Dem Congresswoman Wrecks RFK Jr. for His “Idiotic, Bigoted Messaging”

Representative Stacey Plaskett absolutely destroyed Republicans on Thursday for their decision to let Robert Kennedy Jr. testify before Congress—calling them out for co-signing on his “idiotic, bigoted messaging.”

The House Judiciary Committee held a hearing on the supposed weaponization of the federal government, a favorite talking point of Chair Jim Jordan. Jordan and House Oversight Chair James Comer, close allies of each other and of Donald Trump, have repeatedly argued that the Biden family is using the government to cover up its own wrongdoing while going after the former president.

Prominent anti-vaccine advocate and conspiracy theorist Kennedy, who is running against Joe Biden for the Democratic presidential nomination, was invited to speak on censorship and freedom of speech. But Plaskett, the Judiciary’s ranking member, was not having it.

“Many of my Republican colleagues across the dais will rush to cover that they have Mr. Kennedy here because they want to protect his free speech,” said Plaskett, a former attorney. “This is not the kind of free speech that I know of.”

She called Kennedy out for his previous racist and antisemitic comments, saying, “Free speech is not an absolute. The Supreme Court has stated that. And others’ free speech that is allowed—hateful, abusive rhetoric—does not need to be promoted in the halls of the people’s house.”

“Our right does not mean that we as Americans are … free from accountability. And that’s what’s distressing about this hearing,” Plaskett continued. “Even knowing what they know about Mr. Kennedy’s hateful, evidence-free rhetoric.… Speaker McCarthy, Chairman Jordan affirmatively chose to give this a platform.”

In addition to promoting the long-debunked conspiracy theory that vaccines cause autism, Kennedy came under fire over the weekend for claiming that Covid-19 was “targeted to attack Caucasians and Black people,” while sparing those who are “Ashkenazi Jews and Chinese.”

He has said Black children don’t need vaccines because they have supercharged immune systems. He also implied that Jews in Nazi Germany had more freedom of movement than unvaccinated people during the Covid-19 pandemic.

Even though he is running on the Democratic ticket, Kennedy has many Republican donors. He also agreed to speak at the far-right Moms for Liberty summit, although he later backed out.

“These folks have a plan,” Plaskett said of Republicans. “They want to give expression to the most vile sorts of speech here in this committee room because it prepares the ground for their own conspiracy theories and pseudoscience.”

“And they apparently don’t care how many people are hurt or die as a consequence of their actions.… Because nothing, nothing is more important to them than power.”

Speaker of the House Kevin McCarthy doesn’t want to endorse Donald Trump for president yet. So he instead promised that the House would expunge both impeachments against the former president—and do so before the August recess.

Recess begins in less than two weeks.

Politico’s Playbook reported on McCarthy’s pledge to the twice-impeached, twice-indicted, and liable-for-sexual-abuse former president who now faces a likely third criminal indictment.

McCarthy has so far declined to endorse Trump and last month explicitly said that Trump may not be the strongest Republican candidate for 2024. He has likely avoided an endorsement in efforts to provide cover to all members of his caucus, not placing pressure on any of them, especially the vulnerable ones, to get behind the serial-criminal candidate.

But McCarthy’s refusal to endorse infuriated Trump, who fumed, “He needs to endorse me—today!” on his way to a campaign event in New Hampshire, to whoever was around to hear.

So, to quell the former president, McCarthy pledged that he would get the House to vote to expunge the two impeachments against him, and that they’d get it done before the August recess. And while the deal might’ve gotten McCarthy some time, as Playbook writes, “staving off a public war with the man who almost single-handedly rehabilitated [McCarthy’s] entire career and ensured he won the gavel in January,” the agreement puts McCarthy in a damned if he does, damned if he doesn’t situation.

There are 18 House Republicans who won in 2022 in districts that Joe Biden won. Most would be highly disincentivized, electorally, to vote for any resolution that expunges both, even one, of the impeachments against the former president. Two Republican House members had voted to impeach Trump. And without these members, any attempt to expunge the impeachments would fail.

