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In Angry Letter McCarthy Warns Thompson J6 Docs ‘Do Not Belong to You’ – After Defending Trump Taking Classified Info

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House Minority Republican Leader Kevin McCarthy in an angry letter to Rep. Bennie Thompson (D-MS) warned the Chairman of the U.S. House Select Committee on the January 6 Attack that his role will end on January 3 and it is “imperative that all information collected be preserved.” The California Republican congressman had a dramatically different position on Donald Trump‘s unlawful retention of well over ten thousand items from the White House, including at least 300 documents with classified markings, including some classified at the highest levels.

McCarthy, who is running to be Speaker of the House but is facing strong opposition from some of the GOP caucus, nevertheless is acting as if he will wield the gavel.

His letter, angry and accusatory in tone, also strongly suggests Republicans will hold their own hearings on the January 6 attack on the Capitol and on democracy, but with a vastly different focus.

“The American people chose Republicans to lead the 118th Congress,” McCarthy’s letter begins. “On January 3, 2023, your work as Chairman of the Select Committee to Investigate the January 6th Attack on the United States Capitol will come to an end,” McCarthy told Thompson in his letter, which was reported on by CBS News.

READ MORE: Trump Allies So Shaken by His White Supremacist Dinner a Top Campaign Aide Will Now ‘Be Present With Him at All Times’

“For those reasons, I remind you and your staff on the Committee to preserve all records collected and transcripts of testimony taken during your investigation in accordance with House Rule VII. As the Chairman, regardless of who may be directing the work of the Committee, you are responsible for the work done by its members and staff.”

Some have suggested that Thompson could transfer some or all of the Committee’s work product – all transcripts and other evidence – to the Senate.

McCarthy continued with his angry attack.

“It is clear based on recent news reports that even your own members and staff of the Committee have no visibility into the totality of the investigation. Some reports suggest that entire swaths of findings will be left out of the Committee’s final report. You have spent a year and a half and millions of taxpayers’ dollars conducting this investigation.”

House Republicans, including McCarthy, spent millions of dollars on six Benghazi investigations, the last one of which McCarthy admitted was designed to harm former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s presidential aspirations.

“Everybody thought Hillary Clinton was unbeatable, right? But we put together a Benghazi special committee, a select committee. What are her numbers today? Her numbers are dropping,” McCarthy bragged in 2015.

Unlike his defense of ex-president Donald Trump unlawfully removing and retaining at Mar-a-Lago approximately 13,000 items belonging to the National Archives from the White House, McCarthy warned Thompson the Committee’s work does not belong to the Chairman.

“It is imperative that all information collected be preserved not just for institutional prerogatives but for transparency to the American people,” McCarthy wrote. “The official Congressional Records do not belong to you or any member, but to the American people, and they are owed all of the information you gathered – not merely the information that comports with your political agenda.”

That’s actually false.

READ MORE: Charlie Kirk, Purveyor of ‘Rigged’ Election Lie, Complains GOP Lost ‘Because a Lot of People Do Not Trust the System’

The Committee has undoubtedly uncovered government secrets, including national security information, classified information, and information, for example, the Secret Service needs to keep secret to allow it to continue to secure its protectees. It also has entered into agreements with witnesses that prevent it from releasing those documents, transcripts, and other evidence to the public.

Politico’s senior legal affairs reporter Kyle Cheney says, “Kevin McCarthy’s letter demanding that the Jan. 6 committee preserve its records is mostly nonsense because the committee is planning to release all but a few of its transcripts.”

McCarthy continued, warning: “Although your Committee’s public hearings did not focus on why the Capitol complex was not secure on January 6, 2021, the Republican majority in the 118th Congress will hold hearings that do so.”

He then served up what some might say is a threat.

“The American people have a right to know that the allegations you have made are supported by the facts and to be able to view the transcripts with an eye toward encouraged enforcement of 18 USC 1001.”

