Republican Senator Stunningly Slams Trump for Killing Border Deal

At least one Republican has reached a breaking point over Donald Trump’s border security chicanery.

On Tuesday, North Dakota Senator Kevin Cramer had swing voters at the front of his mind, lobbing his own mud at Trump for describing the bipartisan deal as a “betrayal.”

“Here’s what I worry about. If we don’t try to do something when we have the moment to do something, all of those swing voters in swing states for whom the border is the number one priority have every right to look at us and go: ‘You blew your opportunity. We were ready to give you a shot, and you blew it,’” Cramer told CNN’s Manu Raju.

“I don’t see that coming back as a reward to us,” Cramer added. “If we don’t try, then shame on us.”

Republicans have spent months tanking a potential border deal in an increasingly transparent attempt to help Trump get reelected to the White House.

“As the leader of our party, there is zero chance I will support this horrible open borders betrayal of America,” Trump told a crowd of supporters at a rally in Las Vegas on Saturday. “I’ll fight it all the way. A lot of the senators are trying to say, respectfully, they’re blaming it on me. I say, that’s OK. Please blame it on me. Please.”

Meanwhile, Democrats are on the offensive, claiming that Republicans—who have a measly two-seat majority in the House—chickened out of a “tough deal.”

“It’s clear that when it comes to border security, Democrats are for the fix, and Republicans are for the fiction,” Representative Eric Swalwell told CNN.

And President Joe Biden took a more aggressive stance on the issue over the weekend, following a Supreme Court decision that launched a standoff between Texas state officials and federal border patrol agents.

“Give me the power, I asked them the very day I got into office,” Biden said. “Give me the Border Patrol, give me the people, give me the judges, give me the people who can stop this and make it work,” he added.

During a campaign stop in South Carolina, Biden supported the emerging deal, and said that he would shut down the border if given the authority by Congress.

“It would also give me as president the emergency authority to shut down the border until it could get back under control. If that bill were the law today, I’d shut down the border right now and fix it quickly,” he added.

Republican Representative Troy Nehls went on a rant loaded with racist dog whistles about his Democratic counterpart Cori Bush after she confirmed the Justice Department is investigating her campaign spending.

Bush, a Missouri progressive, said Tuesday that the Department of Justice is investigating her use of campaign funds for security services. Bush said she used the money to retain personal security, including her husband, due to “relentless threats to my physical safety and life.”

Congressional ethics rules for representatives allow them to use campaign funds to pay family members for “bona fide services,” as long as those payments do not exceed fair market value. Bush said she hired her husband as part of her security team because he was able to provide protection at or below market rate.

Nehls went off on Bush Tuesday evening. “The idea to pay her thug money to try to help protect her this and that, for what?” the Texas Republican demanded. “Maybe if she wouldn’t be so loud all the time, maybe she wouldn’t be getting threats.”

When asked by CNN’s Melanie Zanona if he felt Bush deserved the threats, Nehls said, “No, what I’m saying is, is that when you’re out there talking the way she does.… She’s pretty radical. And maybe she should tone it down a little bit.”

While Nehls did not explicitly mention Bush’s race, he did use multiple anti-Black tropes such as “thug” and “loud” Black woman. Bush noted as much when she responded to Nehls on X (formerly Twitter), demanding he apologize.

Bush also noted the veiled threat in Nehls’s comments that she should “tone it down” or face threats. Republicans have increasingly used language both veiled and overt that appears to call for political violence—and people are only too willing to listen.

A man House Republicans had previously claimed was a whistleblower on Joe Biden’s corruption categorically debunked all of the GOP’s accusations in a closed-door hearing on Tuesday.

Eric Schwerin, a longtime business partner of Hunter Biden, testified in front of the House Oversight and Judiciary Committees in a closed-door interview. Schwerin also worked as a financial adviser for Joe Biden from 2009 until 2017, during which time he was able to see transactions in and out of the then vice president’s bank accounts.

“Based on that insight, I am not aware of any financial transactions or compensation that Vice President Biden received related to business conducted by any of his family members or their associates nor any involvement by him in their businesses,” Schwerin said in a prepared opening statement obtained by The New Republic.

Republicans have repeatedly accused Biden of profiting from his son Hunter’s overseas business dealings. House Oversight Committee Chair James Comer has spearheaded the impeachment inquiry into Biden, accusing the president and first son of influence peddling and accepting bribes. He has yet to produce any evidence of Biden’s wrongdoing.

