Wednesday Reads: Chaos in the House and Some Entertaining Gossip
Posted: September 20, 2023 | Author: bostonboomer | Filed under: just because |
Good Afternoon!!
Merrick Garland, by Rodney Pike
If you’re watching cable TV, you know that the House Judiciary Committee is questioning Attorney General Merrick Garland this morning. The purpose of this, of course, is for Republicans to berate Garland about Hunter Biden and about the refusal of the Justice Department to reveal details of ongoing investigations that Republicans want to interfere with. It is maddening to watch. At least Democratic members like Adam Schiff and Eric Swalwell are providing some pushback.
The Washington Post is providing updates: Merrick Garland testifies, faces questions on Hunter Biden, Trump trials.
Attorney General Merrick Garland is testifying Wednesday morning before the House Judiciary Committee, a session that has been contentious at times as Republicans press the nation’s top law enforcement official on a host of politically charged cases. It is Garland’s first congressional appearance since federal grand juries indicted former president Donald Trump — twice — and since he appointed a special counsel to handle the investigation and prosecution of President Biden’s son Hunter Biden. The hearing also comes as the GOP-controlled House moves toward impeachment proceedings against the president.
Here’s what to know:
Rep. Sheila Jackson Lee (D-Tex.) asked the attorney general if the rhetoric from Republicans “had any basis in reality.” Garland answered with a simple, “No, it does not.”
Early questions from Republican lawmakers centered on special counsel David Weiss’s authority in the Hunter Biden case. Garland said he gave him full authority from the start. “I had promised that I would not interfere with this investigation,” Garland said.
A few updates:
David Weiss was appointed by Trump, Democrats note at hearing.
As Republicans criticize Attorney General Merrick Garland for picking David Weiss to oversee the special counsel investigation into Hunter Biden after the collapse in July of a plea deal that Biden’s lawyers had negotiated with Weiss, Democratic lawmakers on the dais have stated repeatedly that Weiss was appointed U.S. attorney in Delaware by Donald Trump.
“Mr. Weiss was appointed by then-President Trump,” Rep. Zoe Lofgren (D-Calif.) said, addressing Garland. “Your decision was to leave the Trump-appointed attorney on this — hands off from you,” she added.
Expect Democrats to continue to remind the room that Weiss is a Trump appointee as Republicans continue to try to tie Weiss to President Biden and press Garland on decisions made to keep him on the investigation in a special counsel capacity. Republicans have charged that Weiss hatched what they’ve called a “sweetheart” deal with Hunter Biden’s lawyers and can’t be trusted to aggressively prosecute the president’s son….
Attorney General Merrick Garland repeatedly told lawmakers that special counsel David Weiss, who is heading the Hunter Biden investigation, had full authority and independence to pursue charges in jurisdictions across the country.
Upon questioning from Rep. Dan Bishop (R-N.C.), Garland insisted that Weiss, who is the top federal prosecutor in Delaware, had authority to bring charges outside Delaware — despite allegations to the contrary.
Garland on ‘astounding’ threats: ‘We will not be intimidated’
Attorney General Merrick Garland addressed what he described as an “astounding number of threats” that American public servants have received over the past few years, tying them to incendiary political rhetoric.
Judiciary Committee Chair Jim Jordan, by DonkeyHote
He said that flight attendants, poll workers and Justice Department workers have been on the receiving end of them.
He told Rep. Sheila Jackson Lee (D-Tex.) that the Justice Department will “not be intimidated” and will continue to do its job amid these violent threats. He specifically said Wednesday that FBI agents working on the Hunter Biden investigation have been targeted.
In his opening statements, Garland also mentioned the threats.
“All of us recognize that with this work comes public scrutiny, criticism, and legitimate oversight. These are appropriate and important given the matters and the gravity of the matters before the Department,” Garland said in his opening statement. “But singling out individual career public servants who are just doing their jobs is dangerous — particularly at a time of increased threats to the safety of public servants and their families.”
There are many more helpful updates at the WaPo live update page. The hearing has been surprisingly substantive, despite efforts of Republican wackos.
Quite a few stories today deal with the ongoing struggle of House Speaker Kevin McCarthy to pass a budget and prevent an immanent government shutdown.
Politico has a story on the White House approach to McCarthy’s mess: Why the White House is letting McCarthy flail.
Speaker Kevin McCarthy is struggling to pass a bill to fund the government — and the White House isn’t about to throw him a lifeline.
