AOC Asks Republicans When They Knew Their Impeachment Push Was a Sham

Representative Alexandria Ocasio Cortez tore into Tony Bobulinski during a House Oversight Committee hearing on Wednesday, pressing conservatives’ so-called “deadly witness” on his ability to point to any illegal activity conducted by President Joe Biden—and in doing so, urging Republicans to admit that the whole proceeding was “based on false charges.”

“I have a quick question. Simple. Is it your testimony today that you personally witnessed President Joe Biden commit a crime?” the New York lawmaker asked.

“I believe the fact that he was sitting with me while I was putting together—” Bobulinski started, before Ocasio-Cortez cut in, narrowing her question.

“Did you witness the president commit a crime? Is it your testimony today?” she prompted.

“Yes,” Bobulinski replied.

“And what crime did …  you witness?” Ocasio-Cortez continued.

In the ensuing back-and-forth, Bobulinski vaguely responded with categories of crimes rather than specific ones, flagrantly patronizing Ocasio-Cortez for not understanding corruption statutes like RICO, only to then be schooled by her explanation that RICO is simply an umbrella category and not a specific crime.

“Clearly what we are seeing here today is a continuation of the 15-month saga of the Republican majority lost in the desert,” Ocasio-Cortez said, starting a speech that would lean into her conservative colleagues for pushing forward with an impeachment probe based on meritless claims that have since been thoroughly debunked—including by one of the investigation’s supposed star witnesses, Alexander Smirnov, who is currently in prison after admitting that he spun the story with the help of top Russian intelligence.

“What we are seeing is that this committee was warned about the falsehoods of these allegations long before that, warned by Trump’s Secretary of State, Mike Pompeo,” Ocasio-Cortez continued. “And yet they proceeded anyway. The chairman proceeded anyway. This committee was warned by a Rudy Giuliani associate right here, Lev Parnas. After that document, about the falsehoods of this, then held hearings where your own expert witnesses said that there was no grounds for impeachment, and you proceeded anyway.”

“At this point, the story is not the fact that the basis of this impeachment inquiry is wrong. The story is why it’s proceeding anyway. Why is this committee proceeding based on false charges?” she added.

Of course, some of her colleagues across the aisle didn’t take so kindly to her laying it all out on the table, deciding instead that the best course of action—rather than respond frankly—would be to attempt to twist Ocasio-Cortez’s vocal offense into fodder for their social media followers.

“Weekly meltdown by Rep. AOC,” posted South Carolina Representative Nancy Mace, sharing a clip of the speech. “Someone needs to remind the Left, just because you are loud, does not mean you are right.”

In a sign of how well the Republican impeachment investigation into Joe Biden is going, right-wing networks on Wednesday barely covered a House hearing that was part of the probe.

The House Oversight Committee heard testimony Wednesday from Tony Bobulinski, Hunter Biden’s onetime work partner with a history of shady business dealings, and Jason Galanis, who is testifying via video call from a federal prison where he is serving a 14-year sentence for financial fraud. Republicans claim both men can prove the Biden family is guilty of corruption, despite the fact that Hunter says he and Galanis only met once.

But before the hearing even began, Newsmax host Rob Finnerty asked House Judiciary Committee Chair Jim Jordan, who has helped lead the probe, why Republicans insisted on continuing with the investigation. The Republican House majority has shrunk so much that articles of impeachment are unlikely to pass.

“It kind of seems like you’re chasing your tail at this point because this is not going to go anywhere,” Finnerty said.

When the hearing began, Fox News barely acknowledged it was happening. Instead, the network only showed the hearing in a small, soundless box in the corner of the screen.

One of the few times Fox did show the hearing was during the opening statement from Lev Parnas, a former associate of Rudy Giuliani. Parnas said he had seen “precisely zero evidence of the Bidens’ corruption in Ukraine.”

“No credible sources ever provided proof of criminal activity,” Parnas said. “The only information ever pushed on the Bidens in Ukraine has come from one source and one source only: Russia and Russian agents.”

Fox quickly cut off the audio and switched to different programming.

Newsmax did cover the hearing, but even the far-right network’s reporters couldn’t deny the fact that Republicans have turned up no proof of the president’s wrongdoing. While Parnas was being questioned, one reporter pointed out to Representative Byron Donalds that “a lot of this evidence is situational, it’s circumstantial.”

“What does the Oversight Committee need right now to complete its investigation, to fill in these holes?” she asked.

