligence agencies told him.

Russia’s interference with the American elections fit the pattern of a country engaged in disinformation and destabilization efforts across the globe, as Johnson has described it. And Russia’s leader was someone Johnson already suspected of nefarious acts. Johnson had previously sponsored resolutions calling for a full investigation into the murder of a Russian political opposition leader and for an investigation of Russia’s attacks on the Ukraine.

Johnson, in short, had an opportunity to be a patriot and condemn the fact that Russia was now engaged in such activities in the United States. But he issued no resolutions — in fact, not one word — on Russian’s cyber attacks on America.

Worse, he has engaged in his own pattern of misinformation on the subject. After the CIA publicly released a report in January concluding that Russia meddled in the presidential election to help Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump win the election, Johnson issued a statement to the Wisconsin State Journal saying he would “would need more definitive information before drawing further conclusions.” Johnson did not reveal that he had been informed back in September this was happening.

Johnson went on to complain to CNBC that the CIA refused to brief him on Russian hacking, saying “I have not seen the evidence that it actually was Russia,” while failing to note the CIA report’s echoed the briefing he’d received from other intelligence leaders in September.

In addition, Ron Johnson was 1 of several GOP Senators who decided last year’s US Independence Day was a great time…to visit the Russians.

Sounds like investigative media might want to ask some questions of these Sconnie Republicans, why many seem to have no problem hanging out with high-level Russian officials, and ask what’s being done to prevent Wisconsinites from being targeted and propagandized against in 2020. The (non)-answers they give might be quiteilluminating.

I’d also like to see Walker, Clarke, Paul Ryan, ex-Trump Chief of Staff Reince Priebus (named several times in the Mueller Report) and Ron Johnson go before Congress and answer some pointed questions in the coming months. They have a lot to answer for in how they’ve allowed our democracy to be threatened over the last few years, and why they don’t seem too willing to do much about it.

LNX below

https://www.alternet.org/2019/04/the-bizarre-link-between-wisconsin-and-russia/

no twt pix clarke w/ rooskie soldier

Mueller Report had plenty of information as to how Russians worked to subvert our elections and gained influence in our current US government. But what jumps out to me is how much of that story and related Russian affairs connected back to Wisconsin.

Our state appears in the Mueller Report as one of a handful in the Midwest that former Trump campaign chair Paul Manafort passed information about to a Russian intelligence agent. The report indicates that this was done to tell the Russians the best way to boost Trump’s chances in those states.

[twt manafort briek kilimnick?]

nd you may recall that Trump did surprisingly well in all of those states in November 2016. Funny, that.

One of the biggest assists Trump got was in the form of a record investment by the National Rifle Association. Keep that NRA support in mind when you hear about this story from Friday night.

"Maria Butina, who has admitted to working as a Russian agent to infiltrate an influential U.S. gun rights group and make inroads with conservative activists and Republicans, asked the court to sentence her to time served ahead of her April 26 sentencing, according to court documents.

Butina, 30, a former graduate student at American University who publicly advocated for gun rights, pleaded guilty in December to one count of conspiring to act as a foreign agent for Russia. She has remained in custody since her arrest in July 2018.

Prosecutors filed a memo on Friday ahead of this week’s sentencing. And check out this segment of that report, which might be familiar to you.

Soon after [Butina] drafted the Diplomacy Project proposal, in April 2015, she traveled to the United States to attend the Gun Rights Organization (aka the NRA) annual meetings with the Russian Official, where she highlighted her experience as a gun-rights advocate in Russia and was introduced to influential members of Political Party 1, one of whom announced his Presidential campaign shortly thereafter.  Statement of Offense at 3.  She did so in furtherance of the conspiracy’s goal to establish the back channel of communication as laid out in the Diplomacy Project.  Id. at 3.  Butina attended this announcement event in July 2015 and, after being tasked by the Russian Official to do so, wrote a report to him in which she emphasized the fact that she was introduced to one of that candidate’s three advisors for matters concerning international politics.   A copy of the Twitter chats, along with the report, is attached hereto as Exhibit 4.   According to her notes from a meeting with then-Russian Ambassador Sergei Kislyak in May 2015, she said she would “send the name of the advisor [to the candidate whose announcement event she later attended] who can come to Moscow.”

