By Trevor Hunnicutt
WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Embattled Republican freshman U.S. Representative George Santos skipped his invitation to a White House reception on Tuesday evening and appears to have been joined by several hardline newcomers in snubbing President Joe Biden.
All first-time lawmakers were invited to the bipartisan reception hosted by Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris, but dozens of Republicans opposed to Biden's policies were missing from the list of more than 40 registrants that was distributed by the White House for the event.
Among the missing were several who tried to block Republican Kevin McCarthy from being elected speaker earlier this month, before relenting once he offered them extensive concessions.
Those representatives were Josh Brecheen of Oklahoma, Eli Crane of Arizona, Anna Paulina Luna of Florida, Andy Ogles of Tennessee and Keith Self of Texas. Their spokespeople did not respond to a request for comment after normal business hours.
Santos, who has faced calls from fellow New York Republicans to step down over fabrications about his career and history, told reporters on Capitol Hill earlier on Tuesday: "I'm not going."
Eleven Republican newcomers were expected to attend the White House event.
"Everyone is invited who is part of the new Congress," said White House spokesperson Karine Jean-Pierre on Monday.
Biden is expected to soon launch his campaign for re-election to a second, four-year term in 2024, and he needs support in Congress to raise the debt limit, pass a new budget and help deliver on a host of promises to voters.
Many Republicans in the House have instead promised to block government spending and investigate Biden's family and use of office.
Biden's fellow Democrats have narrow control of the Senate, while Republicans won a slim majority in the House during the 2022 midterm elections.
McCarthy was elected as speaker only after agreeing to a demand by hardliners that any lawmaker be able call for his removal at any time. That will sharply cut the power the Californian will hold when trying to pass legislation.
(Reporting by Trevor Hunnicutt; Editing by Dan Burns & Simon Cameron-Moore)
Monterey Park (United States) (AFP) - Asian Americans were reeling Tuesday after two mass shootings in California targeting members of their community left 18 people dead -- with the alleged gunmen in both cases being older men of Asian descent.
The killings came in a span of just 48 hours -- so close together that California Governor Gavin Newsom was at a hospital meeting with victims of the first attack when he was pulled away to be briefed about the second.
"It is said all the time: only in America," a clearly exasperated Newsom told reporters Tuesday in Half Moon Bay.
"Only in America. Number one in gun ownership. Number one in gun deaths. It's not even complicated," he said.
"What the hell is wrong with us, that we allow these weapons of war and large capacity clips out on the streets and sidewalks?"
Another shooting occurred overnight in Washington state, where a gunman killed three people at a convenience store, in an act police said appeared to be random.
The carnage prompted President Joe Biden to renew calls for Congress to act quickly on an assault weapons ban. A group of senators on Monday reintroduced a federal assault weapons ban and legislation that would raise the minimum purchase age for assault weapons to 21.
Biden also said he would be dispatching Vice President Kamala Harris to California in the wake of the shootings.
"Our hearts are with the people of California," he said, calling the massacres "devastating."
Investigators were still probing the motives behind the two incidents, which stood out among the scourge of mass shootings in America both for the community impacted -- gun violence is usually seen as rare among Asians and Asian Americans -- and for the age of the suspects, 67 and 72.
The nonpartisan Violence Project says 79 percent of mass shooters from 1966 to 2020 were under age 45. It says a mere 6.4 percent of mass shooters in that time were Asian.
The Monday bloodshed occurred at two farms around Half Moon Bay, a rural coastal community south of San Francisco.
San Mateo County Sheriff Christina Corpus said Tuesday that five men and two woman -- a mixture of Hispanic and Asian -- were killed, and that 67-year-old Half Moon Bay resident Chunli Zhao had been taken into custody.
A semi-automatic handgun had been recovered.
"The only known connection between the victims and suspect is that they may have been co-workers," she said.
"All the evidence we have points to this being an instance of workplace violence."
The San Francisco Chronicle reported a former co-worker had been granted a restraining order against Zhao over violent behaviour.
"Mr. Zhao said to me, today I am going to kill you," Jingjiu Wang wrote in 2013 when the two worked at a San Jose restaurant together.
