Tag: Senate GOP doing Trump’s bidding

GOP’s Obama-era probes fuel Senate angst

The Hill logoThe Republican investigations into the Obama administration are fueling public animosity in the Senate.

Those tensions, which have been simmering for months, boiled over this past week, resulting in shouting matches and multiple warnings of long-standing damage to the chamber as an institution.

The scene played out across days, on and off the floor and in multiple committee rooms, as both Sens. Ron Johnson (R-Wis.) and Lindsey Graham(R-S.C.) took up subpoenas related to their investigations and former Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein testified for the first time since resigning last year. Continue reading.

Senate confirms Ratcliffe to be Trump’s spy chief

The Hill logoThe Senate on Thursday confirmed Rep. John Ratcliffe (R-Texas) to be President Trump‘s next spy chief. 

Senators voted 49-44 on Ratcliffe’s nomination to the director of national intelligence(DNI), a position that has been filled in an acting capacity since former DNI Dan Coats stepped down in August.

The vote is one of the final items on the Senate’s to-do list before the chamber leaves town for a weeklong Memorial Day recess. And it comes only days after the Senate Intelligence Committee advanced Ratcliffe’s nomination along party lines. Continue reading.

Sen. Graham Using Judiciary Committee To Enact Partisan Vengeance

Journalists should treat Sen. Lindsey Graham’s (R-SC) pending Judiciary Committee hearings into the origins of the FBI’s Russia probe as an abuse of power intended as political payback. After all, Graham has explicitly said that would be why he would conduct such an inquiry.

Graham issued a startling threat during an appearance on Sean Hannity’s Fox News show on November 14, 2018. House Democrats had just won a majority in the midterm elections, and their incoming committee chairs were proposing rigorous investigations of the Trump administration. But Republicans held the Senate, putting Graham in line to become chairperson of the Senate Judiciary Committee.

Graham warned congressional Democrats that if he became Senate Judiciary chairperson and House Democrats investigated Russian interference in the 2016 election, he would retaliate by probing whether there was “political bias” involved in the FBI’s handling of the Russia probe and its decision not to indict former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton in relation to her use of a private email server. Those allegations are at the heart of numerous conspiracy theories that had been championed by Hannity, his Fox colleagues, and President Donald Trump. Continue reading.

GOP ‘Unmasking Scandal’ Implodes — Because Flynn Was Never Masked

Another right wing conspiracy theory down the drain.

For days if not weeks the right has insisted various Obama administration officials had targeted former Lt. General Mike Flynn, trying to “unmask” his name from transcripts on intercepted calls with Russian officials.

That was a ludicrous assertion, since “masked” names are masked and no one knows who they are until they are unmasked. Continue reading.

A guide to the players Senate Republicans want to subpoena as they re-litigate the Russia probe into Trump

Washington Post logoSenate Republicans are suddenly ramping up their efforts to dig into the origins of the probe of President Trump’s 2016 campaign. Two committees are launching investigations that essentially ask whether there was an effort at the highest levels of the Obama administration or the FBI to undermine Trump.

This week, the Senate Judiciary Committee took a step toward this by issuing a list of dozens of names of Obama officials they would like to subpoena, either for documents or testimony. And Tuesday, the Senate’s homeland security committee issued a subpoena related to an investigation of Hunter Biden.

Why are they doing this now? The committees say that if there was wrongdoing by the intelligence community as Trump got his presidency started, the American public deserves to know about it. Continue reading.

Trump’s new bombshell in the ‘Obamagate’ farce turns out to be another bust

AlterNet logoIn an apparent Senate and Team Trump effort to something something a new Trump-demanded Obama “scandal,” the Trump administration has declassified an additional portion of a previously disclosed email from Ambassador Susan Rice to herself documenting an Obama meeting with FBI Director James Comey and other top officials over the potential national security threat posed by Trump transition member Michael Flynn’s “frequent” private contacts with the Russian ambassador.

