Tag: kevin mccarthy

McCarthy meets President Tsai; calls Taiwan a ‘great friend of America’

Post By World , , , , , ,

Risking China’s anger, U.S. House Speaker Kevin McCarthy hosted Taiwan President Tsai Ing-wen on Wednesday as a “great friend of America” in a fraught show of U.S. support at a rare high-level, bipartisan meeting on U.S. soil.

Speaking carefully to avoid unnecessarily escalating tensions with Beijing, Ms. Tsai and Mr. McCarthy steered clear of calls from hard-liners in the U.S. for a more confrontational stance toward China in defence of self-ruled Taiwan.

Instead, the two leaders stood side by side in a show of unity at the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library in California, acknowledging China’s threats against the island government but speaking only of maintaining longstanding U.S. policy.

“America’s support for the people of Taiwan will remain resolute, unwavering and bipartisan,” Mr. McCarthy said at a news conference later.

Peace through strength

He evoked Reagan’s peace-through-strength approach to foreign relations and emphasised “this is a bipartisan meeting of members of Congress,” not any one political party. He said U.S.-Taiwan ties are stronger than at any other point in his life.

He and Ms. Tsai spoke to reporters with Reagan’s Air Force One as a backdrop.

She said the “unwavering support reassures the people of Taiwan that we are not isolated.”

Still, the formal trappings of the meeting, and the senior rank of some of the elected officials in the delegation from Congress, threatened to run afoul of China’s position that any interaction between U.S. and Taiwanese officials is a challenge to China’s claim of sovereignty over the island.

More than a dozen Democratic and Republican lawmakers, including the House’s third-ranking Democrat, joined Republican McCarthy for the daylong talks.

Self defence

During a private session they spoke of the importance of Taiwan’s self-defence, of fostering robust trade and economic ties and supporting the island government’s ability to participate in the international community, Ms. Tsai said.

Taiwan’s President Tsai Ing-wen meets U.S. Speaker of the House Kevin McCarthy at the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library in Simi Valley, California, U.S. April 5, 2023.
| Photo Credit:
Reuters

They made no mention of calls from hard-liners in and out of Congress for a greater U.S. commitment to Taiwan’s defense if China should attack.

Ms. Tsai said she stressed to lawmakers Taiwan’s commitment “to defending the peaceful status quo where the people in Taiwan may continue to thrive in a free and open society.”

But she also warned, “It is no secret that today the peace that we have maintained and the democracy which have worked hard to build are facing unprecedented challenges.”

“We once again find ourselves in a world where democracy is under threat and the urgency of keeping the beacon of freedom shining cannot be understated.”

Key provider

The United States broke off official ties with Taiwan in 1979 while formally establishing diplomatic relations with the Beijing government. The U.S. acknowledges a “one-China” policy in which Beijing lays claim to Taiwan, but it does not endorse China’s claim to the island and remains Taiwan’s key provider of military and defense assistance.

For Ms. Tsai, this was the most sensitive stop on a weeklong journey meant to shore up alliances with the U.S. and Central America. The U.S. House speaker is second in line of succession to the president. No speaker is known to have met with a Taiwan president on U.S. soil since the U.S. broke off formal diplomatic relations.

China has reacted to past trips by Taiwanese presidents through the U.S., and to past trips to Taiwan by senior U.S. officials, with shows of military force. After then-House Speaker Nancy Pelosi to Taiwan last August, China responded with its largest live-fire drills in decades, including firing a missile over the island.

Sharp response

Chinese officials have pledged a sharp but unspecified response to the meeting with McCarthy.

Later Wednesday, China said it “firmly opposes and strongly condemns” Ms. Tsai’s visit, in a statement by China’s official Xinhua News Agency.

China will take “resolute and forceful measures to defend national sovereignty and territorial integrity,” the statement said, citing an unnamed Foreign Ministry spokesperson. It urged the U.S. “not to walk further down the wrong and dangerous road.”

There was no sign of a large-scale military response as of Thursday morning as China had done previously.

Chinese vessels were engaged in a joint patrol and inspection operation in the Taiwan Strait that will last three days, state media said Thursday morning. Taiwan’s Ministry of National Defense said Wednesday evening it had tracked the China’s Shandong aircraft carrier passing through the Bashi Strait, to Taiwan’s southeast.

The Biden administration insists there is nothing provocative about this visit by Ms. Tsai, which is the latest of a half-dozen to the U.S.

“Beijing should not use the transits as an excuse to take any actions, to ratchet up tensions, to further push at changing the status quo,” Secretary of State Antony Blinken told reporters Wednesday during travel in Europe.

Rising U.S.-China tensions

The Taiwan president’s visit to America comes as China, the U.S. and its allies are strengthening their military positions and readiness for any confrontation between the two sides, with Taiwan and its claim to sovereignty a main flashpoint.

