Nancy Mace All but Brags About Her Hypocritical House Speaker Vote

Nancy Mace was called out for trying to fundraise off voting to vacate the House speaker, despite previously criticizing colleagues for doing the same.

Mace was one of eight Republicans who voted to oust Kevin McCarthy as speaker and throw the House in disarray. Since then, she has tried aggressively to fundraise off her vote. She even asked for campaign donations while doing an interview inside the Capitol—a violation of House rules.

CNN host Kaitlan Collins called Mace out on the fundraising during a Wednesday night interview. Collins played an interview clip of Mace from January, during the seemingly interminable rounds of votes for speaker that McCarthy ultimately won.

“Matt Gaetz is a fraud. Every time he voted against Kevin McCarthy last week, he sent out a fundraising email,” Mace said in the interview. “What you saw last week was a constitutional process diminished by those kinds of political actions.”

When Collins asked Mace to explain her shifting stance, the congresswoman had no good response. Instead, she cast herself as a victim.

Mace said that unlike Gaetz, she has not been fundraising off the vote “every step of the way.”

“I made the decision to fundraise over the last 24 hours because of the threats that I have received over fundraising and money drying up,” she said. “The establishment is coming after me.”

This kind of a flip-flop is typical for Mace, who will often say one thing and then vote in the completely opposite direction. In July, she said it was an “asshole move” to use the defense budget to bar the Pentagon from reimbursing service members who travel for abortions. Just hours later, she voted to include that amendment in the budget bill.

As Collins pointed out, Mace also joined Steve Bannon’s podcast on Wednesday, despite voting in 2021 to hold him in contempt of Congress for refusing to comply with a subpoena from the January 6 committee. This is not the first time she has joined as a guest on the podcast.

Republicans, livid that Matt Gaetz plunged the House of Representatives into turmoil, have begun to air the worst bits of the Florida Republican’s dirty laundry.

Gaetz introduced a motion to vacate the House speaker on Monday, saying he was frustrated by Kevin McCarthy’s decision to pass a continuing resolution and keep the government open. The next day, Gaetz led seven other Republicans to break ranks and vote with Democrats, ousting McCarthy. The House is now scrambling to find a new speaker, and Gaetz, the man who started it all, has no plan whatsoever.

Marc Short, who served as former Vice President Mike Pence’s chief of staff, brushed off the idea that Gaetz was actually upset about increased government spending with a horrifying joke.

“Matt Gaetz, to say he came here as a fiscal crusader, it’s more likely he came here for the teenage interns on Capitol Hill, to be honest,” Short said Wednesday night on CNN.

Host Jake Tapper did not question the statement at all but let Short continue on about how Gaetz keeps voting for federal spending bills.

Short was referring to a 2020 investigation into allegations that Gaetz had sex with a 17-year-old. The Department of Justice dropped the investigation earlier this year.

Senator Markwayne Mullin also referred to that investigation, pointing out that the media ignored Gaetz after the accusations first broke and no Republicans came to his defense.

“We had all seen the videos he was showing on the House floor, that all of us had walked away, of the girls that he had slept with,” Mullin told CNN’s Manu Raju on Tuesday. “He’d brag about how he would crush E.D. medicine and chase it with an energy drink so he could go all night.”

“No one defended him,” said Mullin, “and then no one on the media would give him the time of the day. All of a sudden, he found fame because he opposed the speaker of the House back in November, and he’s always stayed there. He was never gonna leave until he got this last moment of fame.”

Other Republicans have also accused Gaetz of using the speakership debacle just to get attention. Representative Matt Lawler called Gaetz “disgraceful” and called for him to be expelled from the Republican conference. Representative David Joyce said Thursday he would support such a move.

Some members of the GOP were already weighing whether to expel Gaetz from Congress should the Ethics Committee find him guilty of sexual misconduct, illegal drug use, and other wrongdoings.

Matt Gaetz more or less singlehandedly plunged the House of Representatives into chaos, and his GOP colleagues are furious with him for it.

Gaetz introduced a motion to vacate the speakership on Monday. The next day, he led seven other Republicans to break ranks and vote with Democrats to oust Kevin McCarthy. The House is now scrambling to find a new speaker, and a clear front-runner has not yet emerged. Gaetz, the man who started it all, has no plan whatsoever.

And House Republicans are over it.

“I think Matt Gaetz is a disgraceful human being,” Matt Lawler told reporters Wednesday. “I think he has certainly alienated lots of people left and right.”

Lawler added he thought Gaetz should be kicked out of the Republican conference altogether.

Gaetz’s fellow Florida Republicans think he is “divisive. Disrespectful. Selfish,” not to mention desperate for attention, according to Politico.

“He’s about clicks,” Carlos Giménez said. “He’s about how many cameras he can get shoved in his face, and he’s a historical figure because he caused for the first time in history and all that. I think he gets off on that.”

Many Republicans said it was “disgusting” and “inappropriate” that Gaetz also began to fundraise off kicking McCarthy out, all while bringing the party no closer to achieving its legislative goals.

