BS investigation 2 bengh

see benghazi main

SEE BIDEN IMPEACH Mayorkas

merri ok

see weaponization

see fauci covidiocy

see comer

see acad suppress

see jim jordan bak

see hageman wicked witch west

see house jud comm

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jill biden compromised biggs

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last cab imp 150 yrs ago

'No high crime': GOP slammed for 'completely made up accusations' on Mayorkas impeachment - Alternet.org

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aha reverse of move goalpost on trump [don't impeach, let cts do it --> no ct let voters decide wash rereat --> widen the net/what counts // escalator

an 8 23 no lnx

Republicans’ 'untethered' Hunter Biden claims demolished by WaPo fact-checker

Alex HendersonAugust 17, 2023

A Washington Post fact check on Thursday took House Republicans to task as right-wing lawmakers "over hype" the House Oversight Committee's investigation into President Joe Biden's son, Hunter Biden.

House Oversight Committee Chairman James Comer (R-Kentucky) has been leading the Hunter Biden probe in the U.S. House of Representatives. The Post's Glenn Kessler gives Comer and his GOP colleagues an aggressive fact-check in his August 17 column.

"The House Oversight Committee, led by Comer, has been investigating business dealings of President Biden's son, Hunter, and other family members — and by extension, unverified allegations that the president was involved in his son's business as well," Comer explains. "The Committee has obtained thousands of bank records, and the Republican staff has issued three memorandums summarizing some of the findings. The memos are written in a partisan manner — ignoring or playing down contrary information — but an interesting pattern has emerged."

Kessler continues, "The memos themselves have careful language that is often hedged. Then, Comer and other GOP lawmakers, including House Speaker Kevin McCarthy (Calif.), go on Twitter or speak to conservative media using hyperbolic language that goes well beyond what the memos say. Over time, the reporting on the memos in conservative media becomes untethered from the documentation in the reports."

House Republicans, Kessler emphasizes, typically exaggerate the amount of $20 million in payments that went to the Biden family because of Hunter Biden's business activities.

"As for the $20 million in payments," Kessler explains, "Comer and other Republicans invoke this figure often. A close reading of the memos, however, finds that only about $7 million can be directly attributed to Biden family members, mostly Hunter, while the rest went to 'associates,' according to the memos. Yet Comer and other lawmakers misleadingly suggest all of the money went to the Biden family or, as some label it, 'the Biden crime family.' No evidence has emerged that any of these funds can be traced to Joe Biden himself."

Kessler points out that Comer "often suggests that the Biden family used…. so-called shell companies to launder money." But that claim, according to Kessler, is "undercut by the list of 21 companies that appear in" a staff memo.

READ MORE: 'It's like a soap opera': These Republicans are weary of their colleagues' Hunter Biden obsession

The term "shell company," Kessler points out, has a dark connotation. But the companies Hunter Biden headed, he adds, "had legitimate business interests."

"Others had clearly identified business investments," according to Kessler. "Digging through the records, we find only three whose business purpose remains vague. One, Rosemont Seneca Global Risk Services, LLC, may not even be related to Hunter Biden, according to an e-mail found in Hunter Biden's laptop. The memos do not list any payments that flowed through these three companies."

READ MORE: Vivek Ramaswamy implies Hunter Biden is reason behind US aid to Ukraine: report

Glenn Kessler's full column is available at this link (subscription required).

FROM YOUR SITE ARTICLES

Republicans claim 'coverup' after Merrick Garland appoints special counsel for Hunter Biden probe ›

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Hunter Biden plea deal falls apart when Trump-appointed judge refuses to be a 'rubber stamp' ›

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https://www.alternet.org/alternet-exclusives/gop-scientific-method-evidence-conspiracy/

an 7 23 no lnx

Home | For the GOP, the scientific method is evidence of conspiracy

Lindsay Beyerstein July 19, 2023

A scientific paper now ranks with the grassy knoll in the minds of conspiracy theorists. “The Proximal Origin of SARS-CoV-2” (2020) has become an object of obsession complete with its own rich folklore. Last week, House Republicans devoted a three-hour hearing to haranguing the scientists who wrote it.

:{:{}:

Two of the paper’s authors, Dr. Kristian Andersen and Dr. Robert F. Garry, were hauled before the committee to answer for their defiance from GOP orthodoxy.

The GOP party line is that Dr. Anthony Fauci somehow forced a group of university professors to publish a peer-reviewed paper arguing that Covid-19 wasn’t a bioweapon or a laboratory construct. Fauci supposedly wanted to discredit the lab leak because he helped the Wuhan Institute of Virology create the virus. No, really. They get indignant when you call it a conspiracy theory, but that’s the B-movie plot they’re pushing.

READ MORE: Did Trump let Americans die purely for political purposes?

The proximal origin of Proximal Origin was not Fauci’s NIAID lair, but a teleconference organized by Dr. Jeremy Farrar, then the head of a UK research charity. Farrar set the agenda, invited the guests, and even provided tech support. The witnesses testified that Fauci hopped on the call but said little of substance.

:{:{}:

Andersen also testified that, far from pressuring him to debunk the lab leak, Fauci had encouraged him to publish any evidence that he might find of a leak and offered to help him share any such evidence with the proper authorities. These are not the actions of someone orchestrating a massive coverup.

:{:{}:

In lab leak lore, the researchers’ open-mindedness is evidence of coercion. The subpoenaed emails show that, far from being reflexive leak deniers, the authors of this paper thought they saw features that couldn’t have evolved naturally. If they couldn’t explain how the virus might have arisen in nature, that raised red flags that it might have been engineered. But once they delved into the quirks of SCV2 and explored the weird and wonderful features of wild coronaviruses, their doubts were allayed.

If Fauci was orchestrating a coverup, why would he pick scientists who said they took the lab leak seriously?

READ MORE: Ron DeSantis’ surgeon general 'personally altered' key data on COVID-19 vaccines’ safety: report

Another plank in the GOP conspiracy theory is that Fauci bribed Andersento argue against the lab leak with a federal research grant.In fact, that grant was awarded before the pandemic started. As is standard for such grants, the award was based on high scores by independent reviewers, not the whims of Tony Fauci.

The majority falsely claimed in its report that the authors sent the paper to Fauci for editing and approval before it was published. In fact, Fauci received a copy of the manuscript that had already been accepted by the journal and didn’t offer any comments.

Most disturbing of all, Republicans tried to spin the scientific method itself as evidence of a conspiracy. They seized on a snippet of an Andersen email stating that he and his colleagues were trying to disprove the lab leak theory. That’s not a conspiracy, that’s science. Experimenters start with a testable hypothesis like, “Sars-CoV-2 leaked from a lab” and then they do their best to knock it down. If they can’t defeat it, the hypothesis survives to be tested again another day. As Andersen explained, they couldn’t definitively disprove a lab leak, but the evidence convinced them it was unlikely.

:{:{}:

“My early hypothesis was that of a ‘lab theory’ and when I stated that we were “trying to disprove any type of lab theory,” I was specifically referring to the concept of falsification,” Andersen said in his written remarks.

:{:{}:

“This is a text-book example of the scientific method in use.”

READ MORE: 'Ignorance about the biological function': Virologist dispels testimony from GOP’s lab link 'expert'

FROM YOUR SITE ARTICLES

Noam Chomsky sounds the alarm on the rise of anti-science rhetoric in America ›

'Bigotry and megalomania': Scientific American Editorial board warns of DeSantis’ 'antiscience agenda' ›

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RELATED ARTICLES AROUND THE WEB

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The GOP has a long history of ignoring science. Trump turned it into

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am 7 23 vid

Rep. Jamie Raskin (D-MD) warned Republicans that former President Donald Trump's culpability for Covid-19 deaths "would only deepen" if their theory about a lab leak in China was true.

Raskin made the remarks during a Tuesday House Oversight hearing into the origins of Covid-19.

"We are all interested in finding out the origins of the Covid-19 epidemic to make sure that such a nightmare never happens again to us," Raskin began. "Some people think that the finding that it all started with a lab leak would somehow absolve Donald Trump of his lethally reckless response to the pandemic. Of course, his response was dangerously dysfunctional regardless of how it got started."

The Maryland Democrat pointed out that Trump's former adviser, Dr. Deborah Birx, "said that we lost hundreds of thousands of American lives because of the flaws in the response."

IN OTHER NEWS: Trump has set up an 'embarrassing' trap for his own lawyers: national security attorney

"But even if the virus came from a lab, as indeed it could have, we don't know that yet, that would only deepen Donald Trump's culpability because he was the one who repeatedly and enthusiastically praised China's early handling of the pandemic and assured us that he was working closely with President Xi on the response to it," Raskin added. "So let's just get the facts straight and leave all the political myth-making aside."

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https://www.rawstory.com/jim-jordan-2661556363/

no lnx raw 6 23

Jim Jordan leads GOP push to cripple 'fight against disinformation': report

Matthew Chapman

June 19, 2023,

Republican lawmakers are joining forces with far-right activists to attack universities and even private businesses that are investigating the spread of disinformation online — claiming that this amounts to an effort to silence conservatives on the internet, according to a report.

The New York Times posted a details of the actions they are taking on Monday.

"The effort has encumbered its targets with expansive requests for information and, in some cases, subpoenas — demanding notes, emails and other information related to social media companies and the government dating back to 2015. Complying has consumed time and resources and already affected the groups’ ability to do research and raise money, according to several people involved," reported Steven Lee Myers and Sheera Frenkel.

"They and others warned that the campaign undermined the fight against disinformation in American society when the problem is, by most accounts, on the rise — and when another presidential election is around the corner. Many of those behind the Republican effort had also joined former President Donald J. Trump in falsely challenging the outcome of the 2020 presidential election."

The House Judiciary Committee, under Rep. Jim Jordan (R-OH), has been leading the charge. Meanwhile, a group founded by far-right former Trump adviser Stephen Miller has filed a class-action lawsuit in federal court going after the same entities.

"Targets include Stanford, Clemson and New York Universities and the University of Washington; the Atlantic Council, the German Marshall Fund and the National Conference on Citizenship, all nonpartisan, nongovernmental organizations in Washington; the Wikimedia Foundation in San Francisco; and Graphika, a company that researches disinformation online," said the report.

"In a related line of inquiry, the committee has also issued a subpoena to the World Federation of Advertisers, a trade association, and the Global Alliance for Responsible Media it created. The committee’s Republican leaders have accused the groups of violating antitrust laws by conspiring to cut off advertising revenue for content researchers and tech companies found to be harmful."

The new push is part of a broader, years-long conspiracy theory among right-wing activists that the government and "big tech" companies are colluding to silence conservative speech on the internet. There is no evidence of any such conspiracy; in fact, research shows conservative content actually spreads more easily on Facebook and Twitter.

:{:{}:

LNX

There is no evidence of any such conspiracy; in fact, research shows conservative content actually spreads more easily on Facebook and Twitter.

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whistleblower gone so want raw intel fbi form

https://www.alternet.org/grassley-gop/

claim biden took bribe

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staff oppos res?

an 4 23

Dr. Mark Lowenthal accused Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA) of misleading the public about the origins of Covid-19.

During a House hearing on Covid-19 Tuesday, Greene complained that the government could track down alleged military leaker Jack Teixeira but couldn't determine the origins of the virus.

"So, the intelligence community is able to figure out immediately who was leaking classified information in a Discord chat, but yet still doesn't want to say whether it came from the lab or didn't come from the lab," Greene said. "The intelligence communities seem to release or not release information based on how the information will affect the government that it seems to protect."

Lowenthal, a former intelligence agent, responded to Greene.

"May I respond to something else that you said in your comments, Ms. Greene?" he began. "There is a vast, vast difference between tracking a leak on a social media site and determining the origins of this disease. And to compare the two is entirely fallacious, ma'am."

"Dr. Lowenthal, you've said that you keep your intelligence claims and information nonpartisan," Greene shot back. "In 2018, Mr. Lowenthal, you were quoted in the New York Times saying that President Trump is the best president that Russia ever had. That sounds pretty political to me."

"I was no longer an intelligence officer at the time, ma'am," Lowenthal replied. "I'm a private citizen."

"Well, I think you have a difficult time keeping your political opinions out of your political [analysis]," Greene quipped.[vid]

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https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2023/03/jim-jordan-weaponization-subcommittee-witnesses

ref 2

no lnx ref

Report: Jim Jordan’s “Weaponization” Witnesses Are Conspiracy Theorists With…No Knowledge of Government Wrongdoing

The congressman’s hearings are off to a very embarrassing start.

BY BESS LEVIN

MARCH 3, 2023

One of the most ridiculous things Republicans have done in recent memory—and there are a lot of ridiculous things they’ve done in recent memory—was to create a House subcommittee to investigate the “Weaponization of the Federal Government.” Tasked with probing everything from the FBI’s search of Donald Trump’s Mar-a-Lago last year to what really happened on January 6, the panel operates on the assumption that agencies and officials within the federal government have abused their power to silence, punish, and hurt conservatives; chaired by Representative Jim Jordan, the committee has vowed to expose this bias against the right. And hey—if Jordan & Co. have any evidence to support their claims, they should definitely make them public! Unfortunately, at this time it appears they very much do not.

As for the first three witnesses to testify behind closed doors to the newly formed subcommittee, a trio the GOP insists are brave whistleblowers with inside knowledge of a huge bias against conservatives within the government, Jordan may as well have picked up a few random folks at the gas station or Dunkin’ Donuts by his house on the way to work, for all they revealed. Oh, sure, the witnesses definitely thought they had the kind of damning information the committee has promised, but according to The New York Times, their collective testimony seemed to be less based on actual evidence than it was on crackpot conspiracies one can read about online.

Per the Times:

The trio appears to be a group of aggrieved former FBI officials who have trafficked in right-wing conspiracy theories, including about the Jan. 6, 2021, attack at the Capitol…. The roster of witnesses, whose interviews and statements are detailed in a 316-page report compiled by Democrats that was obtained by The New York Times, suggests that Representative Jim Jordan of Ohio, the chairman of the panel, has so far relied on people who do not meet the definition of a whistle-blower and who have engaged in partisan conduct that calls into question their credibility.

“Each endorses an alarming series of conspiracy theories related to the Jan. 6 Capitol attack, the COVID vaccine, and the validity of the 2020 election,” Democrats wrote in the heavily footnoted report, which cites scores of statements made by the witnesses. “One has called repeatedly for the dismantling of the FBI. Another suggested that it would be better for Americans to die than to have any kind of domestic intelligence program.”

The report focuses on the testimony of George Hill, a retired supervisory intelligence analyst from the bureau’s Boston field office; Stephen Friend, an ex–special agent who worked in the Daytona Beach office; and Garret O’Boyle, a special agent from the Wichita, Kansas, field office who is currently suspended. As the Times notes, Hill has claimed on Twitter that January 6 was a “set up” and part of a “larger #Democrat plan using their enforcement arm, the #FBI.” For his part, Friend, who has also claimed FBI wrongdoing, was suspended after he refused to take part in a SWAT raid of a January 6 suspect who’d been accused of being a member of a right-wing militia group with ties to the Three Percenter movement, and who had posted a video of himself outside the Capitol on January 6 wearing body armor and a gas mask and holding an AR-15-style rifle. Friend also testified about “being asked to surveil a person attending a school board meeting, touching on a claim promoted by Republicans that the government mistreated conservative parents,” as the Times reports. Yet the Democrats’ report found, according to the Times, “Friend conceded during his interview that the man being tracked was a Three Percenter who was under counterterrorism investigation,” and the man was later arrested on charges related to the January 6 attack.

Mr. Friend also engaged with Russian propaganda outlets while he was an FBI employee, the report noted, including being quoted extensively in an article in Sputnik headlined “Under Biden Federal Agencies Turned Into Instrument of Intimidation, FBI Whistleblower Says,” and appearing for an interview with Russia Today…. The report also said that Mr. Hill had embraced a conspiracy theory that an Arizona man named Ray Epps was a federal informant who helped to instigate the attack on the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021. Prominent Republicans—including Mr. Trump—have widely promoted the claim, which Mr. Epps denies and the House Jan. 6 committee determined to be unfounded.

Naturally, O’Boyle also compared COVID-19 vaccine mandates to Nazi genocide, according to the report. Democrats concluded in the report that nothing in O’Boyle’s testimony “suggests misconduct at the FBI” and that Hill had “made multiple claims about the FBI’s handling of criminal investigations into the January 6 Capitol attack, despite having very little personal involvement in those investigations.”

And then, of course, there’s the matter of money. O’Boyle and Friend both testified to the subcommittee that they had received, per the Times, “financial support from Kash Patel, a Trump loyalist and former high-ranking official in the former president’s administration.” (According to Friend, Patel sent him $5,000 basically right after they connected in November 2022.) In a statement to the Times, Patel did not confirm or deny sending the witnesses money, but said, “Whistleblowers who provide credible information exposing government waste, fraud, and abuse serve a critical role for constitutional oversight.”

In their report, Democrats wrote, “Based on this evidence, committee Democrats conclude that there is a strong likelihood that Kash Patel is encouraging the witnesses to continue pursuing their meritless claims, and in fact is using them to help propel his vendetta against the FBI, Justice Department, and Biden administration on behalf of himself and President Trump.”

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an 4 23

House GOP's efforts to find wrongdoing by President Joe Biden aren't yielding the results that some Republican lawmakers thought they would — and there is growing frustration within the caucus and their hardest-right constituents, reported Politico on Tuesday.

"According to interviews with more than a dozen House Republicans, a sizable chunk of the conference is focused on preventing a banking crisis and a looming debt fight instead of on Biden family oversight or a politicized government panel," reported Politico.

"At the same time, the party base is chafing at the lack of big bombshells and concrete steps against administration officials to back up all of lawmakers’ talk."

"Republicans have fired off scores of letters, issued subpoenas and initial reports and held a handful of hearings. But part of the problem is the lofty expectations they set coming in," said the report.

"Long before GOP lawmakers settled their speakership fight, they promised voters they’d deploy the chamber’s oversight power against President Joe Biden on a host of issues. They vowed to find a smoking gun that links Biden to his family’s overseas business dealings. They even embraced comparisons of their investigative efforts to Congress’ storied 1970s Church Committee, which uncovered significant abuses by the intelligence community."

Rep. Mike Johnson (R-LA), told Politico, “All of us hear from constituents that they’re very anxious for results. And our task, part of our task, is explaining to people what this process is about, and what to expect. I think some people get anxious because they just want immediate results.”

Rep. Jim Jordan (R-OH), who heads up a new panel dedicated to investigating what Republicans call the "weaponization" of government, has been stymied at times as his committee gets ahead of itself. A heated exchange between him and Del. Stacey Plaskett (D-VI) took place last month during a public hearing about FBI investigation tactics, after she pointed out he prematurely issued subpoenas without trying to secure officials' voluntary cooperation first.

"[Oversight Chair James] Comer released a report last month focused on Hunter Biden and other Biden family members’ receipt of more than $1 million from an associate who made a deal with a Chinese energy company— though Republicans didn’t draw a direct link to the president, which has been their stated goal," said the report. "The Treasury Department also has granted Comer’s panel access to so-called suspicious activity reports related to Hunter Biden and associates. But the committee has yet to release any new findings from those activity reports, which are records submitted by banks that don’t necessarily indicate wrongdoing."

