MTG: If Republicans Lose House Speakership, It’s Totally Not My Fault

Georgia Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene is attempting to stave off criticism of her recent effort to oust House Speaker Mike Johnson, declaring that she wouldn’t be accepting any of the blame if the move ends in a legislative power flip between the two parties, with House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries claiming the seat. (Sneak peek: She will most definitely be handed most of the blame.)

Instead, Greene is trying to steer attention toward her Republican colleagues who have been resigning en masse over the last few months, citing complaints of Republican infighting and lack of competency. That includes Wisconsin Representative Mike Gallagher and Colorado Representative Ken Buck, whose dual resignations this month have left the conservative party with a scant one-seat majority.

“It’s just a simple math. The more Republicans, like Mike Gallagher, that resign and leave early—guess what, that means we have less Republicans in the House,” Greene said Tuesday on Real America’s Voice. “So, every time a Mike Gallagher or a Ken Buck leaves early, that brings our numbers down and brings us dangerously closer to being in the minority.”

“It’s not Marjorie Taylor Greene that is saying the inconvenient truth and forcing everyone to wake up and realize that Republican voters are done with us doing this kind of crap that we did last week, and they are fed up with speakers of the House and Republicans … go out and campaign and make all these promises, and then turn around and stab their voters in the back,” Greene continued, slamming Johnson for finally following through on a core component of his job on Friday: passing a government spending package.

“I am not going to be responsible for Hakeem Jeffries being speaker of the House, I am not going to be responsible for a Democrat majority taking over our Republican majority. That lies squarely on the shoulders of these Republicans that are leaving early because they don’t have the intestinal fortitude to handle the real fight and the responsibility that comes with leadership at the end of our republic, when our country is nearly destroyed, and when our Constitution is being rammed through a paper shredder,” she added.

Greene then reiterated that she saw the motion to oust Johnson as little more than a “pink slip”—even though she admitted on Friday, shortly after filing it, that she will force a vote.

Donald Trump praised Robert Kennedy Jr. on Wednesday for potentially siphoning votes away from Joe Biden in the 2024 presidential election—one day after Kennedy himself bragged about running a “spoiler” campaign.

“RFK Jr. is the most Radical Left Candidate in the race, by far. He’s a big fan of the Green New Scam, and other economy killing disasters,” Trump wrote on Truth Social. “I guess this would mean he is going to be taking votes from Crooked Joe Biden, which would be a great service to America.”

“It’s great for MAGA, but the Communists will make it very hard for him to get on the Ballot,” Trump continued. “He is Crooked Joe Biden’s Political Opponent, not mine. I love that he is running!”

The day before, as Kennedy announced he had picked Silicon Valley lawyer Nicole Shanahan as his running mate, he himself admitted his independent campaign could throw a wrench in 2024 voting.

“Our campaign is a spoiler,” Kennedy said to cheers from the crowd. “I agree with that.”

Independent candidates historically perform poorly in the general election. They are more often viewed as spoilers who strip just enough votes away from one major candidate to tip the election toward the other. But it’s unclear whether Kennedy will pull more votes away from Trump or from Biden.

Kennedy has expressed some beliefs in the past that are more Democratic, but he’s courting a current donor base and staff roster that are extremely Republican. He has been embraced by the far right for things such as his opposition to vaccines and his belief in conspiracy theories. But he also holds significant sway among independent voters, particularly as Biden’s popularity plummets over his response to Israel’s bombardment of Gaza.

So while it remains to be seen which way Kennedy tips the scales, or even if he affects them at all, the fact remains that Kennedy knows he’s only causing problems. He doesn’t seem to have an issue with that—and in the meantime, Trump is celebrating.

Representative James Comer has found a new scapegoat for his impeachment inquiry into Joe Biden going up in flames: It’s all the deep state’s fault.

Comer made the wild claim during a Monday appearance on the Fox News radio show Fox Across America With Jimmy Failla. The House Oversight Committee chair insisted that Attorney General Merrick Garland was conspiring with the “deep state” to sabotage the impeachment investigation.

“Garland’s working with the deep state, who’s working with the liberal mainstream media to try to indoctrinate into people’s minds that there’s no evidence,” Comer said.

