Republican political scandals, not involving Trump

To post in this sub-forum you must have made 100 posts or have Trust status or have completed our ID Verification

Forums › Politics › Republican political scandals, not involving Trump

1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5

kingdragonfly

11992 posts

Uber Geek
+1 received by user: 12887

Subscriber

#2293142 9-Aug-2019 18:27

United States Republican Senator and Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell booed at Kentucky event over election security

NowThis News

‘Moscow Mitch! Moscow Mitch! Moscow Mitch!’ — Protesters booed and jeered Mitch McConnell in Kentucky for his lack of action against Russia’s election meddling.

kingdragonfly

11992 posts

Uber Geek
+1 received by user: 12887

Subscriber

#2295030 12-Aug-2019 19:12

The Late Show with Stephen Colbert

There Was A Turtle By The Name Of Mitch
And the N.R.A. kept him very rich.
When gun control legislation was pitched, he knew just what to do....

Fred99

13684 posts

Uber Geek
+1 received by user: 10018

#2299601 15-Aug-2019 09:42

U.S. Rep. *Steve King told the Westside Conservative Club on Wednesday that humanity might not exist if not for rape and incest throughout human history.

What if we went back through all the family trees and just pulled those people out that were products of rape and incest? Would there be any population of the world left if we did that?" he said at in Urbandale, Iowa. "Considering all the wars and all the rapes and pillages taken place and whatever happened to culture after society? I know I can't certify that I'm not a part of a product of that.

* campaigns for outlawing abortion - including banning abortion for pregnancies as a result of incest and statutory rape (ie pregnant children).

What a human being! Supported by conservatives in his electorate in Iowa. Life goal - to become a Commander in the Republic of Gilead and to remain a great friend of the US Commander in Chief.

Rikkitic

Awrrr
19071 posts

Uber Geek
+1 received by user: 16318

Lifetime subscriber

#2299733 15-Aug-2019 12:25

Fred99:

U.S. Rep. *Steve King told the Westside Conservative Club on Wednesday that humanity might not exist if not for rape and incest throughout human history.

"Considering all the wars and all the rapes and pillages taken place and whatever happened to culture after society? I know I can't certify that I'm not a part of a product of that."

I would speculate that Steve King might be the product of rather a lot of incest.

Plesse igmore amd axxept applogies in adbance fir anu typos

kingdragonfly

11992 posts

Uber Geek
+1 received by user: 12887

Subscriber

#2300527 16-Aug-2019 17:25

Did a Far-Right Star Recruit Jacob Wohl to Terrorize Women?

Daily Beast, by Will Sommer

“I’ll make it my mission to torture you so much that you end up killing yourself,” reads a text message from a phone number belonging to notorious smear merchant Jacob Wohl.

A perennial House Republican candidate’s alleged harassment of his ex-girlfriend has gone so far that he apparently hired notorious conservative operative Jacob Wohl to pressure her and a former campaign worker, according to text messages and a recording reviewed by The Daily Beast.

Wohl is best known for his blundering, often comical attempts at political trickery, including failed schemes to concoct bogus sexual-assault allegations against former Special Counsel Robert Mueller and presidential hopeful Pete Buttigieg. But text messages from a phone number belonging to Wohl suggest that the 21-year-old hoaxer has branched out into making death threats on behalf of his political allies, telling one woman he would “torture you so much that you end up killing yourself.”

Aug. 1 was a big day for both allies and former friends of Omar Navarro, a Republican known for his perennial failed campaigns against Donald Trump nemesis Rep. Maxine Waters (D-CA). Those runs had earned him more than $1 million in campaign donations in his 2018 run, and high-powered endorsements from Trumpworld stalwarts like Herman Cain, Ret. Lt. Gen. Michael Flynn, and game-show host Chuck Woolery. But suddenly his career as a conservative cause célèbre was at risk.

Navarro was due in court in Torrance, California, that day. A judge was due to decide whether his ex-girlfriend—self-styled MAGA relationship expert DeAnna Lorraine Tesoriero—would be granted a restraining order against him after enduring what she describes as months of harassment since dumping him in April.

A restraining order could be disastrous for both Navarro’s fundraising and his already dim electoral chances—he lost his last two races against Waters by more than 50 percentage points. It also wouldn’t be the first time Navarro has been in court on a domestic issue: He was convicted in 2016 of putting an illegal tracking device on his wife’s car.

Making matters worse, former Navarro campaign worker Irina Chausovskaya had had a falling out with the candidate. She claimed to have secretly obtained recordings of the candidate making crude sexual comments about Waters and planning to invest into bitcoin the campaign funds he received from conservative donors across the country. And Chausovskaya and Tesoriero knew one another, raising the prospect of two damaging stories for Navarro’s career as a perennial candidate breaking at the same time.

