WASHINGTON — Barring something monumental — a health crisis, a debilitating legal development — Donald Trump is all but guaranteed to become the 2024 Republican presidential nominee.
And potential Trump running mates seem to be working overtime this month to audition for the part.
In doing so, many are contrasting their philosophies and MAGA fealty to that of former Vice President Mike Pence, who Trump long ago dumped from consideration.
On January 6, 2021, Pence refused calls from Trump and his allies to overturn the results in crucial swing states during a congressional joint session to certify the 2020 election — won by President Joe Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris.
So what would any of Trump’s current vice presidential suitors do differently, given the same chance as Pence to certify the 2020 presidential election?
The answer: it depends.
Rep. Elise Stefanik (R-NY)
Just last week, Stefanik was asked by CNN’s Kaitlan Collins about what she would have done had she been the vice president that day.
Her response, which contained multiple falsehoods, was notable.
“I would not have done what Mike Pence did. I don’t think that was the right approach. … There was unconstitutional overreach in states like Pennsylvania, and I think it’s very important that we continue to stand up for the Constitution and have legal and secure elections, which we did not have in 2020.”
Stefanik, 39, was one of Trump’s most vocal supporters in the House in the midst of his attempts to overturn the election. Even after the attack on the Capitol, she voted against certifying the results in Pennsylvania, a state that Biden won by just over 80,000 votes.
South Dakota Gov. Kristi Noem
Noem, who has campaigned for Trump during the primary, has not definitively said whether she supported Pence’s decision to not block or attempt to overturn the results of the 2020 presidential election.
Instead, she’s used a common tactic among Republicans in the aftermath of the attack on the Capitol: condemn the riots, while emphasizing the need for election reform.
“What happened on January 6 was horrible and should never happen again in this country,” she said in January of 2021. “What I want to do is look forward and make sure that we continue to have fair and transparent elections that people can trust.”
Businessman Vivek Ramaswamy
Six days after the Jan. 6 attacks, Ramaswamy posted on X (formerly Twitter) that “what Trump did last week was wrong. Downright abhorrent. Plain and simple.”
Since then, though, he has changed his tune, defending Trump’s role in the attack.
During an appearance on NBC News’ Meet the Press in August, the entrepreneur said he would have handled the situation differently than Pence did, although he didn’t offer many specifics.
“I think that there was a historic opportunity that he missed to reunite this country in that window,” said Ramaswamy, who himself ran for president but suspended his campaign after the Iowa Caucuses. “What I would have said is, ‘This is a moment for a true national consensus,’ where there's two elements of what's required for a functioning democracy in America. One is secure elections, and the second is a peaceful transfer of power.”
Former Housing and Urban Development Secretary Ben Carson
In the years since, Carson has not said much regarding the events of January 6, or Pence’s role in the certification of the election.
The day of, though, he condemned the attacks on the Capitol, posting on X that “violence is never an appropriate response regardless of legitimate concerns. Please remember: if a house be divided against itself, that house cannot stand.”
Shortly after, he told the Washington Examiner that while Trump should have toned down his rhetoric on January 6, he was “not sure that we can say that all this was all one person’s fault.”
Sen. Tim Scott (R-SC)
Scott, despite his South Carolina ties, endorsed Trump over Haley last month. It marked a surprising pivot from the 58-year-old, but one that has been seen from a number of Congressional Republicans since Trump announced his initial campaign for president in June of 2015.
But at the time, Scott did not object to the certification of election results, and said in a town hall in July of last year that he did “not believe the election was stolen.”
During the first Republican debate in Milwaukee last August, Scott defended Pence’s actions on January 6, saying “absolutely, he did the right thing.”
Haley has been steadfast on the matter. The 52-year-old has consistently defended Pence, making it unlikely that she will be on the ticket — despite it being a move that would unite the party in advance of the general election.
“Mike Pence is a good man. He’s an honest man. I think he did what he thought was right on that day,” she said in February of 2022.
“The fact that he wanted to change what the states did, the fact that he wanted to overturn the elections in D.C. — those votes happen at the state level," she said last month. "You don’t ever allow in D.C. for those votes to be changed at the federal level. States’ rights matter.”
Of course, Haley remains in the presidential race, running against Trump in the Republican primary. Both candidates have incessantly trashed one another. Trump selecting Haley seems implausible.
But for years, Trump and Haley have found themselves in a political make up/break up cycle, and Trump has long shown a willingness to welcome outcasts back into his orbit — if it suits his needs.
North Dakota Gov. Doug Burgum
Burgum condemned the violence at the Capitol on January 6, and told ABC News’ George Stephanopoulos in August of last year that the party “had to move on to the future.”
The 67-year-old governor, who suspended his own presidential campaign last December, endorsed Trump last month and has been on the campaign trail for the former president.
Arkansas Gov. Sarah Huckabee Sanders
Sanders, who endorsed Trump in November, said in announcing her Arkansas gubernatorial candidacy in January of 2021 that the events of January 6 were “not who we are as Americans.” A former White House spokesperson for Trump, she has not directly commented on Pence’s role in certifying the election.
Sanders has long touted her time in the Trump White House, and while a longshot for the vice presidential position, could be in line for some Trump administration post in the event the then-78-year-old Trump wins the presidency in November.
Kari Lake
Lake was one of the most vocal backers of Trump’s plot to overturn the election, and even sought to overturn her loss to Katie Hobbs in the 2022 Arizona Gubernatorial race.
In December, she promoted a far-right conspiracy that the events of January 6 were partially staged.
“All that January 6 was, was a staged riot to cover up the fact that they certified a fraudulent election,” she said in August, during longtime Trump advisor Steve Bannon’s War Room podcast. “And frankly, if [Pence’s] got a problem with what happened on January 6th, he should … talk to the folks in the FBI who planted a bunch of you know, rabble rousers in the crowd to cause trouble.”
Lake is currently running for the U.S. Senate in Arizona.
Vance, who has gone from self-proclaimed “Never Trump” conservative to staunch Trump backer, was asked by Stephanopoulos on Feb. 4 what he would have done if in Pence’s position on Jan. 6, outlined an approach that would have differed heavily from that of the then-vice president.
“If I had been Vice President, I would have told the states, like Pennsylvania, Georgia and so many others, that we needed to have multiple slates of electors and I think the U.S. Congress should have fought over it from there,” said Vance, who became a senator in 2023. “That is the legitimate way to deal with an election that a lot of folks, including me, think had a lot of problems in 2020.”
Vance, 39, is — along with Scott — the most likely vice presidential choice from the Senate. His conversion to Trump’s wing of the party could pay off come this summer in the form of a spot on the ticket.
It’s hard to imagine anything wearing down the bravado of Donald Trump, but will his legal troubles play poorly in a general election, leading him to lose again in November 2024?
Or might the current Republican front runner go out a different way?
At present, Trump stands accused of 91 charges in four felony cases, testing his political death-defying ability.
So far, the primary campaign has been a display of Trump’s political impunity, with the former president having dispatched all major challengers, except for Nikki Haley, who’s running 32 points behind him in South Carolina, her home state. That’s the next primary, on Feb. 24.
“He is a tank. He is a boulder. I don't think there is literally anything that can happen to this man that would make him lose because he has such a chokehold on the Republican Party,” said Amani Wells-Onyioha, operations director at Democratic political firm Sole Strategies.
But others still consider him vulnerable to defeat — just not exactly in the way you might think.
“There's a very real possibility that he gets convicted of one of these and is looking at prison time,” said Nicholas Creel, assistant professor of business law at Georgia College and State University. “When we get to the hypothetical point of him needing to take office, we've got to figure out now, is he actually above the law. The Supreme Court will have to step in.
“There is a very, very real possibility that a Supreme Court majority — probably a five-four ruling — could say you still have to face the music, Mr. President, and if we enter political paralysis, that's because we have chosen that you would be the president in prison,” Creel continued.
Here are 11 other scenarios where Trump fails for a second straight time to get back to the White House — without losing the 2024 general election:
The other 13 states and a territory use a different system, which favors Trump.
“The remaining states use some sort of winner take all or winner take most system,” she wrote. “For instance, in delegate rich California, if a candidate wins 50 percent of the vote, they get all the delegates. If not, the delegates are awarded proportionally. In a two-person race Trump is likely to win many delegates.”
Then what is Haley doing?
“In the months before the convention Trump may be convicted of one or more crimes,” she wrote. “It’s hard to predict how his loyal base will react. So far Trump’s indictments have only made them more loyal and there’s no reason to believe that convictions would change their minds. Nonetheless a conviction would certainly play into Haley’s critique of him as the chaos candidate. And she may be thinking she’d be the last person standing.”
Or she’s laying the groundwork for a run in 2028.
Trump loses the GOP nomination in a floor fight
Republicans are saying there’s no chance of this, according to NBC News. Morton Blackwell, a member of the Republican National Committee’s convention rules committee since 1988, said convention rules can be changed but it won’t happen — “absent a cement truck coming around the corner and killing the nominee.”
But James Long, professor of political science at the University of Washington, has said Trump supporters might have to ask themselves some tough questions amid the various indictments and Trump’s increasinglyerraticbehavior.
“Everyone saying they’re going to support Trump is going to have to face the reality that this is going to get worse and worse for him, and they’re going to have to think about whether or not he’s a credible winner in the (general) election,” Long said. “And they’re going to have to decide if they care more about him as a person, or they care more about winning.”
A recent CNN poll, however, showed Trump ahead of President Joe Biden by four percentage points.
Trump flees the country
As George Washington University law professor Jonathan Turley wrote, Trump “is one of the most recognized figures in the world. He would have to go to Mars to live incognito. It is facially absurd.”
As outlandish as it may sound, Trump could theoretically find refuge from legal threats in a country that’s not so friendly to the United States — but potentially friendly to Trump.
Think Russia. China. Saudi Arabia. Even — dare one say it — North Korea. Unlike most people in legal peril, Trump has massive amounts of money and the physical means — specifically, his own “Trump Force One” Boeing 757 — to get to a place beyond the reach of special counsel Jack Smith, Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis or the U.S. justice system, writ large.
Trump ally Tucker Carlson, it’s worth noting, was welcomed by Russia to interview President Vladimir Putin at a time when the Russian government has for months detained two American journalists — the Wall Street Journal’s Evan Gershkovich and Radio Free Europe-Radio Liberty editor Alsu Kurmasheva. News organizations and press freedom advocates have roundly condemned the detentions as unjust, with the Wall Street Journal saying that Russia has arbitrarily and wrongfully detained” Gershkovich “for doing his job as a journalist.”
And in addition to the Russias and Chinas of the world, there are dozens of other nations that don’t have extradition treaties with the United States, which makes it extremely difficult for the U.S. law enforcement officials to spirit a wanted man into custody and back to American soil.
Of course, such a drastic move by Trump would all but guarantee that he could never again return to the United States as a free man.
But Trump has well-established business ties in numerous foreign countries and could ostensibly live like a fugitive king in a welcoming nation.
And in October 2020, days before the election he wouldn’t win, Trump himself floated the idea of becoming an ex-pat: “Could you imagine if I lose? I’m not going to feel so good. Maybe I’ll have to leave the country, I don’t know.”
Said Wells-Onyioha: “If he doesn't want to face charges, I can see him attempting to flee. Trump genuinely feels like the rules don't apply to him, so I think that there's nothing that he won't do. I don't think he wants to face any accountability or any repercussions for any of the things that he's done thus far, so I can see him trying to flee.”
In actuality, it’s much more likely that Trump’s legal team will just try to delay the court proceedings as long as possible, John Geer, dean of the college of arts and science and professor of political science and public policy and education at Vanderbilt University, has said.
“(Trump) can tie the legal system up for a long time, so that’s what I suspect he'll end up doing,” Geer said.
Last month, Trump was hit with an $83.3 million verdict by a jury that found Trump liable for defaming a woman — for a second time — about what a previous jury determined was sexual assault.
Trump faces a potentially much larger verdict for what a judge has ruled was fraud involving his business interests in New York. The judge has delayed a verdict on damages after a report that a Trump finance executive planned to plead guilty to perjury.
Trump is scheduled to go on trial March 25 in New York on charges that he falsified financial records to hide payments — prior to being elected President in 2016 — to porn performer Stormy Daniels for staying quiet about an alleged affair.