Comer then insisted that multiple members of the Biden family had received payments from foreign businesses. “This all revolves around Joe because not only have we proven Joe got $250,000, a quarter of $1 million of that money, but Joe met with all the people that were wiring the Bidens money,” Comer said.

The $250,000 that Comer mentioned has already been proven to be from Biden’s brother Jim, who was repaying the president for a loan in 2018. As for Biden meeting with foreign businesspeople, there is no evidence that he ever had more than a passing encounter with any of them.

Despite what Comer says, the “deep state” doesn’t need to convince people that there’s no evidence of Biden’s wrongdoing. There simply is no evidence of Biden’s wrongdoing. Almost all of the Republicans’ supposed star witnesses have said that Biden was not involved in his son Hunter’s business dealings.

During a disastrous Oversight Committee hearing last week, Hunter’s onetime business partner Tony Bobulinski insisted that the president was guilty of corruption but could provide no examples of times he had actually witnessed such crimes. Meanwhile, former Rudy Giuliani associate Lev Parnas said that the impeachment effort was based on Russian disinformation.

Parnas’s accusation is backed up by the arrest of former FBI informant Alexander Smirnov. Smirnov alleged that Biden and his son accepted bribes from a Ukrainian oligarch, sparking the impeachment investigation. When the Justice Department charged Smirnov with providing false information to the FBI, he admitted that his story had been fed to him by a Russian intelligence operative.

Slowly, Republican lawmakers have begun to back away from the impeachment inquiry, grudgingly admitting that there is no proof to their claims. Comer himself changed his tune earlier this week, saying he intends to make nonbinding criminal referrals against Biden to the Justice Department.

Less than 24 hours after Donald Trump got hit with a gag order in his hush-money trial, he launched a fresh attack on the judge and his family.

In posts on Truth Social Wednesday morning, Trump blasted Judge Juan Merchan and his family, singling out his daughter while seemingly spitting on the idea of a gag order altogether.

“Judge Juan Merchan, who is suffering from an acute case of Trump Derangement Syndrome (whose daughter represents Crooked Joe Biden, Kamala Harris, Adam ‘Shifty’ Schiff, and other Radical Liberals, has just posted a picture of me behind bars, her obvious goal, and makes it completely impossible for me to get a fair trial) has now issued another illegal, un-American, unConstitutional ‘order,’ as he continues to try and take away my Rights,” Trump said, accusing the state of depriving him of his First Amendment right to speak out against “Crooked Joe Biden”—even though it definitely did not.

“So, let me get this straight, the Judge’s daughter is allowed to post pictures of her ‘dream’ of putting me in jail, the Manhattan D.A. is able to say whatever lies about me he wants, the Judge can violate our Laws and Constitution at every turn, but I am not allowed to talk about the attacks against me, and the Lunatics trying to destroy my life, and prevent me from winning the 2024 Presidential Election, which I am dominating?” Trump wrote in a second post, continuing to push past the reality of his situation. “Maybe the Judge is such a hater because his daughter makes money by working to ‘Get Trump,’ and when he rules against me over and over again, he is making her company, and her, richer and richer. How can this be allowed?”

Trump’s posts just barely skirt the gag order he was hit with on Tuesday. The partial gag order forbade Trump from speaking publicly about courtroom staff, prosecutors, or any of their family members. Comments about jurors were also prohibited, as well as comments about witnesses—but wiggle room still existed within the order that would allow Trump to attack Merchan or Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg.

Still it’s a clear intimidation tactic aimed at the judge overseeing his first criminal trial.

Trump should be no stranger to the legality of gag orders—so far, he’s been hit with them in two of his other legal trials. In October, Judge Arthur Engoron silenced the former president after he ushered a scourge of far-right vitriol onto Engoron’s chief law clerk. Trump was later fined $15,000 for violating the order. Judge Tanya Chutkan also imposed a gag order on the former president in his election interference trial.

Under a mountain of legal bills, Mike Lindell’s biggest property, MyPillow, just lost a place to lay its head.

