Monitoring Biden and other Contemporary Events

Rep. Adam Kinzinger (R-Ill.) went after the Republican Party and slammed members for sheltering “the ignorant” and “the racist” in a fiery final speech from the House floor on Thursday.

Kinzinger, a member of the Jan. 6 House select committee who has slammed former President Donald Trump ― and his supporters ― in the past, appeared to take aim at Trump again, this time for his recent call to terminate articles of the Constitution to return him to the White House.

The outgoing GOP lawmaker, who has been in Congress for over a decade, declined to seek reelection this year and used his farewell speech to remind Republicans and Democrats that they shouldn’t let go of their belief in the Constitution.

“We all swore an oath in this very chamber to support and defend the Constitution of the United States ― not a political party and not a single man,” Kinzinger said. “Let us renew this belief while casting out those that take the unprecedented call to abolish this sacred document.”

Kinzinger later criticized the Republican National Committee’s vote last year to censure him ― along with outgoing Rep. Liz Cheney (R-Wyo.), who was co-chair of the House select committee ― following their involvement in the efforts to investigate the events surrounding the deadly attack at the U.S. Capitol days before Trump left office in 2021.

He questioned leaders who “belittle, and in some cases justify, attacks on the U.S. Capitol as ‘legitimate political discourse,’” words which the RNC used to refer to the events on Jan. 6 in its resolution condemning the two Republicans.

“The Republican Party used to believe in a big tent, which welcomed the tired, the poor, the huddled masses yearning to breathe free,” Kinzinger said. “Now we shelter the ignorant, the racist, who only stoke anger and hatred to those who are different than us.”

Biden Trolls Trump With Some 'Major Announcements' Of His Own

Joe Biden just threw some major shade at Donald Trump’s “major announcement.”

On Wednesday, the former president teased that he would drop a “major announcement” on his Truth Social account the next day. With characteristic restraint, he declared in all caps that “AMERICA NEEDS A SUPERHERO!”

Some people speculated that Trump might be preparing to announce a run for speaker of the House of Representatives, or that defeated Arizona gubernatorial candidate Kari Lake would be his 2024 running mate.

Instead, the “major announcement” was a major anticlimax. Turns out, Trump is introducing a series of “digital trading cards” with his likeness that sell for $99 a pop. Various cards depict Trump as a superhero, an astronaut and a cowboy ― you know, just like in real life.

As might be expected, the “major announcement” that the former president is basically trying to make more money off his supporters attracted lots of Twitter snark and mockery, not least of which came from the current president.

In a tweet sent from his personal account, Biden said he’d had some “MAJOR ANNOUNCEMENTS” of his own in the past few weeks, and pointed out that inflation is easing, he just signed the Respect for Marriage Act, and Brittney Griner is finally home from Russia, among other things.

Quote:

Joe Biden
@JoeBiden
·
20h

United States government official
I had some MAJOR ANNOUNCEMENTS the last couple of weeks, too…

✔️ Inflation’s easing
✔️ I just signed the Respect for Marriage Act
✔️ We brought Brittney Griner home
✔️ Gas prices are lower than a year ago
✔️ 10,000 new high-paying jobs in Arizona

I sub to Brand and love that we have a handful of people who tell it straight. Since the news is so ******* dismal, I appreciate the sarcastic humor.

Some interesting developments as we head into the weekend:

On Monday the House Select Committee to Investigate the January 6th Attack on the U.S. Capitol will hold its final public meeting. Today, Kyle Cheney and Nicholas Wu of Politico reported that the committee will vote on referring former president Trump to the Justice Department for at least three criminal charges. Those charges include insurrection, obstruction of an official proceeding, and conspiracy to defraud the U.S. government.

Such a referral creates no legal obligation on the Department of Justice to act, but it certainly creates political pressure. If a bipartisan congressional committee—and the January 6th committee has two Republicans on it, no matter how often Trump supporters say it is all Democrats—many of whose members are lawyers, tells the Justice Department it thinks crimes have been committed, the Department of Justice will need, at least, to explain why it disagrees.

In the shorter term, though, Representative David Cicilline (D-RI) and 40 colleagues yesterday introduced a bill in which the term “insurrection” matters a lot. The measure bars Trump from holding office under the restrictions imposed by the Fourteenth Amendment. Written in 1866, after President Andrew Johnson had pardoned most of the Confederate ringleaders and constituents had voted them back into office, Congress wrote:

“No person shall be a Senator or Representative in Congress, or elector of President and Vice President, or hold any office, civil or military, under the United States, or under any state, who, having previously taken an oath, as a member of Congress, or as an officer of the United States, or as a member of any state legislature, or as an executive or judicial officer of any State, to support the Constitution of the United States, shall have engaged in insurrection or rebellion against the same, or given aid or comfort to the enemies thereof.”

The states ratified that amendment in 1868.