So McCarthy is in a bind: Either make good on his wild promise to the man who helped him secure the speakership to expunge his impeachments—and increase the risk of losing that speakership—or go back on the pledge and welcome the leading candidate’s wrath.

In her desperation to prove wrongdoing by Hunter Biden, Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene may have sent his nude photos to minors.

The House Oversight Committee heard testimony on Wednesday from two IRS agents who say the Department of Justice dragged its feet on investigating the younger Biden for tax fraud. The hearing produced zero actual evidence, so instead, Greene tried to claim that Biden engaged in sex trafficking and listed payments to sex workers as a tax write-off.

To support her argument, she held up poster-size prints of Biden’s nude photos, which were taken off his laptop. Not only were her actions wildly inappropriate—Oversight Chair James Comer did not reprimand her, though—but she may also have violated D.C. revenge porn law.

And now, Greene may have emailed the nudes to minors. The Georgia representative emailed her constituents Wednesday evening claiming she had confirmed Biden was guilty of sex trafficking and tax fraud (she had not). The email included a video that showed his nudes.

There is no screening for age when signing up for Greene’s email newsletter, so any minors who subscribe—such as for a social studies project or simply to stay up to date—have now received nudes from their congresswoman. If that is the case, then Greene would not only have violated her state’s revenge porn law, but she could also have broken federal laws banning the distribution of obscene material to minors.

House Republicans, led by Comer, have for months accused the Bidens of corruption and other forms of wrongdoing, although they have yet to produce any actual evidence. The hearing on Wednesday was meant to focus on Hunter Biden’s plea deal over his taxes, which will allow him to avoid jail time.

IRS agents Gary Shapley and Joe Ziegler testified before the Oversight Committee about Hunter Biden’s alleged wrongdoing. Jamie Raskin, the Oversight ranking member, had warned earlier Wednesday, however, that Shapley and Ziegler have already “undermined this Republican narrative” in their previous depositions.

“Joe Biden had the largest public investment in social infrastructure and environmental programs, that is actually finishing what FDR started, that LBJ expanded on, and Joe Biden is attempting to complete,” Marjorie Taylor Greene said at the conservative Turning Point Action conference over the weekend.

Except … she meant it all as an insult?

The topsy-turvy logic was not missed by the Biden White House, which pasted Greene’s remarks into a 35-second video, clipped with videos of Biden and Vice President Harris surrounded by factory workers, officers, restaurant workers, men in hard hats and construction vests, and smiling fans meeting the president.

Greene also noted some of the other programs the Biden administration has focused on, including ones “to address education, medical care, urban problems, rural poverty, transportation, Medicare, Medicaid, labor unions,” adding that “he still is working on it.”

“I approve this message,” Biden’s account tweeted alongside the video.

As of late afternoon Wednesday, the video had amassed 35 million views—second only to a video Biden released in April announcing his reelection bid, which has over 45 million views.

Greene’s royalty-free endorsement of Biden came before another curious favor for Democrats. Today, the Georgia Republican said on the House floor that “when evidence and proof of a crime is presented, no prosecution should be denied, no matter who the person is.”

In other news, twice-impeached, twice-indicted, and rapist former President Donald Trump now faces a likely third criminal indictment.

Women who suffered medical complications after being denied abortions in Texas are now having to relive the trauma of their injuries and dead babies as they plead their case against the state. Welcome to the Republican Party’s America.

On Wednesday, women who are part of a 15-person (both patients and doctors) lawsuit against the state of Texas, returned back to court to challenge the state’s extreme abortion ban.

Texas implemented a near-total abortion ban in September 2021, even before Roe v. Wade was overturned by a Supreme Court now found to have nearly half its jurists embroiled in scandal and corruption. The ban prohibits anyone from getting an abortion unless their life is at risk—no exceptions for a fetus developing an anomaly that would prevent it from surviving past birth. Doctors face life in prison and fines of up to $10,000 if they are found supporting an abortion procedure.

