Mayfield (United States) (AFP) - With the help of volunteers from around the country, families in western Kentucky will be able to celebrate Christmas on Saturday, two weeks after a string of tornadoes wrought a path of deadly destruction.
"We're just trying to provide Christmas," said Jimmy Finch, a volunteer from the neighboring US state of Tennessee who came to Mayfield the day after the twisters hit.
"I haven't kept a total tally of how many people we have fed," Finch said. "We just encourage everybody to keep coming back."
Under a big yellow tent set up in a parking lot, the Scientology Volunteer Minister group also serves hot food and drink on a cold, windy Christmas Eve.
"It's a very difficult time for everybody," said Chad Adams, a member of the organization. "We're trying to make sure everybody eats."
He estimates that they have served over 30,000 meals since the disaster struck, and invites everyone around to keep coming back to have food and hot chocolate.
At other sites, organizations distributed toys to families who have lost everything, hoping to provide some joy amidst the tragedy.
In the nearby town of Benton, Shane Cornwell dressed up as Santa for his volunteer shift at a donation site, where boxes of toys and food lined the walls of the local Elk Lodge.
Outside, volunteers painted Christmas tree ornaments, while local families impacted by the storm collected toys from bins separated by age range.
At least 79 people lost their lives in the tornados, which passed over several states from the night of December 10 to the early morning of December 11.
"The scope and scale of this destruction is almost beyond belief," said US President Joe Biden after touring the damage in Mayfield.
By Marc Jones
LONDON (Reuters) - You might be tempted to pop corks if you've invested in vintage champagne this year - the most coveted bottles have outperformed all major financial market assets, from Big Tech to bitcoin.
Online platforms that allow you to trade desirable wine, champagne and spirit vintages, much like stocks or currencies, have seen record activity and bumper price movements this year.
Data from LiveTrade, which runs the "Bordeaux Index" of drinks, showed champagne accounted for 15 of the 20 top price rises on the platform in 2021.
The charge was led by Salon le Mesnil's 2002 vintage, described by its producer as "captivating like a samurai sword". It has surged more than 80% in value in 2021 on both LiveTrade and another wine platform Liv-ex, and currently sells for roughly 11,700 pounds a bottle ($15,700).
That beats bitcoin's 75% rise and is nearly five times more than the 18% made by the NYFANG+TM stocks index of Facebook, Amazon, Netflix, Google, Tesla and Microsoft which have powered world equity market gains of late.
Taittinger's Comtes de Champagne 2006 also sparkled, along with Krug's 2002 and 1996 vintages, with price rises of more than 70%, while the Krug 2000, Bollinger La Grande Année 2007, Cristal Rosé 2008 and Dom Pérignon P2 2002 have seen rises of 54%-55%.
LiveTrade CEO Matthew O'Connell said several factors had fuelled a boom in fine-wine trading this year - "from low interest rates and high levels of savings accumulated by the wealthy during numerous global lockdowns, to a growing focus on hard assets in the face of rising inflationary pressures".
Champagne benefited early in the year as it was exempt from the 25% U.S. tariffs put on European wines by Donald Trump's U.S. administration which were then suspended shortly after Joe Biden took over.
Cristal's 2012 and 2013 champagnes were the most-traded bottles of the year overall, LiveTrade said, followed by leading fine wine, the 6,450-a-bottle Lafite Rothschild 2014.
The prized claret brand's stellar performance was driven by normally less coveted "off" vintages – namely 2011, 2012, 2014 and 2017 - all of which enjoyed 25% plus sales growth.
A record 220,000 bottles were traded this year on LiveTrade at an average bottle price of about 230 pounds ($308.50) apiece. A tenth of all bottles traded saw their prices rise by over 30%.
The Champagne 50 index was the top-performing sub-index in the Liv-ex Fine Wine 1000, up 33.8% year-to-date.