Also today, at the request of the Department of Justice, U.S. District Court Chief Judge Beryl Howell unsealed an opinion she wrote in June, in which she determined that a number of communications between Representative Scott Perry (R-PA), lawyer John Eastman, and Justice Department lawyer Jeffrey Clark, who tried to take over the attorney general’s job and use the Justice Department to overthrow the 2020 presidential election, and his aide Ken Klukowski were not privileged.

It is not clear why the Department of Justice wanted this decision unsealed.

But the material does show that department lawyers have had access to Clark’s inside account of a couple of key moments: Trump looking at the letter Clark drafted incorrectly telling Georgia legislators the department thought the results of the election were tainted—there is evidence Trump knew this was false—and the key January 3, 2021, meeting in which Trump was stopped from putting Clark in power only when the rest of the Justice Department’s leadership threatened to resign.

Clark’s information came in the shape of an outline for an autobiography. That he set out to write such a document suggests that those involved in trying to overthrow our government saw themselves as heroes in the making: the reason we have so many diaries from Confederates in the early 1860s is that they imagined they were the Founders of their own new nation.

The autobiography also appears to reveal a direct connection between the attempt to overthrow the United States government and the toxic individualism of the Movement Conservatives who took over the Republican Party in the 1990s. Movement Conservatives based their ideology in the idea from the Reconstruction years that Black voters would elect leaders who promised them roads and schools and hospitals that could only be paid for with taxes on property owners. In the post–Civil War South, that primarily meant white men. Thus, in this construction, minority voting meant a redistribution of wealth from white men to Black people.

In the twentieth century, international communism meant government takeover of the means of production. But in the United States, “socialism” and “communism” were defined in the 1870s by those opposed to Black voting, who insisted that letting Black men have a say in their government would create a racial redistribution of wealth that would destroy America.

This idea melded with the nation’s opposition to international communism after World War II, in which support for communism truly seemed to threaten the nation’s existence, to lead us to where we are today. As minority voting grew after 1965 and women began to vote independently of their husbands after 1980, the American fear of communism expanded to justify the belief that elections won by candidates popular with women and minorities are illegitimate.

According to the judge’s decision, this idea was important to Clark. In the conclusion to his autobiography, Clark promised that he would continue to work on “Covid litigation and against wokeism” and that he would “resist communism.”

Finally, the House Ways and Means Committee, which got access to six years of Trump’s tax returns at the end of November after years of litigation, will hold a meeting Tuesday to vote on whether to make them public. Republicans will control the committee in the new Congress, and if the Democrats now in charge don’t vote for their release, it might well not happen.

That being said, at this point my guess is that there are a number of Republicans standing back and silently cheering on those trying to put a definitive end to Trump’s political career.

at this point my guess is that there are a number of Republicans standing back and silently cheering on those trying to put a definitive end to Trump’s political career.

A Tennessee man who was previously charged in connection with the Capitol riot is now facing conspiracy and other charges after allegedly obtaining a copy of a list of law enforcement personnel who played a role in his criminal investigation and discussing plans to kill them, according to a court filing unsealed Friday.

The criminal complaint against Edward Kelley, 33, of Maryville says he obtained the names of law enforcement personnel involved in the probe that led to his initial arrest, and discussed plans to kill them and attack the FBI's field office in Knoxville. Austin Carter, 26, of Knoxville is listed as a co-defendant.

The pair was charged with conspiracy, retaliating against a federal official, interstate communication of a threat, and solicitation to commit a crime of violence.

Federal investigators have obtained access to email accounts from several key allies of former President Trump, including Rep. Scott Perry (R-Pa.) and Trump attorney John Eastman.

The revelation came after a judge in the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia granted a request from the government to partially unseal a memorandum and order from June, as well as a memorandum opinion from September.

The government had previously requested that those documents be sealed at the time. Investigators obtained about 130,000 documents through their June search warrants.

The records obtained include 37 documents consisting of email exchanges and attachments that Perry had with Eastman and former Justice Department officials Jeffrey Clark and Ken Klukowski.

Investigators also obtained 331 versions of an outline of Clark’s autobiography in September.

A “filter” team for the government first obtained the records they requested to search for instances of attorney-client privilege or work-product protections. The records were then given to the investigative team after Chief Judge Beryl Howell ruled they were not protected materials.

The Justice Department has previously searched Eastman, Perry and Clark’s cell phones as part of its criminal investigation into the Jan. 6, 2021, Capitol insurrection and general efforts to overturn the results of the 2020 presidential election.

The House select committee investigating the Jan. 6 insurrection has said that Perry was “directly involved” in efforts to make Clark the attorney general in order to assist with efforts to overturn the election results.

Bannon And Gorka Flip Out Over Trump's Idiotic NFT Scam
"I can’t do this anymore," was Bannon's refrain.