The 62-year-old’s biggest success—a line of poly-foam pillows—is currently facing a court-ordered eviction after the big boss failed to pay $217,000 in rent at one of its two warehouses in ​​Shakopee, Minnesota.

“MyPillow has more or less vacated, but we’d like to do this by the book,” attorney Sara Filo, representing MyPillow’s landlord, First Industrial, said during a hearing on Tuesday. “At this point there’s a representation that no further payment is going to be made under this lease, so we’d like to go ahead with finding a new tenant.”

Admittedly, the business hasn’t been looking too good. According to Lindell, the infomercial-heavy product lost $100 million in revenue after it was dropped by shopping networks and retailers, had its credit limit downsized by American Express, and had to auction off thousands of pieces of equipment, reported The Star Tribune. Lindell, however, would need a mirror to see exactly why MyPillow has transformed over the last several years into a risky investment.

The former millionaire spent months using every platform at his disposal to seed conspiracy theories following the 2020 presidential election, including against Dominion Voting Systems and Smartmatic, claiming the electronic voting companies were complicit in a scheme to keep Donald Trump from retaking the White House. That, however, cost Lindell $5 million and put him on the line in a $1.3 billion defamation suit brought by Dominion, in which he’s being sued not just for spreading the lies but also for attempting to profit off them. Lindell’s ingenious plan for all this is to try to use the ultraconservative Supreme Court to absolve himself—with the help of a crowdsourced legal fund.

The beleaguered conspiracy theorist has, all in all, been struggling with cash flow for some time. Earlier this month, Lindell joined Steve Bannon’s podcast to advertise a new Arizona lawsuit he underwrote for Kari Lake—and to ask if listeners would be willing to spare some change to help him out.

Donald Trump didn’t hold back against his former ally Ronna McDaniel after she was fired from NBC, following just days on the job.

NBC News confirmed the news of McDaniel’s firing Tuesday night, following an immediate on-air revolt by some of the network’s biggest stars. “No organization, particularly a newsroom, can succeed unless it is cohesive and aligned,” NBCUniversal News Group Chair Cesar Conde said in a memo. “Over the last few days, it has become clear that this appointment undermines that goal.”

The dismissal comes just weeks after McDaniel was unceremoniously ousted as Republican National Committee chair, at Trump’s behest. And the Republican presidential nominee wasted no time in piling onto McDaniel’s woes.

“Wow! Ronna McDaniel got fired by Fake News NBC. She only lasted two days, and this after McDaniel went out of her way to say what they wanted to hear,” Trump wrote on Truth Social Tuesday night. “It leaves her in a very strange place, it’s called NEVER NEVERLAND, and it’s not a place you want to be. These Radical Left Lunatics are CRAZY, and the top people at NBC ARE WEAK.”

It’s another embarrassing blow for McDaniel. While she was at the RNC, she repeatedly pushed Trump’s conspiracies, including that the 2020 election had been rigged and that mail-in voting allowed for fraudulent ballots to be cast. She helped organize Trump’s fake-elector scheme and tried to pressure Michigan officials not to certify the state’s 2020 election results. And she even tried to cast doubt on the 2020 election during a Meet the Press interview on Sunday—her first and only appearance on NBC since the network first announced her cushy gig.

NBC had planned to pay McDaniel about $300,000 per year to appear as a conservative political analyst on the network. But her hiring prompted an immediate revolt from some of NBC’s biggest stars.

Longtime anchor Chuck Todd said the top brass owed Meet the Press host Kristen Welker an apology and slammed McDaniel for “credibility issues.” He noted that under McDaniel’s time leading the RNC, many journalists who tried to report on the organization and the Republican Party “have been met with gaslighting, have been met with character assassination.”

On Monday, Morning Joe hosts Joe Scarborough and Mika Brzezinski slammed NBC’s decision to hire McDaniel and played a compilation of the former RNC chair’s many lies. By Tuesday morning, several other MSNBC anchors also expressed outrage, including Nicole Wallace, Joy Reid, Jen Psaki, Lawrence O’Donnell, and Rachel Maddow.