Confrontation between the U.S. and China, a rising power increasingly seeking to assert its influence abroad under President Xi Jinping, surged with Ms. Pelosi’s visit and again this winter with the cross-U.S. journey of what the U.S. says was a Chinese spy balloon.

Democratic Rep. Pelosi said in a statement, “Today’s meeting between President Tsai of Taiwan and Speaker McCarthy is to be commended for its leadership, its bipartisan participation and its distinguished and historic venue.”

Taiwan and China split in 1949 after a civil war and have no official relations, although they are linked by billions of dollars in trade and investment.

For their part, Taiwanese officials in the United States – and Taiwanese presidents on a succession of visits – aim for a delicate balance of maintaining warm relations with their powerful American allies, without overstepping their in-between status in the U.S, or unnecessarily provoking China.

To that end, no Taiwanese flag flies over the former Taiwan Embassy in Washington. Taiwanese presidents call their stops in the U.S. “transits” rather than visits, and they steer clear of Washington.

Mr. McCarthy, the newly elected House speaker, is making an early foray into foreign policy.

Joining him for the meeting were the Republican chairman and ranking Democrat on a new House Select Committee on China, along with the chairman of the Ways and Means Committee that handles tax policy important to Taiwan, among others.

Seated to McCarthy’s right was the third-ranking House Democrat, Rep. Pete Aguilar of California, who spoke of the long history of U.S.-Taiwan cooperation and an “overwhelming bipartisan commitment” in Congress, working with the Biden administration, to strengthen the relationship.

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Everybody Hates Tucker’s January 6 Sedition Porn Recruitment Video, Even Republican Senators

Post By Politics , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Quick follow-up on Tucker Carlson’s lies about how January 6 was just an old white people Sunday school class field trip. It turns out that there are at least some Republicans who weren’t into it!

SOME LIES! Tucker Reveals Ashli Babbitt Just Girl Scout Who Tried To Sell Thin Mints At Wrong House

Obviously, we don’t mean the kinds of Republicans who truly form the ideological mainstream of the party, seditionist, domestic-terrorist-supporting freakshows like Marjorie Taylor Greene. We are not talking about the hordes of Republican feral hogs in the House of Representatives who oink Kevin McCarthy’s daily marching orders at him.

But over there in the Senate, they are not so much into what Tucker and Barely Speaker Kevin are doing. And it’s not just antifa super-soldier woke hippie types like Mitt Romney either, though he was one of ’em, saying that Tucker Carlson’s lying propaganda about January 6 is “dangerous and disgusting.” And also:

In general it sounds like mainstream Republican senators are not cool with Kevin ‘n’ Tucker’s little insurrection-promoting timeshare presentation. CNN’s Manu Raju and other reporters talked to a bunch of them, and actually got them on the record.

Senator Kevin Cramer from North Dakota said, “To somehow put that in the same category as a permitted peaceful protest is just a lie.” He says give everybody all the footage. “[G]ive it to every source at the same time and let everybody go through it and play it in its entirety.”

Thom Tillis from North Carolina was more succinct: “I think it’s bullshit.” He said maybe there were a handful of tourists in the crowd, but:

“But when you see police barricades breached, when you see police officers assaulted, all of that … If you were just a tourist you should have probably lined up at the Visitor Center and came in on an orderly basis. I just don’t think it’s helpful.”

Mike Rounds from South Dakota said, “I thought it was an insurrection at that time. I still think it was an insurrection today.” He says give all journalists all the footage.

John Thune from South Dakota: “I think it was an attack on the Capitol. … There were a lot of people in the Capitol at the time that were scared for their lives.”

Chuck Grassley from Iowa: “The point is, what happened that day shouldn’t have happened.”

These mainstream Republican senators do not sound very committed to Insurrectionist Sparkle Motion, not very committed at all. NBC News has a bunch more quotes, all from the same senators.

Here’s some more video:

Meanwhile, CNN also has the reaction of the Capitol Police chief, Tom Manger, who sounds pissed. He said Tucker “cherry-picked” his footage, and that was just the beginning:

“Last night an opinion program aired commentary that was filled with offensive and misleading conclusions about the January 6 attack,” Manger wrote in an internal department memo obtained by CNN, adding that Carlson’s show didn’t reach out to the police department “to provide accurate context.”

“The program conveniently cherry-picked from the calmer moments of our 41,000 hours of video. The commentary fails to provide context about the chaos and violence that happened before or during these less tense moments,” Manger said.

Manger was specifically pissed that Tucker aired some footage of fallen Capitol Police officer Brian Sicknick, as part of the insurrectionist propaganda campaign to convince people Sicknick didn’t die because of the events of January 6:

“[T]he most disturbing accusation from last night was that our late friend and colleague Brian Sicknick’s death had nothing to do with his heroic actions on January 6,” Manger wrote. “The Department maintains, as anyone with common sense would, that had Officer Sicknick not fought valiantly for hours on the day he was violently assaulted, Officer Sicknick would not have died the next day.”