($1 = 0.7455 pounds)
(Reporting by Marc Jones; Editing by Pravin Char)
After the White House on Thursday rejected a proposal to impose work requirements on Medicaid recipients in Georgia—the last state with a federal waiver permitting such restrictions—President Joe Biden received praise for "quietly erasing" one of his predecessor's "cruelest legacies."
"The announcement from the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services, delivered in a 79-page letter to Georgia's health agency, also reversed a federal waiver allowing the state to charge premiums for the health insurance program for the poor," according to the New York Times.
The Times reported:
Georgia had not yet imposed the proposed work requirements—which limited Medicaid eligibility to those who work at least 80 hours a month—but it could have started the restrictions as early as next week, according to correspondence between the state and federal health agencies.
The premiums that Georgia proposed had also not been enacted. The Medicaid agency said that it was revoking the authority to charge the premiums because those fees "can present a barrier to coverage" and worsen healthcare inequality.
Biden's move dealt "a critical blow to the already reeling effort to attach work requirements to Medicaid," the newspaper noted. "The movement by more than a dozen states managed in practice to enact work requirements in only a few—and only for a short time—as it faced court setbacks, a pandemic, and a new administration that has steadily dismantled such initiatives."
Washington Post columnist Greg Sargent called Biden's elimination of Georgia's Medicaid work requirements—the last remaining proposal of its kind in the U.S.—"a huge deal."
A huge deal: Biden just reversed the Medicaid work requirement in Georgia. By ending work requirements in many states, Biden is erasing one of Trump's cruelest legacies -- even as the ACA Trump tried to destroy is expanding.\n\nNew from @paulwaldman1 and me:https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2021/12/24/biden-medicaid-work-requirements-trump-policy/\u00a0\u2026— Greg Sargent (@Greg Sargent) 1640361643
In 2018, Seema Verma, then-director of the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services under former President Donald Trump, issued guidance allowing states to apply for a waiver to significantly alter eligibility requirements for Medicaid, a Great Society-era program on which 76 million low-income adults, people with disabilities, and children rely for health insurance.
Nearly 20 Republican-led states quickly jumped at the opportunity to take healthcare away from poor and vulnerable Americans, and the Trump administration ultimately approved policies to deny Medicaid coverage to people who didn't comply with strict work requirements in 13 states.
The Biden White House in February invalidated the previous administration's guidance allowing states to apply for Medicaid eligibility restriction waivers and notified states that had already been given permission to impose work requirements that the policies would soon be reversed due to the detrimental impact of coverage loss on Medicaid recipients, particularly during the Covid-19 pandemic, as Common Dreams reported at the time.
After the Biden administration in March told Medicaid officials in New Hampshire and Arkansas—which was the first and only state to fully implement Medicaid work requirements, taking healthcare away from at least 18,000 people over a period of several months in 2018—that approval for such policies had been revoked, progressives urged the White House to forge ahead with its plan to withdraw all remaining Medicaid work requirements nationwide, which it has done.
"This is a genuine achievement, in both symbolic and practical terms," Sargent and Paul Waldman wrote Friday of Biden's successful neutering of Trump's signature attack on healthcare.
Biden's rejection of Georgia's proposal "was effectively the last nail in the coffin of Trump's zombie attempt to make Medicaid more cumbersome and bureaucratic, in hopes of knocking as many people off health coverage as possible," argued the pair.
According to Sargent and Waldman:
Trump's effort to impose Medicaid work requirements was part of a much larger campaign to undermine and roll back our country's fitful advance toward universal healthcare. This constituted an even broader legacy of cruelty, and arguably outright betrayal.
That's because Trump campaigned in 2016 as a corrective to Paul Ryan-style Republicans who had treated destroying the social safety net as a quasi-religious calling. Trump vowed that "everybody's got to be covered," and insisted no one would die on the street, uninsured.
Once in office, however, "Trump embraced GOP anti-safety-net zealotry by going all in on the Republican effort to destroy the Affordable Care Act," they continued. "That culminated in the 2017 repeal attempt, which fortunately failed. Stymied in that effort, which would have taken coverage away from millions on the ACA's Medicaid expansion, Trump sought to weaken the safety net via other administrative means, such as these Medicaid work requirements."