“All I will say is, sit tight and let the rest of the hearing unfold,” Byron said, insisting the first half of the hearing had been “devastating” to the Biden family.

In fact, nothing the Republicans have turned up has been devastating to the Biden family. The only evidence of wrongdoing that has come out has been by the Republicans’ own witnesses. One, Gal Luft, has been charged with acting as a foreign agent for China and as an arms dealer. Another is Alexander Smirnov, the former FBI informant who accused the Bidens of accepting bribes, jump-starting the entire investigation. He is currently imprisoned in California for fabricating the entire allegation. Smirnov has even admitted that he was fed the story by a Russian intelligence officer.

Just a few hours later, Donalds was forced to eat his words on Fox News when host John Roberts pointed out that “the needle hasn’t appreciably moved on this case.”

“Where is the evidence of wrongdoing on the president’s part, and how long can you continue this investigation without that evidence?” Roberts asked.

And shortly before Donalds appeared on Fox, the network’s legal analyst Kerri Urbahn agreed with Roberts that the investigation hadn’t produced any evidence.

“I do think that people are maybe becoming a little bit tired of all this,” she told Roberts.

New York Attorney General Letitia James has urged an appeals court to ignore Donald Trump’s latest effort to worm his way out of paying the $464 million disgorgement from his bank fraud trial.

On Wednesday, an attorney for James told the court that Trump’s claims could not be trusted since they were based on sworn statements by Alan Garten, general counsel at the Trump Organization, and Gary Giulietti, one of Trump’s close friends. There’s a precedent to disqualify them—during the trial, Judge Arthur Engoron decided that Giulietti could not be considered a credible witness and argued that Garten had “professional interests in this litigation.”

Garten, however, snapped back at that. “The court found no such thing. The AG statement is reckless and completely untrue,” Garten said in response to the filing, according to The Washington Post.

So far, Trump has tried and failed to pause the rapidly growing interest on the judgment, counteroffering the court a $100 million bond in lieu of the full amount. He has also approached several brokers and 30 suretors for help securing a bond, though it didn’t seem to work out for him, according to a filing by Trump’s attorneys, who admitted that suretors refused to accept Trump’s real estate as collateral. Instead, they would only accept cash to the tune of $1 billion, which Trump said he and his businesses just don’t have.

In a nearly 5,000-page document filed on Monday, Trump’s attorneys argued that the fine was “grossly disproportional” to Trump’s offenses, which included defrauding banks, insurance companies, and investors by falsely inflating his wealth and the value of his properties.

“The amount of the judgment, with interest, exceeds $464 million, and very few bonding companies will consider a bond of anything approaching that magnitude,” wrote attorneys Alina Habba, Clifford Robert, Christopher Kise, and John Sauer.

Trump issued his own venom Monday night in a string of posts that his former fixer, Michael Cohen, interpreted as fury directed at a “situation that is completely out of his control.”

“A bond of the size set by the Democrat Club-controlled Judge, in Corrupt, Racist Letitia James’ unlawful Witch Hunt, is unConstitutional, un-American, unprecedented, and practically impossible for ANY Company, including one as successful as mine. The Bonding Companies have never heard of such a bond, of this size, before, nor do they have the ability to post such a bond, even if they wanted to,” Trump wrote on TruthSocial.

Regardless of his frustration, he’s quickly running out of time. The former president has until Monday to come up with nearly half a billion dollars—and if he doesn’t, James can begin taking steps to seize his assets to cover the debt, including 40 Wall Street and Trump Tower.*

* This article originally mischaracterized the consequences of the Monday deadline.

Representative Jamie Raskin absolutely destroyed the Republican effort to impeach Joe Biden on Wednesday, describing the somehow still ongoing inquiry as “the most spectacular failure in the history of congressional investigations.”

The House Oversight Committee is hearing testimony Wednesday from Tony Bobulinski, Hunter Biden’s onetime work partner with a history of shady business dealings, and Jason Galanis, who is testifying via video call from a federal prison where he is serving a 14-year sentence for financial fraud. Republicans claim both men can prove the Biden family is guilty of corruption, despite the fact that Hunter says he and Galanis only met once.

“With any luck, today marks the end of perhaps the most spectacular failure in the history of congressional investigations: the effort to find a high crime or misdemeanor committed by Joe Biden and then to impeach him for it,” Raskin, the ranking Oversight member, said in his opening statement. As he spoke, one of his aides held up a poster with quotes from the right-wing outlets Fox News and the Washington Examiner acknowledging that the impeachment investigation has turned up no proof.

