Why This MAGA Candidate's Mother-In-Law Says She's 'Unfit For Office'
In Nevada, far-right MAGA Republican Elizabeth Helgelien is running for a seat in the U.S. House of Representatives. But she has a major foe who clearly hopes she will drop out of the race: her former mother-in-law.
Helgelien critic Christine Halseth lambasted her in an op-ed published by the Nevada Globeon Wednesday, March 13. Halseth's son, Daniel Halseth, was married to Helgelien before being fatally stabbed by the couple's teenage daughter Sierra Halseth, and her boyfriend, Aaron Guerrero in 2021.
Sierra Halseth and Guerrero entered guilty pleas to nine counts each, including arson and murder with a deadly weapon, and are now serving life sentences in state prison, with the possibility of parole after 22 years.
Helgelien herself was never accused of doing anything wrong. But Christine Halseth, in her op-ed, argued that Helgelien — who formerly served in the Nevada State Senate — did a terrible job raising Sierra Halseth and is unfit for political office.
Christine Halseth wrote, "Elizabeth raised a murderer, was forced out of office after a series of sex scandals, was caught in a series of lies, posed for lewd photographs, and has already proven to be unelectable.…We cannot, in good conscience, allow Elizabeth Helgelien to represent honest, decent Americans in Congress."
The Daily Beast's Justin Rohrlich examines Helgelien's campaign and Christine Halseth's arguments against her in an article published on March 17.
Christine Halseth told the Beast, "I don't care about the politics. I just want to stop her."
On her campaign website, Helgelien — who is hoping to unseat incumbent Democratic Rep. Susie Lee — claims that "woke liberals" are soft on crime and that she is running for "law and order."
But Christine Halseth, according to Rohrlich, "sees her ex-daughter-in-law's campaign as an insult to her and her entire family."
Reprinted with permission from Alternet
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Stephen Miller's Latest Loony Claims Of Trump's Immunity From Prosecution
You’re going to love this: the latest brief in the Mar-a-Lago documents case came from Stephen Miller. Yes, that Stephen Miller, the one who came up with the plan of ripping babies out of the arms of their mothers at the Southern Border. He still defends it as a good idea and has given interviews saying there are plans to repeat the policy of breaking up families if Trump is elected in November.
Miller has another wonderful idea this time -- that it was just fine for Donald Trump to leave the White House in 2021 taking a truckload of top-secret documents with him, because they were Trump’s secrets, not the government’s. Miller’s right-wing legal operation, the America First Legal Foundation – old Stevie just can’t get away from those intimations of the Nazi era, can he? – filed a friend of the court brief with Judge Aileen Cannon down in Florida supporting Trump’s position that the Presidential Records Act (PRA) allows him to do whatever the hell he wants to with his White House papers.
The PRA allows no such thing. The act, passed by Congress after the criminal presidency of Richard Nixon, requires every president to turn over all papers deriving from his time in office to the National Archives. Miller’s little nest of right-wing legal mice say the PRA doesn’t apply to Donald Trump because, well, because Donald Trump says so.
It's a little more complicated than that, but not by much. Special Counsel Jack Smith filed a reply brief to Miller’s 28 pages of legal blatherings. Leaving aside its signature page and certificate of service, Smith’s reply brief is all of five pages long. Smith uses a single word to describe the three contentions of Miller’s legal arguments: Wrong.
Reading the Special Counsel’s brief, you can feel him wearying of replying to Trump’s blizzard of filings in the cases Smith has against him in Washington and Florida. Trump’s basic position, backed up most recently by his loyal underling Miller, is this: Yeah, I did it, but you can’t get me because I’m Donald Trump.
Miller’s brief supporting Trump takes the utterly absurd position that the charges against him in the Mar a Lago case must be dropped because they all derive from a criminal referral by the National Archives, which spent 18 months practically begging Trump to turn over his trove of secrets before they called the FBI. Miller’s legal brief says the National Archives can’t call the FBI because all they are is a records depository and don’t have the statutory authority to report a crime. According to Miller’s MAGA theory, the National Archives needs a “regulation” to be allowed to pick up the phone and report a crime.
Smith, with Job-like patience, points out that if Miller is right, that means if a thief enters the National Archives and starts waving a gun around, it would be impermissible for the Archives to call the cops. Smith’s brief points Judge Cannon to the fact that the National Archives, as an entity of the federal government, has an inspector general on its staff, and by federal regulation, all inspector generals are “required to report expeditiously to the Attorney General whenever the Inspector General has reasonable grounds to believe there has been a violation of Federal criminal law.”
The Special Counsel has had to file response after response to motions made by Donald Trump to dismiss charges against him, and every one of those motions takes the same position. Yeah, he did it, but this is why you can’t go after him. He’s immune from prosecution. The prosecution is “selective and vindictive.” Because everybody else got away with it, so should Trump.
Trump is accused in the Mar-a-Lago case of removing important national security information from the White House and failing to secure it by storing top-secret papers, including some that contained secrets about nuclear weapons, in places like a bathroom and a ballroom. But that’s okay, according to Trump’s lawyers, because according to yet another case against Trump, “the President’s actions do not fall beyond the outer perimeter of official responsibility merely because they are unlawful or taken for a forbidden purpose.”
Judge Tanya Chutkan had it right when she dismissed Trump’s first claim of absolute immunity. What he wants is a get of out jail free card. Reelecting Trump will give him a whole pocketful. Every time he holds a rally, he promises to free “the January 6 hostages” with presidential pardons.