"And so, in erasing those requirements," Sargent and Waldman added, "Biden is also erasing a larger hangover of Trumpian cruelty."
Sargent and Waldman noted that "the same ACA that Trump tried to destroy is expanding" because the American Rescue Plan signed by Biden in March enhanced ACA subsidies and widened eligibility for them.
However, they pointed out, "the ACA expansion in the rescue package expires at the end of next year." Although the vast majority of congressional Democrats want to extend the ACA expansion by passing the Build Back Better Act, right-wing Democratic Sen. Joe Manchin's (W. Va.) opposition to the legislation puts beefed-up healthcare subsidies at risk, hurting millions of low-income Americans and potentially jeopardizing Democrats' electoral performance.
"If Democrats aren't able to extend it, millions of people will get notice of huge premium increases right before the midterm election," Larry Levitt, executive vice president for health policy at the Kaiser Family Foundation, told Sargent and Waldman.
Rep. Scott Perry (R-Penn.) is at the center of the latest developments in the House Select Committee's Ja. 6 investigation. In response to Rep. Bennie Thompson's (D-Miss.) letter seeking Perry's "voluntary cooperation," the lawmaker echoed former White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows as he noted his refusal to cooperate with investigators.
On Tuesday, December 21, the Pennsylvania lawmaker took to Twitter with a series of tweets. "I stand with immense respect for our Constitution, the Rule of Law, and the Americans I represent who know that this entity is illegitimate, and not duly constituted under the rules of the US House of Representatives," he tweeted.
Perry continued, "I decline this entity’s request and will continue to fight the failures of the radical Left who desperately seek distraction from their abject failures of crushing inflation, a humiliating surrender in Afghanistan, and the horrendous crisis they created at our border."
Now, a new op-ed is examining how Perry may have laid the groundwork for a crash course and legal battle with Congress. NBC News contributor Teri Kanefield noted the significance of responses like Perry's.
"These responses constitute an attack on the legitimacy of the committee and the government itself and," Kanefield wrote, "like the string of losing election fraud cases, seem to be a right-wing propaganda move and not an actual legal strategy."
She continued: "On one level, Perry and the committee are clashing over something very basic: Did Trump or Joe Biden win in 2020? But more broadly it is a battle over the legitimacy of our government and from where that government draws its authority."
She also offered a detailed comparison of the "rule-of-law principle" in comparison to the rules Trump and his allies play by.
"The committee is operating under the rule-of-law principle, which assumes the legitimacy of our government and the existence of objective facts," she wrote. "Trump and his pals are operating under the strongman principle: They accept whatever Trump says as truth and ignore facts and court rulings that contradict the words of their leader."
Although it is reportedly clear that the committee has substantial evidence of the role Perry allegedly played in former President Donald Trump's plot to overturn the election, Kanefield closed with one compelling question that has yet to be answered. "Will a clear majority of Americans believe the evidence amassed by the committee and accept court verdicts? Or will a dangerous percentage of voters ignore it if a charismatic leader instructs them to do so?"
She concluded by writing, "In a democracy, after all, the fate of the nation rests with the voters."
A Trump-loving congressional candidate in Florida has replaced his controversial "Let's Go Brandon" Christmas display with a lighted "FJB" sign that is nine times larger.
Both displays, of course, are intended to convey the same message: "F*ck Joe Biden."
Martin Hyde was facing fines of up to $150 per day from his homeowners association in Sarasota over the "Let's Go Brandon" sign, which he created with lighted letters on a second-floor balcony facing the street, according to the Sarasota Herald-Tribune. The display included an inflatable Santa Claus standing behind the sign on the balcony.