Raskin described some of the “hilarious episodes” in Republicans’ “long-running madcap series,” including almost all of the GOP’s supposed “star” witnesses stating that the president had not been involved in his family’s business dealings. Lawmakers also combed through tens of thousands of pages of financial documents but were unable to find proof of Biden’s wrongdoing.

Over the course of the investigation, Raskin noted, Republican Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene waved Hunter Biden’s nude photos around during a hearing (and may have emailed them to minors). One of the GOP’s primary witnesses, Gal Luft, has been charged with acting as a foreign agent for China and as an arms dealer. And Alexander Smirnov, the former FBI informant who accused the Biden’s of accepting bribes, jump-starting the entire investigation, is currently imprisoned in California for fabricating the entire allegation. Smirnov has even admitted that he was fed the story by a Russian intelligence officer.

“The comedy of errors comes crashing to an end, as House Republicans in more than a dozen Biden districts beg for mercy and the Committee throws a flabby Hail Mary pass three weeks after the Super Bowl is over,” Raskin said.

Although Oversight Chair James Comer and Judiciary Committee Chair Jim Jordan, who have spearheaded the charge against Biden, remain gung-ho about the investigation, other Republicans have begun to sour on it. In fact, Representative Ken Buck, the one Republican willing to openly oppose the impeachment inquiry, will leave Congress at the end of this week in large part because of the investigation.

“We’ve taken impeachment and we’ve made it a social media issue as opposed to a constitutional concept,” Buck said last week when he announced his retirement. “This place just keeps going downhill, and I don’t need to spend my time here.”

Once again, Donald Trump wants everyone to know he is totally not worried about money—especially not the $454 million judgment stemming from his New York bank fraud trial that the self-purported billionaire can’t seem to muster the money for.

“These baseless innuendos are pure bullshit,” Trump campaign spokesman Steven Cheung said in a statement on Tuesday, referring to a CNN segment that reported the GOP presidential nominee was looking to sell his New York properties—and fast.

“President Trump has filed a motion to stay the unjust, unconstitutional, un-American judgment from New York Judge Arthur Engoron in a political Witch Hunt brought by a corrupt Attorney General,” Cheung continued. “A bond of this size would be an abuse of the law, contradict bedrock principals [sic] of our Republic, and fundamentally undermine the rule of law in New York.”

But Cheung’s insistence that Trump isn’t trying to get rid of his properties just doesn’t seem to jibe with what Trump himself is saying, and what seems to be keeping him up at night. On Tuesday, the former president was online in the early morning hours, complaining that he’d have to sell his properties at “Fire Sale prices” to cover the disgorgement.

“I would be forced to mortgage or sell Great Assets, perhaps at Fire Sale prices, and if and when I win the Appeal, they would be gone. Does that make sense? WITCH HUNT. ELECTION INTERFERENCE!” he wrote on TruthSocial.

So far, Trump has tried and failed to pause the rapidly growing interest, counteroffering the court a $100 million bond in lieu of the full amount. He has also approached several brokers and several dozen suretors for help securing a bond. That, however, didn’t work out for him, according to a filing by Trump’s attorneys, who admitted that suretors refused to accept Trump’s real estate as collateral. Instead, they would only accept cash to the tune of $1 billion, which Trump said he and his businesses just don’t have. All in all, a curious turn of events for a man who claimed during a deposition last year that he had “substantially in excess of 400 million in cash” which was “going up very substantially every month.”

Earlier this month, Trump bragged to Fox News’s Brian Kilmeade that he has “a lot of money” and that he doesn’t “worry about money.” But for all his posturing, Trump is quickly running out of time. The former president has until Monday to come up with nearly half a billion dollars before he’s legally allowed to appeal the case.

From Stormy Daniels’s perspective, there was one obvious reason to accept the hush-money payment from Donald Trump: take it, or be killed.

The danger posed by Trump and his associates in the aftermath of their affair was clear for the adult film star, whose problems with Trump began in 2006 when he slept with her after dangling a potential spot on The Celebrity Apprentice. Soon after, Trump sent his former fixer, Michael Cohen, to pay her $130,000 to stay quiet about their entanglement ahead of his 2016 bid for the presidency.

