Free Republic

Kari Lake is asking the court to quickly issue a judgment and to decide how much she will pay Maricopa County Recorder Stephen Richer in the defamation case he brought against her, according to a filing in Maricopa County Superior Court on Tuesday. Richer sued Lake — who ran for governor in 2022 and is now running for U.S. Senate — for defamation last year, alleging that Lake made defamatory allegations that he had assisted in rigging the gubernatorial election against Lake. They are both Republicans. . . . . Lake’s attorneys do not defend Lake’s claims about Richer in...

Donald Trump’s road to victory in the 2016 presidential election began in March 2011, when he first publicly questioned the origin of Barack Obama’s birth. He soon became the leading voice of the racist “birther” conspiracy theory, forging an unbreakable bond with a large portion of the Republican base that would later propel him to the presidency. Then-Illinois state Senator Barack Obama may not have known it at the time, but his 2002 speech at a Chicago rally opposing an invasion of Iraq set his course to the presidency. Six years later, Obama won his party’s nomination over more experienced...

[Giuliani's] lawyer has argued there is no evidence Giuliani himself encouraged the harassment. Sibley told jurors that right-wing website Gateway Pundit was “patient zero” in spreading the conspiracy theory about the women, and said Giuliani was sued because he is “patient deep pockets.” “Just because these things happened — and they did happen — doesn’t make my client responsible for them,” Sibley said.

On the brink of a federal government shutdown, the House on Saturday swiftly approved a 45-day funding bill to keep federal agencies open as Speaker Kevin McCarthy dropped demands for steep spending cuts and relied on Democratic votes for passage to send the package to the Senate. The new approach would leave behind aid to Ukraine, a White House priority opposed by a growing number of GOP lawmakers, but the plan would increase federal disaster assistance by $16 billion, meeting President Joe Biden’s full request. The package was approved 335-91, with most Republicans and almost all Democrats supporting. the bill....

Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis said Wednesday that if he is elected president he would seek to close four federal agencies as part of an effort to reduce the size of government. "We would do Education, we would do Commerce, we'd do Energy, and we would do IRS," DeSantis said in an interview with Fox News’ Martha MacCallum when he was asked whether he favored closing any agencies. . . . . In the current fiscal year, the budgets for the Commerce, Energy and Education departments were $109 billion, $160 billion and $194 billion, respectively, according to government spending data.

Republican delegates in North Carolina voted Saturday at their annual convention to censure Thom Tillis, the state’s senior U.S. senator, for backing LGBTQ+ rights, immigration and gun violence policies. . . . . Several delegates in Greensboro criticized Tillis, who has held his seat in the Senate since 2015, for his work last year on the Respect For Marriage Act, which enshrined protections for same-sex and interracial marriages in federal law. . . . . Several state legislators, including Sen. Bobby Hanig of Currituck County, criticized the decision, saying it’s a bad idea to create more divisions within the party...

Here are the major polls taken since November of a Donald Trump vs. Ron DeSantis primary race. The ones with an asterisk show Trump's share of the Trump + DeSantis vote in a multiway poll. [Chart in source doesn't reproduce. The takeaway: At one extreme is an Emerson poll that has Trump at 55%, at the other extreme is an Ipsos poll that has him at 25%, and the other 16 are pretty evenly distributed among those two endpoints.] So we know in a Trump vs. DeSantis primary, Trump will get somewhere between 25% and 55% of the vote. Good...

Former Vice President Mike Pence still won't say whether he's running for president next year, and he won't speak ill of his ex-boss, former President Donald Trump. But in an interview with CBS News in Michigan on Wednesday, he also twice declined to commit to supporting Trump if he is the Republican presidential nominee. Instead, Pence said he believes voters in 2024 will choose "wisely again," as they did in 2016. But said he thinks "different times call for different leadership." "I'm very confident we'll have better choices come 2024," he told CBS News political correspondent Caitlin Huey-Burns. "And I'm...

It’s very strange not to seriously pursue a deeply held goal when you have unified control of Washington, then to insist on trying to achieve much of it in one fell swoop when you barely have control of one chamber of Congress. But here we are. This is the Republican pattern. It has been, fundamentally, driven by the fact that two Republican presidents in a row now have won the White House by effectively running against the fiscal conservatism of the party’s congressional wing. George W. Bush’s compassionate conservatism was an implicit rebuke of Newt Gingrich’s bomb-throwing majorities that tried...

Ronna McDaniel’s path to another two-year term leading the Republican National Committee faces a major obstacle: Some of the loudest voices in the conservative movement are calling for her to go. . . . . Since the midterms, RNC members say their inboxes have been clogged with hundreds of emails each week — and the uproar has now turned to the RNC’s spending on events, private travel, luxury accommodations and other expenses in an election cycle that didn’t deliver strong GOP wins. McDaniel’s top opponent is Harmeet Dhillon, an RNC committeewoman from California and election law attorney who has represented...