A March 4 trial date on federal election subversion charges against Trump was delayed for courts to consider Trump’s claim of presidential immunity. A federal appeals court unanimously found no such privilege. The next step is the Supreme Court, which could choose not to take the case and let the appeals court ruling stand.
The start date is uncertain for Trump’s federal trial on charges of illegally retaining classified documents after he left the White House. The judge set a trial date for May but has suggested she might move that back as Trump’s lawyers say they need more time to review “voluminous” evidence.
A Georgia election interference case against Trump is delayed by allegations that the Fulton County District Attorney had a relationship that created a conflict of interest. A hearing is scheduled Feb. 15 on Trump’s motion to dismiss the case over the relationship and alleged financial improprieties.
Trump falls gravely ill or dies of natural causes
When Americans discuss age and the presidency, it’s usually about President Joe Biden, the nation’s first octogenarian commander-in-chief who will be 82 years old on Inauguration Day 2025.
But Trump, 77, is not a young man, either.
Trump turns 78 in June. If elected president this year, Trump would become the oldest president in history at the time he took office, surpassing Biden.
The average age of death for a man who’s served as president of the United States is about 72 years old, according to Statista, and only 12 out of the 45 U.S. presidents have lived to celebrate their 80th birthday.
So while the topic itself is grim, even uncouth, the odds of Trump falling gravely ill or dying before Election Day 2024 are not insignificant.
What would happen next upon either scenario would largely be a function of the point in time Trump stopped running.
Kamarck has written that state election officials are allowed to adjust filing deadlines for new candidates if the frontrunner dies or is incapacitated. For some of the states that haven’t yet conducted their nominating contests, they could also move back their primaries.
If Trump couldn’t continue after winning enough primary votes to become the presumptive 2024 presidential nominee, the nation would almost certainly gird for a brokered Republican National Convention, which is scheduled for mid-July in Milwaukee, Wis.
And if Trump officially secured the GOP nomination, but couldn’t stand for election in November 2024, a select group of Republican Party bigwigs would likely convene to choose a replacement — whether that was Trump’s vice presidential running mate, or someone else.
Trump dies from assassination
Even more grim is the specter of assassination, an ever-present specter for presidents and presidential candidates alike.
Four presidents — John F. Kennedy, William McKinley, James Garfield and Abraham Lincoln — died after being shot.
Ronald Reagan, in 1981, could have been the fifth assassinated president but for the quick reactions of law enforcement and medical personnel.
Last August, while attempting to serve a warrant, FBI agents shot and killed a Utah man who had allegedly made “credible” threats against Biden.
High-profile presidential candidates also come under threat. The most notable modern example is that of Robert F. Kennedy, who died in 1968 after being shot at a campaign event. (Kennedy’s son, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., is now running for president as an independent, and he has publicly stated that he believes his father’s convicted killer isn’t the man who committed the crime.)
Trump, like every past president and many presidential candidates, receives U.S. Secret Service protection and will ostensibly be entitled to such protection even if he’s convicted of a crime and sent to prison or home detention.
Trump agrees to quit the race before Election Day
Scott Galloway made this prediction on the popular podcast Pivot, which he hosts with journalist Kara Swisher:
Trump, Galloway said last year, "has a very nice life, and his life can be going back to golf and sycophants and having sex with porn stars. … Or he can live under the threat of prison. The [political] momentum he has is real leverage and power. And I think he’s going to cash that leverage and power in for a plea deal that includes no jail time.”
With Trump is facing state charges in Georgia and New York, he wouldn’t be able to escape by pardoning himself as president — something he could attempt to do for the federal-level charges he faces. Therefore, Trump’s calculus may change.
Creel noted Spiro Agnew’s resignation from the vice presidency in 1973 after facing the threat of jail for his corruption while governor of Maryland.
“One of the parts of the agreement was [to] resign, get out of politics forever, and we will not pursue this,” he said. “So with a more rational defendant, that would absolutely be something that's on the table. That's something Jack Smith would be bringing to Trump, but for one, we're not dealing with a particularly rational individual. Two, this scenario is significantly different in that we have state-level charges also facing him. And so because they can't really immunize him against that at the state level, the incentive to take that sort of a deal is greatly diminished.”
Wells-Onyioha said Trump maybe – maybe – would come to the realization that prison, and the potential life-long loss of his freedom, is a real and unpalatable possibility.
“I can see them coming up with some sort of like plea agreement, where in exchange for dropping out of the race, they will let him be on probation or something like that,” she said. “I can see that happening. But even so, I'm not even sure if he would take that deal.”
Trump is removed via the 25th Amendment
The Constitution’s 25th Amendment spells out the succession plan if a president dies or is removed from office, which means the vice president takes over.
If the vice president and his cabinet determine that the president is unable to discharge his duties as president — say, being in prison — Congress will have 48 hours to convene and 21 days to decide if the president is fit to hold office. It can remove him by a two-thirds vote.
“You can even see his cabinet exercising the 25th Amendment, saying, look, you're incapacitated. You're not capable because you're needing to go to prison or are in prison. You're not capable of fulfilling the oath of office, therefore, we're invoking [the] 25th Amendment and removing you from office that way, and so you would see whoever his vice president elect is [at] that point stepping up,” Creel said.
If Trump wins the 2024 election, the Supreme Court will ultimately need to decide if a sitting president is immune from state-level prosecution in Georgia and New York, and the Court might rule against his ability to serve as president.
Supreme Court 2022, Image via Fred Schilling, Collection of the Supreme Court of the United States
“Functionally this would mean Trump is the legitimate president but would still be forced to carry out a sentence in a state prison,” Creel said. “In that scenario, it’s difficult to see how he wouldn’t be either impeached and convicted or otherwise removed via the 25th Amendment due to his ‘incapacity.’”
But with a third of the Supreme Court being Trump appointees, Svante Myrick, president of People For the American Way and former mayor of Ithaca, N.Y., said he could see the Court ruling in Trump’s favor and allowing him to serve any legal consequences at a later time.
“Uncharted legal territory with stakes this high means questions like that usually get kicked up to the Supreme Court. Given that, Donald Trump appointed three members of the Supreme Court on a six-person ultra conservative majority, I think the most likely scenario is that he's allowed to stand for office, and if he wins, he could avoid or at least delay paying his debt to society,” Myrick said.
The 25th Amendment could also be used for a president’s mental competence. While Trump attacks Biden for being “cognitively impaired,” Trump is 77 years old and isn’t always sharp himself. He said last year Biden would lead the U.S. into “World War II” and, in the same speech, said he was leading former President Barack Obama in polls for the 2024 election.
Amid Trump’s continued gaffes this year, Haley has called him “confused” and has tried to use the issue to bait him into appearing with her in a debate.
Trump has the 14th Amendment applied to him
The U.S. Supreme Court heard arguments Feb. 8 on whether the Constitution’s 14th Amendment and its “insurrectionist ban” makes Trump disqualified from holding office because of his actions on Jan. 6, 2021.
Colorado’s Supreme Court held in a 4-3 decision in December that the ban does apply to Trump.
Maine’s secretary of state came to the same conclusion, but a court has ordered that the issue be reconsidered after the U.S. Supreme Court decision.
Some other states rejected legal intervention on procedural grounds.
“Donald Trump cannot be president — cannot run for president, cannot become president, cannot hold office — unless two-thirds of Congress decides to grant him amnesty for his conduct on Jan. 6,” William Baude, a professor of law at the University of Chicago, has said.
The 14th Amendment originally intended to prevent Confederate officials from gaining power after the Civil War, but how the disqualification clause would be applied is unclear to legal experts, especially since it’s never been used in the case of a president before, FindLaw, a Reuters company, reported.
Trump is impeached for a third time, then convicted and disqualified from serving as president
If the Supreme Court does say “nobody's above the law, and that includes the president” and lets the criminal justice system do its work, Creel said, Trump could still be disqualified from the presidency via the political system.
“We have a blueprint for how to do that. Impeachment. Conviction. Removal. That's how you could do it, and so you can see him taking office and having that avenue, where he's president for a day and then they just kind of have this perfunctory removal,” Creel said.
Trump was twice impeached while in office, but was acquitted on all counts by the Senate in both cases.
Congress could technically impeach Trump now with the goal of simply disqualifying him from running for elected office. Recall that Trump’s second impeachment trial took place several weeks after he left the White House.
But with Republicans currently controlling the House, where any impeachment proceeding would begin, such a scenario is exceedingly remote.
Trump accepts pardon promise with the understanding that he’ll quit the race
An exotic and unlikely scenario is Biden pardoning Trump with the understanding that Trump will quit the presidential race.
Biden, who has recently stepped up his criticism of Trump, has never spoken of such an idea.
A most imperfect historical parallel would be President Gerald Ford’s pardoning of President Richard Nixon after Nixon resigned amid the Watergate scandal. But there’s no evidence Ford’s pardon involved either an overt or secret quid pro quo, according to the National Constitution Center, and came only after Nixon had officially stepped down.
Also: Could Trump serve as president while set to serve time?
There’s precedent that presidents don’t have full legal immunity — look at the 1997 Supreme Court ruling in Clinton v. Jones, Creel says — but Trump could be still allowed to serve any prison time post-presidency if convicted and sentenced for any of the 91 charges.
That would require the Supreme Court ruling that Trump couldn’t have his presidential duties interfered with by state level charges.
“We have to just set them aside to the point where he could realistically, in that scenario if that's what the Supreme Court says, be told January 20, at 12:01 p.m., 2028, report for incarceration in the state of Georgia,” Creel said. “That's an actual realistic possibility that could go his way.”
WASHINGTON — Republican senators completely missed Sen. Mike Lee's (R-UT) four-hour filibuster on Saturday.
Raw Story polled Democratic and Republican senators at the U.S. Capitol on whether they saw the big speech. Eleven Republicans confessed they missed it.
Sens. Ted Cruz (R-TX), Shelley Moore Capito (R-WV), Chuck Grassley (R-IA), John Boozman (R-AR), Mike Rounds (R-SD), Marsha Blackburn (R-TN), Tom Cotton (R-AR), Josh Hawley (R-MO), Mitt Romney (R-UT), Tommy Tuberville (R-AL) and Lisa Murkowski (R-AK) all told Raw Story they didn't watch.
Among the things Lee complained about was Russia's invasion of Ukraine, claiming it was a "proxy war."
Sen. Mark Kelly (D-AZ) told Raw Story that Lee, has no business coming to Arizona until he passes the border security bill Republicans negotiated before abandoning it on Donald Trump's orders.
Kelly confessed he was "uninterested" in Lee's floor speech on Saturday since GOP senators are unwilling to fix what they've spent years complaining about.
“We should’ve voted on the border security bill," Kelly said. "I mean, these guys talk about this for years and have the opportunity to pass meaningful legislation to stop the crisis? I don’t want to hear his speech. I don’t want to see him coming back to Arizona until he passes the bill that was bipartisan, that they, basically, had agreed to.”
When asked what Sen. Romney was doing instead, he told Raw Story, “Livin the life."
Meanwhile, Democratic colleague, Sen. Martin Heinrich (D-NM) knew it was happening, but that's about it.
“I saw a few texts about it. I have no idea what that accomplishes or who the audience is,” he said on Sunday.
New Hampshire Democratic Sen. Maggie Hassan drew the short straw and was the official who watched Lee bellow in the near-empty chamber for a few hours.
“I got to preside and babysit for two hours,” she said.
“You know what? I decided to go to Target,” Sen. Jacky Rosen (D-NV) told Raw Story when asked if she caught any of Lee's speech.
Lee posted the video of his filibuster on YouTube. It has 1,868 views as of publication.
WASHINGTON — U.S. senators are doing something rare this weekend: Actually working.
Well, at least, some senators are. On Friday night only 83 of the Senate’s 100 members showed up for a late night vote, which is only compounding the tangible frustration at the Capitol as lawmakers have seen their schedules upended — including one senator who had to scrap her plan to attend the Super Bowl — over an internal GOP debate that’s now boiled over into public view.
Sen. Rand Paul (R-KY) is forcing his colleagues to stay in town this weekend and battle over a now $95.3 billion foreign aid package that includes funding for Taiwan, Israel and Gaza — a measure that included border security funding and reforms last weekend until the GOP killed that compromise measure — because Paul opposes the $60 billion in the measure earmarked for Ukraine.
