Tag: benghazi
House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy

McCarthy Threatens Any GOP Member Who Joins Jan. 6 Select Committee

Reprinted with permission from American Independent

The website Punchbowl News reported Thursday that House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy has warned a group of freshmen Republican lawmakers that if they accept an appointment from House Speaker Nancy Pelosi to serve on the select committee to investigate the January 6 insurrection at the U.S. Capitol, they would have to get any committee assignments from her.

McCarthy's threat came the same day the House passed a resolution creating the select committee to investigate the riot by supporters of former President Donald Trump.

Democrats moved to create the committee after Republicans blocked an independent and bipartisan commission to look into the causes of the attack and come up with recommendations on how to prevent similar attacks in the future.

Just two Republicans, Reps. Liz Cheney of Wyoming and Adam Kinzinger of Illinois, voted in favor of the resolution on creating the select committee. The rest of the GOP caucus voted against it, with 19 Republican lawmakers not voting at all. Some, including Reps. Ronny Jackson (R-TX), Jodey Arrington (R-TX), Jim Banks (R-IN), and Austin Pfluger (R-TX), were on a trip to the border to get a photo-op with Trump.

Pelosi has said that she will give one of her eight spots on the committee to a Republican lawmaker, and reserved the right to refuse to seat members McCarthy recommends if those lawmakers had voted against certifying Joe Biden's 2020 presidential election victory in the Electoral College during a session that was underway when the rioters broke into the Capitol building.

It's unclear whether any Republicans aside from Kinzinger or Cheney would accept Pelosi's appointment. Some Republican House members have said the creation of the select committee is overly partisan, even though it is the same procedure used to create the select committee demanded by House Republicans to probe the 2012 terror attack at the American consulate in Benghazi, Libya.

The language in the resolutions creating the select committees is virtually identical. The only difference is that the January 6 select committee will have one more member.

If McCarthy did strip a GOP lawmaker of their committee assignments for accepting Pelosi's appointment, it would be a harsher punishment than he's given to members of his caucus whose behavior and rhetoric has been criticized as threatening or violent.

McCarthy refused to punish Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA) for making anti-Semitic comments, menacing teenage survivors of mass shootings, pushing dangerous conspiracy theories, and promoting posts on social media that called for violence against Democratic lawmakers.

He has not punished Rep. Paul Gosar (R-AZ), who has spoken to white supremacist groups and was set to have a fundraiser with Holocaust denier and white supremacist Nick Fuentes.

To date, the harshest punishment McCarthy has supported during the current Congress was stripping Cheney of her leadership role in the House Republican caucus for criticizing Trump and supporting an investigation into the violent insurrection he helped incite.

Published with permission of The American Independent Foundation.

Mark Meadows

White House Chief Of Staff Loved Oversight, Until Trump Hired Him

White House chief of staff Mark Meadows is reportedly blocking Trump administration officials from testifying before Congress. But during his tenure as a Republican member of the House of Representatives, he tried to impeach people who stood in the way of congressional oversight.

Politicoreported on Sunday that Meadows has implemented a requirement that everyone in the administration must get his permission before they can testify before Congress.

Read NowShow less
Does Hillary Owe Us An Apology? Or Does The Media Owe Her One?

Does Hillary Owe Us An Apology? Or Does The Media Owe Her One?

Way back in April, 1994 Hillary Rodham Clinton held a press conference concerning Whitewater, the granddaddy of all phony Clinton scandals. Pressed about whether she and her husband should have known that their Ozarks real estate partnership was doing badly and paid off its loans, she responded flippantly.

“Shoulda, coulda, woulda,” she said. “We didn’t.”

Editorialists pronounced themselves offended. She was even dubbed a “congenital liar,” although the facts eventually showed that the Clintons’ partner Jim McDougal had actively deceived them about their investment. But you never saw a straightforward account in the scandal-mongering press. That would have spoiled the fun.

From Whitewater through Benghazi, the Clinton Foundation and her accursed emails, it became a familiar pattern. Hillary Clinton was arrogant, corrupt, deceptive—essentially a brass-plated bitch. Each time the actual evidence revealed no real crime, her detractors simply moved on to the next damned thing. It was like something out of Lord of the Flies.

“Lock her up,” crowds chanted, although that was never going to happen.

Sorry to say, but among Hillary’s most ardent detractors were certain of the MSNBC All-Stars and New York Times columnists currently rending their garments over the misbegotten presidency of Donald Trump. I’ve yet to notice even one acknowledge his or her role in the ritual stoning.