In a new documentary that intimately follows Daniels’s side of their ensuing, yearslong legal battle, Daniels explains that she knew she had become a target after Trump’s political career began: The Republican Party, she says, likes “to make their problems go away.”

“I mean, people have been suspiciously killed for political reasons. It was really about two things: trying to keep the story from coming out so that it would not hurt my husband and my daughter, and I wouldn’t lose my life, and that there would be a paper trail and money trail linking me to Donald Trump so that he could not have me killed. All I had to do was sign this piece of paper and collect $130,000,” Daniels explains in Stormy.

But it wasn’t just political paranoia getting the better of her. Even before Daniels attempted to break the nondisclosure agreement that Trump had forced her into, she endured brutal bullying that, at times, threatened not just her life but also that of her child. Stormy also documents a 2011 incident in which she was approached by a strange man in Las Vegas who she claimed threatened her daughter while demanding she forget about her tryst with Trump. Daniels also shared footage of her tailing and calling the cops on an unidentified man in a car who she said she had caught videotaping and following her daughter.

Elsewhere in the documentary, Daniels—whose real name is Stephanie Clifford—reveals that she had recorded a video will in the event that she was murdered. She instructed the filmmaker whom she had quietly hired to follow her around to promise to hand the footage to a news station in the event of her death and split the proceeds 50/50 with her child.

Daniels’s next starring role will be in Trump’s New York hush-money trial, in which the GOP presidential nominee faces 34 felony counts related to falsifying business records to cover up the payments—which may have helped swing the 2016 election. Trump had previously attempted to keep Daniels, along with Cohen, far away from the trial on the basis that the two were “liars.” But on Tuesday, a judge nixed that effort, allowing them both to testify. The trial, which will be Trump’s first in a series of back-to-back criminal cases, is expected to begin sometime in mid-April.

Donald Trump may have secured the Republican presidential nomination, but Nikki Haley—who dropped out of the race two weeks ago—is still proving to be a thorn in his side.

Trump easily won the five Republican primaries held Tuesday night in Florida, Illinois, Ohio, Arizona, and Kansas. But he failed to garner anything close to unanimous party support.

Instead, Haley managed to rack up more than 500,000 votes. And that’s in addition to the nearly three million votes she won while she was still running, including sweeping the primaries in Vermont and Washington, D.C., both Democratic strongholds.

It’s likely that some of the votes Haley received Tuesday were cast early, before she dropped out of the race. But the fact that she continues to nip at Trump’s heels is a sign that he is struggling to unite his voter base.

Although Haley embraced political stances that, in many cases, were just as extreme as Trump’s, she appealed to more moderate Republicans and Never Trump voters. Some Haley voters are bound to vote for Trump, but those who are more centrist or independent aren’t guaranteed to jump to his support.

“The Haley voters are the swing voters of the 2024 election,” Marc Thiessen, the chief speech writer for former President George W. Bush, told Fox News last week. “Trump has to win them over, he has to pivot now to the general election and focus on uniting the party and the non-MAGA part of the GOP.”

“What Trump needs to understand is that MAGA voters are not going to decide this election.”

When Haley dropped out, she did not endorse Trump in her resignation speech. Instead, she urged the former president to “earn the votes” of all Republican and independent voters.

Trump, however, has made a hard pivot to the right. He has somehow become even more extreme than during his first term, garnering comparisons to Adolf Hitler and other authoritarian leaders. And while that has certainly played well with his most loyal supporters, it would seem he is failing to successfully court anyone else.

Donald Trump brazenly included more falsehoods about the 2020 election in a brief filed with the Supreme Court on Tuesday for his immunity case.

Trump was supposed to go on trial in March for trying to overthrow the previous presidential election, but he and his lawyers have delayed proceedings by arguing that the former president has legal immunity against prosecution. The Supreme Court further held things up when it agreed to weigh in on the matter. The high court will hear arguments on April 25.

In a brief filed Tuesday, Trump’s lawyers made their case as to why he is immune from prosecution for actions he took while still in office. Most of the arguments aren’t new, but one part of the filing stands out: In a list of the charges against Trump, the filing alleges that Trump was simply communicating with “the Vice President, the Vice President’s official staff, and members of Congress to urge them to exercise their official duties in the election certification process in accordance with the position, based on voluminous information available to President Trump in his official capacity, that the election was tainted by extensive fraud and irregularities.”