Party leaders hoped to work out a time agreement to speed up debate, but Paul has employed his senatorial right to delay — a filibuster, of sorts — telling the press corps he won’t allow that until “hell freezes over.”
“So hell hasn’t frozen over yet?” Raw Story asked Paul as he left the Capitol on Friday evening.
“Nope,” Paul told Raw Story. “We're still waiting.”
“So we can expect Sunday?”
“I think it'll be Monday or Tuesday until we're finished,” Paul said. “I don't think we should easily allow people to send money to protect someone else's border when we're not willing to protect our own border.”
The Senate isn’t even scheduled to be in session this coming week — let alone this weekend — but senators' planned two-week long President’s Day recess is now delayed indefinitely because of Paul’s protest.
Paul’s last stand is a farce to many of his colleagues, including many of the 17 Republican senators who have advocated for the same isolationist — a.k.a. America first — agenda as Paul but didn’t even bother to show up to the Senate’s Friday night vote.
The Senate’s technically in session today, with some senators giving floor speeches to an empty chamber. But no votes are scheduled, so the Capitol’s quiet.
Senators are slated to come back to the Capitol Sunday afternoon for another procedural vote to keep the foreign aid measure moving, albeit slowly. It’s unclear if those 17 Republicans plan to play hooky from their duties, again, especially after at least one of the party’s private meetings this week devolved into a shouting match that left at least one senator reporting she was “pissed off.”
The GOP has been in disarray since House Speaker Mike Johnson and other prominent Republicans rejected a bipartisan border security compromise that took four grueling months to negotiate after Republicans demanded border funding be a part of any foreign assistance measure.
Johnson torpedoed the initial $118 billion measure with border funding, and on Tuesday the House defeated a $17.6 billion measure that would have only funded Israel after Johnson put it on the floor without measuring its support within his divided conference.
Since then, Speaker Johnson's failed to offer his party an alternative. That’s left his Republican allies in the Senate divided over how the party should proceed, because anything they pass has to be approved by the House eventually. That has Democratic senators all but rolling their eyes.
“We’re starting to look more like the House,” Sen. Martin Heinrich (D-NM) complained to Raw Story as he was getting in his car Friday evening.
While Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell supported rank-and-file Republicans' initial calls for border funding, he’s now been left overseeing an internal GOP brawl as Republican senators fight over which measures the party wants to formally offer on the Senate floor as amendments to the broader aid package.
“There’s a division there. This is not about McConnell and his grip on the leadership. This is about a faction of new Republicans who think disrupting is progress,” Sen. Peter Welch (D-VT) told Raw Story after casting another procedural vote on the foreign aid package Friday.
Democrats complain 2024 presidential politics have now engulfed the Capitol at the behest of the party’s presumptive nominee, former President Donald Trump.
“I’m sorry that we have Republicans that are standing with Donald Trump,” Sen. Debbie Stabenow (D-MI) told Raw Story while walking to her car Friday evening.
“He doesn't want to make a deal on the border, but he also wants to get [Ukrainian] President [Volodymyr] Zelensky. Remember his first impeachment was because of what happened with Zelensky — that ‘perfect’ phone call?” Stabenow said. “So he could get Zelensky and help his buddy [Russian President Vladmir] Putin who he wants to help him in the election, again. And he gets all of that if this bill goes down.”
“Do you think that's part of it?” Raw Story inquired.
“I think it’s not ‘part of it’ — of the people holding this up, it’s like almost all of them. Almost all of them. It really is,” Stabenow said. “Everything they’re doing is for an audience of one: Donald Trump.”
The far-right, spurred on by Trump, is now targeting GOP senators who are voting with Democrats to send more assistance to Ukraine, which is rankling congressional Republicans who support American allies in Eastern Europe.
“It's unfortunate that they are not recognizing the challenges that the United States is facing right now — and that our friends and our allies are,” Sen. Lisa Murkowski (R-AK) told Raw Story. “These are hard times that require, oftentimes, difficult decisions that can be complicated and complex. And so a knee jerk reaction, like calling people ‘traitors’ for trying to understand the full extent of what we have in front of us as a nation, nothing is that simple.”
Murkowski says she doesn’t personally blame Sen. Rand Paul of Kentucky.
“I don't know. The way things have been going around here, if it wasn't Rand, it's probably gonna be somebody else,” Murkowski said. “To me, we ought to be able to figure out pathways forward on significant measures, like the one we have in front of us.”
It’s the Senate, so, of course, Paul and others have their defenders.
“Every senator’s got a right,” Sen. Cory Booker (D-NJ) told Raw Story. “You don’t get far in this place if you hold bitterness.”
“Are you mad at Rand Paul at all?” Raw Story asked on the Capitol’s steps.
“Well,” Sen. Jacky Rosen (D-NV) replied through a deep breath and slight senatorial grimace.
Rosen has been an outspoken advocate of Las Vegas tourism, including the tens of millions of dollars the city is expected to rake in from hosting this weekend’s Super Bowl, which Rosen has a ticket for.
“So if there are votes on Sunday are you coming back?”
“I’m not leaving. You can’t get to Las Vegas and come back,” Rosen told Raw Story after voting on Friday evening. “Nope. We’re here.”
“Oh, so you can't even go?”
“No,” Rosen said through a laugh. “My husband's gonna have a great time.”
WASHINGTON — President Joe Biden has had a bad week, but he’s now got a former Republican presidential candidate in his corner.
Special counsel Robert K. Hur may have cleared Biden of allegations of wilful wrongdoing in his mishandling of classified documents, but he also created quite the political stir for dubbing the president “an elderly man with a poor memory.”
Many Republican politicians and pundits alike have seized on that one clause in Hur’s 345-page report to lambast Biden, but the GOP’s own 2012 presidential nominee tells Raw Story it was a low and petty political jab.
“I thought the report from the prosecutor was politically charged. Unnecessarily,” Sen. Mitt Romney (R-UT) told Raw Story on the steps of the Capitol as he was headed to the Senate floor to cast a rare Friday evening vote.
When it comes to mental hiccups, Romney can relate.
At 76, Romney may be a year younger than the GOP’s presumptive 2024 nominee, former President Donald Trump, 77, but, like Trump and Biden, according to Merriam-Webster, he’s a senior citizen.
While Romney can relate to their mental lapses, he can’t understand what he sees as a double, anti-Biden standard.
“We do that sometimes. As you get older you say the wrong word,” Romney said. “As when Donald Trump said several times, ‘Nikki Haley’ instead of ‘Nancy Pelosi.’ That's no big deal, but Biden does something, it becomes a headline.”
Per his new usual, Romney — who’s retiring at the end of his Senate term — remains an outlier in today’s Republican Party, though other senatorial seniors can relate, especially the Senate’s only nonagenarian who refused to judge America’s current octogenarian president.
“Somebody that's 90-years-old should not comment on somebody that's 80-years-old,” Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-IA) — who turns 91 this fall — told Raw Story.
“No comment on his age?” Raw Story inquired. “Doesn’t it strike you as personally offensive?”
“I think that I should reserve judgment on that, because I haven't had a conversation with him for three years,” Grassley — who served next to Biden for decades in the Senate — said.
Biden may have been thrown under the proverbial bus by the special prosecutor, but he’s getting lots of support from his former Democratic Senate colleagues, especially septuagenarians from his home state of Delaware.
“One of the reasons why I think Donald Trump's not crazy about debating is because his mental faculties would probably make Joe Biden — and the rest of us — look like a genius,” 77-year-old Sen. Tom Carper (D-DE) told Raw Story. “I think that's part of the reason why he won't debate. Maybe someday they'll have a chance to debate and we'll get to judge for ourselves.”
Romney too dismisses what he calls two different standards for Trump and Biden.
“I thought it's interesting that it gets a lot more play,” Romney told Raw Story of the attention Biden’s mental slips get compared to Trump’s gaffes.
Still, Romney knows the debate is only going to heat up from now through November's election.
“But it's a real issue,” Romney said. “And it's not gonna go away.”
Last week, senators put the CEOs of five social media giants each in the hot seat over accusations of their platforms’ negligence toward the sexual exploitation and online safety of children.
The hottest seat of all at a multi-hour Senate Judiciary Committee hearing belonged to Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg, who a senator asked to stand up and publicly apologize to victims and parents in attendance holding photos of their children they say were sexually abused, bullied or committed self harm — many dying by suicide — related to exploitation on social media platforms.
“Mr. Zuckerberg, you and the companies before us, I know you don’t mean it to be so, but you have blood on your hands,” said Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-SC), the committee’s ranking Republican. “You have a product that’s killing people.”
“With the touch of your finger that smartphone that can entertain and inform you can become a back alley where the lives of your children are damaged and destroyed,” said Sen. Dick Durbin (D-IL), chair of the Senate Judiciary Committee.
“You, as an industry, realize this is an existential threat to you all if we don't get it right?” Sen. Thom Tillis (R-NC) said. “We can regulate you out of business if we wanted to.”
“There is literally no plausible justification, no way of defending this,” Sen. Mike Lee (R-UT) said.
Yet, Graham, Durbin, Lee and Tillis are among more than a dozen senators who grilled Zuckerberg and his tech peers but also took donations from Meta’s political action committee, company executives, lobbyists, or a combination of all three, totaling more than $120,000 combined since 2017, according to a Raw Story analysis of federal campaign records.
Who took donations from Meta?
Raw Story reached out to the offices for 15 senators who spoke at the hearing and received donations from political action committees or leaders at Meta and other social media companies represented at the hearing, including TikTok, Snap, X (formerly Twitter) and Discord.
Raw Story asked: Would the senators return donations from these social media companies or refuse future donations?
Only three responded to Raw Story’s requests for comment.
Between late 2019 and mid-2023, Graham’s campaign committee, Team Graham, received at least $15,800 from the PAC and lobbyists for Meta, the parent company of Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp, according to Raw Story’s review of records from the Federal Election Commission.
After a Nov. 7 Senate Subcommittee on Privacy, Technology and the Law hearing with a Facebook whistleblower, Graham said he would refund the money his campaign received from Meta companies and other social media platforms, NTD reported.
Team Graham donated $16,000 and his Fund for America’s Future PAC donated $2,500 to the National Center on Sexual Exploitation, said Kevin Bishop, a spokesperson for Graham.
The National Center on Sexual Exploitation confirmed it received Graham’s committed gift, which helped bring survivors to the hearing and “will continue to be used to bring survivors to meet with legislators across the aisle so survivors have a voice to educate policymakers on the impact of sexual exploitation and the scale at which it occurs online,” said Dawn Hawkins, CEO of the National Center on Sexual Exploitation, via an emailed statement.
“We aren't aware of any similar pledges made by other legislators,” Hawkins said, noting that the center supports bipartisan legislation including the Eliminating Abusive and Rampant Neglect of Interactive Technologies Act (EARN IT) Act and the Kids Online Safety Act (KOSA).
“Graham made a pledge and he fulfilled that pledge,” Bishop told Raw Story via email.
Hawkins said Big Tech companies “know the harm they are facilitating” and “continue to shirk responsibility and roll out piecemeal and ineffective solutions,” particularly in relation to vulnerable populations such as those who identify as LGBTQ+.
“These companies continue to put the burden on overwhelmed parents despite having flawed and ineffective parental controls, and they ignore children without the privilege of involved, tech-savvy caregivers, when high-level corporate actions could better protect all children,” Hawkins said.
The social media companies don’t spend enough on child safety protocols either, Hawkins said, calling the CEOs unprepared for the hearing. To them, “investment in child safety is not a priority, but an afterthought,” she said.
Tillis’ campaign committee received at least $27,200 from current and former registered lobbyists for Facebook and Meta Platforms Inc PAC (previously known as Facebook Inc. PAC), between June 2017 and March 2023, FEC records indicate.
Lee’s campaign received at least $16,800 combined in donations from Meta (and formerly Facebook) PAC and a former Facebook lobbyist, as well as from an executive for ByteDance, the parent company of TikTok, between September 2019 and June 2022. The vast majority of the funds were Meta-related, and one $2,500 check from Facebook PAC went uncashed, according to FEC records.
The campaign for Sen. Chris Coons (D-DE) took in at least $17,100 combined from Meta and (formerly Facebook) PAC and Sheryl Sandberg, former COO for Meta, between March 2020 and December 2023, per federal records.