That’s bad enough, but what we’ve really got to be afraid of is his promise to turn around and put his enemies in jail. At his rallies, “lock her up” has turned into a chant of “lock them up.”
Remember, we are them.
Lucian K. Truscott IV, a graduate of West Point, has had a 50-year career as a journalist, novelist, and screenwriter. He has covered Watergate, the Stonewall riots, and wars in Lebanon, Iraq, and Afghanistan. He is also the author of five bestselling novels. You can subscribe to his daily columns at luciantruscott.substack.com and follow him on Twitter @LucianKTruscott and on Facebook at Lucian K. Truscott IV.
Please consider subscribing to Lucian Truscott Newsletter, from which this is reprinted with permission.
When a neophyte named Edward Moore Kennedy first ran for the Senate in 1962 at barely 30 years old, his primary opponent delivered a debate quip that still echoes.
"If your name were Edward Moore," cracked Ed McCormack, then Massachusetts attorney general, "your candidacy would be a joke." Ted Kennedy won that primary, ascended to the Senate, and then spent a lifetime winning over skeptics with hard work and liberal commitment.
But that harsh zinger could score a bullseye on a different target now: Uncle Teddy's errant nephew Robert Francis Kennedy Jr., the grifting anti-vax lawyer and conspiracy monger whose campaign for president of the United States should be a joke — and certainly would be if his name were merely Robert Francis.
The difference is that RFK Jr., seeking public office for the first time, isn't 30. He is 70, a senior citizen, with a long and checkered record whose bright spots are overshadowed by menacing darkness. Far from upholding the values his family represents or the legacy of his martyred father and uncle, Bobby Jr. is an opportunist whose ambition, greed, dishonesty and arrogance have led him far astray.
There was a time many years ago when, as an environmental lawyer, Kennedy did useful work — usually under the tutelage of wiser heads — after he emerged from the drug addiction that followed his father's murder. At one point, I even wrote an admiring magazine profile of him.
But not too many years later, Bobby began the deceptive anti-vaccine campaign that has marked his moral and intellectual decline ever since. Having authored articles claiming childhood vaccines cause autism, he clung to their refuted arguments and falsified data long after the magazines were forced to withdraw them. He insists those lies are true to this day — and the anti-vax propaganda from which he profits is leaving American kids vulnerable to disease.
How would his late uncle John F. Kennedy, whose memory he so often invokes in his current campaign, react to what Bobby has done? In 1961, President Kennedy worried that resistance to the polio vaccine, which was still rather new, meant millions of schoolchildren might contract that deadly and crippling virus.
At a press conference that April, the president said: "I hope that the renewed drive this spring and summer to provide vaccination for all Americans, and particularly those who are young, will have the wholehearted support of every parent in America."
The following year, JFK pushed through the Vaccination Assistance Act, which financed immunization drives in every state for polio, diphtheria, pertussis and tetanus. That massive campaign established the federal government as the central authority in establishing and coordinating immunization policy for the nation — a role Robert Kennedy Jr. has persistently sought to undermine or even abolish, at potentially enormous cost.
Bobby's betrayal of his family goes further with every step he takes in this campaign, and in every direction. JFK and RFK were both known for surrounding themselves with advisers whose intelligence and experience drew admiration; Bobby is drawn to intellectually null sycophants and boobs, including a large contingent of crooks like Steve Bannon and Roger Stone, as well as the anti-vax scammers, some of whom are outright fascists. These are people his father and uncle would have privately mocked and publicly shunned.
Even worse, Bobby has become a shill for Russian propaganda and an opponent of American military aid to Ukraine's besieged democracy. We don't have to wonder what his uncle would have said, because history tells us.
In his inaugural address, JFK uttered this indelible sentence: "Let every nation know, whether it wishes us well or ill, that we shall pay any price, bear any burden, meet any hardship, support any friend, oppose any foe to assure the survival and the success of liberty." Liberty doesn't mean surrendering to Putin and abandoning our allies.
Lately, Bobby has been sucking up to the Libertarian Party, whose platform would tear down all the achievements of his father and both of his uncles in civil rights, education, health care, environmental protection, food security and a score of essential programs. He wants their ballot line, and he is willing to promote their destructive ideology for his own benefit.
In this campaign, he has reversed the old epigram about history and its personages. In the first act, he presents a farce — and in the second act, should he help to elect Donald Trump, he will bring forth a tragedy.
Joe Conason is founder and editor-in-chief of The National Memo. He is also editor-at-large of Type Investigations, a nonprofit investigative reporting newsroom formerly known as The Investigative Fund, and a senior fellow at Type Media Center.
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March 15 (Reuters) - The Georgia judge overseeing Donald Trump's trial on charges of trying to overturn his election defeat in the U.S. state said that lead prosecutor Fani Willis can remain on the case, so long as she removes a deputy she had a personal relationship with.
Judge Scott McAfee's ruling was a blow to the Republican former U.S. president, who seeks to unseat Democratic President Joe Biden in a Nov. 5 election. Trump has sought to delay trials in the four criminal cases he faces until after the election.
McAfee's decision caps a tumultuous two months for Fulton County District Attorney Willis, whose romantic relationship with Nathan Wade, the special prosecutor she appointed to lead the case, was disclosed in a January court filing by a Trump co-defendant.
It also ends three months of contentious litigation and evidentiary hearings over the relationship that effectively paused the rest of the case, though McAfee has yet to set a trial date.
Defense lawyers said the relationship posed a conflict of interest and improperly enriched Willis and Wade, who vacationed together while Wade was drawing a government salary.
McAfee found the relationship did not pose a conflict of interest but said it created "a significant appearance of impropriety" that required either Willis or Wade to step aside.
