<[Event "67th Mass Open"] [Site "Marlboro Mass"]
[Date "1998.05.24"]
[Round "3"]
[White "Foygel, Igor"]
[Black "Cappallo, Rigel"]
[Result "1-0"]
[ECO "D27"]
[WhiteElo "2461"]
[BlackElo "2293"]

<No time to think?? Is that your excuse??

Time trouble at move 30, an international chess tournament in 1991, at one game per day ? ? What rubbish. The established cyberbully perhidious' lame post (52,000 and counting) merely to belittle others who actually contribute and add to his worthless trash totals as is his permanent custom makes a lazy fool of himself once again.>

Better learn how to count, <fredwuckfad>.

'People with felony convictions shouldn't be allowed to vote.'

<Donald Trump has an uncanny ability to make arguments that come back to bite him years later in a particularly personal way: the Electoral College is bad, presidents shouldn’t play too much golf, parents of immigrants shouldn’t be given visas.

Here’s another one for the list: People with felony convictions shouldn’t be allowed to vote.

Now that Trump has been found guilty of 34 felony counts of falsifying business records, his old arguments against allowing felons to cast a ballot have not aged well, even though he’ll most likely still be able to vote in November. As the joke went during his administration: There’s always a tweet.

This issue first arose in 2016 when Virginia’s then-Gov. Terry McAuliffe, a longtime friend of Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton, began a massive effort to restore voting rights to tens of thousands of Virginians who had served their sentences and parole or probation after a felony conviction in the commonwealth. McAuliffe argued he was righting a historic wrong; Trump claimed it was “crooked politics” to sway the election.

“Hillary Clinton is banking on her friend Terry McAuliffe on getting thousands of violent felons to the voting booths in an effort to cancel out the votes of both law enforcement and crime victims,” Trump said at a rally in August 2016, stirring the crowd into booing. “They are letting people vote in your Virginia election that should not be allowed to vote. Sad. So Sad.”

Trump’s logic was that McAuliffe was restoring the rights of “people that have been convicted of heinous crimes” because he knew “they’re gonna vote Democrat.” But Trump wasn’t the only Republican making that claim. That same year, Arkansas Sen. Tom Cotton argued that voting rights restoration was being pushed by “erstwhile political operatives for the electoral benefit of their political paymasters.” And the previous year, Texas Sen. Ted Cruz was even more direct, claiming that Democrats “know that convicted felons tend to vote Democrat.”

Clinton won Virginia by 5 points, so it was a moot issue. But studies show that people who have left prison — when they even know they’re eligible to vote again and bother to cast a ballot — tend to vote the same as people within their same demographic groups who haven’t been to prison....>

<....And while Democratic-leaning Black Americans are overrepresented in prison, people who have been convicted of a felony, on the whole, are overwhelmingly male and non-college educated and largely white — all groups that are increasingly likely to vote Republican, especially for Trump. A first-of-its-kind survey in 2020 even found white people in prison at the time backed Trump over a Democratic candidate by about 15 points.

Polls show voters are largely supportive of restoring voting rights for people who have served their felony sentences, and a number of Republican officials at the state level have backed these reforms. Iowa Gov. Kim Reynolds, who endorsed Trump this year, signed an executive order in 2020 restoring voting rights and proposed amending the state constitution to make that automatic in the future.

But Trump helped hold the party back on the issue. When Democrats included a measure to re-enfranchise people who have served their sentences in their doomed voting reform legislation in 2019, it became a GOP line of attack. Trump cited the provision, calling the bill a “monster.” Tennessee Sen. Bill Hagerty said the provision would incentivize “dangerous behavior.” Even Indiana Sen. Todd Young — whose home state already automatically restores voting rights to inmates when they leave prison — included it in his criticism of the bill.

And when nearly two-thirds of Florida voters passed a ballot measure to restore voting rights to those who have completed their sentences (other than those convicted of murder or sexual offenses), Gov. Ron DeSantis and state legislators put up roadblocks to the process by making it hard for them to pay off any fees and fines still owed.

