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Watch: Dem Senator’s Viral Video Reveals Scalia Accepted Over 70 Undisclosed Gifts of Vacations Like Clarence Thomas

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U.S. Senator Sheldon Whitehouse (D-RI) has revealed the late U.S. Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia also accepted and did not disclose dozens of trips paid for by special interest advocates, in a similar fashion to the decades-worth of undisclosed luxury travel, vacations, and trips Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas took.

In video that has gone viral on social media – over 1.6 million views in less than 24 hours – Senator Whitehouse says Scalia took “more than seven dozen” of these undisclosed vacations.

“The personal hospitality problems I’ve been pursuing began with Justice Scalia, who took more than seven dozen undisclosed hunting vacations. Most people know of two, the one where he was on the Air Force Two manifest with Dick Cheney and the one where he died,” Sen. Whitehouse said in his remarks during Tuesday’s Judiciary Committee hearing on Supreme Court ethics.

Scalia, a hard-core conservative, died in February of 2016 during a quail hunting vacation, reportedly “at an $800-per-night Texas hunting lodge among still-unknown companions,” a lodge owned by the chairman and CEO of a multi-billion dollar manufacturing company.

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Calling Scalia’s vacation gifts “systematized,” Whitehouse, who has been focused on judicial reform for years, revealed there had been “seventy-plus,” and explained the process the justice would use to get invited.

“Some intermediary would ask the owner of an expensive resort, often a commercial property, to extend to Scalia a personal invitation to the resort, even where the owner was someone he’d never met. Scalia treated it as ‘personal hospitality’ because of the ‘personal’ invitation, and failed to disclose the vacations,” Whitehouse said. “Gun industry advocates, fossil fuel folks, and Republican political figures often tagged along.”

“No reasonable reading of the term ‘personal hospitality’ (we’ve covered this,) but the Supreme Court let this go on for years,” said Whitehouse.

READ MORE: Watch: DeSantis Declines to Say If He Supports ‘Mainstream Human Rights’ When Reporter Asks ‘Yes or No?’

Legal experts have said that under the law, Supreme Court justices do not have to disclose gifts of vacations, like the ones Thomas and Scalia took, as long as they are gifts from personal friends at their personal homes. But they do have to disclose gifts of travel. Some believe any gift that might suggest the possibility of an appearance of impropriety should be disclosed.

“Private jet travel is not in the personal hospitality exemption,” Whitehouse said, “which is limited to food, lodging and entertainment.”

Whitehouse then revealed – with ten exhibits – how he has investigated these gifts; gifts, in Thomas’ case, which some are now referring to as “graft” and “corruption.”

“When I challenged the court about this practice, (exhibit one,) I got a blow-off letter, (exhibit two.) Basically, ‘nothing to see here.’ So then I asked the circuit courts what they thought about this conduct,” Whitehouse said, stating out of 13 inquiries he received zero responses.

“So I then sent another letter saying I hope their silence didn’t indicate some kind of coordinated obstruction (exhibit four.) I also scheduled a subcommittee hearing. Presto, I was told the Financial Disclosure Committee would examine how the exemption was interpreted,” Whitehouse said. “Almost a year later, two weeks before the recent news about Justice Thomas broke, the Judicial Conference updated its guidance to clarify that this sort of non-disclosure violates the law (exhibit six.)”

READ MORE: Revealed: Anti-LGBTQ Group Behind Abortion Pill Ban Lawsuit Left 1000s of Secret Files on an Open Google Drive

He says no judge outside of the Supreme Court has “ever used the personal invitation trick,” because a complaint would be investigated and would become “embarrassing.”

“Only Supreme Court justices refused to allow their conduct to be investigated or reviewed. My bill would fix that,” he says.

Last month a former chief counsel to Sen. Whitehouse, Alex Aronson, writing in Slate, further detailed how Scalia’s scheme worked:

“Retired federal Judge Charles Pickering, Scalia’s frequent hunting facilitator, explained: ‘After it got out that if you took him hunting or fishing that he would come speak, he started getting invitations all over the place.’ For example: hearing that Scalia would ‘do anything if you take him hunting,’ Texas lawyer and Republican mega-donor Mark Lanier chartered a plane to take Scalia boar hunting on a private ranch following a speech he gave at Lanier’s alma mater, Texas Tech. As was typical, Scalia’s financial disclosure revealed only that he had received ‘transportation, food, [and] lodging’ for ‘Lectures,’ with Texas Tech as the sole reimbursing party.”

Whitehouse also spends several minutes in the video discussing Justice Thomas’ scandal, and then, turning back to Scalia, asks: “So what became of the 2011 referral? Did anyone intervene? Is the committee still considering the 2011 referral more than a decade later?”

We apparently do not know.

Watch Sen. Whitehouse below or at this link.

 

 

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‘Aiding and Abetting’: Speaker Johnson Blasted for Blurring Faces of J6 Participants

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Republican Speaker of the House Mike Johnson is once again under fire, this time for intentionally blurring the faces of people caught on camera in the massive 40,000 hours of January 6 videos he ordered to be released to the public.

Speaker Johnson “said Republicans are blurring out the faces of people on the Jan. 6 tapes ‘because we don’t want them to be retaliated against and be charged the DOJ,'” Punchbowl News’ Jake Sherman first reported Tuesday (video below).

Federal law enforcement agencies have used those videos to identify, arrest, charge, prosecute, and convict hundreds of criminals who acted unlawfully during the January 6, 2021 insurrection. The FBI set up a public tip line specifically for their Capitol investigation. While not everyone who was on Capitol grounds acted illegally, the videos provided evidence of wrongdoing. Countless social media users worked together to help identify some of the participants, as was detailed in NBC News’ justice reporter Ryan J. Reilly’s book, “Sedition Hunters.”