"Hyde has embraced 'Let's Go Brandon' as he tries to challenge Republican U.S. Rep. Vern Buchanan from the right. He had bumper stickers and shirts made with the phrase on them," the newspaper reports. "Known for being provocative and outspoken, Hyde hired Roger Stone, a famous GOP provocateur, as a campaign consultant. So it may not be surprising that his Christmas display also would veer into the realm of provocation."
After being warned about the "Let's Go Brandon" display by the homeowners association, Hyde took it down and unveiled lighted "FJB" letters on Wednesday night. He says the new display cost him $1,000 to have made, and he's willing to risk being fined for it.
"He parked his campaign bus outside and played music while offering free pizza, beer and wine to supporters," the newspaper reports. "He gave a speech and then unveiled large lettering wrapped in Christmas lights that read "#FJB."
“When you poke the bear, there are outcomes and circumstances," Hyde told the newspaper.
"We had a blast in Sarasota pushing back on 'Cancel culture,'" he wrote above video from the event on Facebook.
Hyde, who reportedly lives in a liberal-leaning neighborhood, accused the homeowners association of selectively enforcing its ban on signs.
"If I put a message up there they liked, they’d be slapping me on the back," he said. "It’s got everything to do with they don’t like what it says."
But homeowners association president John Habbert said the dispute has nothing to do with politics.
"When he purchased his house, Mr. Hyde signed documents stating that he would abide by all HOA rules -- including no signs other than house numbers or For Sale notices," Habbert said. "Other residents have been asked to remove signs and have complied without any problems, but Mr. Hyde refuses to do so."
A detailed analysis published Thursday shines further light on the Republican Party's sprawling assault on voting rights and the democratic process nationwide, an effort that includes legislation that would "politicize, criminalize, and interfere" with elections.
Compiled by the States United Democracy Center, Protect Democracy, and Law Forward, the new report identifies at least 262 bills in 41 states that—if enacted—would "interfere with election administration." More than 30 such measures have become law in 17 Republican-led states.
"This is an all-hands-on-deck moment."
But the report makes clear that the intensifying Republican attack on democracy reaches far beyond the legislative process. "The nature of the threat," the authors warn, "has metastasized beyond proposing or passing bills."
"As we look toward 2022, we anticipate the anti-democratic strategy will consist of four key pillars: (i) changing the rules to make it easier to undermine the will of the voters; (ii) changing the people who defend our democratic system by sidelining, replacing, or attacking professional election officials; (iii) promoting controversial constitutional theories about our elections to justify partisan takeovers; and (iv) eroding public confidence and trust in elections," the analysis notes. "These four pillars are the foundation for election sabotage, contrary to the will of the voters."
Joanna Lydgate, CEO of the States United Democracy Center—a nonpartisan organization—said Thursday that "we're seeing an effort to hijack elections in this country, and ultimately, to take power away from the American people."
"The anti-democracy playbook is simple: change the rules, change the players, so they can change the outcome," said Lydgate. "These coordinated efforts are based on the same lies about the 2020 election that led to a violent insurrection. This is an all-hands-on-deck moment for those who care about protecting our republic and free and fair elections."
The report cites a number of specific examples of the GOP's attempted election subversion, which could have major impacts on the 2022 midterms and beyond. Republicans need to flip just five Democratic-held U.S. House seats to take control of the chamber.
"In Michigan, in eight of the eleven largest counties in the state, county Republican parties have systematically replaced their appointees to county canvassing boards with election deniers who embrace conspiracy theories and lies about the 2020 election," the report observes. "In Pennsylvania, the state legislature threatened to impeach the members of two county election commissions who voted to count timely received mail-in or absentee ballots that lacked a date handwritten by the voter."
"At the Secretary of State level," the report continues, "a number of candidates running in 2022 are campaigning on radical positions that would undercut independent election administration. Indeed, former President Donald Trump has endorsed three candidates for Secretary of State who contend that he won the 2020 presidential election: Mark Finchem in Arizona, Jody Hice in Georgia, and Kristina Karamo in Michigan."