Then, when former New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg raised money to help those Floridians pay off their fines, Trump argued that the real crime was helping them get back the right to vote.

“It’s a felony,” he told Fox News Radio, using the kind of wildly inaccurate rhetoric that gives fact-checkers headaches. “He’s actually giving money to people. He’s paying people to vote. He’s actually saying, ‘Here’s money, now you go ahead and vote for only Democrats.’ Right?”

Now that Trump has been convicted of felonies, he’ll almost certainly find some way to dodge his past rhetoric on the issue. He may argue that he only meant those convicted of violent felonies or that his convictions shouldn’t count because they are on appeal, or that his sentence hasn’t started yet, or that his convictions were politically motivated. But faced with the question of whether other people with felony convictions should be able to vote in the past, he never made any of those exceptions.

If Trump had his way, he wouldn’t be able to vote.>

https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/poli...

<So in addition to the upside-down American flag displayed at his Virginia home, first reported by the New York Times, Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito had that “Appeal to Heaven” flag aloft at his beach house on the New Jersey shore.

He blamed his wife for the first instance, but initially declined to comment about the second — before blaming his wife again. Didn’t Alito have someone else minding that house — a caretaker, or a cleaner — whom he could convince to take the fall?

On the other hand, why are we surprised? The Supreme Court’s so-called conservative justices have variously been vetted, feted and cosseted by the Federalist Society, along with other well-heeled enablers, to encourage unstinting partisanship. Alito should recuse himself from any cases involving insurrection and Donald Trump, but has already said he will not. True to form, he is aggrieved and defiant, rather than diplomatic or statesmanlike.

We know Alito’s insurrectionist flags are still aloft in his ever aggrieved mind, while also flapping wildly in the sullen gusts of wind inside Justice Clarence Thomas’ head.

Greg Olear recently wrote on Substack that the pro-insurrectionist upside-down American flag and the one beseeching God for relief from demonic Democrats should reopen questions about Alito’s alleged connections to the plan to overturn the 2020 election. Conspiracy theorist and former Trump team lawyer Sidney Powell, as Olear notes, has claimed that Alito was part of the plan to stop the electoral vote count. Was Alito aware of that?

Sam and Martha-Ann Alito have done us a favor, if only inadvertently, by highlighting once again that our Supreme Court is not only pretty darn comfortable with grifters like Alito and Thomas, but is also loaded with religious and ideological zealots.

Providing an account of the history of Alito's second repurposed flag, Lindsay Beyerstein notes in Salon:

Many people are dimly aware that the Appeal to Heaven flag is connected to Trump and the insurrection, but what most don’t realize is that the banner is the calling card of a Christian supremacist movement seeking to impose theocracy on America. This non-denominational Christian tradition rooted in evangelism and Pentecostalism is known to scholars as the New Apostolic Reformation (NAR). Leaders teach that the group’s political enemies are possessed by demons.

Decades ago, right-wing political quacks like Newt Gingrich concluded that comity and compromise on the part of politicians made the government look too good, as if it could actually work. Therefore, their colleagues across the aisle had to be made into enemies by employing a Gingrichian lexicon against them that included words such as "cheat," "disgraceful," "sick" and "traitor." (The entire list is unsurprisingly full of projection.)

Once you head down that road, it’s hard to find a way back. Add a few more decades of regular inoculations against reality with fervent politico-religious rhetoric amplified by Fox News, and a pathologically insecure megalomaniac like Donald Trump, and even the people on your own side of the aisle come under attack for disloyalty. Democrats have been rendered pedophiles who eat children. Literal "demons." The main candidate on the MAGA right calls the Democratic Party and their supporters "enemies" of America. He evidently thinks of nonwhite immigrants as "vermin."

Whew! When I was younger, we mostly disagreed with our Republican friends on the military budget and what constituted fair taxation.