With just days to go before the government runs out of money, Biden’s team is watching Congress steam toward a shutdown, resigned to the reality that there’s little they can do now to fix the situation and confident the politics will play out their way.
President Joe Biden has steered well clear of the chaos engulfing the House, where Republicans are battling each other over a government funding bill. Within the White House, aides have settled on a hard-line strategy aimed at pressuring McCarthy to stick to a spending deal he struck with Biden back in May rather than attempt to patch together a new bipartisan bill.
Kevin McCarthy
“We agreed to the budget deal and a deal is a deal — House GOP should abide by it,” said a White House official granted anonymity to discuss the private calculations. Their “chaos is making the case that they are responsible if there is a shutdown.”
Biden world’s wait-and-see approach comes against the backdrop of an increasingly likely shutdown, which would be the first of the Biden era.
On Tuesday, GOP leadership canceled plans for a procedural vote on a short term funding bill, wary it had the numbers to pass. Hours later, hard-right conservatives tanked a procedural vote related to a defense spending bill. Moderate House Democrats have been working on a last-ditch fall back option to avert a shutdown, but any final product will need approval from the Senate.
For now, the White House is staying out of the mix, trying instead to draw a contrast between the House majority that can’t complete the task of keeping the government’s lights on and Biden, who on Tuesday addressed the United Nations General Assembly in New York. It’s also highlighting the price of the latest GOP plan, such as, in their estimation, cutting 800 Customs and Border Protection agents and 110,000 Head Start positions for children.
Michael Wolff has a new gossipy book out, this time about Fox News.
From The Daily Beast: Murdoch Called Hannity ‘Retarded’ and DeSantis ‘Kicked’ Tucker’s Dog, Wild New Book Claims.
Gov. Ron DeSantis may have kicked Tucker Carlson’s dog, Rupert Murdoch may have called his longest-running primetime star an ableist slur, and Lachlan Murdoch has a knack for anti-Trump toiletries—these are some of the many outrageous pieces of gossip revealed in provocative author Michael Wolff’s upcoming new book about the Fox News universe.
The Fall: The End of Fox News and the Murdoch Dynasty, due out Sept. 26 via Henry Holt & Co., purports to give readers a behind-the-curtains look into Fox’s handling of the Dominion defamation lawsuit over its 2020 election lies, its post-election clashes with former President Donald Trump, its shocking firing of Carlson, and the Murdoch family’s Succession-like turmoil.
In Wolff’s telling, both Fox News and the Murdoch empire are in a slow-motion decline….
The book, which The Daily Beast has obtained and reviewed, is billed as a juicy tell-all and is chock full of eye-opening and at-times absurd anecdotes that occasionally strain credulity. During one chapter, Wolff writes that prior to being fired from his top-rated primetime perch, Carlson considered a run for president in order to escape his Fox News contract. The author also details a bizarre incident that allegedly occurred when Carlson shared a meal with DeSantis.
Rupert Murdoch
With Fox urging its stars to be “open-minded” about the Florida governor, then Murdoch’s “favored candidate” for 2024, Wolff writes, Carlson and his wife Susie welcomed DeSantis and his wife Casey to their Florida home for lunch. Despite hoping to impress Carlson—arguably a top GOP kingmaker—the presidential hopeful and Trump rival failed the “Susie Carlson test” during the visit, Wolff claims.
The DeSantis couple allegedly failed “to read the room,” especially with Carlson’s wife, “a genteel, stay-at-home woman, here in her own house,” Wolff notes. “For two hours Ron DeSantis sat at her table talking in an outdoor voice indoors, failing to observe any basics of conversation ritual or propriety, reeling off an unselfconscious list of his programs and initiatives and political accomplishments.”
Making matters worse, Wolff claims, an “impersonal” DeSantis seemed dismissive and may have used physical force against one of the Carlson family’s four beloved spaniel pups.
During the dinner, Wolff writes, “DeSantis pushed the dog under the table. Had he kicked the dog? Susie Carlson’s judgment was clear: she did not ever want to be anywhere near anybody like that ever again. Her husband agreed. DeSantis, in Carlson’s view, was a ‘fascist.’ The pot calling the kettle even blacker. Forget Ron DeSantis.”
This is from Martin Pengelly at The Guardian: Rupert Murdoch often wishes Donald Trump dead, Michael Wolff book says.
Rupert Murdoch loathes Donald Trump so much that the billionaire has not just soured on him as a presidential candidate but often wishes for his death, the author Michael Wolff writes in his eagerly awaited new book on the media mogul, The Fall: The End of Fox News and the Murdoch Dynasty.
