The Republicans’ major investigation into Biden’s circle of relatives has revealed. . . Not much.
On Wednesday, the House GOP accused Joe Biden and his circle of relatives of doing business with foreign entities, but could not provide genuine evidence linking the president to wrongdoing.
House Oversight Committee Chairman James Comer released a 65-page memo detailing an expanding investigation into Biden and some of his inner circles, namely his son Hunter Biden. Nowhere in the large document is there an express allegation of a crime committed through Biden or anyone close to him. To him.
At a press conference to explain the investigation, Comer was asked if he had any evidence directly linking Biden to corruption. The Kentucky Republican turned around and eventually admitted no.
Asked if he had any evidence directly linking Joe Biden to alleged wrongdoing, Comer said he did not pic. twitter. com/AsatNEiMJd
The memo accuses Biden’s circle of relatives of being involved in an “influence peddling scheme” in Romania from 2015 to 2017, as well as monetary transactions with Americans in China. Hunter Biden’s call pops up several times. But the memo comprises some main points about all those alleged dealings, and contains no evidence that any legislation has been damaged or that Biden is involved in his son’s business in China.
Rep. Jamie Raskin, a senior member of the oversight committee, criticized Comer for “failing to provide factual evidence of his implausible allegations against the president. “
“He continues to bombard the public with innuendo, false claims and outright lies, recycling unsubstantiated claims debunked years ago,” Raskin said in a statement.
Since taking control of the House of Representatives, Republicans have been obsessed with seeking to smear the Biden family, rather than governing. The United States is weeks away from defaulting on its debt, yet the Republican Party is said to be more involved in wild goose hunting.
The co-sponsor of a bill to save you unemployment fraud has been charged with committing unemployment fraud.
On Tuesday, George Santos was indicted on thirteen similar counts of money laundering, rope fraud, mendacity to Congress and public theft of funds. A day later, Republicans began voting on a bill to recover Covid-19 unemployment benefits from fraudulent applicants. Santos was not able to participate, however, as he was busy being dealt with for his thirteen charges, as well as fraudulently claiming $24,000 in Covid unemployment benefits while earning a $120,000 salary.
The icing on the cake is that Santos himself is one of the co-sponsors of the bill, the Taxpayer and Victims of Unemployment Fraud Protection Act.
When asked about the transparent conflict, House Majority Leader Steve Scalise objected.
“As far as George Santos is concerned, he’s already been fired from all of his committees,” Scalise said, bucking House Speaker Kevin McCarthy’s earlier suggestion that Santos himself had opted to leave his committee assignments. Go through the legal process, but we’ll keep working to eliminate fraud, and there are many: we’re talking tens or even billions of dollars of fraud.
Santos is also part of the Republican quest to hold the debt ceiling hostage to imposing frameworks for Medicaid and SNAP benefits — again, a wonderful irony given his own fraudulent use of government subsidies.
The contradiction is a commonplace of a conservative ideological motion (editor’s note: all Republicans and some Democrats) that, in each and every way, has instituted a regime of “regulation for you but not for me. “
When it comes to government subsidies, the conservative motion has inundated corporations, especially those that support it, such as fossil fuel or rail corporations, with canceled subsidies and regulations.
When it comes to taxes, the rich have been to evade taxes and get savage tax breaks, while the deficient pay disproportionately more for a society that treats them disproportionately worse. Most Americans are paying for a formula that only widens the gap between the rich and poor, and the cycle continues, becoming more and more entrenched.
And as for unemployment benefits, Republicans are now pursuing a bill that aims to crack down on scammers as they seek to repeal the federal budget passed by Democrats in 2021 that would empower the Labor Department to investigate fraud cases. Meanwhile, one of his own co-sponsors turns out to be to blame for the precise mischief Republicans claim they seek to solve.
All the contradictions are underpinned by a political motion that has complained about public spending and student debt relief while being among the biggest beneficiaries of Covid PPP emergency funds, or among politicians, from Dianne Feinstein to Kelly Loeffler to Richard Burr, who engaged industry experts at the height of the pandemic.