Mel Barnes, staff counsel at the Wisconsin-based litigation firm Law Forward, said in a statement that the new analysis "demonstrates how urgent the need is to focus on what's happening to our country's democracy and address it head on."
"State legislatures are rolling back voting rights and sabotaging elections at the same time—we cannot remain idle," Barnes added.
In the face of Republicans' coordinated push to suppress the vote in states across the U.S., Senate Democrats have failed to approve legislation that would negate draconian GOP laws and bolster the franchise at the federal level.
This past weekend, the Senate Democratic leadership ignored calls to work through the holidays and adjourned for the year without approving voting rights legislation.
Republicans in the upper chamber have repeatedly wielded the 60-vote filibuster rule to block Democratic voting rights bills, including a compromise measure backed by Sen. Joe Manchin (D-W.Va.). Despite the GOP's unceasing obstruction, Manchin and Sen. Kyrsten Sinema (D-Ariz.) have refused to support changes to the filibuster rule.
On Thursday, President Joe Biden voiced support for a filibuster carve-out that would allow voting rights legislation to pass with a simple majority vote, a proposal that Manchin has thus far declined to endorse.
"The only thing standing between getting voting rights legislation passed and not getting passed is the filibuster," Biden told ABC News. "I support making an exception on voting rights for the filibuster."
As soon as the first week of January, Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) is expected to try once more to advance a voting rights bill in the upper chamber. If Republicans filibuster, Schumer wrote in a recent letter to colleagues, the Senate will "consider changes to any rules which prevent us from debating and reaching final conclusion on important legislation."
Michigan Senate Majority Leader Mike Shirkey (R) says the influence of an endorsement from former President Donald Trump for candidates who are loyal to him is waning, The Detroit News reports.
"We shall let the results speak for themselves, but I will go on record right now predicting that most of the endorsements will fail," he told Jackson TV this Wednesday.
"We can play this back a year from now and find out what happened," Shirkey added.
As The Detroit News points out, Trump has endorsed several state House and Senate candidates as well as candidates for Michigan attorney general and secretary of state who have echoed his voter fraud conspiracy theories.
"Local clerks, both Republican and Democratic, conducted more than 250 audits of the 2020 election and affirmed President Joe Biden's 154,188 vote victory over Trump in Michigan. Countless court rulings also have upheld Biden's victory in Michigan," The Detroit News reports. "The GOP-led Senate Oversight Committee took more than 28 hours of committee testimony from about 90 people and reviewed thousands of subpoenaed documents before concluding there was no evidence of significant acts of fraud in the 2020 election."
In a statement, Shirkey and then-House Speaker Lee Chatfield said that they had "not yet been made aware of any information that would change the outcome of the election in Michigan and, as legislative leaders, we will follow the law and follow the normal process regarding Michigan’s electors, just as we have said throughout this election."
Speaking to Jackson TV on Wednesday, Shirkey said there's "a lot of things that happened in that election that need to be tightened up but, in Michigan in particular, President Trump lost. He just simply lost."
Read more at The Detroit News.
IN OTHER NEWS: CNN justice reporter explains the latest lawsuit against OAN and Rudy Giuliani
CNN justice reporter explains the latest lawsuit against OAN and Rudy Giuliani www.youtube.com
Sen. Joe Manchin has faced pressure from Democrats over his opposition to President Joe Biden's Build Back Better bill, which would invest $1.75 trillion in social spending and climate programs. But Politico on Friday noted that the conservative West Virginia Democrat is not the only potential roadblock to passing the legislation.
The publication explained that the Senate parliamentarian, Elizabeth MacDonough, still has the power to derail the bill.
"Manchin tends to get all of the credit — or take all of the blame, depending on who's speaking — for threatening popular provisions of his party's bill, like an extension of the expanded child tax credit. But the parliamentarian’s office is arguably a bigger hurdle for several of the social spending measure's biggest centerpieces," Politico reported.