The women challenging the ban were essentially forced to relive their trauma, and at one point, the court was forced to take a break after a plaintiff began vomiting on the witness stand while recounting her own experience.

Samantha Casiano vomited while retelling the story of how she was denied access to an abortion after her baby was diagnosed with anencephaly, a birth defect in which a baby is born without parts of the brain and skull. Casiano said she had to watch her baby die after giving birth.

Casiano’s testimony was just one of the heartbreaking stories told on Wednesday.

One of the lead plaintiffs, Amanda Zurawski, testified that she was initially excited to become pregnant. But her water broke prematurely at about 18 weeks, meaning the fetus wouldn’t survive—and her life was at risk if she couldn’t get an abortion. Under the repressive new laws, a Texas hospital refused to help her until she became much sicker. Thanks to the Republican-made delay, Zurawski developed sepsis. People who suffer from septic shock have a mortality rate of up to 40 percent, and even after recovering, sepsis still carries a fatal risk.

In other words, Republicans are directly responsible for Zurawski’s life being on the line even today.

And if she would like to become pregnant again, her fertility has been damaged as a result of the sepsis she developed while constantly being turned away from the hospital. One of her fallopian tubes remains permanently closed.

Testifying in court Wednesday, Zurawski recounted, in tears, about being denied an abortion when her water broke and doctors declared her pregnancy nonviable. Politico reporter Alice Miranda Ollstein reports that the state simply objected, calling the nightmarish testimony “irrelevant.”

The judge overruled.

Zurawski then said she was only able to obtain an abortion after going into septic shock. Again the state objected, calling Zurawski’s description of what doctors told her “hearsay.”

The state of Texas continued its assault against the woman—as if the original attack on her wasn’t enough—apparently in efforts to find someone else to blame for her suffering.

These are just a taste of the misery and suffering Texas Republicans have not only overseen but actively brought into reality.

Governor Greg Abbott, the Republican-controlled state legislature, and even Senators Ted Cruz and John Cornyn have all pined for the abortion ban the state now has. And these are the bloody, mind-numbing consequences.

Republicans have yet to produce any evidence of actual wrongdoing by Hunter Biden, so they let Marjorie Taylor Greene wave his nude photos around Wednesday during a House Oversight Committee hearing on his taxes.

House Republicans have for months accused the Bidens of corruption and other forms of wrongdoing, although they have yet to produce any actual evidence. They’ve recently seized on Hunter Biden’s plea deal on his taxes, which will allow him to avoid jail time. But again, during that House hearing, Republicans and their “whistleblower” witnesses failed to show any meaningful evidence of said corruption.

So instead, Greene tried to claim that Biden engaged in sex trafficking and listed payments to sex workers as a tax writeoff. As part of her argument, she held up poster-size prints of Biden’s nude photos, which were taken off his laptop.

Everyone else in the room grew visibly uncomfortable as Greene displayed photo after photo. At one point, Democrats interjected, pointing out that Greene had gone over her allotted time and warning that her actions were not appropriate. But House Oversight Chair James Comer, who has spearheaded the investigation into the Bidens, did not reprimand Greene.

Not only was Greene’s decision to wave Biden’s nudes around wildly inappropriate for a congressional hearing, but it may also have violated D.C. revenge porn law. City law prohibits knowingly disclosing one or more sexual images of an identified or identifiable person when the person in the photo did not consent to the image being shared.

This isn’t the first time Republicans have shared Hunter’s nudes, but blowing them up on a poster for a congressional hearing is a new low.

Oversight Ranking Member Jamie Raskin tore into Republicans at the beginning of the hearing, noting that the majority party had no evidence. Earlier in the day, he warned that the two witnesses had already “undermined this Republican narrative” in their own previous depositions.

Representative Jamie Raskin came out swinging Wednesday at the start of the House Oversight Committee’s hearing with two IRS agents on supposed corruption in the Biden family.

