Georgia Lt. Gov. Duncan: Trump’s ‘Mountains of Misinformation’ Hurting Republicans in Senate Runoff
Lieutenant Governor Geoff Duncan (R-GA) said Sunday on CNN’s “State of the Union” that President Donald Trump’s “mountain of misinformation” was hurting the chances of Sen. Kelly Loeffler (R-GA) and Sen. David Perdue (R-GA) in the two Georgia runoff races which will determine the balance of power in the Senate.
Anchor Jake Tapper said, “The president at a rally in Georgia last night insists he won your state, which is not true. He attacked your governor and attacked the Republican going to be Raffensperger, a friend of yours. He called the election rigged. Set the record state if you would.”
Duncan said, “The rally last night was kind of a two-part message. The first part was very encouraging to listen to the president champion the conservative strategies of Senators Loeffler and Perdue and the importance for them being re-elected.”
He added, “The second message was concerning to me. I think the fanning of the flames puts us in negative misinformation. Mountains of misinformation are not helping the process but only hurting it. I worry we are handing off a playbook to the Democrats for January 5, and certainly I can’t think of a worse playbook to handoff over the last four or five weeks to the Democrats.”
Follow Pam Key on Twitter @pamkeyNEN
If you want a couple senators to govern solely on behalf of their massive asset portfolio while leaving everyone else twisting in the wind, vote Perdue and Loeffler.
Donald Trump: Nobody ‘Fought Harder for Me’ than Kelly Loeffler
VALDOSTA, Georgia — President Donald Trump said Saturday during a campaign rally for the Georgia Senate runoff elections that no one has “fought harder for me” than Sen. Kelly Loeffler (R-GA).
The president praised the junior Georgia senator’s fight for Trump’s America First agenda.
“When Kelly came in, I didn’t know what to think. There was nobody that fought harder for me,” the president said.
The president also described Loeffler as a “trooper.”
The president also noted that Loeffler had attacked Sen. Mitt Romney (R-UT) for prolonging the impeachment trial against Trump.
“She is so tough and smart; she even went against Mitt Romney. She didn’t like Mitt Romney too much,” Trump said, which drew strong applause from the crowd of several thousand Trump supporters.
Loeffler denounced Romney for calling for additional witnesses during the impeachment trial against Trump. Loeffler said in January that Romney is trying to appease the left by calling for additional witnesses.
“After 2 weeks, it’s clear that Democrats have no case for impeachment. Sadly, my colleague @SenatorRomney wants to appease the left by calling witnesses who will slander the @realDonaldTrump during their 15 minutes of fame,” Loeffler tweeted in January. “The circus is over. It’s time to move on!”:
After 2 weeks, it’s clear that Democrats have no case for impeachment. Sadly, my colleague @SenatorRomney wants to appease the left by calling witnesses who will slander the @realDonaldTrump during their 15 minutes of fame. The circus is over. It’s time to move on! #gapol
— Senator Kelly Loeffler (@SenatorLoeffler) January 27, 2020
The 45th president also described Romney as “kryptonite” during the rally.
During the impeachment trial, Loeffler told Breitbart News that the Senate would quickly move to acquit the president.
Loeffler told Breitbart News in January, “I think it’s going to quickly lead to the vote with witnesses and just to cut to the chase – ultimately the president’s acquittal. I think this impeachment case has been wholly deficient on both articles and not just from a process perspective but from a fact perspective.”
“It’s certainly possible [on a Friday acquittal]. I think everyone’s ready to move on. We’re starting to repeat questions. And certainly, I know back at home Georgians are ready to move on and get back to work, working with President Trump to move his agenda forward,” she added.
Sean Moran is a congressional reporter for Breitbart News. Follow him on Twitter @SeanMoran3.
WELL, YOU KNOW THESE TWO ARE SHITS IF TRUMP WANTS THEM!
Donald Trump: ‘We Must Work Hard’ for David Perdue and Kelly Loeffler
President Donald Trump rallied supporters for Sen. David Perdue and Sen. Kelly Loeffler in the Senate runoff election in a message Wednesday.
“Will be going to Georgia for a big Trump Rally in support of our two great Republican Senators, David and Kelly,” Trump wrote on Twitter.
The president previously indicated that he will campaign in the state for the two Senate Republicans on Saturday, September 5.
“They are fantastic people who love their Country and love their State,” Trump wrote. “We must work hard and be sure they win.”
The president continues voicing support for Loeffler and Perdue even as he has criticized Georgia Gov. Brian Kemp and Republican Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger for failing to pursue allegations of voter fraud in the state.
“Why won’t Governor Brian Kemp, the hapless Governor of Georgia, use his emergency powers, which can be easily done, to overrule his obstinate Secretary of State, and do a match of signatures on envelopes,” Trump asked Monday on Twitter.
….Also, quickly check the number of envelopes versus the number of ballots. You may just find that there are many more ballots than there are envelopes. So simple, and so easy to do. Georgia Republicans are angry, all Republicans are angry. Get it done!
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) November 30, 2020
On Friday, Trump told Georgia supporters that even though the 2020 election was a “total scam,” it was important not to boycott the election.
