Senate Democrats Are Finally Coming For GOP Billionaire Harlan Crow

Senate Democrats have finally taken the first steps to address the ethics crisis rocking the Supreme Court.

The Senate Judiciary Committee announced Monday that it will seek to subpoena Republican billionaire megadonor Harlan Crow and ultraconservative activist Leonard Leo. Both men feature prominently in the ethics scandal for their relationships with Justices Clarence Thomas and Samuel Alito. The committee will also seek to subpoena wealthy GOP donor Robin Arkley II.

“The Supreme Court is in an ethical crisis of its own making,” the committee said in a statement. “In order to adequately address this crisis, it is imperative that we understand the full extent of how people with interests before the Court are able to use undisclosed gifts to gain private access to the justices.”

All three men have so far either refused to cooperate with the committee’s investigation or offered to share an insufficient amount of information. The committee could authorize the subpoenas after a vote as soon as next week.

Crow, a Republican billionaire megadonor and Nazi memorabilia collector, has repeatedly lavished Thomas with expensive gifts. These include island-hopping yacht vacations, private school tuition for Thomas’s nephew, and buying and renovating a Thomas family property, where Thomas’s mother still lives.

Thomas has also been Crow’s guest at Bohemian Grove, which ProPublica describes as a “secretive all-men’s retreat in Northern California” that attracts major corporate and political players. It costs thousands of dollars for a member to bring a guest to the Grove, but Crow has reportedly brought Thomas there almost every year for the past two decades.

Thomas’s visits to the Grove helped him develop a relationship with the Koch brothers. Thomas has participated in events for the Koch donor network for at least a decade. All of his appearances were arranged with the help of dark-money king Leo.

In addition to securing Thomas’s goodwill, Leo also helped organize a luxury vacation that Alito went on. Neither Thomas nor Alito have disclosed any of these lavish gifts on their financial statements.

The Supreme Court does not have a formal code of ethics. Since the Thomas and Alito scandals broke, many people have called on the court to establish an ethics code to help prevent such situations in the future. Six of the justices have resisted such a move, with Alito being one of the most vocal. But Elena Kagan, Amy Coney Barrett, and Brett Kavanaugh have all backed implementing such a code.

The Senate Judiciary Committee advanced a bill in midsummer that would require the justices to adopt a code of ethics, create new financial disclosure rules, and establish a process for submitting and investigating ethics complaints against the justices. But the bill has not yet gone up for debate, and it will have a hard time passing the chamber, where Democrats have only a razor-thin majority.

Former New Jersey Governor Chris Christie has a message for Republican voters holding out for Donald Trump: It’s time to stop.

Christie’s warning comes days after news that Mark Meadows, Trump’s last chief of staff and so-called “special friend,” flipped against his former boss, dishing dirty details on election fraud claims in exchange for immunity. It’ll be Meadows’s testimony, according to Christie, that seals Trump’s fate.

“This is deadly. It’s done. He’s going to be convicted. It’s over,” Christie told MSNBC’s Joe Scarborough on Tuesday, describing Meadows as someone “velcroed to Trump’s hip” through the entire 2020 campaign and beyond.

In several alleged meetings with special counsel Jack Smith’s team this year, Meadows told federal investigators that Trump knew he was lying when he claimed he won, mere hours after the polls closed on election night. To this day, Meadows said he has yet to see any evidence of election fraud.

“I think everybody watching needs to understand from somebody who did this work for seven years, you don’t give Mark Meadows immunity unless the evidence he has is unimpeachable,” Christie noted.

And Christie believes Trump knows it too. The 2024 GOP presidential candidate pointed to a flurry of Trump’s recent gaffes and verbal slipups on the campaign trail as evidence of heightened stress following the news of Meadows’s deal.

“I want all Republican voters to understand this, what’s going to be happening in March,” Christie said. “He’s going to be sitting in a courtroom in Washington, D.C., with Mark Meadows 20 feet away from him, saying, he committed crimes in front of me, on my watch.”

A onetime Trump attorney thinks the former president’s social media addiction might be the end for him in his legal trials.

Throughout October, Trump has been slapped with multiple gag orders for threatening and insulting court staff and witnesses in his various legal cases—though that hasn’t been enough to stop him.

So far, Trump has been fined twice for violating the gag order in his $250 million New York bank fraud trial, but he also faces the real possibility of being jailed if he continues his antics, warned Judge Arthur Engoron.

Meanwhile, in his federal election subversion trial in Washington, D.C., Trump slammed Judge Tanya Chutkan and a potential witness, former U.S. Attorney General Bill Barr, just hours after his gag order was reinstated on Monday. In posts to Truth Social, Trump described Barr as “​​dumb, weak, slow-moving, lethargic, gutless, and lazy.”