Trump's lawyer Steve Sadow said in a statement that he respected the judge's ruling but believed it did "not afford appropriate significance to the prosecutorial misconduct of Willis and Wade."
Willis' office did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Trump has pleaded not guilty in all the cases against him. He is accused in the Georgia case of illegally pressuring state officials to overturn his loss to Biden there in the 2020 presidential election.
He has so far been successful in delaying the start of any trial as he seeks to return to the White House.
One in four self-identified Republicans and about half of independents said they would not vote for Trump if he was convicted of a felony crime by a jury, according to a February Reuters/Ipsos poll. That would be a significant liability in a race where opinion polls show Trump and Biden essentially tied.
The U.S. Supreme Court has agreed to review Trump's bid for presidential immunity in a federal election interference case in Washington, which could delay that trial until after the election.
The judge in Trump's upcoming trial in New York on charges related to hush-money payments to a porn star during his 2016 campaign is weighing postponing the March 25 scheduled trial start after federal prosecutors turned over a mountain of new evidence.
Willis and Wade testified that their relationship did not begin until after Wade was hired. Prosecutors argued the affair was irrelevant because it did not harm the defendants.
Defense lawyers accused the prosecutors of lying to the court, saying the relationship began before Wade was hired. In court papers filed on Feb. 23, Trump's attorney cited location data from Wade’s cellphone suggesting he made numerous late-night visits to Willis’ home before she appointed him.
Trump is also under indictment in Florida over his handling of classified documents upon leaving office. The judge overseeing that case is weighing Trump's bid to move his May 20 trial date.
Reporting by Jack Queen in New York and Andrew Goudsward in Fort Pierce, Florida; editing by Scott Malone, Jonathan Oatis and Howard Goller
Russian Witness Against Biden Received $600K From 'Trump Associates'
I’ll bet you didn’t know that it is possible in this great big world of ours to live a comfortable life being paid hundreds of thousands of dollars for doing basically nothing. Well, not nothing, exactly, but the money you get is unattached to normal stuff we are all familiar with like a job, complete with job-related duties and office hours and a W-2 and maybe even a job title. The money can thus be described by what it is not, which is aboveboard and visible. Instead, this kind of money often ends up in the kinds of accounts said to be “controlled” by you or others, which is to say, accounts which may not, and often do not, have your name on them.
We could describe this kind of money, then, as free floating. It’s just out there. Your function in life, if you are a man like our friend the lying Russian agent and Republican witness Alexander Smirnov, is to make sure that some of it becomes “controlled” by you.
The Guardian published a fascinating story on Thursday in which it connected money paid to Smirnov to firms connected to what the paper called “Trump associates.” It’s not a small amount of free-floating money, either. It’s $600,000, and according to The Guardian, it was paid to Smirnov by a company called Economic Transformation Technologies (ETT) back in 2020, the same year he began his career as a witness against the family of Joe Biden by lying to the FBI.
There’s got to be a whole industry that just has a bunch of people sitting in an office somewhere coming up with company names like Economic Transformation Technologies and selling them to people, almost always men, who are setting up businesses and need something to call them. Note the “ies” on the end of the word “Technology” in the company title. That sort of clever twist – that it isn’t just one technology we’re talking about, but several, maybe even many – is what you’re paying for.
Now why would ETT want to pay $600,000 dollars to a person who has been described as a “criminal, fixer and agent” who has two passports and ends up having connections to Russian intelligence agencies? Six hundred thousand dollars is a lot of money, but in the world of people who traffic in information about, among others, Russian oligarchs, Ukrainian energy companies, and British holding companies with interests in Dubai and elsewhere, maybe it isn’t. Smirnov, when he was arrested recently, was described to the judge considering whether or not to give him bail, as “having access” to as much as $6 million, three million of which was said to be held in accounts “controlled by” his girlfriend.
See where we’re going here? We’re already in the world of accounts “controlled by” people “connected to” other people, and in the case of Smirnov, not by any kind of legal instrument you and I would be familiar with, such as a marriage license that would give you access to the money “controlled” by another person, but simply a “girlfriend” legally unattached to Smirnov but who, according to the Department of Justice, was simply holding as much as $3 million, so Smirnov could have access to it.
Do you live in that world? I’ll bet not. I’ll bet that you have a bank account with your name on it. Maybe it also has your wife’s name on it, and maybe you and she have a joint savings account, or a joint account with a securities brokerage, and I’ll bet you and she have your names on the title and registration of a car – maybe even two cars – and your names are on the title and mortgage of a house or condo or on the lease for an apartment.
But not Smirnov, recipient of $600,000 from a company controlled by people connected to Donald Trump. Smirnov is one of those among us with access to some of the floating-around money that’s out there, money that comes from somewhere and goes somewhere but it isn’t clear why, or how, or through what sort of financial instrument or arrangement.
It would help us if we knew something about the company that arranged to transfer the $600,000 to Smirnov, wouldn’t it? Maybe if we knew what the company does, how it makes money, what its business is, we could better understand why Economic Transformation Technologies decided it would be a good idea to pay, or transfer to, a man who is and has been a fixer and a criminal and an informant and an agent for foreign powers such as Vladimir Putin’s Russia. So, let’s ask ETT what kind of company it is.