It’s no surprise that this purposeful political rancor infected the highest court in the land. Thanks to their Federalist Society and, in most cases, their hard-line Catholic pedigrees, the "conservative" justices of the Supreme Court are steeped in ideological and religious dogma....>

<....People talk about establishing ethics rules for the high court, but the country needs more than rules that can be ignored by justices who are confirmed as individuals and have notably weak leadership from Chief Justice John Roberts. As others have advocated, the court must be revamped to take politics and personality out of the equation. A rotating group of federal judges, drawn from circuit courts around the country, seems like a highly sensible option. At this point, I would prefer a court of randomly selected citizens without law degrees.

Grooming judges through the Federalist Society would have to stop. Even under the current ethical rules that supposedly govern all judges, that should be the case. Radical-right politicians and pundits would protest, of course, that every college and law school is rife with liberal indoctrination and that’s why they started the society in the first place (landing on that remarkably misleading name). What can we even say when a broad secular education is decried as a socialist plot against America?

It's true enough that most of America's founders were Christian, but many of those, like Thomas Paine, followed deism, which posits a detached supernatural creator who does not meddle in human affairs — and who doesn't care about our dogma and our prayers. One might point to the sheer variety of Christian sects present during the revolutionary period as evidence of the absolute need for separation of church and state.

Trump, like many of his followers, barely even pretends to be a Christian. One could accurately label his faith system "meism." Alito and Thomas, it would appear, belong to the same sect.

The founders would never have imagined that judges, called to be impartial above all else, would be groomed by partisans for ideological conformity. We should all remember that when the Federalist-approved justices piously pretend that they are not partisan hacks and lecture us on their séance-like “originalist" readings of the Constitution. They play-act peering into the minds and hearts of the founders while willfully missing the main points, about exercising judicial impartiality, disclosing potential conflicts of interest and honoring our cornerstone separation of church and state.

I also suspect the founders would be troubled to see so many justices with strong religious beliefs. Of the nine on the Supreme Court, six are devout Roman Catholics while a seventh (Neil Gorsuch) was raised in the faith. One of those, Amy Coney Barrett, belongs to a right-wing Catholic group that's difficult to categorize but has been associated with the "tradwife" movement. If the court roughly represented America as a whole, there would be four or five Protestants, roughly two Catholics and at least a couple of judges with no particular religious faith. And in any case, their personal faith systems would be private and understood as largely irrelevant.

In his masterful book "Head and Heart: American Christianities," journalist and historian Garry Wills (himself a Catholic) writes that the disestablishment of the official church at America's founding "was a stunning innovation":

No other government had been launched without the protection of an official cult. This is the only original part of the Constitution. Everything else — federalism, three branches of government, two houses of the legislature, an independent judiciary — had been around for a long time, in theory and in practice. But Disestablishment was not a thing with precedents.

Lauren Boebert and Marjorie Taylor Greene would no doubt disagree strongly and loudly, but Wills has a point: Separation of church and state is the one true genius thing about our Constitution.

Is there a lesson here? There is: Live your religious beliefs! There are many to choose from. Flourish and multiply, if you can! But America’s founders made a rule, which is that the rest of us are not forced to live your faith.

If an individual, including some of those currently on our highest court, finds it difficult to serve as a judge because they cannot suppress their fervent ideological or religious beliefs, that person should do us all a favor and seek a new career. There may not be many jobs that call for such key skills as spitefulness, ignoring precedent, grifting from billionaire pals and blaming your spouse for a blatant political blunder. But isn't that what LinkedIn is for?>

<Donald Trump says he never called for Hillary Clinton to be arrested, tried and jailed, despite publicly pleading to “lock her up” multiple times over the years.

During an interview on “Fox and Friends” Weekend Edition on Sunday, the former president acted like he had nothing to do with the calls to imprison Clinton ― calls that were so common during his 2016 run for the Oval Office.

“You famously said, regarding Hillary Clinton, ‘Lock her up.’ You declined to do that as president,” Fox News co-host Will Cain said in an attempt to paint Trump as merciful.

Having been found guilty on 34 felony counts by a jury of his peers himself last Thursday, Trump brazenly lied about chants aimed at his one-time political rival.

