Anonymous ID: e342cb Feb. 15, 2024, 1:59 p.m. No.20420032   🗄️.is 🔗kun   >>0359 >>0476 >>0597 >>0628 >>0744

GOP Senator Exposes ‘Horrible Thing’ Mitch McConnell Did to Americans

https://conservativebrief.com/gop-exposes-81153/

 

A leading Republican senator is blowing the whistle on the party’s Senate leader, Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.), over the chamber’s latest foreign aid funding bill, which would send tens of billions more in U.S. tax dollars to Ukraine.

 

In a Twitter Spaces session, Sen. Ron Johnson (R-Wis.) said that McConnell and more than a dozen other Republican senators voted to pass a $95 billion “foreign aid” package that would send $60.1 billion to Ukraine at a time when, according to national polling, a growing majority of Americans have said they oppose sending more tax dollars to the war-torn country, especially while domestic problems including a chaotic southwestern border continue to fester.

 

“When we entered this thing, McConnell said his top priority was funding for Ukraine. But public opinion and the very strong political rhetoric that we ought to secure our own border before we spend $60 billion to secure Ukraine’s was effective. And so McConnell finally switched and said, ‘OK, we’ve got to let Democrats know that we are serious. We are going to defeat closure on this bill, and we are going to demand that border security is going to be attached to funding for Ukraine,’” Johnson explained.

 

“Then secret negotiations occurred on an issue the public supports Republicans on, and we end up with this monstrosity of a bill. It is an immigration bill. It’s not a border security bill. But during that time frame, we repeatedly talked about making Ukraine funding contingent on border metrics,” he added.

 

“We had it all laid out. We had a proposal. We had a great deal of support in our conference, but what [Sen.] Mike [Lee] (R-Utah) pointed out is unbeknownst to us at the time, McConnell told [Sen. James] Lankford (R-Okla.) that that’s not even on the table,” the Wisconsin Republican continued.

 

“He, on his own … using his own authority without telling the conference even though he knew that the conference supported tying border security or Ukraine funding to actually securing the border, McConnell just took that off the table,” he said.

 

“And that moment of leverage we had where we could use Biden’s desire for Ukraine funding to actually force him to use his executive authority to secure the border has been lost, and that is why so many of us are speaking out against McConnell. It was such a breach of his leadership position and such a, just a horrible thing to do to Americans who want a secure border,” Johnson added.

 

In the wake of the failed ‘border security’ bill — which Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.) had already declared “dead on arrival” in the House — a growing number of GOP senators are calling on ousting McConnell as the party’s Senate leader.

 

Sen. Ted Cruz, for instance, did not mince words late last week after the chamber failed to advance a “bipartisan” piece of legislation that was advertised as a border security bill but which actually sent billions more dollars to Ukraine, Israel, and other countries.

 

The Texas Republican made it clear he believes it is time for McConnell to step down from the party’s leadership and quite possibly even leave the chamber altogether.

 

“Mitch McConnell, in effect, gave the largest in-kind campaign contribution to the Democrats’ Senate campaign committee in history,” Sen. Ted Cruz, R-Texas, told The Daily Caller.

 

“Every single Democrat candidate in the country running for Senate, running for House will use the identical talking points — they will all say: We wanted to secure the border. We tried to secure the border, but the Republicans wouldn’t let us,” Cruz said. “Now, that is a wild-eyed lie. It is completely false. This bill would have made the border crisis worse.”

 

“I think this is our opportunity to take him out, and we’re sort of working to figure out if that’s possible,” according to one Republican senator, granted anonymity by The Daily Caller.

 

“As long as I’ve been serving in the Senate, there’s never been an issue where the American public is so overwhelmingly in support of our position, which is to secure the border.

 

“So how can you take — as leader — how do you take an issue where the American people support us and lead us into a box, where now, when a bill is produced, it is worse than doing nothing,” Johnson told the outlet. “When that’s rejected, we get blamed. I mean, you got to work overtime to screw that up.”

Anonymous ID: e342cb Feb. 15, 2024, 2:04 p.m. No.20420064   🗄️.is 🔗kun   >>0075 >>0359 >>0476 >>0597 >>0628 >>0744

Judge Rules Trump’s New York Hush Money Trial Will Begin March 25

https://conservativebrief.com/bragg-trump-daniels-81160/

 

Former President Donald Trump will face his first criminal trial next month over a 2016 hush money payment to adult film actress Stormy Daniels. Trump has denied the affair and has pleaded not guilty to the charges

 

Trump’s packed court schedule will become more difficult to manage with his upcoming first trial and campaign trail appearances. The start date of Trump’s federal 2020 election trial was originally set for March 4, but it has been rescheduled.