Durbin’s campaign received at least $11,300 between June 2019 and December 2021 from the Facebook and Meta PAC, and Sandberg, according to Raw Story analysis of FEC data.
Sen. Mazie Hirono (D-HI) received at least $7,900 from Facebook PAC and Sandberg between March 2017 and September 2018, per FEC records.
In 2017 and 2018, Facebook PAC and Sandberg combined to donate at least $7,700 to Sen. Amy Klobuchar (D-MN), according to FEC records. Other Facebook lawyers donated to her campaign.
"Senator Klobuchar has long been the leading advocate for bipartisan competition and safety legislation that the tech companies have opposed. Any question of her integrity when it comes to tech can be refuted by the hundreds of millions of dollars they have spent on TV and in lobbying against her and her legislation,” said Ben Hill, a spokesperson for Klobuchar’s campaign, in a statement to Raw Story.
Sen. Jon Ossoff (D-GA) did not receive donations for his campaign from the PACs for the social media companies, but hundreds of individual employees from Snap, Twitter, Instagram, Facebook and ByteDance donated to his campaign, according to FEC records.
In particular, Isaac Bess, an executive at ByteDance, and Jerry Hunter, an executive at Snapchat, each donated $1,000 to him in January 2021. Michael Lynton, Snapchat chairman, donated nearly $2,000 in December 2020 to his campaign committee.
Other individuals who identified themselves in leadership positions such as directors, business leads and attorneys donated more than $35,000 combined to the Jon Ossoff for Senate committee.
“Sen. Ossoff does not accept contributions from corporations, corporate PACs or federal lobbyists,” said Jake Best, an Ossoff campaign spokesperson, who did not address Ossoff's campaign accepting money from individual social media executives.
The campaign for Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse (D-RI) received at least $4,500 from Facebook PAC in 2017 and 2018, per federal campaign records.
Sen. Alex Padilla (D-CA) did not receive PAC donations from the social media companies, but his campaign took in at least $1,250 in donations combined from registered lobbyists for Twitter (now known as X) and TikTok. Other attorneys and leaders in public policy or risk management from ByteDance (the parent company of TikTok), Twitter and Facebook donated at least $3,700 combined, according to FEC records.
Sen. Tom Cotton (R-AR) got $2,000 from Facebook PAC between 2018 and 2019, and Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX) received at least $1,500 from a Facebook lobbyist between October 2018 and October 2022, according to FEC records.
Sens. Peter Welch (D-VT) — when he was running for the House — Richard Blumenthal (D-CT) and John Kennedy (R-LA) each got $1,000 for their campaigns from Facebook PAC or executives between 2018 and 2021, records show.
Meta did not respond to Raw Story’s request for comment.
Now, there’s a legitimate chance Donald Trump could be running for president, or even serving as commander in chief, from behind bars.
Two overriding factors contribute to this bizarre reality.
Firstly, there’s very little — legally speaking — preventing Trump from doing so.
Secondly, Trump himself has offered no indication he’ll step away. To the contrary, he’s as emboldened as ever to run for and win the presidency he lost in 2020.
Thus far, juries have found Trump civilly liable for the sexual abuse and defamation of writer E. Jean Carroll. He’s been ordered to pay more than $88 million combined in damages.
New York Judge Arthur Engoron also found Trump and associates of his business empire liable for fraudulently inflating the value of the Trump Organization’s assets. Determination of damages in the civil fraud trial are expected this month — and could be well into the hundreds of millions of dollars.
And then there's the felony charges: 91 in total across four cases. If convicted, Trump could face significant prison time — totaling more than 700 years combined.
His trials are scheduled in the midst of the Republican presidential primary.
The indictments:
For the first time in U.S. history, a grand jury on June 8, 2023, federally indicted a former president — Trump — on 37 felony counts related to the alleged willful retention of classified documents and conspiracy to conceal them. District Judge Aileen Cannon set trial to begin May 20, but in February, special counsel questioned whether the FBI missed searching some rooms at Trump’s Mar-a-Lago residence, ABC reported.
Then it happened again on Aug. 1 when Trump was indicted on four separate federal counts related to his alleged efforts to overturn the 2020 election. He was set to be tried starting March 4, but U.S. District Judge Tanya Chutkan delayed the trial's start as Trump — unsuccessfully, so far — petitioned a federal appeals court to rule that he enjoys presidential immunity from such prosecution.
Trump also faces a criminal trial in Georgia related to election interference in the state, with trial requested for Aug. 5. Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis admitted in February to having a romantic relationship with a special prosecutor overseeing the case but denied any tainting of the case, Raw Story reported.
Separately, Trump is charged in New York with 34 felony counts of falsifying business records in relation to payments the Trump Organization made to adult film actress Stormy Daniels. His trial is slated for March 25.
Such a laundry list of legal woes would seemingly sabotage any politician’s campaign efforts. But the cases haven’t slowed Trump down in his pursuit of a second term as president or slashed his chances — now as good as ever — of winning the 2024 Republican nomination.
Trump, who has handily won in the Republican primaries thus far, is almost certain to become the Republican nominee — and has made it clear he has no intention of dropping out of the race no matter how severe his legal battles become.
“I see no case in which I would do that,” Trump said in June during an appearance on a radio show hosted by political strategist Roger Stone, a longtime confidant. “I just wouldn't do it. I wouldn't do it. I had opportunities in 2016 to do it, and I didn't do it.”
But Allan Lichtman, a professor of history at American University, said campaigning for president and defending himself against criminal charges are two very different endeavors.
“He thinks he can win this case in the court of public opinion, but the truth is, Trump can huff, and Trump can puff, but he can't blow the courthouse down,” Lichtman said. “It’s a very, very different game once you enter a federal courthouse or a state courthouse. You can't just bluster. Anything that you present has to be proven, and you're subject to perjury.”
Still, Trump can continue to run his campaign while facing these charges — and he could even do so from prison in the event he were to be tried, convicted and sentenced before the 2024 election.
“Trump’s legal problems shouldn’t affect his campaign. Many of his supporters believe that he is being treated unfairly, and there is no prohibition against a defendant under indictment or even a convicted felon from serving as president,” said Neama Rahmani, a former assistant U.S. attorney and president of West Coast Trial Lawyers. “Theoretically, Trump could even be president while in prison.”
Indeed, the U.S. Constitution stipulates only that a presidential candidate be a natural-born citizen of the United States, be at least 35 years old and a U.S. resident for 14 years. Trump easily checks all those boxes. And congressional Democrats’ strongest efforts to potentially disqualify Trump from ever again seeking the presidency — convicting him following impeachment trials — failed.
So, what would it take for Trump to run a presidential campaign — or govern the nation — from prison?
Raw Story interviewed historians, legal experts, political operatives and former government leaders who pieced together a playbook for how he could do it — and the peril that he’d face along the way as he stands to secure the GOP nomination ahead of a general election rematch with President Joe Biden in November.
Campaigning from a cell
Each of the charges Trump faces in the classified documents federal indictment carries maximum prison sentences between five and 20 years. Across all four indictments, potential prison time could span hundreds of years.
Being behind bars would, of course, prevent Trump from campaigning in his signature fashion: at big, rowdy MAGA rallies.
But Amani Wells-Onyioha, operations director at Democratic political firm Sole Strategies, envisions Trump still figuring out ways to communicate with potential voters.
“There's no doubt in my mind that he would have some recorded press from the little prison phone. There's no doubt in my mind that he would set up press opportunities whenever he's out on the yard getting his recreational use in, that there would be cameras there,” Wells-Onyioha said. “He would be using every opportunity to campaign. I don't see him stopping at all, and I only see him using this as fuel to make him go harder.”
Keeping up his Truth Social posts from prison might not be such a challenge for Trump, Wells-Onyioha said, as some jails and prisons might allow internet access.
“I do see him using the internet because that's all that he has, and he's great at that already,” Wells-Onyioha said. “He's a huge internet, TV personality type of guy, so it really would just force him to be in a position to do something that he's the best at, which is unfortunate for the country, but as far as he's concerned, I think he thinks that this is political gold for himself.”
Plus, Trump isn’t building a campaign from scratch. His 2024 presidential campaign is flush with staffers. He enjoys the support of super PACs, which may raise and spend unlimited amounts of money on his behalf to promote the former president and attack his opponents.
He also has a roster of high-profile MAGA acolytes — from Reps. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA) and Elise Stefanik (R-NY) to Sen. J.D. Vance (R-OH) and South Dakota Gov. Kristi Noem — who gladly serve as Trump surrogates.
And save for former South Carolina Gov. Nikki Haley, who remains in the race despite losses in the Iowa caucuses and New Hampshire primary, with dim prospects going forward, Trump has already vanquished his other main GOP challengers, including Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, Sen. Tim Scott (R-SC), former New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie, former Vice President Mike Pence and businessman Vivek Ramaswamy.
Meanwhile, few politicians are as good as Trump at presenting himself as a victim — he’s single-handedly vaulted the terms “witch hunt,” “deep state,” “hoax” and “fake news” into the contemporary political lexicon. As an inmate, Trump could become a martyr to the MAGA cause.
“You’re obviously handicapped to campaign, but in this electronic age, you can certainly campaign virtually, plus Trump's pretty well known. It’s not like he has to introduce himself to the American people,” Lichtman said.
If not prison, maybe jail
Former President Donald Trump arrives for his arraignment at Manhattan Criminal Court on April 04 in New York City. Michael M. Santiago/Getty Images
Although it seems unlikely Trump will be serving an active prison sentence before the November election, it’s conceivable he could wind up in pretrial confinement of some sort while campaigning.
This, several legal experts said, will depend on Trump himself.
“He has to behave himself during a trial, and that's not beyond the realm of possibility that he'll act up, thinking that somehow he can win over the jury, but that would be a mistake,” said Kevin O’Brien, a former assistant U.S. attorney and partner at Ford O’Brien Landy LLP who specializes in white-collar criminal defense.
His social media antics stand to put him in potential violation of pretrial instructions and release terms, raising the question of whether a judge would dare throw the former president in jail. So far, he’s been fined thousands for violating gag orders.
Brazenly defying a judge’s order or attempting to intimidate witnesses are among the more common ways a defendant can get himself thrown in jail or home confinement before or during his trial.
This isn’t merely conceptual, said Mike Lawlor, a criminal justice professor at the University of New Haven and former member of the Connecticut House of Representatives, who helped lead impeachment hearings against then-Gov. John Rowland, who ultimately pleaded guilty in federal court to political corruption.
Knowing Trump’s penchant for cutting outbursts, Lawlor can envision a judge sanctioning Trump for defying directives. Trump not only has one judge with whom to contend, but several, given the multiple legal actions against him.
“The opportunity to engage in contempt of court or witness tampering or obstruction of justice is fraught at this point. I’m not sure he has the self-control to keep himself from doing something that would get him confined pre-trial,” Lawlor said.
The U.S. House Jan. 6 select committee accused Trump of potential witness tampering, and Lawlor says he’s monitoring similar allegations here, especially because so many of the witnesses are GOP staffers of the former president.
“It’s so easy to imagine a situation where someone could be contacted and intimidated,” Lawlor said. “I think the temptation to do that for a guy like Trump is probably irresistible. I’m not sure his attorneys or the advisors he listens to can stop him from doing so. I don’t rule it out. As I said, it’s unlikely, but I can definitely see it happening.”
Using legal danger to fuel fundraising
The Trump campaign wasted no time in exploiting the indictments to raise money, leaning into a familiar claim that the candidate is a victim of a Democratic witch hunt.
Only one day after news broke about Trump’s first federal indictment, a fundraising appeal built around the charges appeared on the campaign website prominently displayed in a column on the left-hand side of the page, suggesting contribution amounts ranging from $24 to $3,300. The message lays out a bill of particulars with the former president at the center of the persecution narrative, beginning with the apocalyptic opener: “We are watching our Republic DIE before our very eyes.”
Trump Save America, the beneficiary, is a joint fundraising committee for Donald J. Trump for President 2024 and the Save America PAC, which supports Trump.
The fundraising appeal contends that a “witch hunt began when the FBI RAIDED my home and then staged it to look like a made-for-TV crime scene with police sirens and flashing red and blue lights.”
Alluding to his previous indictment in New York state, the appeals continued: “So, after a state prosecutor failed to break us, the Deep State sharpened their attacks and unleashed a FEDERAL prosecutor to TRY and take us down.”
