In October, Trump issued a presidential proclamation that makes November 1 of every year the “National Day of Remembrance for Americans Killed by Illegal Aliens” to honor citizens who have been killed at the hands of illegal immigration.
Dems Gain Full Control of Government
Democrats clinched control of the U.S. Senate on Wednesday, with Raphael Warnock defeating Republican incumbent Kelly Loeffler in a close race and Jon Ossoff narrowly beating Republican incumbent David Perdue.
The victories will give Democrats 50 votes in the Senate, with incoming vice president Kamala Harris poised to break a tie. After Jan. 20, Democrats will control both chambers of congress and the White House for the first time since 2010, enabling President-elect Joe Biden to pursue a progressive policy agenda with full legislative backing.
While Republicans have historically dominated runoff elections in Georgia, President-elect Joe Biden’s narrow victory in November along with a vocal campaign led by failed gubernatorial candidate Stacey Abrams fueled Democratic hopes that the party could prevail.
The results of the races have enormous implications for both President Donald Trump and his successor. Among Republicans, the impact of Trump’s voter fraud allegations and his relentless attacks on the state’s top Republican leaders, will be hotly debated. Perdue led Ossoff by two points in the November election that forced Tuesday's run-off, and Trump is likely to shoulder the blame for Perdue's comparatively weaker performance.
Before results were even tallied on Tuesday evening, one top GOP operative voiced concerns that the president's allegations of voter fraud would undermine the party. "Given everything that has been going on down here, a half-billion dollars on TV, that field operation, … it’s hard to come to any other conclusion that when you’re underperforming in Trump-y or Republican areas, that the impact is all the extracurricular stuff that’s going on," the operative said.
For Biden, the Democratic victories will all but ensure Senate confirmation for a slate of cabinet nominees that would have otherwise faced resistance from a Republican Senate and grease the skids for the passage of ambitious legislation.
Over the past two months, both parties flooded the state with historic sums: Spending in the races neared $900 million and is expected to exceed the total spent last year in the three most expensive Senate races in history combined, according to the Center for Responsive Politics.
The Senate races were also a referendum on Abrams’s leadership in the Peach State. The failed gubernatorial candidate has made it her mission to turn Georgia blue. Abrams on Wednesday is set to go with a statewide ad campaign urging Georgia voters to "check the status of your ballot" and referring them to a voter-fraud hotline.
Abrams, who passed up the opportunity to jump into the race herself, was the principal reason Democrats tapped Warnock, who was by no means the party's default candidate.
"There is a huge bench of voters that wanted to run, huge," the Atlanta-Journal Constitution’s Greg Bluestein told National Journal in November, noting that Abrams "made it super clear that Warnock was her pick and woe be to those who want to challenge him."
Warnock’s voluminous sermons gave Republicans fodder to assail him as a radical out-of-step with Georgia voters. From the pulpit, he argued that "nobody can serve God and the military" simultaneously and asserted that "America needs to repent for its worship of whiteness"—comments that became the centerpiece of Loeffler’s campaign. He also faced criticism for his praise of Rev. Jeremiah Wright’s "God Damn America" speech, which he repeatedly called a "very fine sermon."
The mainstream media, however, largely ignored Warnock’s 2002 arrest for allegedly obstructing child abuse at a camp connected to his church. At least five child abuse cases were brought by Maryland’s Department of Social Services against the camp’s director, according to Maryland state records, and one former camper told the Free Beacon that counselors threw urine on him and locked him outside his cabin all night as a punishment for wetting the bed when he attended the camp at age 12. The camp later had its operating certificate denied by the Maryland Department of Health for health and safety violations and failing to properly report child abuse claims.
Candidates of both parties stuck together throughout the race, with the pair of Democrats lodging attacks against both Republicans and vice versa. Perdue and Loeffler sought to portray Ossoff and Warnock as radicals whose votes would give Biden and Democratic leaders Chuck Schumer (N.Y.) and Nancy Pelosi (Calif.) unfettered power to push forward a left-wing agenda. Democrats argued that Perdue and Loeffler, who are among the wealthiest members of the Senate, had used their positions to enrich themselves with well-timed stock trades.
Historical trends in the state have typically favored Republicans in run-off elections. Republican senator Saxby Chambliss won the Georgia's last Senate runoff by 15 points in 2008. But President-elect Joe Biden's narrow November victory emboldened Democrats working to flip the upper chamber. Biden won the state by just 11,779 votes, becoming the first Democrat to do so in nearly two decades.
Tuesday’s election shattered turnout records, with approximately 4.6 million votes cast, more than doubling the 2.1 million votes cast in the 2008 run-off election that sent Chambliss back to the Senate.
Update 8:00 a.m.: This post has been updated with further information.
Ossoff Promoted Chinese Propaganda Outlet After Stint as ‘National Security Aide’
CCP outlet has rebuffed Justice Dept order to register as foreign agent
Georgia Democratic Senate hopeful Jon Ossoff promoted a Chinese state-run media outlet that has rebuffed U.S. lawmakers' demands to register as a foreign agent.
Months after leaving Rep. Hank Johnson's (D., Ga.) office—where he spent five months serving as a "national security aide" with top-secret clearance—in August 2012, Ossoff urged his Twitter followers to read Xinhua News Agency, a Chinese Communist Party-run propaganda organ.
"Esp. during 18th Party Congress, #follow @XHNews (Xinhua – Chinese state media)," Ossoff wrote.
The Democrat has struggled to fend off GOP senator David Perdue's criticism of his ties to China. In July, Ossoff quietly disclosed receiving a payment from a Chinese-backed media giant, but has since refused to release private financial information from his foreign film company, Insight TWI. In addition, Ossoff's father—who has bankrolled the Democrat's political career—met with Chinese "dignitaries" after commissioning a 60-foot yacht from a China-based shipbuilder tied to Communist Party Officials.
The Ossoff campaign did not respond to a request for comment.
Esp. during 18th Party Congress, #follow @XHNews (Xinhua – Chinese state media). #ff
— Jon Ossoff (@ossoff) November 8, 2012
Founded in 1931, Xinhua News Agency is the largest media outlet in China and serves as the communist nation's primary state-run mouthpiece, though it boasts that it will never "yield to the pressure of ideological stigmatization and political bias" in its Twitter bio. The outlet was chastised by U.S. lawmakers in January after paying the social media giant to promote posts that attacked pro-democracy protesters in Hong Kong.
"Two months on, the escalating violence in Hong Kong has taken a heavy toll on the social order," one such post read. "Hong Kong residents have called for order to be restored."
Rep. Jim Banks (R., Ind.) responded by asking then-Attorney General William Barr to investigate Xinhua News Agency, noting that the outlet rebuffed a 2018 Justice Department order to register as a foreign agent. The Trump administration's order followed a bipartisan appeal from senators Marco Rubio (R., Fla.) and Patrick Leahy (D., Vt.).
While another Chinese state-run outlet—China Global Television Network—went on to register as a foreign agent in February 2019, Xinhua News Agency has thus far refused. A Washington Free Beacon review of U.S. Foreign Agents Registration Act filings shows that the outlet has yet to register as a foreign agent.
Ossoff came under fire for misrepresenting his time working in Johnson's office during his failed 2017 congressional campaign. While the Democrat claimed that he spent five years as a "national security aide with top-secret clearance," Ossoff later admitted that he worked full-time for Johnson for just two years and held top-secret clearance for only five months.
Ossoff will face Perdue in Georgia's January 5 run-off election.
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