18 U.S. Code § 1001 is the federal statute that makes it a crime to knowingly make false statements.

McCarthy had a very different take when the U.S. Dept. of Justice executed a legal search warrant of Donald Trump’s Florida residence and resort, Mar-a-Lago, to retrieve government-owned materials, including classified documents.

“Joe Biden and the politicized Dept. of Justice launched a raid on the home of his top political rival, Donald Trump,” McCarthy said on Sept. 1. “That is an assault on democracy.”

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National Conversation Needed on Law-Abiding Tax-Paying Undocumented Immigrants: Gingrich

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As President Donald Trump’s immigration polling numbers deteriorate and criticism of federal agents grows — and following the killings of two U.S. citizens by federal agents in Minnesota — Republican former House Speaker Newt Gingrich is calling for a national conversation about undocumented immigrants who pay taxes, have lived in the United States for years, and are good neighbors.

Gingrich called on President Donald Trump to “open up a national dialogue,” as he told Fox Business, saying that “this is about dignity,” a quote he took from U.S. Rep. María Elvira Salazar (R-FL).

“Americans don’t want to see the police behaving like a mob, Americans don’t want to see people killed in the streets, and Americans don’t want to see the kind of hunting down people in a way that really demeans the process,” he insisted.

“We need a national conversation about what we’re going to do, about people who’ve come here, some of them 20 years ago, who’ve been obeying the law, paying taxes, good neighbors, have kids, go to PTA,” Gingrich said. “Very few Americans want to see the police walk in and pick them up and deport them.”

READ MORE: Right-Wing Groups Launch Coordinated Push to Overturn Same-Sex Marriage

“On the other hand, people do not want to give them citizenship,” he claimed. “So there should be some middle ground here on long-term goals.”

Federal agents, he said, “may well need more training and maybe more restraint.”

But Gingrich also claimed that anyone trying to stop them from carrying out the law is “engaged in insurrection.”

According to The Hill, “a growing number of Republicans and conservative commentators are urging the White House to shift course and scale back its aggressive immigration enforcement, especially for law-abiding immigrants with roots in their communities.”

MS NOW’s Joe Scarborough, The Hill added, suggested that “if you’ve been in America for a long time, if you’ve been law-abiding, if you’re an asylum-seeker, certainly if you’ve had children that have served in the military, you’re at the front of the line” to return to the U.S. if you’ve been deported.

READ MORE: ‘All Tools Necessary’: GOP Hardliners Press Trump on Insurrection Act

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Right-Wing Groups Launch Coordinated Push to Overturn Same-Sex Marriage

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Forty-seven right-wing organizations have joined together to try to overturn the U.S. Supreme Court’s 2015 Obergefell ruling that found same-sex couples have the same rights and responsibilities to marriage as different-sex couples. The coalition’s focus is to change national public opinion on same-sex marriage by declaring that children are “Greater Than” equality.

“We’re all going to speak with one voice, and it is ‘don’t touch the kids,’” the group’s founder, right-wing activist Katy Faust, told American Family Radio, as People for the American Way reported.

“Faust made it clear that the campaign will continue a long and dishonorable legacy of anti-LGBTQ forces smearing gay people and couples as threats to children,” PFAW added. “She called parenting by same-sex couples a ‘destructive state-sanctioned gaslighting experiment on children.'”

According to The Daily Signal, which was launched by The Heritage Foundation, Faust also said that since the Obergefell ruling, children have been “deprived of the unique love and guidance only a mother and father can provide.”

Contributors to the project are promoting old claims that studies have disproven.

READ MORE: ‘Crime Might Be in Progress’: Ex-DHS Official Warns After Trump FBI Raids Election Office

Southern Baptist Theological Seminary President Al Mohler said in the group’s launch video that same-sex marriage “harms children in virtually every way imaginable.”

Colson Center CEO John Stonestreet claimed that social science data reveals that kids “do best when they are raised in a home with married, biological mom and dad.”

Numerous studies have shown that children raised by same-sex parents fare at least as well as children raised by different-sex parents.

