This is, well, too full of smiles to adequately describe. Florida Congressman Matt Gaetz delivered a resoundingly honest speech to the Republican attendees at the Florida Freedom Summit on Saturday. It is well worth the time to watch, as prompted.
Look, I’m still on the fence with this guy, but his brutal confrontation of the GOPe is some of the funniest and best components of the BIG UGLY so far. The guy has been put through the wringer, hit from every angle, ridiculed by both the left and right, and yet he’s standing there snarking brutal one-liners in their faces while sipping their tears.
It’s so much fun to watch him go full wolverine, and yet so brutal in its abject honesty; quite frankly, it makes him very easy to like. WATCH:
I mean, seriously. Think about it. He took down the Speaker of the House…. 😂
After several interesting hearings and court filings last week, U.S. District Court Judge Aileen Cannon has indicated she is likely to postpone the trial schedule requested by Special Counsel Jack Smith due to the scope of material evidence and the need for defense attorneys to review slow production by the prosecution.
As noted by journalist Julie Kelly, who has attended the hearings, “On Friday morning, [Cannon] announced a stay, or suspension, of all pre-trial deadlines as she prepares a formal order to explain her thinking and very likely issue a new trial date.”
Bad News / Good News – Before getting to the great summary outline provided by Kelly, it is worth remembering one of the challenges in the case, which fortunately Judge Cannon has great familiarity with.
You might remember when the issue of defining “classified documents” surfaced, Judge Cannon appointed a “special master” to review the documents and make determinations. The prosecution filed an appeal to that approach and won within the 11th Circuit based on an outlook the Jack Smith team is relying on.
Essentially the appellate court ruled on the DOJ calling the material “classified” and “vital to national security”, by saying in the court’s determination they have no authority to question the decision of the executive branch when it comes to matters of national security. {Go Deep}
Having just written a rather critical outline showcasing examples of the weaponized FBI for political intents {GO DEEP}, this latest story fits right in.
You might remember last year, when Texas Democrat Congressman Henry Cuellar was highly and publicly critical of the Biden border crisis and the immigration policy of the administration, within 2 weeks the FBI raided his home {LINK}.
Fast forward to today, and for the past several weeks, New York City Democrat Mayor Eric Adams has been highly and publicly critical of the Biden border crisis and the influx of illegal aliens into New York City. Suddenly, the FBI raids the home of his top aide.
(New York Times) – Agents from the Federal Bureau of Investigation on Thursday searched the Brooklyn home of Mayor Eric Adams’s chief fund-raiser, Brianna Suggs, a campaign consultant who is deeply entwined with efforts to advance the mayor’s agenda, according to two people with knowledge of the matter.
More of this is needed. Today, Illinois Senator Dick Durbin (D) and Ohio Senator JD Vance (R) confronted each other in the upper chamber over DOJ nominees that Senator Vance refuses to advance with unanimous consent.
Durbin was furious at the blocks JD Vance was putting in front of the Joe Biden nominees for U.S. Attorney and criticized Vance for campaigning on “law and order” while blocking those DOJ nominees advanced by Durbin. In response, Senator Vance delivered remarks promising to block every DOJ nomination as long as Joe Biden continues weaponizing Main Justice and the USAO nominations to target his political opposition. WATCH [prompted to the Vance response]:
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JD Vance has some tenuous network affiliations in his background that give me a little pause; however, on the substance of this issue, he is righteous in this approach.
There has been little, if any, Republican push-back to the radical nature of the onslaught brought forth by Biden, DAG Lisa Monaco and AG Merrick Garland. Factually the Lawfare tactics have increased in weaponized intensity throughout the Biden term in office.
The Republican House has the ability to block the funding mechanism, and the Republican minority in the Senate have the ability to block the nominees. Until now, we have seen little, if any, effort by either chamber to bring the Biden rogue elements to heel. Perhaps this is the start. Regardless, it is at least a step in the right direction.
The only people who deny financial corruption in Ukraine are those who benefit from it. That group includes U.S. politicians who gleefully send billions of taxpayer funds into the country of Ukraine while capturing returns in the process.
