House Democrats Resurrect Revolt over Biden Nomination

House Democrats are raising objections to the Democratic National Committee’s plan to nominate Biden via a “virtual roll call” vote weeks before the party’s August convention.

The DNC initially turned to the pre-convention virtual roll call to work around an Ohio requirement that parties’ candidates be certified 90 days before the general election. The issue was averted as Ohio passed legislation extending the deadline, but the DNC is poised to move forward with the virtual roll call nonetheless.

A drafted letter by dozens of House Democrats calls this a “terrible idea.”

According to Politico, the letter, authored by House Democrats who span the “spectrum of views” regarding Biden remaining in the race, says, “There is no legal justification for this extraordinary and unprecedented action which would effectively accelerate the nomination process by nearly a month.”

The authors say the move would “stifl[e] debate” by “prematurely shutting down any possible change in the Democratic ticket,” and implore the party to instead “nominate its presidential ticket at the Democratic National Convention, in regular order, as we always have.”

Representative Jared Huffman, who reportedly circulated the letter, told Politico that the DNC sees the virtual roll call vote as “a clever way to lock down debate and I guess by dint of sheer force, achieve unity, but it doesn’t work that way.” Axios reports that many Democratic lawmakers and aides intend to sign on to it, with one House Democrat saying that “the ‘replace Biden’ movement is back.”

The letter represents the chorus of Democratic critics of Biden crescendoing again, after the assassination attempt against Trump briefly superseded conversations about Biden’s electability or lack thereof. Dissatisfaction with Biden remains widespread among Democrats; a recent NBC News poll reports that more than 60 percent of blue voters would prefer an alternative to Biden, whose nomination is now all but inevitable.

We will soon see whether the DNC will heed House Democrats’ exhortations to delay Biden’s nomination until the convention, as Politico reports that the rules committee is “expected to vote on setting up the rules and dates for a virtual roll call vote” at a meeting set for Friday.

Alex Jones is back to hocking conspiracies, and this time his attention is toward the attempted assassination of Donald Trump—which, according to the notoriously factless conspiracy theorist, was a ploy by the Democratic establishment to nix the presumptive GOP presidential candidate from the race.

“Biden’s puppet masters ran the attack on Trump and they will do it again,” Jones wrote Tuesday on X, formerly Twitter. “The secret service now admits the assassin was on the roof for 26 minutes. The secret service has a long history of deliberate stand downs. Think Dallas Texas 1963 and go from there …”

There is little to no evidence that the shooter, Thomas Matthew Crooks, was on the rooftop for 26 minutes—or that the Secret Service had historically “deliberately” stood down in order to allow a political operative to get shot, though Jones’s callback to Dallas in 1963 suggests that he believes the Secret Service allowed President John F. Kennedy to be assassinated.

So far, little is understood about Crooks or his motives, save that he was a 20-year-old white male from Bethel, Pennsylvania. Former classmates described him as a bullied “loner” and “outcast” with a penchant for wearing military and hunting clothes, and who was by all measures “definitely conservative.” The FBI announced on Monday that forensic experts with the agency had infiltrated Crooks’s cell phone and were examining his digital footprint, though they have not yet released their findings.

Speaking with CNN on Monday, Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas conceded that Crooks never should have reached that vantage point on a warehouse roof, just 430 feet away from the former president.

“We are speaking of a failure,” Mayorkas told CNN. “We are going to analyze through an independent review how that occurred, why it occurred, and make recommendations and findings to make sure it doesn’t happen again.”

U.S. Secret Service Director Kimberly Cheatle described the error as “unacceptable” in an interview with ABC News, noting that the “buck stops with me.”

Jones has lost practically everything to his incessant need for the spotlight. In 2017, the InfoWars host lost primary custody of his children in a case that pinned him as a “cult leader” on an online conspiracy network. In 2022, Jones lost a defamation case brought by the families of the children killed in the Sandy Hook Elementary School massacre, who argued that Jones had caused them irreparable harm by baselessly claiming to his far-right followers the shooting was a “hoax.” That case cost the right-wing conspiracy theorist $1.5 billion and forced Jones into bankruptcy months later. He has since lost his stake in his media company, Free Speech Systems, and has been court-ordered to liquidate all of his assets in order to cover the tremendous damages.

After Donald Trump selected J.D. Vance for his running mate in 2024, more and more of his previous gripes with Trump keep popping up, much to the Republican Party’s dismay.

In two 2016 audios uncovered by CNN’s Andy Kaczynski, Vance appeared on a podcast to promote his book The Hillbilly Elegy and argued that Trump is a fraud who preyed on white voters’ fears to achieve victory.

“I don’t think he actually cares about folks,” said Vance on The Matt Jones Podcast in August 2016. “I think I’m going to vote third party because I can’t stomach Trump. I think that he’s noxious and is leading the white working class to a very dark place,” he told NPR that same month.

Vance criticized Trump throughout his press tours at the time. “I’m definitely not gonna vote for Trump because I think that he’s projecting very complex problems onto simple villains,” Vance told CNN’s Jake Tapper before the 2016 election. “Trump makes people I care about afraid. Immigrants, Muslims, etc. Because of this I find him reprehensible. God wants better of us,” he wrote in October 2016.

