In his interview with Mitchell, Buck cited his party's insistence on falsely claiming that the 2020 election was "stolen" from former President Donald Trump as a factor in his decision.
"I always have been disappointed with our inability in Congress to deal with major issues and I’m also disappointed that the Republican Party continues to, you know, rely on this lie that the 2020 election was stolen and rely on the January 6th narrative and the political prisoners from January 6th and other things," he explained.
Buck had increasingly become a thorn in the side of the Trump wing of the party, despite having staunchly conservative policy positions.
He flat-out refused to support Rep. Jim Jordan's (R-OH) bid for the speakership despite heavy pressure from many of his fellow Republicans to do so.
Buck has also repeatedly questioned the drive to impeach Biden and has said there is currently not evidence of an impeachable offense having been committed by the president.
A lengthy executive order on artificial intelligence signed Monday by President Joe Biden is expected to give a big boost to AI development in Silicon Valley. Bay Area experts say the guidelines and government oversight promised in the order, a whopping 20,000-word document, will lend confidence to significant numbers of potential business customers who have not yet embraced the technology, which Silicon Valley companies have been furiously developing. Organizations of virtually every kind have been “kicking the tires” on the technology but are holding off on adoption over safety and security ...
Former President Donald Trump's litany of civil and criminal proceedings in multiple jurisdictions and the political fallout from his controversial presidency have taken a toll on his adult children, according to a new Washington Post report.
"The presidency was painful for everyone in the family on some level. You have subpoenas, legal bills, investigations, testimony, terrible news stories, the constant spotlight," an unnamed source close to the Trump family told the Post. "They grew up famous, but it wasn’t like that. They’d never experienced any of that."
Despite their assistance with his 2016 and 2020 campaigns for the White House, Trump's adult children — Don Jr., Eric, Ivanka, and Tiffany — are allegedly distancing themselves from their father's 2024 endeavor as he faces 91 felony counts in both state and federal courts. Both Ivanka and Trump's wife, Melania, have both made efforts to stay out of the limelight since the 45th president's 2020 loss to Joe Biden, and one of the Post's anonymous sources told the publication that the ongoing legal drama has caused the family to become "conspiratorial" and watchful of "enemies around every corner."
While the ex-president isn't at risk of any jail time in his ongoing civil fraud trial in New York, that case is reportedly "the most deeply personal" to Trump as it concerns his children's inheritance.
"The trial strikes at his identity and the family. His kids, what he’s been able to build over years and years and years," Trump adviser David Urban told the Post.
New York Attorney General Letitia James is seeking $250 million in damages from the Trump Organization in the civil trial. The state is alleging that both Trump and his sons knowingly submitted false financial information to artificially inflate the company's net worth by more than $2 billion over a ten-year period, with the hopes of obtaining more favorable insurance rates and tax advantages. Over the next two weeks, Don Jr., Eric, Ivanka, and Trump himself will all be called to the stand to testify in the trial. Should Trump be found guilty of the allegations, both he and his sons would be held financially liable and would also be permanently banned from being officers in any New York-based company in the future.
Trump spokesman Steven Cheung dismissed the legal proceedings against the former president as politically motivated.
"All of these witch-hunts are about the abuse of power by radical Democrats and Joe Biden to interfere in an election and go after their political opponent," Cheung said.
Melania Trumpappeared in public with her husband for the first time in over six months at a Halloween party at Mar-a-Lago.
The former first lady was photographed wearing a black dress and greeting guests at the party, where Donald Trump made his entrance to Metallica's "Enter Sandman" and wore his typical black suit and red tie, reported The Daily Mail.
That's the first public event at which the couple has appeared together since an Easter brunch hosted in April at the private resort, and she has notably not appeared with her husband at any of his court appearances.
Donald Trump Jr.'s fiancée Kimberly Guilfoyle also appeared at the event in costume as Snow White, and Trump was photographed giving a thumbs-up alongside a guest who appeared to be dressed as President Joe Biden.
All the legal hocus pokus by former President Donald Trump's legal team to unmuzzle their client and appeals of U.S. District Judge Tanya Chutkan's gag order are going to be futile, a legal expert says.
"With respect to Trump's appealed to the D.C. circuit — good luck with that," Neal Katyal, former acting solicitor general said during an appearance on MSNBC's "The Last Word With Lawrence O'Donnell." "I don't think he has a chance in the world in winning that appeal."