Notwithstanding Trump’s claim, the charges in New York state remain pending, and Jack Smith, the special prosecutor appointed by U.S. Attorney General Merrick Garland, was investigating Trump for allegedly mishandling classified documents four months before a grand jury in New Manhattan returned an indictment on the state charges related to the Stormy Daniels affair.
Minutes after the Aug. 1 indictment dropped, Trump started fundraising again, selling "I Stand With Trump" T-shirts featuring the indictment date, and Trump's mugshot from his booking at the Fulton County Jail helped him bring in more than $7 million after the Georgia indictment as he quickly took to selling mugs, shirts and other merchandise with the photo.
At least one prominent surrogate helped retail the fundraising push.
Kari Lake, a fellow election denier who lost her race for governor of Arizona in 2022, joined a Twitter Spaces co-hosted by Dustin Stockton and Jennifer Lynn Lawrence on the night news broke about Trump’s indictment on charges of mishandling classified documents.
Stockton and Lawrence helped organize the rally that provided the springboard for the Jan. 6 insurrection. During her appearance on Stockton and Lawrence’s Twitter Space, Lake, who is now running for U.S. Senate, told more than 1,300 listeners she had just gotten off the phone with Trump shortly after news broke about the indictment on June 8. Lake said it wasn’t enough for Republican voters to just say they stand with Trump or condemn the indictment.
“And if we really stand with him, we need to go to DonaldTrump.com and make a donation tonight,” said Lake, who is herselfpreparing a 2024 U.S. Senate run in Arizona. “Everybody, whether it’s $5, $10, $500 — whatever you can afford. Because if we’re gonna stand with him, we need to put our money where our mouth is tonight.”
The political monetization of Trump’s legal woes grows deeper by the month. Go to Trump’s campaign website and you’ll find several items on sale — a black-and-white ceramic coffee mug is $24 — featuring a fake mugshot of Trump above the words “NOT GUILTY”. Of late, Trump hassuggested that he would “end” his campaign in a deceptive bid to squeeze money from supporters.
The Federal Election Commission, which enforces federal campaign finance laws, would have no grounds to intervene in Trump’s fundraising efforts while facing criminal charges or even time in jail or prison, said Ann Ravel, who served as an FEC commissioner from 2013 to 2017, including one year as the commission’s chairwoman.
Trump's campaign is selling these black-and-white ceramic coffee mugs for $24. (Screen grab)
Trump’s campaign could easily continue sending supporters incessant fundraising emails and text messages in Trump’s name.
“The only problems for him would be if there's failure to disclose, or if people are giving more than the limits, all of the things that are traditional FEC issues, but they don't have the authority to do anything with regard to a person who's been indicted and is still fundraising,” Ravel said. “That in and of itself is not sufficient for the FEC to take any action.”
Lessons of Eugene Debs, incarcerated presidential candidate
Trump wouldn’t be the first candidate to run for president from prison if he were convicted.
In the weeks before the 1920 election, Eugene V. Debs, the Socialist Party candidate for president of the United States and an inmate in federal prison, touched on the significance of the moment.
“Has there ever been anything like it in American history before?” Debs said, as reported by the socialist newspaper Appeal to Reason. “Will there ever be anything like it in American history again? We must impress it upon the people that this scene is symbolic of what has befallen this country.”
There has been one other. Lyndon LaRouche, whom The New Republiccalled “The Godfather of Political Paranoia,” ran from prison in 1992 after being convicted of tax evasion and mail fraud.
His vice presidential running mate, the Rev. James Bevel, did most of the campaigning. This suggests that a jailed Trump could lean heavily on the presence of a charismatic vice presidential candidate — be it someone such as Lake of Arizona, Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene of Georgia or even banished Fox News host Tucker Carlson.
LaRouche received .02% of the popular vote — 26,334.
Debs, who was serving a 10-year sentence for decrying the United States’ involvement in World War I, received 3.4% of the popular vote — 919,799.
He received 6% of the vote as a candidate eight years earlier, in 1912.
While emphasizing that she’s speaking as an individual, Allison Duerk, director of the Eugene V. Debs Museum, located in Debs’ home in Terre Haute, Ind., said she cringes at comparisons between Debs and Trump. In material ways, the two men are polar opposites.
“I bristle at recent casual references to the 1920 campaign — not because they are inaccurate on the surface, but because these two men and their respective projects are diametrically opposed,” she told Raw Story.
Duerk does believe Debs predicted the emergence of American political leaders such as Trump.
Illustration of Eugene Debs while running for president in prison. Indiana State University archives
“Take this quote from the speech that got him locked up,” she said, quoting Debs: “‘In every age it has been the tyrant, the oppressor and the exploiter who has wrapped himself in the cloak of patriotism, or religion, or both to deceive and overawe the people.’"
In an Appeal to Reason article, Debs said he believed in change “but by perfectly peaceful and orderly means.” He added, “Never in my life have I broken a law or advised others to do so.”
Unlike Trump, who nurses grievances daily, the article said of Debs, “Nothing embitters him. Injustice, oppression, persecution, savagery do not embitter him. It is a stirring, an uplifting thing to find a man who has suffered so much and remains so ardent and so pure.”
The U.S. government and the prison warden made small accommodations to Debs’ candidacy. He was, for one, allowed a single written message per week to voters.
“Where Debs had once stormed the country in a verbal torrent,” wrote Ernest Freeberg, author of Democracy’s Prisoner, “he would now have five hundred words a week.”
Debs still had some of the trappings of a political campaign, including a button that had his photo from prison with the words, “For President - Convict No. 9653.” He had printed material that said, “From Atlanta to the White House, 1920,” a reference to his residency inside the Atlanta Federal Penitentiary.
On election night, Debs received the results in the warden’s office and soon conceded the election to President-elect Warren Harding.
In his book Walls and Bars, Debs wrote that the question came up in the room about his potential ability to pardon himself as president — an action over which Trump has reportedly mused.
“We all found some mirth in debating it,” Debs wrote.
Serving as president from prison
If Trump ran a successful campaign from jail or prison, is there anything stopping him from assuming the Oval Office if he were elected president?
“There is nothing in our traditions or the Constitution that prevents someone who is indicted or convicted or, in fact, serving in jail, from also serving as the president,” said Harold Krent, law professor at the Chicago-Kent College of Law, who formerly worked for the Department of Justice. “Does it make any sense? No. But there is no Constitutional disablement from that happening. So, you could think of a scenario in which the case goes to trial, maybe after the primary and results in a prison time with President Trump and then he is inaugurated, and he gets to serve as president from some prison farm somewhere.”
Lichtman said “of course” Trump would just pardon himself of any federal crimes were he reelected president. There’s also the possibility of Trump attempting to preemptively pardon himself, with then-President Gerald Ford’s pardoning of Richard Nixon serving as an imperfect template.
But if Trump is convicted on any state-level charges, where federal pardons do not apply, that’s a different story.
“That's unprecedented, but the pardon power is pretty absolute,” Lichtman. “He can’t pardon himself for the New York case because that’s a state case. If he's convicted in New York, he's stuck. If ... he's convicted in Georgia, he can’t pardon himself from that either, because that's also a state case.”
Trump’s ability to pardon himself is widely debated in the academic community, Krent said.Federal document listing indictment counts against former President Donald Trump. U.S. District Court, Southern District of Florida
“There's no law on the books that says you can't. You just have to reason from the idea of separation of powers and the Constitution or to think that it doesn't make any sense to have one person aggregate or accumulate so much power,” Krent said. “As a constitutional matter, I think that that would be too much of a conflict of interest to be able to pardon yourself.”
Interestingly, the classified documents federal indictment didn’t include counts related to 18 U.S.Code 2071, which deals with the concealment, removal or destruction of government documents. This would disqualify anyone found in violation of the code from running for office, Rahmani said.
“That particular provision was passed after Nixon as a disqualification provision that prevents anyone convicted of it from holding public office,” Rahmani said. “Trump's lawyers would have said that it's unconstitutional because only the Constitution can place limits on who could be president. You can be a felon. You can be in prison and still theoretically be president of the United States.”
The Constitution could be interpreted — ostensibly by the U.S. Supreme Court — that an imprisoned president wouldn’t qualify as capable of carrying out his duties, preventing him from taking the office, Ravel said.
“There's nothing to stop him from becoming president either because the provisions in the Constitution about the presidency and the requirements for presidency don't reflect any concern if a president has been indicted or is in jail,” Ravel said. “Although if he goes to jail, it would create a problem for him because the Constitution does have concerns about the inability to carry out the obligations of the office, which he certainly wouldn't be able to do in jail.”
Specifically, Section 4 of the Constitution’s 25th Amendment potentially empowers Congress to determine — via a two-thirds vote of both chambers — that a president is “unable to discharge the powers and duties of his office” and thereby transfer presidential powers to the vice president.
But if Trump is elected in November, and trials end up taking place after the general election, some of his legal peril could subside — at least at the federal level.
“There's clear Department of Justice memos and policies. It's pretty clear that a sitting president cannot be prosecuted,” Rahmani said.
If Trump won and was convicted but on appeal, he would “probably” still be able to get inaugurated, Krent said.
“The question is whether they would stop the appeal and let him serve out the presidency before it would continue,” Krent said. “Uncharted waters in terms of how this would go. It's gonna affect the primary. It would affect the general election, and it certainly would affect his ability to conduct a presidency.”
Editor’s note: A version of this article was originally published on June 13, 2023, and has been updated to reflect numerous legal and political developments involving Trump.
WASHINGTON — Ever feel the full weight of the far-right messaging machine — misinformation and all — come down on you?
Welcome to the new world of one of the Republican Party’s own — Sen. James Lankford of Oklahoma.
For the past four months, Lankford has been Senate Republicans lead negotiator on a bipartisan Southern border security bill — a policy Republicans demanded be included in a broader foreign aid package for Ukraine and Israel — that conservatives drove to a screeching halt this week.
In doing so, Republicans ditched the hardfought border compromise, along with Lankford, it’s GOP author.
“How’s it feel to be run over by a bus?” Raw Story asked Lankford Tuesday.
“And backed up [over]?” Lankford finished.
It’s not just that House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA) declared the $118 billion package “dead on arrival.’’ Or that Senate Republicans bailed on their party’s point person — only four, including Lankford, voted to advance the measure, which failed to advance in the Senate on Wednesday.
Former President Donald Trump, the head of today’s GOP, also denied ever endorsing Lankford — even though Trump absolutely endorsed him.
“Are they here to block us reporters?” Raw Story inquired about his entourage.
“Oh, no, they’re coming to hear me speak on the floor,” Lankford calmly said. “We want to solve problems. We really do. Status quo is the worst scenario.”
Lankford may be calm, but at least one of his fellow negotiators is enraged.
“Look what they did to James Lankford. It's disgusting what they did to James,” Sen. Chris Murphy (D-CT) told reporters at the Capitol on Tuesday. “They put him out there and asked him on their behalf to negotiate a compromise, and then they didn't even give him the chance to argue the merits. Like, these are not serious people.”
Some of Lankford’s Republican colleagues say the deal is good and that their party just needs time to study the measure.
“They can now see that most of that was misinformation,” Sen. Mike Rounds (R-SD) told reporters Tuesday.
“Senator, that misinformation is now gospel in your party,” Raw Story asked before being cut off, “what is your plan to…”
“I disagree with your assessment on that,” Rounds replied Tuesday before voting against the measure Wednesday. “There's a lot of us that are actually reading the bill, and a lot of the information that James gave us has been misconstrued by other individuals on either side. But it really is something that we've got to work hard to get the correct information out to the public about what's really in the bill.”
The GOP seems to have moved on from the security package, even as most Republicans — Trump excluded — defended Lankford’s honor.
“He got thrown to the wolves,” Sen. Josh Hawley (R-MO) told Raw Story. “He had no leverage. He was given no running room. People who are familiar with the negotiations have described it to me, James was basically told, ‘You have to agree to this. You have to agree to that’.”
“I feel bad for him,” Hawley said. “It’s not his fault.”
Whose fault is it?
Democrats say the answer to that is undeniable.
“It's 100 percent clear what's happening here,” Murphy of Connecticut continued. “The truth is simple, in the end they sided with Donald Trump who wants chaos at the border because it helps him politically, instead of siding with the American people who want the border to be fixed.”
