Tag: GOP as corrupt as Trump

As Ex-Girlfriend Flips For Prosecutors, Gaetz Insists He’s Ignoring Scandal

National Memo logo

Rep. Matt Gaetz (R-FL) has tried to set up a smokescreen, insisting he’s “not focused on scandal” as news breaks his ex-girlfriend has flipped and is now cooperating with federal authorities, just like his former “wingman,” Joel Greenberg.

Gaetz, who is under federal investigation for possible sex trafficking and possible sex with a 17-year old girl, in a Friday interview tried to minimize the charges against his friend, Greenberg, by suggesting he is in jail for defamation. Greenberg was facing dozens of charges, but currently the list stands at just six felonies after he entered a plea deal on Monday. Legal experts expect he is handing federal prosecutors evidence against the Florida GOP Congressman.

Meanwhile, federal authorities investigating Gaetz “have secured the cooperation of the congressman’s ex-girlfriend,” CNN reports. Continue reading.

Leaked texts contradict DeSantis’s claims about vaccine scandal

Raw Story Logo

Ron DeSantis, the Trump-loving governor of Florida, is getting into more hot water over claims that his office steered vaccines toward wealthy communities filled with Republican donors.

The Tampa Bay Times reports that leaked text messages between donors and public officials indicate that DeSantis’s office was involved with directing which areas got special access to vaccines, despite the governor’s denials of favoritism.

At issue is the method by which officials in Manatee County had initially set up vaccination eligibility versus the way that vaccination eligibility was actually determined. Continue reading.

Trump and allies have sought to exclude 1 of every 10 votes in key states

Washington Post logo

President Trump, his legal team and his allies have endorsed excluding nearly 1 out of every 10 votes in the states that decided the 2020 election.

That’s the latest count in light of a lawsuit the Trump campaign filed Tuesday in Nevada. The suit explicitly seeks to throw out 130,000 ballots in Democratic-leaning, Las Vegas-based Clark County over allegedly faulty signature-matching technology. Were the suit to succeed, 1 out of every 11 votes in the state would be invalidated.

That, of course, seems highly unlikely — and that goes double, given the Trump effort’s losing streak in court. But it’s emblematic of and similar in scale to the Trump team’s effort to exclude ballots in the states that mattered. To date, in fact, lawsuits and other efforts have sought the exclusion of nearly 10 percent of all ballots cast in six key states: Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Nevada, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin. The sum is now about 2.5 million votes out of just more than 25 million ballots cast in those states. Continue reading.

Top FEC Official’s Undisclosed Ties to Trump Raise Concerns Over Agency Neutrality

A top Federal Election Commission official, whose division regulates campaign cash, has shown support for President Trump and has close ties to his 2016 campaign attorney, Don McGahn. Experts said the actions raise questions about impartiality.

Debbie Chacona oversees the division of the Federal Election Commission that serves as the first line of defense against illegal flows of cash in political campaigns. Its dozens of analysts sift through billions of dollars of reported contributions and expenditures, searching for any that violate the law. The work of Chacona, a civil servant, is guided by a strict ethics code and long-standing norms that employees avoid any public actions that might suggest partisan leanings.

But Chacona’s open support of President Donald Trump and her close ties to a former Republican FEC commissioner, Donald McGahn, who went on to become the 2016 Trump campaign’s top lawyer, have raised questions among agency employees and prompted at least one formal complaint. Chacona, a veteran agency staffer who has run the FEC’s Reports Analysis Division, or RAD, since 2010, has made her partisan allegiance clear in a series of public Facebook posts that include a photo of her family gathered around a “Make America Great Again” sign while attending Trump’s January 2017 inauguration.

The public display of partisanship bewildered some FEC staffers, according to a former agency employee. For decades, the agency expressly banned employees from engaging in such partisanship, a cultural ethos that has stuck even after those rules were relaxed in 2011. Chacona’s duties included discerning whether the inaugural committee’s disclosures of donor information appeared to contain any “serious violations” of the law, an FEC procedures manual states. Continue reading.