Looks like those Twitter chats will be released when the Butina file is redacted, likely after the sentencing happens on Friday.

But who was this candidate that Butina and Putin-appointed central banker Alexander Torshin met up with, and whose presidential announcement event did she go to in July 2015?

After Walker washed out of the 2016 election race, the sentencing memo describes how Butina organized a meeting with the NRA back home in Mother Russia.

"In December 2015, Butina invited powerful members of the Gun Rights Organization to Moscow as part of the conspiracy’s plan to establish the unofficial channel of communication. Statement of Offense at 3. She actively sought out meetings for this group with high-level Russian government officials, as arranged by the Russian Official.  Id.  As part of this endeavor, the defendant sought information from U.S. Person 1 about the degree of political influence held by the Gun Rights Organization members in the United States and stressed the need for a “political program” as part of the Gun Rights Organization trip to Moscow.  Id. at 3-4.

Following the Gun Rights Organization trip to Moscow, the defendant and the Russian Official discussed the need to “hold the spot” now that “everyone has realized that [the Gun Rights Organization] is a valuable contact,” and she noted that there will be “attempts to seize the  initiative.”  Exhibit 2. Butina has since confirmed that she was worried about others within the Russian government or a political group or activist noticing that the contacts she had built with the Gun Rights Organization were valuable and cutting her and the Russian Official out of the loop. Just days later, Butina noted to the Russian Official that they would “quietly press” or “put pressure on [members of the Gun Rights Organization] later.”

Guess who was in Russia in December 2015?

[pix]

Also don’t forget that a couple of Wisconsin politicians knew about these Russian efforts before the 2016 election, but hid it from unsuspecting Wisconsin voters. In late Summer 2016, President Obama organized a “Gang of 12” to let them know about potential Russian hacking and interference, and 2 of the members of that meeting were then-House Speaker Paul Ryan, and Senate Homeland Security Chair Ron Johnson. That meeting that was kept from public knowledge before the elections after complaints from Senate GOP Leader Mitch McConnell.

I’ve referenced this Bruce Murphy article in Urban Milwaukee from January 2017 in the past, and that’s because it continues to link back to developments in the Trump-GOP-Russia connection. It also points to Johnson being complicit in keeping Wisconsinites from knowing about the Russian garbage that was being sent to their computers, and flat-out lying later on about what intelligence agencies told him.

Russia’s interference with the American elections fit the pattern of a country engaged in disinformation and destabilization efforts across the globe, as Johnson has described it. And Russia’s leader was someone Johnson already suspected of nefarious acts. Johnson had previously sponsored resolutions calling for a full investigation into the murder of a Russian political opposition leader and for an investigation of Russia’s attacks on the Ukraine.

Johnson, in short, had an opportunity to be a patriot and condemn the fact that Russia was now engaged in such activities in the United States. But he issued no resolutions — in fact, not one word — on Russian’s cyber attacks on America.

Worse, he has engaged in his own pattern of misinformation on the subject. After the CIA publicly released a report in January concluding that Russia meddled in the presidential election to help Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump win the election, Johnson issued a statement to the Wisconsin State Journal saying he would “would need more definitive information before drawing further conclusions.” Johnson did not reveal that he had been informed back in September this was happening.

Johnson went on to complain to CNBC that the CIA refused to brief him on Russian hacking, saying “I have not seen the evidence that it actually was Russia,” while failing to note the CIA report’s echoed the briefing he’d received from other intelligence leaders in September.

In addition, Ron Johnson was 1 of several GOP Senators who decided last year’s US Independence Day was a great time…to visit the Russians.