“At the end of the day, we’re doing this, we’re not passing appropriations bills,” Michael Waltz said of the vote to vacate. “We’re not dealing with the border. We’re not dealing with inflation.”

Giménez also warned that Gaetz has “very few friends”—and the list seems to be shrinking. Chip Roy and Gaetz have been staunch anti-McCarthy allies from the beginning, both holding out against the California Republican during the votes for speaker in January. When Gaetz replaced Roy on the House Judiciary Subcommittee on the Weaponization of the Federal Government in February, Roy said he was glad to hand the spot over to “my friend.”

But Roy is singing a very different tune now, lashing out Tuesday at Gaetz and the other Republicans who voted against McCarthy.

“Some of our brothers and sisters—particularly in the, you know, MAGA camp, I think—particularly enjoy the circular firing squad,” Roy said Tuesday night on The Blaze. “You want to come at me and call me a RINO? You can kiss my ass.”

“You go around talking your big game,” Roy said, “and you thumping your chest on Twitter? Yeah, come to my office, come have a debate, mother.”

Roy confusingly later said he was not addressing Gaetz or the other anti-McCarthy Republicans, adding that he understood their frustrations but disagreed with their method.

The growing anger toward Gaetz is unlikely to help him as Republicans weigh whether to expel him from Congress. The House GOP will likely move to expel Gaetz if the Ethics Committee finds him guilty of sexual misconduct, illegal drug use, and other wrongdoings.

Donald Trump on Wednesday launched fresh vitriol against the judge and prosecuting attorney in his New York business fraud trial, carefully skirting a gag order imposed on him just a day prior.

Trump tried Tuesday to bully a court clerk, sharing false conspiracies about her as well as her personal information. Presiding Judge Arthur Engoron issued a gag order later that day prohibiting all parties involved in the case from publicly discussing court staff.

While Trump avoided mentioning court staff on Wednesday, he went all out with attacks against Engoron and New York Attorney General Letitia James.

“This is election interference. They made up a fake case, these fraudulent people,” Trump told reporters. “And the judge already knows what he’s gonna do. He’s a Democrat judge. In all fairness to him, he has no choice.… He’s run by the Democrats.”

Trump has previously accused Engoron of being a Democratic political operative. He also took aim at James, a Black woman, calling her a “political animal.” He wrote on Truth Social that James is “corrupt” and accused her of committing fraud. He said her lawsuit was a “witch hunt” and implied James had lied to the judge about the real estate value of Mar-a-Lago.

At this point, it’s a matter of time before Trump violates his gag order—and many legal experts are already predicting exactly that.

James sued Trump and the Trump Organization in September for fraud, accusing the former president and his allies of fraudulently inflating the value of their real estate assets. Trump has repeatedly attacked James, calling her “racist,” “deranged,” “incompetent,” and a “monster.”

Engoron issued a partial summary judgment last week ruling that Trump committed business fraud and ordering all his New York business certificates be canceled. This makes it nearly impossible to do business in New York and could effectively kill the Trump Organization as it exists today.

Another one of Rudy Giuliani’s lawyers has withdrawn from representing the former New York mayor in Fulton County, Georgia.

Giuliani was charged in Georgia with felony racketeering, alongside Donald Trump and 17 other co-defendants, for his efforts to try to overturn the state’s 2020 election results. Giuliani’s lawyer David Wolfe withdrew last week from representing Giuliani in that case.

Now a second Giuliani lawyer, Brian Tevis, has also filed a motion to withdraw. The document, filed Tuesday evening, does not specify why Tevis chose to leave Giuliani’s legal team. Wolfe also had not indicated why he was withdrawing.

Several of Giuliani’s former lawyers, including his longtime attorney Robert Costello, have sued Giuliani for failing to pay their legal fees. And now Tevis’s departure appears to leave the Trump ally without a local lawyer in Georgia.

Giuliani may have to end up representing himself in Georgia—a tactic he is already employing to save some cash. The man once affectionately known as “America’s mayor” is scrambling to find the money for all his legal fees and even listed his Manhattan apartment for sale in July. In August, after he was indicted in Georgia, Giuliani asked his social media followers to donate to his defense fund.

He also flew to Mar-a-Lago to beg Trump to pay him for working as Trump’s personal attorney. That didn’t work, but Trump did agree to host a fundraiser dinner for Giuliani. Entry cost $100,000 a plate, but Giuliani paid Costello just $10,000 in September.

In addition to the racketeering charges in Georgia, Giuliani was ordered to pay more than $130,000 to Ruby Freeman and Shaye Moss. The two women served as 2020 election workers in Georgia, and Giuliani falsely accused them for months of fraud.

Giuliani’s third ex-wife says he owes her more than $260,000 for her country club memberships, condominium fees, and health care as part of their divorce settlement. Giuliani narrowly avoided jail time over that lawsuit in December. And one of Giuliani’s former associates sued him in May, accusing him of promising to pay her a $1 million annual salary but instead raping and sexually abusing her over the course of two years.