House Republicans, led by Oversight Chair James Comer, have for months accused the Bidens of corruption and other forms of wrongdoing, although they have yet to produce any actual evidence. They’ve recently seized on Hunter Biden’s plea deal over his taxes, which will allow him to avoid jail time. IRS agents Gary Shapley and Joe Ziegler testified before the Oversight Committee about Hunter Biden’s alleged wrongdoing.

Raskin, the committee’s ranking member, tore into both Republicans and their star informants during his opening remarks. “I thought we might be here today on the matter that the chairman declared his top priority—the crusade to find evidence of wrongdoing by President Biden—but now, the majority’s long-promised star witness turns out to be a fugitive from American justice,” he said.

Raskin was referring to Gal Luft, whom Comer has touted as a key informant. Luft was charged last week with acting as a foreign agent for China, violating U.S. sanctions against Iran, and arms trafficking.

“One thing you will not hear today is any evidence of wrongdoing by President Joe Biden or his administration,” Raskin continued. “Like every other try by our colleagues to concoct a scandal about President Biden, this one is a complete and total bust.”

“In fact, the ongoing case that the majority invites us to interfere with today is actually a striking illustration of the success of the American system of independent prosecutors operating under the rule of law and outside the realm of the kind of political influence my colleagues are trying to exercise today.”

He reminded Republicans that the investigating federal prosecutor, David Weiss, was appointed by Donald Trump and hand-picked to lead the investigation by then–Attorney General Bill Barr (also a Trump appointee). Raskin also pointed out that once Joe Biden took office, he did not call the investigation a “witch hunt”—a clear jab at Trump—but instead let the probe play out.

Raskin warned earlier Wednesday that Shapley and Ziegler had already “undermined this Republican narrative” in previous depositions.

On Wednesday, Trump’s request for a new trial in the E. Jean Carroll case, after he was found liable for sexual abuse, battery, and defamation, was rejected. And in his desperate attempt to avoid accountability, the twice-impeached and twice-indicted former president may have unintentionally allowed himself to now be formally known as a rapist.

Trump’s team had requested a new trial in the case, arguing that the $5 million in damages he was ordered to pay Carroll was excessive, because he was only charged with sexual abuse. The jury had not found that Trump “raped” Carroll, a talking point Trump’s team often parroted.

But Judge Lewis Kaplan called Trump’s semantic argument “entirely unpersuasive.” He clarified that the jury found that the former president did indeed “rape” Carroll based on the common definition of the word.

Kaplan noted that New York penal law (the jury in the Carroll case was based in New York) has a “far narrower” definition of the word “rape” than in “common modern parlance, its definition in some dictionaries, in some federal and state criminal statutes, and elsewhere.”

“The finding that Ms. Carroll failed to prove that she was ‘raped’ within the meaning of the New York Penal Law does not mean that she failed to prove that Mr. Trump ‘raped’ her as many people commonly understand the word ‘rape,’” Kaplan wrote.

“Indeed, as the evidence at trial recounted below makes clear, the jury found that Mr. Trump in fact did exactly that [rape, as ‘commonly’ understood].”

“A United States District Judge has now formally held, in a lengthy written opinion, that it is perfectly appropriate, and, indeed, entirely accurate, to call a certain former President of the United States a rapist,” noted George Conway, lawyer and husband to former Trump aide Kellyanne Conway.

All that to say, based on the legal language, a rapist—for the third presidential cycle in a row—is leading the 2024 Republican primary.

Wednesday marks the twentieth day in a row that Phoenix eclipses 110 degrees Fahrenheit—and the next seven days are projected to maintain the record-breaking horror. Thousands of Texans have been going to the emergency room because of heat illnesses. And a rotating cast of some 100 million Americans have been under heat wave and smog alerts for over a month.

Amid all that, Republicans are trying to stop the president from being able to declare a national emergency over climate change.

Last month, a group of Republicans introduced a bill, insultingly known as the “Real Emergencies Act,” to prevent President Joe Biden from mobilizing the nation to take necessary action to stave off life-threatening climate change.