The indictment also rewords special counsel Jack Smith’s other charges against Trump, claiming the former president is being indicted for having “communicated with state officials about the administration of the federal election and urged them to exercise their official responsibilities in accordance with the conclusion that the 2020 presidential election was tainted by fraud and irregularities.”

Absolutely no evidence of fraud has been found regarding the 2020 election. Even investigators that Trump himself hired have been unable to find a shred of proof to back up his claims that the vote was rigged against him.

More importantly, the indictment does not say that Trump was acting based on information that the election was fraudulent. The indictment alleges that Trump knew he had lost but still insisted that fraudulent ballots had been cast and that electronic voting machines were switching votes to Democratic.

“These claims were false, and the Defendant knew that they were false,” the indictment said. “In fact, the Defendant was notified repeatedly that his claims were untrue—often by the people on whom he relied for candid advice on important matters, and who were best positioned to know the facts—and he deliberately disregarded the truth.”

People including then–Vice President Mike Pence and senior Justice Department officials, whom Trump had appointed, repeatedly told him there was no evidence of fraud, according to the indictment. So did the director of national intelligence, the Department of Homeland Security’s Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, senior White House attorneys, and state-level allies.

In fact, a top adviser warned about the efforts to overturn the election quite clearly: “I’ll obviously hustle to help on all fronts, but it’s tough to own any of this when it’s all just conspiracy shit beamed down from the mothership,” an unnamed senior campaign adviser wrote in an email on December 8, 2020, referring to Trump’s “Elite Strike Task Force” led by Rudy Giuliani.

On Tuesday, the Supreme Court allowed the country’s toughest immigration law—Texas Senate Bill 4—to go into effect. But not every member of the nation’s highest court agreed with the decision.

In a dissenting opinion, Justice Sonia Sotomayor argued that the court was inviting “further chaos and crisis in immigration enforcement.”

“The Court gives a green light to a law that will upend the longstanding federal-state balance of power and sow chaos, when the only court to consider the law concluded that it is likely unconstitutional,” she wrote.

Justices Ketanji Brown Jackson and Elena Kagan also dissented from the opinion.

In practice, the law will allow state police to arrest anyone they suspect to be an undocumented immigrant, and charge them with misdemeanors or felonies in the event of repeat offenses. It will also allow them to deport undocumented people back to points of entry along the U.S.-Mexico border. But S.B. 4 and its myriad allowances for local authorities also holds the potential to threaten foreign relations between the two nations, with Texas making judgments otherwise relegated to the federal government and allowing the state to ignore federal immigration standards and court proceedings.

The ultimate legality of the law—which the Department of Justice has argued is unconstitutional—is still undergoing consideration by the ultraconservative Fifth U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals.

“The Court confronts a state immigration law that will transform the balance of power at the border and have life altering consequences for noncitizens in Texas,” Sotomayor wrote.

Still, the reality of Tuesday’s decision already warranted celebration among some of Texas’s most conservative officials.

“Texas has defeated the Biden Administration’s and ACLU’s emergency motions at the Supreme Court. Our immigration law, SB 4, is now in effect. As always, it’s my honor to defend Texas and its sovereignty, and to lead us to victory in court,” said Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton.

Texas Governor Greg Abbott also chimed in, describing the 6-3 decision as “clearly a positive development.”

On Tuesday, the Supreme Court handed Texas Governor Greg Abbott the reins to enforce a contentious law in the state’s radical immigration policy, Operation Lone Star.

Within less than 24 hours, the Supreme Court first allowed a pause on the new law to lapse, then issued an indefinite stay, and finally, on Tuesday afternoon, issued an opinion that canceled that stay and allowed the law to go into effect while litigation continues in lower courts.

“The time may come, in this case or another, when this Court is forced to conclude that an administrative stay has effectively become a stay pending appeal and review it accordingly. But at this juncture in this case, that conclusion would be premature,” read an opinion by Justice Amy Coney Barrett.

Texas Senate Bill 4 could still be blocked at a later date. But for now, it will allow Texas police to question and arrest anyone they believe might have illegally crossed the U.S.-Mexico border, and will grant police the authority to charge them with misdemeanors for first-time offenders and felonies for repeat offenders. It will also allow Texas law enforcement to deport immigrants back to a port of entry along the border. The controversial bill was signed into law by Abbott and was originally supposed to take effect on March 5—until the Justice Department and several civil rights groups got involved, arguing that the bill went way too far, stepping on the toes of the responsibilities of the federal government.

This is a developing story.