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an 3 23

Jim Jordan (R-OH) is questioning whether Manhattan district attorney Alvin Bragg has taken time away from probing former President Donald Trump to investigate Hunter Biden's art sales.

Jordan tweeted Friday, "Is Alvin Bragg looking into Hunter Biden's art sales and business records in New York City?"

USA Today reports:

Republicans are investigating Hunter Biden's art sales as part of wide-ranging inquiries into his business dealings and bank records. Rep. James Comer, the Oversight chairman, questioned whether Hunter Biden was peddling influence to foreign adversaries by using high-value art to evade U.S. sanctions, with prices on his work initially listed at up to $500,000 and now ranging from $55,000 to $225,000 apiece.

New York gallery owner, Georges Berges, according to USA Today has "defended Hunter Biden and predicted he would be 'one of the most consequential artists in this century.'"

Regarding the congressman's spearheading of the Biden probe, Slate reports:

Jordan and other Republicans are not obsessed with Hunter Biden because they believe humbly in the ideals of ethical government. Instead, they are taking cues from Donald Trump, who for several years has fixated on a number of fantastical and never-proven accusations that Hunter and Joe Biden are engaged in 'deep state' corruption together....

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https://www.alternet.org/trump-jim-jordan-insurrection-committee/

badash no tet vid?

This is about one client. Donald Trump': Jim Jordan hammered over 'Insurrection LLC' committee

David Badashand The New Civil Rights Movement March 29, 2023

:{:{U.S. Rep. Eric Swalwell (D-CA) unleashed massive criticism of Jim Jordan Wednesday afternoon, accusing the House Judiciary Committee Chairman of working solely for Donald Trump.}:

In his opening remarks of a Judiciary subcommittee hearing Swalwell, the Ranking Member, slammed Jordan for refusing to comply with a legal subpoena issued by the U.S. House Select Committee on the January 6 Attack, and criticized the subcommittee for holding a hearing – not on gun violence and mass shootings – but on what the California Democrat said was issues to help the ex-president.

Congressman Swalwell blasted Jordan and his “Committee to Obstruct Justice” on a wide range of issues, including obstructing justice, ordering a district attorney to commit a felony, and lying that Attorney General Merrick Garland labeled parents “domestic terrorists.”

:{:{“Well, here we are. Another partners’ meeting of Insurrection, LLC,”Swalwell said as he began his remarks. “That’s what this is. This is the newly formed largest law firm in Washington, D.C. Only has one client, maybe a second client that we’re going to learn about today, but that client is former president Donald Trump.”}:

“Their job,” he said, referring to Jordan’s Judiciary Committee, subcommittees, and his controversial Subcommittee of the Weaponization of the Federal Government, “is to litigate every one of [Trump’s] petty, petty, petty grievances.”}:

READ MORE: Watch: House Dem Mocks Republicans by Thanking Them for Taking Time Away From ‘Trump’s Memorial Service to David Koresh’

“It’s now 321 days since this subpoena was sent to Jim Jordan, that he did not comply with,” Swalwell said, pointing to a large blown-up copy of the subpoena, with the word “subpoena” enlarged exponentially.

“So it’s comical that we are here today, under Jim Jordan’s leadership, asking people why they don’t want to comply with subpoenas. The guy won’t comply with the one that was sent to him 321 days ago, witness to a crime, the crime that has led to more arrests than any investigation in America,” Swalwell observed, referring to the January 6 prosecutions.

“He’s a witness being asked to do his patriotic duty and respond to a subpoena 321 days later, refuses. Also, since the last hearing of this Committee to Obstruct Justice, Chairman Jordan is now in interfering in an independent criminal prosecution. There’s an investigation in Manhattan, also in Atlanta, also at the Department of Justice, into the former president and Jim Jordan has sent a letter to the independently elected District Attorney Alvin Bragg of Manhattan. He is asking Alvin Bragg to commit a felony.”

“Why is he asking Alvin Bragg to commit a felony? To help Donald Trump. Why is it a felony? Because if Alvin Bragg were to turn over what Jim Jordan is asking of him, Bragg would be violating New York law that says you cannot turn over grand jury proceedings, but that’s what they’re asking them to do. Again, the law doesn’t matter if your client is Donald Trump.”

“The other day Jim Jordan was asked, ‘Well, what do you think of the former president who put out on Truth Social the other day, essentially an another call to action? A January 6-like post when the former president said this posting, Jim Jordan was presented with this post by the former president that calls for ‘death and destruction.’ And Mr. Jordan said that he would ‘need his glasses.’ He was looking the other way. Jim Jordan looking the other way.”

READ MORE: Here’s How Five Republicans in Congress Are Responding to the Mass Shooting of 3 Children and 3 Adults in Nashville (Video)

“Well, we have blown up on the screen and we’ve put it right here and I’ll leave it for Jim Jordan. This is what Donald Trump said, Mr. Jordan,” Swalwell said, reading the e-president’s social media post:

“‘What kind of person can charge another person? In this case it former president of the United States who got more votes than any sitting president in history and leading candidate by far for the Republican Party nomination with the crime when it is known by all that? No crime has been committed and also known that potential death and destruction and such a false charge can be catastrophic for our country. Why and who would do such a thing? Only a degenerate psychopath that truly hates the USA?'”

“Again, I’m gonna leave this up here in probably 200 font. So Mr. Jordan doesn’t need his glasses to read it,” Swalwell added, referring to news that Jordan recently refused to comment on a Trump social media post claiming he first hadn’t read it, then when a reporter showed it to him, Jordan said he couldn’t read it because he didn’t have his glasses.

:{:{}:

“The same individual who posted this also posted this photo. There you go, Donald. Trump. Real tough guy holding a baseball bat, next to a picture of that independent prosecutor that Jim Jordan wants to commit a felony, Alvin Bragg.”}:

“But you won’t hear from this Committee to Obstruct Justice, any condemnation of what Donald Trump posted. They can’t condemn him. They can’t. So in their silence, they condone it. And in these posts from Donald Trump, he incites more and more Americans to commit violence like a woman who was arrested yesterday, near Times Square with a knife seeking to carry out an act of violence in Donald Trump’s name.”

Swalwell blasted Chairman Jordan for repeatedly falsely claiming that Attorney General Merrick Garland had labeled parents speaking at school board meetings “domestic terrorists,” a lie made by many Republicans and conservatives.

READ MORE: New WSJ Poll Is Devastating for DeSantis and His ‘Anti-Woke’ Policies

“No parent has a right to threaten a school board volunteer. If a threat is brought to the FBI, it’s their duty to investigate those threats. We’ve also learned from all the document production from DOJ and the FBI in the Department of Education, that there is not one instance where the Department of Justice called any parent or a group of parents, ‘domestic terrorists,’ as has been claimed by Jim Jordan.”

:{:{And he criticized House Republicans, who, under Jim Jordan, had posted a tweet in support of Donald Trump, Elon Musk, and Kanye West.}:

“It’s also about a tweet that Jim Jordan posted back in the fall. ‘Kanye. Elon. Trump.’ Now after that tweet was posted, Kanye said he’s going to declare ‘DEF CON three on the Jews.’ The tweet stayed up for months. Everyone was like, ‘Hey guys, turns out your hero Kanye West hates the Jews. We all stand with Israel. Please take down the tweet.’ They didn’t take down the tweet. They kept the tweet up. Day after day. Jewish community they’re hurting, they say, ‘Please don’t take, please don’t put this tweet up.’ It stays up.”}:

He also blasted the GOP for holding hearings with witnesses they invited who are anti-police, despite their motto of “backing the blue.”

“Last week, we had a hearing where you could call anyone in America when you have the majority, the power of a subpoena. We had a hearing about the ATF. These guys brought a witness who had just recently tweeted, ‘fuck cops.’ Cops. That’s what this guy tweeted. Anyone on Earth could have come to that hearing and they brought someone that said, ‘fuck cops.’ Then one of their colleagues, this is what she’s selling on her social media: ‘defund the FBI.’ So we went from backing the blue to backing the coup.”

Swalwell concluded his remarks by slamming the committee for doing nothing to reduce gun violence in the wake of Monday’s school mass shooting.

“So we’ll waste our time today on this exercise on behalf of Donald Trump and perhaps Elon Musk, but everyone on their side is going to have to go home this weekend to their constituents and their constituents are going to ask them one question: Three little babies died this week in a school in Nashville. No other committee in Congress has jurisdiction to do something about that except this committee. So you’re on the Judiciary Committee. Three kids are dead. They’re gonna be buried this week. What did you do about it? Did you show up to the Judiciary Committee and fight for those kids? Or did you show up and fight for Donald Trump? They showed up to the first hearing after Nashville and they’re fighting for Donald Trump.”

Watch the videos above or at this link.===

https://www.propublica.org/article/jim-jordan-disinformation-subpoena-universities

3 23

house Republicans have sent letters to at least three universities and a think tank requesting a broad range of documents related to what it says are the institutions' contributions to the Biden administration’s “censorship regime.”

The letters are the latest effort by a House subcommittee set up in January to investigate how the federal government, working with social media companies, has allegedly been “weaponized” to silence conservative and right-wing voices. So far, the committee’s investigations have amplified a variety of dubious, outright false and highly misleading Republican grievances with law enforcement, many of them espoused by former President Donald Trump. Committee members have cited supposed abuses that include the FBI’s search of Mar-a-Lago, its investigations of Jan. 6 rioters and the Biden administration’s purported use of executive powers to shut down conservative viewpoints on social media.

now, universities and their researchers are coming under the spotlight of the committee, which the Republicans have labeled the House Judiciary Select Subcommittee on the Weaponization of the Federal Government. The letters, signed by Rep. Jim Jordan, R-Ohio, who is chair of both the House Judiciary Committee and the subcommittee, were sent in early March.

They cover an investigation into how “certain third parties, including organizations like yours, may have played a role in this censorship regime by advising on so-called ‘misinformation,’” according to a copy of one of the letters obtained by ProPublica.

The committee requested documents and information dating back to January 2015 between any “employee, contractor, or agent of your organization” and the federal government or social media organizations pertaining to the moderation of social media content. ProPublica confirmed the requests went to Stanford University, the University of Washington, Clemson University and the German Marshall Fund of the United States.

The letters have prompted a wave of alarm among those in the field that the congressional inquiry itself, no matter what it finds, will lead universities to pull back on this research just as the 2024 election gets underway. “Recent efforts definitely have a chilling effect on the community of experts across academia, civil society and government built up to understand broader online harms like harassment, foreign influence and — yes — disinformation,” Graham Brookie, who leads studies in this area at the Atlantic Council, told ProPublica.

“The ‘weaponization’ committee is being weaponized against us,” another researcher told ProPublica. Like half a dozen others interviewed for this story, this person asked not to be identified because of the ongoing congressional probe.

Democrats have called the committee a modern-day House Un-American Activities Committee, akin to the congressional committee that pursued alleged communists during the McCarthy era.

Since Rep. Jordan took over the gavel of the judiciary committee in January, he has issued more than 80 subpoenas and requests for documents. Recipients have included the CEOs of social media companies, intelligence officials who signed on to a statement about Hunter Biden’s laptop during the 2020 campaign and members of the National School Boards Association who asked the Justice Department to investigate threats of violence against school board officials. Jordan himself refused a subpoena to testify before the Democratic-led House Select Committee on the January 6 Attack, prompting that committee to refer the matter to the House Ethics Committee.

Jordan’s missives were sent a day after a committee hearing on the “Twitter files,” leaked internal communications from the company that purported to show how right-wing accounts were sidelined and silenced. In written testimony, a panelist accused a broad swath of organizations and individuals of being members of the “Censorship Industrial Complex,” including, he implied, the FBI, Department of Homeland Security, CIA, Department of Defense and universities. The witness wrote disinformation researchers, working with the government, are “creating blacklists of disfavored people and then pressuring, cajoling, and demanding that social media platforms censor, deamplify, and even ban the people on these blacklists.”

A New York Universitystudyconcluded in 2021 that social media had not silenced those on the right. “The claim of anti-conservative animus” by social media companies, the study said, “is itself a form of disinformation: a falsehood with no reliable evidence to support it."

A spokesperson for Rep. Jordan did not respond to requests for comment.

Since the 2016 elections, Stanford, UW, Clemson and others have engaged in research, sometimes in partnership with social media platforms, government officials and each other, into ways that disinformation can pose tZreats to democracy and how such efforts can be meaningfully countered. The role of lies and disinformation leading to the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol gave increased prominence to their work.

As ProPublica has previously reported, sustained accusations by congressional Republicans and right-wing influencers that the Biden administration is stifling dissent have caused the administration to back away from its efforts countering disinformation, including canceling research contracts and sending messages inside the administration that disinformation work is too hot to handle.

Those moves followed a bungled rollout of a clumsily named “Disinformation Governance Board” to coordinate efforts to counter what the administration had called “dangerous conspiracy theories that can provide a gateway to terrorist violence.” Following criticism, the administration disbanded the board and accepted the resignation of its executive director, Nina Jankowicz.

Jordan has subpoenaed Jankowicz, too. She is scheduled to testify April 10 and said she will happily testify under oath.

“This sort of inquiry isn’t something that belongs in the United States Congress,” said Jankowicz. “But given that this method of bullying has caused other institutions to fold to Republican pressure in the past, I fear we may see the blunt force of congressional committees continue to be used in ways that are in direct opposition to the safety, security and free expression of the American people."

deSantis Privately Called for Google to Be “Broken Up”

Stanford did not answer a question about whether it stood by its research or make its researchers, the Stanford Internet Observatory’s Alex Stamos or Renee DiResta, available for comment. The university referred ProPublica to an online fact sheet addressing “inaccurate and misleading claims” made in the congressional testimony about Stanford’s “projects to analyze rumors and narratives on social media relating to U.S. elections and the coronavirus.” The German Marshall fund said it was working to address the request and Clemson University’s media relations department did not respond to requests for comment.

The University of Washington’s Center for an Informed Public issued a statement that said “We’re incredibly proud of our work,” adding that “some of the projects CIP researchers have contributed to have become the subject of false claims and criticism that mischaracterizes our work, a tactic that peer researchers in this space are also experiencing.” The statement did not specifically address the House requests.

A university spokesperson, Victor Balta, said in an email, “The UW stands behind this important research aiming to resist strategic misinformation and strengthen our discourse. We have received a request for documents and information, and a response is in progress.”

---

~ bragg

https://www.alternet.org/trump/gop-trump/ obstruct justice

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https://www.alternet.org/james-comer-2659569934/

an 3 23 no lnx

house Oversight Chair James Comer's zeal to open multiple investigations into President Joe Biden and members of his administration is starting to rankle his GOP colleagues who want the Kentucky Republican to slow down and stay out of their work.

According to a report from Punchbowl, there is a belief among Republicans that Comer is spreading himself too thin by chasing after multiple investigations that normally don't fall under his committee's purview.

As Punchbowl is reporting, "In a little more than two months as chair, Comer has launched a barrage of probes into everything from the withdrawal of U.S. troops from Afghanistan to Ukraine aid to the toxic train derailment in East Palestine, Ohio," and that has some other House committee chairman unhappy that he is stepping on their toes.

One of those avenues of investigations is into Biden's withdrawal from Afghanistan which resulted in a letter from Comer demanding information and that letter caught House Foreign Affairs Committee Chair Michael McCaul (R-TX) flatfooted.

“I was a little surprised by the letter,” he admitted before brushing it off with, “But we’ve talked since then. We’re working it out.”

According to the report, "Comer’s letter to Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg last month requesting information on the Ohio train derailment raised eyebrows in GOP circles as well. Some Republicans thought the probe is overreaching on an issue better served by either the Energy and Commerce or Transportation and Infrastructure panels."

One aide for a House member was critical of Comer thrusting himself into everything.

“There’s a big difference between oversight where you have expertise and oversight to churn out press releases,” they explained. “Everyone thought he’d learn from prior chairmen and work in a more coordinated way. It’s been quite the opposite.”

The report adds that House Judiciary Committee Chair Jim Jordan (R-OH) tried to tamp down complaints about Comer's intrusiveness, telling Punchbowl: "We’re gonna do stuff in our committee. He’s going to do stuff on his committee, and if there’s overlap, and he’s doing stuff that we’re doing too … the most important thing is that the American people get the facts, we propose legislation and we address things in the appropriations process.”

You can read more here.

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ABC host grills GOP House Oversight chair: Will you be investigating Jared Kushner too? ›

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an 3 23no lnx

Rep. Stacey Plaskett (D-VI) clashed with Rep. Jim Jordan (R-OH) on Thursday after she accused Republicans of using a "playbook" that includes "false narratives" about the 2020 election and the Capitol attack on Jan. 6, 2021.

At a House Oversight hearing on government "weaponization," Plaskett blasted Jordan for only providing access to documentation minutes before the event. She compared the tactics to House Speaker Kevin McCarthy's (R-CA) decision to give Fox News host Tucker Carlson thousands of hours of video from Jan. 6.

"This is unacceptable," she explained. "I'm ready for it. I don't know if a lot of other people are, but just as it was unacceptable for Kevin McCarthy to provide 41,000 hours of sensitive security footage to a biased talking head in an effort to rewrite what happened on January 6th."

"This is a new Republican playbook, apparently. Risk American safety and security to score political points," Plaskett insisted.

"The gentlelady's word should be struck," one Republican on the panel demanded. "That is out of line and outside the rules of this committee."

Plaskett objected.

"You don't get to determine what's struck down," Jordan snapped, declining to take down her words.

"This is a false narrative," Plaskett said of the hearing. "We're engaging in false narratives here, and we [Democrats] are going to tell the truth."

Following Plaskett's opening statement, Jordan felt the need to push back.

"You guys don't care," he remarked on Jan. 6. "You don't care. You don't want the American people to see what happened. The full video, transparency, you don't want that."

"And you don't want [the testimony of] two journalists who have been named personally by the Biden administration FTC in a letter," Jordan added. "They're here to tell their story. And frankly, I think they're brave individuals for being willing to come after they've been named in a letter from the Biden FTC."

"Is this your question time?" Plaskett asked.

"No, I'm responding to your ridiculous statements you made in your in your opening statement," Jordan shot back.

"OK, well, let's get on with it," Plaskett said.

"Oh, now we want to get on with it. So you can say all the things you want?" Jordan complained.

"I did in my opening statement as well as you had an opening statement," Plaskett pointed out. "You said what you needed to say in your opening statement. And I, as the ranking member, have used my time!"

Watch the video below from the U.S. House.

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an 3 23

all 26 Republicans on the powerful House Oversight Committee have refused to sign a simple, two-sentence statement denouncing white supremacy.

"We, Members of the Committee on Oversight and Accountability, together denounce white nationalism and white supremacy in all its forms, including the 'Great Replacement' conspiracy theory. These hateful and dangerous ideologies have no place in the work of the United States Congress or our Committee," the statement (copy below) from Ranking Member Jamie Raskin (D-MD) reads.

It comes after several Oversight Committee Republicans "invoked dangerous and conspiratorial rhetoric echoing the racist and nativist tropes peddled by white supremacists and right-wing extremists," during a February hearing on the "border crisis," Ranking Member Raskin said in a March 5 letter to Committee Chair James Comer (photo, top.) The Washington Post first reported on Raskin’s letter.