It has been over two years since reports dropped that Donald Trump's chief financial officer, Allen Weisselberg, was suspected of lying to investigators about former Trump attorney Michael Cohen.
Now that the longtime Trump CFO is being investigated for another act of perjury, Cohen wants to know about Weisselberg's previous act of perjury.
CNN reported in August 2021 that four people familiar with prosecutors' thinking told them about Weisselberg, who was given a plea deal with the condition that he testified under oath and told the truth. He would only be sent to prison for five months for his role in a decades-long tax scheme at the Trump Organization.
Now, it turns out that Weisselberg lied in the New York fraud trial, too, and he is in negotiations with prosecutors over a perjury charge.
A New York Times report citing people with knowledge of the matter claimed that Weisselberg, as part of a plea deal with prosecutors, would be forced to admit he lied during the New York fraud trial, which is a different matter from what investigators suspect were previous lies told in 2018 during the Cohen case.
Cohen was sent to prison for his role in Trump's hush money deal with adult film star Stormy Daniels.
During their investigation from 2021, CNN reported, "prosecutors gave limited immunity to Weisselberg, who was involved in the company’s effort to reimburse Cohen for the hush money payments, a matter that has also come under scrutiny by the Manhattan district attorney’s office. But federal prosecutors ended up questioning their decision to give Weisselberg immunity, according to people familiar with the matter."
Prosecutors then weighed whether or not to pursue perjury charges for Weisselberg and whether they could withdraw his immunity, the report said. That was the last the public heard on the topic.
A 2019 court filing revealed that the prosecutors told Cohen's judge that they had “effectively concluded its investigations of (1) who, besides Michael Cohen, was involved in and may be criminally liable for the two campaign finance violations to which Cohen pled guilty” and whether certain people, the details of which were redacted, “made false statements, gave false testimony or otherwise obstructed justice in connection with this investigation.”
According to the CNN report, prosecutors grew skeptical about Weisselberg's testimony about the Cohen reimbursement and how it was categorized in the Trump Organization's books as legal expenses.
"Weisselberg wasn’t the only Trump Organization official whose testimony prosecutors doubted, according to one of these people," the CNN report read without giving any further details.
Fast forward two years to the deal that Weisselberg made for just five months in prison for his role in the Trump Organization tax fraud scheme, where he and others were given perks off the books and untaxed.
Then, in October 2023, Forbes reporters uncovered that Weisselberg "lied in sworn testimony" in the Manhattan fraud trial too.
"Weisselberg was on the stand as part of a $250 million lawsuit that the New York attorney general is waging against Trump and his associates, including Weisselberg, accusing them of lying about Trump’s net worth to financial institutions," Forbes said. "To arrive at inflated figures, the Trump Organization used demonstrably incorrect facts, such as valuing Trump’s penthouse as if it contained 30,000 square feet, when it in fact consisted of 10,996."
While being questioned, Weisselberg confessed that 30,000 square-feet estimate was wrong, but he suggested he didn't have anything to do with such a bogus number.
“I never focused on the triplex, to be honest with you,” Weisselberg said. “It was almost de minimis relative to his net worth, so I really didn’t focus on it.”
“I never focused on the apartment Mr. Trump owned,” Weisselberg said at another point.
He later claimed: “I didn’t correlate the square footage of Donald’s apartment. I never focused on it. It was always in my mind a de minimis asset of the overall of Donald J. Trump’s statement of financial condition. That was never a concern of mine. I never even thought about the apartment. It was de minimis in my mind.”
Forbes has been tracking Trump's wealth since 1982 as part of its "richest Americans" list and they have emails and notes from conversations with Weisselberg where he said the opposite.
According to the information Forbes has, Weisselberg "played a key role in trying to convince Forbes over the course of several years that it was worth more than it really was. Given the fact that these discussions continued for years, and that Weisselberg took a very detailed approach in reviewing Trump’s assets with Forbes, it defies all logic to think he truly believes what he is now saying in court."
The report prompted prosecutors to begin pursuing a perjury investigation into Weisselberg for the fraud trial testimony and now Judge Arthur Engoron, who is presiding over the case, is demanding to know what is going on given he is supposed to be making a ruling on the Trump Organization.
Engoron has already ruled that the Trump Org. is liable for fraud, but has not yet determined the penalties. Weisselberg being caught in perjury could mean additional delays, which has been a legal strategy for Trump, according tonumerousreports.
The judge's email Monday read: “As the presiding magistrate, the trier of fact, and the judge of credibility, I, of course, want to know whether Mr. Weisselberg is now changing his tune and whether he is admitting he lied under oath in my courtroom at this trial.”
Cohen, however, wants to know what happened to investigations into the suspected falsehoods Weisselberg told with regards to his own case.
Speaking to Raw Story on Monday, Cohen referred back to the 2021 story, and then alleged that the Southern District of New York used lies against Cohen.
Characterizing what unfolded, Cohen alleged, and later confirmed by four people with knowledge, that the Southern District of New York knew Weisselberg had lied to them, put him before the grand jury to repeat the lie, and then used that lie as a basis for an indictment against Cohen. In exchange for this, Weisselberg received limited immunity.
Assistant U.S. Attorney Nicholas Roos is the only lawyer still with the Southern District of New York from the existing Cohen case.
Raw Story contacted the Southern District of New York press office to ask what happened to the Weisselberg perjury investigation in that case and whether Cohen's prosecution was contingent on Weisselberg's testimony.
A representative explained they could not comment on any investigation that didn't result in public charges. As for the Cohen case, they won't comment on anything other than what has already been reported previously.
While Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg is the law enforcement official behind the case about Trump's role in the hush money scheme, Cohen was charged by the federal Justice Department prosecutors in the Southern District of New York.
Cohen feels he has been in a "David vs. Goliath" battle between both the Justice Department and the Trump world for the past several years, gaining help from members of Congress.
It's unknown whether it is even on the Merrick Garland Justice Department's radar that Weisselberg potentially lied in their investigation, but Cohen has been pressing for information by going to court and using Freedom of Information Act requests to try to obtain documents related to his case.
"After removing certain search terms, including grand jury document requests, the number of responsive documents was reduced to approximately 49,000," wrote Cohen. "Pursuant to the Court’s directive, processing of said documents was to begin August 23, 2022. Despite more than 14 months since the Court’s directive, not a single FOIA document has been turned over."
As CNN's 2021 report explained, "Weisselberg has denied wrongdoing in the tax fraud investigation and in connection with anything pertaining to the Cohen case."
WASHINGTON — Raw Story walked with Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA) on Capitol Hill Tuesday as she trashed members of her own party over a bipartisan border control bill looking unlikely to pass.
Senate Republicans have spent weeks hammering out a landmark legislation on border security and immigration but its future looks bleak as far-right Republican in the House condemn it and those in the Senators threaten a filibuster.
Raw Story asked Greene if MAGA Republicans trust Sen. Mitch McConnell, one of the leading forces behind the bipartisan bill.
"Nobody trusts Mitch McConnell," Greene said. "Let's just say that."
She then went off on an attack against the Senate legislation, saying it "legalizes a daily invasion."
The Senate bill, she argued, "brings more illegals into the country."
"That is the most America-last — it's like they're traitors — anybody who voted for it would be a traitor," Greene continued.
When asked if this shows that Trump is running the House and Senate Republican caucuses, Greene argued it isn't about Trump, it's what the American people want.
WASHINGTON – Maxwell Frost has not been shy about criticizing Joe Biden’s administration – from climate change to border policy to Israel’s war in Gaza.
But the nation’s first Gen Z congressman has nevertheless seen his profile inside the Democratic Party rise. And despite Frost’s concerns, the 27-year-old Floridian is becoming an increasingly essential surrogate for the 81-year-old Biden.
To Frost, that push and pull is part of any relationship, and he doesn’t know why it should be any different in politics.
“I just refuse to fall for this, ‘I hate you or I love you thing,’” Frost said in an interview. “I'm going to be honest with you. And if I think that our values align, I'm going to work with you. And I think my values align with President Biden.”
That dichotomy between publicly dissing Biden and supporting him, while unusual for a presidential campaign surrogate, reflects how Gen Z broadly feels about a certain Silent Generation commander-in-chief who’s off seeking a second term.
It also helps explain Frost’s appeal among young voters who are wary of Biden but aghast at the prospect of Donald Trump returning to power. Frost stands as a willing bridge to a new and skeptical generation of voters that the president urgently needs for general election success.
Much like Biden, Frost also sees a second term for former President Donald Trump as an “almost existential threat for this country,” one reason he is motivated to reelect Biden.
Florida is “the epicenter of fascism rising in this country,” Frost said of the home state he shares with Trump, and the former president “obviously represents that movement on such a larger scale.”
‘See themselves reflected in this administration’
While backing Biden is an easy decision for Frost, he said he realizes it might not be for other voters.
That’s why he wants to engage with them as he did recently in Southern Nevada, a state that will be a presidential battleground in 2024 — and one where an uptick in youth turnout during the 2022 midterms proved key in the state’s three competitive House contests and pivotal Senate race. The congressman headlined a roundtable with students at the University of Nevada-Las Vegas who had experienced the December 6 mass shooting at the school. He then held a happy hour with other college Democrats, where he spoke about Biden and addressed concerns the students had about the Biden administration.
“He is a symbol for Gen Z that they can see themselves reflected in this administration and in Congress and in Washington,” said a Nevada Democrat who worked with Frost on the trip.
Biden’s age creates an understandable distance with these young voters, the Democrat added, but the people Frost met with came away saying, “If this guy, who is like me, is saying we should get on board, then we should get on board.”
Frost’s ability could become a campaign super-weapon for Biden, the oldest president in American history who, upon serving a complete second term, would be 86 years old the day he leaves soffice in early 2029.
Polls show younger voters are unsure about Biden, citing many of the same critiques – climate change and Gaza, primarily – as reasons to question him. Some are considering third-party candidates, such as Robert F. Kennedy Jr. or Cornel West. Others are open to not voting at all, an outcome that top Democrats think could lead to losses nationwide.
That’s why Frost, who has said he will do whatever he can to re-elect Biden, wants people to understand the effect of non-participation.
“The main opponent here for me is not even Donald Trump,” he said. “As a campaigner, what I'm thinking is, ‘Our main opponent is the couch,’ it is no action at all. And that's how Republicans win, right?”
U.S. Rep. Maxwell Frost (D-FL) gives a thumbs-up outside the Capitol after voting to continue funding the government for 45 days. Philip Yabut/Shutterstock
People who have worked with Frost said he gives younger voters cover for their anti-Biden feelings and demonstrates how you can both criticize a man who is old enough to be your grandfather and support him for four more years in office.
“Maxwell Frost gives younger voters the opportunity to see both sides of the coin,” said Jasmine Burney Clark, founder of Equal Ground Education Fund and Action Fund, a civic engagement organization in Florida that has worked with Frost. “The congressman has been critical of this administration and has applauded this administration at the same time. He has made that complexity available for other folks who are sitting in their [own] complex situations as well around whether to support or not.”
The congressman has “Gen Z gravitas,” added Burney Clark, who has seen Frost campaign with young voters.
Gen Z — four generations removed from Biden’s Silent Generation — is defined by the Pew Research Center as anyone born between 1997 and 2012. When voters elected Frost in 2022, the then-25-year-old became Congress’ first Gen Z member ever.
Frost’s victory, therefore, became a milestone that garnered considerable attention, landed Frost on cable news and led Biden, then president, to call and congratulate him. He was also one of the few bright spots for Florida Democrats in that cycle, which otherwise saw the state’s ranks decimated by Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis’ political operation.
“He is one of the few positive things out of Florida right now,” said a Democratic operative working in Florida who requested anonymity to speak openly about the shabby state of Democrats in the state.
Bashing — and boosting — Biden
But his election was not the first time Frost found himself in the public eye.
Frost grew up as an organizer, volunteering for Barack Obama, Bernie Sanders and Hillary Clinton. He survived his own brush with gun violence in 2016 at a Halloween event in Orlando, eventually leading him to become the national organizing director for March for Our Lives, the gun control organization sparked by the 2018 shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School that killed 17 people.
And Frost was a Biden critic long before he came to Congress.
In 2019, while working for the American Civil Liberties Union, Frost reportedly filmed a colleague confronting Biden about the Hyde Amendment, which significantly restricts federal funding for abortion.
“The goal of the program is to impact candidates,” Frost reportedly said at the time.