Shortly before Tesoriero’s court hearing, Chausovskaya received text messages from a number with a 949 area code in Orange County. Whoever was behind the number wanted to know whether Chausovskaya would be at the hearing.

“Don’t worry, I’ll see you soon,” the text message read. “It won’t be painful. I’m looking forward to watching your soul leave your eyes.”

“I’ll make it my mission to torture you so much that you end up killing yourself,” the writer of the messages added.

The text messages were just the latest in a series of threatening text and WhatsApp messages that Chausovskaya and Tesoriero claim to have received over months since angering Navarro.

Usually, the messages came from numbers they had never seen before, sometimes with fake names attached. This time, though, there was a clue as to who was behind the latest round of texts.

A search in the TrueCaller app, which collects phone data from users and phone directories, showed the 949 number was associated with Jacob Wohl. The Daily Beast was able to independently confirm the connection. Calls to the 949 number Wohl has used before that threatened to “torture” Chausovskaya weren’t answered. But the evidence of Wohl’s involvement matched what Tesoriero says she heard from Navarro campaign worker Sean Daniel.

In a recording reviewed by The Daily Beast, a man Tesoriero identifies as Daniel tells her that he had talked to Navarro, who had told Daniel he would hire Wohl for $5,000 to “do something against your career” if she succeeded in getting the restraining order granted.

“He’s going to investigate and spend money with Jacob Wohl, to have you like get obliterated, because he’s gonna be so pissed because his political career, he said, is gonna be over, if he gets another restraining order,” the man in the recording said. “That’s what he told me.”

Daniel, who has been paid $11,665.68 this year by Navarro’s campaign for digital marketing services, didn’t respond to requests for comment.

In the recording, the man says that Navarro said he would use campaign money to hire Wohl.

“He raised a lot of money last quarter,” the man in the recording said. “He says he’s got a lot of money to be able to have people go after you.”

There’s no question that Wohl and Navarro know each other. In May, Wohl posted a picture of himself meeting with Navarro in the lobby of the Trump International Hotel in Washington on Instagram.

In an Instagram direct message to The Daily Beast, Wohl denied being “privy to anything regarding any congressional candidate’s personal life.” Navarro denied hiring Wohl, and said any text messages provided to The Daily Beast or used in Tesoriero’s application for a restraining order were “total fake news.” But the judge found Tesoriero credible and granted her a five-year restraining order against Navarro—the longest option available in California.

“What happened in court was not justice,” Navarro said. “It was basically a judge going off of someone crying in a courtroom.”

Navarro’s political career, such as it is, has grown alongside Waters’ profile as a Trump antagonist. Navarro raised less than $3,000 in his 2016 run against Waters, and lost in a landslide.

He also went down in defeat in 2018—but in the lead-up to that race, Waters had become a top enemy for Trump supporters, and Navarro’s campaign treasury was filled with donations from Republicans eager to see her out of Congress. Navarro raised more than $1.1 million in the 2018 cycle—$24,583.04 of which he paid to himself as a salary, an unusual but not unprecedented move for a congressional candidate.

“It’s a cash cow, and they don’t want the cash cow to end,” Chausovskaya said.

Navarro’s reputation in the world of right-wing internet personalities began to wane earlier this year, however, when he allegedly began harassing Tesoriero. Navarro had begun going out with Tesoriero, the author of Trump-themed dating guide Making Love Great Again!, earlier this year, while he was still divorcing his wife. By April, though, Tesoriero told him they were done. He didn’t take it well, according to an application for a restraining order that Tesoriero filed in July.

“Omar became very jealous and became obsessed with accusing me of having other romantic relationships,” Tesoriero wrote in the application.

Tesoriero’s court filing includes a lengthy list of times Navarro allegedly harassed her after she dumped him, including confronting her at Georgetown’s tony Cafe Milano and following her around the lobby at the Trump International Hotel in Washington in May. As Tesoriero left the hotel with her friends, she claims Navarro followed behind her, yelling, “That’s my girlfriend!”

Later that day, Tesoriero says she was deluged with text messages calling her a slut and a wh0re.

Tesoriero says Navarro threatened to release details about their sex lives and put out other damaging information about her if she wouldn’t get back together with him. She claims she was forced to stay in contact with him for fear that he would attack her on his Twitter account, which has more than 200,000 followers.
...

kingdragonfly

11992 posts

Uber Geek
+1 received by user: 12887

Subscriber

#2313025 8-Sep-2019 14:32

The Republicans Are Dropping Like Flies

What do retiring members of Congress know that President Trump doesn’t?