"In particular, some Members repeatedly described the number of migrants arriving at the border as an 'invasion,' and even went so far as to falsely accuse the Biden-Harris Administration of implementing a plan 'to deliberately open our border' for purposes of 'changing our culture'—mirroring language often used by MAGA extremists who believe that pro-immigration policies are designed to replace white populations with non-white immigrants and other racial minorities," Raskin's letter says.

Congressman Raskin is a former constitutional law professor who gained national prominence as the impeachment manager during the second impeachment of Donald Trump.

"As I explained to you at the hearing," his letter to Comer continues, "such language borrows from the 'Great Replacement' theory, the central dogma of contemporary white supremacy that has been repeatedly invoked by white nationalists to justify violent acts of domestic terrorism, including the mass murders of dozens of Americans at a Tops Supermarket in Buffalo, New York, the Tree of Life Synagogue in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, and a Walmart in El Paso, Texas."

All 21 Democrats on the Oversight Committee signed the statement, and all 26 Republicans refused. A Committee spokesperson called the statement a "distraction," according to The Independent.

the 26 Republican Representatives who refused to denounce white supremacy and white nationalism are (in order of appearance on the statement): James Comer, Jim Jordan, Mike Turner, Paul Gosar, Virginia Foxx, Glenn Grothman, Gary Palmer, Clay Higgins, Pete Sessions, Andy Biggs, Nancy Mace, Jake LaTurner, pat Fallon, Byron Donalds, Kelly Armstrong, Scott Perry, William Timmons, Tim Burchett, Marjorie Taylor Greene, Lisa McClain, Lauren Boebert, Russell Fry, Anna Paulina Luna, Chuck Edwards, Nick Langworthy, and Eric Burlison.

See a copy of the signed/unsigned statement below or at this link.

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an 3 23 raw

no lnx twt vid

Jamie Raskin (D-MD) blasted a House Select Committee on Covid-19 by noting that former President Donald Trump had refused for months to investigate the virus's origins but praised China President Xi Jinping instead.

:{:{}:

At a hearing to determine the origins of Covid on Wednesday, Raskin wondered why Republicans were not more upset with Trump's mishandling of the pandemic.

:{:{}:

"The COVID-19 pandemic came to America in 2020, of course, when Donald Trump was president," Raskin told the committee. "And that president's policy failures, magical thinking, and total recklessness caused, according to his own special advisor on COVID, Deborah Birx, the unnecessary death of hundreds of thousands of Americans."

Raskin said that answers "must come from objective, fact-based investigations informed by doctors, scientists, and public health experts."

"Whatever the origins of COVID-19, whether it is bats or bureaucrats, no finding will ever exonerate or rehabilitate Donald Trump for his lethal recklessness in mismanaging the crisis in America, which cost us more than a million lives," he continued. "Indeed, if COVID was actually the product of a lab leak, or the worst bioweapon of mass destruction ever invented, as some have argued, and obviously we don't have the scientific evidence to say any of this yet, it would not only not remove Donald Trump's culpability, it would only deepen his culpability in the most profound way."

The congressman offered a list of tweets in which Donald Trump praised Xi in the early days of the pandemic.

:{:{}:

"I'm just giving the committee a tiny taste of Donald Trump's fawning, star-struck, sycophantic embrace of everything the Chinese government was telling him in 2020," he explained. "He could have directed the intelligence community to lead a COVID-19 origins investigation back in March of 2020, three years ago. He did not. He wasted precious time minimizing the risk of the virus and lavishing his praise on President Xi."

:{:{}:

Raskin concluded: "He could have pushed back against the CCP for interfering with the WHO's investigation into its origins, and he could have asked our intelligence community to intervene. He did none of those things. And everyone should remember that. Let's take the politics out of it, and let's get to the bottom of what happened."

Watch the video below from the U.S. House.

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===

https://www.mediamatters.org/steve-bannon/steve-bannon-guest-says-house-weaponization-committee-failure-jim-jordans-part

:{:{}:

===

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cudgel threat enforce retaLIaTION

an 3 23

In late January, DirecTV dropped far-right Fox News competitor Newsmax from its satellite lineup when the two were unable to reach an agreement on license fees. MAGA Republicans were bitterly disappointed, as Newsmax prides itself on being more right-wing and more pro-Donald Trump than Fox News and Fox Business. However, DirecTV hasn't ruled out the possibility of bringing Newsmax back if they can come to an agreement on license fees.

Some of the MAGA Republicans who hated to see Newsmax removed from the DirecTV lineup are angrily accusing DirecTV of discriminating against the right. And one of them is Rep. James Comer (R-Kentucky), who now chairs the House Oversight Committee.

During a Friday, February 24 appearance on Newsmax, Comer threatened to use House Oversight against DirecTV if it doesn't restore Newsmax to its lineup.

Comer told Newsmax host John Bachman, "I'm very concerned. I'm very upset that DirecTV does not have Newsmax on there. I've been in constant communication with the leadership at AT&T and DirecTV. I have strongly encouraged them to meet with your CEO, Mr. (Chris) Ruddy, to get this worked out — or else! If anyone has ever watched the House Oversight Committee — any of our first three hearings — they have to ask themselves: Do they really want to go in front of the House Oversight Committee?"

Fox News continues to have the highest ratings on right-wing cable TV. But in MAGA World, Newsmax appeals largely to people who believe that Fox News and Fox Business aren't far enough to the right.

On Bachman's show, Comer told the host, "We're all huge fans of Newsmax. We don't like to see Newsmax not being offered on DirecTV, especially considering Newsmax is the, I think, the fourth highest-rated news show on TV now."

Comer also said, "And they have dozens of other news shows that have much lower ratings than Newsmax. So, I'm doing everything in my ability to see that this gets worked out. If it doesn't, then I would expect the Republican majority to begin to take steps to take action in this."

DirecTV, however, has maintained that its decision to drop Newsmax was merely a business/budgetary matter — not an effort to silence Republicans.

In late January, a DirecTV spokesperson told Fierce Video, "On multiple occasions, we made it clear to Newsmax that we wanted to continue to offer the network, but ultimately, Newsmax's demands for rate increases would have led to significantly higher costs that we would have to pass on to our broad customer base. Anyone, including our customers, can watch the network for free via NewsmaxTV.com, YouTube.com and on multiple streaming platforms like Amazon Fire TV, Roku, and Google Play. We continually evaluate the most relevant programming to provide our customers and expect to fill this available channel with new content."

Watch The Daily Beast's video here (subscription required).

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an 3 23

Rep. Steve Cohen (D-TN) called out House Judiciary Committee Chair Jim Jordan (R-OH) because he had no plans to investigate abuses at the Justice Department during the Trump administration.

At an Oversight hearing on Tuesday, Democrats argued that a rules package offered by Republicans was "cut and pasted" from the "right-wing echo chamber" and that it was full of "racist tropes."

"I've been concerned about the weaponization of the federal government program," Cohen said. "And I think it was pretty clear during the previous administration, [former Trump attorney] Michael Cohen went to jail for doing what Donald Trump asked him to do. Donald Trump was called Individual 1. He didn't go to jail. He didn't even go to jail when the administration changed, and Merrick Garland came in."

Cohen recalled that Trump's former attorney was forced to return to jail when he tried to write a book about the ordeal.

"It's come out; it was the Justice Department that did that," he continued. "Could we go, Mr. Chair, back into those issues and look at the weaponization that occurred during the Trump [administration], particularly that Michael Cohen incident?

However, Jordan said he only remembered the falsehoods Michael Cohen allegedly said during his testimony before Congress.

"But you do remember he went to jail?" Cohen asked.

"I remember that too," Jordan confirmed.

"And they put him back in when he was going to publish a book because they wanted him to not comment on it, and you do remember that when they put him back in jail, they put him in solitary confinement?" Cohen pressed.

"I don't recall the details," Jordan said.

"Should we not be able to study that because you don't know it?" the Tennessee Democrat wondered. "That's weaponization!"

Jordan, however, changed the subject and accused Democrats of "targeting parents."

"My Chairman, it's my time; I'm going to reclaim it," Cohen said.

"But you asked me a question," Jordan protested.

"That's not the answer," Cohen explained.

"You may not like — that's my answer!" Jordan exclaimed. "You may not like it, but I'm allowed to give the answer I want to give."

"I'm all for parents, but that's not the issue," Cohen snapped. "The issue is the weaponization of the Justice Department that happened under Trump like never before in our country's history."

House Republicans have vowed to investigate the so-called weaponization of the federal government by Democrats, corporations, and the "deep state."

Watch the video below from the House Oversight Committee.

===

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possible not knowing govt structure not a problem for base? asset even?

an 2 23

Secretary of Transportation Pete Buttigieg embarrassed House Oversight Committee Chairman James Comer Friday evening after he published a letter launching an investigation into the Transportation Secretary in the wake of the Norfolk Southerntoxic train derailment. The investigation notably is not into Norfolk Southern or the Dept. of Transportation itself, but into Secretary Buttigieg’s handling of the derailment.

"This incident is an environmental and public health emergency that now threatens Americans across state lines," Chairman Comer writes. “Despite the U.S. Department of Transportation's (DOT) responsibility to ensure safe and reliable transport in the United States, you ignored the catastrophe for over a week," he claims. “DOT needs to provide an explanation for its leadership’s apathy in the face of this emergency.”

"The fallout from the Ohio train derailment continues to develop. DOT’s National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) issued a preliminary report on February 23, 2023, which stopped short of declaring a concrete cause of the derailment,” Comer added, which is also false, as the Transportation Secretary pointed out in a tweet.

"I am alarmed to learn that the Chair of the House Oversight Committee thinks that the NTSB is part of our Department," Buttigieg said. “NTSB is independent (and with good reason). Still, of course, we will fully review this and respond appropriately.”

The investigation will also focus on the Biden administration’s massive – and bipartisan – infrastructure bill, which the President signed into law in late 2021. Infrastructure projects typically take years to be approved and completed. And yet Chairman Comer appeared to suggest the President’s infrastructure package should have prevented the train’s derailment – suggesting a lack of understanding of basic governmental processes.

"Under your leadership, DOT supported President Biden’s Infrastructure Bill, which included billions of dollars devoted to revamping America’s railways in an effort to make them safer and more efficient. Yet America now faces one of transportation’s largest failures, even while DOT seems to not lack available funding. In America, over 1,000 trains derail every year."

Comer’s letter is signed by 21 Republicans, but noticeably absent is the signature of the Oversight Committee’s Ranking Member, Democrat Jamie Raskin. It appears Raskin was not a part of the decision to send the letter.

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raw tom b an 2 23

On the heels of a Republican-led House Oversight and Accountability Committee grilling of Twitter executives over perceived bias against conservatives, the editorial board of the St. Louis Post-Dispatch offered up a post-mortem that summarized the proceedings as not only a waste of time but also detrimental to the Republican Party.

Last Wednesday, the committee, headed by Rep. James Comer (R-KY), attempted to make a major case out of a decision by Twitter executives to tamp down a New York Post story on the laptop belonging to Hunter Biden, the son of President Joe Biden.

In the words of Comer, "Twitter aggressively suppressed conservative elected officials, journalists and activists,” with Rep. Jim Jordan (R-OH) later chiming in, "I think you guys got played. I think you guys wanted to take it down. I think you guys got played by the F.B.I.”

With the Post-Dispatch editors pointing out that Twitter execs now believe it was a mistake to suppress the tweets, they added that the entire hearing hinged on the flimsiest of conspiracy theories and, "To say it blew up in their faces like a gag cigar is putting it mildly."

"The Republican obsession with proving Twitter conspired with Democrats and the FBI against conservatives boomeranged during a House hearing last week, exposing the wispiness of one of the new majority’s favorite made-up scandals," they wrote. "Republicans have asserted, based on nothing, that the platform was pressured by the FBI to tamp down the story for Joe Biden’s sake. It’s part of a broader narrative on the right that says, again with scant evidence, that mainstream social-media sites are in cahoots with liberals and against conservatives."

According to the editors, what transpired was "oafish" and nothing less than "disappointing" when all was said and done.

They wrote, "How they [Republicans] must have wished they hadn’t even uncorked this bottle when a witness further testified that, in fact,the company scuttled its standing prohibition on abusive language toward immigrants so it wouldn’t have to ban then-President Trumpfor his infamous, racist tweet in 2019 saying several American-born congresswomen of color should 'go back and help fix the totally broken and crime infested places from which they came.'"

They added that the GOP is headed down the road to doing more damage to itself which might root out the extremists in the party more interested in revenge than public policy.

"Maybe the GOP’s plan to spend the next two years in retaliatory investigations against Biden isn’t such a bad thing after all. Not if they all go like this," they concluded.

You can read the whole editorial here.

===

https://www.alternet.org/debbie-schultz-wasserman/

Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz (D-Fla.) did not hold back when she interrogated a Fox News legal analyst for offering “pure conjecture” during an appearance before the U.S. House of Representatives' newly established committee for the Weaponization of the Federal Government.

On Thursday, February 9, Fox News' Jonathan Turley, appeared before the committee as a witness called by Republican lawmakers. During his appearance, he discussed the so-called "Twitter files," which spawned from Twitter CEO Elon Musk sharing intel with journalists.

However, Wasserman Schultz appeared unsure about Turley actually having “unique knowledge” about the social media platform.

“Do you have any formal relationship with the company?” she asked.

“No, I just have an account,” replied Turley, to which, Schultz said, “So essentially your responses to the questions here today were your own opinion and pure conjecture.”

But despite Turley's remarks, Schultz pushed back for more clarity saying, “You said that you don’t have any specific or unique knowledge of Twitter, but you spoke as if you did. ... And so this is only just your opinion, would you say, as a Twitter account user?”

“No, I come to give legal analysis based on facts that are in the public domain,” Turley said.

Refusing to back down, Schultz offered Turley a harsh lesson on the real meaning of "legal analysis specifying that it is “another word for ‘opinion.'”

Watch the video below or at this link.

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an 2 23

no lnx etc

House Oversight Committee hearing held this week to purportedly prove that former Twitter executives colluded with federal government officials to cover up a 2020 New York Post article about Hunter Biden's laptop did not pan out the way Republican members hoped, The Daily Beast reports.

:{:{}:

Per CNN, hard-right GOPers in the House, including Rep. James Comer (R-TN), Rep. Jim Jordan (R-OH), and Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA), have allotted a significant amount of time to push their "factually unsupported narrative" that the so-called "collusion" is designed to suppress conservatives.

Ex-Twitter executives Yoel Roth, James Baker, and Vijaya Gadde, and Anika Collier Navaroli testified during the hearing that "it was a 'mistake' to briefly block the article over misinformation concerns," but they ensured the House members that there was no government involvement, Daily Beast reports.

READ MORE: GOP Congressional candidate encourages violence over the information surrounding Hunter Biden laptops

During the hearing, Comer asserted that Twitter intentionally abided by demands from the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) to cover up the Hunter Biden story "because they were 'terrified of Joe Biden not winning the election,'" according to CNN.

However, the GOP member's accusation backfired.

The former Twitter executives not only proved that there wasno government involvement in the Hunter Biden Laptop story, but also testified that former President Donald Trump "received preferential treatment for years" and "directly requested the site remove tweets that he didn’t like," according to The Daily Beast.

:{:{}:

Democratic Virginia Rep. Gerry Connolly showed that it was Trump's administration that attempted to have content removed in 2019 after model Chrissy Teigen tweeted that Trump is a "p***y a** b****."

And on the other hand, President Joe Biden's administration never called on the social media giant to have content taken down.

READ MORE: GOP lawmaker vows to investigate Twitter employees who may have helped to censor news on Hunter Biden's laptop

A former senior Trump aide told Rolling Stone, “It was strange to me when all of these investigations were announced because it was all about the exact same stuff that we had done [when Donald Trump was in office]."

:{:{}:

“It was normal," the aide added.

Additionally, CNN reports Navaroli "testified that the social media company ended its ban on abusive language against immigrants to 'go back to where they came from' so that Trump would not face repercussions for his racist 2019 attack on four minority Democratic congresswomen."

Still, the GOP members remain steadfast in pushing their theory.

:{:{}:

“My, my, my—what happens when you hold a hearing, and you can't prove your point?” Connolly asked.

WATCH: Marjorie Taylor Greene 'wrongly' declares her Twitter ban as illegal

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Marjorie Taylor Greene criticizes Tulsi Gabbard in Twitter rant for giving George Santos 'zero grace' ›

GOP lawmaker vows to investigate Twitter employees who may have helped to censor news on Hunter Biden's laptop ›

===

an raw 2 23

House Republicans will hold their first hearing on the alleged "weaponization" of the federal government against conservatives, and Fox News viewers will recognize plenty of familiar themes and face

Two current Fox News contributors, former Democratic Rep. Tulsi Gabbard and former FBI agent Nicole Parker, will testify Thursday at the House subcommittee hearing, along with GOP Sens. Chuck Grassley and Ron Johnson, constitutional lawyer Jonathan Turley and former FBI official Thomas Baker, reported Politico.

“They have very specific stories to tell. We’ll see what they say," said Rep. Kelly Armstrong (R-ND), "but this hearing was needed, outside of all of the politicization."

Rep. Jim Jordan (R-OH) will chair the subcommittee, which includes Rep. Matt Gaetz (R-FL) and Darrell Issa (R-CA), to investigate alleged unfair targeting of conservatives by the Justice Department and other federal agencies, and their work will run parallel to investigations by the Judiciary Committee, Oversight Committee and other panels, and their findings will likely get widespread airing on conservative media outlets.

"[Johnson will discuss] coordination between government agencies, Democrat members of Congress, and the liberal media to suppress and censor the truth," said a spokesperson for the Wisconsin senator.

Democrats selected Rep. Jamie Raskin (D-MD) and CNN contributor Elliott Williams, a former Justice Department official under Barack Obama, to give statements but not face questioning, and a House Democratic aide said Raskin was selected to be “a calm and sober voice on what will be a wild first panel.”

“He’s going to talk about the threats to our democracy posed by this select committee and why weaponizing congressional oversight against your political opponents is so dangerous,” the aide said.

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When conservative Republican John Boehner was House speaker during the Barack Obama years, he had nothing but disdain for Rep. Jim Jordan (R-Ohio). Boehner, in fact, has used the words “legislative terrorist” to describe the far-right congressman.

But Jordan went from being someone Boehner regarded as the U.S. House of Representatives’ lunatic fringe to chairing the House Judiciary Committee in 2023 under Republican Speaker Kevin McCarthy. Liberal Washington Post opinion columnist Greg Sargent examines Jordan’s recent activities in his February 7 column, warning that the Ohio Republican is turning that committee into a bastion of conspiracy theories.

“Rep. Jim Jordan (R-Ohio), chairman of the Judiciary Committee, has subpoenaed top Justice Department officials, supposedly to investigate the Department’s suppression of information about the persecution of conservative parents,” Sargent explains. “Republicans have long alleged that federal jackboots have terrorized parents for protesting at school board meetings about COVID-19 restrictions and teachings about race and sex.”

The columnist adds, “Democrats will no doubt respond by noting that this claim has been decisively debunked. But Democrats should use these hearings not just defensively, but also, affirmatively, to show that GOP rhetoric, much of it degenerate nonsense, has helped fuel a toxic atmosphere of threats and violence toward educators that has no business anywhere near your child’s school.”[elect principals?]

Rep. Eric Swalwell, a California Democrat known for his work on the House Judiciary Committee, discussed Jordan’s activities with Sargent.

