Rep Madison Cawthorn Taunts Liz Cheney on Ouster From GOP Leadership: ‘Na Na, Hey Hey, Goodbye’
Freshman congressman keeps it classy
Freshman representative Madison Cawthorn celebrated Wednesday after his colleagues in the House voted to remove Rep. Liz Cheney from her leadership position because of her criticism of former President Donald Trump.
“Na na na na, na na na na, hey hey, goodbye Liz Cheney,” the young Republican wrote in a tweet.
Cawthorn’s November election, like Cheney’s Wednesday morning ouster, signals how much power Trump and his brand of conservatism have in the Republican party. Just before Cheney was stripped of her role as House Republican Conference chairwoman, MSNBC’s Joe Scarborough tore into the new iteration of the GOP on “Morning Joe,” saying the party he used to be proud to belong to no longer exists.
Cheney, too, had plenty to say to the coalition that removed her over her vocal criticism of Trump, though she did not agree with Scarborough’s assessment.
“I do not think that it is an indication of where the Republican Party is. I think that the party is in a place that we’ve got to bring it back from and we’ve got to get back to a position where we are a party that can fight for conservative principles, that can fight for substance. We cannot be dragged backward by the very dangerous lies of a former president,” she said.
Still, the party is clearly basing plenty on Trump. In 2020, Cawthorn, a 25-year-old North Carolina Republican and political novice, sent a distinctly Trumpy, antagonistic tweet when he won the U.S. House seat held by Trump White House chief of staff Mark Meadows.
“Cry more, lib,” Cawthorn tweeted on election night after the Associated Press projected him the winner in his contest with Democrat Moe Davis, a 62-year-old retired Air Force colonel. Cawthorn had won 54.4% of the vote to 42.4% for Davis, with 99% of the ballots counted.
Read original story Rep Madison Cawthorn Taunts Liz Cheney on Ouster From GOP Leadership: ‘Na Na, Hey Hey, Goodbye’ At TheWrap
More than 100 Republican former officials to seek reforms, threaten new party
More than 100 influential Republicans plan to release a call for reforms within the GOP alongside a threat to form a new party if change isn't forthcoming, a person familiar with the effort said.
The statement, set to be released Thursday, involves a "Call for American Renewal," a credo that declares that it is imperative to "either reimagine a party dedicated to our founding ideals or else hasten the creation of such an alternative." The push will include 13 yet-to-be-revealed principles that the signatories want the GOP to embrace.
This is not the first group to form as the pro-Trump and traditional conservative factions of the Republican Party remain at loggerheads. The new effort comes as a vote looms to oust Liz Cheney of Wyoming from the No. 3 House Republican leadership post for her refusal to stay silent about former President Donald Trump's repeated election lies and his role in the Jan. 6 riot at the U.S. Capitol.
The move was first reported by Reuters, which cited some of the people involved: former New Jersey Gov. Christine Todd Whitman, the former administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency; former Pennsylvania Gov. Tom Ridge, the first secretary of homeland security; former Transportation Secretary Mary Peters; and former GOP Reps. Charlie Dent of Pennsylvania, Barbara Comstock of Virginia, Reid Ribble of Wisconsin and Mickey Edwards of Oklahoma. Evan McMullin, a former CIA agent who ran for president as an independent in 2016, is also involved.
A push to channel anti-Trump sentiment with the "Never Trump" movement in the spring of 2016 was largely unsuccessful at the time, and none of the people backing this latest effort are serving as elected Republicans. However, it comes as Trump's pull within his party appears to have lessened. A recent NBC News poll found that 44 percent of Republicans said they support Trump more than the GOP, compared to 50 percent who said they support the GOP more than the former president.
One of the organizers is Miles Taylor, a former Trump official who, as "Anonymous," wrote an op-ed in The New York Times blasting the Trump administration in 2018.MO"We're going give the GOP one last chance to get its act together and moderate, but we're not going to hold our breath," Taylor told NBC News. "We're ready to get out there and fight against the radical elements in the party to try to excise those elements from within the GOP and our national politics and to try to invest in the deeper pro-democracy bench."
Taylor suggested that the nascent movement will work to back candidates who support its principles, whether they are moderates or independents.
"Enough is enough, and the GOP has had enough time to decide whether it's going to separate itself from a man who is a chronic loser," he said, referring to Trump, predicting a "raging civil war" if the rest of the party doesn't get on board.