On its website, ETT tells us this about what the company does: “ETT’s state-of-the-art platform utilizes advanced Artificial Intelligence (AI), Machine Learning (ML), Natural Language Processing (NLP), Data Science, Lexicon Management, and many other workflows in an extremely secure environment, the ETT Platform creates the ‘holy grail’ of Real-Time, Predictive, and Meaningful Data through more than 1,600 APIs - making it one the world most momentous and timely platforms. As a final point, ETT set up the chess board to bring in top notch executives from those sectors to help implement its vision of love and social impact to improve the quality of human existence through the application of ‘New Age’ technologies.”
If that sounds like a word-salad put together, complete with misspelled words, by the kind of boiler room that probably generated the name of the company, well, I agree with you. What they appear to have done is watch some cable TV and read a few newspapers like the Wall Street Journal and maybe even paid attention to a technology site or two, and they came up with a list of buzz words describing what others are doing in what we might call the “technology sector,” and then they threw in a phrase approximating a mission statement, the wonderful sounds-like-it-was-written-by-a-speaker-of-a-second-language, “…implement its vision of love and social impact to improve the quality of human existence through the application of ‘New Age’ technologies.”
I mean, really. If this is what passes for corporate-speak today, woe be unto the world of corporations in general and this one, ETT, in particular.
The Guardian describes the man at the helm of ETT, an American by the name of Christopher Condon, as a one-third shareholder in something called ETT Investment Holding Limited in London, because of course he is, London being the epicenter of all things international when it comes to finance and moving money around. The connections go on, to one Farooq Arjomand, described by The Guardian as “a former chairman and current board member of Damac Properties in Dubai who is also listed as an adviser on ETT’s American website.” And from Farooq, and Dubai, it’s just a short hop and a jump and what do you know, we’re in a Trump branded property in Dubai that paid our former president $5 million in 2017, and the only reason we know about the $5 million is because Trump was elected president in 2016 and had to fill out an FEC financial statement for the first year he was in the White House as a federal employee, 2017.
See what happened there? Donald Trump, for all his carefully curated reputation as a billionaire, which we now know is about as solid as a pile of melting snow along a random roadside, was one of those free-floating-money guys, out there in business-world-land, grabbing $5 million here and a few hundred thousand there and making his own private decisions about how, or whether, he would report the money as income. And then, in 2015, he decided to run for president and what do you know, he was elected and had to start filling out stuff like FEC forms, where it’s not so easy to attribute or even hide money.
While in office, Donald Trump became addicted to perks like Air Force One, on which he repeatedly flew down to Mar a Lago or over to Bedminster to play a round of golf and then flew back. So, he decided after losing the White House to Joe Biden in 2020 that he would like to go back to flying around on Air Force One and decided to run for election again. To this end, he enlisted a gaggle of half-wits in the House of Representatives to engender an impeachment of his rival, President Biden, and they began casting about for “evidence” that “the Biden crime family” had committed the same sort of crimes the Trump crime family had committed.
And out of a crack in a condo in Las Vegas slithered a sneaky snake called Alexander Smirnov to whisper in the ear of his FBI handlers – because of course a fixer/criminal/agent like Smirnov would have handlers – that Joe Biden and his son Hunter took bribes from a company called Burisma in Ukraine. The half-wits in Congress, having failed to come up with any other “evidence” of crimes, glommed onto Smirnov’s assertion of criminal wrongdoing by the Bidens, and off they went.
At least until it emerged that the FBI discovered they had been lied to by Smirnov and charged him with committing several serious crimes, and the whole house of cards of the impeachment investigation began to crumble.
The problem with houses of cards when they fall is that they have to land somewhere, and where the particular card with Smirnov’s name on it landed is a connection right back to Donald Trump, who in 2020 with a tightly contested race against Joe Biden on his mind was looking around for “dirt” on Joe Biden. Friends of Trump’s found Alexander Smirnov slithering out of cracks in Las Vegas, so they threw six hundred grand his way and thus began his years-long construction of the Burisma lie that has now landed him in pre-trial detention awaiting trial on charges of lying to the FBI and generally being a criminal/fixer/agent for foreign powers, including Putin’s Russia.
Funny how that keeps happening with Donald Trump, isn’t it? In 2016, it was yet another itinerant floating-money Russian intelligence-connected guy named Joseph Mifsud, who in Rome spied an eager-beaver young “adviser” to Donald Trump’s campaign named George Papadopoulos and started romancing him by coming up with a Russian honeypot he introduced to young George as “Putin’s niece,” and a Russian think tank executive who was actually an agent for the FSB, and bingo! All of a sudden there is dirt on offer in the form of Hillary’s emails!
The emails, once revealed by the Russian FSB through WikiLeaks, contained nothing criminal or even mildly interesting, but that didn’t matter. They gave Trump something he could yell at his rallies, along with “lock her up,” and that beat Hillary in November, and he won the presidency.
Now, please take your seats and fasten your seat belts because we’re coming in for a landing. The Guardian story delves deeper and deeper into the connections between Smirnov and Dubai guys and a Pakistani-American and a bunch of companies that include a “blank check company” called BurTech Acquisition Group which is connected to Digital World, another “blank check company” that becomes associated with Donald Trump’s Truth Social in a merger that, after problems with the SEC are resolved, may “garner Trump as much as $4 billion in shares.”
The whole thing circles back to ETT and the $600,000 it paid to Smirnov in 2020, which the Wall Street Journal discovered was “in exchange for a stake in an Israel-based crypto trading platform, called Bitoftrade, [that] Smirnov was working on launching.”
You just knew crypto had to be in there somewhere, didn’t you?
But still we’re stuck with the mystery of ETT, the company we’re told is in the business of “implement[ing] its vision of love and social impact to improve the quality of human existence through the application of ‘New Age’ technologies.” Where the hell did ETT come from in the first place, you may ask?
