Vivek Ramaswamy Wants to Give Putin Whatever He Wants in Ukraine

Republican presidential candidate Vivek Ramaswamy has a reckless plan for achieving U.S. global dominance: giving away other countries’ territory.

Ramaswamy is already under fire for his objectively terrible plan to let China invade Taiwan after 2028 if he were elected. Now, the presidential hopeful thinks that Russia should be allowed to keep the parts of Ukraine it currently occupies.

“Our goal should not be for Putin to lose. Our goal should be for America to win,” Ramaswamy told CNN Thursday night.

Ramaswamy said that U.S. involvement in Ukraine is strengthening the Russia–China military alliance—and the only way to break that alliance and bring Russia around to the American side is to give Vladimir Putin what he wants.

“I would freeze the current lines of control, and that would leave parts of the Donbas region with Russia,” Ramaswamy explained. “I would also further make a commitment that NATO will not admit Ukraine to NATO. But there are even greater wins that I will get for the United States.”

Ramaswamy seems to be under multiple false impressions with this diplomatic plan, the first being that the United States has the authority to simply give away parts of another sovereign nation. He also appears to believe that if he visits Moscow, he can single-handedly buddy up to Putin enough to convince the Russian leader to drop a highly advantageous military alliance.

And as anchor Jim Acosta rightly pointed out, Putin is unlikely to stop with Ukraine. He wasn’t satisfied with annexing Crimea in 2014 and now wants all of Ukraine. If he is allowed to keep parts of Ukraine, it’s possible that he’ll try to invade somewhere else such as Poland, a NATO member—which would require military intervention from the rest of the members.

This plan is just as bad as Ramaswamy’s strategy for Taiwan. Earlier this week, Ramaswamy proposed letting China take over Taiwan after 2028, which he believes is when the U.S. would build up its own supply of semiconductors. Taiwan produces about 60 percent of the global supply of semiconductors, which are microchips crucial to making all electronic devices.

Ramaswamy said he intends to dramatically up the firepower around Taiwan during his first term, to make clear to Beijing that they should “not mess” with the island until the U.S. has semiconductor independence. After that, China can do whatever it wants. It did not seem to occur to him that China would likely interpret these moves as acts of aggression and respond in kind. Nor does he seem to realize that it’s highly unlikely China would listen to his proposed arrangement.

But despite his only campaign points being battling “wokeness,” taking away rights, and, apparently, allowing authoritarian governments to do whatever they want, Ramaswamy is somehow rising in the polls.

A Republican Georgia state senator is so mad that Donald Trump was indicted that he is moving to impeach the investigating district attorney—even though his plan has no chance of working.

Trump was indicted for a historic fourth time late Monday, and charged with racketeering for trying to overturn Georgia’s 2020 election results. District Attorney Fani Willis spent more than two years investigating the former president and building her case against him and 18 co-defendants.

“As a Georgia State Senator, I am officially calling for an emergency session to review the actions of Fani Willis,” Senator Colton Moore tweeted Thursday. “America is under attack. I’m not going to sit back and watch as radical left prosecutors politically TARGET political opponents.”

Moore called to strip funding from Willis’s office and impeach her. He shared a letter to Governor Brian Kemp, stating that the “undersigned” members of Congress, “comprising ⅗ of each respective house pursuant to Article IV, Section Il, Paragraph VI(b)” urged him to call a special session.

Here’s where Moore’s plan falls apart. In order to call a special session, either the governor or three-fifths of both the state House and Senate have to call one. This is clearly laid out in Article V of the Georgia state constitution. (Moore cites Article IV, which deals with the venue for a civil lawsuit.)

Moore also is the only member of the state legislature who has signed the letter. While Republicans have the majority in the state assembly, they only make up three-fifths of the Senate. House Democrats are unlikely to agree to Moore’s proposal.

Kemp is also unlikely to call a special session. He has been one of the most vocal Republicans to rejecte Trump’s claims that the Georgia election was fraudulent.

And even if a special session were somehow convened, the budget for Willis’s office is set by the Fulton County Commission, not the state assembly. So Moore’s plan holds absolutely no water. Instead, he and other Republicans are simply having a tantrum over Trump being held accountable.

A desperate Rudy Giuliani traveled all the way to Mar-a-Lago to beg Donald Trump to pay his legal bills—but the former president didn’t seem all that interested in donating, according to a new CNN report. 

Giuliani and his lawyer Robert Costello visited the former president in April, in the hopes that an in-person appeal to Trump would better persuade him to help pay for Giuliani’s steadily growing legal bills.

Giuliani and Costello met with Trump twice while visiting Mar-a-Lago, and while Trump verbally agreed to pay some of Giuliani’s bills, he was unspecific about how much he’d be offering and didn’t give a timeline for his financial support.

“It’s not a smart idea” for Trump to deny Giuliani’s request for funds, a source told CNN.

