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Senior Republican Party Officials Preparing To Replace Donald Trump Should He Quit Race

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Deeply Frustrated GOP Leadership Can’t Dump Trump but Are Working on Plan if He Exits

Sources inside the Republican National Committee have confirmed to The New Civil Rights Movement that senior party officials are preparing to set in motion the process to select a candidate to replace embattled GOP nominee Donald Trump.

One official, speaking on the condition of anonymity, acknowledged that the Party Leadership cannot force the New York businessman to quit. He noted, however, that given Trump’s refusal to endorse Republican House Speaker Paul Ryan as well as Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, and a general lack of support for other candidates in the GOP fold has angered party officials to the “point of no return.”

Trump has also lost any semblance of support by party stalwarts, the latest defection occurring Tuesday when Meg Whitman, Hewlett Packard CEO and a major Republican fundraiser, said she would support Secretary Hillary Clinton as well as give a “substantial” contribution to Clinton’s campaign in order to “stop Trump,” whom she sees as a “threat to American democracy.”

Trump’s bombastic style coupled with his gaffes on the campaign trail have further angered officials, the latest coming during a campaign rally at a high school in suburban Loudoun County, Virginia, just outside of Washington D.C. Tuesday, where he threw a crying baby and mother out of the rally.

Trump’s ongoing public battle with the parents of U.S. Army Captain Humayun Khan, a decorated Muslim-American killed in Iraq in 2004, who appeared at the Democratic Party National Convention last week and denounced Trump’s statements about their fellow Muslims, and questioned his knowledge of the U.S. Constitution has also angered senior Republicans who have publicly distanced themselves from his remarks.       

U.S. Senator Lindsey Graham (R-SC) told reporters, “This is going to a place where we’ve never gone before, to push back against the families of the fallen. There used to be some things that were sacred in American politics — that you don’t do — like criticizing the parents of a fallen soldier even if they criticize you.”

The DNC speech made by Khan’s father Khizr paid homage to his son and a criticized Trump’s statements that he wanted to bar non-American Muslims from entering the United States. Khizr Khan also took aim at the billionaire real estate mogul, saying that Trump did not understand that people of many backgrounds had given their lives in service of their nation.

“Have you ever been to Arlington Cemetery?” Khizr Khan asked. “You will see all faiths, genders, and ethnicities. You have sacrificed nothing. And no one.”

Trump later attacked Khan’s wife Ghazala by suggesting she was unable to speak due to her Muslim faith.

“If you look at his wife, she was standing there,” he told ABC News’ George Stephanopoulos.“She had nothing to say. She probably, maybe she wasn’t allowed to have anything to say. You tell me, but plenty of people have written that.”

Ghazala Khan later wrote in an editorial published by the Washington Post the morning after Trump’s comments to Stephanopoulos, that she did not speak because of the powerful emotion that the photo of her son, which was prominently displayed in the hall, evoked.      

Senior GOP leaders are also frustrated with Trump’s sometimes bizarre behavior as polling numbers show a narrower lead for the Democratic nominee, former U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton. Republican Party Chair, Reince Priebus is angered at Trump’s disregard for the numerous requests by Priebus to change course drastically and to watch the tenor of his public utterances.

On Wednesday, ABC News Chief White House Correspondent Jon Karl, speaking about Republican leaders behind the scenes examining party rules and maneuvering to prepare to replace Trump, told George Stephanopoulos that Trump “is so unpredictable right now, they are so unable to control his message, that they just don’t know and clearly think it is a possibility, which is why they’re looking at these rules,” Karl said.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-2naZyDOZZA

“I have to say the frustration is especially deep because they believe that Hillary Clinton looks vulnerable,” Karl said, “and had a bad few days, the DNC has gone through a whole shake-up.”

“She misstated what that director said about her emails. One top official told me if Trump had gone on vacation for the past two weeks, he would be in the lead. But, yes, he can still raise money and still has support among the Republican rank-and-file.” 

Karl added that the Republican Party could not force Trump out of the race now that he’s their nominee, but he might solve their problem by dropping out. 

“He would have to go out voluntarily, then it would be the 168 members of the RNC, through a complicated process, that would pick a new candidate,” Karl said. “It would have to happen by early September.”

EARLIER:

Republican Meg Whitman: Trump Is a ‘Dishonest Demagogue,’ I’m Supporting Hillary Clinton

‘Staff Suicidal’: Is Donald About to Implode? Reporters Reveal Chaos, Crisis Inside Trump Camp

Purple Heart Recipients Slam Trump: “No One Should Ever ‘Want’ to Get One of These”

 

Image by Disney | ABC Television Group via Flickr and a CC license

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BREAKING NEWS

Trump Files Sweeping Legal Motion to Try to Block Georgia Grand Jury Findings and District Attorney Fani Willis

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March 20, 2023

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Attorneys for Donald Trump Monday morning filed a sweeping 483-page legal motion asking a Georgia court to block any report from the Fulton County special grand jury and any evidence the grand jury may find, and to force District Attorney Fani Willis to recuse in the investigation into his unlawful attempts to overturn the 2020 presidential election results in that state.