He continued to explain that the only one to blame for having a Gucci loafer stuck in his mouth is the 45th president himself.
"He may win something marginal around the edges, but before Judge Chutkan, who wrote the initial gag order opinion, before she ruled, during the time she ruled, after the time she ruled — I tell you, no one has made a more compelling case for the need for the gag order than a guy named Donald Trump."
Judge Tanya Chutkan oversees the 2020 election federal case that Trump was charged with over the summer.
He stands accused of coordinating an effort to stymie the transfer of power after then President-Elect Joe Biden was declared the victor.
Trump along with six unindicted, unnamed co-conspirators are being blamed for fanning unrest by proclaiming there was rampant "fraud in the election and that [Trump] had actually won."
The rhetoric and efforts led to the an attack on the Capital back on Jan. 6, 202.
Trump continues to deny any culpability in the case.
The original gag order remains under appeal.
But Judge Tanya Chutkan had paused it while deciding whether or to make it a permanent pause.
In a filing last week, special counsel Jack Smith explained that pausing the gag order is a dangerous move as he already railed against his former chief of staff, Mark Meadows, who took a guilty plea granting him immunity in the subversion case against him in Georgia.
Katyal suspects that Chutkan is keeping tabs on what is happening in Georgia and that it only harms Trump's attempts to free him from the mandatory silence.
"It's absolutely the case that the judge in D.C. is going to take cognizance of what's going on in Georgia," he said. "They are going to even look probably at this threat... because a threat like what happened in Georgia doesn't happen in a vacuum."
"I have just learned that the very Biased, Trump Hating Judge in D.C., who should have RECUSED herself due to her blatant and open loathing of your favorite President, ME, has reimposed a GAG ORDER which will put me at a disadvantage against my prosecutorial and political opponents," Trump posted.
Katyal is further convinced that the more Trump acts up with the same types of rhetoric and shots in public — it will backfire against his supposed strategy to delay the trial at all costs before November 2024.
"I think Judge Chutkan has a more limited option, which she has already talked about in the earlier hearings, which is, 'Look, Trump, if you keep saying the kind of stuff you're doing and scaring witnesses and attacking prosecutors, the result is going to be, I'm going to move the court date up.'"
"And she's absolutely within her rights to do that and would never be the subject of a viable appeal for Trump," he added.
Trump's second run for the White House and perhaps his political future could be toast if a litigation trial in Denver, Colorado, that began this week, doesn't go in his way.
"That's why that judge who is presiding over this litigation in that Colorado courtroom, if she is an honest broker of the facts and the law, and I have no reason to be believe she 's not — she will conclude that Donald Trump engaged in insurrection and is therefore disqualified form serving as president again," he said.
It was brought in September by six Colorado voters arguing that Trump should be disqualified from holding office claiming he engaged in “summoning” and “inciting” a mob to halt the certification of the election that favored then President Elect Joe Biden, and therefore exposed himself to the 14th amendment.
The Civil War-era amendment states that anybody who "engaged in insurrection or rebellion" when sworn to protect the Constitution is ineligible from holding office.
In an opening statement, attorneys for the plaintiffs, including representatives of the nonprofit Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington [CREW], said their four-point case was simple: Trump took an oath to support the Constitution; the Jan. 6 attack was an insurrection; Trump engaged in that insurrection; and Colorado election officials can and must bar ineligible candidates from the ballot.
A blunt Kirschner believes not only was Jan. 6 an insurrection, but it was all fomented by the former commander-in-chief.
"Make no mistake about it this was Donald Trump's insurrection," he said.
He turned back in time to Trump's debate with then Democratic nominee Joe Biden when Trump peered into the camera and told the Nationalist group, the Proud Boys, "Stand back and stand by" as the moment he "recruited the insurrectionists."
And he then explained that Trump gave the go-ahead on Jan. 6.
"...on the morning of Jan. 6, at his pre-insurrection pep rally on the Ellipse, he incited the insurrection."
"He ginned everybody up with lies. That their vote was stolen. Their election was taken. Their favorite president was being unlawfully taken from them."
Kirschner continued: "He incited the insurrection and then he gave the order to attack.
"He commenced the insurrection. He told them 'You have to fight like hell or you won't have a country anymore. So go to the Capitol and stop the certification. Stop the steal.'"
