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'This is insane': Experts hammer Kevin McCarthy for letting George Santos attend classified China briefing
February 08, 2023
U.S. Rep. George Santos (R-NY), under multiple state and federal investigations, and even a criminal fraud investigation in Brazil, recently stepped down from his committee assignments pending House ethics investigations, but on Thursday he will be allowed to attend a classified briefing by the Pentagon on threats from China.
Santos is facing numerous investigations, including ongoing, pending, or possible investigations from the U.S. Dept. of Justice (DOJ), the Federal Election Commission (FEC), the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), the Nassau District Attorney, the Queens District Attorney, the New York State Attorney General, along with the House Ethics Committee.
CNN’s Manu Raju Wednesday afternoon reports: “Asked Speaker McCarthy if he’s OK with George Santos attending tomorrow’s classified briefing on China. ‘Yes,’ he told me.”
Experts are expressing outrage, and are calling allowing Santos to gain access to classified information a “threat to our national security.”
“George Santos should not be getting access to classified information,” the government watchdog Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (CREW) immediately responded.
Last month CREW published a report that states: “George Santos should not get intelligence information.”
“Santos’s misrepresentations of large swaths of his background have proven his tendency to lie for power and personal gain. It is clear that he has not demonstrated the trustworthiness necessary to guard our country’s most closely guarded secrets,” it reads.
“Santos’s serial misrepresentations of the truth about a vast array of subjects have demonstrated an astonishing level of untrustworthiness,” CREW President Noah Bookbinder says in the report. “It would be a threat to our national security to allow him to serve on any committee where he would gain access to national intelligence.”
Retired U.S. Naval War College professor Tom Nichols, an academic specialist on international affairs including Russia, nuclear weapons, and national security affairs, tweeted: “This is insane.”
Just last month Speaker McCarthy banned two top House Democrats, Eric Swalwell and Adam Schiff, from returning to the Intelligence Committee. While he claimed it was for national security reasons, some believe it was retribution for their roles in prosecuting Donald Trump’s impeachments.
“I cannot put partisan loyalty ahead of national security, and I cannot simply recognize years of service as the sole criteria for membership on this essential committee. Integrity matters more,” McCarthy wrote in a letter.
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Michael Cohen calls out Republicans: 'The real weaponization' from the DOJ came from Bill Barr
February 08, 2023
Former Rep. David Jolly (R-FL) asked former Donald Trump lawyer Michael Cohen about a comment he made about the "real weaponization" that happened under the Justice Department when Attorney General Bill Barr was in charge.
Republicans have started their own House committee against the "weaponization of the federal government" alleging that
Cohen defended District Attorney Alvin Bragg, who had previously said that he wasn't open to prosecuting Trump for the crimes that were previously outlined by DA Cy Vance's time in office.
Former acting solicitor general Neal Katyal said that it was honorable for Cohen to give Bragg the benefit of the doubt, but that he feels like "no one where looks good."
IN OTHER NEWS: Jamie Raskin drops the hammer on Republicans after their Oversight hearing turns up 'absolutely nothing'
"There are three basic characters. One is this district attorney Bragg who looks really timid, and some of it is not entirely his fault," said Katyal. "Prosecutor after prosecutor has flinched and wilted in the face of Donald Trump's attacks on them. And they melt under pressure. So, Bragg has been inheriting some of that. So, some of that is not his fault. Michael is saying it would be unfair to judge him. He needed time to study it. It seems that Bragg did more than saying, 'I need some time.' It seemed like he mostly closed the investigation and signaled he wasn't going to indict. It feels like it was something more than just a bid for more time."
He explained that it was why Mark Pomerantz was so furious, quit his job with the DANY and brought top investigator Carey Dunn along with him in a very public attack on Bragg and his decision not to go after Trump.
It was when Jolly noted that Bragg is an elected official and he has to run for reelection. While that race isn't for some time, he will always be remembered for letting Trump off the hook. He asked Cohen about the allegations of weaponization of government and whether it was happening when he was working with Trump.
It's not "about while I was with Donald Trump," explained Cohen. "It was while I was out and when I was the subject of the weaponization, meaning Bill Barr, meaning Donald Trump, the Department of Justice, Southern District of New York and all the prosecutors including the judge."
What Cohen was referring to is that during his time in prison, he was told he could be released on house arrest due to the COVID-19 pandemic. He was then told that the only way he could be released is if he signed a nondisclosure agreement committing not to talk about Trump, speak to cable news or write a book about Trump. Cohen refused and he was sent back to prison. He sued claiming it was a violation of his First Amendment rights and he was being singled out by it.