The parliamentarian is tasked with ruling on procedural issues in the Senate. "These days, MacDonough's most striking rulings do concern reconciliation bills. In a polarized Senate, where the majority party cannot muster 60 votes to end a filibuster, one of the only ways to get legislation passed is to attach – or 'ride' – controversial measures or provisions through the Senate on a reconciliation bill," explained University of Baltimore law professor Charles Tiefer.
READ MORE: Joe Manchin and the GOP refused Build Back Better — now 9/11 health care program is in jeopardy
Earlier this month, the Senate parliamentarian ruled against Democrats' push to include immigration reform provisions in the Build Back Better bill.
"Democratic leaders believed they had thoroughly pre-vetted the legislation to work under the budget reconciliation process that they're using to pass it along party lines, but the immigration setback still disappointed some in the party," Politico noted.
Several other provisions could be peril, according to Politico, including "tax credits for union-built electric vehicles, caps on out-of-pocket costs for Americans who need insulin and student aid to some undocumented immigrants who came to the United States as children."
The bill aims to funnel funds toward lowering the cost of child care and prescription drugs, supporting the purchasing power of households and investing in the transition to clean energy.
Manchin's opposition to the legislation is a major problem for Biden, who has spent significant political capital in seeking to secure the passage of what is seen as a signature bill of his presidency.
Republicans in the divided Senate solidly oppose the legislation, meaning passage depends on every Democrat in the chamber supporting it.
With additional reporting via AFP
Millions of Americans are traveling before Christmas even as national Omicron Covid-19 infections surpass Delta's peak and hospitals run out of space for patients.
Several thousand travelers face a grim Christmas Eve as airlines United, Delta and Alaska said Thursday they were canceling December 24 flights due to Covid.
United Airlines said it had called off about 120 flights over the "nationwide spike in Omicron cases," with Delta Air Lines telling customers they had pulled 90 flights.
Alaska Airlines said they canceled 17 flights after some employees "may have been exposed to the virus," adding more trips may be scrapped.
A Christmas testing crunch compounded the country's problems, with pharmacy appointments in big cities booked, government sites overwhelmed and home kits nowhere to be found.
At a newly opened federal testing site in New York City's Travers Park, people formed long lines, wearing puffy winter gear in the bone-chilling cold.
"I was planning to meet up with my family, but I might be positive for Covid, so that's something that I don't think is going to be happening," Queens resident Maria Felix said as she awaited her result.
Government workers handed out home tests to passersby -- but with only 2,000 set aside for each of the five boroughs in a city of 8.4 million, the items are set to remain scarce for some time.
"It is so sad that only 2,000 tests are available," said Jocelyn Antigua, who wanted to check her Covid status before seeing her elderly parents.
President Joe Biden -- who as a candidate blasted Donald Trump for failures on the same issue -- this week promised more testing sites and to ship out half a billion home kits, beginning January.
But there are signs that Covid was not massively deterring travel.
The American Automobile Association estimated 109 million people -- a 30 percent increase on 2020 -- will hit the road, board airplanes or take other transport on trips 50 miles (80 kilometers) or longer between December 23 and January 2.
American Airlines said it was operating 5,000 daily flights between December 19 and January 1, representing 86 percent of its schedule compared to pre-Covid 2019.
Festivities are expected to further drive up Covid cases as the heavily mutated Omicron variant pushes the nation's stretched hospitals -- and exhausted health workers -- to the brink.
Omicron now accounts for more than 90 percent of all cases in some regions.
The seven-day average of new daily cases in the US is about to pass the Delta peak seen in September, according to non-profit website Covid Act Now.
Intensive care units are running at more than 90 percent capacity in many parts of the country.
"There are more people in the hospitals this year, at this time of the year, than there were last year," Delaware Governor John Carney said, announcing all elective surgeries will be postponed.
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention announced new guidance to overcome a health worker shortage, allowing asymptomatic staff with Covid to return to work after seven days isolation, down from 10 days.
Workers do not need to quarantine if they are exposed to a case, if they are vaccinated.