The congressman said of House Judiciary Republicans, “They don’t want the FBI to investigate people on their side who they’ve spun up over, frankly, b******t claims. You have a right to say just about anything you want, but you don’t have a right to threaten violence.”

Democrats, according to Sargent, need to use House Judiciary hearings to show that Republicans are promoting an environment that is dangerous for educators.

“If Republicans think they can prove FBI harassment of conservatives, let’s air this out,” Sargent argues. “But Democrats can’t function just as fact-checkers, accusing Republicans of ‘conspiracy theories’ and complaining they are ‘stoking the culture wars.’ That could make Democrats seem defensive and responsive, which isn’t sufficient in an environment that’s increasingly shaped by full-blown information warfare.”

Sargent adds, “Instead, Democrats should make these hearings about what Republicans did. This entails using spectacle to show what happened to educators as a result of Republicans systematically smearing them with hateful propaganda. Why not try to bring in educators to testify emotionally about the threats and harassment they’ve faced?”

Read Greg Sargent’s full Washington Post column at this link.

===

an 2 23

its first hearing isn’t until Thursday but already Chairman Jim Jordan‘s Select Subcommittee on the Weaponization of the Federal Government is being mocked after the list of witnesses was released.

NBC News’ Garrett Haake reports testifying before the committee on Thursday will be ex-Democratic Congresswoman Tulsi Gabbard, U.S. Senator Ron Johnson (R-WI), U.S. Senator Chuck Grassley (R-IA), and former FBI special agent Nicole Parker.

Gabbard left the Democratic Party and is now an independent and a Fox News contributor. In 2019, Hillary Clinton suggested she was a Russian asset being groomed for a third-party presidential run. She sued the former Democratic presidential nominee and former U.S. Secretary of State but later dropped the defamation lawsuit.

Also, Gabbard “shared false information,” Forbes reported last year, “about U.S. involvement in Ukraine biological laboratories … giving credence to an unfounded Russian-backed conspiracy theory the U.S. has warned could serve as justification for Russia to use biological and chemical weapons against Ukraine.”

Sen. Johnson, who narrowly won re-election after being among the top promoters of Donald Trump’s “Big Lie,” is a conspiracy theorist who uses his Senate seat to spread false information about COVID and a host of other crises.

CNN’s Chris Cillizza branded Johnson the “Senate’s leading conspiracy theorist” just one year ago. The Washington Post reported last May that Sen. Johnson “expressed openness” to “a fervent anti-vaccination” commentator’s “idea that maybe the coronavirus vaccines are a conduit for deliberately giving people AIDS.”

Sen. Grassley has come under fire for his racist remarks about COVID-19, dangerously false claims about the IRS, and apparent falsehoods about the January 6 insurrection and its participants.

Last year The American Independent reported Grassley told a constituent “what you said is accurate.” According to The Independent, the constituent said during a town hall: “Knowing that the FBI and Capitol Police were complicit in Jan. 6, what have you done to get the political prisoners being held in gulag conditions out on bail?”

Some were quick to mock Chairman Jordan’s choice of witnesses to testify before his subcommittee’s first hearing.

“Johnson actively pushed the WI legislature & the VP to overturn the election. Tulsi used her perch in Congress to secretly meet with Assad & whitewash his war crimes. so in a sense, they are indeed experts on weaponizing gov’t.,” mocked former Hillary Clinton foreign policy spokesperson Jesse Lehrich.

Jim Manley, a top aide to then-Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, described the panel as “low energy.”

NBC News Justice reporter Ryan J. Reilly pre-deflated Parker’s possible contributions, citing her as saying: “’I was never asked to participate in anything that was political,’ Nicole Parker said in one of her Fox News hits (Hannity, specifically).”

Even CNN did not hide its skepticism, beginning its reporting with this line: “The GOP-led House select subcommittee on so-called weaponization of the federal government will draw upon a prominent ex-Democrat, two of their Republican Senate colleagues, and a former FBI agent in their first public hearing to discuss how they believe the government has been weaponized against conservatives, multiple sources familiar with the plans tell CNN.”

===

boing 2 23

after Kevin McCarthy caved to his insurrectionist pals, we've seen a number of insurrection-supporting congresspeople placed on some very important committees, making a mockery of congress. When notorious Trump-boot licker Matt Gaetz wanted to add the pledge of allegiance to House Judiciary Committee meetings, the democrats on the committee pointed out that he and some of his pals had already broken that oath.

Gonna be a long two years.

NBC News:

The fiery back-and-forth took place in a House Judiciary Committee meeting where members set rules for the current Congress. It began after Rep. Matt Gaetz, R-Fla., offered an amendment that would give the committee the opportunity to begin each of its meetings with the Pledge of Allegiance. He said the rule would give members "the ability to invite inspirational constituents" to be able to share and lead in the pledge.

Rep. Jerry Nadler, D-N.Y., the committee's ranking member, immediately objected, arguing that House members already recite the pledge on the floor every day. "I don't know why we should pledge allegiance twice in the same day to show how patriotic we are," he said.

Rep. Hank Johnson, D-Ga., noted that many Republicans on the committee voted against certifying the 2020 presidential election on Jan. 6, 2021. Rep. David Cicilline, D-R.I., then said he was introducing an amendment to Gaetz's amendment that clarified that the pledge cannot be led by anyone who has supported an insurrection against the United States in any way.

"This pledge is an affirmation of your defense of democracy and the Constitution," Cicilline. "It's hard to take that claim seriously if in fact, an individual in any way supported an insurrection against the government."

===

impeach mayorkas 2/2 by biggs

basically no change title 42? in court? biden admin expanded countries on it?

an 2 23

Critics of Rep. Jim Jordan of Ohio, including some conservative Republicans, have long described the ultra-MAGA congressman as an example of style over substance. To Jordan’s detractors, he is a showman and a buffoon, not a serious lawmaker.

On the right, former House Speaker John Boehner detests Jordan and has described him as a “legislative terrorist.”And when former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi was putting together a bipartisan select committee on the January 6, 2021 insurrection, she made it clear that Jordan would not be a part of it. Pelosi welcomed the participation of two right-wing GOP conservatives — then-Rep. Liz Cheney of Wyoming and then-Rep. Adam Kinzinger of Illinois — but she believed that Jordan’s theatrics would make a mockery of the committee.

But Rep. Kevin McCarthy of California, now House speaker, regards Jordan as an ally. And according to a report for The Hill by journalists Rebecca Beitsch and Emily Brooks, the congressman and staunch Donald Trump defender now enjoys greater prominence in the U.S. House of Representatives than ever before.

In an article published on February 2, Beitsch and Brooks explain, “Once a thorn in the side of House GOP leaders, Jordan has been elevated to be a top attack dog against Democrats. With the new power to not only direct congressional hearings but utilize subpoenas, Jordan will be both a standard-bearer for the GOP base and a sculptor of the Washington political landscape for the next two years.”

After serving in the Ohio State Legislature for over a decade, Jordan was first elected to the U.S. House in 2006. That year, Democrats enjoyed a major blue wave thanks to frustration with the George W. Bush Administration and the war in Iraq. But Jordan entered Congress via a highly gerrymandered district and has been reelected eight times; he is now serving his ninth term and has been a key member of the far-right House Freedom Caucus.

During the Boehner-era House, making Jordan chairman of the House Judiciary Committee would have been unthinkable. Now, in the McCarthy-era House, Jordan holds that position.

“It’s a role that will leave the fiery Jordan front and center in representing the GOP, this time imbued with subpoena power as he works to arm-wrestle Biden Administration agencies previously under little obligation to comply with minority oversight,” Beitsch and Brooks note.

Read The Hill’s full report at this link.

===

an 223

One of the most mysterious chapters of former Attorney General Bill Barr's tenure at the Department of Justice got a little sunlight last week when the New York Times published a deeply reported piece on the Durham Investigation, Donald Trump's "investigation of the Mueller investigation." We knew that Special Counsel John Durham, a man whose reputation was one of seriousness and rectitude, had only brought two prosecutions but failed to win convictions in both. And we knew that there had been turmoil in his office with several people resigning at what seemed to be pivotal moments in the case. But, until now, we didn't know the details — and they are explosive.

The Times story, reportedby Charlie Savage, Adam Goldman and Katie Benner, essentially reveals that the investigation which was supposed to blow the lid off of the Russia investigation by proving that it was a "partisan witch hunt," was itself a witch hunt — only on behalf of Trump. Barr was enabling and covering for Trump throughout his tenure as we saw with his preemptive press conference to diminish the Mueller Report and mislead the public as to its conclusions and his willingness to back Trump's strategy to discredit Vote-By Mail during the 2020 campaign. Even when he finally deserted the sinking ship in December of 2020, his letter of resignation showered Trump with praise even as he knew he was plotting to obstruct the peaceful transfer of power. But the Durham investigation was his personal project and it turns out that it was a monstrous abuse of power.

The whole point of naming a Special Counsel is to remove the taint of political interference by keeping a distance between the politically appointed Attorney General and the investigation. Barr did not do that. In fact, he directly participated in the probe by traveling overseas to the United Kingdom and Italy with Durham to interrogate their intelligence officials about whether they helped American investigators frame Trump which apparently offended them to no end since they did nothing of the sort. Durham and Barr became bosom buddies, throwing back scotch together at the end of the work day and having dinner on a regular basis. And Barr, who was convinced that the CIA had created the whole "Russia hoax," eagerly ran interference with the Intelligence agencies for him as needed. Evidently, Durham was very taken with Barr and agreed from the get-go that Trump had been set up.

We had previously heard that Barr and Durham went to Italy on some sort of Hardy Boys expedition, but now we learn that they had been told by Italian authorities about some very credible information that Trump had committed serious financial crimes. Barr and Durham realized that it wasn't something they could completely ignore (as much as they probably wanted to) so Barr assigned that case to Durham instead of another prosecutor and opened a criminal investigation. This was then leaked to the public in a way that implied they had found evidence of criminal behavior on the part of the FBI, the intelligence agencies or possibly even Hillary Clinton. They certainly didn't let on that they were investigating Trump.

From what we know, Durham quietly closed that "investigation" without much fuss. Considering the rest of their behavior one can't help but suspect that he and Barr either didn't look too closely or decided that revealing Trump's crimes wasn't worth jeopardizing their crusade to expose the "deep state."

This is stunningly unethical behavior by an Attorney General. But we shouldn't be too surprised. After all, Barr got the job in the first place by sending an unsolicited letter to Trump in which he criticized the Mueller investigation by claiming that a president can't obstruct justice. In fact, Barr pretty clearly believes former president Richard Nixon's famous line "when a president does it it's not illegal" since his view, accordingto legal expert Marty Lederman, was that "the president has absolute constitutional authority over actions by executive branch officers in carrying out law enforcement powers given to them by Congress." If you ever wondered where Trump got the idea that the Constitution gave him the power to "do whatever I want," look no further than Bill Barr.

He and Durham colluded together for months and came up with zilch. There simply was no evidence that the FBI, DOJ, CIA or the Mueller team had done anything untoward. But that didn't stop Durham. He decided to focus on Trump's bête noire Hillary Clinton and he brought a couple of cases designed to show that she set Trump up with bogus claims of Russian collusion. That blew up in his face too. He's still in business today doing what we don't know, yet Attorney General Merrick Garland doesn't seem to be willing to pull the plug.

As a New York Times op-ed by David Firestone points out, this exposè pretty much destroys Barr's attempt to rehabilitate himself with the public. He famously dissed Trump repeatedly in his January 6 Committee testimony andwrote a book in which he turns on his former boss, calling him "detached from reality" and urging Republicans not to nominate him for the presidency in 2024. But he narrows his criticism to the post-election period conveniently forgetting the previous four years of incompetence, corruption and mental instability which Barr encouraged. It's a little too little and way too late.

Unfortunately, while Barr's lame attempt at rehabilitation may have finally been put on ice by these latest revelations, the conspiracy theories that fueled it have not. As Firestone notes:

Republicans in the House are launching a new snipe hunt for proof that these same government offices were "weaponized" against conservatives, an expedition that is likely to be no more effective than Mr. Durham's and Mr. Barr's.

In fact, now that I think about it, this might be the one thing that will make Bill Barr and John Durham look good by comparison. These House extremists will air every half baked, fever dream of twitter randos and QAnon weirdos in public hearings and present them as facts. At least Barr and Durham mostly kept their conspiracy theories to themselves over scotch and prime rib. That's about the best you can say for them

===

mma `1 23

STEVE BANNON (HOST): Their complete meltdown over all these investigations. I think the a — you've got Oversight, you have Judiciary, you got House Intel, we're now going to have a special committee on the COVID virus and particularly Wuhan lab, MTG is on that. But, the jewel of the crown, I think, at least right now, has got to be Weaponization of Government. This is going to a classic like Church, maybe even harder-hitting.

an me 1 23

A new analysis is criticizing Rep. James Comer's (R-KY) blatant double standard regarding former President Donald Trump's classified documents.

Like many Republican lawmakers, Comer has had difficulty seeing Trump and President Joe Biden's situations through an unbiased lens. However, MSNBC's Steven Benen is explaining how the two cases differ vastly.

"There are obviously a handful of ongoing controversies surrounding national officeholders and alleged mishandling of classified materials, but by any sensible measure, the controversy surrounding Donald Trump is qualitatively different," Benen wrote.

He continued:

After all, the former president, unlike President Joe Biden and former Vice President Mike Pence, ignored requests to return the relevant documents, and failed to comply with a federal subpoena," he explained. "And stands accused of obstructing the retrieval process. And reportedly proposed a possible trade in which he said he’d consider returning materials, but only if officials gave him something else in return. And launched a months-long crusade against federal law enforcement, literally equating the FBI with 'the Gestapo.'

Despite Trump’s track record of misconduct, Benen notes that the House Oversight Committee, chaired by Comer, does not appear to have any interest in investigating the former president.. Expounding on the issue, Benen wrote, "The Republican chairman of the panel, Rep. James Comer of Kentucky has not only defended the former president’s actions, he’s also dismissed the scandal’s importance."

"Comer is, however, deeply interested in pursuing the Biden story, despite the fact that it appears far less serious. How does the GOP chairman explain the double standard? He’s still working on that," Benen wrote.

Referencing Comer's Sunday night discussion with CNN’s Pamela Brown, Benen noted that the Republican lawmaker was asked one compelling question: "Does he have evidence of influence peddling surrounding Biden and classified documents?"

Comer responded saying, “We don’t know. We want to look.”

To that answer, Benen offered a critical assessment, writing, "It was like watching a snake eat its own tail."

Following that interview with CNN's Brown, Comer appeared the National Press Club while in Washington, D.C. where he explained his reason for not putting energy into the Trump classified documents investigation.

“Well, there’s a special counsel,” Comer explained. “There’s a special counsel and I am confident that that special counsel is looking into everything.”

However, Benen has pushed back with a detailed argument explaining why Comer's explanation falls flat. "It was not a good point," Comer noted.

"As the chairman of the House Oversight Committee really ought to know, Attorney General Merrick Garland appointed a special counsel to scrutinize the Biden matter, too," Benen wrote. "If the existence of a special counsel investigating Trump leads Comer to believe he should focus his attention elsewhere, then the existence of a special counsel investigating the Biden story should lead him to the same conclusion."

===

an 1 23

powerful Chairman of the House Oversight Committee, James Comer (R-KY) is being highly mocked after declaring he will investigate President Joe Biden for “influence peddling” despite admitting there’s little if any evidence President Biden has engaged in influence peddling.

When pressed, he pointed to Biden’s classified documents and one alleged email from Hunter Biden’s laptop.

But when pressed again by a frustrated CNN host, asking why he’s not investigating ex-president Donald Trump, he couldn’t offer a valid reason, except to claim there no evidence of it.

Some were quick to point out the Trump’s tenure in the White House was filled with alleged influence peddling operations.

Here’s Chairman Comer with CNN’s Pamela Brown on Sunday. While the transcript is a bit simplified, it’s not far off.

JAMES COMER: We're investigating the Biden family for influence peddling\n\n

CNN'S PAMELA BROWN: But why not investigate the Trump family for the same?\n\nCOMER: We have no evidence\n\n

BROWN: What evidence do you have for Biden?\n\nCOMER: That's what we're investigating\u201d

— Aaron Rupar (@Aaron Rupar)=

---

an 1 23

For months, Fox News and other right-wing media outlets relentlessly hyped former special counsel John Durham’s probe of the Russia investigation. Durham, appointed by former U.S. Attorney General Bill Barr, conducted what was essentially an investigation of an investigation. And Fox News pundits, along with former President Donald Trump, predicted that the probe would be seriously damaging to prominent Democrats.

But when Durham finally delivered his final report for the probe, it was hardly the total annihilation of Democrats that Fox News hosts were expecting. Liberal pundits on MSNBC were quick to describe Durham’s findings as mostly a “nothingburger.” And according to reporting in the *New York Times, Durham’s investigation included some questionable Russian sources.*

Rolling Stone’s Nikki McCann Ramirez describes those Russian sources as “sketchy,” and she argues that House Republicans will probably “ignore” Durham’s probe when they conduct their new select committee on the “weaponization of the federal government.”

Ramirez explains, “Earlier this month, Kevin McCarthy announced the creation of a new ‘weaponization of the federal government’ select committee aimed at investigating overreach by the Justice Department. One case that House Republicans are likely to ignore is special counsel John Durham’s probe into the Russia investigation, despite the New York Times reporting on Thursday, (January 26) that Durham and former Attorney General Bill Barr, who appointed him, may have abused their investigative powers in a litany of ways, including by using sketchy Russian intelligence to gain access to the e-mails of an aide to Hungarian billionaire George Soros, a frequent target of right-wing conspiracies.”

The Rolling Stone journalist points out that according to the New York Times’ reporting, Durham “seized on dubious Russian intelligence memos in order to target Leonard Benardo, the executive vice president of Soros’ Open Society Foundations.”

“According to interviews conducted by the Times,” Ramirez observes, "despite significant factual inconsistencies in the memos being raised by investigators, the special counsel reportedly went to great lengths to obtain information on the contents of Benardo’s e-mails. When a judge struck down a request from his office to access the information, citing a lack of evidence compelling enough to overwrite privacy laws, Durham reportedly attempted to circumvent her decision through a grand jury. While the Times was unable to ascertain if Benardo was subpoenaed by Durham, he did voluntarily provide the special counsel with the requested information.”

Ramirez describes Durham’s investigation as “primarily a giant waste of time and resources.”

“It’s the exact type of partisan witch hunt one might think a House committee on the ‘weaponization of the federal government’ might want to investigate, but Rep. Jim Jordan (R-Ohio), who will run the subcommittee, is unlikely to bring it to the table,” Ramirez writes. “Jordan, a devout Trump loyalist, repeatedly lauded the Durham investigation, and publicly affirmed his belief that the probe would result in criminal penalties for those under Barr and Durham’s scrutiny.”

Read Rolling Stone’s full article at this link.

===

https://www.businessinsider.com/gop-hard-right-rewarded-after-mccarthy-stance-boebert-plum-role-2023-1

no lnx

GOP Freedom Caucus is reaping its reward for holding House speaker election ransom, with even holdout Boebert given plum committee role

Sinéad Baker Jan 18, 2023,

GOP Freedom Caucus members initially held out on voting for Kevin McCarthy for House speaker.

Many have now received key appointments, including Lauren Boebert on the Oversight Committee.

McCarthy reportedly flipped members of the group by pledging committee seats for ultraconservatives.

