Activism
Busted: Federal regulator hearing complaint against Ted Cruz has one of his yard signs
The regulator set to hear a campaign finance complaint about Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX) has a yard sign for the senator's campaign at his house, reported the San Antonio Current on Wednesday.
"Trey Trainor, an attorney serving on the Federal Election Commission (FEC) — the panel scheduled to hear the complaint — recently retweeted a photo his wife Lucy Trainor shared of a yard sign outside their Austin-area home promoting the Texas Republican's campaign for a third term in the U.S. Senate," said the report. "'Got my new @tedcruz yard sign installed today,' Lucy Trainor tweeted April 19, 10 days after a pair of campaign-finance watchdogs filed their FEC complaint against Cruz. Trey Trainor retweeted the image the same day his wife posted it."
Per federal contribution records, Trainor also made three contributions to Cruz in 2013, totaling to $325.
ALSO READ: Revealed: What government officials privately shared about Trump not disclosing finances
"Trainor's retweet follows last month's report by the Current that FEC Chairman Sean J. Cooksey served as Cruz's deputy chief counsel in 2018. From 2019 until joining the FEC in 2020, Cooksey served as general counsel for Missouri U.S. Senator Josh Hawley, a GOP hardliner frequently aligned with Cruz," noted the report. "Both Trainor and Cooksey are Trump appointees to the six-member FEC, which is comprised of equal numbers of Republicans and Democrats."
The complaint in question stems from iHeartMedia, which hosts Cruz's podcast, making a $630,000 payment to Truth and Courage PAC, which supports Cruz. Senate rules prohibit senators from accepting greater than "nominal value" gifts from companies that employ lobbyists, as iHeartMedia does.
Cruz, for his part, denies that anything about this arrangement is unlawful.
The senator has personally challenged campaign finance laws in the past. For instance, in 2022, after he ran afoul of a law that limited how much he could pay himself back with campaign contributions for money he loaned to his own campaign, he got the Supreme Court to toss out the law altogether.
‘Nuts’: Marjorie Taylor Greene skewered for justifying vote against antisemitism bill
Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene announced Wednesday she's refusing to vote for a bill on antisemitism awareness, arguing it would see Christians arrested for their faith.
Greene made this announcement on X the same day the bipartisan Antisemitism Awareness Act of 2023 (H.R. 6090) — crafted to combat the problem on college campuses — was slated to go to a vote in the House of Representatives.
"Antisemitism is wrong, but I will not be voting for the Antisemitism Awareness Act," Greene explained. "[It] could convict Christians of antisemitism for believing the Gospel that says Jesus was handed over to Herod to be crucified by the Jews."
Greene backs up this claim with two images; the first a screenshot of the bill's definition of antisemitism and the second a printout Greene doesn't source.
The bill uses the definition crafted by the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance, of which the U.S. is a member, and adopted by the State department, congressional records show.
“Antisemitism is a certain perception of Jews, which may be expressed as hatred toward Jews," the IHRA definition states. "Rhetorical and physical manifestations of antisemitism are directed toward Jewish or non-Jewish individuals and/or their property, toward Jewish community institutions and religious facilities.”
The IHRA website page on which this definition appears also includes a bulleted list of 11 contemporary examples of antisemitism in public life that does not appear in the legislation's text.
But this appears to be the document Greene references in her refusal to back the bill.
"Read the bill text and contemporary examples of antisemitism like #9," Greene demands of her readers.
Number nine, in both the IHRA list and Greene's, reads as follows: "Using the symbols and images associated with classic antisemitism (e.g., claims of Jews killing Jesus or blood libel) to characterize Israel or Israelis."
ALSO READ: Former FBI official accuses Marjorie Taylor Greene of spreading foreign propaganda
These claims, according to the Holocaust Encyclopedia, were commonly repeated by the Nazis.
"The term blood libel refers to the false allegation that Jews used the blood of non-Jewish, usually Christian children, for ritual purposes," the definition states. "The Nazis made effective use of the blood libel to demonize Jews, with Julius Steicher's newspaper Der Stürmer making frequent use of ritual murder imagery in its antisemitic propaganda."
Greene is not alone in refusing to support the bill, but her reasons differ widely from those cited by the American Civil Liberties Union in their letter in opposition to House representatives.
"Federal law already prohibits antisemitic discrimination and harassment by federally funded entities," the ACLU argues. " H.R. 6090 is therefore not needed to protect against antisemitic discrimination; instead, it would likely chill free speech of students on college campuses by incorrectly equating criticism of the Israeli government with antisemitism."
As this important debate on a complex issue unfolded in the House of Representatives, Greene's social media followers took the opportunity to remind readers of the Georgia lawmaker's history.
"BREAKING NEWS," wrote X user Mr. Newberger. "Woman who key noted a Nazi rally won't vote for Antisemitism bill."
This likely references Greene's decision to speak at a White Nationalist event in 2022.
"This you?" asked Travis Matthew, sharing an article entitled "Republicans blast Marjorie Taylor Greene's Holocaust remarks" about her likening COVID-19 masks to the Nazi's mass murder of Jewish people.