Trump Is Surrounded by Criminals
https://mexicanoccupation.blogspot.com/2019/11/the-fall-of-donald-trump-final-days.html
“The legal ring surrounding Trump is collectively producing a historic indictment of his endemic corruption and criminality.” JONATHAN CHAIT
Trump leaves office facing mounting debt, devalued assets and scarcity of willing lenders
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NTNQUOOznG
Noam Chomsky: Where the Left Goes After Trump (2021 Interview)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Huy82PVaCzs
Starting with Trump, It’s Time for a White Collar Crime Crackdown
This week, a federal judge slammed Bill Barr over the Mueller investigation. Hopefully, Merrick Garland’s Justice Department will stay on Barr and give financial crimes the attention they deserve.
This week, Judge Amy Berman Jackson delivered a significant victory to anticorruption advocates. The federal judge ordered the Department of Justice to hand over the March 24, 2019 memo that former Attorney General William Barr claimed to have relied on when he decided not to criminally charge then-President Donald Trump with obstructing the Mueller Investigation. In a fair, but brutal dressing down of Bill Barr, Judge Jackson confirmed our worst suspicions, that the fix had been in to clear Trump. “The fact that he would not be prosecuted was a given,” she wrote.
Now, Attorney General Merrick Garland is at an inflection point. He will either deliver this internal memo from the Barr Justice Department to the Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (CREW), the watchdog group who brought the original Freedom of Information Act Request, or he can appeal Judge Jackson’s decision. The direction Garland takes here has huge implications, not just for this case, or for public corruption, but more broadly for addressing our current white collar crime epidemic. Here’s why.
No one is supposed to be above the law. But during Donald Trump’s presidency, we were more likely to witness a White, wealthy, and well-connected felon pardoned than perp-walked. This was, perhaps, a piece of Trump’s kinship if not admiration for these elite grifters.
By the end of just the first two years of the Trump administration, federal white collar criminal enforcement was at an all-time low. We saw at least a 26 percent decline in the number of these defendants prosecuted since the Obama era, according to the Department of Justice. Also, criminal investigations by the I.R.S. for tax evasion, money laundering, and identity theft fell by 36 percent. How big is our white collar crime problem? While the F.B.I. pegs street-level “property” crimes including burglary, larceny, and theft nationwide at around $16 billion annually, there is no equivalent F.B.I. figures published on white collar crime. Scholars have tallied the cost to be at least $800 billion.
There is no official count of the number of suspects, convicts, victims, or total dollars involved, and there is not even a uniform definition of what qualifies as “white collar crime.” Though, Edwin Sutherland, the sociologist who coined the expression in 1939 to mean “a crime committed by a person of high social status and respectability in the course of his occupation,” today we typically define it by the nature of the offense, not the status of the offender.
What makes determining the white collar crime numbers additionally challenging is that the numbers change depending on who is adding them up. When reporting data to the F.B.I., state and local law enforcement can include behavior that would not seem to fit the bill, such as the arrest of a low-income suspect for writing a bad check or committing welfare fraud as white collar crime. Tracking at the federal level is equally tough. The 93 U.S. Attorneys’ offices annually report prosecutions organized by category. What is included has changed, creating an apples-to-oranges problem for those making comparisons over time. As an illustration, back in 1992, the annual report listed within its section on white collar crime: money laundering, official corruption, procurement fraud, and environmental, health and safety offenses. Today, those are tallied under different headings.
Despite this numerical opacity, we are in the midst of a prosecution crisis or rather a nonprosecution one, according to many experts. So, what can be done? Quite a lot, actually.
First, the Justice Department must pursue the obstruction case against Donald Trump. Volume II of the Mueller Report provided detailed, persuasive arguments that Trump committed criminal obstruction on several occasions. To ignore this evidence simply due to his status as a former president would further the public’s suspicion that the most powerful are above the law. If the DOJ wins a conviction, they can deal with the problems of incarcerating a former president later. What they should not do, is simply fail to prosecute because the this is unprecedented territory.
A Trump prosecution should be thought of as under the white collar crime umbrella using both Sutherland’s 1939 status-based definition and the more modern offense-based understanding. As for status, Trump occupied the highest office in the nation, if not the world. And, as for the nature of the offense, the obstruction-of-justice statutes are often used by federal prosecutors against defendants in complex fraud investigations. It’s the lying not the underlying crime that often is prosecuted. As one example, Martha Stewart was never charged with securities fraud. Instead, she was indicted for and found guilty of obstructing an agency proceeding and making false statements to investigators looking into her suspicious stock trading.