Comer had listed Schwerin as one of the many supposed whistleblowers who spoke to Oversight Committee investigators about the Biden family. In March, Comer said four whistleblowers had come forward. But when committee Democrats asked him to share the new information, they were told that there wasn’t actually any new witness information. Comer’s statements referred to just two people: Schwerin and Kathy Chung, who worked as Biden’s executive assistant when he was vice president.

But in his statement Tuesday, Schwerin said Biden had not been involved, either as a public official or a private citizen, in Hunter’s business dealings, nor had he ever been asked to take action on Hunter’s behalf. Schwerin said that in his role as Hunter’s business partner, he never asked Biden to get involved with their work. He and Hunter never suggested to or promised their clients or associates that Biden would get involved, either.

“In my discussions with the Vice President concerning his personal finances, he was always crystal clear that he wanted to take the most transparent and ethical approach consistent with both the spirit and the letter of the law,” Schwerin said. “Given my awareness of his finances and the explicit directions he gave to his financial advisers, the allegation that he would engage in any improper conduct to benefit himself or his family is preposterous to me.”

This is far from the first time that one of Republicans’ star witnesses in the Biden corruption investigation has completely debunked their claims. One such witness was Devon Archer, another of Hunter’s business partners. In his testimony, Archer said he was “not aware of any” wrongdoing by the president and said he disagreed with the allegation that Biden accepted a bribe. Republicans then refused to let Democrats introduce Archer’s testimony as evidence during a September hearing.

Donald Trump’s lawyer Alina Habba on Tuesday suddenly backed off her own claim that the presiding judge in the E. Jean Carroll defamation trial had a conflict of interest, less than a day after she made the initial court filing.

Habba filed a letter to Judge Lewis Kaplan on Monday accusing him of failing to disclose the fact that he had worked at the same law firm as Carroll’s lawyer Roberta Kaplan (no relation) in the 1990s. Habba said she believed the judge had shown “preferential treatment” to Carroll’s team and would seek to have both verdicts overturned.

“As Ms. Habba well knows, these allegations are utterly baseless,” Roberta Kaplan said in a letter of her own, submitted Tuesday.

Roberta Kaplan explained in her letter that she and Judge Kaplan had worked at the same New York law firm, but they overlapped for less than two years. What’s more, Roberta Kaplan has no recollection of interacting with the now-judge whatsoever.

She also expressed concerns about the sourcing behind Habba’s accusations and the New York Post article cited in her complaint. The Post article cited one anonymous source, who claims that the Kaplans had a mentor-mentee relationship.

“While both the New York Post and Ms. Habba purport to cite the recollections of an ‘unnamed partner at Paul Weiss’ … that partner (if he even exists) clearly has a very flawed memory about events that occurred three decades ago,” Roberta Kaplan wrote.

Roberta Kaplan accused Trump and Habba of pushing “a false narrative of judicial bias” and explained that while she had wanted to respond quickly to Habba’s allegations, she might still seek sanctions against the other attorney.

Within hours, Habba submitted another letter backtracking on her accusations. “The purpose of the letter was simply to inquire as to whether there is any merit to a recently published New York Post story which reported on the alleged existence of such a relationship,” Habba said.

“Since Ms. Kaplan has now denied that there was ever a mentor-mentee relationship between herself and Your Honor, this issue has seemingly been resolved,” she wrote, although she added in a footnote that there were other issues about Judge Kaplan’s conduct, “including potential bias hostility towards defense counsel,” that she would raise in her appeal of the verdict.

Habba butted heads repeatedly with the judge throughout the trial over her disruptive behavior. Kaplan regularly admonished her for breaking the rules he established before the trial even began.

House Speaker Mike Johnson had a foot-in-mouth moment on Tuesday, absentmindedly admitting to reporters that he has courted Donald Trump’s opinion “at length” on the border deal he wants to kill.

“The former president has made it clear that he doesn’t want you guys to move forward on this, and judging by his comments, he clearly wants to campaign on this issue. Have you spoken to him about the Senate proposal, and are you simply trying to kill this to help him on the campaign?” probed CNN’s Manu Raju.

“No, Manu, that’s absurd,” Johnson retorted before ranting about the federal government’s job to “protect its citizens.”

“We have only a tiny, as you know, a razor-thin—actually, a one-vote majority right now in the House. Our majority is small, we only have it in one chamber, but we’re trying to use every ounce of leverage that we have to make sure that this issue is addressed.”

“I have talked to former President Trump about this issue at length, and he understands that. He understands that we have a responsibility to do here. The president, of course—President Trump wants to secure the country. President Trump is the one that talked about border security before anyone else did. He ran on, as you remember, building the wall. Why? Because he saw this catastrophe coming,” Johnson continued.