"This is absolutely nuts," wrote Hadar Susskind. "MTG is just mad that they didn’t accept her space laser amendment."
‘Can’t look weak’: Expert says Trump lawyer stuck between a ‘crazy’ rock and a hard place
Former president Donald Trump's attorney Todd Blanche is stuck between a rock and a hard place in the form of a "crazy, unreasonable client," according to former federal prosecutor Harry Litman.
Litman's analysis Tuesday came on the heels of proceedings in the criminal hush money trial that saw Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg and Trump's lawyers debating whether the former president had violated his gag order.
Trump's lawyer, Blanche, was ridiculed by legal experts who said he failed to craft an argument without case law to back it up.
"I don't have any cases," Blanche said in court. "It's just common sense."
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"You're losing all credibility," Judge Juan Merchan replied.
"Hard to maintain with a straight face," former prosecutor Joyce Vance said of the battle between Blanche and the judge.
CNN's legal analyst called it an outright "disaster," because it went so poorly for Trump.
According to Litman, this exchange put Trump's lawyer in difficult position.
"Blanche needs badly to work hard to regain Merchan's trust, but he's between a rock and a hard place," Litman said. "He can't look weak in front of his crazy, unreasonable client."
Trump's former impeachment attorney, Robert Ray, tried to downplay the exchange, saying he's had judges say things like that to him before.
Speaking to MSNBC Tuesday, Ray explained that Blanche likely conveyed "he wouldn't be so easily intimidated."
Former Brooklyn prosecutor Charles Coleman disagreed, saying that running afoul of the judge this early in the trial was a problem.
"That was the most explosive," he told Nicolle Wallace on Tuesday afternoon. "That is — for as accomplished an attorney as Todd Blanche is, I don't understand the argument he made. To have a judge tell you that you are losing credibility this early in a trial is really, really dangerous ground to operate on."
Even teenagers were ridiculing Blanche. Two students came to court to observe the trial, including one 14-year-old who thought the exchange between Merchan and Blanche was "funny."
"When the defense attorney was basically annihilated by the judge," said Hope Harrington outside the courthouse. "It was — it really made my day. It was really funny. He had no evidence whatsoever."
‘Increasingly goofy’: Analyst hits Fox News’ for efforts to spin Trump trial
As Donald Trump's first criminal trial got underway, proceedings received extensive coverage in the media.
But over at Fox News, the story is not the center of the news world — and the network's focus was more centered around Trump's grievances over the trial, which accuses him of falsifying business records to cover up a hush money payment made to adult movie star Stormy Daniels.
According to The Daily Beast's Justin Baragona, "The rest of the cable news landscape has devoted round-the-clock coverage to the trial," but Fox has "mostly dipped in and out."
"Spending the bulk of its time on the pro-Palestinian protests at Ivy League schools, Fox News has centered a large portion of its Trump trial coverage on criticizing the case and the court’s treatment of the former president," Baragona wrote.
Baragona contends that Fox's approach to coverage of Trump's trial is causing its hosts and guests to take "increasingly goofy and zany positions" in order to defend Trump, and he cites a number of examples, including from The Five host Jesse Watters.
Also read: 'Perma-scowl': Observers say Trump is not doing well at hiding frustration from jurors
“The guy needs exercise. He’s usually golfing. And so, you’re going to put a man who’s almost 80, sitting in a room like this on his butt for all that time? It's not healthy,” Watters said during a segment this Monday.
“You know how big of a health nut I am. He needs sunlight and he needs activity. He needs to be walking around, he needs action. It’s really cruel and unusual punishment to make a man do that. And any time he moves, they threaten to throw him in prison!”
Baragona then points to the roundtable show Outnumbered, where GOP operative and regular Fox News guest Ian Prior compared Trump being criminally tried to the fall of Rome.
“The very problem that we have here is we are weaponizing the justice system to go after former presidents. You back up 2,000 years and this is the kind of thing they would do in the Roman Republic that led to the end of the Roman Republic,” Prior said. “Caesar is out there and says if you do not come back to Rome…and face prosecution, what did he do? He crossed the Rubicon and there’s the end of the Republic.”
Then there's Fox & Friends co-host Ainsley Earhardt, whose take on the matter didn't make much sense to Baragona, and he asked his readers to decide what the following commentary means.
“Does this set a precedent for other people who want to run for president?” Earhardt sighed. “What if they've done something like this in the past and they can say, 'Oh, well, they told me in the 8th grade they want to run for president, so since they paid off a girl when they were 30 years old, then that was election interference!'”
But the craziest take, according to Baragona, came from former Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich.
“I am deeply worried that tomorrow, a totally corrupt judge and a totally corrupt district attorney are going to try to put a former president of the United States, candidate of his party, and front-runner in the polls in jail. Now, I think this is so horrendous that there has to be some way to reach out to the Supreme Court,” Gingrich said on Monday night’s Hannity.
“This is literally like some of the civil rights workers in Mississippi in the 1960s. The New York system is now so deeply corrupted and it's so bitterly, deeply anti-Trump.”
Read more at The Daily Beast.