When the actual victims of a terrorist attack and their families are calling you a piece of shit, it might be time to rethink your approach. But Tucker’s never one to let a moral compass or human decency get in the way of his propaganda. He’s fighting a war here, and he’s not on the same side as the people who protect the United States Capitol.

We’ve mentioned the statement from Sicknick’s family here today, but we ought to give it a little more airtime:

“Every time the pain of that day seems to have ebbed a bit, organizations like Fox rip our wounds wide open again and we are frankly sick of it,” the Sicknick family said. […]

“FOX has shown time and time again that they are little more than the propaganda arm of the Republican Party and like Pravda, will do whatever they are told to keep the hatred and the lies flowing while suppressing anything resembling the truth,” the family said. “Fox does this not for any sense of morality as they have none, but for the quest for every penny of advertising money they can get from those who buy airtime from them.”

Those are mere excerpts. The whole thing is so much more.

Give all the journalists all the tapes. If you don’t, then the terrorists win. Literally.

[CNN / CBS News]

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WATCH: Democrats Kick Living Sh*t Out Of Republicans Removing Ilhan Omar From Foreign Affairs Committee

Post By Politics , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

We discussed this week how Barely Speaker Kevin had managed to wrangle up the votes to subject Democratic Rep. Ilhan Omar to more racism and bullying, under the guise of expelling Omar from the House Foreign Affairs Committee because she is “antisemitic.” (Their proofs for this were, shall we say, limp and flaccid.) We highly doubt the votes materialized because of Kevin McCarthy’s negotiating prowess. Occam’s Razor would suggest that any holdout Republicans just remembered they hate minorities and were like JK fuck yeah we’ll do that.

McCarthy is doing this for retaliatory reasons, because he’s mad Democrats expelled his new BFF QAnon Marge Greene and white nationalist Paul Gosar from their committees. He’s doing it because he’s a fucking child, and this is his way of saying “neener.” He’s doing this because he’s a little tiny sad man and this makes him feel powerful.

Look at this fucking troll doll.

Oh! Kevin McCarthy is so offended that Ilhan Omar said “all about the Benjamins!” Obviously you see the Kevin McCarthy tweet Rupar found just below that, but if you can’t, it says “We cannot allow Soros, Steyer, and Bloomberg to BUY this election!” But it’s not antisemitic when McCarthy says it, because reasons.

The vote was today, and Omar was removed from that committee. But not before a bunch of Democrats had a chance to stand up and tell white supremacist Republicans to go eat bags of dicks in hell.

Rep. Eric Swalwell didn’t hold back. He noted how Republicans “root for rioters,” “show sympathy for the insurrection,” are a conference that “harbors a wanted international criminal,” and have “members who choose violence over voting every single day.” He said he figured when they said they were going to hold somebody accountable for antisemitism, it would be Jim Jordan, since he kept that “Kanye. Elon. Trump” tweet up on the House Judiciary Committee GOP account for two months after Kanye started levying Nazi attacks against Jewish people. (Jordan writes those tweets.)

“Look in your own damn mirror before you ever come over here!” he shouted.

Swalwell, of course, was just the other day a victim of McCarthy’s insolent little revenge campaign, when McCarthy removed him from the Intelligence Committee.

The other victim of that was Rep. Adam Schiff, who also had some things to say. He said if they want to punish somebody for inciting violence, introduce a resolution against Donald Trump. “Nobody has incited more violence against this chamber than Donald Trump.” And antisemitism? “Do not insult our intelligence,” he said.

Want to condemn someone? How about “someone dining with antisemites? Someone dining with white nationalists? Members of your conference who are speaking at white nationalist rallies.” He mentioned Trump again, and Marjorie Taylor Greene and Paul Gosar.

And on and on it went like that. People pointing out the hypocrisy, people pointing out the lies. Rep. Mark Pocan and others noted how Republicans seat on committees a person who believes “Jewish space lasers set forest fires in California.” Rep. Pramila Jayapal put a fine point on how Republicans are doing this because they have nothing of real value to offer the American people, just this “inane” shit.

Rep. Dean Phillips is Jewish. He said a lot, and you should watch it all, but he made an important point when he asked why 90 percent of the Jewish people in Congress are just fine with keeping Omar on her committees? Because isn’t this Kevin McCarthy supposedly protecting them from mean Ilhan Omar? Fucking please.

Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez? Whew. Back up and make some room for her, because she is ready to fuck you all up. “This is about targeting women of color in the United States!” And so much more.

Rep. Rashida Tlaib was furious to the point of tears, and we guess House Republicans didn’t want to hear it, so they gaveled her to shut her up and cut her mic:

And here is Rep. Omar herself, defending herself against the tsunami of white supremacy coming at her from the other side of the aisle. “Is anyone surprised that I am being targeted?” she asked. She took it all the way back to the Trump-led movement to label Barack Obama a Muslim. This is who these people are.

www.youtube.com

“My leadership and voice will not be diminished if I am not on this committee for one term. My voice will get louder and stronger and my leadership will be celebrated around the world as it has been! So take your votes or not, I am here to stay, and I am here to be a voice against harms around the world and advocate for a better world. I yield back.”

