  Friday, October 13, 2023

TODD ZWILLICH

Deputy DC Bureau Chief, VICE News

Washington, D.C. Bureau
@toddzwillich

U.S. Rep. Jim Jordan (R-OH) makes his way to a candidate forum with House Republicans to hear from members running for U.S. Speaker of House on October 10, 2023 in Washington, DC. (Anna Moneymaker/Getty Images)

Big Buck, Hunter

Rep. Ken Buck, the Colorado conservative, wound up very disappointed when he asked the two GOP candidates for Speaker of the House to answer a simple question: Did Joe Biden win the 2020 election fair and square?

Steve Scalise and Jim Jordan prevaricated and danced. The GOP-only meeting was behind closed doors, but Donald Trump would inevitably hear about it. So they refused to answer.

"They weren't direct. They evaded the question," Buck said. "I wasn't happy, so I voted 'present.'"

Now Scalise is out of the race because he can't find 217 votes in the harried, divided, and mutually suspicious House GOP. Jordan is still going to make a run at it, though it should be noted: Trump endorsed Jordan for speaker at the beginning of the week, and in a secret GOP-only ballot, Jordan lost.

Both Scalise and Jordan share Trump's anti-democratic values. Scalise had more than a passing dalliance with white supremacy during his political rise, and he's been an active supporter of Trump's election lies ever since late 2020.

But where Kevin McCarthy needed some coaxing to surrender the House's institutional power to Trump's personal and corrupt use, Jordan has always been at the ready.

Jordan was in repeated, direct contact with Trump and other plotters immediately before and during Jan. 6 (as I've said before: this clip, forever.) He refused a subpoena to give evidence to the January 6 investigation. And of course, he's used his power as chair of the House Judiciary Committee to attempt to undermine prosecutors and interfere in their criminal investigations of Trump.

Jordan's turned the committee into a rodeo of Fox-ready Hunter Biden propaganda, election denial, and snide trolling. It's easy to see what Trump and the MAGA right see in him as a Speaker.

And it's hard to see where this ends. As of this writing, Jordan is still trying to put the votes together to avoid a humiliating flop on the House floor, or a repeat of McCarthy's record 15-ballot limp to the gavel.

If Jordan falters, it'll be an important sign of waning confidence among elected Republicans that Trump's dictates are in their political interest. If that happens, GOPs could turn to a caretaker speaker with, incidentally, a less abject history of trying to undermine democracy for Trump.

Well see. For now there's no evidence that Ken Buck's demand for honesty about the 2020 election will become a litmus test for anyone else.

There are even one or two Republicans entertaining the long-shot idea that a handful of GOPs join with Democrats to elect a bipartisan speaker. Don't hold your breath, but also stay tuned, because no one knows how this will end.

Don't forget to sign your friends up for Breaking the Vote!

BREAKING THE VOTE LAW

My gag time gal

Special Counsel Jack Smith and his team head to court Monday to urge Judge Tanya Chutkan to issue a partial gag order that prevents Donald Trump from intimidating jurors or attacking the judge, the court, and lawyers. Smith's team has cited Trump's attacks on witnesses like retired Gen. Mark Milley (who Trump said should be executed) and former Veep Mike Pence, along with his long, long track record of inciting violence and intimidation against anyone he perceives as a threat.

Trump's attorneys argue that the proposed order is an effort to stifle his free speech and his campaign for president. In separate motions, Smith is also urging Judge Chutkan to take steps to protect prospective jurors from Trump's intimidation tactics.

While it's clear that Trump wants to intimidate court officers and poison the jury pool, the question of a limited gag order is a difficult balance for the judge. Giving Trump too much leeway guarantees he'll use every bit of it to try to taint the proceedings and delegitimize them to his supporters. Cracking down would inevitably fuel Trump's claims of persecution, not to mention providing possible fodder for appeals if he's eventually found guilty.

Remember, a Trump supporter from Texas was already arrested and charged for threatening to kill Judge Chutkan. Monday morning!

The "I crossed my fingers" defense

The first bid to keep Donald Trump off the 2024 ballot goes to trial at the end of the month in Colorado. Yup, this is one of the cases seeking to disqualify Trump under Section 3 of the 14th Amendment, which states that no one who's sworn an oath to the Constitution then does an insurrection can ever hold public office again.

One legit question sure to come up at trial is whether the President of the United States qualifies as an "officer" of the government under the Constitution. And then there's this: Trump's lawyers argue in a motion to dismiss the case that when Trump swore to "preserve, protect and defend" the Constitution when he took the oath of office, he never actually swore to "support" it.

Kraken the case

Lawyers for Ken Chesebro were in court this week trying to get Fulton County Judge Scott McAfee to toss the case against him on the grounds that the fake electors he helped organize weren't really fake after all. The judge seemed skeptical.

Anyway, we're just a week away from the start of jury selection in the speedy-trial case of Chesebro and co-defendant Sidney Powell. DA Fani Willis has made it known that RNC chair Ronna McDaniel and career liar Alex Jones, both MAGA cast members, are on the list of potential witnesses. This trial will be televised!

Slowdown dirty shame

As long as Trump's having no luck getting the cases against him dismissed, delay is the name of the game. It's the only thing that could stave off judgment long enough for him to get elected and corruptly pardon himself. His latest target is the Mar-a-Lago case, where his lawyers are trying to convince Judge Aileen Cannon that they need many more months to gain access to classified evidence. The wildcard here is Cannon. Everyone is looking for signs that she's slow-walking decisions or ready to help Trump delay the May 2025 trial date.