New York Times By Frank Bruni

...We talk and write all the time about the Never Trumpers: those previously stalwart Republicans who cringed at Trump’s entry into the presidential race; grew increasingly apoplectic as he raged on; began to live, courtesy of him, in an unwavering state of unalloyed outrage; and scaled new media and sometimes financial heights as party turncoats, their antipathy toward the president more titillating and telegenic by dint of their loyalty to Republicans before him.

But they’re not the best gauges of his and the party’s political fortunes. Their estrangement and emotional pitch have been changeless.

The more interesting and maybe predictive group are the Republicans who, to varying degrees, tried to make do with Trump, found ways to rationalize him and still won’t acknowledge how offensive he is but have fled or are fleeing government nonetheless. He made their participation in political life joyless. He so thoroughly befouled their party’s image that they reek by association. And, thanks largely if not entirely to him, many of them faced or face punishment at the polls.
...
Republicans in Congress, especially in the House are making their predictions with their feet, and they’re heading for the exit.
...
To recap: Before the 2018 midterms, 46 Republicans but only 20 Democrats decided not to seek re-election to their offices in Congress, and among those, 32 Republicans and 11 Democrats weren’t doing that in order to run for some higher, different post. They were just bolting. The discrepancy between the Republican and Democratic numbers amounted to a weather forecast — and an accurate one at that. Although Democrats didn’t improve their standing in the Senate, they picked up a whopping 40 seats in the House.

Heading into the 2020 election, 19 Republicans in Congress have already announced that they won’t seek another term in their current office, a number higher than at the same point two years ago. Of the 19, 17 aren’t retiring from Congress to pursue some kind of political promotion. Meanwhile, only four Democrats in all are retiring from Congress. To analyze these numbers in the context of what happened in the midterms is to conclude that Republicans are limping toward a disastrous Election Day.
...
“Most often I’m asked why so many Republicans aren’t running for re-election,” Dave Wasserman, who analyzes House races for the nonpartisan Cook Political Report, told me. “But I ask why so many are. This isn’t the cruise they signed up for.” He noted that up until a few months before Trump effectively secured the Republican nomination in 2016, not a single Republican in Congress had endorsed him. The first two House members who took that icy plunge — Chris Collins of New York and Duncan Hunter of California — are now under criminal indictment (though not for anything having to do with Trump).

Both before the midterms and now, Republicans are leaving Congress for all sorts of reasons. But they outnumber Democrats on the way out because, generally speaking, they assume that Republicans will remain in the House minority and they’re exhausted by the tandem experiences of powerlessness and answering for Trump’s chaos and cruelties.
...
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/09/07/opinion/sunday/republican-party-2020.html

kingdragonfly

11992 posts

Uber Geek
+1 received by user: 12887

Subscriber

#2322744 22-Sep-2019 16:57

Beating Trump Is Almost Meaningless Without Reforming Mitch McConnell’s Senate

Adam Jentleson on how McConnell remade the Senate into a minority-rule institution by abusing a once-obscure procedural rule—and how to restore its integrity.

By Adam Jentleson

...If Democrats beat Trump in the next election, they’ll find Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell lurking in the background, ready to turn their promises of change into gridlock that depresses their voters, feeds the alienation of our era, and paves the way to the White House for a more polished Trump, someone who can marshal the same malevolent forces with fewer rough edges.

Even if 2020 brings a blue tsunami that sweeps away McConnell himself, his strategy of obstruction will survive to paralyze a new Democratic administration, just like it did President Barack Obama. Beating Trump won’t be enough, regardless of the size of the victory. To deliver on their promises, Democrats need to both take back the Senate and reform it to prevent Republicans from wielding a slim minority to gridlock the entire government.

...The simple reality is that to get anything done, Democrats will need to reform the Senate to end the ability of the party out of power to force everything—from routine business to major legislation—to secure 60 votes in order to clear a once-obscure procedural hurdle.

This is the tool McConnell wielded against Obama as a weapon of mass obstruction. He calculated that Republicans could obstruct relentlessly, play on the media’s “both sides” instincts to defray blame, and then be rewarded when the public blamed the party in power for gridlock. To that end, McConnell obliterated all records for deploying the 60-vote threshold, using it as many times in Obama’s first term as in the previous 20 years combined.
...

https://www.gq.com/story/senate-reform-necessity

kingdragonfly

11992 posts

Uber Geek
+1 received by user: 12887

Subscriber

#2327471 1-Oct-2019 09:55

Over a year later, this Republican finally resigns

New York Congressman Chris Collins Is Charged With Insider Trading

New York Times, By Alan Feuer and Shane Goldmacher

Representative Chris Collins was at the Congressional Picnic on the South Lawn of the White House last summer when he received an unexpected email from the head of a drug company in which he was heavily invested. The company’s only product — an experimental treatment for multiple sclerosis — had just failed a do-or-die scientific trial.