“I beat her,” Trump said. “It’s easier when you win. They always said, ‘Lock her up.’ And I could have done it, but I felt it would have been a terrible thing.”

“And then this happened to me, so I may feel differently about it,” he went on. “I can’t tell you, I’m not sure I can answer the question.”

Shifting the blame to his supporters, Trump added, “Hillary Clinton — I didn’t say, ‘Lock her up,’ but the people would all say, ‘Lock her up, lock her up.’ OK. Then we won, and I said pretty openly, I’d say, ‘Alright, come on, just relax. Let’s go. We gotta make our country great.’”

The Republican’s claim was easy to debunk, however.

He repeatedly invoked “lock her up” cries during his 2016 run for president and, at the time, even said he would appoint a special prosecutor to look into accusations Clinton improperly used a private email server during her time as Barack Obama’s secretary of state.

While Trump did soften his stance a bit after securing his 2016 presidential win, telling supporters they “owe” Clinton “a major debt of gratitude for her service to our country,” by 2020 he was back to his old schtick.

Responding to chants of “lock her up” at a rally in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, that September, he told followers, “I agree.”

Though Trump has now been convicted of nearly three dozen felonies, it’s still unclear if he will face any jail time for his crimes.

New York Supreme Court Justice Juan Merchan has scheduled the politician’s sentencing for July 11, just four days ahead of the Republican National Convention.>

<A major study of Donald Trump’s social media posts has revealed the scale of the former US president’s ambitions to target Joe Biden, judges and other perceived political enemies if he returns to power.

Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (Crew), a watchdog organisation, analysed more than 13,000 messages published by Trump on his Truth Social platform and found him vowing revenge, retaliation and retribution against his foes.

The presumptive Republican nominee has threatened to use the federal government to go after Biden during a second Trump administration 25 times since the start of 2023, the study found. These threats include FBI raids, investigations, indictments and even jail time.

He has also threatened or suggested that the FBI and justice department should take action against senators, judges, members of Biden’s family and even non-governmental organisations.

“He is promising to go after what he perceives to be his political enemies,” said Robert Maguire, vice-president for research and data at Crew. “He is promising to essentially weaponise the government against anyone he sees as not sufficiently loyal or who is openly opposed to him.

“He has constantly seeded this idea that the numerous charges against him are trumped-up charges and it seems almost to have given him licence to openly say, ‘You’ve done this to me, so I’m going to do it to you.’”

Trump launched Truth Social in early 2022 after he was banned from major sites such as Facebook and the platform formerly known as Twitter following the 6 January 2021 attack on the US Capitol. Although he has since been reinstated to both, he has mostly stayed off X, as it is now called, the Elon Musk-owned platform that was once his primary megaphone.

Trump reaches far fewer people on his platform, where he has fewer than 7 million followers, than he might on X, where he boasts 87 million. The research firm Similarweb estimates that Truth Social had roughly 5m monthly visits in February of this year. This compares with more than 2bn for TikTok and more than 3bn for Facebook.

The study is part of a larger Crew project tracking and analysing Trump’s Truth Social posts. The watchdog says that Trump’s niche following means that the extent of his threats has flown mostly under the radar. There have also been concerns about Trump fatigue over the past decade, with some voters numbed and inured to statements that would have been jaw-dropping from any other president.

Maguire said: “His comments are often reported on or discussed as one-offs. ‘Trump said this today,’ and people talk about it and then it fades away because Trump said something else the next day or the next week or the next month.

“We figured it would be helpful to quantify these comments that he’s making to show this isn’t just a whim or a passing idea that he put out in the world because he saw somebody say something on TV. It’s a fixation of his, it’s a promise he’s making to use the government in ways that are squarely unethical.”

Crew duly analysed more than 13,000 of Trump’s Truth Social posts from 1 January 2023 to 1 April 2024 and found that, while the former president has recently dialed down some of his more violent rhetoric, he remains fixated on threatening political opponents.