A large 2014 study found that children raised by same-sex couples were happier and healthier than their peers raised by different-sex couples.

In 2023, The Guardian reported on a study that also found that “children of same-sex couples fare just as well, if not better, than those of heterosexual couples.”

“The findings chime with several other studies, including three decades of research from Australia that revealed children raised by same-sex parents do as well emotionally, socially and educationally as their peers in heterosexual families.”

Hemant Mehta at The Friendly Atheist wrote that the “Greater Than” campaign “claims loving gay parents are the real threat to kids.”

“While the video has received the bulk of the attention so far, it’s the campaign’s website that actually deserves a closer look. Because surely there’s evidence that children with gay parents suffer, right?” Mehta said. “Nope. There are no studies cited on the website. There’s no proof of any sort offered anywhere.”

He charged: “This is nothing more than repackaged bigotry and finding new ways to express anti-gay hate because the old ways no longer work.”

READ MORE: ‘All Tools Necessary’: GOP Hardliners Press Trump on Insurrection Act

 

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‘Crime Might Be in Progress’: Ex-DHS Official Warns After Trump FBI Raids Election Office

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Miles Taylor, the former chief of staff of the U.S. Department of Homeland Security during President Donald Trump’s first term, is sounding the alarm after the FBI raided the Fulton County, Georgia election office and removed ballots and related voting materials from the 2020 election, in what is being called an “apparently unprecedented action.”

Taylor is also warning that Trump Director of National Intelligence, Tulsi Gabbard, was “caught on camera” at the raid — a highly unusual move for the nation’s intel chief, a role that is supposed to be nonpartisan.

“This is bad. Very bad. But we don’t need to speculate wildly about why this is happening,” Taylor writes. “In an interview earlier this month, Trump openly said he wished he’d ‘seized’ ballots in the 2020 election, and he suggested he had the authority to do so. That should have rung alarm bells across the country.”

“When he laments he didn’t ‘seize’ ballot boxes after losing the 2020 election, he’s referring to a specific executive order that he thinks would justify such an act.”

“But guess what?” Taylor also wrote. “I co-wrote the order he’s talking about. He’s lying. And a crime might be in progress.”

READ MORE: Trump ‘Hellbent’ on Punishing Americans He Still Claims ‘Stole’ the Election: Columnist

“Trump and his lawyers, Taylor says, “have suggested that Executive Order 13848, signed in 2018, gives the president the power to intervene in elections, even to the point of seizing voting machines or ballots.”

But he insists that it does not — and warns that those involved in drafting that executive order are willing to testify that it does not.

He says the executive order was designed to make it easier to impose consequences on foreign actors who interfered in U.S. elections — but “NOT to revisit vote counts. NOT to rummage through ballot boxes. And certainly NOT to allow a president to deploy the military against local election infrastructure because he didn’t like the outcome.”

Taylor also charges that Trump is now “reinterpreting the order as some all-powerful election snooping tool.”

Trump stating that he should have seized ballots, according to Taylor, is “an admission he wanted to take an illegal act and then pretend the law would have somehow allowed it.”

He also takes aim at DNI Gabbard.

“I can’t emphasize how big of a break in custom this is (at best) and how deeply corrupt it might be (at worst),” that she was at the FBI raid on Wednesday — saying that it “stinks to high hell.”

Commenters weighed in.

The Lincoln Project’s Jeff Timmer, a political strategist, wrote: “This is a big f — — deal, and all y’all need to act like it. ”

“When Trump’s storm troopers show up at the Detroit, Milwaukee, Philadelphia, Fulton County, Maricopa County, etc clerks’ offices and seize absentee ballots before they can be opened and counted, it will be too late,” he warned.

“People,” warned veteran journalist Michael Burgi, “this FBI raid on an Atlanta voting center is really dangerous. Especially when Tulsi Gabbard is lingering in the background.”

READ MORE: ‘All Tools Necessary’: GOP Hardliners Press Trump on Insurrection Act

Image via Reuters

 

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