"He then took a pillow and started to cover my face and suffocate me."
The small community of Half Moon Bay was on Tuesday struggling to come to terms with the mass shooting.
"This is tragedy, and to happen on the New Year," Aily Li, whose family owns the China House restaurant, told AFP.
Sophie Li, who works at Shiki Japanese Cuisine in the town, said guns were terrifying.
"Without a gun, we just argue. But if you have a gun, it gives you more power and then something will happen," she said.
"You deal with people who carry a gun and you never know what will happen. People got shot, right?"
That tragedy unfolded as detectives in southern California were still probing what drove 72-year-old Huu Can Tran to shoot dead 11 people gathered for Lunar New Year on Saturday night at a suburban dance hall.
Los Angeles County Sheriff Robert Luna said Tran, who had been arrested decades earlier for unlawful possession of a firearm, fired 42 rounds in the attack in Monterey Park.
"What drove a madman to do this?" he said.
Luna confirmed officers had been told Tran may have been known to some of his victims.
Information about Tran remained unclear. CNN reported that, according to his marriage license, he had immigrated from China; the New York Times cited immigration documents saying he was a naturalized US citizen of Vietnamese origin.
A former friend described Tran as a vengeful loner.
"Two simple words that cover the whole thing: He's a person of distrust. He distrusts people around him. Second word is hate. He hates people around him, especially if he thought someone was doing bad on him," the friend said, according to the Los Angeles Times.
"He would say, 'Someday I will get back at you, get even, get revenge.'
"I think his life was so miserable and desperate that he chose that day to end his life and meanwhile he wanted to get people he didn't like or hated to go with him," the man said.
Under the terms of the deal that got him confirmed, House Speaker Kevin McCarthy (R-CA) agreed to advance "FairTax" — a 30-year-old proposal to entirely abolish the IRS and replace it with a 30 percent tax on all retail sales and spending.
But that doesn't mean McCarthy is on board with the proposal. In a conversation with CNN congressional reporter Manu Raju on Tuesday, asked if he supported the plan, he simply replied, "No."
"As part of the deal to win the speakership, McCarthy did agree to let the bill move through 'regular order' — in other words to let the House Ways and Means Committee vote on it and see if it has enough support to get to the floor, according to Rep. Chip Roy," reporter Raju. "The chairman of that committee, Jason Smith, told me that they plan to have a hearing on the bill to discuss the 'pros and cons.'"
Even Smith, noted Raju, "was non-committal in backing the bill or holding a committee vote on it."
READ MORE: 'A stroke of genius': Trump could be on the receiving end of the same charges used to indict gang members
FairTax has been introduced as a bill in Congress before, and even had the backing of some Republican presidential candidates, including former Gov. Mike Huckabee (R-AR) both times he ran. However, it has never been seriously debated as legislation.
Experts, including former Ronald Reagan adviser Bruce Bartlett, have broadly slammed the proposal as unworkable, regressive on the poor, and potentially disastrous for the economy and the functioning of the government. President Joe Biden has also signaled he plans to go after Republicans for proposing the idea, pointing out the extra expense it would create for families.
Watch the video below or at this link.
As Republican party loyalists are enjoying the afterglow of classified documents being found belonging to President Joe Biden, while minimizing the classified documents that have been found at the Indiana home of former Vice President Mike Pence, Steve Bannon longtime adviser, supporter and confidant of former President Donald Trump, has used the opportunity to knock Pence off his GOP platform for a possible 2024 presidential campaign.
On Bannon's Gettr social media account, he reacted to the news of Pence's classified documents.
"Judas Pence attempts to provide cover for Biden," Bannon posted.
Bannon's comments come with no basis on Pence trying to minimize the findings of Biden's classified documents, and before a major media response has been provided by Pence. Most political insiders believe Bannon is just acting as a de facto Trump spokesperson on the issue.
IN OTHER NEWS: 'Monumentally stupid': Reagan adviser shreds GOP over IRS plan
Another possibility is that Bannon is trying to deflect attention from his current case and the charges that he fraudulently obtained donations for the Build the Wall Campaign and misappropriated those funds for the unfinished project. Bannon is facing charges of conspiracy, money laundering and scheming to defraud investors.