Trump, of course, is notorious for not paying his legal team, but he may want to stay in Giuliani’s good graces in the wake of the newest indictment out of Fulton County, Georgia. 

On Monday, Giuliani was indicted along with Trump and 17 other co-defendants for helping to overturn the 2020 election. Giuliani faces 13 charges, including racketeering. It is likely that Giuliani will be under immense pressure to cooperate with federal and state prosecutors.

Trump did make some small promises to Giuliani, sources say. He agreed to stop by two fundraisers for Giuliani, and to cover an outstanding fee from Trustpoint, a data vendor hosting Giuliani’s records. A few months after their meeting, Trump’s Save America PAC paid $340,000 to Trustpoint.

Giuliani has been in dire straits for months and is facing hundreds of thousands of dollars in legal bills.

At a hearing on Wednesday in the ongoing defamation lawsuit against the former mayor brought by Smartmatic, the voting technology company, another attorney for Giuliani told the judge that Giuliani does not have the money to pay additional legal costs to produce records for that case.

“There are a lot of bills that he’s not paying,” Giuliani’s attorney Adam Katz said at the hearing. “I think this is very humbling for Mr. Giuliani.” 

With the new indictment, Smartmatic’s defamation suit, his former associate’s sexual abuse lawsuit against him, and yet another lawsuit over an anti-Biden documentary scam, this is looking like it will be a very expensive year for the former mayor. If only his partner in crime were willing to foot the bill.

New explosive footage of Roger Stone strategizing to overturn the 2020 presidential election—before the vote was even called for Joe Biden—dooms Donald Trump’s main legal defense.

The video, aired on MSNBC Wednesday night and shot by filmmaker Christoffer Guldbrandsen, depicts the right-wing lobbyist dictating a fake elector plot in key battleground states. The video was taken on November 5, 2020, two days before the election was called, thus disproving Trump’s main defense that he and his allies genuinely believed they had won the race.

“Any legislative body may decide on the basis of overwhelming evidence of fraud to send electors to the electoral college who accurately reflect the president’s legitimate victory in their state which was illegally denied him through fraud,” Stone said, as an associate transcribed his words. “We must be prepared to lobby our Republican legislatures … by personal contact and by demonstrating the overwhelming will of the people in their state—in each state—that this may need to happen.”

Trump was indicted for the fourth time and charged with 13 counts in Georgia on Monday.

Stone is not named as a co-defendant in the indictment. He could, however, potentially be one of the 30 unnamed, co-conspirators.

The clip was part of Guldbrandsen’s documentary, A Storm Foretold, released in March of this year. Guldbrandsen told The Daily Beast that Stone was “upset” when the documentary aired.

In another clip from the documentary taken on November 1, 2020, Stone said Trump needed to claim victory early on election night.

“I really do suspect it’ll still be up in the air. When that happens, the key thing to do is to claim victory. Possession is nine-tenths of the law,” he said.

Florida health regulators have fined an Orlando abortion clinic nearly $200,000, a move that is purportedly for violating a state abortion law and would likely bankrupt the health center into closing.

Abortion is currently legal up to 15 weeks in Florida, but patients are required to wait 24 hours between the initial visit with their doctor and getting an abortion. The state legislature passed a law mandating the waiting period in 2015, but it did not go into effect until 2022.

Florida’s Agency for Health Care Administration said that the Orlando Women’s Center has violated the waiting period 193 times since the law took effect, and on Monday ordered the abortion clinic to pay a $1,000 fine for each violation.

The total $193,000 total is nearly triple the fine that a judge recommended in the spring. Administrative law Judge J. Bruce Culpepper issued an order that said the clinic should only pay $350 per violation.

The clinic said in court filings that it repeatedly asked the AHCA, which is led by a Ron DeSantis appointee, when the waiting-period law went into effect, but they never heard back. The AHCA has made multiple efforts to fine abortion clinics for not complying with this particular law.

Democratic state Representative Anna Eskamani, who represents Orlando, slammed the fine. “This is a local abortion provider that is being charged excessive fees by AHCA all designed to shut them down,” she said Thursday on Twitter. She also shared a fundraiser for the Orlando Women’s Center organized by a group of abortion clinic escorts, who help guide patients past protesters.

Florida’s 15-week abortion ban will go before the state Supreme Court in September. If the court upholds the law, then an even more restrictive measure banning abortion at six weeks—before people know they are pregnant—will go into effect.

DeSantis signed the hugely unpopular six-week ban in April. If it is implemented, it will decimate abortion access for much of the southern United States.

Meanwhile, the pro-abortion group Floridians Protecting Freedom is working to get an abortion rights referendum on the state’s 2024 ballot. The group says they have collected nearly three quarters of the 900,000 verified signatures from registered voters required for the ballot initiative.

If they succeed, then abortion protections would likely be enshrined in the state constitution, overriding any laws the legislature has passed. A February study by the Public Religion Research Institute found that 64 percent of Floridians believe abortion should be legal in all or most cases.