Members of the ultra-conservative Freedom Caucus have benefited from holding back on supporting Rep. Kevin McCarthy's bid for House Speaker, with members, including Rep. Lauren Boebert, now receiving roles on key committees.

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Boebert and several other Freedom Caucus Republicans have been given seats on the House Oversight Committee, the main oversight body in the House of Representatives.

The committee will lead any investigations that Republicans launch into President Joe Biden and his administration.

Boebert has regularly criticized Biden, both questioning his competence and suggesting that his family are a "crime family."

Reps. Byron Donalds, Paul Gosar, and Scott Perry, other members of the Freedom Caucus, were also put on the committee, Axios reported.

Members of the Freedom Caucus, which include vocal Trump supporters and 2020 election deniers, repeatedly refused to support McCarthy in his bid for House speaker.

It took 15 rounds of voting for McCarthy to eventually get the support he required. Boebert never voted for him, even in the final ballot, when she was one of six holdouts.

McCarthy's bid to become the House speaker earlier this month was one of the most drawn out votes for the position in history. Most of the holdouts were members of the Freedom Caucus, with many of those flipping to vote for McCarthy in later ballots only after he agreed to key demands.

The New York Times reported in January that among the concessions McCarthy agreed to was granting ultraconservative members of the party approval over a third of the seats on the Rules Committee, which controls which legislation reaches the House floor.

Rep. Andy Bigs, a caucus member who didn't vote for McCarthy, and Rep. Dan Bishop, a caucus member who eventually gave his support, have kept their roles on the House Judiciary Committee,NBC News reported.

Meanwhile, Rep. Josh Brecheen, who voted for McCarthy on the 12th ballot, was given a seat on the Homeland Security Committee, while Reps. Mike Cloud and Andrew Clyde, who both eventually voted for McCarthy, have been given seats on the House Appropriations Committee.

Caucus member Marjorie Taylor Greene, who supported McCarthy throughout the process, was given a seat on theHomeland Security and Oversight Committees, and pledged on Tuesday to investigate Biden.

It is still not clear how much power McCarthy had to concede to finally get the role he has long coveted, Insider's Taiyler Simone Mitchell reported earlier this month.

Republicans won control of the House in the November midterms, but only by a slim majority, meaning that internal disagreements could limit their chance of pushing ahead with stated goals, including launching investigations into the Biden administration.

Republicans have 222 seats in the House, compared with 213 for the Democrats.

Read next

NEWS

The House speaker battle showed a 'schism within a schism' in the GOP as MTG and Matt Gaetz were on opposite sides and even a plea from Trump couldn't sway some of his biggest supporters

Freedom Caucus

Kevin McCarthy

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===

1 23 intercept

....Jordan and the Republicans are trying to assume the mantle of one of the most iconic investigative committees in congressional history.

But the differences between the Church Committee and Jordan’s new subcommittee are stark, observes Loch Johnson, who served as an aide to Church on the committee and later wrote a firsthand account of the committee’s work. “The Church Committee was strongly oriented toward following the documentary evidence that we were able to uncover,” said Johnson. “The inquiry was driven not by ideology, revenge, or anything else but the facts.” Today’s Republicans, he added, seem “motivated by ideology and a sense of grievance, starting with the ‘stolen election’ of 2020.”

Johnson and others argue that what the Republicans are creating is unlikely to be anything like the Church Committee, especially if, as seems almost certain, it descends into conspiracy theories about a mythical “deep state” that is out to get Trump and conservatives.

The existence of an anti-Trump “deep state” has become one of the most persistent conspiracy theories on the right and feeds into the anger and resentment against the government held by pro-Trump forces, including Jordan. Like all powerful and lasting conspiracy theories, it relies on some basic facts — but then turns reality on its head to reach a fantastical conclusion.

It is true that America is burdened with a sprawling and ever-growing military-industrial complex built on a network of relationships linking the Pentagon; the CIA; Homeland Security; defense, intelligence, and counterterrorism contractors; and many others in a powerful and partially hidden web that, over the past few decades, has pushed the nation into a period of nearly endless war. The traditional post-World War II military-industrial complex grew steadily for decades despite President Dwight Eisenhower’s famous warning about its rising power in his 1961 farewell address: “In the councils of government, we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex.” Its power expanded exponentially after the September 11 attacks as counterterrorism and homeland security became big businesses, making it far more difficult for the United States to ever reduce its paranoia over the threat of terrorism.

But today’s combined military, intelligence, and counterterrorism complex is a capitalistic, pro-military center of gravity in American society. It is not anti-Trump or anti-conservative, and it is definitely not a secret political organization bent on imposing “woke” views on Americans.

In fact, it was the work of the Church Committee that helped ensure that the “deep state” is nothing more than a right-wing conspiracy theory today. In the first three decades after World War II, the U.S. intelligence community faced no real oversight or outside scrutiny, and as a result, the CIA, the FBI, and the NSA grew beyond presidents’ ability to control and became increasingly lawless. The reforms created as a result of the Church Committee helped to bring the intelligence community fully under the rule of law for the first time. By disclosing a series of shocking abuses of power, Church and his committee created rules of the road for the intelligence community that largely remain in place today.

The Church Committee’s work represented a watershed moment in American history — which is why Republicans are now so eager to co-opt its name. But there is no evidence that Jordan plans to follow the earlier panel’s serious and comprehensive approach. In fact, the involvement of Jordan and other House Republicans in Trump’s efforts to overturn the 2020 presidential election already constitutes an obvious conflict of interest. Rep. Hakeem Jeffries, the New York Democrat who is now House minority leader, tweeted that “extreme MAGA Republicans have established a Select Committee on Insurrection Protection.”

RATHER THAN BEING a true heir to the Church Committee, Jordan’s subcommittee seems destined to follow the pattern of the Army-McCarthy hearings of 1954. Jordan and today’s Republicans are employing the same kind of resentment and grievances against “elites” that fueled Joseph McCarthy, and Jordan also seems destined to use some of McCarthy’s tactics, targeting individual officials to claim they are “woke” or part of the “deep state” — updated versions of McCarthy’s phraseology about “Communist subversion.” It’s no coincidence that Roy Cohn, who worked as chief counsel to McCarthy during the Army-McCarthy hearings, later became a key mentor to Trump in the work of launching vicious political attacks.

Previously an obscure back-bench Republican senator from Wisconsin, McCarthy surged to fame in 1950, when he falsely claimed in a speech in Wheeling, West Virginia, to have a list of Communists in the State Department, triggering a period of intense paranoia and witch hunting that is now known as the McCarthy era. After he became a committee chair in 1953, McCarthy switched his focus to the Army, with Cohn by his side.

By going after the State Department and then the Army, McCarthy took on two of the most important and tradition-bound institutions in the United States at the time. The State Department had not fought back successfully against McCarthy, but the Army did. After McCarthy charged Army leaders with ignoring evidence of Communist subversion at a military facility in New Jersey, the Army went on the attack, accusing McCarthy of seeking special treatment for David Schine, a McCarthy consultant and friend of Cohn’s. The charges and counter-charges ultimately led to a long-running series of nationally televised hearings that garnered huge audiences, pitting McCarthy and Cohn against Joseph Welch, an urbane outside lawyer brought in to represent the Army.

“We’re headed for something that combines a witch hunt with a circus.”

In a televised hearing on June 9, 1954, McCarthy and Welch engaged in a historic showdown, with Cohn looking on. Bitter at Welch, McCarthy publicly raised questions about the loyalty of Fred Fisher, a lawyer at Welch’s law firm. Welch’s devastating response — “Have you no sense of decency?” — has gone down in history as the moment McCarthy’s power was broken.

In December 1954, the Senate finally voted to censure McCarthy; by 1957, he was dead.

Does the shame that finally brought down McCarthy still have the power to curb Republican excesses? Johnson, Church’s former aide, isn’t so sure.

“We’re headed for something that combines a witch hunt with a circus,” Johnson said, noting that the so-called new Church Committee “is likely to make the 1950s McCarthy hearings appear, in retrospect, rather benign.”

CONTACT THE AUTHOR:

James Risen

===

mma 1 23

Mainstream news outlets are already failing in their coverage of a newly created House Select Subcommittee on the Weaponization of the Federal Government by allowing false Republican claims to go unchallenged, and omitting crucial context about suppression of left-wing groups at the hands of federal law enforcement.

The new committee is chaired by Rep. Jim Jordan (R-OH), and was reportedly established as a concession to hardline opponents of Speaker Kevin McCarthy (R-CA) in his recent, rocky bid for the chamber’s top office. Jordan and his team have set their sights on the Department of Justice, the FBI, the IRS, and other offices that Republicans falsely claim are specifically targeting and persecuting conservatives.

In describing the committee’s investigative prospects, several mainstream outlets allowed false or misleading claims to go unchallenged.

Axios described Rep. Thomas Massie’s (R-KY), who has announced his spot on the subcommittee, as “a libertarian-minded conservative long skeptical of the federal security apparatus,” who “pointed to IRS targeting of Tea Party groups in the 2010s and Trump's sparring with the FBI as inflection points.”

Axios failed to inform its readers that Massie’s claim of a partisan witch hunt by the IRS is false. Although the IRS did audit some Tea Party groups, the agency also targeted “scores” of progressive groups for audits as well.

The New York Times reported that the committee is planning to investigate “allegations that the federal government encouraged Twitter to discriminate against Republicans and the treatment of conservative or right-wing protesters at school board meetings and abortion clinics.”

Readers of the Times’ coverage wouldn’t know that Twitter, in fact, has shown a bias toward promoting conservative content, not suppressing it. Conservatives have also claimed, falsely, that the DOJ has targeted parents at school boards, including identifying them as domestic terrorists. Although the Times didn’t use that phrase, their coverage failed to challenge the myth that conservative parents are facing federal persecution.

One of the focuses of the subcommittee is likely to be an examination of the FBI and DOJ’s case against a group of men who plotted to kidnap Michigan Governor Gretchen Whitmer. The FBI used undercover agents and informants in their investigation, which conservatives have argued could amount to entrapment.

In Politico’s article on the subcommittee, they quoted Rep. Dan Bishop (R-NC), who cited the Whitmer case, and asked, “Exactly what is the line on entrapment and then the law on entrapment?”

Although that is a fair question to ask in the abstract, Politico’s readers could be left thinking that the FBI specifically uses informants against right-wing movements. In fact, the FBI has been using informants extensively against Muslims at least since 9/11. John Miller, a high ranking police officer turned conservative pundit turned CNN analyst exemplifies the right-wing impulse towards increased investigations of Muslim communities.

None of these articles include broader historical context, which is that the FBI has disproportionately targeted left-wing movements since its inception. None of them include more recent examples of the FBI targeting the left, either, especially FBI operations to infiltrate and spy on Black activists, including creating the ridiculous category of “Black Identity Extremist” to justify the Bureau’s actions.

Those real documented examples of FBI overreach are nowhere to be found in this overly credulous mainstream coverage. Nor are readers given an adequate sense of what this committee is likely actually about, as detailed recently by a Trump-aligned think tank called the Center for Renewing America, which released a proposed federal budget sharing almost the exact same title as the new subcommittee.

CRA is run by Christian nationalist Russ Vought, who served as former President Donald Trump’s director of the Office of Management and Budget. His organization’s budget proposal makes clear that the conservative aim here is unleashing the FBI on the right’s political enemies while ensuring immunity for themselves.

All of that context is crucial to understanding this new subcommittee, and the new Republican House majority writ large. Jordan and company haven’t even begun their work, but mainstream outlets are already falling short.

===

no lnx vids see comer anno

[https://www.alternet.org/james-comer/](no%20lnx%20vids%20see%20comer

https://www.alternet.org/james-comer/

U.S.%20Rep.%20James%20Comer%20of%20Kentucky,%20the%20Republican%20chair%20of%20the%20powerful%20House%20Oversight%20Committee%20is%20repeatedly%20pushing%20a%20baseless%20narrative%20that%20President%20Joe%20Biden,%20who%20has%20served%20his%20nation%20for%2050%20years,%20is%20“compromised.”

Chairman%20Comer,%20who%20has%20promoted%20the%20false%20theory%20of%20fraud%20in%20the%202020%20election,%20blaming%20alleged%20“troubling%20reports%20of%20irregularities%20and%20improprieties”%20on%20Democrats,%20has%20been%20regularly%20criticized.%20He%20was%20deemed%20“a%20fundamentally%20unserious,%20dishonest,%20laughable%20caricature,”%20by%20Democratic%20strategist%20Sam%20Cornale%20on%20Wednesday,%20and%20mocked%20by%20The%20Washington%20Post’s%20Dana%20Milbank%20last%20year.

“In%20interviews%20with%20Fox%20News%20and%20other%20public%20pronouncements,%20Comer%20has%20alleged%20that%20the%20president’s%20son%20is%20responsible%20for%20just%20about%20everything,”%20Milbank%20wrote%20last%20year.%20“Why%20is%20fentanyl%20flowing%20into%20the%20United%20States?%20Hunter%20Biden.%20Why%20is%20President%20Biden%20pushing%20electric%20vehicles?%20Hunter%20Biden.%20Why%20isn’t%20the%20president%20tougher%20on%20Russian%20oligarchs?%20Hunter%20Biden.%20Why%20isn’t%20the%20administration%20pinning%20the%20pandemic%20on%20a%20Wuhan%20lab%20leak%20and%20battling%20China%20over%20currency%20manipulation?%20Hunter%20Biden%20and%20Hunter%20Biden.%20Why%20did%20the%20United%20States%20rejoin%20the%20Paris%20climate%20accord?%20Hunter%20Biden.”

On%20Tuesday,%20Fox%20News’%20Sean%20Hannity%20led%20a%20highly-criticized%20interview%20with%20Speaker%20Kevin%20McCarthy,%20Majority%20Leader%20Steve%20Scalise,%20Judiciary%20Chair%20Jim%20Jordan,%20and%20Oversight%20Chair%20James%20Comer%20that%20was%20shockingly%20filmed%20inside%20the%20U.S.%20House%20of%20Representatives.

READ%20MORE:%20‘The%20Deep%20State’%20Wants%20to%20‘Wipe%20Out%20the%20American%20Cowboy’%20Warns%20GOP%20Congressman%20in%20Conspiracy-Laden%20Rant%20%28Video%29

New%20York%20University%20Professor%20Ruth%20Ben-Ghiat,%20an%20expert%20on%20fascism%20and%20authoritarian%20leaders,%20responded%20by%20declaring,%20“Americans,%20I%20give%20you…President%20Murdoch%20and%20the%20coronation%20of%20Fox%20News%20as%20state%20media.”

Hannity%20and%20the%20top%20Republicans%20were%20surrounded%20by%20dozens%20of%20House%20Republicans,%20sitting%20quietly,%20as%20the%20Fox%20News%20personality%20promoted%20their%20talking%20points.

In%20addition%20to%20posting%20video,%20journalist%20Matt%20Laslo%20tweeted,%20“Hannity%20noted%20to%20the%20lawmakers%20%28who%20are%20obediently%20sitting%20and%20saying%20nothing%20which%20is%20WILD%29%20that%20many%20of%20the%20lawmakers%20in%20attendance%20might%20not%20make%20it%20on%20TV%20tonight%20but%20they%20gave%20up%20an%20hour%20to%20support%20the%20Speaker.”

But%20Chairman%20Comer%20made%20news%20for%20two%20remarks%20%28both%20seen%20in%20the%20clip%20below%29:%20calling%20Ukraine%20–%20which%20is%20fighting%20to%20protect%20democracy%20in%20Europe%20and%20thus%20around%20the%20globe%20–%20an%20“adversary”%20of%20the%20United%20States,%20and%20strongly%20suggesting%20President%20Joe%20Biden%20is%20“compromised.”

READ%20MORE:%20Watch:%20Democrats%20File%20Ethics%20Complaint%20Against%20George%20Santos%20After%20GOP%20Leadership%20Calls%20It%20an%20‘Internal’%20Matter

“You%20know%20there’s%20a%20pattern%20here%20with%20Communist%20China,%20with%20Ukraine,%20with%20Russia,%20with%20our%20adversaries%20across%20the%20world,”%20he%20told%20Hannity.%20“And%20you%20look%20at%20the%20bad%20decisions%20that%20Joe%20Biden%20makes%20and%20this%20White%20House%20makes%20every%20day%20that%20has%20a%20detrimental%20effect%20on%20every%20American%20–%20you%20wonder,%20is%20this%20President%20compromised?”

Hannity%20himself%20has%20promoted%20the%20baseless%20claim%20that%20President%20Biden%20may%20be%20“compromised.”

In%20a%20December%20interview%20with%20Comer,%20Hannity,%20known%20to%20have%20had%20nightly%20conversations%20advising%20Donald%20Trump%20when%20he%20was%20president,%20concluded%20with%20this%20question:%20“Do%20you%20believe%20it’s%20possible%20Joe%20Biden%20is%20compromised%20by%20Russia%20and%20China?”%20Comer%20dutifully%20replied,%20“I%20fear%20that%20he%20is.”

That%20word,%20“compromised,”%20is%20now%20being%20used%20by%20Comer%20and%20his%20fellow%20House%20Republicans%20repeatedly%20against%20President%20Biden%20–%20and%20his%20family.

On%20Monday,%20U.S.%20Rep.%20Andy%20Biggs%20%28R-AZ%29,%20the%20former%20chair%20of%20the%20far-right%20House%20Freedom%20Caucus,%20a%20former%20policy%20advisor%20to%20an%20anti-LGBTQ%20hate%20group,%20and%20an%20alleged%20co-founder%20of%20the%20Stop%20the%20Steal%20movement,%20called%20President%20Biden,%20First%20Lady%20Dr.%20Jill%20Biden,%20and%20Hunter%20Biden,%20“compromised”%20–%20while%20making%20false%20claims%20about%20classified%20documents%20%28and%20the%20Biden%20think%20tank%29%20that%20were%20immediately%20handed%20over%20to%20the%20National%20Archives.

On%20Wednesday,%20Chairman%20Comer%20again%20baselessly%20used%20the%20word%20“compromised”%20against%20President%20Biden.

“The%20Committee%20on%20Oversight%20and%20Accountability%20is%20investigating%20President%20Biden’s%20involvement%20in%20his%20family’s%20foreign%20business%20practices%20and%20international%20influence%20peddling%20schemes,”%20Chairman%20Comer%20wrote%20in%20an%20official%20letter%20published%20by%20ABC%20News,%20to%20Treasury%20Secretary%20Janet%20Yellen,%20making%20an%20unsubstantiated%20clam%20as%20if%20it%20were%20fact.

“The%20Committee%20is%20investigating%20President%20Biden’s%20knowledge%20of%20and%20role%20in%20these%20schemes%20to%20assess%20whether%20he%20has%20compromised%20our%20national%20security%20at%20the%20expense%20of%20the%20American%20people,”%20Comer%20wrote.

ABC%20News%20adds%20that%20Comer%20“called%20the%20Biden%20probe%20a%20‘top%20priority%20for%20House%20Republicans%20during%20the%20118th%20Congress.'”

READ%20MORE:%20GOP%20Congressman%20From%20Texas%20Calls%20for%20Defunding%20Homeland%20Security

“The%20American%20people%20must%20know%20the%20extent%20of%20Joe%20Biden’s%20involvement%20in%20his%20family’s%20shady%20business%20deals%20and%20if%20these%20deals%20threaten%20national%20security%20and%20his%20decision-making%20as%20president,”%20Comer%20told%20ABC.