Sounds like investigative media might want to ask some questions of these Sconnie Republicans, why many seem to have no problem hanging out with high-level Russian officials, and ask what’s being done to prevent Wisconsinites from being targeted and propagandized against in 2020. The (non)-answers they give might be quite illuminating.

I’d also like to see Walker, Clarke, Paul Ryan, ex-Trump Chief of Staff Reince Priebus (named several times in the Mueller Report) and Ron Johnson go before Congress and answer some pointed questions in the coming months. They have a lot to answer for in how they’ve allowed our democracy to be threatened over the last few years, and why they don’t seem too willing to do much about it.

==

ref

https://urbanmilwaukee.com/2017/01/10/murphys-law-ron-johnson-asleep-on-russian-hacking/

Yesterday, in an interview with Wisconsin Public Radio, Sen. Ron Johnson made it clear he takes a very tough stand on Russia and its leader Vladimir Putin.

“I’m very wary of Vladimir Putin,” Johnson said. “There have been close to 30 suspicious political assassinations since he has taken power.”

As for Putin and Russian using cyber hacking to interfere with America’s elections, he declared, “I take it very seriously. As chair of European Subcommittee on Foreign Relations, we’ve held a number of hearings on Russia’s disinformation campaign and how they are trying to de-stabilize certainly Eastern European countries, but just their destabilization efforts around the world.”

Indeed, Johnson had “heard firsthand of Russia’s efforts to destabilize and interfere in the internal affairs of its neighbors,” he told the Wisconsin State Journal.

And yet back in mid-September when Johnson was informed by intelligence leaders of Russian hacking and was asked to join a bipartisan effort to warn Russia to desist, Johnson did nothing.

To date no one in the Wisconsin media has even reported that Johnson attended this intelligence briefing, much less that he had no response to the information.

The details of the mid-September meeting are in a story by the Washington Post, which reported that President Barack Obama had dispatched his counterterrorism and homeland security adviser, Lisa Monaco, FBI Director James B. Comey and Homeland Security Secretary Jeh Johnson “to make the pitch for a ‘show of solidarity and bipartisan unity’ against Russian interference in the election,” as a senior administration official told the Post.

As chairman of the Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee, Johnson was one the so-called “Gang of 12,” the top 12 congressional leaders, who were invited to the meeting. (House Speaker Paul Ryan also attended the meeting.) Johnson later confirmed to Politico that he participated in the briefing.

“In a secure room in the Capitol used for briefings involving classified information, administration officials broadly laid out the evidence U.S. spy agencies had collected, showing Russia’s role in cyber-intrusions in at least two states and in hacking the emails of the Democratic organizations and individuals,” the Post reported.

“And they made a case for a united, bipartisan front in response to what one official described as ‘the threat posed by unprecedented meddling by a foreign power in our election process.’”

But Republican leaders declined to join a bipartisan response to the information. Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell “raised doubts about the underlying intelligence and made clear to the administration that he would consider any effort by the White House to challenge the Russians publicly an act of partisan politics,” the Post reports.

Russia’s interference with the American elections fit the pattern of a country engaged in disinformation and destabilization efforts across the globe, as Johnson has described it. And Russia’s leader was someone Johnson already suspected of nefarious acts. Johnson had previously sponsored resolutions calling for a full investigation into the murder of a Russian political opposition leader and for an investigation of Russia’s attacks on the Ukraine.

Johnson, in short, had an opportunity to be a patriot and condemn the fact that Russia was now engaged in such activities in the United States. But he issued no resolutions — in fact, not one word — on Russian’s cyber attacks on America.

Worse, he has engaged in his own pattern of misinformation on the subject. After the CIA publicly released a report in January concluding that Russia meddled in the presidential election to help Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump win the election, Johnson issued a statement to the Wisconsin State Journal saying he would “would need more definitive information before drawing further conclusions.” Johnson did not reveal that he had been informed back in September this was happening.