The Daily Beast’s Jose Pagliery first reported the filing. The Atlanta Journal Constitution also reports Trump’s attorneys have filed the motion.

Lawfare Blog’s Anna Bower, who has been covering the Fulton County case, calls the filing “mammoth.”

The news comes just hours after reports District Attorney Willis could be considering RICO, or conspiracy and racketeering charges against Trump.

READ MORE: ‘This Man Is a Criminal’: George Conway Busts GOP’s ‘Completely Ridiculous’ Trump Defense

This is a breaking news and developing story. 

Image via Shutterstock

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‘RICO’: Trump Could Be Facing Racketeering and Conspiracy Charges Used to Prosecute Organized Crime

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1 hour ago

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March 20, 2023

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Fulton County, Georgia District Attorney Fani Willis is reportedly considering RICO charges against Donald Trump in her probe of his attempts to overturn the 2020 presidential election, CNN reports. RICO charges are generally used when prosecuting organized crime cases.

“The reason that I am a fan of RICO is, I think jurors are very, very intelligent,” Willis had said last year about a different case. “They want to know what happened. They want to make an accurate decision about someone’s life. And so RICO is a tool that allows a prosecutor’s office and law enforcement to tell the whole story.”

Former U.S. Attorney Joyce Vance, a law professor and an NBC News/MSNBC contributor, Monday morning on Twitter, pointing to CNN’s report, said Willis “is seriously considering a RICO charge.” She repeated that claim on MSNBC shortly after.

READ MORE: Experts Warn Trump Is Encouraging Violence One Day After He Announces Rally at Waco on 30th Anniversary of Siege

CNN reports, “Investigators have a large volume of substantial evidence related to a possible conspiracy from inside and outside the state, including recordings of phone calls, emails, text messages, documents, and testimony before a special grand jury. Their work, the source said, underscores the belief that the push to help Trump was not just a grassroots effort that originated inside the state.”

On-air Monday morning, CNN senior legal analyst Elie Honig, a former federal and state prosecutor, explained conspiracy, racketeering, and RICO, saying, “conspiracy” is “a loaded word. But all it really means is an agreement, a meeting of the minds between two or more people to commit a crime.”

But he added, “if we go up to racketeering, now, this is a really powerful tool the prosecutors use. What you have to do is show two things. First of all, the existence of what we call a racketeering enterprise, that can be a Mafia family, that can be a drug trafficking organization, but it could also be a corporation or a political entity, and then you have to show that they engage in what we call a pattern of racketeering activity, meaning that they committed two or more crimes in an organized fashion, which brings us to this other new piece of information. There’s a third phone call we already know about, of course, the infamous phone call to Brad Raffensperger. ‘I just want to find 11,780 votes.’ There’s also a public recording of Donald Trump talking to this investigator, Francis Watson, when he tells her, ‘when the right answer comes out, you’ll be praised.'”

READ MORE: ‘Reacting to a Cult Leader’: Trump Supporters Organizing to ‘Stock Up on Weaponry’ Says GOP Adviser

“Now we know, Trump also called the former Georgia Speaker of the House asking him to convene a special session,” Honig continued. “As we know we’ve heard from some of the grand jurors special grand jurors who’ve come out, they’ve told us that they recommended indictments for more than a dozen people.”

Watch CNN’s report below or at this link.

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‘This Man Is a Criminal’: George Conway Busts GOP’s ‘Completely Ridiculous’ Trump Defense

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2 hours ago

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March 20, 2023

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George Conway ripped Republicans for defending lifelong “criminal” Donald Trump against a looming indictment in New York.

The ex-president apparently expects to be charged in the Stormy Daniels hush money payoff, and the conservative attorney told MSNBC’s “Morning Joe” that he richly deserves it.

“The Republicans are behaving like complete disgraces,” Conway said. “They’re basically saying that, by saying that Trump is being persecuted, they’re essentially saying, you can’t touch Trump and Trump is above the law. Whatever slack you might have wanted to cut a former president, that was gone after Jan. 6. This man is a recidivist criminal, he’s committed fraud all his life, he’s lied all of his life.”

“This Stormy Daniels thing was something he cooked up,” Conway added. “The notion that [Michael] Cohen is going to be discredited on it is ridiculous given the paper trail. We see the checks signed by Donald Trump. It’s hard to say he is being picked on for paying $130,000 in hush money to a porn star and concealing that and using a straw donor, which was Cohen, to do that, and saying he’s being persecuted somehow when no one has ever done that it is completely ridiculous.”

RELATED: Georgia weighs slapping Trump with racketeering charges: CNN

Watch the video below or at this link.


 

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