That would not be the last time Frost has confronted Biden.
When the Biden administration approved a large new oil drilling project in Alaska, Frost said he was “very disappointed” and argued that Biden was disrespecting young voters.
“Youth voter turnout was at its highest in 2020 & young folks supported him because of commitments such as no more drilling on federal land,” Frost wrote. “That commitment has been broken. We deserve a livable future.”
When the Biden administration decided to build additional miles of border wall, Frost called the decision “equivalent to sticking our heads in the sand,” adding he was “deeply disappointed in the Biden Administration for this hazardous move as the climate crisis looms and the humanitarian crisis deepens.”
After war between Israel and Hamas broke out in Gaza, Frost called for an “immediate ceasefire,” a position that directly opposes the Biden administration’s support for Israel in the wake of the October 7 terrorist attack by Hamas that killed more than 1,200 people.
It would be hard to imagine a campaign surrogate speaking out against Trump’s positions and remaining on Team MAGA.
But part of the reason Frost said he’ll work to get Biden reelected is that administration officials have “never” asked him to tone down the rhetoric.
“In fact, they’ve said, ‘Talk to us, tell us what's up!’ They've listened to us,” he said. “It hasn't been some sort of House of Cards thing, where it's like you're shunned or you're blacklisted or you're strong-armed.”
In 2023, Biden opened the first-ever White House Office of Gun Violence Prevention, an idea Frost helped spur. In the announcement of the office, Biden thanked Frost for his work as they stood together in the Rose Garden, said he was a “big reason why I’m so optimistic about America’s future” and joked, “I remember when I was young.”
Frost said the office is doing “amazing things” and his city of Orlando received about $1.5 million in federal funds for community violence intervention.
“When I was protesting in Orlando, and I was tear-gassed and I was maced and I went to jail in the district that I represent, one of the things I was protesting for was money to communities to end gun violence, and President Biden has done that,” he said.
While he has disagreed with him on climate policy, he also credited Biden for pausing approvals of liquefied natural gas exports and for signing the Inflation Reduction Act, Biden’s signature law to fight climate change.
“Some of us joke that the Inflation Reduction Act is the downpayment of the Green New Deal,” he said, referring to the preferred climate change proposal of the far-left. “I care about that, and that’s a huge win.”
National Democrats have noted this balancing act, believing that Frost – unlike some other progressive members of Congress – represents the views of America’s youngest voters.
“It is normal to have disagreements. You can’t expect anyone to be with you 100 percent of the time,” said a national Democratic strategist close to the Biden campaign. “What’s important is that you can have these disagreements and still be on board, and that’s reflective of the strength in the diversity of the Democratic Party.”
That ability to balance criticism with help has helped Frost navigate internal Democratic politics. In just a few years as an elected official, top Florida Democrats say, Frost is now seen as a “power center” in Florida Democratic politics.
“He is essential to the party apparatus in the state,” said Nikki Fried, chairwoman of the Florida Democratic Party who unsuccessfully ran for governor in 2022.
“He ran a very grassroots campaign when he first got elected in 2022. And he created an atmosphere of hope,” said Fried, who has been open about how Florida Democrats were in a troubling place when she became chair in early 2023. “He's really important to not only energize our base, but to show the rest of the elected in the state of Florida what it looks like to be a true public servant.”
WASHINGTON — After protecting – and studying – lawmakers at the U.S. Capitol for the past 15 years, Harry Dunn turned his service revolver over to the Capitol Police at the end of 2023.
He then entered the 2024 race to represent residents of Maryland’s 3rd congressional district, which curls through the suburbs south and west of Baltimore, as a Democrat.
Dunn found his life upended during the 2021 Capitol insurrection as he protected then-Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s staffers from militia group the Oath Keepers and other violent attackers.
In the three years since the Capitol attack, Dunn has made it his mission to raise the alarm about what he sees as the greatest threat to American democracy: former President Donald Trump.
He offered gripping testimony about the day to the U.S. House’s select January 6 committee.
“I was distressed, I was angry, and I was scared," Dunn testified to the select committee in 2022. "During the event, it was just about surviving."
He also became a New York Times bestselling author with his book “Standing my Ground.”
In this Raw Story exclusive, Dunn discusses more than his newfound ambitions as a politician – “Don't think of me as one! I’m a public servant.” He also pulls the veil back on how his fellow officers reacted to his accidental activism and what he views as the hypocrisy of former House Speaker Kevin McCarthy.
“I refuse – win or lose this election – to let the story of January 6 and the narrative go in any other direction than the truth. Hell, that's been my mission since I started speaking out three years ago,” Dunn told Raw Story.
The distinguished former Capitol Police officer also discussed his personal interactions with Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA) and other lawmakers – “a lot of the people that are holding those seats shouldn't be there” – including House Republican Conference Chair Rep. Elise Stefanik (R-NY), who has supported imprisoned Jan. 6 attackers and seems to be auditioning to get the vice-presidential nod from Trump.
Raw Story’s conversation with Dunn is lightly edited for length and clarity:
Raw Story: “So now you are running…”
Harry Dunn: “I know. What the hell am I thinking, right?”
RS: “Exactly! You’ve looked at all these politicians from the other side and, to now to be running — how's that change feel?”
HD: “Maybe ‘inspire’ is the right word. I've been up close and personal with them every day of my life for the last 15-plus years, and I feel like I see what they're doing and I'd say, ‘I could do it a little better’ – or not necessarily better but different or more effective. I've watched them. I've heard the things that they said, specifically the MAGA faction of the Republican Party that has kind of downplayed everything since January 6. Now, obviously, Jan. 6 was the catalyst that brought me to this point, but I have a lot of opinions about a lot of things.”
RS: “Even before we jump into January 6, just seeing lawmakers every day, you kind of get a takeaway, like, ‘oh, wait, they're just humans.’”
HD: “I love that part of it, man. Because that's what public servants, to me, are supposed to be: just people – average people that aren't on a pedestal. But my job is to give a voice to the members of the community that I represent, and that's what your job is as an elected official. Your job is to represent those people, and you should be an everyday American because that's what the government should be made up of.”
RS: “Now to get to January 6, especially this year with the anniversary, it just had a different feeling at the Capitol, almost like it never happened.”
HD: “Because that's what Donald Trump wanted. Everything that Donald Trump has said — slowly but surely it starts trickling down into Congress. Everything that Donald Trump has said they are saying – ‘they’ meaning the subordinates of him in Congress parroting his talking points – and that's not how Congress is supposed to work.”
RS: “You'd expect it more – I'd expect it more from someone like MTG – but how is it watching…”
HD: “Do I expect more? At the Capitol, we would see these individuals every day so maybe we expect more from the position that they hold but not necessarily the person. Like, I don't expect more from Donald Trump, I expect more from the presidency. And that's how I was able to do my job. I was able to separate that, the institution of Congress – I marvel at it; I respect it – but a lot of the people that are holding those seats shouldn't be there.”
RS: “I've been with MTG to the D.C. jail for her to advocate for J6 prisoners, and it's been a part of her rhetoric. But now to hear Elise Stefanik – who’s been in Republican leadership – say, ‘January 6 hostages,’ that's new.”
HD: “So what is Elise Stefanik right now? She’s vying for a VP nod, right? So it's anything to stay in Trump's graces. We've seen it all the way from the beginning of January 6 with Kevin McCarthy when later that night he went on the floor and condemned Donald Trump. Few days later, he’s down at Mar-a-Lago changing his tune, right? [Sen.] Lindsey Graham, same thing with him. Elise Stefanik. The list goes on and on and on. He has that much of a hold over the people that it's dangerous and very counterproductive in Congress.”
RS: “We see Trump’s stranglehold on the Republican Party, how would it be serving with those folks?”
HD: “The same way it was for me protecting them. This isn't just something that I'll have to get used to being able to see them and say ‘hi’ to them every day. I did that January 7th – the day we went back after the attack at the Capitol, because I revere the institution. I hold it in high regard. I think the world of it, and I expect great things to come from Congress. The fact that we haven't been able to doesn't mean that we shouldn't still strive to get greatness out of it.”
RS: “Have you been surprised watching the rhetoric of MTG and that faction trickle into the leadership?”
HD: “I'm disappointed. I'm not surprised, because Donald Trump has this stranglehold over these individuals. It's very important to acknowledge, though, what Congress is supposed to do. I believe in it, and maybe that's crazy on me for believing in something that hasn't functioned well for a long time.”
RS: “How important is this election just for the legacy of January 6, because it feels very tied to Donald Trump and his future?”
HD: “It's very important, not necessarily for the legacy of it, so to speak. I refuse – win or lose this election – to let the story of January 6 and the narrative go in any other direction than the truth. Hell, that's been my mission since I started speaking out three years ago. But I think what this election will show is how important the threats to free and fair elections are and holding on to our democracy is to people. Donald Trump said it himself that [he] wants to be a dictator on day one. He said that. So I think what the election will show is how many people think that what we have now is worth preserving and worth fighting for it.”
RS: “When you were on the force, what was the reaction from Capitol Police brass – but then your fellow officers – to you speaking out?”
HD: “That was tough to navigate, because Capitol Police officers aren't allowed to give press conferences or speak to the media. So when I spoke, I was speaking as a citizen. I wasn't representing Capitol Police. So it was difficult to navigate, because those things are tied together – the Capitol Police and January 6 – so I was in a tough bind. I never went rogue or anything like that. I was respectful to the department. I said, ‘Listen, this is what I want to do. I'm not here to bash the department. I'm here to get the people responsible and hold them accountable.’ Period. There were a couple head bumps about me speaking out. I respect the Capitol Police leadership, and they were great. And obviously, when you talk about frontline — my co-workers — a lot of them were indifferent. A lot supported me, and said, ‘keep going.’ And there were a few that hated it – you know, ‘I'm making it about me’ – which kind of sucks, but it’s expected. If you look, the FOP [Fraternal Order of Police], the last few times Donald Trump ran, they endorsed him, so there's a lot of police officers that support Donald Trump, even after January 6. So I expected all types of mixed reactions. But I know what I'm doing, I'm standing up for what I believe in.”
RS: “What do you make of seeing law enforcement come around Trump or, more so, seeing Republicans still try to wear the mantle of law enforcement when they threw y'all literally under the bus?”
HD: “Does that make me dislike Donald Trump more or does that make me have to face the sad reality of what our country is? I don't think that necessarily makes me hate Donald Trump even more, I think it makes me have an awakening to, ‘hey, this faction exists, and it's not a small faction – it's a large population of people.’ We have to figure out how to navigate that, because they're here and clearly aren't going anywhere.”
RS: “When it comes to the lead up of January 6, have your questions been answered? For one, on congressional leaders – Pelosi and [Sen. Mitch] McConnell — for the pre-planning. But then also the agencies. Are you sure we can’t have a repeat?”
HD: “I don't believe in any conspiracy that McConnell or Pelosi wanted to see the Capitol attacked. I don't believe that at all. I believe in incompetence, versus it was a setup or some s— like that. Somebody dropped the ball, and they need to be held accountable. I don't know where that is, but somebody did. But I don't believe it was the leadership. I think they trusted people that they put in positions to answer for those things, and those people need to be held accountable.”
RS: “Seeing groups like Moms for Liberty take root on the right, are you worried about — maybe January 6 not repeating itself in a physical assault but them kind of taking root at the local level and trying to really take control of the reins of democracy at voting stations, etc.?”
HD: “We have to realize this faction – this chokehold that Donald Trump has – it's not just limited to members of Congress. It's triggered all the way down to local school board elections, like Moms for Liberty. And that's why it's so important to have truth tellers, individuals that really understand what is at stake right now. Obviously, we all want, in the long run, the same things, but I don't think that a lot of people realize the dire situation and how urgently we need to fight for it right now. Because it is a clear and present threat right now and we have to take it seriously. I left my job early. Meaning, I was there 15-plus years, four years short of being able to collect a full pension, because it's that important to me. It can't wait.”
RS: “How's that been going? Because it's hard for me to think of you as a politician, but, I guess, technically on paper, you are.”
HD: “Don't think of me as one! I’m a public servant. You saw me at the Capitol every day. You saw me interacting with people, ‘how can I help you?’ My job was to help people, and that's what I did. I've been doing that for the last 15 years of my adult life, and that won't change.”