“I have never heard of such a spectacularly overbroad restriction on speech as a condition of probation or supervised release," said ACLU director of the National Prison Project David C. Fathi at the time.
He went on to agree to tell Jolly that what happened then was "actionable" and he wishes he could talk to the Biden DOJ about it.
"Not only that, I think it's extremely important for Democrats to be able to expose the signatures of the weaponization by the Trump administration because if we allow someone like Donald Trump to do what he did, now that they have the playbook, I talk about that in my book Revenge. If we allow them to get away with it, now that they have the playbook."
Cohen and others have requested the documents around that request by the Bureau of Prisons and the DOJ only to be stonewalled at every go. Two members of Congress, the former House Judiciary Chairman and multiple lawsuits have all asked for the documents about the DOJ's demand of Cohen's NDA. No one can get ahold of it.
Cohen thinks that's about to change, however.
Nicolle Wallace said that there's more than enough evidence already that the DOJ was weaponized under Barr in John Durham's probe with at least two people who complained of corruption.
"Why hasn't Bill Barr not been brought in to testify?" asked Cohen. Sen. Dick Durbin (D-IL) said that he intends to look into the weaponization of the Durham probe.
Katyal asked Cohen, "I'd love your view on what you think changed for District Attorney Bragg? He came into office and poured water on this investigation that you and so many other people brought receipts and made it pretty ironclad, at least to us lay people on the outside. So is Bragg just engaged in a PR offensive? Is this real? Is it just a reaction to Mark Pomeranz's book? What do you think is going on?"
Cohen thinks time was the greatest help to Bragg's resistance to the case.
Katyal said that if it was just "time" why Bragg began his term in office shutting it all down instead of telling people "I need more time to review this."
"I don't think he wanted to lose coming in as the very first case that he may be working on," Cohen said.
See the full discussions in the videos below or at this link.
Part 1:
Cohen Bragg part 1 www.youtube.com
Part 2:
Cohen Bragg 2 www.youtube.com
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Jamie Raskin drops the hammer on Republicans after their Oversight hearing turns up 'absolutely nothing'
February 08, 2023
In a fiery statement concluding today's Twitter testimony at the House Oversight Committee, ranking member Rep. Jamie Raskin (D-MD) tore apart the entire premise of the hearing and chided Republican members for failing to focus on more serious problems in social media.
The hearing, which included three former Twitter executives, focused on the decision by the company to briefly suppress a New York Post story detailing information about Hunter Biden's laptop ahead of the election as disinformation — a decision the company has freely admitted was a mistake, as many of the details of the story subsequently proved to be true. Republicans have claimed, without any evidence, that the FBI or the Biden campaign pressured Twitter into suppressing the story.
"I want to start with a simple point," said Raskin. "We have members threatening witnesses with arrest and prosecution for clearly imaginary offenses, or at least offenses that might make sense in their mind, but I don't know what they would be," said Raskin. "Twitter is a private, First Amendment protected media entity, and you make your own decisions, like Fox News — and I might get kicked off of Fox News or they might not cover me — or the Wall Street Journal or MSNBC. I've got no constitutional right to go there, so I think there is legal fallacy and logical fallacy that pervades most of the questioning today."
"Under our First Amendment, there's state action requirement; there is no state action here," said Raskin. "Now, there's an attempt to, perhaps, jerry-rig some state action by claiming, well, it was really the FBI that committed whatever offense was there, but what do we have in terms of what we found today? Today's witnesses, each and every one, testified no U.S. governmental official directed any of them to censor, remove, or take down the New York Post story. That was their mistake. Two, today's witnesses testified the Biden campaign did not direct Twitter to take action against the New York Post story. And three, the whole hearing was predicated on the idea the FBI directed Twitter to take down the New York Post story to protect Biden, but, once again, not a single witness testified the FBI even communicated with Twitter about the New York Post story."
IN OTHER NEWS: Republican gets slapped down after calling on committee to ‘look into’ Dem’s remarks
The upshot, said Raskin, is that "this has been a wild cyber goose chase all day. It has turned up absolutely nothing."
"But there was one serious point made by our witness, Ms. Navaroli," continued Raskin. "The violence and the chaos that was wracked upon this institution not far from where we sit today on January 6, the attempt to topple a presidential election and install someone who had not been elected as president, was facilitated by Twitter and other social media entities and, at Twitter at least, the brass specifically rejected the pleas of employees to take seriously all of the signs and clues of coming violence and the insurrectionary action that took place. That's a serious problem that we're going to have to deal with in a serious hearing."
Watch video below or at this link.
Jamie Raskin's closing statement at Hunter Biden laptop hearing www.youtube.com
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