Kirschner says Trump told the insurrectionists (whom Kirschner called his "foot soldiers") to attack the Capitol and hunt for elected officials and then he failed to "call off the attack, thereby assisting the insurrection."
And when Trump had a chance to try to make sense of the violence that descended on the nation's Capitol, Kirschner claims Trump failed yet again.
"What did he say? 'You are very special! We love you insurrectionists!'"
"And ever since he has been pledging to pardon the insurrectionists who attacked the Capitol that day, assaulted police officers, hunted for election officials and in fact stopped the certification of Joe Biden's election win albeit only temporarily."
"He pledged love and pardon to the insurrectionists."
House Republicans, lead by newly minted Speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA), are demanding that the cost of the aid package to Israel be "offset" by $14 billion in cuts to IRS enforcement funding guaranteed in President Joe Biden's Inflation Reduction Act — which is not only unrelated to the issue at hand, but experts say it would actually increase the deficit.
The fact that Republicans are demanding an increase in tax evasion as their condition of supporting a key U.S. ally's military is not an accident, argued Talking Points Memo's Josh Marshall on MSNBC Tuesday, but a sign of how low the GOP has sunk.
"I have to say, Josh, like, Mike Johnson rolling out, going after the IRS on a must-pass is past even a caricature, I can imagine, of a priority from the Republican House speaker," said anchor Chris Hayes. "Were you surprised?"
"Yeah, I kind of was," said Marshall. "You know, I have pretty low expectations of the new speaker, but you know, the thing that differentiates him from a lot of the Freedom Caucus — he's just as right-wing, he's extremely right-wing, but he's not another one of these Republicans who's, you know, going on Twitter and sharing Pepe the Frog memes, right? He's just a little more genial, he's a little softer. So, I expect that he would try to maybe get past this hurdle a little more gracefully. But as you said, this is kind of like a caricature. It doesn't even save money."
"It's almost, you know, Republicans increasingly, is almost a philosophical basis of this is sort of like neener-neenerism, right?" Marshall continued. "It's just like oh, you want that? You have to make it easier to cheat taxes and we are holding the football, so you've got to come to us."
"Like, it's not even when — it seems stupid and kind of gross in a way that I think a pretty broad cross-section of the electorate would see it that way," added Marshall. "You know, aid for Israel and Ukraine is not just like liberal issue in this country. There's a lot of people who are pretty engaged with this. So, it did surprise me."
Former President Donald Trump is now trying to claim that the timing of the four criminal indictments against him is proof of their illegitimacy. “REMEMBER, CROOKED JOE BIDEN AND HIS RADICAL LEFT THUGS WAITED THREE YEARS TO BRING THESE INDICTMENTS & LAWSUITS AGAINST ME, RIGHT IN THE MIDDLE OF MY CAMPAIGN!” he wrote on Truth Social this week.
Unfortunately for Trump, wrote Aaron Blake for The Washington Post on Tuesday, this argument falls flat when you consider the actual timeline, rather than the version of it Trump is putting forward.
For one thing, Blake noted, the "three years ago" demand would have put an indictment during the 2020 election — before either the removal of classified documents to Mar-a-Lago or the plot to overturn the vote.
Even if we accept Trump was speaking hyperbolically, though, and simply meant why wasn't he indicted in 2021 right around when the conduct occurred, that misinterprets both what the public knew about his conduct and what investigators knew.
"These things take time, and we’ve seen that play out," wrote Blake. "Trump allegedly left office with classified documents in late January 2021. But the charges brought by special counsel Jack Smith in federal court in Florida are not focused on merely possessing them. Rather, they are focused on his failure to return them when authorities came calling, along with alleged efforts to obstruct that process."
As for the other cases, wrote Blake, even the business fraud case brought by Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg, that too took a large amount of time investigating the behavior — and all of this was compounded by the scrupulousness with which prosecutors built up their case to avoid it looking political, and the fact that Trump himself chose to time his campaign announcements early to try to give himself a legal shield.
Taken all together, Blake concluded, "It’s surely inconvenient for Trump that these prosecutions are underway in the final 12 months before an election" — but on the other hand, "It’s hardly surprising given the time frames involved. And it’s not clear what actually plausible timing would have met with his approval."