One of the conditions House Speaker Kevin McCarthy (R-CA) agreed to under the terms of getting a group of far-right holdout lawmakers to stop blocking his election was to hold a serious House vote, for the first time ever, on a proposal known as "FairTax."
An idea that has been kicking around in libertarian circles for decades, FairTax calls for the IRS and all current forms of federal taxation to be abolished and replaced with a 30 percent tax on spending that would apply to everything from retail sales to real estate to anything involving a good or service being paid for. It would also establish what supporters call a "prebate," sending a monthly check to every household that covers the average amount a household would pay in tax for bare essentials like food and medicine.
On Twitter Tuesday, former Ronald Reagan economic adviser Bruce Bartlett demolished the idea as completely unworkable.
"The so-called FairTax is monumentally stupid and has been since the day it was invented some 30 years ago. I lost friends because I said so at the time and many times since. I hope the Stupid Party brings it up for a vote," wrote Bartlett, a fierce critic of the modern GOP. "I am reminded that a big supporter of the Fair Tax was former Ways & Means Committee chairman Bill Archer. Yet despite chairing the committee for years he never introduced a bill to implement it because it's a stupid idea that won't work."
IN OTHER NEWS: 'I will not be part of this charade': McCarthy bleeding votes to boot Democrats off committees
Bartlett has been warning about the problems with the FairTax plan for years. In 2005, he published a lengthy paper deconstructing how impossible it would be to enforce, how the tax revenues could never fund the modern federal government as we know it, how it would depress wages for workers, and how the whole scheme is probably unconstitutional. He reiterated many of these issues in a Wall Street Journal editorial two years later.
FairTax has next to no chance of passing the Senate even if it passes the House. However, President Joe Biden is already set to blast House Republicans over the proposal in his upcoming economic policy speech, accusing them of moving to raise prices for groceries and other essentials for families at a time when the country is already recovering from the worst inflation in 40 years
CNN's national security reporter, Zachary Cohen, spoke to former President Donald Trump's legal team after the news broke that Mike Pence had classified documents in his Indiana home. According to the lawyers, it changes everything.
It was announced on Tuesday that unknown to Pence, among the items taken from his time in the White House were a few documents that were marked classified. Pence, like President Joe Biden, immediately contacted the FBI and handed over the information.
The Trump team thinks that it will make it difficult for prosecutors to justify bringing charges against the former president without charging Pence and Biden.
“They are all now linked in a way," the source told CNN.
IN OTHER NEWS: George Santos fumes after GOP senator labels him a 'bunny boiler'
Legal experts have maintained that there are huge differences between the two cases. Trump knowingly took the documents, and even plotted to make them public online, according to aide Kash Patel. Trump also refused to turn them over for a year and lied about having turned them all over.
The adage in political dramas is," it's never the crime, it's the coverup." In Trump's case, his intent will be proven by his behavior after the National Archives began to work with his office to get the documents back.
Trump took to his social media site on Tuesday to proclaim Pence's innocence and defending him as someone who "never did anything knowingly dishonest in his life."
IN OTHER NEWS: Trump's 'strategic abuse' of the courts just blew up in his face
The comments come two years after Trump railed against Pence for refusing to overturn the 2020 election on Jan. 6, 2021. The crowd of Trump's activists erected a gallows and chanted "hang Mike Pence," searching for him through the Capitol halls.
Former FBI agent Peter Strzok penned a post to his Substack this week explaining to Americans that accidentally misplacing classified information is more frequent than one might assume.
In the wake of revelations that Donald Trump possessed over 13,000 documents, some of which were classified, former White House staffers were quick to say that were they to do something like that they'd be thrown in jail. In some ways they were correct. What Trump did by refusing to hand things over and making it clear that he took the documents intentionally would certainly cause trouble for any lower-level staffer.
But accidentally mishandling or grabbing classified documents at higher levels isn't uncommon.
At the FBI Strzok investigated those incidents. He agreed it was "serious business," but the overwhelming majority of the time it's unintentional and not espionage.