In other words, go fuck yourself, Kevin, and go fuck yourself, all the rest of you seditious white supremacist Republican snakes. The end.

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Hey Jim Jordan, We Got Your Weaponized FBI Right Here, His Name Is Bill Barr

Post By Politics , , , , , , , , ,

The crazy caucus squeezed Kevin McCarthy’s balls pretty hard during the hostage negotiation over the House speaker’s gavel. (Hey, man, whatever you’re into!) And one of the things that popped out during their 15 rounds of light bondage was a Select Subcommittee on the Weaponization of the Federal Government.

By which they do not mean the routine brutalization of Black Americans by law enforcement officers.

What they mean is every fool theory about the Deep State vomited out on Telegram and amplified by Tucker Carlson for the MAGA masses. They want to rehash the stupid shit Matt Taibbi and Bari Weiss have been sock puppeting out with Elon Musk’s hands up their asses. They want to pretend it was scandalous for the Justice Department to treat threats to teachers and schools by anti-vaxx terrorists as actual terrorism. They want to lie that the Capitol Riot was instigated by FBI plants, and that the insurrectionists in jail for trying to overthrow the government are actually brave patriots, or tourists, or First Amendment political prisoners. In short, they want to pretend that white Christian conservatives are being victimized by a government which has done nothing but privilege their interests for 250 years, and they just extorted McCarthy to secure staff, funding, and subpoena power on par with the January 6 Select Committee to do it.

Which is ironic, because we just spent four years watching Trump and his cronies weaponize the FBI to target his enemies and help his friends, and the GOP doesn’t seem to give a rat’s ass about it.

We saw Attorney General Bill Barr sic riot police on racial justice protestors based on blatant lies about Antifa supersoldiers flying around the country in uniform to wreak havoc. We saw him break longstanding DOJ protocol and authorize investigations of non-existent election fraud before the 2020 results had been certified — after spending months pretending that mail-in ballots were rife with fraud. We saw him lie about the Mueller Report. We saw him attempt to ratfuck the Roger Stone prosecution, successfully ratfuck the Mike Flynn prosecution, and do his damnedest to blow up the Michael Cohen plea deal. We saw him go to the mat to try to prosecute former FBI Deputy Director Andy McCabe for the crime of being mean to Donald Trump. We saw him try to Saturday Night Massacre the US Attorney’s Office in the Southern District of New York to protect Trump and his pals. FFS, this asshole only closed the Clinton email investigation in October of 2019, more than six years after Hillary Clinton left the State Department.

And that was before last week’s New York Times story about all the ways Bill Barr and Special Counsel John Durham tried to frame the FBI, Hillary Clinton, and — when everything else failed — George Soros for the supposed crime of investigating Donald Trump’s ties to a Russian effort to interfere in the 2016 presidential election. Rep. Jim Jordan wants to talk about weaponization of the Justice Department? Here it is, asshole.

Barr announced publicly that there was something untoward about the origins of the Russia investigation before he even opened the Special Counsel inquiry. When the Justice Department Inspector General found the opposite, Barr and Durham leaned on him to change his conclusions, then put out statements undercutting his report.

When Barr and Durham failed to find any evidence of their public accusations, they shifted to the rightwing conspiracy theory that Hillary Clinton somehow tricked the FBI into investigating Trump. This required them to pretend that the FBI’s Crossfire Hurricane probe, which was opened in July of 2016 after coffee boy dipshit George Papadopoulos bragged to an Australian diplomat that Russian state actors were going to start releasing hacked information to harm Hillary Clinton’s campaign, was actually based on DNC lawyer Michael Sussmann’s September report to the FBI about the mysterious pings between Trump Tower and a sanctioned Russian bank. But denying linear time is no problem for this dynamic duo!

Durham was able to secure a guilty plea from one low level line attorney for falsifying an email, but his vaunted prosecutions of Sussmann and Russia analyst Igor Danchenko went down in flames. But in the meantime, Durham relied on an extremely dubious Russian memo which cited supposedly hacked communications between Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz and an employee at the Open Society Foundation (which is funded by Soros) regarding a supposed promise by then-Attorney General Loretta Lynch promising that the investigation of Clinton’s emails wouldn’t get out of hand. When Durham couldn’t get a warrant because his evidence was so shaky, he just used a grand jury subpoena to extort the communications — which showed that he was once again going down a blind alley because none of that shit ever happened.

Let us all take a moment to appreciate the irony of Durham and Barr trying to pretend that the FBI was too nice to Clinton about her emails (or literally anything else), at a time when it was also investigating the Trump campaign and managed not to hold press conferences about it every other week. And while we’re conjuring Alanis, note that Durham and Barr accidentally kicked loose some dirt on Trump when they were traveling around England and Italy, shouting at our allies to confess to trying to screw the Trump campaign. Of course, they failed to disclose that one, too.