Since Rep. George Santos made his way into the public consciousness six months ago, a primary has been precisely how he made his money. The Republican congressman claimed to have made millions in a short period of time, without a genuine explanation of where the money was. I came here from.
The new rates, if any, further complicate matters.
Santos was indicted Wednesday in federal court in New York on thirteen counts of bureaucracy of monetary fraud, adding two counts of misrepresentation in his House of Attorneys’ monetary disclosure reports. Santos claimed in the past that he earned $3 million in the years leading up to his bid for Congress. , adding up to a salary of $750,000 in 2021.
But according to court documents, he never came close to earning that much. The court filing alleges Santos earned only about $55,000 in 2020, when he first ran for Congress, on salaries from two other companies. One such company, Harbor City Capital, is accused of a Ponzi scheme, which Santos conveniently failed to disclose.
The indictment also states that Santos falsely claimed a $750,000 salary and between $1 million and $5 million in dividends from his Devolder corporate organizations. So if so, where did Santos get what he claimed to have, adding the funds from his crusade?And even did it exist?
One big question was where that $750,000 salary that Santos suddenly claimed in 2022 came from. This suggests that it didn’t come from anywhere, that he invented it, and that there is no evidence that he was given this kind of cash from anywhere. twitter. com/O4eqkCW9Je
The indictment makes clear that prosecutors are also looking for the source of Santos’ alleged great nonpublic wealth.
Santos also charged Wednesday with two counts of unemployment fraud for claiming Covid-19 unemployment benefits and five counts of cordon fraud for soliciting donations in 2022, claiming they were for his House campaign. Instead, he transferred the donations to his own bank account and used it for non-public expenses, such as buying designer clothes and credit card payments.
The accusation is verified with other shady dealings that were heard related to Santos in recent months. One donor told Talking Points Memo that he donated $1,000 to his 2020 campaign, paying by credit card over the phone. Over the next year, more than $15,000 in fraudulent fees were made with this card, with some of the cash going to businesses and other Santos-related campaigns.
Santos also helped negotiate the sale of a $19 million yacht between two of his top donors weeks before the November election, The New York Times reported. He told Semafor that the reference payment for such a deal would be several hundred thousand dollars.
But in the end, the precise source of all your money remains a mystery. Perhaps his upcoming federal trial will shed a little more light on the matter.
More and more Republicans actually began to spread their expressed discomfort or speak out in favor of Donald Trump after he was convicted of sexual abuse and defamation against E. Jean Carroll on Tuesday.
But, of course, there are still swarms of Republicans who still stumble to portray themselves as disgusting, in their docility and in their demonic, or even flattering, defenses of Trump and his now assertive habit as a sexual plague.
Here’s a look at how some Republicans are protecting a guy that even former aides now admit to being a serial bully.
Kentucky Attorney General Daniel Cameron, who has already shown mild deference to existing laws by not charging any police officers in the killing of Breonna Taylor, expressed little displeasure with Trump.
Kentucky Attorney General Daniel Cameron, one of the leading R candidates in the GOP’s fierce gubernatorial primary, asked in the debate what he thought of President Trump’s approval after today’s verdict in Case E. Jean Carroll: “I am honored. . . He’s a fighter and I’m a fighter. ” pic. twitter. com/MOUnRtOwrU
Alabama Sen. Tommy Tuberville said the verdict finding Trump guilty of sexual abuse “makes me vote for him twice. “
Florida Sen. Marco Rubio, who opposed Trump in 2016 and now acts as his cute lapdog, attacked the jury and the case as a “joke. “who did their part by participating in it) not on issues raised, but because Trump was convicted of someone’s sexual harassment.
Rubio also denied Trump’s duty for defaming Carroll. “If someone accuses me of raping you and I didn’t, and you’re innocent, of course you’re going to say something about it. . . It’s a joke. “
It wasn’t a joke, and if Trump wanted to “say something,” why didn’t he protect himself at his trial?