IN OTHER NEWS: Trump makes last-ditch effort to save Peter Navarro from prosecution
"On a daily basis somewhere in the federal government, someone accidentally inserts classified information into an unclassified email, or takes home a stack of paper which has some classified in the middle of the pile, or misplaces a briefcase with classified information in it on the metro or at a conference," he wrote.
"When I was the head of the FBI’s Counterespionage Section, on a monthly basis, if not more, we’d get calls from various agencies telling us they’d come across a scenario like I just described, asking us if we would open a case. The subsequent discussion inevitably centered around one critical question: what did they know about the intent of the person who had mishandled the classified information?" Strzok went on.
This is the key reason that so many legal analysts have focused on the question of "intent" over the past few weeks in comparing Trump to Biden and now Mike Pence.
As former FBI general counsel Andrew Weissmann explained earlier this month, the difference is in spilling a glass of milk vs. throwing a glass of milk in someone's face.
READ MORE: ‘Was that OK?’ Trump Jr. seeks reassurances from girlfriend during rocky premier of new Rumble show
As of last week, the grand jury has already called witnesses to answer questions about Trump's motives for taking the information he did.
"Insight into the president’s frame of mind—his intent and motivation, are likely to be the foundational building blocks of any case that the special counsel considers seeking against Trump," longtime journalist Murray Waas first reported.
Strzok explained that the main questions he posed as an investigator were:
1. Did the person intentionally and willfully mishandle it?
2. Was there a lot of documents?
"I’m not talking about tens of documents - I mean tens of thousands or more, Chelsea Manning or allegedly Edward Snowden amounts of material," he clarified.
3. Was anyone else involved that was linked to a foreign power or the media that would indicate any kind of disloyalty to the United States?
4. Did the person try to obstruct the investigation, try to destroy evidence or lie in any way?
Walking through the timeline, some of these questions can already be answered about Trump vs. Biden simply with the information available publicly. Strzok goes on to lay those pieces out and give specifics. Pence will likely be similar in that he too quickly cooperated with the Justice Department and FBI.
"One more point before diving into Trump’s and Biden’s behavior. I spent a fair amount of my professional life in wealth and power-adjacent settings, usually in a governmental context. One thing that may not be apparent is the administrative complexity of the life of a cabinet-level employee (or Senator or Vice President or President)," he explained. "Time and attention are at a premium. Very senior employees have staff which prepare and present material in advance of meetings and who remove it when the meetings are complete. They have security details, drivers, their own aircraft. They have advisors, attorneys, public affairs specialists, cooks, people who run errands, plan their schedules, ensure bananas are cut in the precise way they prefer, mow their lawns, pack things, and unpack things. What most of us experience as the administrative burden of moving through life is not done alone but rather by a team - sometime a team of hundreds."
He said that to demonstrate that it's entirely possible for a higher-level person to have a few things swept up. What is not normal, however, is 15-20 boxes of documents being "accidentally" taken.
The US Justice Department sued Google on Tuesday for its dominance of the online advertising market, launching a fresh legal battle against the California-based tech giant.
The federal antitrust suit accused Google of unlawfully maintaining a monopoly that had "corrupted legitimate competition in the ad tech industry".
"Google has used anticompetitive, exclusionary, and unlawful means to eliminate or severely diminish any threat to its dominance over digital advertising technologies," the suit added.
The case was launched by the US Justice Department (DOJ) in conjunction with eleven states including Florida, Georgia, Indiana, Louisiana and Texas.
Central to the case is Google's dominance of the ad tech business, the technology that companies rely on for their online advertising needs.
The prosecutors said Google "now controls" the crucial sector, meaning website creators earn less and advertisers pay more, all while innovation is choked by the lack of rivals in the sector.
"In pursuit of outsized profits, Google has caused great harm to online publishers and advertisers and American consumers," said Deputy US Attorney General Lisa Monaco in a statement.
The federal case follows state lawsuits against Google that have alleged it illegally dominates the markets for online search, advertising technology and apps on the Android mobile platform.
Google has denied vehemently it is a monopoly, saying rivals in the online ad market include Amazon, Facebook-owner Meta and Microsoft.
"Today's lawsuit from the DOJ attempts to pick winners and losers in the highly competitive advertising technology sector," a Google spokesperson said in an email.