In 2015, both the Timesand Washington Post cut deals with Peter Schweitzer, author of Clinton Cash, a murky expose of imagined corruption at the Clinton Foundation. Schweitzer basically proved that to raise billions for health care in Africa, it’s necessary to pal around with rich people. Not that Bill and Hillary ever minded. Schweitzer’s book was financed by a foundation run by one Stephen K. Bannon—a fellow recently in the news.

To summarize, a recent report from Harvard’s Shorenstein Center documented that  Clinton scandals drew “sixteen times the amount of news coverage given to [Hillary’s] most heavily covered policy position.” Her emails alone drew four times more negative coverage than the old P***y Grabber’s treatment of women.

On the day FBI director James Comey released his ill-advised, ultimately withdrawn letter hinting at previously undiscovered emails, the Timesentire front page above the fold was devoted to the story. Sample headline: “With 11 Days to Go, Trump Says Revelation Changes Everything.”

As, indeed, it did. Absolutely did the bitch in. Anybody who denies Comey’s intervention settled the election can’t have looked at the data.

Fat lot of good it did him.

So anyway, there was Hillary last week giving us the shoulda, coulda, woulda version of her 2016 election loss. Given that any baseball fan can name pitchers who never got over surrendering dramatic home runs, maybe her contrition shouldn’t be surprising.

Nevertheless, I found it so.

  “Every day that I was a candidate for president,” she wrote, “I knew that millions of people were counting on me, and I couldn’t bear the idea of letting them down—but I did. I couldn’t get the job done, and I’ll have to live with that for the rest of my life.”

But what really eats at Hillary is her failure to confront the Bully-in-Chief when she had the chance. In a recorded excerpt on “Morning Joe,” she remembers thinking “This is not O.K….It was the second presidential debate, and Donald Trump was looming behind me. Two days before, the world heard him brag about groping women. Now we were on a small stage and no matter where I walked, he followed me closely, staring at me, making faces. It was incredibly uncomfortable. He was literally breathing down my neck. My skin crawled.”

Indeed, replays show the big galoot lurching around the stage like the villain in a teen slasher film. All he lacked was a pair of overalls and a chainsaw. Hillary recalls asking herself what to do:

“Do you stay calm, keep smiling and carry on as if he weren’t repeatedly invading your space?” she said. “Or do you turn, look him in the eye, and say loudly and clearly: ‘Back up, you creep, get away from me! I know you love to intimidate women, but you can’t intimidate me, so back up.’ ”

“I chose option A. I kept my cool, aided by a lifetime of difficult men trying to throw me off. I did, however, grip the microphone extra hard. I wonder, though, whether I should have chosen option B. It certainly would have been better TV. Maybe I have overlearned the lesson of staying calm, biting my tongue, digging my fingernails into a clenched fist, smiling all the while, determined to present a composed face to the world.”

Better TV maybe, but Option B risked disaster. A classic New York blowhard surrounded by bodyguards all his life, Trump revels in name-calling contests. There are no depths to which he won’t sink.

But then I don’t think Hillary Clinton owes me an apology at all.

#EndorseThis: Seth Meyers Surveys Trump Chaos, From Capitol Hill To Mar A Lago

#EndorseThis: Seth Meyers Surveys Trump Chaos, From Capitol Hill To Mar A Lago

To Seth Meyers, the ongoing chaos in the Trump White House — and what the president preciously calls “the southern White House,” meaning Mar a Lago — is fascinating. He talks about meetings that never happen, he behaves like a dejected schoolboy with the German chancellor. But with FBI director James Comey’s confirmation in Congress that his agency is investigating collusion between Trump staffers and the Kremlin during the 2016 presidential campaign, it all just got a lot worse.

Taking “a closer look” at that hearing, the Late Night host is bemused by the behavior of the House Republicans, who were keen to discuss anything but the bombshell Comey laid before them.

So committee chair Devin Nunes (R-CA) asked whether the Russians had somehow changed vote tallies in specific states — Michigan, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, Florida, North Carolina, or Ohio — an allegation that nobody has ever made. (Comey said no.) Trey Gowdy (R-SC), whose Benghazi special committee leaked continuously to the press for partisan purposes, wanted to know whether the FBI is investigating leaks that have embarrassed the White House. And in his usual manner, Gowdy insinuated without evidence that the leakers were Obama administration officials, including the former president himself.

As always, Meyers adeptly highlights the low mental acuity of the nation’s elected representatives. Even he was surprised by the question framed by Rep. Mike Conaway (R-TX), who came up with a special subject to waste Comey’s time.

Just click.