Washington Post columnist Philip Bump revealed in a piece Tuesday that he recently started getting a barrage of text messages asking that he support a number of Republican causes. The texts, he said, oddly came from figures including Rep. Matt Gaetz (R-FL), Donald Trump's attorney John Eastman and Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX).
"I am curious," said the well-known liberal writer, "As to whether this was a change in approach by Republican fundraisers or an effort to troll me with spam personally, but that’s beside the point."
On Monday evening, he said, he received a request to donate to Rep. James Comer (R-KY), who is chairing an impeachment investigation into President Joe Biden.
“40 FBI Informants. In the Biden Family. For 15 years,” the text told him. “It’s Chairman Comer and you need to read this”
The message linked to a WinRed fundraising page — it struck Bump as bizarre that Comer was desperately trying to fundraise off of his hearings.
"After all, the allegation about the informants wasn’t something that came from his and his party’s efforts," Bump wrote. "The pitch couches that a bit, asserting in boldface text that '[i]t has come to light' that these informants purportedly existed. But there’s no news release about it from the normally news-release-enthusiastic House majority and no mention of it on Comer’s X/Twitter feed. The account for the Oversight Committee did mention it once, pointing back to the source of the claim: Sen. Charles E. Grassley (R-IA)."
Grassley and Comer have been coordinating on the Biden investigation, suggesting that the president and his family were involved with some kind of bribery scheme with foreigners. "No evidence corroborating the claim has emerged; evidence undercutting it is generally ignored," Bump wrote.
This month, Grassley sent a letter to the FBI and Attorney General Merrick Garland claiming the FBI, under President Donald Trump and Biden, put off investigations into the claims. Implying that he's getting information from the FBI itself, Grassley admits, "I've been made aware that at one point in time the FBI maintained over 40 Confidential Human Sources that provided criminal information relating to Joe Biden, James Biden and Hunter Biden." He didn't share other information to substantiate or verify it.
"That Comer is raising money off Grassley’s claim — raising money by exaggerating the claim to assert that there were 40 informants for 50 years — is the point," wrote Bump.
"This wasn’t his work; it was simply an allegation that those who would respond to an 'I’m fighting Biden for you' appeal would find compelling. I once referred to Comer’s efforts as a fishing expedition, but he’s not simply throwing out bait to see what he gets, he’s throwing out as much bait as he can to vacuum up as many fish as there are in the sea."
Bump closed by explaining it's easy to twist the story into a scandal, particularly when Comer, Grassley and Fox are pushing the same claims of conspiracy.
"It’s like Trump and election fraud: He keeps saying the election was stolen, so all sorts of things that very much aren’t evidence of that point are granted the default assumption that they are," said Bump.
"Comer takes pixelated images of checks and well-edited videos claiming that Biden’s on the take, puts them on a hook and tosses it into the right-wing ecosystem. Then he refreshes his WinRed page to see how much his 2024 reelection bid is bringing in."
Former GOP Rep. Adam Kinzinger hit out at D.C. for becoming a "new Hollywood" where people are getting elected just "to become famous."
"And a lot of the time they just put their head in the sand and pretend like we can get this fixed by just allowing the far right to have their way on a number of things," Kinzinger said. "And so while most may be there to govern, that doesn't mean that they're going to actually do what they need to do to get to a situation where they can fight back and govern."
When it comes to the ousting of Kevin McCarthy as Speaker of the House, Kinzinger said the "writing was on the wall."
"When you cut a deal with what I think [former Speaker John] Boehner aptly called the 'terrorist caucus,' and you start cutting deals that make it where they hold you hostage, and then you come up against real deadlines like a debt limit, like government shutdowns, I think it was inevitable," he said.
When asked if he still considers himself a Republican, Kinzinger replied that he does, but "only because I'm not willing to give up and only because I haven't changed. I will say I will call myself a Republican that feels politically homeless at the moment and don't know where I belong.
"But I also know that if everything kind of tracks the way it is in 2024, I won't be voting Republican because, again, I think it's a simple question of democracy or no democracy," he said. "And the Republican Party represents right now a real slide to authoritarianism ... If it was Joe Biden and Donald Trump, I don't think there's any question I would vote for Joe Biden."
"War Room" host Steve Bannon, former New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani and MyPillow CEO Mike Lindell are among the many Donald Trump allies who falsely claimed that the 2020 election was stolen from the former president. Since then, all three of them have had an abundance of legal problems — and, according to The Guardian's Peter Stone, are being dropped by their attorneys after failing to pay their "hefty" legal bills.