The lawsuit "is doubling down on a flawed argument that would slow innovation, raise advertising fees, and make it harder for thousands of small businesses and publishers to grow," Google added.
The Computer & Communications Industry Association, a big tech lobby, said the lawsuit failed to take into account offline rivals that include ads in newspapers and on TV and radio.
"The governments’ contention that digital ads aren’t in competition with print, broadcast, and outdoor advertising defies reason," CCIA said in a statement.
The Unites States is home to global tech giants Google, Apple, Amazon and Meta and has largely depended on the courts to curb their power.
Earlier this month, US President Joe Biden urged Republican and Democratic lawmakers to break years of political gridlock and pass laws that would set stricter rules for Big Tech.
WASHINGTON — Democratic Senators speaking to Raw Story made it clear that they're on board with President Joe Biden's refusal to negotiate with Republicans on the debt ceiling.
"It really holds Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid hostage," Sen. Ron Wyden (D-OR) said. "Over in the House they said they were going to balance the budget in ten years, and yet they're spending more money letting the wealthy tax cheats off the hook. It puts more pressure on Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid."
He went so far as to say that Republicans "want to kill grandma."
Wyden is referencing the funding bill that enabled the IRS to hire enough agents, customer service, and other staff to be able to handle the load. One of the larger problems explained by NPR, GQ and ProPublica is that it's a lot cheaper and easier to audit lower-income Americans who can't afford expensive lawyers and long court battles. By contrast, millionaires and billionaires skirting and paying their taxes are generally left alone out of fears that the legal battle would cost the IRS too much in court feels and lawyers. The far-right has tried to scare Americans into thinking that more IRS agents means going after everyday Americans, which the department explained isn't true.
IN OTHER NEWS: Trump abruptly drops his effort to challenge NY AG's fraud case against his company
Wyden said that he's tried to emphasize focusing on wealthy tax cheats and that the first vote in the House this year was the perfect example of Republicans trying to throw a bone to those who don't want to pay their fair share. He said that the Congressional Budget Office scored it as costing taxpayers $100 million.
"I think they manufactured an unnecessary crisis," he continued. "And it's going to hurt the economy and hurt jobs."
He called on it to be a clean bill. "Listen, they're always talking about a regular order. if they've got proposals to cut spending, let them propose them."
The self-imposed debt ceiling has been used politically by the GOP for decades to attempt to make cuts to services to Americans. In a recent comment, House Speaker Kevin McCarthy (R-CA) lied about which parties have done the worst when it comes to adding to the nation's debt.
“Just in the last four years that Democrats were in the majority, they increased discretionary spending by 30 percent. When Republicans were in the majority for the eight years prior, they didn’t increase it by $1," McCarthy claimed.
The Washington Post gave it "Three Pinocchios," using their grading system of four being the top.
Biden is open to cuts in future spending, but the debt ceiling isn't about what bills may or may not pass in the future. The debt ceiling is about decisions lawmakers already made under Donald Trump, for example, and now don't want to pay for. Biden has also made it clear that he won't negotiate such cuts it at the expense of the American economy.
The debt ceiling vote is one that Republicans tend to support when their party is in the White House and they oppose when the opposite party is in the White House, the Washington Post explained.
"Remember during the Trump administration the Republicans supported raising the debt ceiling," Wyden said.
Republicans have argued that breaking the debt ceiling isn't all that bad, while Democrats and the White House follow the advice of economists and economic forecasters.
“One of the greatest threats we have to this nation is our debt,” McCarthy told the Fox network earlier this month. “We don’t want to just have this runaway spending.”
“Fiscal deadlines will pose a greater risk this year than they have for a decade,” the New York Times cited one Goldman Sachs economist.
Inevitably, the debt ceiling always gets raised, but in cases where the government is shut down over the debate, Americans end up spending more money, hurting those who rely on their paychecks from government jobs and some wouldn't get things like Veteran's assistance, Social Security checks, tax refunds and other projects.
Goldman's estimations warn that the exact date could be "thrown into flux by uncertainty over the Treasury Department’s cash flow, which could change depending on the trajectory of the economy and the fate of certain policies."