The Guardian figured that out, too. Turns out ETT used to be called Pandora Venture Capital Corp, which was registered in Florida by a Ukrainian-American called Boris Nayflish, who is – you’re going to love this – the ex-husband of Alexander Smirnov’s current “partner,” Diana Lavrenyuk, she of the $3 million that the Department of Justice told a judge that Smirnov “has access to,” because of course he does.
The old hippie phrase comes to mind: what goes around comes around. In the world of free-floating money and blank-check companies and outfits that describe themselves as implementing visions of love and social impact through “new age” technologies, one of the truths of this particular new age is that when it comes to Donald Trump, what goes around keeps coming around to Russian intelligence and fixer/criminals like Alexander Smirnov.
Ladies and gentlemen, we have now landed. Feel free to use your electronic devices, and welcome to the world of sneaky snakey Donald Trump’s America.
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A lot of people now know about Mark Robinson, the Republican candidate for governor in North Carolina. Some national and international outsiders looking in were shocked at his Super Tuesday win. But I always thought the Donald Trump-endorsed Robinson was a shoo-in. That’s the red-versus-blue country we live in, when many times the “D” or “R” label means more than the person wearing it.
Yet, I find myself glancing side to side at my fellow North Carolinians, realizing that with Robinson’s win, they either don’t know much about the man other than his party affiliation, or they know him and approve of what he says and how he says it.
And as loud as he screams his repugnant views, there’s no excuse for anyone within state lines pretending he’s an unknown quantity. I swear you can hear him roar from the beach to the Blue Ridge Mountains.
His voters won’t be able to hide now, though, since national newspapers and cable networks are all doing their “Mark Robinson” stories in the same way gawkers slow down for a better look at a car crash on the side of the road.
So, what exactly has Robinson said to make national media finally notice? Take your pick, since the list of racist, misogynistic, anti-Semitic, Islamophobic comments and personal insults is long.
The civil rights movement that provided the path for Robinson, a Black man, to rise to his current post of lieutenant governor? He has said it was “crap,” called the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., an “ersatz pastor” and a “communist,” and disavowed being any part of the African American community. “Why would I want to be part of a ‘community’ that sucks from the putrid tit of the government and then complains about getting sour milk?” he wrote, employing every offensive stereotype that would be right at home at a white supremacist get-together.
Women? Robinson’s message to a North Carolina church was that Christians were “called to be led by men,” that God sent Moses to lead the Israelites. “Not Momma Moses,” he said. “Daddy Moses.”
Robinson reserves especially toxic rhetoric for members of the LGBTQ community, unapologetically, and often in sermons. “There’s no reason anybody anywhere in America should be telling any child about transgenderism, homosexuality, any of that filth,” Robinson preached in one of them.
And though Robinson has tried to clean up his record with a trip to Israel, the Hitler-quoting candidate wrote in 2018 on Facebook: “This foolishness about Hitler disarming MILLIONS of Jews and then marching them off to concentration camps is a bunch of hogwash.”
There is plenty more, but you get the idea.
His party is embracing him, from the Republican Governors Association to party leader Trump, who called him “Martin Luther King on steroids.” I don’t remember King screaming hateful diatribes or conspiracy theories, and Robinson himself probably would recoil at any comparison to a man he has so little respect for.
You can see why Trump sees a kindred spirit in Robinson. After all, the man at the top of the GOP ticket, a spot clinched by this week’s primary results, isn’t known for his decorum. Both leave no personal insult unsaid. An example? Each somehow found humor in the hammer attack on Paul Pelosi, and it goes downhill from there, with Robinson finding any opportunity to spew potshots at everyone from Beyoncé to former first lady Michelle Obama, as well as at the Black Panther film.
While it’s no surprise those two are besties, it’s telling that GOP voters are similarly enamored, picking these two men to lead them.North Carolina Attorney General Josh Stein, Robinson’s Democratic opponent in November, is — like current Democratic Gov. Roy Cooper, a former attorney general – pretty low key, preferring to do just the job.
Either candidate would make history, as North Carolina’s first Black or Jewish governor.
Expect bombast, headlines and cash in a match made in news junkie heaven, with two candidates who could not be more different in policy and demeanor. And that’s even though Republicans in the state legislature have stripped the governor’s office of as much power as they could get away with — and with a supermajority, they could get away with a lot.
In the tradition of many extreme candidates facing a general election, Robinson has already begun the big pivot, blaming the media for misleading voters about him and his views. That’s not a great strategy when everything is on tape, video or in social media posts.
He will still try, though, especially since he really hates the media. He once told a Christian gathering, a conference sponsored by the North Carolina Faith & Freedom Coalition, that he could “smell” members of the media in the dark and “they stink to high heaven” — to applause.
But I wonder if Robinson really needs to change a thing.
In the past, North Carolinians most often have chosen hard workers over firebrands — and Democrats over Republicans — for governor, while narrowly sticking to the GOP in federal elections.
But will the old rules hold?
It’s not as though conservative Republicans in North Carolina didn’t have a choice. In fact, using electability as one argument, his primary opponents attacked Robinson’s statements as hard as any Democrat would, spending plenty on televised ads to get the word — his words — out.
One of them, attorney and businessman Bill Graham, had the support of one of the state’s U.S. senators, Thom Tillis, a Republican, which may have worked against him at a time when even a slightly moderate view is rejected by base voters as part of an inauthentic “establishment.”
Robinson smoked them all, winning nearly two-thirds of the vote.
A warning to Democrats: Don’t celebrate. Getting the candidate you wish for doesn’t always work out in November. Ask Hillary Clinton.