Wyoming Senator Cynthia Lummis just raised her hand, as if she had no signature among the 0. 00016% of Americans in Congress.
Lummis with a ? ♀️ “People who love Trump, love Trump. People who hate Trump, hate Trump. It probably wouldn’t make any difference. . . it validates what Trump’s enemies think of him. People who love him have seen him go through things like this before, they don’t seem to care.
He said the resolution would not be his resolution on who to help in 2024. “I’m going to remain neutral,” the Wyoming Republican said when asked if she had anything to say about the fact that her party’s leading candidate had been convicted of sexual abuse. . .
House Majority Leader Kevin McCarthy, who is now juggling dealing with Trump’s rate of sexual abuse and defamation and George Santos facing thirteen counts of fraud and begging before Congress, opted to stand firm and straighten himself out by simply ignoring questions about Trump’s rates.
“Sir, what is your reaction when President Trump found out you were guilty in Case E. Jean Carroll?” he asked about a reporter in the halls of Congress. McCarthy pursed his lips and kept walking.
New York Rep. and serial fabulist George Santos was indicted Wednesday on thirteen counts of bureaucracy of money fraud.
The congressional freshman known for his volleyball career (among other more serious fabrications) surrendered to the federal government on Long Island. He was officially charged with five counts of wire fraud for soliciting donations from a company through his LLC, Devolder Organizations LLC. Santos reportedly said the cash would go to his Chamber’s crusade and that donations could be unlimited since the company is a Super PAC and a registered nonprofit, which is not true.
Santos was charged with 3 counts of illegal financial transactions for moving those donations from the company’s bank account to his private account. for his campaign.
He was also charged with one count of theft of the public budget and two counts of unemployment fraud. In mid-June 2020, Santos reportedly applied for unemployment benefits under the Covid-19 relief program, despite earning a $120,000 salary at an investment firm. According to court documents, Santos earned normal unemployment benefits from June 2020 to April 2021, even though he worked.
Ultimately, Santos was charged with two counts of making false statements in the House’s monetary disclosure reports. In 2020, when he first ran for Congress, he claimed his total earned income stream was $55,000, paid through a single business. In reality, he was given over to him by a company at the time, Harbor City Capital, which he accused of a Ponzi scheme and conveniently did not disclose.
Then, in 2022, he claimed he had a $750,000 salary from Devolder Organizations LLC and between $1 million and $5 million in dividends from the same company in a savings account. Court documents allege that not only were none of those claims true, but Santos only made about $48,000 from 2021 to the time he filed the disclosure form. Half of that was cash a salary from another company and the rest came from unemployment benefits.
Santos has only sparked scandal since he was elected midterm in 2022. It turns out that he fabricated most of his professional and educational resume. He also claimed that his mother survived September 11 (she wasn’t even in the country) and lied when he said his grandparents fled the Holocaust and that 4 of their workers died in the Pulse nightclub shooting.
Santos also continues to be investigated through the House Ethics Committee and reached an agreement with the Brazilian government to investigate him for currency fraud.
This story has been updated.
Read the full indictment here.
For those who are worried about where Tucker Carlson might land after being kicked out of Fox, don’t worry. You land in a position where you will be even more ideologically comfortable and where you will not be bothered by the pesky main points of things like editorial duty. or legal duty.
For what? Because Elon Musk’s Twitter rolls out a welcome mat for the far-right TV host. Carlson will relaunch his exhibit on the social media website, bringing in some of his former Fox employees.
“Starting soon, we’ll bring a new edition of the exhibit we’ve been doing for over six and a half years on Twitter,” Carlson said in a video on Twitter.
“The most productive thing you can hope for in the news industry right now is the freedom to tell the fullest possible fact. But there are limits,” Carlson continued, “being fired for that,” perhaps nodding toward his own departure from Fox after the network paid $787. 5 million to settle a defamation lawsuit filed through Dominion Voting Systems over the network’s lies about its voting machines and the integrity of the 2020 election.