US health authorities are banking on vaccinations to lower the number of severe Covid cases, and inoculation numbers have been strong all week.
On Wednesday, 1.86 million doses were administered, White House official Cyrus Shahpar tweeted.
The Food and Drug Administration authorized a Merck-developed Covid capsule as a treatment for high-risk adults, after greenlighting Pfizer's more effective pill a day earlier.
The two oral treatments are intended to complement vaccines and help relieve some of the burden of severe cases.
If former President Donald Trump tries to recapture the White House in 2024, it would be "the best thing that could happen" to President Joe Biden, according to MSNBC host and analyst Al Sharpton.
Biden said Wednesday he plans to seek re-election, adding that a potential rematch with Trump would only increase his desire to run.
On Thursday, Sharpton addressed concerns about Biden's 41 percent approval rating, as well as the fact that he will be 82 at the time of the next presidential election.
"I think the best thing that could happen to him is that Donald Trump run(s)," Sharpton said. "This whole thing of saying that Joe Biden will be 82 pales when you see that Donald Trump will be 78. I'd rather have an 82-year-old Joe Biden who's been stable and kind of steady all his life than — can you imagine Donald Trump two years older as wild as he already is?"
"So all I would do is have a commercial showing old Donald Trump getting worse," Sharpton added. "There's only a four-year gap there. You're not talking about somebody 60 running against somebody 82, you're talking about somebody 78 who's not considered stable by many of us."
Watch below.
Al Sharpton on a Biden-Trump rematch www.youtube.com
Two election workers in Georgia are suing former Trump lawyer Rudy Giuliani and the One America News network for lying about them rigging the 2020 election for President Joe Biden.
In a new lawsuit flagged by Politico's Kyle Cheney, Wandrea “Shaye” Moss and her mother, Ruby Freeman, documented the harassment and threats they've been subjected to after Giuliani and OAN falsely accused them of manipulating ballots in the Peach State.
"On multiple occasions, strangers camped out at Ms. Freeman's home and/or knocked on her door," the lawsuit states. "When Ms. Freeman was not home or would not answer the door, these strangers would sometimes also harass her neighbors. Strangers were coming to her home so frequently that the local police agreed to add her address to their patrols in the area."
The complaint also said the FBI advised Freeman to vacate her home throughout most of January 2021 lest she be endangered by angry Trump supporters. She ultimately took the FBI's advice and did not return home for two months.
READ MORE: ‘You should be hung!’ How Trump supporters drove two Georgia election workers into hiding
The lawsuit tells a similar story about what happened to Moss, and it claims that "on at least two occasions, strangers showed up at her grandmother's home and attempted to push into the house in order to make a 'citizens' arrest.' On these occasions, Ms. Moss's grandmother, who is in her mid-seventies, called her in a panic, confused and scared for her safety."
Moss and Freeman earlier this month filed a lawsuit against the Gateway Pundit website, which also published false claims about them stealing the election for Biden.
It's been more than a year, but former President Donald Trump still hasn't gotten over losing the 2020 presidential election.
In a statement released on Thursday, the twice-impeached former one-term president complained that no one had yet taken up his offer to hold a public debate about the supposedly "rigged" election he lost to President Joe Biden.
"Has it been at all noticed that I offered to debate anybody, on television or otherwise, about the RIGGED Presidential Election of 2020," Trump's statement began. "This was a publicly stated challenge -- I have been called a 'ratings machine,' and therefore would be good for television economics—which have not been doing so well lately. With all the bravado out there, I have not had one credible person willing to stand up and debate me in order to defend the CROOKED election."
READ MORE: Trump files ‘legally groundless request’ — and is quickly ridiculed by a top legal expert
Trump then went on to again attack the House Select Committee investigating the January 6th riots at the United States Capitol, whom he accused of being too cowardly to debate him.
"So, after one month, a very public offer to debate, I have no takers -- not even the sleazebags you see on the January 6th Commission who speak with such fake reverence about the day," Trump said. "This is Cancel Culture. They think they got away with the Crime of the Century and they don’t want it to be talked about or discussed. Look at what has happened to our Country, and what a shame it is!”
