“Know When to Fold”: Democrats Call on Bob Menendez to Resign

After Senator Bob Menendez was convicted Tuesday on all 16 counts in his federal corruption trial, many of his Democratic colleagues swiftly called for his resignation.

“In light of this guilty verdict, Senator Menendez must now do what is right for his constituents, the Senate, and our country, and resign,” Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer said shortly after the news broke.

Many others now urging the New Jersey congressman to step down had also done so after the charges first came to light. For example, Representative Andy Kim, the Democratic challenger for Menendez’s Senate seat this election, echoed previous calls for his opponent’s resignation, tweeting: “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.”

Senators Cory Booker, Dick Durbin, and Amy Klobuchar, and Representative Katie Porter all similarly reiterated their previous calls for Menendez’s resignation. “You’ve got to know when to hold ’em, and know when to fold ’em,” Senator Tom Carper said, advising Menendez to do the latter.

Some have gone further, advocating for Menendez’s expulsion from the Senate should he fail to resign. New Jersey Governor Phil Murphy issued a statement saying, “If [Menendez] refuses to vacate his office, I call on the United States Senate to vote to expel him. In the event of a vacancy, I will exercise my duty to make a temporary appointment to ensure the people of New Jersey have the representation they deserve.”

A statement by New Jersey Representative Mikie Sherrill similarly said, “If he refuses to resign from the Senate, he should be expelled. New Jersey deserves leadership that puts the people and our country first—not profit or self interest.”

Vowing to appeal the verdict, Menendez has not answered questions about whether he will heed these calls and resign.

Georgia’s Court of Appeals ruled Tuesday that it will hear oral arguments for Donald Trump’s appeal to disqualify Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis from his election interference case after the presidential election has already taken place.

In a new order, the court scheduled the proceedings for December 5. As a result, the case likely will not resume until well into 2025, if at all. If Trump is reelected to the White House, the case against him would be postponed until his term ends in 2029—or possibly longer.

Earlier this month, the court ordered a stay in Trump’s election interference case pending the outcome of several appeals from Trump and his co-defendants seeking to remove Willis from the case, appealing a lower court decision to keep her on.

Since then, the Supreme Court has issued a ruling on Trump’s immunity, making it impossible to prosecute any president for what they claim to be “official acts” taken in office. One of Trump’s attorneys has already started claiming that Trump and his allies’ fake elector scheme constituted an “official act.”

In a sneaky footnote in Chief Justice John Roberts’s majority opinion, the court also affirmed that a sitting president cannot be criminally prosecuted, meaning that should Trump be elected again, all of his criminal trials will come to an abrupt end.

The Georgia court’s decision comes a day after Judge Aileen Cannon dismissed Trump’s classified documents case in Florida. Cannon ruled that special counsel Jack Smith’s appointment was unconstitutional.

Republican vice presidential nominee J.D. Vance once gave a strange defense of disgraced conspiracy theorist Alex Jones during an event held by a shadowy dark money–backed conservative network, according to video obtained by ProPublica.

In 2021, when Vance had just entered the race to replace Ohio Senator Rob Portman, he spoke at a closed-door event hosted by the secretive Teneo Network, an organization backed by conservative billionaire Leonard Leo.

Leo, who is the co-chairman of the Federalist Society, and single-handedly responsible for installing the conservative majority in the U.S. Supreme Court, tracelessly infuses hundreds of millions of dollars into the conservative legal movement every year. With the Teneo Network, Leo said he hoped to create “networks of conservatives that can roll back” liberal influence in all spheres of life, including business, media, and entertainment, according to an informational video about the group obtained by ProPublica.

Vance joined the network in 2018, years before he would run for office. At the time, he was a bestselling author running a nonprofit and investment fund.

During his speech at Teneo’s 2021 Retreat, Vance tried to explain his defense of Jones, the right-wing podcaster and supplement pusher who infamously insisted that the Sandy Hook massacre of children was a hoax. Vance had recently sparked a tidal wave of backlash after he tweeted that Jones was more reliable than MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow.

In front of the audience, Vance tried to defend himself, saying he was “just trolling,” before walking back his denial to insist “that doesn’t mean what I said is in any way untrue.”

Vance explained that it was important to “have a little fun” when you might end up as a political prisoner in your own country. “It’s OK to troll when you make and speak fundamental truths. But, look, I do think what I said was correct,” he said.

“If you listen to Rachel Maddow every night, the basic worldview that you have is that MAGA grandmas who have family dinners on Sunday and bake apple pies for their family are about to start a violent insurrection against this country,” said Vance. “But if you listen to Alex Jones every day, you would believe that a transnational financial elite controls things in our country, that they hate our society, and oh, by the way, a lot of them are probably sex perverts too.”

“Sorry, ladies and gentlemen, that’s actually a hell of a lot more true than Rachel Maddow’s view of society,” said Vance.

Vance urged conservatives to listen to conspiracists and ignore the baseless, dangerous claims they make. He used himself as an example. “I believe the devil is real and that he works terrible things in our society,” he said. “That’s a crazy conspiracy theory to a lot of very well-educated people in this country right now.”

“A lot of the things that are ultimately gonna get revealed as truths are gonna be advocated originally by crazy people. It doesn’t mean you have to be best friends with them,” Vance said, adding that conservatives should stand up for “nonconventional people.”

Vance has a pretty solid track record of ignoring the more heinous things his buddies say. In 2022, the soon-to-be senator gave a friendly 90-minute interview with right-wing activist Jack Murphy, who had once claimed that “feminists need rape,” according to Mother Jones. And of course, there’s his newfound support for Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump, whom Vance once called “America’s Hitler.”

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.