In short, the Justice Department has indeed been weaponized against the president’s political enemies, but we’re pretty sure that Jim Jordan won’t be looking into any of that, although, as the Post‘s Greg Sargent points out, the Senate Judiciary Committee might do it. But over in the House, Ol’ Rasslin’ Jim is going to pretend to work himself into a lather about nonsense. Of course, Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries isn’t going to cede the field to Republicans, so we’ll be on the spot to factcheck in real time. Because unlike Kevin McCarthy, the Democratic leader is not a weak-kneed idiot. So, there’s that, anyway.

[WaPo / NYT]

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Will THIS GUY Expose Hillary’s FBI Conspiracy To Steal Election From Herself To Frame Trump For Russia Stuff?

Post By Politics , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Here’s an interesting story to know about, against the backdrop of new House Barely Speaker Kevin McCarthy caterwauling about how Adam Schiff LIEEEEED TO THE AMERICAN PEOPLE about Donald Trump’s collusion with Russia and TREEEEASON PARAPHRASED Trump’s very perfect call with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy, back in more innocent days when Trump was just extorting Ukraine to help him steal the 2020 election in exchange for protection from Russia.

Goddamn, that impeachment seems so much simpler to explain these days, don’t it?

The former top intelligence guy for the FBI’s New York field office, Charles McGonigal, has just been charged in federal courts in both DC and Manhattan with a number of very interesting crimes. For example, after he left the FBI, secretly working for Russian oligarch Oleg Deripaska investigating a rival oligarch, and also working on Deripaska’s behalf to get him off the US sanctions list, itself a violation of the sanctions. Also hiding $225,000 in other bribes from a different dude while he was working at the FBI.

So that’s weird, yeah?

Charles McGonigal, 54, who retired from the FBI in September 2018, was indicted in federal court in Manhattan on charges of money laundering, violating U.S. sanctions and other counts stemming from his alleged ties to Deripaska, an ally of Russian President Vladimir Putin. In his role at the FBI, McGonigal had been tasked with investigating Deripaska, whose own indictment on sanctions-violation charges was unsealed in September.

A second indictment, filed in Washington, accused McGonigal of hiding payments totaling $225,000 that he allegedly received from a New Jersey man employed decades ago by an Albanian intelligence agency. The indictment also accused him of acting to advance that person’s interests.

It seems bad for one of the former top intelligence guys at the FBI to be indicted for taking secret bribes and secretly working for the interests of one of Russia’s most powerful oligarchs, yeah? Especially one of the closest oligarchs to Vladimir Putin, Paul Manafort’s former boss, who was seemingly very close to the Russian operation to steal the 2016 election? Is that bad? Paul Manafort, of course, ran the Trump campaign, and pretty much every Russia report produced by the US government has concluded that he was integral to the NO COLLUSION!

Oh, and what was Manafort’s previous work for Deripaska? Propping up pro-Russian forces in Ukraine.

Trump Goon Paul Manafort Made $10 MILLION A YEAR To ‘Benefit Putin.’ Totally Normal!

It’s Manafort. It’s Always Been Manafort. And The Senate Intel Committee Seems To Agree!

NO COLLUSION! NO COLLUSION! You Know, Except For ALL THIS F*CKING COLLUSION!

Hey, Paul Manafort! Remember All That Shit You Pulled To Sell The World On The Ukrainian Dictator? Robert Mueller Remembers!

Most of the regular news reporting on this is extremely dry and weeds-y and virtually unreadable to anyone who isn’t obsessed with this stuff, but this excerpt about McGonigal, way down at the bottom of the Washington Post‘s article, is some extremely important context we will briefly explore:

McGonigal was an expert on Russian intelligence activities targeting the United States, as well as U.S. efforts to recruit Russian spies, said several former intelligence officials who worked with him and spoke on the condition of anonymity to describe sensitive matters.

His position at the New York field office would have given him direct access to past and current recruitment efforts, work that was coordinated with the CIA, these people said. McGonigal was well-known at the CIA among officers who dealt with Russia and counterintelligence matters, and he knew the details of some intelligence operations targeting Russia, former officials said.

McGonigal has not been charged with espionage, but the former officials who worked with him said his knowledge and experience would have put him at high risk of being recruited by a foreign government.

Rightwing weirdos are already pretty sure this guy — this guy! Not the last guy or the guy before that, this guy! — will be the key to unraveling the Deep State conspiracy where Hillary Clinton colluded with Russia and the FBI in order to steal the election from herself for the sole purpose of destroying the life and presidency of God-fearing patriot and humble servant Donald Trump. They are pointing to the fact that in 2016, he was head of Cybercrimes at the home office in DC, and was one of the first people who knew about allegations from Trump campaign idiot George Papadopoulos that the Russians had big dirt on Hillary that they were going to deploy against her.