Second, President Biden should provide clear direction that cracking down on white collar crime is a priority. Tone from the top matters. After the Savings and Loan Crisis of the 1980s, President George H.W. Bush said, “We will not rest until the cheats, the chiselers and the charlatans spend a large chunk of their lives behind bars in prison.” He backed this rhetoric with resources. An interagency group was set up to target the biggest offenders. Plus, he sought new legislation from Congress to increase funding and laws to sharpen tools to investigate bank fraud, including the use of wiretaps. By his third year in office, federal prosecutors had charged more than 1,000 and secured convictions of more than 900 individuals involved in significant S&L fraud.
Similarly, during the George W. Bush administration, between mid-2002 and early 2006, the Justice Department, secured convictions of more than 1,000 individuals involved in corporate fraud cases, including eighty-two CEOs, eighty-five corporate presidents, thirty-six chief financial officers, and fourteen chief operating officers. The posterchild of these prosecutions was Enron, the once high-flying, energy innovator with a $70 billion market capitalization that came crashing down when accounting fraud surfaced. Big talk matched with big resources, delivered big results.
There are promising signs that President Biden is similarly setting the right tone. In his joint address to Congress on the eve of his 100th day in office, he promised, “The I.R.S will crack down on millionaires and billionaires who cheat on their taxes. That’s estimated to be billions of dollars.” This month the I.R.S. commissioner testified that the annual tax gap (the difference between what the I.R.S. is owed and what it’s actually collecting) is now nearly $1 trillion a year, most of which he said is due to tax evasion by the high-earners and large corporations. Importantly, President Biden is asking Congress to put our money where his mouth is, seeking additional I.R.S. funding of $80 billion over ten years toward this priority.
Third, Attorney General Merrick Garland should make individual accountability a reality, not just words on paper. When a large business enterprise is caught up in federal criminal activity, the trend has been to allow the enterprise to enter what’s called a deferred prosecution agreement or nonprosecution agreement to avoid the expense, embarrassment, and uncertainty of indictment or trial. The company pays some amount in penalties and fines, sometimes submits to an independent monitor, and within a few years is cleared. The vast majority of the time, no real people inside the organization face any criminal consequences.
Duke University Law School professor Brandon Garrett has calculated, individuals were charged alongside just 27 percent of the 497 of these agreements with organizations between 2001 and 2018. And high-level executives even more rarely. This must change. Similar to my recommendation in Big Dirty Money for an elite crime division, Garrett recommends an independent corporate prosecution function with Main Justice and key regional offices. This new unit should also get a handle on data reporting problem.
Garland has the right team in place to make this happen. His number two in command is Deputy Attorney General Lisa Monaco. While on the Enron Task Force, she helped convict several former executives on an assortment of wire fraud and conspiracy charges.
Of course, President Biden must stay independent of any investigation touching on the former president. However, that recusal should not make either pursuing Trump or cracking down on white collar crime any less of a priority. The ongoing criminal investigations of Trump in New York County for insurance and bank fraud, and in Fulton County, Georgia for election interference should not absolve the U.S. Department of Justice from following the facts where they lead, even if they lead them to the former occupant of the Oval Office.
Mitt Romney: Removing Liz
Cheney will Cost GOP ‘Quite a
Few’ Votes
Sen. Mitt Romney (R-UT) once again defended Rep. Liz Cheney (R-WY), saying that removing the embattled Wyoming Republican as House Republican Conference chair will hurt the GOP at the ballot box.
“Expelling Liz Cheney from leadership won’t gain the GOP one additional voter, but it will cost us quite a few,” Romney wrote on Twitter.
Romney’s comments come after the Utah Republican praised Cheney last week, saying: “Every person of conscience draws a line beyond which they will not go: Liz Cheney refuses to lie. As one of my Republican Senate colleagues said to me following my impeachment vote: ‘I wouldn’t want to be a member of a group that punished someone for following their conscience.’”
Cheney has faced blowback for her repeated criticisms of former President Donald Trump. Last Monday, Cheney garnered ire for stating that anyone alleging that the 2020 presidential election was stolen is “poisoning our democratic system” — a direct rebuke of Trump, who claimed previously that his defeat to President Joe Biden would be known moving forward as “THE BIG LIE!”