What’s the new disclosure show, then? That intelligence leaders were extremely alarmed by Flynn’s behavior, with Comey informing Obama that Flynn “potentially” represented a security risk severe enough that the Obama administration should avoid passing him sensitive information. While Obama wanted law enforcement and intelligence communities to handle their concerns “by the book,” Obama told Comey to “inform him” if anything came up that “should affect how we share classified information with the incoming team.”

The declassified portion can be found at Politico: Continue reading.

Senate Republicans issue first subpoena in Biden-Burisma probe

The Hill logoSenate Republicans issued their first subpoena on Wednesday as part of wide-ranging investigations tied to the Obama administration, deepening a battle in Congress with implications for this fall’s presidential race.

The Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee voted along party lines to issue a subpoena for Blue Star Strategies, a firm with ties to Ukrainian gas company Burisma Holdings.

Sen. Ron Johnson (R-Wis.), the chairman of the panel, has homed in on the U.S. firm as he probes Hunter Biden‘s work for Burisma Holdings, where Biden — the son of presumptive Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden— was a member of the board until he stepped down in 2019. Continue reading.

McConnell’s GOP takes Trump’s election-year cues

Senate Republicans are embracing the president’s most explosive attacks after previously sidestepping them.

Mitch McConnell can’t afford any tension with President Donald Trump. So he’s doing everything he can to keep his fragile majority in sync with Trump and his explosive election-year playbook.

Just three days after Trump berated McConnell on Twitter to “get tough” with Democrats and probe the 2016 Russia investigation that ensnared Trump’s campaign, the Senate majority leader took to the floor to echo the president’s misgivings in a way he declined to do last week. Trump’s campaign “was treated like a hostile foreign power by our own law enforcement,” McConnell said Tuesday, subject to “wild theories of Russian collusion.”

In the days to come and with McConnell’s public blessing, GOP committee chairmen plan to follow Trump’s lead and approve a series of subpoenas for documents and testimony that could hit some of Trump’s favorite targets, including Hunter Biden and dozens of Obama administration officials. Continue reading.

Trump administration declassifies full Susan Rice email sent on Inauguration Day

The email describes a Jan. 5, 2017, Oval Office meeting about Michael Flynn and Russian interference in the 2016 election.

On the day of President Donald Trump’s inauguration, outgoing national security adviser Susan Rice sent herself an email that has since drawn intense scrutiny from Republicans.

Now the full text of the email has been declassified, and POLITICO reviewed it. It says that then-FBI Director James Comey worried about sharing classified information with the Trump team because of incoming national security adviser Michael Flynn’s frequent conversations with the Russian ambassador but that Comey had no knowledge of Flynn sharing classified information with the envoy.

Republicans have seized on the document as potential evidence that the outgoing president had ordered the FBI to spy on the new administration, as Trump has alleged. And they have raised questions about the “unusual” nature of Rice memorializing the conversation in an email to herself, suggesting that in warning Comey to proceed “by the book,” Obama was implying that top law enforcement officials had done the opposite. Meanwhile, a spokesperson for Rice said it shows the Obama administration handled the Flynn situation appropriately. Continue reading.

Trump Lackeys Know Their Boss Is Losing His Grip

The bully-in-chief keeps issuing taunts on Twitter that accuse former President Barack Obama of some unspecified grand conspiracy. In what may be more evidence of a deteriorating mental state, President Donald J. Trump has made up “Obamagate,” apparently to account for the incompetence and malfeasance of his own administration.

On Thursday, Trump tweeted out a call for his congressional lackeys to force President Obama “to testify about the biggest political crime and scandal in the history of the USA, by FAR … Do it, @LindseyGrahamSC, just do it.”

But even the lackeys seem to understand this is another example of the president’s inability to stop heaping damage upon himself. While White House aides have not been able to stop Trump from appearing at coronavirus “briefings,” where he dishes out dangerous advice, distorted data and downright lies, Republican senators are quite unlikely to try to subpoena Obama. That would bulldoze what remains of Trump’s re-election campaign. Continue reading.