Trump himself is raaaaaaaging over McGonigal’s arrest on Truth Social:

“The FBI guy after me for the Russia, Russia, Russia HOAX, long before my Election as President, was just arrested for taking money from Russia, Russia, Russia,” Trump wrote on his Truth Social platform on Tuesday. “May he Rot In Hell!”

Yeah OK, buddy, mash your meds up in some ketchup and swallow them.

What’s more interesting to us is what happened later in 2016, closer to the election.

As Heather Cox Richardson explains, October of 2016 was when then-FBI Director James Comey moved McGonigal into that position as head of counterintel at the New York field office. And what was happening in October of 2016, specifically regarding the New York FBI field office? That was the one that was as intent on skullfucking the Clinton campaign as Russia was, the one that seemed to be leaking fake bullshit about Clinton to Rudy Giuliani, who was babbling on the radio that the FBI was going to “revolt” if she wasn’t indicted.

Fox News was cumming itself at the time screaming that Hillary’s indictment was coming, apparently sourced from some dumb bucktoothed idiot types at the New York office who were furious Main Justice wouldn’t sanction their investigation into the Clinton Foundation, since it was based on debunked, Breitbart-funded bullshit from that dumb Clinton Cash book.

As Cox Richardson reminds us, when James Comey went before Congress in 2018, he said he was worried that if he didn’t blabber forth 11 DAYS BEFORE THE ELECTION about the “re-opening” of the Hillary emails investigation, after some “new” (not new) emails were found, that the New York office would leak it. And more:

Former acting attorney general Sally Yates was clearer. She told the inspector general that Comey and other FBI officials “felt confident that the New York Field Office would leak it and that it would come out regardless of whether he advised Congress or not.”

Yeah, so anyway!

Radicalized FBI Sleeper Cell Probably Led By Rudy Giuliani

James Comey Strikes Again (And Again And Again And Again)

Anthony Weiner’s Dick Explodes All Over Hillary Clinton’s Emails

Uh Oh, Did Adam Schiff Do TREASON COLLUSION With The Whistleblower’s Report? (No)

One more thing from Cox Richardson about what McGonigal did after his stint at the NY FBI office:

We also know that after McGonigal left the FBI, he went to work for Brookfield Properties, the multibillion-dollar real-estate company in New York that handled the bailout of Jared Kushner’s 666 Fifth Avenue by a $1.1 billion, 99-year lease—all paid up front—thanks to the Qatar Investment Authority.

And also went to work for Oleg Deripaska, which seems to tell us something about what kinda guy this dude is.

So yeah, huh! Weird stuff.

As she points out, these indictments aren’t about any of that stuff, but we kind of feel like — based on context clues — this guy might NOT end up being the guy who exposes the Deep State conspiracy where Hillary Clinton colluded with Russia and the FBI in order to steal the election from herself for the sole purpose of destroying the life and presidency of God-fearing patriot and humble servant Donald Trump.

We could be wrong.

Talking Points Memo has the indictments and much more on the charges related to the Albanian intelligence thingie, should you want to dive into the weeds.

Also here’s some MSNBC reporting on all this:

www.youtube.com

[Washington Post / Daily Beast / Heather Cox Richardson]

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The Debt Ceiling, AGAIN? The Deuce You Say!

Post By Politics , , , , , , ,

Did you feel a little “thump” yesterday as the United States bumped up against its $31.4 trillion debt ceiling? If so, maybe you should have yourself tested for synesthesia, since the debt limit is not a physical thing. But we hit it all the same, as Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen explained in a letter to House Speaker Kevin McCarthy noting that starting Thursday, Treasury would be implementing “extraordinary measures” to keep the country from crashing right through the limit.

For starters, Yellen said, Treasury will have to suspend payments into the Civil Service retirement fund, and also payments to the Postal Service’s Retiree Health Benefits Fund, from now through June 5. So please, Kev, if you don’t mind, could you please give some thought to not fucking up the US and world economies by allowing the US to default on its debts, please? Jerk.

Fine, in reality Yellen wrote, “I respectfully urge Congress to act promptly to protect the full faith and credit of the United States, you slimy neutered fuckweasel.” We’re pretty sure we copied that much correctly.

So here we are at the debt ceiling, but we haven’t actually blown through it yet because money is entirely imaginary anyway but if you stretch its imaginary nature too much it will snap back and ruin you and everyone you know, but somehow never Kevin McCarthy or Donald Trump, how even IS that?

Here’s how the magic hocuspocus works: By one set of numbers, we’re at the debt ceiling, just floating up there like the weird bubbly uncle in Mary Poppins trying desperately to fart on Dick Van Dyke so they can both descend. Fortunately, as the AP explains, Yellen can get help from her League of Extraordinary Measures and hold off a real default on the debt for a few more months via “accounting tweaks” like holding off on new payments into retirement funds and the like. (As far as we know, it does not include measures like taking the nation’s inventory of nuclear missiles to Pawn-4-Cash for a temporary loan, either.)