“The 2020 presidential election was not stolen,” Cheney tweeted of the former president’s remark. “Anyone who claims it was is spreading THE BIG LIE, turning their back on the rule of law, and poisoning our democratic system.”
Cheney’s targeting of Trump has has become too large a distraction for the House Republican caucus to ignore at a time when the party is working to retake the lower chamber. House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy (R-CA) and House Minority Whip Steve Scalise (R-LA) have both endorsed Rep. Elise Stefanik (R-NY) to replace Cheney as House Republican Conference chair.
“To defeat Nancy Pelosi and the socialist agenda, we need to be united, and that starts with leadership. That’s why we will have a vote next week, and we want to be united and looking moving forward. I think that’s what will take place,” McCarthy told the Fox News Channel’s Sunday Morning Futures.
“Any member can take whatever position they believe in. That’s what the voters vote on the individuals, and they make that decision. What we are talking about, it’s a position in leadership,” he added. “We are in one of our biggest battles ever for this nation and the direction of whether this century will be ours. As conference chair, you have the most critical jobs of the messenger going forward.”
A vote on the matter is expected to take place Wednesday.
No one is supposed to be above the law. But during Donald Trump’s presidency, we were more likely to witness a White, wealthy, and well-connected felon pardoned than perp-walked. This was, perhaps, a piece of Trump’s kinship if not admiration for these elite grifters.
House GOP leader Kevin McCarthy apparently pays $1,500 to live in a 12-bedroom, 16-bath penthouse
Kinzinger: Republican Party Is ‘Basically The Titanic’ in the Middle of a ‘Slow Sink’
Representative Adam Kinzinger (R-IL) Sunday on CBS’s “Face the Nation” called the Republican Party “basically the Titanic” and was in the middle of a “slow sink.”
Partial transcript as follows:
DICKERSON: Speaking of internal divisions, the Republican Party in the House. It looks like Liz Cheney, the number three in House leadership on the Republican side, is no longer going to hold that position. What is this debate about?
KINZINGER: Yeah, look, it’s incredible. So Liz Cheney is saying exactly what Kevin McCarthy said the day of the insurrection. She’s just consistently been saying it. And a few weeks later, Kevin McCarthy changed to attacking other people. And so I think what the reality is, is as a party, we have to have an internal look and a full accounting as to what led to January 6th. I mean, right now, it’s basically the- the Titanic. We’re like, you know, in this in the middle of this slow sink, we have a band playing on the deck telling everybody it’s fine. And meanwhile, as I’ve said, you know, Donald Trump’s running around trying to find women’s clothing and get on the first lifeboat. And I think there’s a few of us that are just saying, guys, this is not good, not just for the future of the party, but this is not good for the future of this country. We’re four months after January 6th, an insurrection, something that was unthinkable in this country. And the message from the people that want to get rid of Liz Cheney is to say it’s just time to focus on the future and move on, like this was 10 years ago and we’ve been obsessed about it since. It’s been four months. And we have so many people, including our leadership in the party, that has not admitted that this is what it is, which was an insurrection led by the president of the United States, well deserving of a full accounting from Republicans.
DICKERSON: But if you are a leader of a party and 70% of the members of your party think the last election was stolen, though, they’re wrong about that, you are a leader of that party. You can’t change the party. You’re the leader. So why shouldn’t a person be a leader of a party that is fundamentally at odds with what Liz Cheney believes?
KINZINGER: Because truth matters. Right now- and we have to look and understand why, yes, 70% of the base believes that the election was stolen because they’ve been told it was. They’ve been told by the president of the United States. They’ve been told in many cases by Republican leaders or at least Republican leaders in the least have not countered it on something so vastly crazy as the election is stolen. You know, and- and this is why you have this real battle right now in the party, this idea of let’s just put our differences aside and be unified. You cannot unify truth with lies. The lie is that the election was stolen. The truth is Joe Biden beat Donald Trump. And I’m sorry that 74 million people voted for Donald Trump. They weren’t disenfranchised. They were simply outnumbered and as a party let’s focus on now, how do we go out and win more people. And that’s why actually I started the ‘Country 1st’ movement, at country1st.com is just to say, tell people the truth and quit peddling and conspiracies, because that’s what we’ve seen in this party. And they’re going to get rid of Liz Cheney because they’d much rather pretend that the conspiracy is either real or not confront it than to actually confront it and maybe have to take the temporary licks to save this party and in the long term this country.
Follow Pam Key On Twitter @pamkeyNEN
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