Comer%20wasn’t%20done%20using%20the%20“compromised”%20word%20against%20President%20Biden.

“In%20a%20letter%20to%20the%20White%20House%20counsel%20today,”%20Politico%20on%20Wednesday%20reported,%20“new%20Chairman%20James%20Comer%20%28R-Ky.%29%20said%20the%20committee%20‘is%20concerned%20that%20President%20Biden%20has%20compromised%20%28intelligence%29%20sources%20and%20methods%20with%20his%20own%20mishandling%20of%20classified%20documents.'”

Chairman%20Comer%20has%20even%20set%20up%20a%20microsite%20on%20the%20House%20Oversight%20Committee’s%20website,%20titled,%20“Biden%20Family%20Investigation.”

On%20it,%20he%20alleges,%20“If%20President%20Biden%20is%20compromised%20by%20deals%20with%20foreign%20adversaries%20and%20they%20are%20impacting%20his%20decision%20making,%20this%20is%20a%20threat%20to%20national%20security.”

Donald%20Trump’s%20tax%20returns%20show%20numerous%20foreign%20bank%20accounts,%20including%20in%20China,%20and%20there%20were%20reports%20of%20real%20estate%20deals%20in%20foreign%20countries%20while%20he%20was%20president,%20but%20Republicans%20ignored%20that.

“Two%20years%20into%20his%20presidency,”%20OpenSecrets%20reported%20in%202019,%20“Donald%20Trump%20continues%20to%20make%20money%20from%20properties%20and%20licensing%20deals%20in%20nearly%20two%20dozen%20countries%20around%20the%20world,%20fanning%20the%20flames%20of%20concerns%20that%20the%20Trump%20administration%20is%20subject%20to%20unprecedented%20levels%20of%20foreign%20influence.”

“Trump%20continued%20to%20hold%20more%20than%20$130%20million%20in%20foreign%20assets%20in%20a%20revocable%20trust%20as%20his%20second%20year%20in%20office%20came%20to%20a%20close,%20according%20to%20OpenSecrets’%20analysis%20of%20the%20president’s%20most%20recent%20annual%20personal%20financial%20disclosure%20released%20by%20the%20Office%20of%20Government%20Ethics%20last%20month,”%20the%20website,%20which%20tracks%20money%20in%20politics,%20noted.%20“Trump’s%20business%20entanglements%20continue%20to%20leave%20him%20with%20positions,%20assets,%20trademarks%20and%20other%20business%20interests%20in%20more%20than%2030%20countries.”

In%20November%20of%20last%20year,%20CNN%20reported,%20“The%20governments%20of%20six%20foreign%20countries,%20including%20Saudi%20Arabia,%20Qatar%20and%20the%20United%20Arab%20Emirates,%20spent%20more%20than%20$700,000%20at%20then-President%20Donald%20Trump’s%20Washington,%20DC,%20hotel%20over%20the%20first%20two%20years%20of%20his%20presidency,%20according%20to%20newly%20released%20accounting%20documents.”

Watch%20the%20videos%20above%20or%20at%20this%20link.)

U.S. Rep. James Comer of Kentucky, the Republican chair of the powerful House Oversight Committee is repeatedly pushing a baseless narrative that President Joe Biden, who has served his nation for 50 years, is “compromised.”

Chairman Comer, who has promoted the false theory of fraud in the 2020 election, blaming alleged “troubling reports of irregularities and improprieties” on Democrats, has been regularly criticized. He was deemed “a fundamentally unserious, dishonest, laughable caricature,” by Democratic strategist Sam Cornale on Wednesday, and mocked by The Washington Post’s Dana Milbank last year.

“In interviews with Fox News and other public pronouncements, Comer has alleged that the president’s son is responsible for just about everything,” Milbank wrote last year. “Why is fentanyl flowing into the United States? Hunter Biden. Why is President Biden pushing electric vehicles? Hunter Biden. Why isn’t the president tougher on Russian oligarchs? Hunter Biden. Why isn’t the administration pinning the pandemic on a Wuhan lab leak and battling China over currency manipulation? Hunter Biden and Hunter Biden. Why did the United States rejoin the Paris climate accord? Hunter Biden.”

On Tuesday, Fox News’ Sean Hannity led a highly-criticized interview with Speaker Kevin McCarthy, Majority Leader Steve Scalise, Judiciary Chair Jim Jordan, and Oversight Chair James Comer that was shockingly filmed inside the U.S. House of Representatives.

READ MORE: ‘The Deep State’ Wants to ‘Wipe Out the American Cowboy’ Warns GOP Congressman in Conspiracy-Laden Rant (Video)

New York University Professor Ruth Ben-Ghiat, an expert on fascism and authoritarian leaders, responded by declaring, “Americans, I give you…President Murdoch and the coronation of Fox News as state media.”

Hannity and the top Republicans were surrounded by dozens of House Republicans, sitting quietly, as the Fox News personality promoted their talking points.

In addition to posting video, journalist Matt Laslo tweeted, “Hannity noted *to the lawmakers* (who are obediently sitting and saying nothing which is WILD) that many of the lawmakers in attendance might not make it on TV tonight but they gave up an hour to support the Speaker.”

But Chairman Comer made news for two remarks (both seen in the clip below): calling Ukraine – which is fighting to protect democracy in Europe and thus around the globe – an “adversary” of the United States, and strongly suggesting President Joe Biden is “compromised.”

READ MORE: Watch: Democrats File Ethics Complaint Against George Santos After GOP Leadership Calls It an ‘Internal’ Matter

“You know there’s a pattern here with Communist China, with Ukraine, with Russia, with our adversaries across the world,” he told Hannity. “And you look at the bad decisions that Joe Biden makes and this White House makes every day that has a detrimental effect on every American – you wonder, is this President compromised?”

Hannity himself has promoted the baseless claim that President Biden may be “compromised.”

In a December interview with Comer, Hannity, known to have had nightly conversations advising Donald Trump when he was president, concluded with this question: “Do you believe it’s possible Joe Biden is compromised by Russia and China?” Comer dutifully replied, “I fear that he is.”

That word, “compromised,” is now being used by Comer and his fellow House Republicans repeatedly against President Biden – and his family.

On Monday, U.S. Rep. Andy Biggs (R-AZ), the former chair of the far-right House Freedom Caucus, a former policy advisor to an anti-LGBTQ hate group, and an alleged co-founder of the Stop the Steal movement, called President Biden, First Lady Dr. Jill Biden, and Hunter Biden, “compromised” – while making false claims about classified documents (and the Biden think tank) that were immediately handed over to the National Archives.

On Wednesday, Chairman Comer again baselessly used the word “compromised” against President Biden.

“The Committee on Oversight and Accountability is investigating President Biden’s involvement in his family’s foreign business practices and international influence peddling schemes,” Chairman Comer wrote in an official letter published by ABC News, to Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen, making an unsubstantiated clam as if it were fact.

“The Committee is investigating President Biden’s knowledge of and role in these schemes to assess whether he has compromised our national security at the expense of the American people,” Comer wrote.

ABC News adds that Comer “called the Biden probe a ‘top priority for House Republicans during the 118th Congress.'”

READ MORE: GOP Congressman From Texas Calls for Defunding Homeland Security

“The American people must know the extent of Joe Biden’s involvement in his family’s shady business deals and if these deals threaten national security and his decision-making as president,” Comer told ABC.

Comer wasn’t done using the “compromised” word against President Biden.

“In a letter to the White House counsel today,” Politico on Wednesday reported, “new Chairman James Comer (R-Ky.) said the committee ‘is concerned that President Biden has compromised (intelligence) sources and methods with his own mishandling of classified documents.'”

Chairman Comer has even set up a microsite on the House Oversight Committee’s website, titled, “Biden Family Investigation.”

On it, he alleges, “If President Biden is compromised by deals with foreign adversaries and they are impacting his decision making, this is a threat to national security.”

Donald Trump’s tax returns show numerous foreign bank accounts, including in China, and there were reports of real estate deals in foreign countries while he was president, but Republicans ignored that.

“Two years into his presidency,” OpenSecrets reported in 2019, “Donald Trump continues to make money from properties and licensing deals in nearly two dozen countries around the world, fanning the flames of concerns that the Trump administration is subject to unprecedented levels of foreign influence.”

“Trump continued to hold more than $130 million in foreign assets in a revocable trust as his second year in office came to a close, according to OpenSecrets’ analysis of the president’s most recent annual personal financial disclosure released by the Office of Government Ethics last month,” the website, which tracks money in politics, noted. “Trump’s business entanglements continue to leave him with positions, assets, trademarks and other business interests in more than 30 countries.”

In November of last year, CNN reported, “The governments of six foreign countries, including Saudi Arabia, Qatar and the United Arab Emirates, spent more than $700,000 at then-President Donald Trump’s Washington, DC, hotel over the first two years of his presidency, according to newly released accounting documents.”

Watch the videos above or at this link.

===

an 1 23 edit bd

Do you sometimes feel like the punditariat is watching a different Congress from the one you’re watching? It’s like the opiniontalkers can’t let go of their sacred cows long enough to see the reality that’s goring them. We could cheer on their faith in America, I guess. Honestly, though, there’s hope, then there’s abject confabulation.

Yet some in the punditariat can’t help themselves. They have to weigh their observations of what’s happening in Washington against their idea of what should be happening, and what should be happening is rooted deeply in what they believe America is.

They won’t assess America on its own terms. They won’t see the idea of America through the lens of its reality. When Alexander Vindman said during testimony that, “Here, right matters,” that warmed the cockles of pundits’ hearts. He validated their civic-religious dreams. Unsaid, however, is this – right usually has nothing to do with it.

If you’re like me, and read a lot of opiniontalkers, you know this cast of mind is everywhere. ThePost’s Jennifer Rubinis hardly alone. But her recent column – “The GOP can’t slam Biden on classified documents without condemning Trump” – illustrates my point.

It’s a heartbreaking work of staggering naivete.

LMAOOO!

The documents in question are the ones found recently in Joe Biden’s office in Washington’s Penn Biden Center for Diplomacy and Global Engagement. He used it sometimes when he was the vice president. His attorneys were there recently. They found about 10 documents, some classified, in a secured space. They turned them over to the National Archives and notified officials at the Department of Justice.

The Republicans quickly compared the news to Donald Trump’s fantasia of corruption at Mar-a-Lago, where the criminal former president hid state secrets after leaving Washington. He withheld dozens of classified documents. None were secure. “When a grand jury issued a subpoena demanding that they be returned,” Rubin wrote. “Trump’s lawyers handed over 38 documents, stating that no other documents were in Trump’s possession.” There were 100 more.

According to Rubin, this isn’t bad news for Biden so much as bad news for the Republicans for two reasons. One, “if they decide to investigate the documents at Biden’s office, it’s entirely possible they will find no wrongdoing. Two, if they insist Biden’s case is super serious, they wind up conceding that Trump’s actions — willful, egregious and aggravated by his own obstruction — are, too.”

Finally, this howler (italics mine):

If they return to the standard they once used for Hillary Clinton — that no one who mishandles classified information should be president — then Republicans would have to demand that Trump not run for president and agree that he should be investigated and prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law.

LMAOOO!

Standard denial

Again, I don’t know which Congress Rubin is watching but it’s not the Congress I’m watching. “They wind up conceding” – stop right there. Conceding? Remember, we just watched Kevin McCarthy enbrown his nose to become House speaker. He is, at best, a puppet poobah. At what point are we to recognize a level of integrity among the Republicans compelling them to recognize the authority of a fact?

I haven’t seen it yet.

“If they return to the standard they once used for Hillary Clinton” – no, yeah, no. They might make up a new one if it’s convenient. But otherwise, the past never happened. Again, virtuous people with integrity would try to be consistent when applying standards. The Republican anarchists don’t try to be consistent. They don’t try to be fair. They don’t try at all. They deny standards applied equally.

They won’t tolerate any limit on their appetite for power.

“Demand that Trump not run for president”?

Come (TF) on.

Projecting intellectual honesty

As the Post was posting Rubin’s piece, Roll Call reported that the House GOP decided the past never happened and “are escalating their calls for swift federal action” on the Biden documents. They want an “immediate review and damage assessment,” the paper said.

“This discovery of classified information would put President Biden in potential violation of laws protecting national security, including the Espionage Act and Presidential Records Act,” said Ohio Congressman Michael Turner of the House Intelligence Committee.

So much for “they wind up conceding.” They concede nothing. They will use “the standard they once used for Hillary Clinton,” because it was intended for the GOP. Standards apply to the Democrats only. The Republicans are intellectually dishonest. They keep telling us as much. We shouldn’t project intellectual honesty where there’s none.

To the extent that the past did happen, the House Republicans want the Justice Department to give the current president the same treatment it’s giving to the criminal former president – though the facts at hand are so different as to be virtually unrelated cases. The Biden case appears to be one of basic human error. The Trump case appears to be one of greed, contempt, espionage and betrayal.

The goal here is to make the Biden case seem really bad while making the Trump case seem almost good by comparison. Kevin McCarthy, the ensniveler, revealed that goal when he said that the Democrats “overplayed their hands” in their handling of the Mar-a-Lago case.

They can and they will

John Dewey, the philosopher, once said western philosophy would make more sense if philosophers stopped paying so much attention to “the problems of philosophy” and more to the “problems of men.”

His point, as I see it, was about the difference between abstractions and things. Or rather, that you can’t have one without the other. Poet William Carlos Williams probably said it best: “No ideas but in things.”

Pundits can be so in love with the idea of America that they can’t see what America is. Instead of loving the idea in the thing, they love the idea only. For Rubin, it’s as if she can’t envision an America in which fairness is arbitrary. “The GOP can’t slam Biden on classified documents without condemning Trump”? They can. They will.

===

mma 1 23

After a historic week of messy party infighting, the Republican-led House of Representatives has finally selected a speaker, passed a rules package, and gotten to work on its agenda of making the country safer for wealthy tax cheats. There are important lessons to learn from the chaos given the likelihood of future interparty rifts over the next two years — and the centrality of the right-wing media to the GOP.

Here are some key takeaways:

The GOP’s leaders are fueled by right-wing media.Gaining prominence in the modern Republican Party virtually requires a willingness to rub elbows with the right-wing press. New House Speaker Kevin McCarthy (R-CA)spent the last several years cozying up to Fox hosts, and two of his “key” supporters “helped corral surrogates – especially in the conservative media space – to act as validators” for his bid. He also benefited from the backing of Reps. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA), the congresswoman from QAnon and an ally of Steve Bannon, and Jim Jordan (R-OH), whose regular Fox appearances helped him ascend from back-bencher to incoming House Judiciary chair. Meanwhile, McCarthy’s most prominent opponents included Rep. Matt Gaetz (R-FL), who has gained prominence entirely on the basis of his courting of the right-wing media and reportedly sought jobs at Fox and its competitors, and Rep. Lauren Boebert (R-CO), another favorite of the fringe-right press. The right-wing media will be the key battleground for future fights between those sides.

Fox is now the GOP establishment. While Fox once aligned with the insurgent wing of the Republican Party, Donald Trump’s presidency had the effect of merging the network with the GOP’s establishment wing, and almost all of its prominent personalities lined up behind McCarthy’s bid and sought to stifle the revolt against him. Several of the pro-McCarthy network hosts have since sought to minimize the extent of the divide within the party by praising the concessions the rebels extracted during the fight. But the fracas sets a precedent for which side the party’s powerful propaganda arm will back the next time its insiders and outsiders face off.

The narratives of the right-wing press will form the core of the GOP agenda. With Democrats in control of the Senate and the White House, House Republicans are unlikely to see many of their priorities become law — but they plan to make noise, and to do so in step with their propagandists’ priorities. The initial bills proposed in the House Republican rules package were “centered on issues and themes important largely in the conservative media world,” as The Washington Post’s Philip Bump pointed out. The rules package also included not just the Tucker Carlson-sought “weaponization” panel but also a coronavirus committeewhich promises to put investigative muscle behind various right-wing pandemic narratives. And the first bill the House passed rolled back last year’s increased funding for the Internal Revenue Service, which became a target of right-wing conspiracy theories.

Fox’s competitors will use party fights to gun for the network’s market share.As Fox rallied behind McCarthy, its rivals in TV and digital media saw an opening. They became the propaganda support for the anti-McCarthy campaign, savaging the would-be speaker and championing his critics. They also went after Fox, denouncing the network and its top hosts for purportedly selling out in an offensive more extensive than any from the right since late 2020, when Fox declared Joe Biden the president-elect and Trump urged his supporters to switch to its competitors. Expect more of this in the future as right-wing outlets try to use internal GOP fights to build their audiences at Fox’s expense.

Tucker Carlson is the most influential right-wing media figure.Carlson’s show is a festival of white nationalism, far-right conspiracy theories, and violent rhetoric that seeks to work his viewers into a frenzy. It is also a guiding force in the modern GOP. While his colleagues were foursquare behind McCarthy, Carlson was playing all sides of the debate, criticizing the would-be speaker one moment, praising him the next, and, above all else, seeking specific concessions. It worked — Carlson got the House inquiry into the purported “weaponization” of federal law enforcement and intelligence agencies that he’s been building up to for years. Now he’ll be able to spend the next two years cheering on the Republican efforts to spread his conspiracy theories about the January 6 insurrection and whatever else the panel tries to push.

===

20 hard rt held mccarthy hostage

United States Congressman Scott Perry (R-Pennsylvania) claimed on Sunday's edition of This Week that there is nothing remiss about him serving on House Speaker Kevin McCarthy's (R-California) proposed committee to investigate the Justice Department's probes of the January 6th, 2021 Capitol insurrection, despite the fact that he was a central player in former President Donald Trump's corrupt scheme to remain in power after he lost the 2020 election to President Joe Biden.

According to the now-disbanded House Select Committee that amassed evidence of a vast conspiracy behind the January 6th Capitol attack, Perry was the brains behind a plot to replace then-Attorney General Bill Barr with Jeffrey Clark, who was the acting assistant attorney general for the civil division at DOJ during the Trump presidency. The plan was to fire Barr and install Clark in exchange for his cooperation in the ploy to have fraudulent electors from key swing states – such as Pennsylvania – award the Electoral College votes that Biden won to Trump. This ruse was based on Trump's false insistence that widespread voter fraud cost him the election. There is no evidence that this was the case, yet it remained the foundation of Trump's efforts to overturn the election and thwart the peaceful transfer of power.

In August 2022, the Federal Bureau of Investigation seized Perry's cell phone. White House aide Cassidy Hutchinson told the Select Committee that Perry purportedly sought a presidential pardon from Trump, although he denied having done so.

Regardless, however, these facts prompted ABC News moderator George Stephanopoulos to grill Perry on the ethics of his participating in congressional investigations of the agencies with which he is entangled.

"The speaker has also reportedly said that he's going to appoint a church-style committee to investigate the investigations. Since you’re part of the investigation by the Justice Department, will you – will you pledge not to serve on that committee?" Stephanopoulos asked the GOP lawmaker.