As The Lever notes, “If Biden were to declare a national emergency over climate change, he could take aggressive action to cut fossil fuel production and speed up clean energy manufacturing by reimposing the ban on crude oil exports, halting oil and gas leasing, investing in public transit infrastructure, and requiring private companies to manufacture renewables.”

This kind of strong, collective action—to stand up against fat-cat fossil fuels, to make our public transportation actually serve the public, to make our systems and thus lives cleaner—is what Republicans are furiously opposing.

And these do-nothing Republicans are buttressed by their fossil fuel friends who have known for decades the climate and environmental risks of their vampiristic activities—and have kept on drilling anyway.

The bill was introduced by West Virginia Republican Senator Shelley Moore Capito and Texas Republican Representative August Pfluger.

As we noted Tuesday, Pfluger’s own district has been at the center of some of the most severe heat in the country—in, again, a state sending thousands of people to the emergency room. Yet he has been busy using taxpayer-funded time introducing legislation to stop action on climate change, or to pledge American support to Israel while it maintains an apartheid regime over Palestinians.

Pfluger has taken in over $1.1 million from the fossil fuel industry and another $28,050 from pro-Israel, election-denialist-supporting AIPAC. He has collected all that and more while only taking office three years ago.

As The Lever also points out, Pfluger is the House’s second-highest recipient of oil and gas money, behind none other than Speaker Kevin McCarthy. And the Texas Republican has a personal conflict of interest, being a director of “an energy company engaged in pipelines and infrastructure” and an investor in a pipeline company that  celebrated the passage of another one of his bills to repeal a methane emissions tax.

The swamp is swamping.

Capito, meanwhile, is no different; she has been a major backer for the natural gas Mountain Valley Pipeline while also being invested in one of the companies constructing the whole thing.

Overall, the House and Senate sponsors of the bill to stop the government from declaring a climate emergency have collected at least some $5 million from fossil fuel interests in the past five years alone.

This—bought-out officials fighting to stop the government from calling a crisis sending thousands of people to the emergency room an “emergency”—is what is wrong with American politics. Not wokeness, not diversity, not gay people. Don’t let anybody tell you differently.

E. Jean Carroll has a message for Donald Trump: Pay me what you owe me.

Trump was unanimously found liable in May for sexual abuse and battery against Carroll in the mid-1990s, and for defaming her in 2022 while denying the assault. He was ordered to pay her about $5 million in damages.

But the former president simply could not accept the fact that he was being held accountable, and he and his lawyers asked in June for a new trial in the decided case. Trump’s lawyers argued in court documents that the damages were “excessive” because the jury determined Carroll had not been raped and that his assault had not caused her any mental injury.

But presiding Judge Lewis Kaplan denied the request on Wednesday, calling Trump’s arguments “entirely unpersuasive.” The request “ignores the bulk of the evidence at trial [and] misinterprets the jury’s verdict,” Kaplan said in his decision.

Carroll’s lawyer Roberta Kaplan (no relation to the judge) hailed the decision, saying in a statement, “Now that the court has denied Trump’s motion for a new trial or to decrease the amount of the verdict, E Jean Carroll looks forward to receiving the $5 million in damages that the jury awarded her.”

Carroll accused Trump in her 2019 memoir of raping her in the Manhattan Bergdorf Goodman department store in the mid-1990s. She initially sued him twice for defamation: first in 2019, when he said she made up the rape allegation to promote her book, and again in November for posts he made about her on social media. Carroll is not the only woman to accuse Trump of sexual assault, but her first case was the first to make it to a courtroom.

Trump continues to vehemently deny all of the allegations and launched fresh vitriol at Carroll during the disastrous CNN town hall. She amended her second lawsuit, which is still pending, to include those comments.

Trump and his allies have repeatedly tried to thwart Carroll’s lawsuits, but he has been denied at every turn. And last week, he lost a major battle: The Justice Department said that it no longer considers him immune in the second defamation lawsuit.