Its report, the first in a series, says his attitude can be summed up in one Truth Social post from August 2023: “IF YOU GO AFTER ME, I’M COMING AFTER YOU!” Indeed, last December Trump posted a word cloud based on his speeches: the biggest word was “revenge”.

Many of his threats to Biden reflect Trump’s now familiar tactic of reversing charges against his opponents, conjuring a mirror world in which he claims they are guilty of the very offence of which he is accused.

In one post about the special counsel Jack Smith, he warned that there will be “repercussions far greater than anything that Biden or his Thugs could understand” and, if the investigations continue, it will open a “Pandora’s Box” of retribution.

In another, Trump wrote that his federal indictments are “setting a BAD precedent for yourself, Joe. The same can happen to you.” In July last year Trump reposted rally coverage quoting him that “Now the gloves are off.”

Trump has explicitly threatened Biden with a special counsel investigation and indictment. In one post he called on the attorney general, Merrick Garland, to “immediately end Special Counsel investigation into anything related to me because I did everything right, and appoint a Special Counsel to investigate Joe Biden who hates Biden as much as Jack Smith hates me”.....>

<....In another he asked: “When will Joe Biden be Indicted for his many crimes against our Nation?” Trump has posted about this repeatedly, promising to appoint a special prosecutor to investigate Biden, and indict him if Trump returns to the White House for a second term.

Trump has “reTruthed” others’ posts about Biden that are even more ominous. In June last year he reposted a clip from Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene asserting: “Joe Biden shouldn’t just be impeached, he should be handcuffed and hauled out of the White House for his crimes.”

The former president also posted a screenshot of a different post saying the FBI should “raid all of [Biden’s] residences and seize anything they want, including his passports”.

Some posts announced plans for retribution against the specific lawyers, judges and other officials whom Trump blames for his legal troubles. Two months before he was found guilty of 34 counts of falsifying business records, he reposted a call for the Manhattan district attorney, Alvin Bragg, to be “put in jail”.

He has reposted calls for Jack Smith and others to be locked up and to “throw away the key.” One reTruth promised to charge the Fulton county district attorney, Fani Willis, along with Bragg, Smith, Garland and Biden, with conspiracy and racketeering.

Trump has also made threats to non-profit organisations because of their work. Last November he posted on Truth Social: “For any radical left charity, non-profit, or so called aid organizations supporting these caravans and illegal aliens, we will prosecute them for their participation in human trafficking, child smuggling, and every other crime we can find.”

Crew argues that the posts should not be taken as empty threats but as a wake-up call for Congress to erect meaningful guardrails against the weaponisation of law enforcement agencies before it is too late.

The group has called on Congress to pass the Protecting Our Democracy Act (Poda), which would curb abuses of power by presidents of any party and strengthen Congress’s ability to fulfil its constitutional role as a check on executive branch overreach. The legislation passed the House of Representatives in 2021 on a bipartisan basis but has since languished in the Senate.

Maguire added: “It is critical in making sure that law enforcement and the Department of Justice – all of the things that that entails, both the federal prosecutors and the FBI – cannot be manipulated by the president to go after political enemies. That would go a long way to hamstringing any effort by any president, to be clear, to use those law enforcement powers to go against political enemies.”>

1.e4 g6 2.d4 Bg7 3.Nc3 d6 4.h4 Nc6 5.Be3 Nf6 6.Be2 e5 7.d5 Nd4 8.Qd2 c6 9.h5 Nxe2 10.Ngxe2 cxd5 11.h6 Bf8 12.Nxd5 Nxd5 13.Qxd5 Be7 14.Nc3 O-O 15.O-O-O a5 16.Qb5 Ra6 17.Nd5 Bg5 18.Rd3 Rc6 19.Rhd1 Rc5 20.Qb6 Bxe3+ 21.fxe3 Qxb6 22.Nxb6 Bg4 23.R1d2 f5 24.Rxd6 fxe4 25.Rd8 Rxd8 26.Rxd8+ Kf7 27.Rh8 g5 28.Rxh7+ Kg6 29.Rh8 Rc7 30.Nd5 Rf7 31.h7 Rf1+ 32.Kd2 Rd1+ 33.Kc3 Rxd5 34.Kc4 Rd2 35.Rg8+ Kxh7 36.Rxg5 Rxc2+ 37.Kd5 Bd7 38.Kd6 Bc6 39.Rxe5 a4 0-1>

<The guilty verdict rendered against former President Trump is bringing moderate Republicans and longtime Trump skeptics to his side in a way that Trump’s campaign has failed to do for months.