U.S. advisors and consultants, along with private sector contractors and multinational corporations like Blackrock, are all beneficiaries of the vast sums of money being dumped into Ukraine. We all know this. So, on one hand it is simple to see why the Ukraine government officials would use the same opportunity to enrich themselves
After all, U.S. taxpayers are not only buying bombs, missiles and bullets with the money sent to Ukraine, we are also paying the salaries and pensions of the same government officials who are skimming the proceeds. The corruption is everywhere, and every entity is participating in the graft, in one form or another.
Zelenskyy’s wife goes shopping in Paris during the war. Where exactly do politicians think she is getting the money to spend on glitzy holiday vacations? Everybody knows exactly what is going on. The glaringly obvious theft is a large part of the contention the American people have with this insufferable effort to fund Ukraine.
During a lengthy Time Magazine article, one of the close and key advisors to President Volodymyr Zelenskyy admitted that the corrupt stealing of US funds is widespread. In addition to the theft, the overall tone of the Time Magazine article paints the war effort in Ukraine, what we have always called ‘World War Reddit’ for its mostly theatrical value, as a lost cause. This is not surprising; however, for Time Mag to make such an admission, that does indicate a narrative shift in the overall effort.
TIME – […] Since the start of the invasion, Ukraine has refused to release official counts of dead and wounded. But according to U.S. and European estimates, the toll has long surpassed 100,000 on each side of the war. It has eroded the ranks of Ukraine’s armed forces so badly that draft offices have been forced to call up ever older personnel, raising the average age of a soldier in Ukraine to around 43 years. “They’re grown men now, and they aren’t that healthy to begin with,” says the close aide to Zelensky. “This is Ukraine. Not Scandinavia.”
Within the budget process there are two different facets. Congress is charged by the Constitution with making decisions about how to spend public money. Those spending decisions are split into two parts: authorization and appropriations. In the recent political era the “authorization” process has essentially been nulled; no one ever asks if the program (Ukraine, Israel, FBI, etc.) should be funded.
“Authorization” is done by Congress via legislation that “can establish, continue, or modify an agency, program, or activity for a fixed or indefinite period of time,” per the Congressional Research Service. In other words, authorization is Congress saying that money can be spent on a given item — not that it necessarily will be spent on that item.
“Appropriations” are done by Congress via legislation that authorizes agencies to make payments from the federal Treasury (i.e. it allows them to spend the money that had previously been authorized). Appropriations bills are ordinarily passed each year, but in recent years it has been common for Congress to fund the government “on autopilot” via continuing resolutions that simply allow agencies to continue spending the same amount of money they were spending under the previous funding bill.
Matt Gaetz has been trying to change this dynamic because the external recipients of the appropriation spending, the lobbyists, are the ones driving the continuation of the CR approach. The lobbyists pay congress via campaign donations. Those donations come from congressional appropriation. The CR process maintains the largesse.
Every time this guy pops up, I am reminded of his previous fame in constructing the “YouTube video narrative” as an explanation for the 2012 Benghazi attack. At the time, it was Jake Sullivan working in the State Dept who fabricated that entire story; yes, it was entirely his creation, and the Clinton and Obama team (then NSA Susan Rice) pushed it into the media as the official U.S. explanation. It’s funny (not really) how no one ever calls Sullivan out on that history, given his current position.
Taking that background context, while also accepting that everything we are told about Ukraine and the official position of the U.S. as it pertains to current Israeli War aspects, Jake Sullivan’s prior manufacturing of extreme defensive narratives, abjectly false presentations, leads more credence to accepting that we are once again being manipulated by fundamentally false information. Jake Sullivan is now Joe Biden’s National Security Advisor.
Appearing on CBS, Sullivan outlines the current coordination between the Biden administration and Israeli leadership. While he didn’t specifically say the words in the headline, instead describing exactly that while pretending something else, Hamas is FACTUALLY holding 500+ Americans hostage as human shields. WATCH:
[Transcript] – MARGARET BRENNAN: We go now to White House National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan. Jake, good morning to you.
JAKE SULLIVAN: Good morning, Margaret.
MARGARET BRENNAN: Does the US know if the roughly five to six hundred Americans in Gaza have survived the past 23 days of bombing and have the hostages?