Johnson went on to complain to CNBC that the CIA refused to brief him on Russian hacking, saying “I have not seen the evidence that it actually was Russia,” while failing to note the CIA report’s echoed the briefing he’d received from other intelligence leaders in September.

Johnson also complained that Obama had failed to confront the Russia government with strength, even though the Obama administration had proposed a strong stand on cyber hacking which Johnson declined to join.

So things stood until this week, when Johnson did an about face and declared his concern about Russia’s cyber hacking of his country. Why the sudden shift of position?

Perhaps because Trump’s election was certified last week so Russia’s efforts to help elect him can’t be used to pry away any electoral votes. Or perhaps because of the Senate hearing last Thursday, where senators on both sides of the aisle expressed concern about testimony by intelligence leaders on Russian hacking. As GOP Sen. Lindsay Graham noted, Republicans could be the next target of cyberattacks. “Could it be Republicans next election?” he said. “It’s not like we’re so much better at cybersecurity than Democrats.”

Indeed, all Americans are threatened when a hostile nation targets us for cyber attacks. That’s true now, and was true back in mid-September when Ron Johnson failed to take any action. Perhaps it’s time for him to explain why.

More about the Russian Affair

Op Ed: Is Walker a Russian Dupe? - Bill Kaplan - Jul 24th, 2018

Gov. Scott Walker Political Operation Snagged $250,000 Check Mere Days After Meeting With Accused Russian Spy - One Wisconsin Now - Jul 20th, 2018

What’s Walker Hiding? - Democratic Party of Wisconsin - Jul 18th, 2018

Campaign Cash: Russian Operative Highlights Walker’s NRA Ties - Wisconsin Democracy Campaign - Jul 18th, 2018

Matt Flynn Blasts Scott Walker for Meeting with Russian Spy - Matt Flynn - Jul 16th, 2018

Plenty of Horne: Giuliani Can’t Practice Law in D.C. - Michael Horne - Jun 28th, 2018

Pocan Statement Regarding Reports that Russian-Linked Facebook Ads Targeted Wisconsin - U.S. Rep Mark Pocan - Oct 4th, 2017

Wisconsin Notified of Unsuccessful Russian Hacking Attempt - Wisconsin Elections Commission - Sep 22nd, 2017

Murphy’s Law: Wisconsin A Key State for Russian Hacking - Bruce Murphy - Aug 8th, 2017

Report Suggests Wisconsin Voters Targeted by Collusion Between Trump Campaign, Russian Fake News Operation - One Wisconsin Now - Jul 13th, 2017

Rep. Pocan Statement on Former FBI Director James Comey’s Testimony on Trump and Russia - U.S. Rep Mark Pocan - Jun 8th, 2017

Speaker Paul Ryan Swears House GOP To Secrecy Regarding Trump’s Ties To Russia, Spokesperson Lies About The Conversation - Democratic Party of Wisconsin - May 17th, 2017

As FBI Confirms Russia Investigation - Democratic Party of Wisconsin - Mar 21st, 2017

FBI Investigation into Links Between Trump/Russia Highlights Need for Special Prosecutor - U.S. Rep. Gwen Moore - Mar 20th, 2017

Revelations about Sessions’ Contact with Russia Warrants his Removal - U.S. Rep. Gwen Moore - Mar 2nd, 2017

Senators Call for Independent Prosecutor to Investigate Trump Officials’ Collusion with Russia and Apparent White House Cover-Up - U.S. Sen. Tammy Baldwin - Feb 15th, 2017

Rep. Pocan Urges President Trump to Fully Declassify Report on Russian Interference in 2016 Election - U.S. Rep Mark Pocan - Feb 14th, 2017

Murphy’s Law: Ron Johnson Asleep on Russian Hacking? - Bruce Murphy - Jan 10th, 2017

U.S. Senator Tammy Baldwin Joins Call for Bipartisan Senate Select Committee Investigation of Russian Interference in 2016 Election - U.S. Sen. Tammy Baldwin - Jan 3rd, 2017