Republican officials have become increasingly audacious in giving away the game on the border deal. On Friday, Senator Josh Hawley explicitly tied the GOP’s border security grandstanding to a coordinated effort to hurt President Joe Biden’s reelection chances.

“There is absolutely no reason to agree to policies that would further enable Joe Biden,” Hawley told Fox News.

Donald Trump’s former national security adviser has some chilling warnings about what could happen if the former president is elected back into office.

John Bolton laid out his terrifying predictions in the foreword to a new paperback edition of his book The Room Where It Happened, which comes out Tuesday.

“A mountain of facts demonstrates that Trump is unfit to be President,” Bolton wrote. “If his first four years were bad, a second four will be worse.”

“Trump really cares only about retribution for himself, and it will consume much of a second term.”

Bolton’s biggest concern is that Trump will drill down hard on isolationism. This could include pulling the United States out of NATO, cutting support to Ukraine as it battles the Russian invasion, and emboldening China to invade Taiwan. Trump could also seek to reunite with North Korean Leader Kim Jong Un or strike some sort of deal with Iran—no matter how bad—to prove his own negotiating skills.

“It is a close contest between Putin and Xi Jinping, who would be happiest to see Trump back in office,” Bolton said.

Bolton served as Trump’s national security adviser from 2018 to 2019. Since leaving the White House, Bolton has become an outspoken Trump critic, particularly regarding Trump’s indictment for hoarding classified documents.

When the indictment was announced in June, Bolton called the case “devastating” and said it should mark the “end of Donald Trump’s political career.” A few weeks later, Bolton said that any 2024 Republican presidential candidates who say Trump shouldn’t be prosecuted for keeping classified material don’t deserve to be president.

This stance is a surprise from Bolton, an Iraq War architect, radical nationalist, and neocon who seemed all too happy to support Trump while the latter was in office. Trump’s campaign seized on this shift in position.

“For someone who professes to have such great disdain for President Trump, ‘Book Deal Bolton’ sure has found a way to grift off the relationship,” Trump campaign spokesman Jason Miller told Axios.

Republicans are losing confidence in their party—and in Republican National Committee Chair Ronna McDaniel.

Days ahead of an RNC meeting, hundreds of conservatives descended upon Las Vegas for a Turning Point Action event meant to be a “wakeup call” to the Republican Party.

“We are at war,” one man shouted from a microphone at the event, reported Politico. “Where are the tools? Where are all the little things that the left is doing but we don’t?”

Most of the attendees of the Restoring National Confidence summit—which by no coincidence shares the RNC’s initials—put that blame on McDaniel’s shoulders, citing her seeming inability to earn them reelections. Some state party officials bemoaned the poor results in 2023, while others held her responsible for party failures even before Trump got her the job in 2016. Altogether, the Republican activists seemed set on going their own way—taking their chances for reelection on their own merits rather than relying on party strategy.

“My county is going to flip to blue if we can’t get control,” Maria Holiday, chair of the Republican Party in Johnson County, Kansas, told Politico. “And I don’t see any effective strategies coming out of the RNC down to the grassroots, and that’s where the people are going to vote.… We’re on our own.”

Event organizer and Turning Point Action’s founder Charlie Kirk also gave the RNC an earful, calling the upcoming, official party convention a “bunch of losers.”

“They know it. The grassroots knows it. The donors know it,” Kirk said. “They lost in ’18. They lost in ’20. They lost in 2022. We have tried to reach out to them many times, and I’m not going to put up with another culture of losing.”

The alternative event points to larger unrest within the party, as national lawmakers worry that their failure to follow through on campaign promises will doom them this election. In October, the GOP witnessed its House representatives cannibalize their own leader for the first time in U.S. history, ousting former House Speaker Kevin McCarthy in a coup led by just eight members of the party.

The ensuing madness, seeded, stoked, and fueled by Trump, has amounted to a complete divide in the Republican Party, with some members disavowing the formal platform entirely.

“I used to be the establishment when I first got started in politics,” Fanchon Blythe, the RNC committeewoman from Nebraska, told Steve Bannon’s War Room. “But God awakened me.”

Turning Point spokesman Andrew Kolvet told Breitbart News that the impetus for the alternative event was due to “overwhelming demand” from conservatives who were allegedly turning to Kirk and his co-organizer, Tyler Bowyer, for answers.

“How many hundreds of phone calls does Tyler have to take before he’s like, ‘OK, I guess we have to get the band together? I guess we have to do this thing because everyone’s telling me there’s this huge problem.’ The way we see it is people need this,” Kolvet told the far-right publication.