According to Wolff, Murdoch, 92, has become “a frothing-at-the-mouth” enemy of the 77-year-old former US president, often voicing thoughts including “This would all be solved if … ” and “How could he still be alive, how could he?”
The Fall was announced last month and will be published in the US next Tuesday. The Guardian obtained a copy.
Author Michael Wolff
Wolff has written three tell-all books about Trump – Fire and Fury, Siege and Landslide – and one about Murdoch, The Man Who Owns the News. In his second Murdoch book, he says he may be “the journalist not in his employ who knows [Murdoch] best”.
Wolff also describes his source material as “conversations specifically for this book, and other conversations that have taken place over many years … scenes and events that I have personally witnessed or that I have recreated with the help of participants in them”.
After Trump entered US politics in 2015, winning the White House the following year, he, along with an increasingly extreme Republican party, Fox News and other properties in Murdoch’s rightwing media empire formed a symbiotic relationship.
ut Murdoch has long been reported to have soured on Trump – a process which, according to Wolff, saw Murdoch personally endorse the Fox News call of Arizona for Joe Biden on election night in 2020 that fueled Trump’s campaign of lies about voter fraud, culminating in the deadly January 6 attack on Congress.
By the beginning of this year, Wolff writes, what Murdoch “adamantly didn’t want … was Trump.
“Of all Trump’s implacable enemies, Murdoch had become a frothing-at-the-mouth one. His relatively calm demeanor from the early Trump presidency where, with a sigh, he could dismiss him merely as a ‘fucking idiot’ had now become a churning stew of rage and recrimination.
“Trump’s death became a Murdoch theme: ‘We would all be better off …?’ ‘This would all be solved if …’ ‘How could he still be alive, how could he?’ ‘Have you seen him? Have you seen what he looks like? What he eats?’”
Read more at The Guardian.
There’s an excerpt from the book at New York Magazine. The page isn’t letting me copy anything, but you can read it at this link if you’re interested. They usually let you have one free article.
Martin Pengelly also has the goods on a new memoir from Cassidy Hutchinson, who was assistant to Mark Meadows in the Trump White House and who testified at length to the January 6 committee: Ex-Trump aide Cassidy Hutchinson claims Rudy Giuliani groped her on January 6.
Cassidy Hutchinson, the former Trump aide turned crucial January 6 witness, says in a new book she was groped by Rudy Giuliani, who was “like a wolf closing in on its prey”, on the day of the attack on the Capitol.
Describing meeting with Giuliani backstage at Donald Trump’s speech near the White House before his supporters marched on Congress in an attempt to overturn the 2020 election, Hutchinson says the former New York mayor turned Trump lawyer put his hand “under my blazer, then my skirt”.
“I feel his frozen fingers trail up my thigh,” she writes. “He tilts his chin up. The whites of his eyes look jaundiced. My eyes dart to [Trump adviser] John Eastman, who flashes a leering grin.
“I fight against the tension in my muscles and recoil from Rudy’s grip … filled with rage, I storm through the tent, on yet another quest for Mark.”
Mark Meadows, Trump’s final chief of staff, was Hutchinson’s White House boss. Hutchinson’s memoir, Enough, describes the now 27-year-old’s journey from Trump supporter to disenchantment, and her role as a key witness for the House January 6 committee. It will be published in the US next Tuesday. The Guardian obtained a copy.
And that wasn’t the end of Rudy’s attacks:
Describing the events on January 6, the deadly culmination of Trump’s attempt to overturn his defeat by Joe Biden, Hutchinson writes that she “experience[d] anger, bewilderment, and a creeping sense of dread that something really horrible [was] going to happen”.
“I find Rudy in the back of the tent with, among others, John Eastman,” she continues. “The corners of his mouth split into a Cheshire cat smile. Waving a stack of documents, he moves towards me, like a wolf closing in on its prey.
“‘We have the evidence. It’s all here. We’re going to pull this off.’ Rudy wraps one arm around my body, closing the space that was separating us. I feel his stack of documents press into the small of my back. I lower my eyes and watch his free hand reach for the hem of my blazer.
“‘By the way,’ he says, fingering the fabric, ‘I’m loving this leather jacket on you.’ His hand slips under my blazer, then my skirt,” Hutchinson writes.
What a disgusting creep.
A few more interesting stories:
The Wall Street Journal: Justice Department Probe Scrutinizes Elon Musk Perks at Tesla Going Back Years.