 

The former president filed an appeal this week, which the Supreme Court might consider and postpone the trial. The judge overseeing the case denied Trump’s request to have the charges dismissed to begin the hearing on Thursday.

 

Judge Juan Merchan announced that the trial’s jury selection process will begin on March 25, CNN reported.

 

A Manhattan grand jury indicted Trump in March of last year on 34 felony counts of first-degree business record falsification. His plea to the charges was not guilty. The prosecution claims that Trump paid Daniels $130,000 as part of a “catch and kill” plot.

 

Trump is the first president to be charged with a crime, living or dead, as a result of the New York indictment. One of the numerous ongoing legal cases that Trump is dealing with as he runs for the GOP presidential nomination in 2024 and a second term in office is the hush money case.

 

When the judge announced the decision to proceed with the trial, Trump’s lawyers immediately objected, stating that they had planned to discuss the timing of the trial during the hearing.

 

Todd Blanche, a prominent member of Trump’s legal team, called the decision a “serious injustice” and cited the former president’s numerous legal complications as evidence.

 

“We have been faced with compressed and expedited schedules in every one of those trials,” Blanche told the judge. “We — meaning myself, the firm and President Trump — have been put into an impossible position.”

 

Manhattan District Attorney Bragg is facing a pair of lawsuits related to his filing of charges against Trump, accusing him of illegalities involving a hush money payment to adult film star Stormy Daniels ahead of the 2016 election, facilitated by his then-personal attorney Michael Cohen.

 

Trump is charged with 34 counts that include allegations of falsifying business records to hide the payment.

 

Fox News noted in June: “The Heritage Foundation, a Washington, D.C.-based conservative think tank, has sued Bragg under suspicions that he and his office coordinated or communicated with the Justice Department, the White House, and Rep. Daniel Goldman, D-N.Y., about the prosecution. In its lawsuit, Heritage claims that such actions eventually led to investigations by several U.S. House committees into Bragg’s conduct.”

 

“Regrettably, these questions have not been met with answers. These reports have raised concerns in many circles based in large part upon the longstanding history of President Trump’s political opponents coordinating their activities to systematically weaponize the criminal justice system against him and thereby pervert the course of Justice,” says a filing for the first lawsuit.

 

Heritage has filed a separate lawsuit claiming that Bragg and his team engaged the services of prominent law firms specializing in white-collar litigation, pro bono. In the lawsuit, Heritage is seeking a court declaration that the requested documents fall under the purview of the New York Freedom of Information Law and should be released.

 

The organization is also requesting that Bragg and his team provide the requested documents and be prohibited from seeking costs and fees related to the specific request mentioned in the case.

 

Mike Howell, director of Heritage’s Oversight Project, the group’s government watchdog division, said the organization believes Bragg was “coordinating, or otherwise communicating” with Trump’s political opponents and that “there’s reason to believe Bragg was a prolific communicator” via cellphone.

Anonymous ID: e342cb Feb. 15, 2024, 2:09 p.m. No.20420096   🗄️.is 🔗kun   >>0359 >>0476 >>0597 >>0628 >>0744

House GOP Probes Intel Agencies Using ‘Disinformation’ Charge to Obstruct Biden Investigation

https://conservativebrief.com/house-gop-biden-81159/

 

Ohio Republican Rep. Jim Jordan launched an oversight investigation into U.S. intelligence agencies for allegedly obstructing a 2020 Senate investigation concerning the Biden family.

 

Jordan wrote a letter to National Intelligence Director Avril Haines stating that the House Judiciary Committee and its subcommittee “are investigating allegations that the U.S. Intelligence Community obstructed a congressional inquiry in 2020 by falsely alleging that the work of two U.S. Senators was advancing Russian ‘disinformation.'”

 

Senators Ron Johnson (R., Wis.) and Chuck Grassley (R., Iowa) initiated a congressional investigation into claims of influence peddling involving President Joe Biden and his son Hunter Biden three years ago. On August 6, 2020, two FBI officials presented the Republican lawmakers with a “defensive” briefing as part of their investigation, characterizing those claims as misinformation from Russia.

 

Grassley and Johnson were nearing completion of their September 2020 report concerning the purported influence-peddling schemes of Hunter Biden in China and Ukraine at that time, as noted by National Review.

 

Jordan is requesting that Haines provide “all drafts of the script” that were used to brief the two senators, demanding information about that “so-called ‘defensive’ briefing,” as he put it.

 

Jordan wrote, “The Senators’ investigation into Hunter Biden’s financial connections to foreign governments and foreign nationals was hampered by the briefing, the existence of which was later leaked.”

 

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