Other NBC employees, speaking anonymously, wondered what exactly McDaniel could offer the network. McDaniel is not close to Republican leaders in Congress, and she is unpopular with anti-Trump voters, who think she tipped the primaries toward the former president. McDaniel has also fallen out of favor with Donald Trump himself, leading to her resigning from the RNC at the start of the month.

McDaniel’s talent agency, CAA, which represented her in the deal with NBC, also dropped her on Tuesday. She is reportedly looking for a lawyer to represent her against the network.

A new report from the Department of Defense reveals the number of times military members were reimbursed for costs of traveling out of state for reproductive health care—and in doing so, exposes just how ridiculous Senator Tommy Tuberville’s protest of that policy was.

Tuberville single-handedly held up more than 400 military promotions last year to protest the Defense Department policy of reimbursing service members who had to travel for an abortion or other form of reproductive care. Despite repeated warnings from department leadership that he was hurting military readiness, the Alabama Republican claimed he wanted to “stand up for the taxpayers of this country” against what he considered a “bad policy.”

But deputy Pentagon press secretary Sabrina Singh revealed Tuesday that the policy wasn’t such a burden on taxpayers after all.

Between June and December 2023, “the policy was used 12 times to access noncovered reproductive health care services,” Singh told a press briefing. Those services include abortion, as well as assisted reproductive procedures such as egg retrieval and in vitro fertilization.

“The number 12 accounts for each instance of an individual using the policy for a round-trip event,” Singh explained.

The total cost for travel and transportation in those 12 instances was $44,791.20, Singh said.

In comparison, the Defense Department’s total budget for 2023 was $816.7 billion. And the amount has gone up for this year.

Tuberville held up hundreds of military promotions for most of 2023, throwing the entire U.S. military into disarray. He finally relented in December, after succeeding only in making everyone angry with him. Military leaders called him out by name, accusing him of “aiding and abetting Communist and other autocratic regimes,” while fellow Republicans criticized him, with one calling him “dumb” on the Senate floor.

Through it all, the Defense Department refused to budge on its policy. Dropping that policy “would be an egregious violation of the covenant that we make, the military makes, with the people that sign up and volunteer,” Pentagon spokesman John Kirby said in October.

“When they volunteer for that duty, they have every right to expect that they’re going to get the health care they need.”

A special election in Alabama on Tuesday proved one thing for Democrats: Abortion is a winning issue.

Democratic candidate Marilyn Lands defeated her Republican opponent, Madison City Council member Teddy Powell, for a state House seat in a deep-red district after she made abortion and in vitro fertilization access a cornerstone of her campaign.

“Today, Alabama women and families sent a clear message that will be heard in Montgomery and across the nation. Our legislature must repeal Alabama’s no-exceptions abortion ban, fully restore access to IVF, and protect the right to contraception,” Lands said in a statement after her victory.

Lands secured a whopping 63 percent of the vote—a 26-point lead—by aggressively going against the grain, telling voters she supports a repeal of Alabama’s abortion bans while sharing her own experience with abortion two decades ago, when she received a devastating diagnosis: a genetic defect called trisomy.

“Twenty years ago I was able to get the care I needed. My three doctors told me this is the procedure I needed, that my life was at risk. I was able to go to my own hospital with my own doctor there, I didn’t have to leave my community,” Lands told The New Republic’s Greg Sargent. “And to think we’ve gone 20 years backwards. I can’t believe that. I’ve seen, in my lifetime, women make great strides in many areas. And, I’m just, I’m outraged that 20 years later women do not have the same freedoms and protections that I had.”

The special election also sees Lands take the seat back from a Republican she lost to in 2022—former state Representative David Cole, who resigned from the elected position after pleading guilty to voting fraud charges.

It could be the beginning of a turning tide for a state that witnessed an immense backlash after Alabama’s highest judiciary voted 7–2 to ascribe rights to embryos, effectively restricting IVF access across the state. Still, Democrats have a long way to go before they have a stronghold in the state legislature. Republicans currently hold a 75–27 advantage over the liberal party in the state House.

Now that Lara Trump, who once said that people should “get ahead by merit and merit alone,” is in charge, the Republican National Committee has a new question to determine the merit of all job candidates: Was the 2020 election stolen?