DEBT CEILIN’ ON MY MIND: Government Shutdown Season Is Different From Debt Ceiling Season: A Handy Wonkette Guide

Normally, a word no one should be allowed to use anymore, Congress would just shrug its shoulders and pass a bill to increase or suspend the debt ceiling, as Congress did as needed from 1917 until 2011, since it’s an artificial limit to the amount the US can borrow to cover its debts, and authorizing it is just a thing Congress does, like naming post offices and making speeches about how terrible Congress is. We explain it in excruciating detail here.

The thing to keep in mind is that since the US is Big King Fuck of Global Economics Mountain, our debt is the most desired investment in the world, the place to keep your money safe because the US has never, not once, defaulted on its debt. If the US defaults, our bond ratings would tank, and the US would go into a recession, with the world being dragged along like that Buzz Gunderson kid in Rebel Without a Cause whose leather jacket got caught in the door handle of the car, only it’s everyone going off the cliff not just one teenager who barely showed up in the credits (it was Corey Allen, we’ll save you the time). Chickie Run, indeed.

You’d think nobody would want to risk that, but Republicans during the Obama administration decided it would be “fun” to withhold their votes for a debt ceiling increase unless Barack Obama agreed to a clusterfuck called “sequestration” that cut 2.5 percent of federal spending across the board during the last six months of each fiscal year. Those cuts substantially hurt the economy and slowed the recovery from the Great Recession, and probably helped elect Donald Trump as a result.

So you can see why Republicans think it’s a fun game. But Joe Biden has already refused to play it, saying he will not allow any of the cuts to Social Security and Medicare that Republicans want, to say nothing of racing for the title slip to his beloved ’67 Corvette.

When Democrats held the House in 2021, Biden also refused to stand for any Senate Republican shenanigans, and the debt ceiling got extended without any conditions, right up through yesterday, but actually sometime in May or June. But Republicans are super mad that Mitch McConnell didn’t crash the world economy even a little bit. Biden still insists on a “clean” debt limit increase, while Kevin McCarthy said that Congress needs to cut spending and live within its means exactly like it never did during the Trump administration.

And also on Wednesday, President Marjorie Taylor Greene announced that she “will not sign a clean bill raising the debt limit,” and everyone laughed at her because members of Congress vote on stuff, they don’t sign anything except for when they are Kevin McCarthy making a deal with Satan to become Speaker of the House. Silly Kevin — he didn’t even ask Satan to throw in some blues guitar lessons! Yeah, just as well.

Now, remember, the Debt Limit has to be increased to prevent an economic meltdown. It’s permission to borrow to keep servicing the debt the US already has, so if we blow through it, that doesn’t make the debt go away. And because it’s the debt on all government spending going back decades, that debt keeps growing even without new spending, because interest.

Also too, CNN is full of hacks now, framing Biden’s insistence on a clean debt ceiling bill as if Joe Biden were some sort of crazy hostage-taker, because look at how much that’s upsetting … Republicans who want to cut Social Security and Medicare. The headline is bad enough: “House GOP’s swing votes demand talks on debt ceiling and push back on White House’s hard-line stance”

Oh, that wild, inflexible Joe Biden! He won’t even negotiate (to cut Social Security). The lede paragraph is just as weird, resorting to some truly weird gymnastics to portray Biden as the extremist:

House Republicans from swing districts are flatly rejecting the White House’s position that there be no negotiations with Congress over raising the national debt ceiling, insisting that they won’t bend to the Democrats’ take-it-or-leave-it approach to avoid the first-ever debt default with no conditions attached.

Yeah, that Joe Biden, with his my way or the highway to … not defaulting on the debt. You maniac! You won’t blow it up! Ahh…damn you! God damn you all to Hell!

So is there a deal in the offing? Heck, June is like a million years from now. That cliff isn’t anywhere near us. Still plenty of time to fix this.

[AP / CNBC]

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McCarthy to try again for House speaker, with Trump backing

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House Republicans will open the second day of the new Congress much like the first — with leader Kevin McCarthy trying to become House speaker despite losing in multiple rounds of voting that threw the new GOP majority into chaos.

It was the first time in 100 years that a nominee for House speaker could not take the gavel on the first vote, but Mr. McCarthy appeared undeterred by the gravity of the moment. Instead, he vowed to fight to the finish, encouraged, he said, by former President Donald Trump to end the disarray and pull the Republican Party together.

The House is scheduled to convene Wednesday after the stalemate essentially forced all other business to a standstill, waiting on Republicans to elect a speaker.

“Today, is that the day I wanted to have? No,” Mr. McCarthy told reporters late Tuesday at the Capitol after a series of closed-door meetings.

Mr. McCarthy said Mr. Trump wants him to stay in the race and told him to bring an end to the House Republican chaos and pull the party together.

The former president “wants to see the Republicans united to be able to accomplish the exact things we said we’d do,” Mr. McCarthy said.