In addition to facing a variety of civil lawsuits, Giuliani is a co-defendant in Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis' election interference case. Bannon was charged with contempt of Congress for defying a subpoena from the January 6 Select Committee.
Lindell has been sued for defamation by Dominion Voting Systems and its competitor Smartmatic.
In a report published by The Guardian Tuesday, Stone explains, "A trio of top Donald Trump allies who have racked up huge legal expenses to defend themselves from either criminal charges, convictions or defamation lawsuits have lost key lawyers for failing to pay six- and seven-figure bills in a sign of the huge legal problems they face…. Welcome to the escalating legal and financial headaches plaguing three of the former U.S. president's top loyalists who pushed various false claims about his 2020 election loss to Joe Biden that helped provide cover for Trump's election falsehoods."
Stone adds that the "list of legal woes" that Bannon, Giuliani and Lindell are facing "is long."
"In October," Stone reported, "the law firm (representing Lindell) formally asked a court to allow it to withdraw from representing Lindell…. citing millions of dollars it was owed. On another legal front, a top lawyer for Bannon and Giuliani has ditched them and filed big claims for monies owed. Robert Costello and his firm, which has represented both Giuliani and Bannon, have filed separate claims against the duo, respectively, for $1.4m and $480,000."
When House Republicans unveiled their bill Monday afternoon, reaction was immediate. Critics are blasting Speaker Johnson and the GOP for, as one top Democratic staffer said, "exploiting a war to pass a tax cut for the rich."
Republicans are claiming that using funds allocated to the IRS, which President Joe Biden accomplished as part of the Inflation Reduction Act, will "offset" the $14.3 billion the bill will provide to Israel. Critics charge it will actually cost Americans more, since it hampers the IRS' ability to collect taxes owed to the U.S.
But Congressman Perry's remarks may be a better peek inside House Republicans' real goal.
"I mean, no one in America says you can fix all of America's problems or Israel's problems if we just hire more IRS agents," Congressman Perry told Fox News on Monday, adding that Speaker Johnson is "going to make the the Senate Democrats and Republicans, and some Republicans in the House, and of course House Democrats choose between the IRS or supporting our greatest ally, against an unprovoked terror attack on their soil. I think it's an easy choice, quite honestly."
Punchbowl News' Jake Sherman says Democrats will "reject" the bill immediately.
Watch Congressman Perry's remarks below or at this link.
Scott Perry says Mike Johnson is gonna make members of Congress "choose between the IRS or supporting our greatest ally." pic.twitter.com/syrNdyHpcu
— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) October 30, 2023
Chris Christie says "it's over" for Donald Trump and he knows he'll be convicted, and that's why he's struggling to remember Joe Biden's name and forgetting which city he's visiting.
The former New Jersey governor and 2024 Republican presidential candidate said the stress of his legal problems has been weighing heavily on Trump, and he told MSNBC's "Morning Joe" that Mark Meadows, in particular, poses a substantial threat to the ex-president's future now that he reached an immunity deal with special counsel Jack Smith.
"I think it's the stress of what he knows is coming in his criminal problems, and I think this week, because a lot of that was from the last week," Christie said. "That's all post-Mark Meadows. Everyone watching needs to understand, from somebody who did this work for seven years, you don't give Mark Meadows immunity unless the evidence he has is unimpeachable."
"I want Republican voters to understand this," he added. "What's going to be happening in March, he'll be sitting in a courtroom in Washington, D.C., with Mark Meadows 20 feet away from him, saying, 'He committed crimes in front of me, on my watch.'"
Trump seems to be banking on winning re-election and making all the investigations go away, but Christie doesn't think he'll be able to outrun the special counsel now that he has secured Meadows' testimony.
"Look, this is a guy who was velcroed to Trump's hip for the entire 2020 campaign and all the post-campaign nonsense, so this is deadly," Christie said. "It's done, he's going to be convicted – it's over. I don't think he can delay it. I don't have the impression this District Court judge in Washington is amenable to delay."
"Maybe it starts in April, maybe not," he added. "She's not given much to this point to the defense claims for delay. That's why Jack Smith indicted this case with just Trump, because you don't have multiple defendants."