The RNC is meeting behind closed doors this week, after McDaniel’s plan to make Trump the party’s presumptive nominee crumbled due to Republican outrage, reported the Associated Press. Even Trump declared it was too soon to rule Nikki Haley out.

“While they have far more votes than necessary to do it, I feel, for the sake of PARTY UNITY, that they should NOT go forward with this plan,” Trump posted on his social media platform Truth Social.

Donald Trump’s lawyer has made another desperate bid to throw out E. Jean Carroll’s case against the former president, but legal experts say Alina Habba’s request is doomed to fail.

A jury ruled last week that Trump owes Carroll $83.3 million for defaming her in 2019 after she revealed he sexually abused her in the mid-1990s. But Habba argued in a Monday court filing that the ruling should be thrown out.

In the document, Habba cited a New York Post article that reported Carroll’s lawyer Roberta Kaplan had worked at the same firm as Judge Lewis Kaplan (no relation), who presided over both of Carroll’s trials against Trump, in the 1990s. The Post article stated the now judge had been like Kaplan’s mentor.

“The underlying defamation case tried last year, and the damages trial completed last week, were both litigations in which there were many clashes between Your Honor and defense counsel,” Habba said in her letter. “We believe, and will argue on appeal, that the Court was overtly hostile towards defense counsel and President Trump, and displayed preferential treatment towards Plaintiff’s counsel.”

Habba also said that Carroll’s other lawyer, Shawn Crowley, had served as Judge Kaplan’s law clerk, and the judge allegedly co-officiated Crowley’s wedding.

Multiple legal experts brushed off Habba’s attempt to overturn the Carroll verdict. “This is a bogus motion by the Trump team. There’s nothing here,” CNN legal analyst Elie Honig said Monday night. “Every judge in that courthouse knows, socializes with, has worked with, sometimes maybe mentored, dozens, hundreds of attorneys in this city.”

“I used to practice in that courthouse in front of judges who used to be my colleagues, my supervisors,” Honig continued, citing his career as an assistant U.S. attorney for the Southern District of New York. “If anything, they were tougher on me as a result of it. That is not enough for a conflict of interest.”

Attorney Andrew Fleischman noted on X (formerly Twitter) that it could be argued that the judge would have had a conflict of interest if Carroll had sued Trump in 1992, “and then the lawsuit languished for 32 years, and one of the original lawyers who filed that suit was still with the firm.” But Carroll didn’t bring her first lawsuit until 2019.

Former U.S. attorney Joyce Vance pointed out that Habba has previously tried to leverage tenuous professional relationships. Habba appeared to suggest in early January that the three Supreme Court justices that Trump appointed owe him allegiance.

This isn’t the first time Trump has tried to get Carroll’s cases against him thrown out, or at least delayed. Trump unsuccessfully claimed that he was protected against the legal proceedings by presidential immunity. In June, Trump ally James H. Brady argued Carroll’s 2019 defamation suit should be thrown out because the former president was being unfairly treated because he is a “white Christian.”

Trump has also demanded a do-over of the first trial, which took place in May. The jury unanimously found Trump liable of sexual abuse and battery against Carroll and of defaming her in 2022. The jury recommended Carroll be awarded $5 million in damages.

Trump claimed that the damages should be reduced, and the second lawsuit thrown out altogether, because he only sexually abused Carroll instead of raping her. So Judge Kaplan clarified the situation, stating that the jury found that the former president did indeed “rape” Carroll based on the common definition of the word.

New York penal law has a “far narrower” definition of the word “rape” than “common modern parlance,” Kaplan said.

“The finding that Ms. Carroll failed to prove that she was ‘raped’ within the meaning of the New York Penal Law does not mean that she failed to prove that Mr. Trump ‘raped’ her as many people commonly understand the word ‘rape.’”

Writer E. Jean Carroll had some special language to describe Donald Trump, referring to the GOP front-runner as an empty vessel. 

“This team of brilliant young people have, as you said, stood up to the man,” Carroll told MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow Monday evening. “Who, by the way Rachel, is not even there. He’s nothing.”

“He is like a walrus snorting, and like a rhino flopping his hands—he is not there. That was the surprising thing to me,” she continued.

“Well on that point, talking about you know being face to face with him, being in the same physical space with him for the first time since when you say he assaulted you in 1996, what you’re describing there, in terms of him being nothing—him feeling like an animal, him feeling not intimidating, was that a shock to you?” Maddow asked.