Asked if he would drop out, Mr. McCarthy said, “It’s not going to happen.”

It was a tumultuous start to the new Congress and pointed to difficulties ahead with Republicans now in control of the House.

Tensions flared among the new House majority as their campaign promises stalled out. Without a speaker, the House cannot fully form — swearing in its members, naming its committee chairmen, engaging in floor proceedings and launching investigations of the Biden administration. Lawmakers’ families had waited around, as what’s normally a festive day descended into chaos, with kids playing in the aisles or squirming in parents’ arms.

But it was not at all clear how the embattled GOP leader could rebound to win over right-flank conservatives who reject his leadership. It typically takes a majority of the House to become speaker, 218 votes — though the threshold can drop if members are absent or merely vote present, an strategy Mr. McCarthy appeared to be considering.

Mr. McCarthy won no more than 203 votes in three rounds of voting, losing as many as 20 Republicans from his slim 222-seat majority. Not since 1923 has a speaker’s election gone to multiple ballots, and the longest and most grueling fight for the gavel started in 1855 lasting two months and 133 ballots during debates over slavery in the run-up to the Civil War.

“Kevin McCarthy is not going to be a speaker,” declared Rep. Bob Good, R-Va., one of the holdouts.

A new generation of conservative Republicans, many aligned with Mr. Trump’s Make America Great Again agenda, want to upend business as usual in Washington, and were committed to stopping Mr. McCarthy’s rise without concessions to their priorities.

In many ways, the challenge from the far-right was reminiscent of the last time Republicans seized power in the House, when tea party Republicans brought hardball politics and shutdown government after winning control in the 2010 midterm elections.

As the spectacle of voting dragged on, Mr. McCarthy’s backers implored the holdouts to fall in line for the California Republican.

“We all came here to get things done,” the second-ranking Republican, Rep. Steve Scalise, said in a speech nominating Mr. McCarthy for the vote and urging his colleagues to drop their protest.

Railing against Democratic President Joe Biden’s agenda, Scalise, himself a possible GOP compromise choice, said, “We can’t start fixing those problems until we elect Kevin McCarthy our next speaker.”

But the holdouts forced a third and final round of voting before Republican leaders quickly adjourned Tuesday evening.

“The American people are watching, and it’s a good thing,” said Rep. Chip Roy, R-Texas, who nominated fellow conservative Rep. Jim Jordan of Ohio as an alternative for speaker.

Mr. Jordan, the Mr. McCarthy rival-turned-ally, was twice pushed forward by conservatives, but he does not seem to want the job. The Ohio Republican is line to become Judiciary Committee chairman, and he rose during the floor debate to urge his colleagues to instead vote for Mr. McCarthy.

“We have to rally around him, come together,” Mr. Jordan said.

In all, a core group of 19 Republicans — and then 20 — voted for someone other than Mr. McCarthy. The first ballot sent votes to Rep. Andy Biggs of Arizona, Mr. Jordan and others, while Mr. Jordan alone won the votes on the next two ballots.

The standoff over Mr. McCarthy has been building since Republicans appeared on track to win the House majority in the midterm elections in November. While the Senate remains in Democratic hands, barely, House Republicans are eager to confront Biden after two years of the Democrats controlling both houses of Congress. The conservative Freedom Caucus led the opposition to Mr. McCarthy, believing he’s neither conservative enough nor tough enough to battle Democrats.

To win support, Mr. McCarthy has already agreed to many of the demands of the Freedom Caucus, who have been agitating for rules changes and other concessions that give rank-and=file more influence in the legislative process. He has been here before, having bowed out of the speakers race in 2015 when he failed to win over conservatives.

Late Tuesday, pizza, Chick-fil-A and tacos were carried into various meeting rooms at the Capitol after the failed votes as Mr. McCarthy supporters and detractors hunkered down to figure out how to elect a speaker.

“Everything’s on the table,” said Mr. McCarthy ally Rep. Patrick McHenry, R-N.C. — expect, he said, having the leader step aside. “Not at all. That is not on the table.” Rep. Scott Perry, R-Pa., the chairman of the Freedom Caucus and a leader of Mr. Trump’s effort to challenge the 2020 presidential election had said earlier it was up to McCarthy to meet their demands and change the dynamic.

Democrats enthusiastically nominated Hakeem Jeffries, who is taking over as party leader, as their choice for speaker — a typically symbolic gesture for the minority but one that took on new importance with Republicans at odds with each other.

While Mr. Jeffries won the most votes overall, 212, it was not the majority to become speaker.

Mr. McCarthy focused on Mr. Jeffries’ total late Tuesday, saying if he could win 213 votes, he would have the majority, so long as others were absent or simply voted present.

It’s a strategy former House speakers, including outgoing Democratic Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Republican Speaker John Boehner had used when they confronted opposition, winning the gavel with fewer than 218 votes.

Mr. McCarthy said late Tuesday at the Capitol: “You get 213 votes, and the others don’t say another name, that’s how you can win.”

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