RS: “But now you gotta dial for dollars and stuff like that. How's the campaigning?”
HD: “That sucks. I hate asking people for stuff. It’s difficult, but it's necessary. It's not like I'm raising money and putting it in my pocket. It’s for messaging, and I want to reach as many people as I can. Obviously, to win the election, but, the bigger picture, to educate and inform people of what is at stake right now.”
RS: “I'm from Chicago, which is very much like Baltimore, you got these old political machines. How's it been navigating Maryland Democratic politics?”
HD: “It's a lot to learn, but I've cared about politics, so it's not like, ‘who is the lieutenant governor?’ I'm engaged. Before I'm a candidate, before I'm a police officer, I'm a proud citizen of Maryland – and I have been my whole life – who wants to see the people and the state thrive. So running for office or not, that is always how I felt. But being a player now, so to speak, I don't want to lose the essence of who I am, which is a public servant.”
RS: “You obviously get a lot of focus from January 6, but what are the other things you're running on that you think – especially coming from law enforcement – that you can really bring to the table?”
HD: “Since you said it, let’s talk about that, law enforcement and police reform. There's been a long time where Cory Booker and Tim Scott, two black senators, were working together to create a bill to address police reform of criminal justice reform. They were unable to come to an agreement through a consensus, so the talks stalled and now it's just tabled. But the change can't wait … I've been very vocal about mental health. I think we need to reallocate funding to fight the war on mental health right now and the stigma that is associated with it. We all are struggling in some capacity every single day, and we need to make accessibility to mental health way more accessible … Lower health care costs. Obviously, I agree with the majority of the Democratic principles: the woman's right to choose, common sense gun reform. That's the stuff that I agree on, and those issues fall under the umbrella of democracy to me, because, you know, if Trump is elected back into the White House, do those issues even matter? They’ll be gone just like that.”
RS: “You have a presence, and it's usually a smiley, happy presence at the Capitol, but knowing that you were one of our boys in blue but then if you're wearing a suit and wearing that congressional pin, what signal would that send to the MTGs, the Matt Gaetzes, the Boeberts, the people trying to whitewash January 6th?”
HD: “That I can't be dismissed. It's easy to dismiss me when I was an officer, right? As just some ‘angry liberal plant,’ right? It's easy to dismiss me as that. But actually, I'm your colleague, now, I'm your equal. You can't dismiss me. You have to listen. I can bring an issue to the table and force it to be addressed.”
RS: “What would the lawmakers tell you like, personally off the record, post January 6?”
HD: “Well, the ones that I got to talk to, the ones who would dare talk to me about it – and that’s how bad it was – a lot of those members aren't in Congress anymore. That’s just a symptom of being a truth teller in a Donald Trump Congress, so to speak. It sucks. It’s unfortunate. But you mentioned MTG, I mean, she was a very friendly person. When I saw her on the Hill, she would always wave. She would always say hello. I don't know if she knew who I was, but she would always say hello. So I don't have anything bad to say about her about that.”
RS: “You get that southern nice but then it seems like some of those policies are very harmful but then they're cloaked in this smile. Like, does that worry you?”
HD: “I think it's disingenuous – smiling without even having your pulse on what's going on.”
WASHINGTON — Arguably the most bipartisan – nonpartisan, really – committee in the Senate is also, arguably, the biggest laughing stock on Capitol Hill.
For at least 17 years and running, the Senate Ethics Committee — tasked with confidentially investigating allegations of misconduct by the chamber’s austere members and staffers — has failed to formally punish anyone at all, a
Raw Story analysis of congressional records indicates.
That amounts to 1,668 complaints alleging violations of Senate rules with exactly zero resulting in disciplinary action.
In 2023 alone, the Senate Ethics Committee on Wednesday
disclosed accepting 145 separate reports of alleged ethics violations. Of them, 19 merited preliminary inquiries by committee staff. Of those, the committee dismissed 12 for “a lack of substantial merit” or because they deemed a violation to be “inadvertent, technical or otherwise of a de minimis nature.”
None resulted in a “disciplinary sanction.”
And senators seem to know it.
“Maybe it's the equivalent of a warning ticket when you're speeding, like the police,” Sen. John Cornyn (R-TX) – the former number two Republican, or whip, in the Senate – told Raw Story through a laugh this week.
The senators who make up the secretive six-member ethics panel will neither confirm nor deny their work.
“We don’t – I don’t discuss that,” Sen. Deb Fischer (R-NE) told Raw Story.
Fischer’s
far from alone, with Senate Ethics Committee Chairman Chris Coons (D-DE) previously declining to comment to Raw Story about the committee’s work.
Senate ethics vs. House ethics
While members of the Senate Ethics Committee refuse to discuss their work — and lack thereof — some members of the House Ethics Committee are aghast at what their senatorial counterparts aren’t doing.
"What's the point of having ethics rules if there's no teeth?" Rep. Veronica Escobar (D-TX) – a member of the House Ethics Committee – told Raw Story.
“Without accountability, we're not going to have compliance,” Escobar said. “If you expect people to abide by ethics rules, there has to be trust in the process and trust that the outcome is fair. But if there's no outcome, then there’s no faith in the system and people will operate with impunity, because there’s no consequences.”
Historically, at least, it would be laughable to look to the House Ethics Committee as a beacon of efficiency — or anything. But in recent months, the committee has changed.
Case in point: Now former-Rep. George Santos (R-NY), who allegedly lied himself both into and out of office.
George Santos yelling at reporters (C-SPAN).
Before Santos was expelled in
December, he survived expulsion votes in May and then November.
But some two weeks later, on November 16, the House Ethics Committee spoke in one loud and bipartisan voice when they dropped their
damning 55-page report that pulled the veil back on the web of lies, greed and corruption they alleged surrounds Santos most anywhere he goes.
The committee interviewed 40 witnesses — after issuing 37 convincing congressional subpoenas — while also thumbing through upwards of 170,000 pages of records, as new nonprofit newsroom
NOTUS pointed out in its helpful historical primer on Senate ethics inaction, which built on a 2023 Raw Story investigation.
By the time the House took up its third Santos expulsion measure on Dec. 1, 2023, the tides had turned even in the full House of Representatives, where Republicans were holding on to a razor thin
222-213 seat majority. While all five GOP leaders in the House voted against expulsion, rank-and-file Republicans voted to oust their camera-loving colleague.
“That was a tough vote for them given the margins that were so small,” Rep. Glenn Ivey (D-MD) – another member of the House Ethics Committee – told Raw Story. “Democrats too, because, I think, there were two votes before but he wasn’t expelled. When the report came out, I think, people were able to look at the body of evidence,”
In the end, based on the ethics report,
73% of the House voted to expel only the sixth member in the storied history of the rowdy chamber.
"At the end of the day, to me, what it did was, it allowed for due process," Rep. Mike Lawler (R-NY) told Raw Story. “It allowed for due process for him, but it gave us the ability to move ahead with the expulsion.”
Lawler and other New York Republicans led earlier efforts to oust Santos — in part because
his constituent’s were calling their offices for assistance — and he says the Ethics Committee report was the gamechanger.
“A lot of people felt that they had enough due process and information,” Lawler said.
The nation’s founders wanted the two separate branches of the legislative branch to police themselves. That’s about it. In the Constitution, the details of said policing were left to be written by future generations of lawmakers themselves.
"Each House [of Congress] may determine the Rules of its proceedings, punish its members for disorderly behavior, and, with the concurrence of two-thirds, expel a member," according to the
Article I, section 5 of the Constitution.
Historic Senate inaction
The House and the Senate are different. And that extends to ethics, too.
In its 235-year history, the U.S. Senate has expelled 15 members. The first came in 1797 — less than a decade since the chamber’s inception — when
Sen. William Blount (R-TN), a founding father who signed the original Constitution before being expelled by a vote of 25 to 1 for committing treason.
The other
14 expulsions came in 1861 and ‘62 when roughly 20 percent of senators were expelled after they joined the Confederate rebellion against the United States of America.
But during the ensuing 162 years, the so-called “
world’s greatest deliberative body” has, when it comes to ethical matters, done a lot of … deliberating.
All of those cases of historic corruption came before the Senate Ethics Committee. Some of those inquiries seem to have scared some senators into resigning early, but not one elicited an expulsion vote. Most senators emerged from these and other tribulations without even receiving a formal punishment.
While Santos was the gadfly of the House, there’s still a senior senator buzzing about that even some members of his own party say should be expelled.
In September, responding to numerous requests for information about freshly indicted Sen. Bob Menendez (D-NJ), the Senate Ethics Committee released a rare statement.
In essence: The Senate Ethics Committee said it wasn’t going to say anything, and that it would let criminal investigators take the lead.
“[T]he Senate Select Committee on Ethics does not comment on matters pending before the Committee or matters that may come before the Committee. Also, absent special circumstances, it has been the long-standing policy of the Committee to yield investigation into matters where there is an active and ongoing criminal investigation or proceeding so as not to interfere in that process.”
The closest the Senate Committee on Ethics got to formally reprimanding one of its own during 2023 came on March 23, when it issued a “
public letter of admonition” to Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-SC) for soliciting campaign contributions in a federal building.
Specifically, Graham in November 2022 asked the public, via Fox News, to contribute money to the U.S. Senate campaign of Republican Herschel Walker, who ended up
losing his midterm race to incumbent Democratic Sen. Raphael Warnock.
In admonishing Graham, the Senate Committee on Ethics noted that Graham had previously violated the prohibition on soliciting campaign donations in federal buildings when he raised money for his own campaign in 2020.
But for all that, Graham’s letter isn’t much more than ink, paper and embarrassment.
Such letters “shall not be considered discipline,” according to the Senate Committee on Ethics’
Rules of Procedure, and they fall well short of actual acts of internal discipline such as censure, denouncement, condemnation, restitution payments or — in the most extreme of cases — expulsion.
The last time the U.S. Senate formally disciplined a senator?
That came on July 25, 1990, when the Senate
voted 96-0 to denounce Sen. Dave Durenberger (R-MN) for “unethical conduct in personal business dealings, Senate reimbursements and using campaign contributions for personal use.”
“I commend the members of the Ethics Committee for their commitment and their dedication to the most difficult task in this place,” Durenberger told his colleagues from the Senate floor following the vote.
Sen. Jon Ossoff (D-GA), currently the Senate’s youngest member, was three years old at the time.
‘Different set of rules’
Senators maintain the two chamber’s ethical standards are on different planes. They say it’s like comparing apples to, well, the House of Representatives.
For starters, the House doesn’t allow outside parties to initiate ethics complaints, while the Senate does, argues Cornyn of Texas.
“So just a different set of rules,” Cornyn said.
Cornyn loves throwing the book at the deserving, he maintains. Before coming to Congress, he served as an
associate justice of the Texas Supreme Court. He also served as the Lone Star State’s attorney general under then-Govs. George W. Bush and Rick Perry.
The Senate Ethics Committee isn’t just about crime — of which there’s been a lot of on Capitol Hill — it also acts as a guide to senators, Cornyn said.
“To keep us ethical, hopefully,” Cornyn said. “Hopefully to provide guidance, so that people don't get in trouble in the first place. That's, I think, one of the roles.”
Raw Story asked Cornyn what its like serving with Menendez, noting that the
allegations against him — fraud, conspiracy to commit bribery, conspiracy to commit extortion — are quite serious.
“I’m a believer that there's a presumption of innocence until proven guilty, so we'll wait and see how that process plays out,” Cornyn said. “I'm sure it's a miserable experience.”
Misery loves company. And, unlike Santos, who’s busy
photobombing Trump victory parties, Menendez remains in office and has lots of Senate colleagues keeping him relatively warm these days.
Supreme Court 2022, Image via Fred Schilling, Collection of the Supreme Court of the United States
Former President Donald Trump arrives for his arraignment at Manhattan Criminal Court on April 04 in New York City. Michael M. Santiago/Getty Images
Trump's campaign is selling these black-and-white ceramic coffee mugs for $24. (Screen grab)
Illustration of Eugene Debs while running for president in prison. Indiana State University archives
Federal document listing indictment counts against former President Donald Trump. U.S. District Court, Southern District of Florida
U.S. Rep. Maxwell Frost (D-FL) gives a thumbs-up outside the Capitol after voting to continue funding the government for 45 days. Philip Yabut/Shutterstock
George Santos yelling at reporters (C-SPAN).