News of Carlson’s exhibition comes after months as Musk stepped up Twitter to make it look more like a far-right haven and less of an open platform that serves as a data trail for the world.
Musk re-entered far-right Nazis on Twitter. He has banned many news hounds for doing their job. It has absolutely disrupted the verification system, allowing identity theft and misinformation to run rampant. He gave the archives exclusive to a handful of writers, so they can build a carefully curated, conspiracy narrative about suppressing the far right online.
In days, Musk has concocted lies and conspiracy theories about everything from the horrific mass shooting in Allen, Texas, perpetrated by a neo-Nazi white supremacist, to Daniel Perry’s murder of homeless Jordan Neely in the New York City subway.
All of this harmful rhetoric, exemplified through how the Allen, Texas, shooter explicitly said that stochastic terrorist figures like Libs of TikTok encouraged, tolerated, and even encouraged him through Musk under the summary glorification of “free speech. “
“Surprisingly, as of tonight, there aren’t many platforms left that allow free speech. The last big one left in the world, the only one is Twitter, where we are now,” Carlson said. “Twitter is not a partisan site, everyone is allowed here. . . But in fact, the guards are still in charge,” he continued. “We think it’s a bad system. We know exactly how it works,” he concluded, referring to “the new version. “of its exhibition as an antidote to its problem.
Carlson long ago made his logo a logo that aims to protect the little one, when he redirects anger to the wrong targets, or even flatters other people who already have strength and influence (like Musk). The dynamic was more or less the same. in your comments.
Musk, for his part, claims that Twitter has signed an exclusive agreement with Carlson and that it is “subject to the same regulations and rewards as all content creators” (which, given the amount of incorrect information and inflammatory content users have received). allowed to extend so far, doesn’t necessarily say much anyway. )
However, Carlson’s screen news still refers to how Musk is Twitter to create his own echo chamber. Already, within Musk’s new Twitter regime, in which most of Twitter Blue’s thousands of fans are Musk sycophants, far-right users, or either. many of the most common responses under the types of conspiratorial tweets Musk himself promotes are also conspiratorial or incendiary. And those same tweets are the ones that get inordinate amounts of amplification in spaces like Twitter’s “for you” tips tab. the debate or the discourse or even the intellectual exchange that Twitter might have had before is gone.
So make no mistake, whatever “free speech” Carlson advocates (read: at best, fake populism that doesn’t call for collective action against corporate villains; at worst, brutally racist attacks that inspire surveillance or militaristic police repression against protesters). ) is not only already allowed, but is inspired by Musk’s Twitter.
Twitter has already gone down the drain; advertisers have fled en masse, and will most likely only leave faster after Musk’s even more particular conspiracy stunt over the past 48 hours. Carlson’s chord adds another layer of that that will swirl in the sewers.
Republicans are never smart about convicting Donald Trump, and that’s no exception after the verdict in his sexual assault trial.
A New York jury unanimously found Trump guilty of sexual abuse and assault on Carroll in the mid-1990s and defamed her when she accused him of assault decades later. They are asking that Carroll get a total of $5 million in damages.
And Republican reactions to the verdict were at best.
Rep. Mike Burgess, Tom Cole and Thomas Massie pleaded ignorance. Burgess said he hadn’t noticed the verdict yet, Cole said he “didn’t know anything about it” and Massie said he had “been in a car” and hadn’t. I didn’t notice the result.
Rep. Jim Jordan, a staunch Trump ally, said he thought all the ongoing lawsuits against the former president were “ridiculous. “But he also said he was unaware of the verdict with Hunter Biden’s computer and attacking other people investigating Trump of the real things Trump is accused of.
House Speaker Kevin McCarthy, a Trump loyalist, also said he had not yet heard the verdict. “I attended that assembly,” he said, referring to a meeting with President Joe Biden and other congressional leaders on the U. S. debt limit.
Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell and Sen. John Kennedy did not comment on the verdict. Mike Rounds pulled off something of a rebuke by saying, even half-heartedly, that he probably won’t Trump in the 2024 presidential race.
Only former Arkansas Gov. Asa Hutchinson, also a presidential candidate, has had the courage to call out Trump so far. “In my more than 25 years of experience in the courts, I have noticed with my own eyes how an arrogant and arrogant disregard for the rule of law can backfire,” he said in a statement. “The jury’s verdict will have to be treated seriously and is another example of Donald Trump’s indefensible behavior. “
Mary Trump’s tweet about it as short and direct as possible:
E. Jean Carroll.
He tweeted it at 3:20 p. m. When I saw it leave an hour later, it had over 10,000 likes.
That’s because everyone knew what Mary Trump was communicating, simply by repeating Carroll’s name. She said thank you, be blessed, we salute you.
Knowing what we know now about the trial, it’s easy to think it’s child’s play. Carroll a stone on the dais. The corroborating witnesses were solid. Joe Tacopina, Trump’s lawyer, gave the impression of being as bad as a lawyer aware of his reputation: as a bully protecting an accused sex offender. Trump’s video statement, in which he literally mistook Carroll for his current wife, Marla, embarrassing to him. Well, that embarrassing component. The component where he said men have raped women for a million years, “fortunately or unfortunately,” a little worse than that.
But it’s not child’s play. It took courage. It took great courage to register this lawsuit and bring it to light, to eat everything Trump’s lackeys would seek to dissect it, to confront all kinds of threats he faced, and most importantly, to threaten waste. Because wasting would have been terrible, for her and for the accountant. But she knew the fact and was convinced that she could convince a jury of the fact.
She thus becomes the first user in history to hold justice accountable to Donald Trump. He punched Merrick Garland. E. Jean Carroll, Trump crudely said you weren’t his type. We say with admiration that you are definitely ours.
Donald Trump has been indicted twice, lost the popular vote twice, was the first president indicted, faces investigations into his efforts to overthrow democracy, and has now been convicted of sexually abusing E. S. Jean Carroll.
And minutes after Trump’s new conviction was announced, Fox himself began asking the question: Why else does Trump face consequences?The 2024 candidate faces fraudulent charges for his efforts to “illegally cancel the 2020 election. “
Fox’s selection follows an already conservative reaction to Trump’s most recent serious misdeeds. While conservatives have tried to downplay or deflect attention from the allegations, there have been relative expressions of a new willingness to criticize the former president.
Shortly after the verdict, Fox aired the clip of Trump’s statement confusing E. Jean Carroll with his ex-wife. One guest on the show, former federal prosecutor Andy McCarthy, didn’t even bother to come out to film the incriminating clip.
“The context is that he said ‘she wasn’t his type,'” McCarthy said. “The last user you’d have to confuse her with would be you. “There was an awkward pause.
Alas! Fox News airs the clip of Trump confusing E Jean Carroll with his ex-wife in their statement and even they can’t turn it pic. twitter. com/IxzajNrcKi
It’s possibly just a matter of subtleties after paying more than $787. 5 million to Dominion in a trial deal; It would be a matter of facts too incriminating not to acknowledge a bit. Yet even Fox is beginning to admit the nature of Trump’s criminality, and that most Americans see him that way, too.
Former President Donald Trump will have to pay $5 million for sexual abuse, assault and defamation against E. Jean Carroll, and he’s furious.
A New York jury unanimously found him guilty of sexually abusing and attacking Carroll in the mid-1990s, and of defaming him when she accused him of attacking him decades later. They are asking that Carroll get a total of $5 million in damages.
“I HAVE ABSOLUTELY NO IDEA WHO THIS WOMAN IS. THIS VERDICT IS A DISGRACE: THE CONTINUATION OF THE GREATEST WITCH HUNT IN HISTORY,” Trump on Truth Social.
Carroll is rarely the only woman to accuse Trump of sexual assault: At least 26 others did, two of whom testified at trial. But Carroll was the first to get justice.