Mary C. Curtis has worked at The New York Times, The Baltimore Sun, The Charlotte Observer, as national correspondent for Politics Daily, and is a senior facilitator with The OpEd Project. She is host of the CQ Roll Call "Equal Time with Mary C. Curtis "podcast. Follow her on X @mcurtisnc3.
Reprinted with permission from Roll Call
Tuesday’s House Judiciary Committee hearing with special counsel Robert Hur showcased Republican desperation to find some way to attack President Joe Biden.
Despite the release of a full transcript of the interview between Hur and Biden that showed complaints about the president’s memory to be exaggerated, if not outright lies, many Republicans continued to pursue the Biden-so-old route. Texas Rep. Nathaniel Moran went so far as to suggest that Biden should be placed under guardianship for diminished mental capabilities.
At the same time, committee Chair Jim Jordan was one of multiple Republican members who asked Hur to envision fantasy scenarios in which the president was 15 or 20 years younger. That was part of an extended, and sometimes laughably desperate, effort by Republicans to get Hur to say that somehow, somewhen, somewhere in the multiverse, he might have considered charging Biden. They did not succeed.
But the biggest reason for the Hur hearing wasn’t just to give a chance to alternate between asking whether Biden should be in a care facility or if he’s a criminal mastermind. The reason that the Republicans called in Hur is that their big impeachment scheme has fallen apart. Now they are madly searching for something, anything, that they can throw against the walls of the White House.
As Politico reported on Wednesday, the Republican plan to impeach Biden appears to be all but dead. That effort began as soon as Republicans had their hands on the machinery of the House, with Rep. James Comer chairing the House Oversight Committee running a parallel “investigation” with Jordan on the Judiciary Committee and Chairman Jason Smith on the Ways and Means Committee. It reached its ludicrous peak on Sep. 12, 2023, when then-Speaker of the House Kevin McCarthy announced a formal impeachment inquiry in a blatant effort to hang onto his big office. That didn’t work.
By the time Hunter Biden made his way to a closed-door meeting of the inquiry on Feb. 28, 2024, it seemed clear Republicans were only spinning their wheels. Despite hundreds of interviews and thousands of documents, Republicans had produced nothing more than some truck payments, family loans, and a heavily debunked claim from an indicted foreign agent.
However, as the Politico article notes, Republicans see it as a high priority to “antagonize the White House.”
It might seem that getting some legislation passed after a session in which Republican infighting resulted in just 27 bills escaping the House (that includes renaming some Veterans Affairs clinics and issuing a commemorative coin). But Republicans are convinced that demonstrating competence in governing doesn’t matter to their voters.
So they are just going to throw crap against the walls of the Capitol in the hopes that some of it might stick.
Among the Republican Plan Bs under consideration are:
- Sending criminal referrals for Hunter Biden to the Justice Department.
- Keep investigating, but save any announcements for closer to Election Day.
- Just keep investigating and making false claims—because that’s worked so well so far.
There’s also a plan to sue the Department of Justice, though it’s not clear why.
There’s even a suggestion that Republicans might do something that seems anathema to them so far—draft legislation. In this case, it would be legislation to tighten rules for financial reporting and foreign lobbying.
However, not only would this require them to break out a pencil stub and do the work they’ve resisted since taking control of the House in 2023, it would also mean drafting something that would pass the Senate. It could be exceedingly difficult to craft a bill on financial reporting that didn’t have a much bigger impact on Donald Trump than Biden. Ditto on issues of foreign lobbying.
The problem for Republicans is that Trump and his family did all the things they’ve been attributing to Biden and his family. Which would seem to make the legislative route difficult without netting the wrong fish.
Other options, like the idea of making a criminal referral on Hunter Biden, would be an obvious exercise in toothless grandstanding. But that hasn’t seemed to bother Republicans so far, so this is likely what they’ll do.
Republicans are reportedly so far away from mustering enough support for a Biden impeachment that even Speaker of the House Mike Johnson can see that such a move would fail. But they’re unwilling—and possibly incapable—of trying to dig their way back to respectability by passing legislation that addresses the nation’s needs.
So they’re going to sit among the ashes of their very fine impeachment inquiry and try to find something else ugly enough to please MAGA voters. So far, they’ve got nothing.
Reprinted with permission from Daily Kos.
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'Serial Liar' Stefanik Grabs Credit For Infrastructure Funds She Voted To Kill
House Republican Conference chair Rep. Elise Stefanik (R-NY) recently patted herself on the back for a $1.8 million federal grant a community within her district received. However, that money came from a bill she and every other Republican opposed.
Local publication North Country This Week — based in Stefanik's 21st House District in upstate New York — reported that the US Department of Agriculture grant went toward the South Raquette Water District in Massena, NY. Stefanik took credit for the funding, telling the outlet that she helped fast-track the grant application through the House Appropriations Committee to quickly get the funds approved.
"Infrastructure has been a top priority for some time and I am able to offer assistance in a very targeted way, whether it be for water projects, sewer projects or supporting our first responders," she said.
"I am proud to announce that I secured $1,857,000 for a Water District Development Project for the Town of Massena in this year’s appropriations process," Stefanik wrote in a Tuesday tweet. "This funding will go toward providing public water service to the residents of Massena."
Stefanik didn't actually vote for those funds, which were part of the Inflation Reduction Act that passed the House of Representatives in 2022. In a now-deleted statement posted to her House.gov website, she called the legislation a "radical spending bill that will raise taxes and crush hardworking families and small businesses."