Federal prosecutors are scrutinizing personal benefits Tesla may have provided Elon Musk since 2017—longer than previously known—as part of a criminal investigation examining issues including a proposed house for the chief executive.
Elon Musk by Ricardo Galvao
The U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Southern District of New York also has sought information about transactions between Tesla and other entities connected to the billionaire, people familiar with the investigation said. Prosecutors have referenced the involvement of a grand jury.
The new information indicates that federal prosecutors have a broader interest in the actions of Musk and Tesla than was previously known and that they are pursuing potential criminal charges. The Wall Street Journal reported last month that the Justice Department is investigating Tesla’s use of company resources on a secret project that was described internally as a house for Musk.
The house effort was known within the carmaker as “Project 42,” and plans called for an expansive glass building to be constructed near Tesla’s Austin-area factory and headquarters.
The Securities and Exchange Commission has opened a separate civil investigation into the project, the Journal has reported.
On X, the social-media platform formerly known as Twitter, Musk hassaid there isn’t a glass house “built, under construction or planned.” He didn’t address past work or plans; neither he nor his representatives have responded to requests for comment.
There’s more at the WSJ. I got in by clicking on the Memeorandum link.
The Washington Post: Biden to create new office of gun violence prevention.
President Biden on Friday will announce the creation of a new office for gun violence prevention, an escalation of the administration’s efforts to tackle the issue amid stalled progress in Congress, according to four people briefed on the action who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss plans that were not yet public.
Biden and Vice President Harris are scheduled to announce the new office at an event in the White House Rose Garden on Friday afternoon, the people said.
Greg Jackson, a gun violence survivor who is the executive director of the Community Justice Action Fund, and Rob Wilcox, the senior director for federal government affairs at Everytown for Gun Safety, are expected to have key roles in the office, the people said.
The new office will report up through Stefanie Feldman, the White House staff secretary and a longtime Biden policy aide who has worked on the firearms issue for years, the people said. Feldman previously worked on the Domestic Policy Council and still oversees the gun policy portfolio at the White House….
Since Biden was elected, gun violence prevention groups have pressed the White House to create such an office, arguing that it would help coordinate efforts across the federal government to reduce gun violence. Activists say this type of office would also allow the White House to exert more leadership on the issue.
“If this announcement is, in fact, the creation of a single point of leadership on gun violence in the administration, it’s a very big deal for the movement,” Shannon Watts, the founder emerita of Moms Demand Action, a group working to stop gun violence, said in a statement after The Washington Post approached her with the news.
One more from CBS News: Exclusive: Pentagon to review cases of LGBTQ+ veterans denied honorable discharges under “don’t ask, don’t tell.”
Thousands of LGBTQ+ veterans who were kicked out of the military because of their sexuality could see their honor restored under a new initiative the Defense Department announced Wednesday, on the 12th anniversary of the repeal of “don’t ask, don’t tell” policy banning gays and lesbians from openly serving in the military.
Before the repeal of the ban, tens of thousands of LGBTQ+ service members were forced out of the military “under other than honorable conditions,” rather than with an honorable discharge.
As CBS News documented in a nine-month investigation, many LGBTQ+ veterans found that without an honorable discharge, they were deprived of access to the full spectrum of veterans benefits, including VA loan programs, college tuition assistance, health care and some jobs.
In a statement commemorating the anniversary of the repeal, Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin acknowledged the military fell short in correcting the harms of its past policies against LGBTQ+ service members.
“For decades, our LGBTQ+ Service members were forced to hide or were prevented from serving altogether,” Austin said. “Even still, they selflessly put themselves in harm’s way for the good of our country and the American people. Unfortunately, too many of them were discharged from the military based on their sexual orientation — and for many this left them without access to the benefits and services they earned.”
In a statement commemorating the anniversary of the repeal, Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin acknowledged the military fell short in correcting the harms of its past policies against LGBTQ+ service members.
“For decades, our LGBTQ+ Service members were forced to hide or were prevented from serving altogether,” Austin said. “Even still, they selflessly put themselves in harm’s way for the good of our country and the American people. Unfortunately, too many of them were discharged from the military based on their sexual orientation — and for many this left them without access to the benefits and services they earned.”
More details at the link.
That’s it for me today–lots of gossip in the news today. Have a great Wednesday, everyone!!
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https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2023/sep/20/texas-teacher-fired-anne-frank-book-ban
Texas or Florida? Which best represents NAZI Germany?
Geez, fucking hell. And I have to say, I never thought I’d have something in common with Murdoch…but it turns out I do!