Longtime Trump critics, including Senate GOP Leader Mitch McConnell (Ky.) and moderate Sen. Susan Collins (R-Maine), among others, are rallying to Trump’s defense after the verdict — and other Trump-leery Republicans such as Nikki Haley are expected to do so as well.

Haley, who said last week she would vote for Trump over President Biden, has so far stayed quiet about Trump’s conviction, but prominent Republicans, even some of his biggest critics, say the case brought by Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg (D) was fundamentally unfair.

McConnell said after the verdict the “charges never should have been brought in the first place” and predicted the conviction will be overturned on appeal.

And Collins said Bragg had blurred “the lines between the judicial system and the electoral system” by running for the district attorney’s office on a pledge to prosecute Trump.

“This decision has the same dramatic effect across the country like President Clinton’s impeachment. They are very different scenarios, but both caused a massive rally effect. With Clinton it was Democrats, and now with Trump it’s Republicans who believe there is judicial overreach,” said Ron Bonjean, a Republican strategist and former senior Senate and House leadership aide.

Bonjean said McConnell’s surprise defense of Trump is a signal to the other traditional, mainstream Republicans to rally behind the former president.

“He’s giving establishment Republicans permission to be supportive of Trump going into November,” he said.

Senate Republicans in particular recognize their hopes of winning back the majority are riding on Trump’s performance in battleground states. This leaves them little choice but to close ranks as Trump faces a possible jail term when he is scheduled to be sentenced shortly before the GOP nominating convention in mid-July.

Bonjean said McConnell’s show of support for Trump is “making sure that Republican challengers in battleground states are fully supported from the top of the ticket with Trump.”

Even former Trump Vice President Mike Pence, who has refused to endorse Trump, called the verdict an “outrage.”

“The conviction of former President Trump on politically motivated charges is an outrage and disservice to the nation,” he told Fox News Digital.

“No one is above the law, but our courts must not become a tool to be used against political opponents,” he said, echoing talking points used by Trump’s allies claiming “weaponization” of the Justice Department.

Ford O’Connell, a GOP strategist, said the verdict “is going to have a unifying effect on the party.”

“You can do two things simultaneously, say, ‘Hey, I’m not a big fan of Trump, but at the same time this is completely wrong,’” he said.

O’Connell said the more than $30 million the Trump campaign raised after the announcement of the verdict “is a good indicator of the unifying effect it would have on what we call base Republican voters, regular Republican voters.”

A recent New York Times/Siena College poll of voters across six battleground states found that 49 percent of respondents did not think Trump would get a fair trial in New York, while 45 percent thought he would.

An NPR/PBS NewsHour/Marist poll conducted before the verdict came out and published Thursday showed that 25 percent of Republican respondents said they would be more likely to vote for Trump if a jury found him guilty.

The same poll found that 67 percent of surveyed voters nationwide said they would not vote differently in November if Trump were found guilty.

GOP senators had predicted before the verdict that a guilty finding could energize GOP voters behind Trump and put Democrats on the defensive.

“He might win in a landslide,” said Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.) last month about the political impact of a guilty verdict on Trump’s chances in the general election. “It looks so awful.”

Paul noted that New York’s statute of limitations had expired on Trump’s falsification of business records, which forced Bragg to combine them with campaign finance violations to bring his case forward....>

<....The Trump campaign announced that it raised $34.8 million in the first six hours after the jury announced its guilty verdict.

Trump pollster Jim McLaughlin said Trump skeptics such as McConnell, Collins and Pence are rallying behind the former president because they are genuinely offended by the conviction over conduct the general public has known about for years.