Vance built his early political brand on being a “Never Trump” Republican, and the receipts show it. He called Trump a total fraud in public and asked if Trump may be “America’s Hitler” in private. Before the election, in a since-deleted tweet, Vance claimed he would be writing in Evan McMullin, a former CIA officer who ran as an independent. In 2018, he revealed that he did in fact vote for a third-party candidate in 2016.

Since winning his Senate seat in 2022 with Trump’s backing, Vance has changed his tune, deleted tweets, and retracted his negative statements about the former president.

Ever since talk began that Vance could be on the list for vice president, he’s been sucking up to Trump and denouncing his previous views. “He was a great president,” said Vance, who didn’t vote for him, “and it’s one of the reasons why I’m working so hard to make sure he gets a second term.”

Judge Aileen Cannon’s decision to toss out Donald Trump’s classified documents case by ruling special counsel Jack Smith’s appointment unconstitutional flies in the face of legal precedent, and the law itself, according to a former federal solicitor.

Neal Katyal, who while serving as acting solicitor general helped draft the Department of Justice’s regulations for installing special counsels, challenged the Trump-appointed judge’s ruling in a New York Times op-ed Tuesday. He slammed Cannon’s claim that no congressional law authorized the special counsel’s appointment as “palpably false.”

Cannon’s decision “is legally unsupported, ignores decades of precedent and is deeply dangerous,” Katyal said, describing her actions as “highly erratic.”

Katyal argued that the regulations on special counsel appointments were drafted under specific congressional laws. In particular, Katyal referred to U.S. Code 28 Section 515, which grants the attorney general, in this case Merrick Garland, the power to commission attorneys “specially retained under authority of the Department of Justice” as “special assistant[s] to the attorney general or special attorney[s].”

The same law also states that those attorneys can then “conduct any kind of legal proceeding, civil or criminal,” that other U.S. attorneys are “authorized by law to conduct,” and Section 533 permits the attorney general to commission officials “to detect and prosecute crimes against the United States.”

“These sections were specifically cited when Attorney General Merrick Garland appointed Mr. Smith as a special counsel. If Congress doesn’t like these laws, it can repeal them. But until then, the law is the law,” wrote Katyal.

Katyal wrote that when he proposed new regulations on appointing special counsels to Capitol Hill in 1999, not a single lawmaker challenged the legality of the new rules. Regulation 28 CFR 600 would come to replace the expired Independent Counsel Act with the Office of Special Counsel.

In her ruling, Cannon referred to the expired Independent Counsel Act as the basis for her decision, claiming that the Department of Justice had appointed Smith under the since-defunct provision.

Katyal also said that Cannon’s ruling went against the Supreme Court precedent set in United States v. Nixon, which affirmed the process of appointing the special counsel under both Section 515 and 533.

“Congress has vested in the Attorney General the power to conduct the criminal litigation of the United States Government,” wrote Justice Warren Earl Burger in the majority opinion. “It has also vested in him the power to appoint subordinate officers to assist him in the discharge of his duties.

“Acting pursuant to those statutes, the Attorney General has delegated the authority to represent the United States in these particular matters to a Special Prosecutor with unique authority and tenure,” Burger wrote.

According to Katyal, Cannon attempted to dismiss this ruling as “dicta” because she deemed it irrelevant to the holding of the case. She did, however, manage to cite Justice Clarence Thomas’s solo concurrence in Trump’s immunity case several times. Thomas had suggested in one line that “if there is no law establishing the office that the Special Counsel occupies, then he cannot proceed with this prosecution.”

New Jersey Senator Bob Menendez was found guilty on all counts Tuesday in a sprawling, nine-week trial that charged the 70-year-old Senate Foreign Relations Committee chairman for accepting envelopes of cash and gold bars as bribes while acting as a middle man between local real estate moguls and foreign governments.

The New Jersey Democrat and his wife were accused last year of acting as foreign agents for Egypt, taking hundreds of thousands of dollars’ worth of flashy gifts in exchange for Menendez’s “power and influence to protect and enrich” the businessmen and government of Egypt.

In a superseding indictment filed in January, Menendez was also accused of other corruption-related charges, including allegedly taking bribes from Qatar in an attempt to help a New Jersey real estate developer secure a multimillion-dollar investment from a company tied to the Middle Eastern country and collecting lavish gifts in exchange for his handiwork.

Evidence in the trial included a set of gold bars stamped with the name “Menendez,” with serial numbers matching those reportedly owned by one of the senator’s alleged bribers, New Jersey real estate tycoon Fred Daibes.

Menendez had appeared hopeful Monday before the verdict was delivered.

“It’s obvious that the government’s case is not as simple as they made it to be,” Menendez told the Associated Press from outside the courthouse. “It’s not as simple as they made it to be. The jury’s finding that out.”

Menendez had refused to resign from the race for his Senate seat, but left the door open to run for reelection as an independent candidate. Tuesday’s verdict potentially pulls the plug on any future chances Menendez has at winning reelection in November.

But the convicted lawmaker’s opponents weren’t celebrating the news.

“This is a sad and somber day for New Jersey and our country,” wrote Representative Andy Kim, the Democratic candidate running for Menendez’s seat, in a statement. “Our public servants should work for the people, and today we saw the people judge Senator Menendez as guilty and unfit to serve.

“I called on Senator Menendez to step down when these charges were first made public, and now that he has been found guilty, I believe the only course of action for him is to resign his seat immediately,” Kim continued. “The people of New Jersey deserve better.”

This story has been updated.