Jeff Danziger lives in New York City. He is represented by CWS Syndicate and the Washington Post Writers Group. He is the recipient of the Herblock Prize and the Thomas Nast (Landau) Prize. He served in the US Army in Vietnam and was awarded the Bronze Star and the Air Medal. He has published eleven books of cartoons and one novel. Visit him at DanzigerCartoons.com.
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Gov. Ron DeSantis
By James Oliphant
WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Florida Governor Ron DeSantis said on Tuesday he was proud to have signed a six-week abortion ban, after seeming initially reluctant to embrace the recently passed law in Florida that outlaws almost all abortions in the state.
As DeSantis prepares to formally announce a 2024 White House run in the coming weeks, he is increasingly trumpeting the measure to help him draw more of a contrast with former President Donald Trump, the front-runner for the Republican presidential nomination.
At a news conference on Tuesday, DeSantis said he was “proud” to have signed the legislation and fired back at Trump, who suggested in an interview this week that the six-week ban is overly restrictive.
“He will not answer whether he would sign it or not,” said DeSantis, who is a leading contender for the Republican nomination. The nominee will take on President Joe Biden, a Democrat, in next year’s general election.
In an interview with online news site the Messenger posted on Monday, Trump said, “If you look at what DeSantis did, a lot of people don’t even know if he knew what he was doing. But he signed six weeks, and many people within the pro-life movement feel that was too harsh.”
DeSantis seized upon that at his news conference.
“Protecting an unborn child when there’s the detectable heartbeat is something that almost, probably, 99% of pro-lifers support,” he said.
He cited a similar law in Iowa, which will hold the first Republican presidential nominating contest early next year and is a state with a large bloc of evangelical voters.
Bob Vander Plaats, a leading evangelical advocate in Iowa, criticized Trump’s remarks on Twitter.
“No, Mr. President, many in the #ProLife community do not believe saving babies is too harsh,” Vander Plaats wrote.
He praised DeSantis for “leading on life” and in a later tweet, contended the Iowa nominating contest, known as the Iowa caucuses, is now “wide open.”
During the recent Florida legislative session, DeSantis did not expressly advocate for the six-week abortion ban, and he signed it last month without fanfare to replace what had been a 15-week ban. In speeches afterward, he largely avoided highlighting it.
While DeSantis’ abortion stance could help garner him votes among hard-right conservatives, some Republican donors have expressed unease with his position.
In an interview with Reuters last week, Republican donor Andy Sabin said he could not support DeSantis after he signed the abortion law.
(Reporting by James Oliphant in Washington; Additional reporting by Rich McKay in Atlanta; Editing by Ross Colvin and Matthew Lewis)
Former U.S. Attorney John Durham was appointed as Special Counsel by Donald Trump’s pet Attorney General William Barr in 2019 to investigate the investigators — that is, to look into how another Special Counsel, Robert Mueller, handled his investigation into the contacts between the Trump campaign and Russia in the 2016 election.
Almost four years to the day later, Durham has presented his report, which has failed to enlarge upon the findings of another investigation by the Department of Justice Inspector General which looked into the same stuff and found no “documentary or testimonial evidence of intentional misconduct" by either the FBI or Mueller.
In other words, Durham’s report amounts to a Barr-and-Trump-infected rewrite of the Inspector General’s report which found no significant wrongdoing.
You want to talk about putting his thumb on the scale of justice? At the time Durham was appointed, Donald Trump predicted that he would turn up evidence of “the crime of the century.” Durham ended up finding just three people to indict. Federal juries returned not guilty verdicts in two cases after very brief deliberations. At least one juror gave an interview to the press saying essentially that the whole case was a waste of time.
The third person indicted by Durham was a former FBI lawyer. He pleaded guilty to the great big gigantic earthshaking crime of having changed a couple of lines in an email he wrote to help an FBI agent prepare an application for a warrant to surveil Carter Page, a Trump aide who traveled back and forth to Russia several times while he worked on the Trump campaign. So we can look forward to mega-bleating from the flock of Trumpazoid sheep who have been holding candles outside Mar-a-Lago as they waited for Durham’s big expose to be handed down.
Well, pals, the wait is over. The Washington Post reported that Durham “argued that the FBI rushed to investigate Trump in a case known as Crossfire Hurricane, even as it proceeded cautiously on allegations related to then-Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton.” Whoopdedoo. The Post doesn’t mention it, but the big investigation of Hillary Clinton that the FBI carried out during her campaign for president found that she did exactly nothing wrong — other than have the temerity to run for president against Donald Trump.
Recall that former FBI Director James Comey made not one but two announcements that the FBI was investigating Clinton before announcing a few days before the election that they had come up with nothing. Meanwhile, Roger Stone was coordinating with Wikileaks and a Russian intelligence agent who called himself Guccifer II to release a stash of Democratic Party emails that had been stolen from a Democratic Party server by Russian intelligence agents. Donald Trump mentioned "Hillary’s emails” more than 200 times at his rallies during the campaign, and that was after he said this: “Russia: If you’re listening, I hope you’re able to find the 30,000 emails that are missing,” referring to the Clinton emails he harped on at every campaign stop. “I think you will probably be rewarded mightily by our press.”
So just sit back and think about this for a moment: Seven years after the 2016 election, six years after Mueller was appointed to investigate Russia’s interference with the election, and four years after John Durham was appointed to investigate the investigators, “Russia-Russia-Russia” isn’t over. Durham’s investigation has turned into the Warren Commission of Russia’s involvement in the 2016 election, and 20 years from now, some of those same Trumpazoid sheep will still be digging through the Durham report looking for something they can point to and say, “See! I told you there was gold in them thar hills!”
Something tells me this is going to be a very long century.
Lucian K. Truscott IV, a graduate of West Point, has had a 50-year career as a journalist, novelist, and screenwriter. He has covered Watergate, the Stonewall riots, and wars in Lebanon, Iraq, and Afghanistan. He is also the author of five bestselling novels. You can subscribe to his daily columns at luciantruscott.substack.com and follow him on Twitter @LucianKTruscott and on Facebook at Lucian K. Truscott IV.
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