Perry objected to the question itself:

Well, why should I be limited – why should anybody be limited just because someone has made an accusation? Everybody in America is innocent until proven otherwise. And I would say this, the American people are really, really tired of the persecution and the instruments of federal power being used against them. We're talking aboutparents that go to school board meetings for the schools that they pay for with their taxes and having the temerity to question the curriculum, and then they're put on, you know, the red-flagged, or they’re flagged by the Department of Justice and the FBI for attending a meeting. That's not what America is supposed to be about. That sounds like some tin horn third-world dictatorship. Sure, we're going to investigate and we need to. We need to make sure that these agencies aren't running amuck and aren’t out of control which clearly they are.

Stephanopoulos pressed Perry a second time:

Doesn't that pose a conflict to you since you’re also part of the investigation?

Again, Perry deflected:

So, should everybody in Congress that disagrees with somebody be barred from doing the oversight and investigative powers that Congress has? That's our charge. And again, that's appropriate for every single member regardless of what accusations are made. I get accused of all kinds of things every single day, as does every member that serves in the public eye. But that doesn't stop you from doing your job. It is our duty and it is my duty.

Watch below or at this link.

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an 1 23

Three years ago in January 2020, reports of a then-new disease in Wuhan, China were becoming increasingly disturbing. That disease came to be called COVID-19 and has since killed more than 6.7 million people worldwide, according to Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, Maryland. Over one million of the fatalities have occurred in the United States.

In 2023, COVID-19 remains highly contagious but isn’t killing nearly as many people as it was in 2020 and 2021. Millions of people around the world have been vaccinated, and at this point, most COVID-19 infections aren’t fatal and aren’t serious enough to require hospitalization.

But in an op-ed published by the Daily Beast on January 9, Dr. Peter J. Hotez of the Baylor College of Medicine in Houston notes that COVID-19 is “still killing hundreds of Americans every day.” And he fears that as House speaker, Rep. Kevin McCarthy of California won’t give this problem the serious attention that it deserves.

“McCarthy and his fellow Republicans have a disturbing set of plans forso-called oversight of the coronavirus that could divert precious resources from what must be our main goal in the coming years: preventing the next pandemic,” explains Hotez, who is known for his expertise in virology. “It’s still early, and the shape of GOP intentions — and their ability to enact them — are still very much coming into focus. But it’s clear that after years of far-right, anti-science resistance to vaccines or basic pandemic safety, the Republicans plan to satiate their base’s lingering anti-government rage. This could mean fresh epidemiological disaster — and not in 20 or 30 years, but within this decade.”

Hotez fears that McCarthy, as House speaker, will cater to unscientific members of his party.

“Just prior to the new year,” Hotez observes, “Republican members on the House Committee on Oversight and Reform also made a series of misleading or downright outlandish claims. Among them: that they had evidence that COVID-19 likely originated from a laboratory in Wuhan, that experimental and risky coronavirus research was funded by the NIH, and that said information may have been covered up by Dr. Anthony Fauci. The problem is these views represent an alternative reality to the findings from the mainstream community of biomedical scientists, especially the virologists.”

The Baylor College researcher continues, “Yes, it’s true that the so-called lab leak theory is not confined to the total fringe, and that well-credentialed experts — including Fauci — remain open to it. But three papers published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences USA last year tell a very different story for COVID-19 origins…. No findings can entirely rule out the possibility of lab leak, and I have long argued it is theoretically plausible. But the extensive studies and information collected even in the past year overwhelmingly point to animal origins of COVID-19.”

Hotez warns that in the future, new coronaviruses could lead to deadly pandemics.

“We have now had three serious epidemics or pandemics from human coronavirus infections in this 21st Century — first SARS, then MERS, and now, COVID-19,” Hotez notes. “This is a reason my research group began making coronavirus vaccines a decade ago. Mother Nature is not being obscure or coy with us. She has let us know the plan: Every seven to nine years, the world will experience a serious, potentially worldwide pandemic from coronaviruses that likely first arise from bats before they jump to humans.”

The severity of COVID-19 infections varies from person to person. Some people test positive for COVID-19 but never have any symptoms; other infections could resemble anything from a minor cold to a bad case of the flu.

Millions of people who are getting sick with COVID-19 will feel bad for a week or two but go on to make a full recovery; those who have the misfortune of getting “long COVID,” however, can suffer debilitating symptoms that drag on for months.

According to a new study authored by University of Washington scientists Sarah Wulf Hanson and Theo Vos and published by the Journal of the American Medical Association, “even mild COVID-19” infections can have “long-lasting effects on people’s health.”

“Long COVID is defined as the continuation or development of symptoms three months after the initial infection from SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes COVID-19,” Hanson and Vos explain. “These symptoms last for at least two months after onset with no other explanation. We found that a staggering 90 percent of people living with long COVID initially experienced only mild illness with COVID-19. After developing long COVID, however, the typical person experienced symptoms including fatigue, shortness of breath and cognitive problems such as brain fog — or a combination of these — that affected daily functioning. These symptoms had an impact on health as severe as the long-term effects of traumatic brain injury. Our study also found that women have twice the risk of men and four times the risk of children for developing long COVID.”

Hanson and Vos found that “nearly one out of every seven” people suffering long COVID “were still experiencing these symptoms a year later.”

“We found that patients who were hospitalized for COVID-19 had a greater risk of developing long COVID — and of having longer-lasting symptoms — compared with people who had not been hospitalized,” Hanson and Vos report. “However, because the vast majority of COVID-19 cases do not require hospitalization, many more cases of long COVID have arisen from these milder cases despite their lower risk.”

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an 12 22

Rep. Jim Jordan (R-Ohio), a top-ranking lawmaker who is expected to take over the leadership of the House Judiciary Committee, has rolled out his plans for the panel's agenda for next year when Republican lawmakers take over the House chamber.

According to NBC News, the Ohio lawmaker is planning to take aim at the Big Tech industry starting with letters addressed to the CEOs of Amazon, Alphabet, the Apple Corporation, Facebook's parent company, Meta, and Microsoft.

In the letters dated Wednesday, December 21, the Republican lawmaker "demanded information about what he called 'the nature and extent of your companies’ collusion with the Biden Administration.”

Per the news outlet, Jordan also "demanded documents and communication going back to January 2020 between employees and contractors of the companies and anyone affiliated with the executive branch of the government pertaining to 'moderation, deletion, suppression, restricting, or reduced circulation of content.'"

However, Jordan didn't stop there. As a fierce critic of Big Tech, he's also requested a list of company employees who were tasked with "developing content moderation policies, now or in the past, as well as third-party groups, companies or people the company has consulted on content moderation policies."

As part of Jordan's formal request, he is also asking for the documents to be provided by 5pm on December 29 and requesting that existing and future records are preserved.

Despite Jordan's claims, Big Tech firms have denied the allegations of biased actions and stand by their efforts to enforce the community guidelines outlined in their policies.

Many of the companies addressed in the letter have not responded to the network's request for comment.

===

marjorie Taylor Greene tells Steve Bannon she plans to impeach Joe Biden over renewable energy

Brandon Gage

September 12, 2022

United States Congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Georgia) revealed to Real America's Voice talk show host Steve Bannon on Monday that she has drafted articles of impeachment against President Joe Biden

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During an appearance on MSNBC's "The Sunday Show, former Republican National Committee head Michael Steele gave a thumbs up to a plan by Democrats and liberal operatives to fire back at Republicans who are itching to open up multiple investigations now that they have taken control of the House.

Speaking with host Jonathan Capehart, Stele was asked about plans by allies of Hunter Biden who are setting up a warroom to combat the coming Republican-majority investigation into President Joe Biden's son.

Asked what he thought about the Washington Post report, he quickly answered, "Love it."

"Fight fire with fire," he added. "I appreciate very much the idea of not letting this narrative go sideways: it already has, to some degree."

"The fact that there is cachet in the public space to even begin to bring these hearings to the floor-- look, if it were me, if I'm advising Hunter Biden, I'd say when that subpoena comes, you take it outside and you lay it on the ground and you let the dogs do what dogs do with something on the ground -- meet that fire with fire," he continued.

"They probably won't do that but the idea that you're going to go on offense, that you're not going to give ground when you look at the people who are calling the investigation and hosting the investigation, they got their own-ish," he explained, likely meaning Donald Trump. "At least Hunter Biden can talk about 'Hey, I'm dealing with addiction.' What's their excuse? So the reality of it is, this is a new offensive. We'll see how it plays out -- it's smart to get ahead of it."

Watch below or at this link:

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an ah 12 22

during the 2022 midterms, countless Democrats warned that if Republicans obtained a majority in the U.S. House of Representatives, that majority would pander to the far right and conduct an abundance of overtly partisan investigations. Republicans narrowly flipped the House, and just as Democrats predicted, Rep. James Comer of Kentucky is promising to make in-depth investigations of President Joe Biden’s son, Hunter Biden, a top priority.

A Hunter Biden investigation by House Republicans is the type of thing that pundits typically describe as “red meat for the MAGA base.” But reporter Joe Perticone, in an article published by the conservative website The Bulwark on December 17, warns that an excess of “frivolous” investigations could damage House Republicans in 2023 — and end up benefitting Democrats in the long run.

“The Republican majority in the House is planning to launch full-throated investigations into Hunter Biden and other political bugbears when the new Congress convenes in January, prompting Democrats on the other side of the Capitol to respond with the powers of their Senate majority,” Perticone explains. “Democrats who spoke with The Bulwark said House Republicans’ stated oversight priorities are nakedly political, but won’t help the GOP’s future electoral efforts. Meanwhile, Senate Democrats are poised to take the baton on what they consider critical investigations, such as that of the House January 6th Committee.”

One of the Democrats The Bulwark interviewed was Sen. Tim Kaine of Virginia.

Kaine told The Bulwark, “We may do some of our own work here to tell a more accurate story — that would depend on what the investigation is. But if the House wants to go from a legislative body into a body that’s just trying to get headlines on weird investigations, they may feel like at the end of the day, they can pat themselves on the back because they got on a cable news TV show. But I don’t think they’re going to be impressing their voters.”

The Virginia Democrat went on to say, “I think if we do the work of a legislative body and produce some results, good confirmations, continue to produce bipartisan bills as we have — and the House is known for wacky investigations that aren’t really top of mind to anybody but an extreme view — that will show a real contrast between who the two parties are in ways that will not necessarily be harmful to us.”

Sen. Chris Murphy of Connecticut, another Senate Democrat, argued that the more House Republicans pander to the far right in 2023, the more it could hurt them in the 2024 election.

Murphy told The Bulwark, “I think if they spend the next year talking about Hunter Biden instead of health care, housing and gun violence, we won’t have to do much. They may dig their own grave…. We’ll do oversight (in the Senate) when it’s policy-related, but we’re not going to engage in witch hunts.”

Although Republicans will have a small majority of about six seats in the U.S. House in 2023, Democrats not only held their Senate majority in the midterms — they slightly expanded it when Sen. Raphael Warnock of Georgia defeated Republican challenger Herschel Walker in a runoff election on Tuesday, December 6. Democrats will have a 51-49 Senate majority in 2023.

Republicans, Perticone notes, “appear to be all in on making the House agenda about Hunter Biden, examining whether arrested January 6th rioters have been treated unfairly by the Justice Department, and more.” But Sen. Mitt Romney of Utah is warning fellow Republicans that politically motivated House investigations could be a distraction from major issues.

The conservative senator told The Bulwark, “I think it’s really hard to know what the politics of a course of action might be in this day and age, to know where our party stands, what our base wants, what independent voters want. But I think you have to do what you think is right, and I think the American people want us to tackle some of the big challenges we have — immigration, inflation, and so forth — and the other things that divert from those priorities, I think, are a waste of time.”

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{{ ===

an 12 22

We’ve been warned. When the Republicans take control of the House, it’s going to be all Hunter’s laptop, all the time.

Despite haughty GOP denials, the laptop story is probably a cover for another Russian hack and leak operation, and the Republicans are gleefully laundering it.

Republicans have browbeaten various social media execs – who are surely nervous about being called before GOP committees – into saying they were wrong to throttle access to what everyone correctly assumed was foreign election interference laundered through Donald Trump’s personal lawyer and election interference go-to-guy Rudy Giuliani.

Various major media outlets have authenticated a small percentage of the data dump as having belonged to Hunter Biden. But that’s exactly what you’d expect in a hack and leak operation. The question is whether the data were really abandoned by Hunter Biden or whether they were uploaded to that laptop as a pretext for trafficking in stolen secrets.

“That’s Rudy”

In October 2020, weeks before the general election,the New York Postran a story about what Rudy Giuliani claimed was a hard drive abandoned by Hunter Biden at a computer repair shop in Wilmington, Delaware.

Over 50 retired intelligence pros signed an open letter arguing that L’Affaire MacBook bore all the hallmarks of Russian disinfo. Twitter’s former head of safety said this week that the story set off “every single one of my finely tuned [Russian intelligence] hack and leak campaign alarm bells."

Conveniently, the former shop owner who gave the data to Giuliani is legally blind, so he can’t say whether the man who dropped off the machines was Hunter Biden. He’s also a frothing conspiracy theorist who was unable to tell a straight story about the provenance of the laptop.

We know Vladimir Putin personally directed a campaign of interference in the 2020 elections that focused on feeding anti-Biden propaganda to influential Americans, including members of Trump’s inner circle, according to a 2021 report by the Office of the Director of National Intelligence.

The report doesn’t name names, but contains enough clues to identify Rudy Giuliani, Donald Trump’s personal lawyer, as the useful idiot in chief.

This time, the collusion between Trump and the Russians was right out in the open. With Trump’s support, Giuliani spent much of 2019 ostentatiously shuttling to Ukraine and huddling with Kremlin-linked oligarchs, including an active Russian agent who was later sanctioned by Secretary Steve Mnuchin’s Treasury Department for interference in the 2020 election.

Data from Hunter Biden’s computer were on the market in Kyiv around the time Giuliani went disinfo-shopping. As you recall, Giuliani was searching for dirt in Ukraine because Hunter Biden sat on the board of a Ukrainian energy company, Burisma Holdings, which, according to that ODNI report, was hacked by the Russian spy service known as the GRU in late 2019.

Multiple US intelligence agencies repeatedly and explicitly warned Donald Trump in 2019 that Giuliani’s bottomless thirst for dirt on the Bidens made him the target of a Russian intelligence operation. National Security Advisor Robert O’Brien warned Trump that any information Giuliani brought back from his Ukraine junket should be considered “contaminated” by the Russians. Trump reportedly shrugged and said, “That’s Rudy.”

Stolen and dumped

Let’s not forget Trump’s first impeachment was the result of a desperate bid to wring dirt out of the Ukrainians. Trump froze congressionally authorized defense aid to Ukraine in order to strong-arm the country’s new president into announcing a bogus investigation into Hunter Biden.

Republicans have falsely claimed that forensic analyses have proven that the data was found on a laptop that Hunter Biden abandoned at a repair shop in Delaware. These analyses have shown that some of the materials were produced by Hunter Biden. But that’s how hack and leak attacks work.

In a hack and leak, data is stolen and dumped.

A largely genuine trove of stolen data is also the perfect place to hide forged or stolen elements, which enjoy unearned credibility because they’re packaged with real stuff. That’s why the victims of hack and leaks are advised never to confirm the authenticity of anything.

The attackers are counting on the public to draw the erroneous conclusion that, because some things are genuine, the whole package is real, and – most importantly – that it came from where the cover story says it came from, be that an imaginary collective of good-hearted “hacktivists” or a computer repair shop in Delaware. Anywhere but the GRU.

The GRU is notorious for hacking and leaking.

A GRU unit known as FancyBear or APT128 famously deployed this tactic against the Democratic National Committee and the Hillary Clinton campaign in 2016. They also targeted George Soros, the World Anti-Doping Agency, scientists investigating the poisoning of a former Russian agent, and countless others. For particularly high-value targets, GRU combines hacking with good-old-fashioned stalking, following their targets around, hoping to catch them using insecure hotel wifi.

Isn’t it a crazy coincidence that a disk image of “Hunter Biden’s laptop” was revealed to the world by the same guy who we know was the main conduit for Russian disinformation about the Bidens? A guy who has also been investigated for other kinds of election interference on behalf of Trump.

If you believe that, I’ve got an extended warranty to sell you.

READ MORE: Fiona Hill warns Musk is 'transmitting a message' for Putin as DeSantis rushes to billionaire’s defense

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ref wapo

Military

White House was warned Giuliani was target of Russian intelligence operation to feed misinformation to Trump

By Shane Harris, Ellen Nakashima, Greg Miller and Josh Dawsey

October 15, 2020

Former New York mayor Rudolph W. Giuliani pauses while addressing Trump supporters on Oct. 12, 2020, during a Columbus Day gathering at a Trump campaign field office in Philadelphia. (Jacqueline Larma/AP)

U.S. intelligence agencies warned the White House last year that President Trump’s personal lawyer Rudolph W. Giuliani was the target of an influence operation by Russian intelligence, according to four former officials familiar with the matter.

The warnings were based on multiple sources, including intercepted communications, that showed Giuliani was interacting with people tied to Russian intelligence during a December 2019 trip to Ukraine, where he was gathering information that he thought would expose corrupt acts by former vice president Joe Biden and his son Hunter.

...

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https://www.dni.gov/files/ODNI/documents/assessments/ICA-declass-16MAR21.pdf

march 2021

Foreign Threats to the 2020 US Federal Elections

Key Judgment 1: We have no indications that any foreign actor attempted to alter any technical aspect of the

voting process in the 2020 US elections, including voter registration, casting ballots, vote tabulation, or reporting

results. We assess that it would be difficult for a foreign actor to manipulate election processes at scale without

detection by intelligence collection on the actors themselves, through physical and cyber security monitoring around

voting systems across the country, or in post-election audits. The IC identified some successful compromises of state

and local government networks prior to Election Day—as well as a higher volume of unsuccessful attempts—that we

assess were not directed at altering election processes. Some foreign actors, such as Iran and Russia, spread false or

inflated claims about alleged compromises of voting systems to undermine public confidence in election processes and

results.

Key Judgment 2: We assess that Russian President Putin authorized, and a range of Russian government

organizations conducted, influence operations aimed at denigrating President Biden’s candidacy and the

Democratic Party, supporting former President Trump, undermining public confidence in the electoral process,

and exacerbating sociopolitical divisions in the US. Unlike in 2016,we did not see persistent Russian cyber efforts

to gain access to election infrastructure. We have high confidence in our assessment; Russian state and proxy actors

who all serve the Kremlin’s interests worked to affect US public perceptions in a consistent manner. A key element of

Moscow’s strategy this election cycle was its use of proxies linked to Russian intelligence to push influence

narratives—including misleading or unsubstantiated allegations against President Biden—to US media

organizations, US officials, and prominent US individuals, including some close to former President Trump and

his administration.}}:

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an 12 22

Rep. James Comer (R-Ky.) is vowing to bring Twitter employees before Congress as part of an investigative effort to determine how they may have censored reports on Hunter Biden's laptop during the 2020 election cycle.

On Friday, December 3, the Kentucky lawmaker appeared on Fox News where he spoke with guest host Jason Chaffetz who asked him about the report written by Substack journalist Matt Taibbi. According to Taibbi's report, there was an "organized effort at Twitter" to suppress the circulation of the story.

Mediaite reports that "Taibbi, whose source was Elon Musk, reported Democrats and Republicans both had back channels that killed unfavorable tweets."

According to the news outlet, the journalist also claimed "internal Twitter files showed Democrats had more channels that were used to suppress unfavorable tweets and initial reports on Hunter Biden’s laptop."