NEW!\n\nPresident Donald J. Trump:\n\n\u201cHas it been at all noticed that I offered to debate anybody, on television or otherwise, about the RIGGED Presidential Election of 2020. This was a publicly stated challenge\u2014I have been called a \u201cratings machine,\u201d and therefore would be good...pic.twitter.com/GKYD8naoL4— Liz Harrington (@Liz Harrington) 1640280072
Although Democrats have won the popular vote in seven of the United States’ last eight presidential elections, six of the U.S. Supreme Court’s nine justices are Republican appointees — including Justice Amy Coney Barrett, whose confirmation was rammed through the U.S. Senate only a month before then-President Donald Trump was voted out of office. The far right wanted Barrett confirmed ASAP, and according to Daily Poster reporters Andrew Perez and Julia Rock, “conservative dark money” played a major role in Barrett’s “confirmation campaign.”
Perez and Rock, in an article published on December 19, report, “A conservative dark money group led by former President Donald Trump’s judicial adviser Leonard Leo bankrolled Amy Coney Barrett’s Supreme Court confirmation campaign with nearly $22 million in anonymous cash, while another nonprofit that Leo helps steer saw a fundraising bonanza and showered cash on other organizations boosting Barrett, according to tax returns obtained by The Daily Poster. The new tax returns shed light on how Barrett’s successful last-minute confirmation campaign was aided by a flood of dark money.”
Those tax returns, the reporters add, “also reveal the rapid growth of Leo’s already highly successful dark money network and its tentacles in the broader conservative movement.”
“Leo is a longtime executive at the Federalist Society, a group for conservative lawyers,” Perez and Rock explain. “He formed the Rule of Law Trust (RLT) in 2018, and the group quickly raised nearly $80 million. RLT started spending that money in 2020, donating $21.5 million to the Judicial Crisis Network (JCN), another group steered by Leo that played a key role in Republicans flipping the Supreme Court and building a conservative supermajority.”
Perez and Rock add that JCN “spent millions pressing Republican senators to block (President Barack) Obama’s 2016 Supreme Court pick, Merrick Garland, and subsequently spent millions boosting each of Trump’s High Court nominees — Neil Gorsuch, Brett Kavanaugh and Barrett — all while Leo was advising Trump’s judicial strategy.”
The fact that JCN opposed Garland’s nomination so vehemently speaks volumes. After Justice Antonin Scalia’s death in 2016, Obama went very centrist with his Garland nomination; he didn’t nominate someone as liberal as Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg or Chief Justice Earl Warren. And Obama was more than willing to meet Republicans half way.
In fact, Garland, as U.S. attorney general under President Joe Biden, has cited Edward Levi — Republican President Gerald R. Ford’s attorney general during the mid-1970s — as his role model for how the U.S. Department of Justice should operate. Ford, of course, was vice president under President Richard Nixon before Nixon resigned, in August 1974, because of the Watergate scandal. And the JCN is so far to the right that they consider even the legal and judicial standards of the Ford Administration too liberal.
“Leo also helps direct the 85 Fund, a charitable organization being used to fiscally sponsor a host of conservative nonprofits, including the Judicial Education Project, which has long been JCN’s sister arm,” Perez and Rock note. “The 85 Fund reported bringing in nearly $66 million in 2020, according to its latest tax return. That’s a huge increase over the roughly $13 million the organization raised in 2019, per OpenSecrets, which found the majority of the 85 Fund’s 2020 money came from DonorsTrust, a group known as a ‘dark money ATM,’ for its use as a pass-through vehicle.”
Copyright © 2026 Raw Story Media, Inc. PO Box 21050, Washington, D.C. 20009 |
Masthead
|
Privacy Policy
|
Manage Preferences
|
Debug Logs
For corrections contact
corrections@rawstory.com
, for support contact
support@rawstory.com
.