Federal prosecutors have asked that a former Marine and retired New York Police Department officer receive a 17-year sentence for his actions during the riot at the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021 -- actions that included him assaulting another police officer with a Marine Corps flagpole he had brought along. Thomas Webster, 56, was one of the first people to be charged for his role in the violence the day Congress was set to certify the results of the presidential election. He was arrested on six charges on Feb. 21, 2021. He was found guilty on all counts --...

Kevin McCarthy is a dolt. The refusal of the Trump/GOP to participate in the committee meant that they were shut out of last night’s hearing. They had a chance to make their case, but chose instead to sulk. As last night’s evidence unfolded, that decision looked more and more like an act of supreme political malpractice.

In the weeks between the 2020 election and the January 6 attack on the US Capitol, almost 100 text messages from two staunch GOP allies of then-President Donald Trump reveal an aggressive attempt to lobby, encourage and eventually warn the White House over its efforts to overturn the election, according to messages obtained by the House select committee and reviewed by CNN. The texts, which have not been previously reported, were sent by Republican Sen. Mike Lee of Utah and GOP Rep. Chip Roy of Texas to then-White House chief of staff Mark Meadows. The text exchanges show that both...

Some of Donald Trump's handpicked candidates are hitting an obstacle in their efforts to purge the Republican Party of Trump skeptics: money. Lots of it. Driving the news: Key Trump-backed Republican challengers were heavily outraised by their Republican primary opponents late last year, newly filed financial reports show.

The defiant far-right acolytes of former president Donald Trump in the House Republican caucus have embarked on a targeted campaign ahead of the midterm elections to expand their ranks — and extend their power — on Capitol Hill. The effort, backed by Trump and guided by House members such as Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.) and Madison Cawthorn (R-N.C.), is part of a broader push by followers of the “Make America Great Again” movement to purge the GOP of those not deemed loyal to the former president and his false claims that the 2020 election was rigged in favor of Joe...

Election attorney Lin Wood claimed this week that former President Donald Trump maintains a secret backchannel to the U.S. military that allows him to order nuclear strikes. Wood made the assertion during an event in Myrtle Beach, where he was campaigning to become the next South Carolina Republican Party chair. Video was later obtained by PatriotTakes. “He won the election,” Wood said of Trump. “Donald J. Trump is still the guy the military will call for the code if they need a first strike. Joe Biden is not the president of the United States.”

Some Republicans have called for a commission to investigate the 2020 election. There might be bipartisan support for an investigation of one specific aspect: the use of vulnerable electronic voting machines. In 2019, four Democratic Senators sounded the alarm – https://www.klobuchar.senate.gov/public/index.cfm/2019/3/senators-demand-to-know-why-election-vendors-still-sell-voting-machines-with-known-vulnerabilities – about security flaws in the machines of the major manufacturers, including Dominion. Republicans have also been pointing to a letter later in 2019 in which a different group of Democrats addressed the issue. That letter was touted by conservative sources – https://www.westernjournal.com/revealed-klobuchar-warren-sent-letter-warning-dominion-election-tech-2019/ and https://pjmedia.com/news-and-politics/matt-margolis/2020/11/13/flashback-democrats-warned-of-voting-machines-switching-votes-last-year-n1143044 – after November 3. One question I have is: Who could be appointed to...

The House passed a Democrat-backed bill that would require election systems to use voter-verified paper ballots as an attempt to avoid election interference by a party-line vote of 225-184 on Tuesday, with only one Republican voting in favor. The Securing America’s Federal Elections (SAFE) Act — spearheaded by Rep. Zoe Lofgren (D-Calif.) — would authorize $600 million for the Election Assistance Commission, which would be allocated to states to enhance their security ahead of 2020 and includes language that would ban voting machines from being connected to the internet and being produced in foreign countries. . . . . “I...

Don Jr. [has] ... already teased about running for governor of New York or mayor of New York City, but a better bet will be a quickie relocation to Montana or some other state, at least nominally, before he launches his political career. Junior has spent a lot of time on the campaign trail and has learned the ropes. Expect to see him at the center of the Trump efforts in 2020 and as a constant presence on social media. . . . . Yes, the Imperial Trumps are here to stay. Get ready for four years of the right-wing...

The GOP’s new health bill would mean Nevada cannot afford to maintain coverage for the 210,000 residents insured under Medicaid expansion, Gov. Brian Sandoval says. The governor and Sen. Dean Heller, R-Nev., spoke against the bill during a Friday news conference in Las Vegas. Heller said he couldn’t support the bill in its current form. . . . . “I want to make sure that we prop up Medicaid to the degree that the federal government has given in the past and that has become an expectation for the state of Nevada,” Heller said. . . . . “There isn’t...