Meanwhile, prosecutors say they can prove why Trump took all those highly sensitive documents in the first place. But they're not saying what his motive was just yet.

Yesterday Judge Cannon tried to hold a long-awaited conflict-of-interest hearings for lawyers representing Trump co-defendants Walt Nauta and Carlos De Oliveira. Those attorneys are also representing several witnesses who could wind up testifying against the defendants. It didn't go well, and now the whole thing's been postponed. If you're looking for evidence Judge Cannon is working to delay things for Trump, this is it.

No accountant for good taste

Former Trump Organization CFO and recently-released Rikers inmate Allen Weisselberg took the stand in Trump's New York civil fraud trial this week. He forgot… a lot. But he remembered that he cleared the company's financial disclosure statements directly with Trump and also probably with one or both of his adult sons.

Why would Weisselberg suffer a sudden bout of amnesia on the stand? As the AG's lawyers pointed out, maybe it has something to do with all the money he loses if he cooperates!

Then yesterday Weisselberg's testimony abruptly ended after Forbes published an article accusing him of perjuring himself on the stand earlier this week.

Also, how could Trump possibly be guilty of fraud when a bank gave him a trophy?!

Trump says he's returning to court next week. Even he doesn't want to miss the expected testimony of one Michael Cohen.

Michael Cohen listens to closing statements during a House Oversight Committee hearing in Washington, D.C., U.S., on Wednesday, Feb. 27, 2019. (Al Drago/Bloomberg via Getty Images)

WHAT'S HAPPENING

She does Nazi a problem

Is it really so hard to condemn Nazis? Don't answer yet!

A candidate in Franklin, Tennessee, just outside Nashville (population about 85,000), is blowing up this month's mayoral election by courting the support of local white supremacists, then refusing to condemn them when the rest of the town's leaders objected. Gabrielle Hanson did her own riff on "fine people on both sides" before telling Franklin altermen "you reap what you sow" when neo-Nazis in the community feel mistreated.

Elections are Oct. 24, a week from Tuesday.

Design within bleach

The Supreme Court's conservative majority appears poised to greenlight a South Carolina GOP gerrymander that disarms the votes of tens of thousands of Black citizens. Bottom line: Republicans pinky-swear that their 2021 gerrymander of the 1st congressional district was done to exclude Democrats (which is legal), and not Black people (which is not). It just so happens that that same gerrymander transformed an R +1 district into an R +14 one by moving 30,000 Black voters to a neighboring district, where they had no chance of swaying the outcome.

A lower federal court called that "bleaching" and ordered the map thrown out. But at oral arguments Wednesday, justices were vexed that the lawyers challenging the map hadn't shown proof the gerrymander was based on race.

If you're a regular reader you know that similar cases across the South could help determine whether the GOP can hold on to its meager House majority in 2024. Alabama Republicans were just dragged kicking and screaming to a second Black-majority district in their state. A similar case is pending in Louisiana, and Georgia's map is currently on trial in federal court.

Maximum override

It's going to be harder to vote and easier to intimidate election workers now that North Carolina Republicans overrode Gov. Roy Cooper's veto of new election restrictions. The new law, pushed through by the GOP supermajority, shortens the deadline for absentee ballots to arrive on election night; increases the number of people who can challenge the validity of ballots; and makes it harder to register and vote on the same day.

That simply means fewer ballots being counted and more voters being disenfranchised. The new GOP-sponsored law also expands the ability for poll-watchers to rove polling places and monitor workers' conversations. It's the latest blow in Republicans' relentless drive to gerrymander and vote-suppress their way to a permanent majority that doesn't have to worry about losing elections in an evenly-divided state.

Several Democratic groups immediately sued.

I SAID WHAT I SAID

"If we don't have the moral clarity to decide whether President Biden won or not, we don't have the moral clarity to rule."

— Conservative GOP Rep. Ken Buck, withholding his support for both Jim Jordan and Steve Scalise for Speaker of the House.

ON OUR RADAR

Tender loving Kari — A softer, kinder Kari Lake walked out on stage to announce her Senate run this week. There was hardly any fevered talk of stolen election conspiracies, and no old favorites like threatening violence on Trump's prosecutors. Now that Lake's years of Trumpist propaganda have earned her Trump's endorsement, she seems happy to heed the advisors who want her to move on from said propaganda to broaden her appeal. We'll see what happens if Lake winds up in a three-way bag-o'-rats race with Trump at the top of the ticket.

Naive felony — Sixty-nine-year-old Marsha Ervin is the latest former Florida felon resident arrested and charged under Gov. Ron DeSantis's police crackdown on convicted felons who vote illegally. Now civil rights groups are asking the state to drop the case. Like most of the people arrested by DeSantis's Office of Election Crimes and Security, Ervin is Black and a Democrat. And like many, she was issued a voting card and thought she could go to the polls under a 2018 legal change that restored the franchise to most non-violent convicted felons.

But he's our racist — Sure, Nick Fuentes was Donald Trump's dinner guest. But how is it that a white supremacist antisemitic bottom-feeder like him keeps getting face time with mainstream GOP figures? VICE News's Tess Owen has this story of Fuentes' 7-hours of quality time with a prominent Republican donor. Prediction: Exactly zero Republicans will voice any serious concern about this.

Schume gang — Word on New York's Upper East Side is that Chuck Schumer's been talking shit about Jared Kushner.

Me IRL — Well said, NYU journalism professor Jay Rosen!