“What’s happened is people realize this is wrong, it’s flat out wrong,” he said, citing legal scholars such as Jonathan Turley and Alan Dershowitz who have strongly criticized Bragg’s case.

Turley, a law professor at the George Washington University, predicted on social media the conviction would be reversed on appeal.

And Dershowitz, a Harvard Law professor emeritus, warned Friday on Fox News that Trump’s conviction would begin “a war of weaponization of the criminal justice system.”

McLaughlin downplayed the significant share of Republican primary votes against Trump in states such as Indiana and Nebraska that were cast after Haley dropped out of the presidential race in early March.

“I think that whole thing is overrated. I’m not really worried about ‘Nikki Haley’ voters. Look at all the surveys that came out before all this. Trump’s getting 90 percent-plus of the Republican vote, and one of the reasons he’s doing as well as he’s doing is because he gets more of his Republican partisans than Biden gets of the Democrats,” he said. “He’s got his Republican base locked down. He gets 90-percent plus of the Republican vote.

Some GOP senators acknowledge, however, that a criminal conviction could further alienate independent voters, especially college-educated and suburban women who moved away from Trump and the GOP in the 2020 presidential and 2022 midterm elections.

Sen. Lisa Murkowski (R-Alaska), who said in March she couldn’t support Trump for president, on Friday said the party would have a better chance of winning back the White House with another nominee.

“A Republican nominee without this baggage would have a clear path to victory,” she posted on the social media platform X.

Murkowski said it was a “shame” that the presidential election has “focused on personalities and legal problems rather than a debate about policies that would lift up Americans.”

“These distractions have given the Biden campaign a free pass as the focus has shifted from Biden’s indefensible record and the damage his policies have done to Alaska and our nation’s economy to Trump’s legal drama,” she lamented.

Former Maryland Gov. Larry Hogan (R), who is running for the U.S. Senate in Maryland, was one of the few Republicans with a significant national profile to break with fellow Republicans who have blasted Bragg’s case and the jury’s verdict.

“At this dangerously divided moment in our history, all leaders — regardless of party — must not pour fuel on the fire with more toxic partisanship,” Hogan said Thursday. “We must reaffirm what has made this nation great: the rule of law.”

But that prompted an angry backlash from Trump’s camp that could spell trouble for Republicans in November.

“You just ended your campaign,” Trump adviser Chris LaCivita wrote on X, reposting Hogan’s comments.

Sen. Mitt Romney (R-Utah) told The Hill before the verdict came out that a conviction would not likely dent Trump’s support among GOP voters

“I don’t think it will have any impact on his support at all, in part because people have already processed that. They know about the relationship with Stormy Daniels, they know about the payment, there’s been nothing particularly new that’s come out at trial,” Romney said. “What the jury does one way or another probably won’t make any difference in terms of President Trump’s support.”

“When I was running against [the late Sen. Ted Kennedy (D-Mass.)] in 1994 [in the Massachusetts Senate race] people were saying, ‘You need to bring up Mary Jo Kopechne,’” he said, referring to the young woman who died in a car accident while Kennedy was at the wheel in 1969.

“People have already thought that through and made a decision and have moved on. Once people have made that decision, raising it again does nothing but irritate them,” he said.>

<Dr. Anthony Fauci testified before the House Oversight Committee about the origins of the Covid-19 pandemic, and he faced questions from Republicans who have portrayed him as a villain for his involvement.