Chaffetz, also a former chairman of the House Oversight Committee said, “They can’t figure out how to justify this type of suppression. What can Congress, what can the Oversight Committee do, and where are they going to go next with this?”

The Republican lawmaker responded by sharing his intent as chairman of the committee. "When I take your old position as chairman of the House Oversight Committee, I can promise you this: every employee at Twitter who was involved in suppressing the Hunter Biden laptop story will have an opportunity to come before Congress and explain their actions to the American people," Comer said. "This was a huge story."

He added, "When we announced the investigation of the Biden family and referenced material from the laptop, many in the mainstream media said this is just a conspiracy theory. The mainstream media is still trying to use the old talking points the laptop is somehow Russian disinformation."

According to Comer, Musk's decision to share Twitter's files with Taibbi suggests there was some form of collusive effort to diminish the circulation of reports on the social platform. The Republican lawmaker also commended theNew York Post for its original report which was published in October 2020.

He concluded by saying, “We are going to have every person at Twitter in front of the House Oversight Committee."

Watch the video below or at this link.

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mma 11 22

Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA) did an interview several months ago with a white nationalist commentator who previously said that he thinks “peaceful coexistence” with Black people isn’t “possible” and “the war on whites is escalating very quickly. Plan accordingly.” Greene’s interview, which hasn’t been previously reported, is another example of how the Republican congresswoman has been reaching out to fellow extremists to appeal for support.

Republican House leadership is set to give committee assignments back to Greene and has reportedly told her that it would support her potential investigations.

Before entering Congress in 2021, Greene was a right-wing pundit who pushed conspiracy theories about school shootings, satanic child blood drinking, “Pizzagate,” 9/11, and Jewish people using a space laser to start fires. She has also endorsed violence against politicians, the QAnon conspiracy theory, and bigoted rhetoric.

She has continued to promote toxic rhetoric since taking office, including associating with Holocaust denier Nick Fuentes, toxic conspiracy theorist Alex Jones, and grifting election denier Steve Bannon; and posting on the white nationalist and antisemitic social media haven Gab.

Infowars foreign correspondent Dan Lyman interviewed Greene for his Infowars-affiliated site Border Hawk,where he fearmongers about the supposed danger of undocumented immigrants. Greene’s interview was posted and promoted on Jones’ website, which means that Infowars is monetizing it.

Lyman received a press pass and attended the Turning Point USA Student Action Summit in late July, where he interviewed right-wing extremists including Jack Posobiec, Alex Stein, and Greene, calling her “one of our great immigration patriots in Congress.”

During the interview, Greene echoed white nationalist rhetoric by claiming: “It's not just a border invasion. It's an invasion of our entire country because these people are spreading to every single state, all 50 states.” She also said that the Republican-backed House would be “investigating all of the wrongdoing and the corruption” of the Biden administration; claimed that “Democrats don’t want” the U.S. to have “a border any more”; and declared that“we should investigate” the United Nations,nonprofits, and other “globalist groups and networks” for supposedly contributing “to the invasion of America."

[vid]

greene isn’t a stranger to pushing white nationalist talking points regarding immigration. In 2018, she shared an anti-Muslim and antisemitic video that quotes a Holocaust denier claiming that “Zionist supremacists have schemed to promote immigration and miscegenation.”

Lyman is a “Pizzagate” conspiracy theorist and white nationalist who has repeatedly made racist and anti-Muslim remarks. Here’s a sampling of his rhetoric:

Lyman tweeted in November: “Wake up, White folks. The nation your ancestors sweat, bled, and died to build for you is being ripped out of your hands.”
In September 2021, Lyman appeared on Red Ice Radio, a white nationalist program that has also promoted Holocaust denial. At the start of the interview, Lyman said that he’s “been a big fan of Red Ice for years and it's truly an honor to join you today.” He later blamed non-white migrants for a “pattern” of “heinous sexual crimes” and “pretty crazy rape stories,” stating: “They [refuges from Afghanistan] really don't care what they're going after as long as it's has a pulse. And so to see that there's going to be so many more of them coming over, you know, I say the worst people that have invaded Europe in recent years have to be either Afghans, Pakistanis, or Somalis.”
Lyman tweeted in July 2020: “All Whites with any sense should flee diversity zones immediately. Peaceful coexistence no longer appears possible. Get out ASAP.”
Lyman tweeted in July 2020: “The war on whites is escalating very quickly. Plan accordingly.”

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https://www.alternet.org/2022/11/postliberalism/

salon kat j

...For Hazony, the primary issue was about how conservatives understand China, the rising superpower that NatCons see as America's No. 1 rival. Their conference had banned all speakers who are "pro-Xi, pro-Putin, racists or antisemites," although that standard seems malleable at times. (As Political Research Associates' Ben Lorber reported, this year'sNatCon included a meditation on the viciously xenophobic French novel "Camp of the Saints," approving mention of antisemitic Action Française leader Charles Maurras and an address by a former Trump speechwriter fired for alleged ties to white nationalists.) But some integralists, Hazony charged, had "always had a soft spot for dictatorship, for imperialism and for China," and in recent months that had become impossible to ignore, as members of the movement wrote articles praising China's government or culture.

Then there was Compact Magazine, the hybrid "radical American journal" Ahmari co-founded last March with fellow Catholic Matthew Schmitz and Marxist populist Edwin Aponte. Its professed agenda was to wage "a two-front war on the left and the right" and promote "a strong social-democratic state that defends community — local and national, familial and religious — against a libertine left and a libertarian right."

Although Compact has declined to specify who funds the magazine, a source familiar with its operations told Salon that it was launched with significant support from right-wing tech billionaire Peter Thiel — who has funded numerous other "new right" projects, from NatCon conferences to the political campaigns of J.D. Vance, Blake Masters and Josh Hawley — and Claremont Institute chair Tom Klingenstein (another top NatCon donor). Klingenstein did not respond to requests for comment. A source close to Thiel denied that Thiel has directly funded Compact, but couldn't rule out the possibility that an entity Thiel funds has in turn donated to the magazine. In a statement, Ahmari said, "Compact is an independent, for-profit publication supported by our subscribers. A group of investors helped us jump-start it. We respect their privacy and decline to name them."

Both Thiel and Klingenstein spoke at NatCon this year, and a handful of other NatCon speakers attended the integralist conference too. But on the whole, Hazony said, Compact was a bridge too far for most NatCons. While many in the movement were open to "rethinking the commitment to the free market as an absolute principle," and might even support targeted business regulations, he said, there was "no appetite, no capacity among nationalist conservatives to accept the ideal of social democracy as an alternative to the market mechanism."

Integralists had their own complaints. Some also involved foreign policy questions, like whether NatCons' enthusiastic defense of Ukraine amounted to a creeping neoconservative revival, or whether their strident hostility to China reflected warmed-over Cold War politics. But their main concern was more fundamental: NatCons, they charged, were abandoning the populist promise of Trumpism for a seat at the establishment table.

To be sure, NatCon 3 featured critiques of big business, but, with limited exceptions, most amounted to dragging "woke corporations." Ron DeSantis (introduced in Miami as "the future president") spoke dutifully about how free enterprise should be seen as a tool to help "our own people" rather than an end in itself. But his real firepower was saved for war stories: his battle with Disney over Florida's "Don't Say Gay" law, his resolution banning state pension funds from weighing environmental or social justice concerns in investment decisions, a promised law to help Floridians sue tech companies that commit "viewpoint discrimination."

Other speakers called forblacklisting banks that disinvest in fossil fuels; seizing universities' endowments; and making it illegal for employers to ask if applicants attended college, in order to disincentivize young people from entering the "inherently liberalizing environment" of higher education. (In a more recent example, after contrarian billionaire Elon Musk bought Twitter and numerous companies stopped advertising on the platform, Republicans suggested that congressional hearings into "leftist corporate extortion" might be in order.)...

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https://www.alternet.org/2022/11/marjorie-taylor-greene-house-oversight/

raw

Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA) suggested that House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy (R-CA) will name her to the Oversight Committee if he becomes Speaker.

During an interview on Wednesday, conservative host Charlie Kirk asked Greene how she could be sure McCarthy would follow through with a far-right agenda, including subpoenas for Dr. Anthony Fauci and people close to President Joe Biden.

"He has said publicly that we are going to do all of these investigations into everything you just named," Greene insisted. "We are definitely doing these investigations and he's allowing the chairmen of the committees to run it."

Greene added: "I'm very excited to serve on Oversight. That's the committee I've asked for and no one has told me no about anything. I am going to be pursuing many things and I'm thrilled to be able to do that."

The lawmaker has split with fellow Reps. Matt Gaetz (R-FL) and Andy Biggs (R-AZ) over a disagreement about who should be the next Speaker of the House.

Democrats stripped Greene of all committee assignments in 2021 after reports found she repeated conspiracy theories and bigoted comments.

Watch the video clip below from Real America's Voice.

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https://www.politico.com/news/2022/11/16/democratic-strategists-launch-war-room-00065498

group of top Democratic strategists are launching a multi-million-dollar hub to counter an expected investigative onslaught by the likely incoming House GOP majority — digging into President Joe Biden, his administration and his son, on top of potential Cabinet impeachments.

The newly relaunchedCongressional Integrity Project initiative, details of which were shared first with POLITICO, will include rapid response teams, investigative researchers, pollsters and eventually a paid media campaign to put congressional Republicans “squarely on the defense,” founder Kyle Herrig said in an interview.

It’s designed to serve as the party’s “leading war room” to push back on House Republican investigations, Herrig said in an interview. He added that the project would “investigate the investigators, expose their political motivations and the monied special interests supporting their work, and hold them accountable for ignoring the urgent priorities of all Americans in order to smear Joe Biden and do the political bidding of Trump and MAGA Republicans." [vid]

a team of researchers has already begun scouring public records, press clippings and other documents in a bid to immediately undercut House GOP leaders, from Minority Leader — now speakership hopeful — Kevin McCarthy to the likely committee chairs expected to manage probes of Biden and his network.

The House GOP views investigations as a key piece of its agenda for the next Congress once it takes the narrow majority that’s now expected, particularly as much of its legislative wish list is on track to stall thanks to the Senate filibuster and Democratic president. McCarthy has privately talked with committee chairs-in-waiting to coordinate plans, making the swift launch of the outside-group pushback plan a potential godsend to Democrats.

Democratic leadership on the Hill has been briefed about the project’s relaunch, according to a person familiar with its plans.

Brad Woodhouse, a longtime Democratic strategist who is part of the project’s new leadership team, called the House GOP’s looming investigations a “vendetta” after two impeachments of and investigations into former President Donald Trump while Democrats controlled Congress, including the bipartisan select committee probing the Jan. 6 Capitol riot.

The project “will exploit every tactic available,” Woodhouse said, adding: “It’s not enough to wait and see what they’re going to do and how far they’re going to go.”

Republicans wouldn’t formally take the House until January, but its leaders are already vowing to cut a broad investigative swath. As McCarthy put it during his conference’s recent agenda rollout: “Every committee has responsibilities for oversight.”

“They’ve virtually outlined no substantive agenda for governing,” Herrig said of House Republicans. “This is what they’re going to do ... so you really need a concentrated effort that’s doing this every day.”

In addition to Herrig and Woodhouse, the project’s leadership team will include Leslie Dach, a well-known Democratic communications specialist who has led progressive organizations for decades, served in the Obama administration and advised the Biden administration’s pandemic response.

In a sign of the important role the initiative will play over the next two years — and its proximity to the White House — other senior advisers include Jeff Peck, a former Biden aide during the president’s time in the Senate who served as treasurer and vice chair of the Biden Foundation as well as a senior adviser to the Biden-Harris transition.

The Congressional Integrity Project leadership team will include Leslie Dach, a well-known Democratic communications specialist who has led progressive organizations for decades. | Brian Stukes/Getty Images for Protect Our Care

For the final two years of Biden’s term, Republicans will be aided in their oversight push by a coalition of outside conservative research groups that have already mapped out potential targets and started digging into issues ranging from Hunter Biden’s business dealings to immigration policy.

And GOP lawmakers have left their own investigative breadcrumbs that make it clear where they intend to go. Likely Oversight Committee Chair James Comer (R-Ky.) will lead the Hunter Biden investigation, with Republicans already preparing to elevate the probe to Joe Biden although no evidence has publicly emerged that his decisions were affected by his son’s business dealings. Comer recently told POLITICO that he and likely Judiciary Committee Chair Jim Jordan (R-Ohio) would provide a public update this week.

Jordan, meanwhile, is preparing to use the gavel he’s poised to take for conduct a sweeping investigation into the Justice Department and FBI, two frequent targets of Trump’s ire. That probe is likely to touch on everything from the search at Mar-a-Lago for classified documents to tracking threats against local school officials, which the GOP slams as an effort to target parents despite denials from the bureau. [vid]

other GOP areas of interest include the withdrawal from Afghanistan, Ukraine aid and a coronavirus probe that is likely to sweep up longtime public health adviser Anthony Fauci.

McCarthy and his allies are under pressure from their base and some members of their own conference to pair their investigations with impeachment articles; some in the party are clearly itching for payback after then-President Trump was impeached twice. Though impeaching Biden is likely a heavy lift — and a step that McCarthy isn’t endorsing for now — Republicans see Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas as a more likely target for attempted removal from office.

congressional Democrats and others close to the administration view Republicans’ vows to investigate Mayorkas’ department and the border as the latest sign that they aren’t serious about trying to pass immigration legislation. And they slam Republican investigative plans writ large as thinly veiled attempts to help Trump, pointing to Jordan’s public remarks earlier this year that characterized GOP probes as helping “frame up the 2024 race.”

The Congressional Integrity Project is also aiming to raise funds for a paid media campaign, including dedicated websites, digital ads, mobile billboards, newspaper ads and, occasionally, TV ad buys. Its public opinion research will be shared with like-minded organizations and congressional allies to contrast GOP investigations with issues the American public cares most about, project leaders said.

Their goal is to prevent a repeat of the 2016 presidential campaign when Republicans also controlled the House and created a select committee to investigate the 2012 attack on the U.S. mission in Benghazi, Libya, that killed four Americans. That GOP select panel ended up zeroing in on former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton as she prepared to ascend to the Democratic nomination, culminating in an 11-hour grilling of Clinton.

Republicans’ two-year Benghazi investigation spent $7 million in taxpayer money and dogged Clinton on the campaign trail before finally producing an 800-page report that didn’t focus on the former secretary of state.

Then-Majority Leader McCarthy quipped in 2015 to Fox News’ Sean Hannity that the Benghazi committee had successfully driven down Clinton’s poll numbers. “He took a lot of crap for it, but in the end, it was true” that the investigation hurt Clinton politically, recalled Woodhouse.

Rather, Democrats hope the flood of investigations will lead to a repeat of the 1998 midterm elections, held amid the GOP push to impeach then-President Bill Clinton. Voter backlash against that move helped Democrats defy historical trends in House races that favor the party that doesn’t occupy the White House gaining seats.

POLITICO

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gop Republican congressional aides huddled this month with conservative think-tank leaders on Maryland's Eastern Shore to hone tactics and messaging for Biden administration probes, Axios has learned.

Why it matters: If the GOP wins control in the midterms, leaders want to kick off high-profile investigations as soon as the new Congress is seated. Republicans plan to draw on investigative power from allies across Washington.

Details: The retreat was hosted by the Heritage Foundation, the Conservative Partnership Institute and the American Accountability Foundation, a nonprofit run by Trump administration alumni that's dogged Biden nominees with independent investigative work.

In attendance were aides to the top Republicans on the House Transportation and Infrastructure, Ways and Means and Oversight committees, as well as a senior aide to Rep. Jim Banks (R-Ind.), who is considered a leadership contender.
Aides toSenate Banking Committee ranking member Sen. Pat Toomey (R-Pa.) and Sens. Rick Scott (R-Fla.) and Mike Braun (R-Ind.) also attended.

The big picture: With unified Democratic control in D.C., Republicans have been limited in their efforts to wield Congress' probative powers around high-profile issues such as a southern border immigration surge, the U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan and economic shocks that threaten a U.S. recession.

If they win congressional majorities, Republicans plan to use that power in retrospective fashion to dig into Biden administration conduct going back to his inauguration.
That will mean a congressional microscope on Biden administration policies and spending. It will also bring stepped-up GOP scrutiny of private sector actors such as tech companies that Republicans see as politically adversarial.

Behind the scenes: Over two days, congressional aides at the retreat got briefings from prominent conservative activists and organizations on a host of investigative tactics.

Gene Hamilton, a former senior aide in Trump's Justice Department and a board member of the America First Legal Foundation, briefed staffers on how to use legal experts and the federal court system to conduct research and "advance conservative priorities in the courts."
Alexa Walker, the Banks aide and the Republican Study Committee's coalitions director, and Scott Gast, a former senior aide in the Trump White House counsel's office, discussed strategies for coordinating congressional oversight with outside research and investigative groups.
Mike Howell and Roman Jankowski of the Heritage Foundation led a training on the Freedom of Information Act.
AAF chief Tom Jones briefed attendees on tactics for investigating presidential nominees and appointees.
Phil Reboli of CPI trained staffers on effective communications strategies to sell oversight efforts to outside groups and the press.

What they're saying: "We are pleased we brought together senior staff and leading outside researchers to focus on enhancing oversight skills, particularly since we're expecting increased oversight opportunities in the future," Jones said in an emailed statement.

"The American people are deeply frustrated by the failed policies and lack of leadership of the Biden Administration. They expect good government groups like ours and Congressional leaders to work together to hold this administration accountable."

Howell, who leads Heritage's Oversight Project, t0ld Axios the goal of the event was to ensure congressional staff members are equipped to kick-start investigations as soon as the new Congress is gaveled in.

"What's going to happen next Congress is, you've got to do four years of oversight in two years. That's going to be an immense lift, and it means that they cannot wait to get these committees situated," he said in an interview.
"There are thousands of people who served in the Trump administration, myself included, who experienced what was probably the most intense congressional oversight to date," Howell said. They "are now chomping at the bit to deploy these skills that they've learned back at the Biden administration."

Between the lines: The event provides a glimpse of where Republicans see potentially fruitful oversight avenues.

Senate Banking has been at the center of Biden nomination fights, with committee Republicans successfully sinking two high-profile nominees.
The Oversight Committee, whose chief counsel for oversight attended, has a broad mandate. Its ranking Republican, Rep. James Comer (R-Ky.), has recently signaled scrutiny of Biden's immigration policies, his son Hunter’s business dealings abroad and tech companies' ostensible political bias.
The Transportation Committee's Republican general counsel wrote in a disclosure filing that the training would help the committee ensure "fiscal stewardship and effective oversight of the recently passed infrastructure bill and other items within T&I's jurisdiction."
The Ways and Means Committee, which sent two Republican aides to the retreat, is a powerful panel with oversight jurisdiction over tax and financial policies at the center of a national furor over inflation.

Republican oversight won't be confined to federal agencies or the White House, Howell said.

"Big Tech is in the crosshairs," he said. "They're going to be subject to document requests and subpoenas and depositions."
Howell pointed to the subpoena power wielded heavily by the Jan. 6 select committee, which has sought private phone and bank records, among other documents.
"It's really a whole new frontier that has been opened with a whole bevy of new tactics and techniques, which were once thought out of bounds. They're now going to be a tool in the hands of the other side."

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