Trump and former North Carolina Republican Party head Michael Whatley took over the RNC at the beginning of the month. Both had been picked by her father-in-law, Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump, to replace Ronna McDaniel. Lara Trump and Whatley promptly purged all RNC staffers but allowed them to reapply for jobs with the organization.

The application process now includes an interview with Donald Trump advisers, The Washington Post reported Tuesday night, citing anonymous sources. One prospective employee, who is based in a key swing state, said they were asked, “Was the 2020 election stolen?”

Applicants told the Post they were startled by the question, which seemed more about measuring their loyalty to Donald Trump than their political acumen. While the questions about the 2020 election were reportedly open-ended, one former RNC employee pointed out that “if you say the elections wasn’t stolen, do you really think you’re going to get hired?”

Republican strategist Doug Heye, who worked as the RNC’s communications director, told the Post that the party has always expected staffers to mimic presidential candidates’ positions. “You’re there for that specific reason, to back the candidate up and go along with the worldview,” he said.

“The problem with Trumpism is that despite bringing in very smart and very capable people, if you want to play Trump’s game, you have to back him up on everything he says. Claims about the election being stolen is kind of the last frontier of that.”

The RNC has doubled down on promoting election fraud falsehoods. One of the organization’s first hires post-purge was Christina Bobb, a lawyer and outspoken election denier. Bobb will head the RNC’s new election integrity unit.

The new loyalty test in the application process shouldn’t be surprising now that Lara Trump is at the helm of the RNC. The former personal trainer, model, and cake decorator is running the RNC, all because she has sworn absolute loyalty to her father-in-law.

Donald Trump endured a couple of losses in his hush-money trial on Tuesday, though maybe none more irritating for the boisterous GOP presidential pick than his first gag order in the case.

The ruling came after Trump openly attacked Judge Juan Merchan and his family in a post on Truth Social, targeting the judge’s daughter in particular.

In his order, which came at the request of Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg, Merchan forbade Trump from speaking publicly about courtroom staff, prosecutors, or any of their family members. Comments about jurors are similarly prohibited, and he cannot make—or order others to make—comments about witnesses. The order does still allow Trump to attack Bragg himself.

In a post on Truth Social earlier in the day, Trump attacked Merchan and his daughter.

“Judge Juan Merchan, a very distinguished looking man, is nevertheless a true and certified Trump Hater who suffers from a very serious case of Trump Derangement Syndrome. In other words, he hates me!” he wrote in a Tuesday morning post. “His daughter is a senior executive at a Super Liberal Democrat firm that works for Adam ‘Shifty’ Schiff, the Democrat National Committee, (Dem)Senate Majority PAC, and even Crooked Joe Biden. He was recently the judge on an unrelated trial of a long term employee, elderly and not in good health.”

“This judge treated him viciously, telling him either you cooperate or I’m putting you in jail for 15 years,” Trump continued. “He pled, and went to jail for very minor offenses, highly unusual, served 4 months in Rikers, and now they are after him again, this time for allegedly lying (doesn’t look like a lie to me!), and they threatened him again with 15 years if he doesn’t say something bad about “TRUMP.” He is devastated and scared! These COUNTRY DESTROYING SCOUNDRELS & THUGS HAVE NO CASE AGAINST ME. WITCH HUNT!”

The whole ordeal is a sign that Trump still hasn’t learned his lesson, even after suffering gag orders in previous trials. In October, Judge Arthur Engoron silenced the former president after he ushered a scourge of far-right vitriol onto Engoron’s chief law clerk. Trump was later fined $15,000 for violating the order. Judge Tanya Chutkan also imposed a gag order on the former president in his D.C. trial, which focuses on his efforts to subvert the 2020 election.

Still, the gag came as welcome news to some of Trump’s other victims, including his former fixer (and one of the expected star witnesses in the trial), Michael Cohen, who said he’s “been under relentless assault from Donald’s MAGA supporters.”

“Nevertheless, knowing Donald as well as I do, he will seek to defy the gag order by employing others within his circle to do his bidding, regardless of consequence,” Cohen told New York Daily News’s Molly Crane-Newman.