That kind of behavior will probably be enough to lock him up, according to Ty Cobb, a former Trump attorney and current partner at the law firm Hogan Lovells.

In an interview with CNN, Cobb argued that the violations in the New York trial, which are a civil matter, aren’t as “consequential” as the criminal conspiracy charges he faces in D.C.

“I think she’ll come in with a much heavier penalty and, ultimately, he’ll spend a night or a weekend in jail,” Cobb said.

“I think it’ll take that to stop it,” he added.

Ty Cobb was a part of the Trump administration legal team from July 2017 until May 2018 and managed matters related to special counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation. Cobb later described Mueller as an “American hero.”

Cobb has since commented several times on Trump’s ongoing legal woes—in August, the attorney told CNN that the evidence against the former president is “so overwhelming” in the classified documents case, describing it as “tight.” In September, Cobb likened Trump to a “mob boss.”

Ron DeSantis was knocked back on his heels by a new allegation, and his attempts to sidestep the matter failed miserably.

The Republican presidential hopeful has for weeks sparked theories that he’s wearing lifts inside his cowboy boots to make himself appear taller. Internet users and shoe experts alike point to the bizarre fit of DeSantis’s boots and his apparent struggle to walk in them. The Florida governor’s campaign team has vehemently denied the accusations.

But DeSantis was caught flat-footed Monday during an appearance on the PBD Podcast. Host Patrick Bet-David brought up the internet’s theory and showed DeSantis some videos that internet jokesters had edited to show how they thought DeSantis was essentially standing on tiptoes in his boots.

“What are they—I don’t even—I haven’t seen that,” DeSantis said, a little too fast.

Bet-David then produced a pair of flat designer shoes, which he said he had bought for DeSantis so the governor could try them on and prove how tall he is.

“I don’t accept gifts. I can’t accept it,” DeSantis said in an awkward monotone.

If DeSantis and the 1999 Yale baseball roster are to be believed, DeSantis is 5-foot-11. It’s also understandable why he would want to appear tall at all costs. Taller candidates generally (although not always) perform better, but more importantly, DeSantis is facing off against Donald Trump. Trump loves to describe people as “little” as a form of, well, belittlement.

Unfortunately, this could be a massive missed opportunity for DeSantis. If he is shorter, he could embrace his short king status, call Trump out for body-shaming, and seek to prove that good things come in small packages. If the shoe fits, wear it, right?

Instead, whatever he’s doing is just creating an incredibly strange, clown-like effect. As menswear expert Derek Guy wrote in Politico, whether or not he has lifts in his boots, DeSantis is still wearing really terribly fitting boots. Guy spoke with three bootmaking-industry veterans, and all  agreed that DeSantis’s boots are far too wide around his calves. The heels are low and the toes turn up abnormally high. The boots bulge and crease in weird places.

All of these things could be signs that DeSantis simply needs to get his feet re-measured—or that he shoved some lifts into his boots.

House Republicans tacked on a pretty unusual addendum to their aid package for Israel: In exchange for $14.3 billion to the U.S. ally, the GOP wants to cut $14.3 billion from the IRS budget.

The spending cut is not just an unusual addition to an emergency aid package, it will also likely backfire for the party platform as it may very well increase the national deficit. Democrats are expected to reject the bill outright.

The effort, however, underscores exactly how extreme the Republican Party has gotten, particularly under Speaker Mike Johnson’s new leadership.

“We’re going to have to pay for it. We’re not just going to print money and send it overseas,” Johnson told Fox’s Kayleigh McEnany, arguing that standing with the “innocent” in Israel is more aligned with the national interest than “IRS agents.”

As it stands, the bill would gut additional IRS funding allocated in the Inflation Reduction Act. The cuts would target parts of an IRS expansion that include tax enforcement, operations support, free filing for taxpayers, an office of tax policy, and tax court, reported The Washington Post’s Jeff Stein. The Congressional Budget Office has repeatedly warned that cutting IRS funding will encourage tax cheating and increase the deficit. The CBO has also estimated that the Inflation Reduction Act’s $80 billion IRS expansion will actually reduce the deficit by more than $100 billion.

“The IRS has recovered over $100 million in unpaid taxes from the wealthy and well-connected in the last month. Yet, in the chaotic world of my Republican colleagues, they view this funding as a never-ending well to promulgate their whims of ‘fiscal responsibility,’ protect billionaires and wealthy corporations, and ultimately, cost taxpayers more,” Representative Richard Neal told Fox News’s Chad Pergram.

Senate leadership also torpedoed the bill, arguing that apart from the unlikely spending cut, Congress should be focusing on passing an all-inclusive emergency aid package for U.S. allies around the globe.

“We believe, our Democratic Caucus, we should be doing all of it together: Israel, Ukraine, South Pacific, etc. And obviously a pay-for like that makes it much harder to pass,” said Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer, according to Politico.