Republicans try to distract from the Trump and Santos debacle with a Biden nothingburger |
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Earlier this year, I spoke to Republican Representative Nancy Mace of South Carolina about the dilemma that the GOP faces when it comes to women after the Supreme Court's Dobbs v Jackson ruling. During that time, she excoriated her fellow Republicans for their stance on abortion and told me the GOP was "not going to win hearts and minds over by being a**holes to women."
But on Wednesday, Ms Mace joined a swarm of Republicans who alleged without any hard evidence that President Joe Biden had committed multiple federal crimes. While the press conference took place, news broke that Representative George Santos, the New York Republican who has come under fire for fabricating large parts of his story out of thin air, surrendered himself to authorities at a federal courthouse on Long Island.
Just the day before, a jury found former president Donald Trump liable for sexual assaulting writer E Jean Carroll, but not rape, and said that Mr Trump must pay her $5m. In the days after the January 6 riot, Ms Mace had said that Mr Trump had erased his legacy, but voted against his impeachment. Later, ahead of her primary last year, she posted a video of herself in front of Trump Tower.
But despite House Oversight Committee Chairman James Comer's proclamation that his committee "will not pursue witch hunts, or string the American people along for years with false promises of evidence that is beyond circumstantial evidence," they failed to produce any hard evidence during a press conference and many reporters seemed incredulous that the chairman would waste our time with such flimsy evidence. In doing so, Mr Comer seemed to break one of the cardinal rules of politics, especially when feeding something to reporters: he over-promised and he under-delivered.
Afterward I asked Ms Mace, who is herself a sexual assault survivor who later dropped out of high school before earning her GED and being one of the first female graduates of the Citadel military academy, about the jury's ruling in New York. She replied: "I haven't had a chance to look at it. I hear the deposition interviews is pretty bad. So I'll take a look at it later this week." She added: "But it's important that that the American people that both sides are held accountable Republican or Democrat. That's why we're asking the media today to follow the money on the Biden paper trail and all these bank records like what the hell was going on? This clearly was unethical, immoral, and probably maybe possibly allegedly illegal."
To her credit, she said Mr Santos needed to resign long before many of her Republican colleagues stepped up to suggest the same. But Mr Santos's legitimate legal trouble, as well as Mr Trump's, wound up making the House GOP's allegations seem all the more farcical and more of a reach. So far, House Republicans have yet to produce a smoking gun showing that Mr Biden directly knew about any legal impropriety or conducted anything illegal during his tenure as vice president.
Furthermore, Mr Comer, and other ostensibly "Responsible Republicans" (it would be a mistake to all any of them moderate) choosing to tie themselves to more right-wing MAGA figures like Jim Jordan, who engaged in a long-winded rant about the US-Mexico border when it was his time to speak, or the election-denying Representative Andy Biggs of Arizona, strained the credibility of their investigations and made them seem more conspiratorial and farcical.
But the press conference revealed the biggest problem: The GOP looks like they are being "a**holes to women" because they are being led by someone who has prided himself on behaving like one and now the legal system has caught up with him. And since the GOP has refused to expel Mr Trump, or his acolyte Mr Santos, they have hamstrung their ability to accuse anyone else of impropriety. |
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George Santos described criminal charges against him as a "witch hunt" in a defiant press conference following his arrest on Wednesday. The New York congressman spoke outside a federal courthouse after being arraigned on charges of fraud, theft of public funds and money laundering. "It's a witch hunt," he told a crowd of reporters. "I'm gonna fight my battle, I'm gonna deliver, I'm gonna fight the witch hunt, I'm gonna take care of clearing my name," he said, adding that he was planning to run for re-election. The 34-year-old congressman for New York's 3rd District, who won his election after a campaign that was littered with lies about his past, was arrested shortly after 9am after turning himself in to authorities.
- Michael Fanone, one of the police officers assaulted during the Capitol riot, has slammed CNN for hosting a town hall event featuring Donald Trump — the man he says "tried to get me killed." The retired DC Metropolitan Police officer and now regular CNN contributor penned an essay in Rolling Stone explaining the "sucker punch" he felt when the network announced that the former president would be included in a special town hall event, comparing it to a "rehabilitation party." Though he recognises that Mr Trump is the likely Republican frontrunner ahead of the 2024 election and admits that he is far from the only politician who has lied to the American public, Mr Fanone still believes the former president is uniquely unworthy of a national platform. "I'll tell you why this is different," Mr Fanone writes. "Those lies convinced thousands of his supporters to storm the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, violently attacking uniformed police officers and terrorizing members of Congress and their staff. I witnessed this assault firsthand as an officer with the Metropolitan Police Department, who like hundreds of MPD officers, responded to the U.S. Capitol Police Department's calls for assistance after their officers were overrun by Trump's mob. As a result of my efforts that day I was severely beaten, struck numerous times with a taser, and suffered a heart attack as well as a traumatic brain injury. One police officer died, and several others took their own lives in the wake of that barbaric day."
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