Rep. Debbie Lesko (R-AZ) had a few questions for Fauci — and she seemed uninterested in having Fauci actually answer them. One exchange she and Fauci had over emails that she believed backed up her own allegations had Fauci pushing back:

Lesko: My next question, sir, is on February 1st, 2020. You, yourself, Dr. Fauci, the [National Institute of Health] director, [Francis Collins], and at least 11 other scientists were on a conference call to discuss the origins of Covid. A number of the scientists said that they were concerned that Covid was the result of a lab leak at the Wuhan Institute of Virology, and were concerned that a revelation of the lab leak theory would hurt their relationship with China. The [Centers for Disease Control] director [Robert Redfield] testified that he was not invited on this conference call, and he believes that because he believed the lab leak theory was possible. Three days later, on February 4th, 2020, four participants on the conference call authored a paper, Proximal Origin, which was sent to you for editing — Proximal Origin pushed the natural origin theory. On April 16th, 2020, the NIH director Dr. Collins emailed you expressing dismay that the Nature Medicine article, which was based on Proximal Origin, didn’t suppress the lab leak theory and asked you for more public pressure to suppress the lab leak theory. The very next day, in response to Dr. Collins’ request to suppress the lab leak theory, you cited the Nature Medicine article, which discounted the lab leak theory from the White House podium. My question to you, sir: Did you cite this article at the White House because the NIH director asked you to suppress the lab leak theory?

Fauci: I did not do that in response to anybody’s suggestion to suppress anything. It was in response to a question that someone asked at the podium. And I did not edit any paper, as shown in my official testimony. So you said about four or five things, Congressman, that were just not true.

Lesko: Well, we have emails to prove it.

Fauci: But you don’t!

Lesko: Thank you. And I yield back.>

It took <fredthedolt>'s hero long enough to actually get round to the question.

<Republican lawmakers are putting additional pressure on Special Counsel Jack Smith and the Department of Justice amid the criminal prosecutions of former President Donald Trump.

In a letter signed by House Judiciary Committee chairman Jim Jordan on Monday, the GOP lawmaker and close ally of Trump proposed several reforms to the 2025 fiscal year budget that would restrict funding for "politically sensitive investigations," among other issues. Jordan specifically requested that federal funding be prohibited from going toward "a criminal prosecution against a former or current President or Vice President" by the Justice Department. The chairman is also seeking to prohibit taxpayer money from being put toward a new FBI headquarters.

Jordan's proposals, which were sent to Appropriations Committee Chairman Tom Cole, also focus on the state-level prosecutions and civil suits that Trump has faced while running for reelection. Under Jordan's reforms, federal funds would be prohibited from being used by an agency "to be used, to consult, advise, or direct state prosecutors and state attorneys general in the civil action or criminal prosecution of a former or current President or Vice President brought against them in state court."

The new fiscal year will begin on September 29 and end on September 27, 2025. President Joe Biden submitted his proposals for FY 2025 back in March. In order for Jordan's list of requests to be passed, they would have to pass both the House and the Democratic-controlled Senate before being presented to Biden to sign.

In a post to X, formerly Twitter, the House Judiciary GOP's account said that Jordan's letter contained "legislative proposals to DEFUND lawfare by Jack Smith, Fani Willis, Alvin Bragg, and Letitia James."

Smith's office declined to comment to Newsweek on Jordan's budget proposals on Monday. An email was also sent to the Democratic caucus on the House Judiciary Committee same day.

Jordan's list of budget proposals comes a few days after Trump was found guilty of 34 felony counts of falsifying business records in his hush-money case in Manhattan. The congressman called Trump's conviction "a travesty of justice" in a post to X last week and accused prosecutors of trying "to keep President Trump off the campaign trail and avoid bringing attention to President Biden's failing radical policies."

"Americans see through Democrats' lawfare tactics and know President Trump will be vindicated on appeal," Jordan added.

The hush money case, led by Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg, is one of four criminal cases up against Trump as he seeks a second term in office in November. Smith's office has announced two sets of indictments against the former president over his handling of classified materials after leaving office and his actions related to the riots at the U.S. Capitol on January 6, 2021.

Trump, who pleaded not guilty in all 34 counts included in his hush money indictment, has repeatedly denied any wrongdoing in the list of legal battles against him and accuses prosecutors of launching a "witch hunt" to upset his reelection chances.

The former president has previously demanded that Congressional Republicans defund the Justice Department and the FBI. A handful of his allies, such as Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene, have pressed other GOP lawmakers to withhold funds from federal prosecutors over Trump's indictments.>