During his remarks Tuesday Johnson also claimed the U.S. House Select Committee on the January 6 Attack was “a partisan exercise” that produced a “biased report” and “hid some of the important evidence.”

READ MORE: Florida GOP Chair Could Face ‘Censure or Discipline’ After Rape Allegation and Three-Way Sex Claim

The Speaker’s comments are in direct conflict with his recent statement defending his march toward an impeachment investigation of President Joe Biden.

Johnson, who frequently reminds reporters he is “a constitutional attorney,” was labeled by The New York Times recently as “a key architect of his party’s objections to certifying President Biden’s victory” in the 2020 election.

Last week, in promoting what some critics – and the White House – say are House Republicans’ baseless allegations against the President, Johnson also told reporters Republicans are “the rule of law team.”

The Speaker was quickly criticized for, as former GOP congressman Joe Walsh said, “aiding and abetting.”

“The party of the police; the party of law and order,” mocked MSNBC’s Mehdi Hasan. Top national security attorney Brad Moss similarly wrote, “Party of ‘law and order.'”

“The House Republican Speaker doesn’t want people who broke the law on January 6 to be charged with a crime … and he said this publicly,” notes MSNBC columnist Michael A. Cohen.

READ MORE: RNC Chair Falsely Claims ‘Biden White House’ Killed Hunter Laptop Story in 2020

“Wait. I thought the GOP said they were just tourists? Show their faces or admit they weren’t orderly tourists,” wrote former U.S. Rep. Carol Shea-Porter (D-NH).

Watch the videos of Johnson above or at this link.

 

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Florida GOP Chair Could Face ‘Censure or Discipline’ After Rape Allegation and Three-Way Sex Claim

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Christian Ziegler, the Donald Trump-endorsed Florida Republican Party chair who is reportedly under criminal investigation for alleged rape, and had a consensual three-way sexual relationship with his wife and the woman who is now accusing him, could face some form of discipline from party leadership if he does not resign.

Florida Republican Party Vice Chair Evan Power is calling for a special meeting to consider Ziegler’s future, according to Florida Politics.

Ziegler, who is opposed to the special meeting which could decide his fate with the party, wants to wait until the board’s scheduled meeting in February to discuss the allegations against him. He has refused to resign.

“In an act of respect for the Chairman, this evening, I phoned him to request he call an executive board meeting,” Power wrote in an email to board members. “He declined and said the matters could be taken up in February. It is the opinion of the many members that it is not an acceptable timetable.”

READ MORE: ‘Given My Experience’: Gaetz Waiting to ‘Render Judgment’ on Florida GOP Chair Accused of Rape

“Because of my role as Vice Chairman, I now offer the following call for a Special Meeting with an option for each of you to sign on to,” Power added. “I hope that we are able to move the Party forward in a positive manner as the 2024 elections are the most important elections we face in my lifetime. If you have any questions, please do not hesitate to reply to this email or give me a call or text.”

Ziegler’s wife Bridget Ziegler is an an elected school board member and a co-founder of the anti-LGBTQ Moms for Liberty, which the Southern Poverty Law Center has designated as an anti-government extremist group. She told police “that she and her husband had previously engaged in a ‘sexual encounter’ with the woman. The following day, [Christian] Ziegler was interviewed by police with his attorney present. He told them the encounter with the woman was consensual and said he’d taken a video of it,” according to the Florida Center for Government Accountability’s Trident news site.

Power has “as laid out an agenda for a meeting” that “includes potential censure or discipline for Ziegler following party rules. That includes determining if Ziegler must be deemed unfit for office and whether his actions have hurt the ‘good name of the RPOF,'” Florida Politics adds. He also wants the board to discuss suspending Ziegler’s responsibilities, pay, and holding a no-confidence vote.

READ MORE: ‘Authoritarianism’: Florida Says Its Public Schools Exist to ‘Convey Government’s Message’

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‘He Can Warp Time or Something’: Morning Joe Mocks GOP’s Biden Impeachment Probe After Latest Flop

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MSNBC’s Joe Scarborough and Mika Brzezinski needled House Republicans for overhyping their latest revelation in the impeachment inquiry of President Joe Biden.

House Oversight chairman James Comer (R-KY) obtained bank records showing Hunter Biden’s law firm had made monthly payments to his father in late 2018, but those three checks were reimbursement for a pickup truck the elder Biden had purchased and allowed him to use.

“What kind of car was it?” Scarborough asked. “It could have been a hot rod Lincoln. I don’t know, do you ride around in it in Tennessee, go through the Smoky Mountains? More smoking guns.”

Republican National Committee chairwoman Ronna McDaniel also on Monday accused Biden of suppressing media coverage of his son’s laptop ahead of the 2020 presidential election, which would have been before he was president, and the “Morning Joe” co-hosts called out the bad-faith coverage by conservative media of her outlandish allegations.

“Obsessed,” Brzezinski said.

“The fact that Joe Biden was so corrupt, so evil, so powerful that he could suppress this information, his White House could suppress this information, even when he was not in the White House,” Scarborough said sarcastically. “It means he has, like, some X-Men/Avengers, I think it’s more X-Men. He has these X-Men powers where he can warp time or something. Maybe it is more, like, an Avengers multiverse thing – he’s not really present, but he is. I don’t think Ronna knows that. I’m wondering why she said the Biden White House did it when Biden wasn’t in the White House, and nobody corrected her.”

Watch the video below or at this link.

 

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