"[Democrats] have made their priorities clear, and they are not for the American people. I will continue to stand up against reckless government spending and any tax increases," Stefanik said at the time, adding that the bill "also wastes $350 billion on 'Green New Deal' provisions that prioritize large cities over rural communities."
Others on X/Twitter took issue with Stefanik boasting about her district receiving the funds she voted against. In addition to a community note (a public fact-checking feature on the platform) specifying that Stefanik "voted Nay along party lines with every other Republican" against the bill, she was also slammed by various journalists, public figures and commentators for her tweet.
Reprinted with permission from Alternet.
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Right-wing “manosphere” influencers including Sneako, Jon Zherka, and Myron Gaines are embracing Nazism and defending Adolf Hitler online. These influencers — who have large followings across multiple platforms — have histories of making antisemitic comments and pushing conspiracy theories about Jewish people, but their pro-Hitler and Nazism commentary marks an escalation.
Over the past year, these three figures have praised and defended Hitler, done the Nazi Seig Heil salute while streaming, and refused to disavow Nazism.
These influencers are part of the manosphere, an online community of right-wing websites, bloggers, and personalities cultivating a worldview based on conservative and regressive gender politics repackaged for the internet age.
While purporting to provide dating, financial, and lifestyle advice to men, some manosphere figures are aligning themselves with far-right personalities. Their online presence can serve as a gateway to push audiences further to the right toward more dangerous ideologies, as they often use other topics that interest young men — like weightlifting, video games, and boxing — to draw viewers in before diving into extremist content and misogyny.
Figures in this group often push extremism and antisemitism while blaming women for myriad societal woes and treating them as an inferior sex. Rhetoric from these influencers can sometimes be overtly cruel and promote hitting, degrading, and shaming women.
Sneako
- Right-wing streamer Sneako (real name Nico Kenn De Balinthazy) is a manosphere influencer and associate of pro-Hitler rapper Ye (formerly Kanye West). He has been described as “a cheap imitation” of misogynist, media personality, and alleged human trafficker Andrew Tate.
Sneako is also an associate of white supremacist and Holocaust denier Nick Fuentes. He spoke at one of Fuentes’ antisemitic rallies. He is banned on TikTok and YouTube and has promoted the abuse of women.
Sneako recently interviewed Nevada Lt. Gov. Stavros Anthony at an event for former President Donald Trump. Several attendees also pointed out that Sneako is one of Fuentes’ associates.
On several occasions, Sneako has praised, defended, and embraced Adolf Hitler and Nazism.
While probing a German woman about her sex life in a stream uploaded to X, Sneako made antisemitic comments and said he wanted to do the fascist Roman salute “so bad.”
“How about we role play,” Sneako said. “I’ll be the Nazi and I’ll shove you in the oven like a dirty Jew.”
- Sneako wrote on X that people should not “bash” Hitler for killing Jewish people and wished him a happy birthday.
Jon Zherka & Myron Gaines
- Self-proclaimed woman-hater and manosphere influencer Jon Zherka, who has flirted with underage girls online, been praised by Fuentes, and shared content promoting violent attacks against women, has also embraced Nazism.
Zherka instructed a group of women to do a Nazi Sieg Heil during a livestream and say “heil Hitler.”
- During a livestream debate about Israel featuring Zherka, Fuentes, white nationalist Vincent James Foxx, Proud Boys founder Gavin McInnes, and Rumble streamer Elijah Schaffer, Zherka did a Nazi Sieg Heil salute.
- In a bizarre livestream video posted to Reddit, Zherka melted down after finding out a woman he was hanging out with is Jewish. “You rule the world and all the banking,” he said to the woman while pretending to hit her.
After the woman said “I don’t like Hitler,” Zherka asked, “The fuck is wrong with you?” He later added, “I’ll regret this, dude.”
Zherka ended the livestream by saying “Hitler was a good guy.”
- Zherka again did the Nazi Sieg Heil alongside Fuentes and manosphere influencer Myron Gaines (real name Amrou Fudl) during a livestream. Gaines then pretended to be Hitler’s ghost.
Antifeminist influencer Hannah Pearl Davis was also featured on the stream.
- During a stream with Sneako, Zherka identified himself as a Nazi while attacking a man’s appearance.
“You look like a Nazi that became a Nazi just to fit in,” Zherka said. “Like, you’re not actually one of us.”
- Gaines previously defended and praised Hitler on his Fresh & Fit After Hours podcast.
“Though he did things that were morally incorrect, he definitely did a bunch of things correct for his country. That’s a fact,” Gaines said.
Influence on young people
- Reporting shows how easily toxic rhetoric from manosphere influencers can infiltrate the minds of young audiences, even among users as young as 11.
And some of the videos these manosphere influencers share, showing them meeting their fans, demonstrate just how young some of these viewers are.
- In one clip, young Sneako fans repeat his toxic rhetoric back to him, saying, “Fuck the women,” and, “All gays can die.” He seems to half-jokingly ask the camera, “What have I done?”
- This sort of misogynistic and extremist rhetoric does not live in a vacuum online; it can lead to real-world violence and harassment.
Reprinted with permission from Media Matters.
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In October 2023, The Nation's Elie Mystal warned that "'promoting violence" is a major part of ex-President Donald Trump's plan if he manages to secure the presidency again.
Mystal wrote, "I cannot actually list all the people Donald Trump has wished to harm with physical violence. They include most of his political opponents, often along with their families; every prosecutor who has investigated or indicted him; nearly every judge who has presided over one of his cases, protesters; hecklers; former Vice President Mike Pence."