U.S. Senator Tammy Baldwin Statement on Russian Cyberattacks - U.S. Sen. Tammy Baldwin - Dec 16th, 2016

Wisconsin Comrades Set to Welcome Donald Trump, Whitewash Russian Attempts to Influence Elections- One Wisconsin Now - Dec 13th, 2016

==

==

also ref

https://www.jsonline.com/story/news/politics/2018/07/05/johnson-urges-dialogue-russia-but-warns-against-midterms-interference/761043002/

republican U.S. Sen. Ron Johnson said Thursday that he and others in a congressional delegation to Moscow put Russians on notice not to interfere with the 2018 midterm elections.

Johnson was in the group of congressional Republicans that traveled this week to Moscow for talks with Russian lawmakers.

Johnson said Russia's meddling in the 2016 U.S. elections was "brought up constantly by multiple senators."

"The point was made," Johnson said. "I think they are very well aware of the fact that a way to blow up this first step would be to interfere in the 2018 elections.

"They were very well put on notice that we're not buying what they're saying. That we're basically issuing, let me be kind here, guidance that it would not be smart to be caught meddling in 2018. I think they got the message. There's no way they couldn't have had."

The Washington Post reported the Republicans "sounded a newly conciliatory tone" in the talks that were held ahead of President Donald Trump's July 16 summit with Russian President Vladimir Putin in Helsinki, Finland.

U.S. Sen. Richard Shelby (R-Ala.) led the delegation. Johnson said he was only "cleared" to go on the trip last week, left for Moscow on Sunday and returned to Wisconsin Thursday.

Late last year, Johnson and fellow Republican Sen. John Barrasso of Wyoming called off a planned trip to Moscow after Russia denied a visa to Democratic Sen. Jeanne Shaheen of New Hampshire.

RELATED: Sen. Ron Johnson backs Russia probes but downplays urgency

RELATED: Wisconsin Sen. Ron Johnson walks back claims of an anti-Trump 'secret society' within FBI

RELATED: Russian Twitter trolls stoked racial tension in wake of Sherman Park rioting in Milwaukee before 2016 election

Johnson said relations between the U.S. and Russia are "strained."

"I've been saying for a long time that I wish Russia was no worse than a friendly rival as opposed to an unfriendly adversary," he said. "I don't want it to degrade to the enemy category."

"Right now, we're adversaries, there's no two ways about it," he said.

But Johnson was hopeful that a process could be started for "an ongoing dialogue to find individuals so we can actually find relationships."

"Those on-going personal relationships can be crucial in uncertain times," he said.

"My takeaway there was a sincere desire on both sides to improve relationships," he added.

Johnson, who chairs the European subcommittee of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, defended the trip that saw the U.S. lawmakers in Moscow over July 4th.

"This is an important relationship," he said. "Russia is not going away."

He added, "The main reason you go there is to understand their perspective."

This was Johnson's first trip Moscow, which he described as "a modern, well-maintained European city. There was nothing shabby about it."

He said there was "no evidence" that international sanctions were having an effect on the Russian economy. But he said Russia is rankled by sanctions on individuals, "targeting the oligarchs, their legislators."

see distraction

https://www.alternet.org/2019/04/trio-of-republican-senators-demand-doj-hand-over-information-on-clinton-email-probe-as-ag-barr-prepares-for-release-of-redacted-mueller-report/

As Attorney General William Barr prepares the release of a redacted version of special counsel Robert Mueller’s Russia investigation report, Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-SC) is reportedly recruiting other Republican senators help with a separate endeavor. As MSNBC reports, “a trio of top Republican senators” are demanding the Justice Department “hand over information on the handling of the probe into Hillary Clinton’s private email server.”

Graham, along with Sen. Ron Johnson (R-WI) and Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-IA) sent a letter to Barr on Tuesday requesting documents pertaining to the department’s investigation of the former secretary of state.

endit1