Sarah Sanders vouches for Trump on dead soldiers — using a false claim

Washington Post logo

Sarah Sanders is out with a new book on her time in the Trump administration. And as she told ABC News on Tuesday morning, she believes it’s a contrast to the criticism of the president from other former officials.

“It’s really simple,” Sanders said: “I think mine is actually the honest account.”

But in the same interview, she relayed an inexplicably false claim while defending President Trump — as she has many times before. Continue reading.

Ethics Experts, DFL Party Blast Hagedorn Over Ethics Scandals

Hagedorn likely under investigation by House Ethics Committee

SAINT PAUL, MINNESOTA — Today, DFL Party Chairman Ken Martin was joined by several experts on ethics in government to criticize Congressman Jim Hagedorn’s clear mismanagement of his office budget and his breaking of House ethics rules. A video of the press conference can be found here.

What They Said:

“The corruption in Congressman Hagedorn’s office is staggering,” said DFL Party Chairman Ken Martin. “Hagedorn has used our tax dollars to prop up his failing campaign and lied about it, broken House ethics rules by using our tax dollars to line the pockets of one of his staff, and there are still so many unanswered questions.

“Jim Hagedorn owes it to the people of Minnesota to come clean, but he won’t,” added Martin. “Instead, Hagedorn has lied to us, tried to deflect blame, and hired a D.C. lawyer who represents crooked politicians. The plain truth is that Jim Hagedorn does not deserve our trust, he does not deserve our support, and he does not deserve to represent the great state of Minnesota in Congress.”

GOP Defends NRA Despite Evidence Of Waste, Fraud, And Abuse

Republican lawmakers are calling a lawsuit brought by New York Attorney General Letitia James on Thursday against the National Rifle Association an attack on gun ownership while ignoring the charges of “fraud and abuse” contained in the filing.

House Minority Whip Steve Scalise tweeted in response to the suit: “Violent crime is skyrocketing in NYC. What’s New York’s Democrat Attorney General focused on? Launching politically motivated attacks against the Second Amendment & NRA. Make no mistake: Making it harder for law-abiding Americans to defend themselves is the far-left’s agenda.”

James’ suit seeks to dissolve the organization and ban its officers from serving on nonprofit boards in the future. Continue reading.

The Billion-Dollar Disinformation Campaign to Reelect the President

How new technologies and techniques pioneered by dictators will shape the 2020 election

One day last fall, I sat down to create a new Facebook account. I picked a forgettable name, snapped a profile pic with my face obscured, and clicked “Like” on the official pages of Donald Trump and his reelection campaign. Facebook’s algorithm prodded me to follow Ann Coulter, Fox Business, and a variety of fan pages with names like “In Trump We Trust.” I complied. I also gave my cellphone number to the Trump campaign, and joined a handful of private Facebook groups for MAGA diehards, one of which required an application that seemed designed to screen out interlopers.

The president’s reelection campaign was then in the midst of a multimillion-dollar ad blitz aimed at shaping Americans’ understanding of the recently launched impeachment proceedings. Thousands of micro-targeted ads had flooded the internet, portraying Trump as a heroic reformer cracking down on foreign corruption while Democrats plotted a coup. That this narrative bore little resemblance to reality seemed only to accelerate its spread. Right-wing websites amplified every claim. Pro-Trump forums teemed with conspiracy theories. An alternate information ecosystem was taking shape around the biggest news story in the country, and I wanted to see it from the inside.

The story that unfurled in my Facebook feed over the next several weeks was, at times, disorienting. There were days when I would watch, live on TV, an impeachment hearing filled with damning testimony about the president’s conduct, only to look at my phone later and find a slickly edited video—served up by the Trump campaign—that used out-of-context clips to recast the same testimony as an exoneration. Wait, I caught myself wondering more than once, is that what happened today? Continue reading.