JAKE SULLIVAN: We are in regular contact with most of the Americans who are in Gaza. We can’t say every single one, but all of the ones who reach out to us we follow up with on a regular basis, even sometimes a daily basis. And so, we know that many of them are still there, still waiting to get out. And we are working actively to try to make that happen. The challenge right now, Margaret, is that the Egyptians are prepared to let Americans and other foreign nationals out of Gaza. The Israelis have no issue with that. But ¹Hamas is preventing their departure and making a series of demands. We’re trying to work through that to create a circumstance where all of the Americans who are in Gaza are able to get out. It is a priority for the President. He has no higher priority than their safe passage out. And he will continue to work at it until it is accomplished.
Earlier today Mike Lee sent this little bit of raw data from the border, “In the last 4 weeks alone (since the beginning of FY2024), the Border Patrol in the Rio Grande Sector has apprehended 5 illegal immigrants from Afghanistan, 19 from Syria, and 75 from China. It’s not a stretch—in fact, it’s putting it mildly—to say “they might not mean us well.” {link} It is very concerning to think about who is walking into our country.
Earlier today, Texas AG Ken Paxton also asked the court for a restraining order against Joe Biden’s administration who are taking down border barriers and cutting through barbed wire in order to increase the flow of illegal aliens. [Court Filing Here] AG Paxton wants the court to stop Biden from opening the border.
TEXAS – Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton filed a motion for a temporary restraining order on an emergency basis after federal agents escalated their destruction of Texas’s barrier at the State’s border with Mexico. The federal government’s renewed effort to destroy Texas’s barrier and assist aliens’ entry into the country follows just days after Texas filed a lawsuit against the Biden Administration’s Department of Homeland Security (“DHS”), DHS Secretary Mayorkas, and other agencies for numerous documented incidents of barrier destruction and occasions on which federal agents facilitated aliens’ mass entry during a severe immigration surge in recent months.
Texas is seeking an order that would enjoin federal agents from cutting, destroying, damaging, or otherwise interfering with Texas’s concertina wire fence. (link)
At this point, I am writing this for a whole bunch of people, and it’s ridiculous.
(1) – No, Mark Meadows never told Jack Smith that President Trump didn’t declassify records. That was the Lawfare leak to ABC News in August – intended to dilute the defense of declassification in the Mar-a-Lago documents case. It was made up by Jack Smith, and leaked to ABC for a specific purpose.
(2) – No, Mark Meadows never told the DC grand jury (under immunity) that he informed President Trump that Joe Biden’s election was legitimate. Again, that was a Lawfare leak to ABC News this week – intended to undermine President Trump’s DC defense (mens rea, know it) that Trump’s state of mind was such that he knew he was violating the law by saying the election was stolen. This story was made up by Jack Smith and leaked to ABC for a similar specific purpose.
In reality, Meadows was questioned under oath, during the grand jury, and asked if Joe Biden was the legitimate President. Meadows responded (encapsulated), “Well, he’s president isn’t he”? The rest is a manufactured narrative.
(3) – No, Mark Meadows never wore a wire as a confidential informant while he was President Trump’s Chief of Staff. Again, yet another Lawfare fabrication to the alt-right media, via layers of plausible deniability – intended to get President Trump to attack Mark Meadows and provide fuel for Jack Smith to request the reinitiation of a currently suspended gag order against President Trump. The ABSURD story is pure Lawfare bait. The absurdity of the story is why even ABC News couldn’t be used.
And right on cue….
(NYP) – Special Counsel Jack Smith has implored a judge to revive the partial gag order in the federal election interference case against Donald Trump — citing the ex-president’s “threatening” social media posts about former White House chief of staff Mark Meadows.
Smith’s team argued in a filing late Wednesday that Trump, 77, is capitalizing on a stay in the gag order “to send an unmistakable message to a foreseeable witness in this case… with knowledge that it would reach him.” (read more)
This is deep weeds inside baseball, but boy howdy does it tell a story. Representative Matt Gaetz (MAGA, FL) goes through the details of yesterday’s House republican conference assembly as they select a Speaker nominee.
What Gaetz reveals in detail is how Kevin McCarthy has been working the conference to undermine any other Speaker candidate so that McCarthy would be renominated as the only possible alternative. The insight and details are really interesting. This is a must watch.