“We must get out and help David and Kelly, two GREAT people,” he wrote. “Otherwise we are playing right into the hands of some very sick people”:
No, the 2020 Election was a total scam, we won by a lot (and will hopefully turn over the fraudulent result), but we must get out and help David and Kelly, two GREAT people. Otherwise we are playing right into the hands of some very sick people. I will be in Georgia on Saturday! https://t.co/1ziqFq9S6O
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) November 27, 2020
The naked corruption of Kelly Loeffler and David Perdue
Control of the United States Senate hinges on two January 5 runoff elections in Georgia, where incumbent Republicans David Perdue and Kelly Loeffler are facing Democrats Jon Ossoff and Raphael Warnock respectively. Most immediately, the race is a contest over whether President-elect Joe Biden and the Democratic Party will be able to govern — especially by passing another big coronavirus rescue package.
However, Loeffler and Perdue are also excellent examples of what interests the Republican Party serves — namely, the ultra-rich, which includes both Loeffler and Perdue personally. These are two people who were rich before they got into politics, and leveraged their power as senators to make themselves even more rich — by profiteering off the pandemic. It is government of, by, and for the top 0.1 percent.
Let me consider their cases in turn. David Perdue is a longtime businessman who served as CEO of Dollar General in the mid-2000s, where he worked diligently to source more products from China. According to his financial disclosures, he is worth between $15 million and $43 million.
As Michela Tindera writes at Forbes, Kelly Loeffler and her husband Jeffrey Sprecher own a big stake in International Exchange, a financial clearinghouse company that Sprecher founded and where he remains CEO and chairman. (That company also owns the New York Stock Exchange, where Sprecher is again chairman.) After closely examining Loeffler's financial disclosure forms and other information, Tindera estimates that the couple is worth at least $800 million, and likely over $1 billion — or roughly quadruple the wealth of the second-richest member of Congress, Senator Mitt Romney (R-Utah).
Here's how the pandemic profiteering worked. On January 24, there was a private all-Senate briefing about the looming disaster — long before there was a broad public understanding that the U.S. was going to get slammed by COVID-19. Immediately afterward, both Loeffler and Perdue started trading strategic stocks. As The Daily Beast reported at the time, Loeffler executed 29 transactions valued between $1.275 and $3.1 million in the following days before the market crashed, almost all of them sales — one exception was a purchase of Citrix, which sells teleworking software. (Also, Loeffler recently violated the legal prohibition on soliciting campaign funds in a Senate office building.)
Perdue made a similar number of trades, but bought more than Loeffler — in particular, an investment of up to $850,000 in DuPont, which manufactures personal protective equipment. And as The Associated Press reports, in late January he sold between $1 million and $5 million in shares of Cardlytics, a financial technology firm, at $86 per share. Then, when the market had bottomed out in March, he snapped up between $200,000 and $500,000 of Cardlytics shares at $30 apiece; since then the share price has shot back up to $121. Nice tidy little profit to counterbalance the 270,000 dead Americans. (The Daily Beast also reports that in 2019, Perdue bought up shares of a submarine parts manufacturer before voting to give the company a lucrative contract, then sold it for another handsome profit.)
When reports of these trades first came out, both Loeffler and Perdue insisted they had nothing to do personally with the moves. "I have never used any confidential information I received while performing my Senate duties as a means of making a private profit ... professionals buy and sell stocks on our behalf," wrote Loeffler in an April 8 Wall Street Journal op-ed. Perdue told the Atlanta Journal-Constitution that advisers made his investment decisions on their own.
In the first place, candidates not taking direct control of their stock trades does not actually remove the conflict of interest. If you are a senator, and you hire a bunch of asset managers to look after your investments without any kind of blind trust, you still know what those investments are. You can make decisions knowing that your Goldman Sachs lackeys will make the profit-maximizing move in response — which is the best-case scenario of what happened here.
But realistically speaking, it is virtually impossible to believe that all these trades had nothing to do with the two senators. Are we really to believe it was a coincidence that these asset managers started making "there is a pandemic coming" trades the very same day the two were receiving classified briefings on the disaster? Come on. Indeed, The New York Times recently reported that Perdue was lying with his blanket denial — he did directly instruct his manager to sell the Cardlytics shares after receiving a cryptic email mentioning "upcoming changes" from the company's then-CEO. (Perdue and Loeffler have been cleared of legal wrongdoing by the Department of Justice, but given that Attorney General Barr is a shameless Trump stooge, that is hardly reassuring.)
Since then, both Perdue and Loeffler have largely downplayed the pandemic. Unlike Ossoff and Warnock, both have been holding large, in-person rallies. In July, both Loeffler and Perdue came out against extending the boost to unemployment insurance in the CARES Act, and since then neither have answered questions about further economic rescue measures from Atlanta Magazine. Instead, since the election they have amplified Trump's flagrant lies that Georgia's Republican governor and secretary of state somehow helped Joe Biden steal the election there.
Over the last decade or so, there has been a long discussion of why Democrats are bleeding votes in rural areas (precisely where Republicans run up huge margins in Georgia). And on one level it's an important debate — there is good evidence that as Democrats embraced austerity, deregulation, and free trade that harmed such places, it hurt their vote share.
But on another level, it is frankly staggering that the Republican Party has swooped in to replace them. The Democrats may not be much of a friend to the working class or rural farmers, but Republicans are straight-up picking their pockets. If you want a couple senators to govern solely on behalf of their massive asset portfolio while leaving everyone else twisting in the wind, vote Perdue and Loeffler.
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