“No, Rachel—I was terrified. I was just a bag of sweating corpuscles as we prepared for trial. And four days before trial I had an actual breakdown. I lost my ability to speak, I lost my words, I couldn’t talk, I couldn’t go on. That’s how frightened I was,” Carroll responded.

“But oddly, we went into court, [my attorney] took the lectern, I sat in the witness chair like this, and she said, ‘Ms. Carroll, good morning. Could you please spell your name for court?’ And amazingly, I looked out, and he was nothing. He was nothing. He was a phantom,” she continued.

“It was the people around him who were giving him power. He himself was nothing. It was an astonishing discovery for me. He’s nothing. We don’t need to be afraid of him. He can be knocked down.”

Carroll won her defamation case against Trump on Friday, earning her $83.3 million in a historic verdict that octupled her legal team’s original asking price for damages after the former president was depicted bragging about his wealth during a legal deposition.

The jury awarded $7.3 million for damage to Carroll’s reputation, $11 million for emotional harm, and $65 million for punitive damages.

It was Carroll’s second defamation case against Trump, which came after the Apprentice host spent years attacking the writer’s character and claimed that he didn’t harass or even know Carroll, even after he was found liable by a jury for sexually abusing her.

On Monday, Carroll revealed she was looking forward to using cash for “something Donald Trump hates”—a “fund for the women who have been sexually assaulted by Donald Trump.”

The Pennsylvania state Supreme Court ruled Monday that a 40-year-old law banning Medicaid from covering abortions could be considered discriminatory based on sex, and sent the case back to a lower court, setting up a battle to establish financial coverage for the procedure.

The case stems from the Pennsylvania Abortion Control Act of 1982, which prohibits Medicaid from covering abortions unless the pregnancy is the result of rape or incest or it puts the patient’s life at risk. A state Supreme Court ruling three years later established that the law is not a form of sex discrimination, meaning it cannot be challenged under the Pennsylvania Equal Rights Amendment.

In 2019, a coalition of seven state abortion providers filed a lawsuit arguing that the law discriminates based on sex and therefore violates the ERA. The plaintiffs urged the justices to recognize that the state constitution guarantees people the right to abortion access.

On Monday, the justices stopped just short of stating a constitutional right to abortion, but they did rule 3–2 that the state’s ERA applied to Medicaid coverage of abortion access. Justices Christine Donohue and David Wecht, who were in the majority, said that “the right to reproductive autonomy, like other privacy rights, is fundamental.”

In the 219-page majority opinion, Donohue wrote that “the right to make healthcare decisions related to reproduction is a core important right encompassed by the enmeshed privacy interest protected by our Charter.”

“Whether or not to give birth is likely the most personal and consequential decision imaginable in the human experience. Any self-determination is dependent on the right to make that decision,” she said.

Justice Kevin Dougherty, who concurred with the overall majority decision, called Donohue and Wecht’s argument “incredibly insightful.” But he said he felt the gist of the current case was too narrow to decide the constitutionality of abortion.

Donohue noted that refusing to cover abortion discriminates against people trying to exercise the right to reproductive autonomy and therefore violates state constitutional protections against discrimination by the government.

“The government does not bear a constitutional obligation to provide medical care to the indigent, nor is the government required to financially support the exercise of a fundamental right, including a woman’s exercise of her right to reproductive autonomy,” Donohue wrote.

“However, once the government chooses to provide medical care for the indigent, including necessary care attendant to pregnancy for those women exercising their right to reproductive autonomy who decide to carry a pregnancy to term, the government is obligated to maintain neutrality so as not to intrude upon the constitutional right to full reproductive autonomy, which includes the right to terminate a pregnancy.”

The case will now return to the lower Commonwealth Court to determine if Medicaid should cover abortion and if abortion is constitutionally protected. The state government must prove that banning Medicaid from covering most abortions does not violate the ERA.

David Cohen, one of the lawyers for the plaintiffs, told The New Republic that the Pennsylvania government has a “very high bar” to clear to justify Medicaid excluding abortion coverage after this ruling.

The government must prove it has a “compelling state interest” in prohibiting Medicaid from covering abortion, and no other “less intrusive methods” to implement the policy, Cohen, who is also a constitutional law professor at Drexel University’s Kline School of Law, explained. The “least intrusive method” is a way of analyzing laws to determine whether they do the least amount of harm possible in achieving the measure’s stated goal.

“The court said that [the law] is a form of sex discrimination and that sex discrimination under the state’s Equal Rights Amendment needs to be very strictly scrutinized,” Cohen said. “But it’s not an absolute bar. It’s not like the court didn’t say all sex discrimination is prohibited. It’s just a very difficult hurdle for the state to overcome.”