A lawyer for Mike Pence found about a dozen documents with classified markings at the former vice president's private residence.
The lawyer discovered the government documents last week at Pence's home in Indiana and turned those records over to the FBI, multiple sources familiar with the matter told CNN.
The FBI and the Justice Department’s National Security Division are now investigating how the government materials wound up at Pence's new home in Carmel, where a lawyer conducted a review in response to the discovery of classified materials at President Joe Biden's private office and residence, the sources said.
Pence has repeatedly said he did not have any classified documents in his possession, but his team plans to discuss the matter Tuesday with lawmakers.
IN OTHER NEWS: Republican Party fractures result in a brawl at a local farm show
The Department of Justice continues to investigate the materials found in Biden's possession, along with top-secret materials found at Donald Trump's private residence and other locations that he had refused to return them to the National Archives.
U.S. Senator Lindsey Graham (R-SC), a top Trump ally who has defended the Republican ex-president at almost every turn, is speaking up to defend President Joe Biden in the face of the DOJ's probe into his handling of classified documents.
Graham, 67, an attorney who just celebrated his 20th year in the Senate, is the former Chairman of the Judiciary Committee. He also spent over three decades in the U.S. military, including as a Colonel in the U.S. Air Force Judge Advocate General's (JAG) Corps.
President Biden, in addition to being President Barack Obama's Vice President for eight years, spent 36 years as a U.S. Senator from Delaware.
According to Ahtra Elnashar, the national correspondent for Sinclair Broadcast Group on Capitol Hill, Graham "would be shocked" if there was anything "sinister" with President Biden's handling, or mishandling, of classified documents.
"Significant," Elnashar wrote on Twitter Tuesday. "Sen. Lindsey Graham tells me he’s known Biden for a long time and would be shocked if there was anything sinister going on with his handling of classified documents."
In a video clip, Graham tells reporters, "Let me just say this: I've known President Biden for a long time. I don't think there's – I'd be shocked if there's anything sinister."
Watch below or at this link.
Here's the video: pic.twitter.com/6QJI5N05aV
— Ahtra Elnashar (@AhtraElnashar) January 24, 2023
Rep. Matt Gaetz (R-FL) urged Republicans to back off from impeaching President Joe Biden because the Florida lawmaker believes Democrats will "take out the trash" using a classified documents scandal.
During an interview on Real America's Voice, host Steve Bannon asked Gaetz if Biden should be removed from office after classified documents were found in his home and former offices.
"I think that the Republicans aren't going to take out the trash for the Democrats because they're going to do it themselves," Gaetz said. "And that's what you're observing right now. So I would caution my Republican colleagues against swallowing this hook, you know, whole."
Instead, Gaetz argued Republicans should "allow the Democrats to feast on Biden."
Watch the video below or at this link.
President Joe Biden has maintained "there's no 'there' there" in his handling of classified documents, but one conservative columnist argued that only makes his case look the same as Donald Trump's.
The former president stashed top-secret government materials at his private Mar-a-Lago resort after leaving office and refused to return them to the National Archives when asked, but The Bulwark's Will Saletan said the Biden administration was sending a confusing message by insisting the current president had done nothing wrong.
"Biden is completely wrong," Saletan wrote. "The 'no "there" there' defense doesn’t distinguish him from Trump. It makes the two cases look alike. It positions Biden, like Trump, as a denier of obvious reality. Biden shouldn’t have had classified records in his home, his garage, or other unauthorized locations. But he did."
The president read a scripted statement last week saying he had no regrets about taking classified materials to one of his old private offices, his home library and a garage at his residence, but two days later FBI agents again found classified documents at his Wilmington home in the presence of Biden's personal legal team and the White House counsel's office.
IN OTHER NEWS: Top NY paper dunks on Trump after they prove he lied
"Stop pretending there isn’t anything to see here," Saletan wrote. "We already know there is. The only remaining question is how bad it is. So far, there’s no evidence that Biden, his lawyers, or the White House resisted attempts by DOJ or the National Archives to recover documents, as Trump did. But as to how many classified files Biden improperly retained, or what they were: We don’t yet know."
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