What Mr. Collins did next, apparently in a state of panic, forms the core of a federal indictment unsealed on Wednesday in New York that accuses him of insider trading and lying to federal agents. Federal prosecutors charged Mr. Collins with brazenly using his private information about the company to help his son and others avoid financial disaster.

The charges against Mr. Collins, a New York Republican who was one of President Trump’s earliest and most ardent supporters, stem from his involvement with Innate Immunotherapeutics Limited, a small drug maker based in Australia, which had no approved drugs but several well-placed allies in the capital.

Within minutes of learning about the company’s unsuccessful test, Mr. Collins frantically called his son, Cameron Collins, who, in the days that followed, sold off his stock, avoiding losses of more than $570,000, prosecutors said.

Brought to court by the United States attorney’s office in Manhattan, the indictment cast what could be a long shadow in the House. At least five Republican lawmakers were shareholders in Innate Immunotherapeutics at the time of the Collins family’s sell-off, according to financial disclosures.
...

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/08/08/nyregion/chris-collins-insider-trading.html

kingdragonfly

11992 posts

Uber Geek
+1 received by user: 12887

Subscriber

#2337537 15-Oct-2019 17:18

Prank with Senator Lindsey Graham

Russian pranksters Valdimir Kznetsov and Alexey Stolarov held two conversations with Republican Senator Lindsay Graham on the topic of sanctions against Turkey for the purchase of Russian long-range, surface-to-air S-400 missiles.

The pranksters pretended to be the Turkish defence minister. After the first conversation, the Senator went to discuss this topic with Trump. Lindsey Graham reported the results of the conisation with Trump.

Rikkitic

Awrrr
19071 posts

Uber Geek
+1 received by user: 16318

Lifetime subscriber

#2414760 8-Feb-2020 22:16

A state legislator in Montana has said that the Constitution requires that socialists be shot. Even other Republicans have condemned him for this remark, but it belies a dangerous mindset now legitimised by Trump. I am old enough to remember when Americans thought communists were the pinnacle of evil and lurked under everyone's beds. I am not old enough to remember McCarthyism, but I sure know the history and this is exactly the same kind of thing. Single out a group of people for their ideas, claim they want to undermine our way of life, use that as an excuse to subject them to any form of punishment up to and including death. In McCarthy's time the buzzword was communists in government trying to subvert the country. Now it is socialists, presumably aimed at Bernie Sanders. I doubt the idiot who is saying this has any idea what a socialist is, but he is an elected representative and he is calling for their death, citing the Constitution as his authority. That, of course, is also nonsense. I doubt he has even bothered to read the Constitution. He certainly doesn't understand it.

This is the beginning of a trend. Find scapegoats and pin catchy labels on them, blame them for whatever is wrong, demand increasingly extreme punishments. If Trump is re-elected, democracy will be dead in America. It may not last even that long. We will now start to see increasing calls of this nature, and pretty soon Republicans will no longer denounce them. Tyranny is on the march and it may already be too late.

Plesse igmore amd axxept applogies in adbance fir anu typos

gzt

18689 posts

Uber Geek
+1 received by user: 7827

Lifetime subscriber

#2414771 8-Feb-2020 23:23

Rikkitic: A state legislator in Montana has said that the Constitution requires that socialists be shot.

Australia had it's own outbreak resulting from bats in proximity to horses in proximity to humans. Even Australia has more efficient and effective medical care than America. Australia must be a socialist country. It's totally logical.

linw

2893 posts

Uber Geek
+1 received by user: 1205

#2414819 9-Feb-2020 05:51

Rikkitic:

A state legislator in Montana has said that the Constitution requires that socialists be shot. Even other Republicans have condemned him for this remark, but it belies a dangerous mindset now legitimised by Trump. I am old enough to remember when Americans thought communists were the pinnacle of evil and lurked under everyone's beds. I am not old enough to remember McCarthyism, but I sure know the history and this is exactly the same kind of thing. Single out a group of people for their ideas, claim they want to undermine our way of life, use that as an excuse to subject them to any form of punishment up to and including death. In McCarthy's time the buzzword was communists in government trying to subvert the country. Now it is socialists, presumably aimed at Bernie Sanders. I doubt the idiot who is saying this has any idea what a socialist is, but he is an elected representative and he is calling for their death, citing the Constitution as his authority. That, of course, is also nonsense. I doubt he has even bothered to read the Constitution. He certainly doesn't understand it.

This is the beginning of a trend. Find scapegoats and pin catchy labels on them, blame them for whatever is wrong, demand increasingly extreme punishments. If Trump is re-elected, democracy will be dead in America. It may not last even that long. We will now start to see increasing calls of this nature, and pretty soon Republicans will no longer denounce them. Tyranny is on the march and it may already be too late.

Salem, anyone?

1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5