Building on Mystal's point, conservative journalist and author David French last month wrote a New York Times op-ed highlighting "how much the constant threat of violence, principally from MAGA sources, is now warping American politics."
French noted "he has been inundated with death threats because of his criticism of Trump and that countless judges, lawyers, prosecutors, journalists, election workers and politicians live with the threat of MAGA violence."
On Tuesday, Colorado's 9News journalist Kyle Clark reported that far-right activist and commentator Joe Oltmann called for President Joe Biden to be killed during the Friday, March 8 segment of his online show.
According to Clark, the DCF Guns co-owner "has long used violent political rhetoric," before responding to Biden's expression of "support for a ban on so-called assault weapons" during his Thursday, March 7 State of the Union speech.
"I have gun stores and ranges," Oltmann said "on his Conservative Daily political program, which streams online and on MyPillowGuy Mike Lindell’s far-right broadcast network, FrankSpeech," Clark reports. "I’m not taking one gun off the shelf," the far-right activist added.
Reprinted with permission from Alternet.
Georgia Judge: Trump Did It, But That's OK Because Oaths Don't Really Matter
As if we had not been reminded before, the dismissal of six charges against defendants in the Georgia RICO case reminds us once again that the whole notion of taking an oath to support and defend the Constitution, including state constitutions, has apparently become a nullity in modern times. According to the judge in Georgia, if you’re required to take an oath, it’s just a ceremony, not an actual requirement to uphold the law – the law being the Constitution of the United States or the Constitution of Georgia.
Defendants in the Georgia racketeering case, who include Donald Trump, Rudy Giuliani, and Mark Meadows among others, were charged with 41 counts of violating Georgia’s law in that they “knowingly and willfully joined a conspiracy to unlawfully change the outcome of the election in favor of Donald Trump.” The judge in the case, Scott McAfee of Fulton Superior Court, has now dismissed six of those counts, not because the defendants didn’t take the actions they are charged with, but because those actions were not illegal enough. The judge found that the charges filed by the grand jury in Georgia did not spell out with adequate specificity why those actions were illegal.
All six charges relate to actions taken by the defendants to “solicit” various Georgia officials to violate their oaths of office. For example, Trump and Meadows called Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger and solicited him to “unlawfully influence the certified election returns.” Multiple defendants “solicited elected members of the Georgia Senate to violate their oaths of office on December 30, 2020, by requesting or importuning them to unlawfully appoint presidential electors.” Giuliani solicited members of the Georgia House of Representatives by “requesting or importuning them to unlawfully appoint presidential electors.”
You will note in the quotes from the indictment that the word “unlawfully” appears in each count of the indictment the judge dismissed. He’s not saying that what the defendants asked the Georgia officials to do was lawful, therefore the charges must be dismissed. No, he’s figured out a clever way around that. The judge is saying the charges must be dismissed because they don’t spell out how the illegal acts they were being asked to commit violated their oaths.
The law in Georgia prohibits any public officer from “willfully and intentionally violating the terms of his or her oath as prescribed by law.” The judge is saying that all the Georgia officials took their oaths of office, but Fani Willis’ grand jury has failed to spell out how what they were being asked to do violated those oaths. To illustrate the problem, as he sees it, the judge even favorably cites a case in Georgia where a conviction of a police officer was reversed “when a police officer’s oath did not expressly include a provision to uphold state law.” In another case, charges were dismissed in a drug possession case because the specific drug and its quantity were not specified.
Got that? In Georgia, you can swear to defend and protect the state Constitution, but that oath, at least in the case of the police officer in question, does not require you to “uphold state law.”
That this would utterly negate the whole idea of taking an oath doesn’t seem to have occurred to Judge McAfee, but moving on…
To sum up as briefly and bluntly as I can, the charges against Trump and the rest of them have been dismissed because the indictment against them does not spell out precisely how “unlawfully” doing something like appointing fake electors or “finding” enough votes for Trump to overturn the election violates the oaths of the Georgia officials being asked to commit those acts, even though the acts themselves are, as per the judge’s order dismissing the indictments, “unlawful.”
The judge took pains to point out that the United States Constitution “contains hundreds of clauses, any one of which can be the subject of a lifetime’s study,” so his message to Fani Willis is, get studying. If you want a new charge against Trump and his pals to stick, you’re going to have to find a clause they urged a Georgia official to violate.
The Supreme Court has been up to the same sort of thing in the series of decisions it has handed down eviscerating laws against the bribery of public officials. Their theory is that bribery hasn’t taken place, and thus the law hasn’t been broken, unless the person soliciting the public official to favor their interests by giving them a bribe spelled out in complete sentences what it is they want the official to do. For example, if a gangster is buying off a judge to find someone not guilty, it’s not enough for you to be the brother of the defendant and sit down with the judge and hand him money across the table. You’ve got to open your mouth and say the words: here’s some money to let my brother off.
This is the kind of double-reverse triple-salchow legal squiggling Donald Trump wants to use to beat the charges against him in Georgia. He’s not saying that he didn’t do it. He did. He’s not saying that what he did wasn't illegal. It was. He’s saying that it didn’t amount to causing others to violate their oaths in the exact same manner he was violating his.
Lucian K. Truscott IV, a graduate of West Point, has had a 50-year career as a journalist, novelist, and screenwriter. He has covered Watergate, the Stonewall riots, and wars in Lebanon, Iraq, and Afghanistan. He is also the author of five bestselling novels. You can subscribe to his daily columns at luciantruscott.substack.com and follow him on Twitter @LucianKTruscott and on Facebook at Lucian K. Truscott IV.
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